A Breath of Snow and Ashes (103 page)

This was simple contrariness on my part; the sight of my unrestrained hair outraged their Scottish sense of what was proper in a woman, and they’d been trying—with varying degrees of subtlety—to force me into a cap for years. I was damned if I’d let circumstance accomplish it for them.

Having now seen myself in a mirror, I felt somewhat less adamant about it. And my scalped head did feel a bit chilly. On the other hand, I realized that if I were to give in, Jamie would be terribly alarmed—and I thought I’d frightened him quite enough, judging by the hollow look of his face and the deep smudges under his eyes.

As it was, his face had lightened considerably when I rejected the cap he was holding, and he tossed it aside.

I carefully turned the looking glass over and set it on the counterpane, repressing a sigh.

“Always good for a laugh, I suppose, seeing the expressions on people’s faces when they catch sight of me.”

Jamie glanced at me, the corner of his mouth twitching.

“Ye’re verra beautiful, Sassenach,” he said gently. Then he burst out laughing, snorting through his nose and wheezing. I raised one eyebrow at him, picked up the glass and looked again—which made him laugh harder.

I leaned back against the pillows, feeling a bit better. The fever had quite gone, but I still felt wraithlike and weak, barely able to sit up unassisted, and I fell asleep almost without warning, after the least exertion.

Jamie, still snorting, took my hand, raised it to his mouth, and kissed it. The sudden warm immediacy of the touch rippled the fair hairs of my forearm, and my fingers closed involuntarily on his.

“I love you,” he said very softly, his shoulders still trembling with laughter.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly feeling quite a lot better. “Well, then. I love you, too. And it
will
grow, after all.”

“So it will.” He kissed my hand again, and set it gently on the quilt. “Have ye eaten?”

“A bit,” I said, with what forbearance I could muster. “I’ll have more later.”

I had realized many years before why “patients” are called that; it’s because a sick person is generally incapacitated, and thus obliged to put up with any amount of harassment and annoyance from persons who are
not
sick.

The fever had broken and I had regained consciousness two days before; since then, the invariable response of everyone who saw me was to gasp at my appearance, urge me to wear a cap—and then try to force food down my throat. Jamie, more sensitive to my tones of voice than were Mrs. Bug, Malva, Brianna, or Marsali, wisely desisted after a quick glance at the tray by the bed to see that I actually
had
eaten something.

“Tell me what’s happened,” I said, settling and bracing myself. “Who’s been ill? How are they? And who—” I cleared my throat. “Who’s died?”

He narrowed his eyes at me, obviously trying to guess whether I would faint, die, or leap out of bed if he told me.

“Ye’re sure ye feel well enough, Sassenach?” he asked dubiously. “It’s news that wilna spoil with keeping.”

“No, but I have to hear sooner or later, don’t I? And knowing is better than worrying about what I
don’t
know.”

He nodded, taking the point, and took a deep breath.

“Aye, then. Padraic and his daughter are well on the mend. Evan—he’s lost his youngest, wee Bobby, and Grace is still ill, but Hugh and Caitlin didna fall sick at all.” He swallowed, and went on. “Three of the fisher-folk have died; there’s maybe a dozen still ailing, but most are on the mend.” He knit his brows, considering. “And then there’s Tom Christie. He’s still bad, I hear.”

“Is he? Malva didn’t mention it.” But then, Malva had refused to tell me anything when I’d asked earlier, insisting that I must just rest, and not worry myself.

“What about Allan?”

“No, he’s fine,” Jamie assured me.

“How long has Tom been sick?”

“I dinna ken. The lass can tell ye.”

I nodded—a mistake, as the light-headedness had not left me yet, and I was obliged to shut my eyes and let my head fall back, illuminated patterns flashing behind my lids.

“That’s very odd,” I said, a little breathlessly, hearing Jamie start up in response to my small collapse. “When I close my eyes, often I see stars—but not like stars in the sky. They look just like the stars on the lining of a doll’s suitcase—a portmanteau, I mean—that I had as a child. Why do you suppose that is?”

“I havena got the slightest idea.” There was a rustle as he sat back down on the stool. “Ye’re no still delirious, are ye?” he asked dryly.

“Shouldn’t think so.
Was
I delirious?” Breathing deeply and carefully, I opened my eyes and gave him my best attempt at a smile.

“Ye were.”

“Do I want to know what I said?”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“Probably not, but I may tell ye sometime, anyway.”

I considered closing my eyes and floating off to sleep, rather than contemplate future embarrassments, but rallied. If I was going to live—and I was—I needed to gather up the strands of life that tethered me to the earth, and reattach them.

“Bree’s family, and Marsali’s—they’re all right?” I asked only for form’s sake; both Bree and Marsali had come to hover anxiously over my prostrate form, and while neither one would tell me anything they thought might upset me in my weakened condition, I was reasonably sure that neither one could have kept it secret if the children were seriously ill.

“Aye,” he said slowly, “aye, they’re fine.”

“What?” I said, picking up the hesitation in his voice.

“They’re fine,” he repeated quickly. “None of them has fallen ill at all.”

I gave him a cold look, though careful not to move too much while doing it.

“You may as well tell me,” I said. “I’ll get it out of Mrs. Bug if you don’t.”

As though mention of her name had invoked her, I heard the distinctive thump of Mrs. Bug’s clogs on the stair, approaching. She was moving more slowly than usual, and with a care suggesting that she was laden with something.

This proved to be true; she negotiated sideways through the door, beaming, a loaded tray in one hand, the other wrapped round Henri-Christian, who clung to her, monkeylike.

“I’ve brought ye a wee bit to eat,
a leannan,
” she said briskly, nudging the barely touched bowl of parritch and plate of cold toast aside to make room for the fresh provisions. “Ye’re no catching, are ye?”

Barely waiting for my shake of the head, she leaned over the bed and gently decanted Henri-Christian into my arms. Undiscriminatingly friendly as always, he butted his head under my chin, nuzzled into my chest, and began mouthing my knuckles, his sharp little baby teeth making small dents in my skin.

“Hallo, what’s happened here?” I frowned, smoothing the soft brown licks of baby hair off his rounded brow, where the yellowing stain of an ugly bruise showed at his hairline.

“The spawn of the de’il tried to kill the poor wean,” Mrs. Bug informed me, mouth pulled tight. “And would have done, too, save for Roger Mac, bless him.”

“Oh? Which spawn was this?” I asked, familiar with Mrs. Bug’s methods of description.

“Some of the fishers’ weans,” Jamie said. He put out a finger and touched Henri-Christian’s nose, snatched it away as the baby grabbed for it, then touched his nose again. Henri-Christian giggled and grabbed his own nose, entranced by the game.

“The wicked creatures tried to drown him,” Mrs. Bug amplified. “Stole the puir wee laddie in his basket and set him adrift in the creek!”

“I shouldna think they meant to drown him,” Jamie said mildly, still absorbed in the game. “If so, they wouldna have troubled wi’ the basket, surely.”

“Hmph!” was Mrs. Bug’s response to this piece of logic. “They didna mean to do him any good,” she added darkly.

I had been taking a quick inventory of Henri-Christian’s physique, finding several more healing bruises, a small scabbed cut on one heel, and a scraped knee.

“Well, you’ve been bumped about a bit, haven’t you?” I said to him.

“Ump. Heeheehee!” said Henri-Christian, vastly entertained by my explorations.

“Roger saved him?” I asked, glancing up at Jamie.

He nodded, one side of his mouth turning up a little.

“Aye. I didna ken what was going on, ’til wee Joanie rushed up to me, shouting as they’d taken her brother—but I got there in time to see the end of the matter.”

The boys had set the baby’s basket afloat in the trout pool, a wide, deep spot in the creek, where the water was fairly quiet. Made of stoutly woven reeds, the basket had floated—long enough for the current to push it toward the outfall from the pool, where the water ran swiftly through a stretch of rocks, before plunging over a three-foot fall, down into a tumbling churn of water and boulders.

Roger had been building a rail fence, within earshot of the creek. Hearing boys shouting and Félicité’s steam-whistle shrieks, he had dropped the rail he was holding and rushed down the hill, thinking that she was being tormented.

Instead, he had burst from the trees just in time to see Henri-Christian, in his basket, tip slowly over the edge of the outfall and start bumping crazily from rock to rock, spinning in the current and taking on water.

Running down the bank and launching himself in a flat dive, Roger had landed full-length in the creek just below the fall, in time for Henri-Christian, bawling with terror, to drop from his sodden basket, plummet down the fall, and land on Roger, who grabbed him.

“I was just in time to see it,” Jamie informed me, grinning at the memory. “And then to see Roger Mac rise out o’ the water like a triton, wi’ duckweed streaming from his hair, blood runnin’ from his nose, and the wee lad clutched tight in his arms. A terrible sight, he was.”

The miscreant boys had followed the basket’s career, yelling along the banks, but were now struck dumb. One of them moved to flee, the others starting up like a flight of pigeons, but Roger had pointed an awful finger at them and bellowed,
“Sheas!”
in a voice loud enough to be heard over the racket of the creek.

Such was the force of his presence, they
did
stay, frozen in terror.

Holding them with his glare, Roger had waded almost to the shore. There, he squatted and cupped a handful of water, which he poured over the head of the shrieking baby—who promptly quit shrieking.

“I baptize thee, Henri-Christian,” Roger had bellowed, in his hoarse, cracked voice. “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost! D’ye hear me, wee bastards? His name is
Christian
! He belongs to the Lord! Trouble him again, ye lot of scabs, and Satan will pop up and drag ye straight down screaming—TO HELL!”

He stabbed an accusing finger once more at the boys, who this time did break and run, scampering wildly into the brush, pushing and falling in their urge to escape.

“Oh, dear,” I said, torn between laughter and dismay. I looked down at Henri-Christian, who had lately discovered the joys of thumb-sucking and was absorbed in further study of the art. “That must have been impressive.”

“It impressed
me,
to be sure,” Jamie said, still grinning. “I’d no notion Roger Mac had it in him to preach hellfire and damnation like that. The lad’s a great roar to him, cracked voice and all. He’d have a good audience, did he do it for a Gathering, aye?”

“Well, that explains what happened to his voice,” I said. “I wondered. Do you think it
was
only mischief, though? Them putting the baby in the creek?”

“Oh, it was mischief, sure enough,” he said, and cupped a big hand gently round Henri-Christian’s head. “Not just boys’ mischief, though.”

Jamie had caught one of the fleeing boys as they hurtled past him, grabbing him by the neck and quite literally scaring the piss out of the lad. Walking the boy firmly into the wood, he’d pinned him hard against a tree and demanded to know the meaning of this attempted murder.

Trembling and blubbering, the boy had tried to excuse it, saying that they hadn’t meant any harm to the wean, truly! They’d only wanted to see him float—for their parents all said he was demon-born, and everyone kent that those born of Satan floated, because the water would reject their wickedness. They’d taken the baby in his basket and put that into the water, because they were afraid to touch him, fearing his flesh would burn them.

“I told him I’d burn him myself,” Jamie said with a certain grimness, “and did.” He’d then dismissed the smarting lad, with instructions to go home, change his breeks, and inform his confederates that they were expected in Jamie’s study before supper to receive their own share of retribution—or else Himself would be coming round to their houses after supper, to thrash them before their parents’ eyes.

“Did they come?” I asked, fascinated.

He gave me a look of surprise.

“Of course. They took their medicine, and then we went to the kitchen and had bread and honey. I’d told Marsali to bring the wee lad, and after we’d eaten, I took him on my knee, and had them all come and touch him, just to see.”

He smiled lopsidedly.

“One of the lads asked me was it true, what Mr. Roger said, about the wean belonging to the Lord? I told him I certainly wouldna argue with Mr. Roger about that—but whoever else he belonged to, Henri-Christian belongs to me, as well, and best they should remember it.”

His finger trailed slowly down Henri-Christian’s round, smooth cheek. The baby was nearly asleep now, heavy eyelids closing, a tiny, glistening thumb half in, half out of his mouth.

“I’m sorry I missed that,” I said softly, so as not to wake him. He’d grown much warmer, as sleeping babies did, and heavy in the curve of my arm. Jamie saw that I was having difficulty holding him, and took him from me, handing him back to Mrs. Bug, who had been bustling quietly round the room, tidying, all the while listening with approval to Jamie’s account.

“Oh, ’twas something to see,” she assured me in a whisper, patting Henri-Christian’s back as she took him. “And the lads all poking their fingers out to touch the bairnie’s wee belly, gingerlike, as if they meant to prod a hot potato, and him squirmin’ and giggling like a worm wi’ the fits. The wicked little gomerels’ eyes were big as sixpences!”