Outlander aka Cross Stitch - Gabaldon Diana - Страница 55

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“I can’t breathe,” he complained.

“If you breathe, it will hurt. Don’t move. Where did you learn to fight like that? Dougal, again?”

“No.” he winced away from the vinegar I was applying to the cut eyebrow. “My father taught me.”

“Really? What was your father, the local boxing champion?”

“What’s boxing? No, he was a farmer. Bred horses too.” Jamie sucked in his breath as I continued the vinegar application on his barked shin.

“When I was nine or ten, he said he thought I was going to be big as my mother’s folk, so I’d have to learn to fight.” He was breathing more easily now, and held out a hand to let me rub marigold ointment into the knuckles.

“He said, ‘If you’re sizable, half the men ye meet will fear ye, and the other half will want to try ye. Knock one down,’ he said, ‘and the rest will let ye be. But learn to do it fast and clean, or you’ll be fightin’ all your life.’ So he’d take me to the barn and knock me into the straw until I learned to hit back. Ow! That stings.”

“Fingernail gouges are nasty wounds,” I said, swabbing busily at his neck. “Especially if the gouger doesn’t wash regularly. And I doubt that greasy-haired lad bathes once a year. ‘Fast and clean’ isn’t quite how I’d describe what you did tonight, but it was impressive. Your father would be proud of you.”

I spoke with some sarcasm, and was surprised to see a shadow pass across his face.

“My father’s dead,” he said flatly.

“I’m sorry.” I finished the swabbing, then said softly, “But I meant it. He would be proud of you.”

He didn’t answer, but gave me a half-smile in reply. He suddenly seemed very young, and I wondered just how old he was. I was about to ask when a raspy cough from behind announced a visitor to the shed.

It was the stringy little man named Murtagh. He eyed Jamie’s strapped-up ribs with some amusement, and lobbed a small wash leather bag through the air. Jamie put up a large hand and caught it easily, with a small clinking sound.

“And what’s this?” he asked.

Murtagh raised one sketchy brow. “Your share o’ the wagers, what else?”

Jamie shook his head and made to toss the bag back.

“I didna wager anything.”

Murtagh raised a hand to stop him. “You did the work. You’re a verra popular fellow at the moment, at least wi’ those that backed ye.”

“But not with Dougal, I don’t suppose,” I interjected.

Murtagh was one of those men who always looked a bit startled to find that women had voices, but he nodded politely enough.

“Aye, that’s true. Still, I dinna see as that should trouble ye,” he said to Jamie.

“No?” A glance passed between the two men, with a message I didn’t understand. Jamie blew his breath out softly through his teeth, nodding slowly to himself.

“When?” he asked.

“A week. Ten days, perhaps. Near a place called Lag Cruime. You’ll know it?”

Jamie nodded again, looking more content than I had seen him in some time. “I know it.”

I looked from one face to the other, both closed and secretive. So Murtagh had found out something. Something to do with the mysterious “Horrocks” perhaps? I shrugged. Whatever the cause, it appeared that Jamie’s days as an exhibition were over.

“I suppose Dougal can always tap-dance instead,” I said.

“Eh?” The secretive looks changed to looks of startlement.

“Never mind. Sleep well.” I picked up my box of medical supplies and went to find my own rest.

We were drawing nearer to Fort William, and I began to ponder seriously what my plan of action should be, once we had arrived there.

It depended, I thought, upon what the garrison commander was likely to do. If he believed that I was a gentlewoman in distress, he might provide me with temporary escort toward the coast and my putative embarkation for France.

But he might be suspicious of me, turning up in the company of the MacKenzies. Still, I was patently not a Scot myself; surely he would not be inclined to think me a spy of some sort? That was evidently what Colum and Dougal thought – that I was an English spy.

Which made me wonder what I was meant to be spying on? Well, unpatriotic activities, I supposed; of which, collecting money for the support of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the throne, was definitely one.

But in that case, why had Dougal allowed me to see him do it? He could easily enough have sent me outside before that part of the proceedings. Of course, the proceedings had all been held in Gaelic, I argued with myself.

Perhaps that was the point, though. I remembered the odd gleam in his eyes and his question, “I thought ye had no Gaelic?” Perhaps it was a test, to see whether I really was ignorant of the language. For an English spy scarcely would have been sent into the Highlands, unable to speak with more than half the people there.

But no, the conversation I had overheard between Jamie and Dougal would seem to indicate that Dougal was indeed a Jacobite, though Colum apparently was not – yet.

My head was beginning to buzz with all these suppositions, and I was glad to see that we were approaching a fairly large village. Likely that meant a good inn, as well, and a decent supper.

The inn was in fact commodious, by the standards I had grown accustomed to. If the bed was apparently designed for midgets – and flea-bitten ones, at that – at least it was in a chamber to itself. In several of the smaller inns, I had slept on a settle in the common room, surrounded by snoring male forms and the humped shadows of plaid-wrapped shapes.

Customarily I fell asleep immediately, whatever the sleeping conditions, worn out by a day in the saddle and an evening of Dougal’s politicizing. The first evening in an inn, though, I had remained awake for a good half-hour, fascinated by the remarkable variety of noises the male respiratory apparatus could produce. An entire dormitory full of student nurses couldn’t come close.

It occurred to me, listening to the chorus, that men in a hospital ward seldom really snore. Breathe heavily, yes. They gasp, groan occasionally, and sometimes sob or cry out in sleep. But there was no comparison to this healthy racket. Perhaps it was that sick or injured men could not sleep deeply enough to relax into that sort of din.

If my observations were sound, then my companions were plainly in the most robust health. They certainly looked it, limbs casually asprawl, faces slack and glowing in the firelight. The complete abandon of their sleep on hard boards was the satisfying of an appetite as hearty as the one they had brought to dinner. Obscurely comforted by the cacophony, I had pulled my traveling cloak around my shoulders and went to sleep myself.

By comparison, I found myself now rather lonely here in the solitary splendor of my tiny, smelly attic. Despite having removed the bedclothes and beaten the mattress to discourage unwelcome co-habitants, I had some difficulty in sleeping, so silent and dark did the chamber seem after I had blown out the candle.

There were a few faint echoes from the common room two floors below, and a brief flurry of noise and movement, but this served only to emphasize my own isolation. It was the first time I had been left so completely alone since my arrival at the castle, and I was not at all sure I liked it.

I was hovering uneasily on the verge of sleep, when my ears picked up an ominous creaking of floorboards in the hall outside. The step was slow and halting, as though the intruder hesitated in his path, picking the soundest-appearing of the boards for each next step. I sat bolt upright, groping for the candle and flint box by the bed.

My hand, blindly searching, struck the flint box and knocked it to the floor with a soft thump. I froze, and the steps outside did likewise.

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