The Fiery Cross Read online

  114 Diana Gabaldon

  Josiah Beardsley had believed me. And, having come near death the minter before when an abscess in his throat had nearly suffocated him before bursting, he was not eager to risk another such occurrence.

  "You're the only surgeon north of Cross Creek," Jamie pointed out. "Who else could do it?"

  "Well, yes," I said uncertainly. "But-"

  "So, I've made the lad an offer," Jamie interrupted. "One section of landwee Roger and myself will help him to put up a cabin on it when the time comes-and he'll go halves with me in whatever he takes in the way of skins for the next three winters. He's willing-provided you'll take out his tonsils as part o' the bargain."

  "But why today? I can't take someone's tonsils out here!" I gestured at the dripping forest.

  "Why not?" Jamie raised one eyebrow. "Did ye not say last night it was a small matter-only a few wee cuts wi' your smallest knife?"

  I rubbed a knuckle under my nose, sniffing with exasperation. "Look, just because it isn't a massive bloody job like amputating a leg doesn't mean it's a simple matter!" It was, in fact, a relatively simple operation-surgically speaking. It was the possibility of infection following the procedure, and the need for careful nursing-a poor substitute for antibiotics, but much better than neglect-that raised complications.

  "I can't just whack out his tonsils and turn him loose," I said. "When we get back to the Ridge, though-"

  "He doesna mean to come back with us directly," Jan-lie interrupted. "Why not?" I demanded.

  "He didna say; only that he had a bit of business to do, and would come to the Ridge by the first week of December. He can sleep in the loft above the herb shed," he added.

  "So you-and he-expect me just to slash out his tonsils, put in a few stitches, and see him on his merry way?" I asked sardonically.

  "Ye did nicely wi' the dog," he said, grinning. "Oh, you heard about that,"

  "Oh, aye. And the lad who chopped his foot with an ax, and the bairns wi' milk rash, and Mrs. Buchanan's toothache, and your battle wi' Murray MacLeod over the gentleman's bile ducts . . ."

  "It was rather a busy morning." I shuddered briefly in remembrance, and took another sip of whisky.

  "The whole Gathering is talking of ye, Sassenach. I did think of the Bible, in fact, seeing all the crowd clamoring round ye this morning."

  "The Bible?" I must have looked blank at the reference, because the grin got wider.

  "And the whole multitude sought to touch him," Jamie quoted. "For there went virtue out of him, and healed them all.',

  I laughed ruefully, interrupting myself with a small hiccup. "Fresh out of virtue at the moment, I'm afraid."

  "Dinna fash. There's plenty in the flask."

  Thus reminded, I offered him the whisky, but he waved it away, brows drawn down in thought. Melting hail had left wet streaks in his hair, and it lay

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  like ribbons of melted bronze across his shoulders-like the statue of some military hero, weathered and glistening in a public park.

  "So ye'll do the lad's tonsils, once he comes to the Ridge?"

  I thought a moment, then nodded, swallowing. There would still be dangers in it, and normally I wouldn't do purely elective surgery. But Josiah's condition was truly dreadful, and the continued infections might well kill him eventually, if I didn't take some steps to remedy it.

  Jamie nodded, satisfied. "I'll see to it, then."

  My feet had thawed, even wet as they were, and I was beginning to feel warm and pliable. My belly still felt as though I'd swallowed a large volcanic rock, but I wasn't minding all that much.

  "I was wondering something, Sassenach," he said. "Yes?"

  "Speakin' of the Bible, ye ken."

  "Got Scripture on the brain today, have you?"

  One corner of his mouth curled up as he glanced at me.

  "Aye, well. It's only I was thinking. When the Angel of the Lord comes along to Sarah and tells her she'll have a bairn the next year, she laughs and says that's a rare jest, as it's ceased to be wi' her after the manner of women."

  "Most women in that situation likely wouldn't think it at all a funny idea," I assured him. "I often think God's got a very peculiar sense of humor, though." He looked down at the large maple leaf he was shredding between thumb and forefinger, but I caught the faint twitch of his mouth.

  "I've thought that now and again myself, Sassenach," he said, rather dryly. "Be that as it may, she did have the bairn, aye?"

  "The Bible says she did. Fm not going to call the book of Genesis a liar." I debated the wisdom of drinking more, but decided to save it for a rainywell, a rainier-day, and put the stopper back in the flask. I could hear a certain amount of stirring in the direction of the campsite, and my ears caught a word of inquiry, borne on the chilly breeze.

  "Someone's looking for Himself," I said. "Again."

  Himself glanced over his shoulder and grimaced slightly, but made no immediate move to answer the call. He cleared his throat, and I saw a faint flush move up the side of his neck.

  "Well, the point is," he said, carefully not looking at me, "that so far as I ken, if your name's not Mary and the Holy Ghost isna involved in the matter, there's only the one way of getting wi' child. Am I right?"

  "So far as I know, yes." I put a hand over my mouth to stifle a rising hiccup. "Aye. And if so ... well, that must mean that Sarah was still bedding wi' Abraham at the time, no?"

  He still wasn't looking at me, but his cars had gone pink, and I belatedly realized the point of this religious discussion. I reached out a toe and prodded him gently in the side.

  "You were thinking perhaps I wouldn't want you anymore?"

  "Ye dinna want me now," he pointed out logically, eyes on the crumbled remains of his leaf.

  "I feel as though my belly is full of broken glass, I'm half-soaked and mud to

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  the knees, and whoever's looking for you is about to burst through the shrubbery with a pack of bloodhounds at any moment," I said, with a certain amount of asperity "Are you actually inviting me to participate in carnal revelry with you in that mound of soggy leaves? Because if you are-"

  "No, no," he said hastily. "I didna mean now. I only meant-I was only wondering if-" The tips of his ears had gone a dull red. He stood up abruptly, brushing dead leaves from his kilt with exaggerated force.

  "If," I said in measured tones, "you were to get me with child at this point in the proceedings, Jamie Fraser, I would have your balls en brocbette." I rocked back, looking up at him. "As for bedding with you, though. . . "

  He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. I smiled at him, letting what I thought show plainly on my face.

  "Once you have a bed again," I said, "I promise I won't refuse it."

  "Oh," he said. He drew a deep breath, looking suddenly quite happy. "Well, that's all right, then. It's onlyl wondered, ye ken."

  A sudden loud rustling in the shrubbery was followed by the appearance of Mr. Wemyss, whose thin, anxious face poked out of a nannyberry bush.

  "Oh, it's yourself, sir," he said, in evident relief.

  "I suppose it must be," Jamie said, in resignation. "Is there a difficulty, Mr. Wemyss?"

  Mr. Wemyss was delayed in answering, having become inextricably entangled with the nannyberry bush, and I was obliged to go and help release him. A onetime bookkeeper who had been obliged to sell himself as an indentured servant, Mr. Wemyss was highly unsuited to life in the wilderness.

  "I do apologize for troubling ye, sir," he said, rather red in the face. He picked nervously at a spiny twig that had caught in his fair, flyaway hair.

  "It's only-well, she did say as she meant to cleave him from crown to crutch wi' her ax if he didna leave off, and he said no woman would speak to him in that manner, and she does bave an ax . . ."

  Accustomed to Mr. Wemyss's methods of communication, Jamie sighed, reached out for the whisky flask, uncorked it, and took a deep, sustaining swig. H
e lowered the flask and fixed Mr. Wemyss with a gimlet eye.

  "Who?" he demanded.

  "Oh! Er ... did I not say? Rosamund Lindsay and Ronnie Sinclair." "Mmphm.

  Not good news; Rosamund Lindsay did have an ax; she was roasting several pigs in a pit near the creek, over hickory embers. She also weighed nearly two hundred pounds and, while normally good-humored, was possessed of a notable temper when roused. For his part, Ronnie Sinclair was entirely capable of irritating the Angel Gabriel, let alone a woman trying to cook in the rain.

  Jamie sighed and handed the flask back to me. He squared his shoulders, shaking droplets from his plaid as he settled it.

  "Go and tell them I'm coming, Mr. Wemyss," he said.

  Mr. Wemyss's thin face expressed the liveliest apprehension at the thought of coming within speaking range of Rosamund Lindsay's ax, but his awe of Jamie was even greater. He bobbed a quick, neat bow, turned, and blundered straight into the nannyberry bush again.

  A wail like an approaching ambulance betokened the appearance of Marsali,

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  Joan in her arms. She plucked a clinging branch from Mr. Wemyss's coat sleeve, nodding to him as she stepped carefully round him.

  "Da," she said, without preamble. "Ye've got to come. Father Kenneth's been arrested."

  Jamie's eyebrows shot up. "Arrested? just now? By whom?"

  "Aye, this minute! A nasty fat man who said he was sheriff o' the county. He came up wi' two men and they asked who was the priest, and when Father Kenneth said it was him, they seized him by the arms and marched him straight off, with none so much as a by your leave!"

  The blood was rising in Jamie's face, and his two stiff fingers tapped briefly against his thigh.

  "They've taken him from my hearth P " he said. "A Dhia I

  This was plainly a rhetorical question, and before Marsali could answer it, a crunching of footsteps came from the other direction, and Brianna popped into sight from behind a pine tree.

  "What?" he barked at her. She blinked, taken aback.

  "Ah ... Geordie Chisholm says one of the soldiers stole a ham from his fire, and will you go and see Lieutenant Hayes about it?"

  "Yes," he said promptly. "Later. Meanwhile, do you go back wi' Marsali and find out where they've taken Father Kenneth. And Mr. Wemyss-" But Mr. wemyss had at last escaped the clinging embrace of the chokecherry bush. A distant crashing signaled his rush to fulfill his orders.

  A quick look at Jamie's face convinced both girls that a swift retreat was the order of the day, and within seconds, we were alone again. He took a deep breath, and let it slowly out through his teeth.

  I wanted to laugh, but didn't. Instead I moved closer; cold and damp as it was, I could feel the heat of his skin through his plaid.

  "At least it's only the sick ones who want to touch me," I said. I held out the flask to him. "What do you do when all the virtue's gone out of you?"

  He glanced down at me, and a slow smile spread across his face. Ignoring the flask, he stooped, cupped my face in his hands, and kissed me, very gently. "That," he said.

  Then he turned and strode downhill, presumably full of virtue once more.

  BEANS AND BARBECUE

  TOOK THE KETTLE BACK to our camp, only to find the place momentarily deserted. Voices and laughter in the distance indicated that Lizzie, Marsali, and Mrs. Bug-presumably with children in tow-were

  on their way to the women's privy, a latrine trench dug behind a convenient screen of juniper, some way from the campsites. I hung the fiill kettle over the fire to boil, then stood still for a moment, wondering in which direction my efforts might be best directed.

  While Father Kenneth's situation might be the most serious in the long run, it wasn't one where my presence would be likely to make a difference. But I was a doctor-and Rosamund Lindsay did have an ax. I patted my damp hair and garments into some sort of order, and started downhill toward the creek, abandoning the mobcap to its fate.

  Jamie had evidently been of the same mind regarding the relative importance of the emergencies in progress. When I fought my way through the thicket of Arillow saplings edging the creek, I found him standing by the barbecue pit, in peaceffil conversation with Ronnie Sinclair-meanwhile leaning casually on the handle of the ax, of which he had somehow managed to possess himself.

  I relaxed a bit when I saw that, and took my time in joining the party. Unless Rosamund decided to strangle Ronnie with her bare hands or beat him to death with a ham-neither of these contingencies being at all unthinkable-my medical services might not be needed after all.

  The pit was a broad one, a natural declivity bored out of the clay creekbank by some distant flood and then deepened by judicious spadework in the years succeeding. Judging by the blackened rocks and drifts of scattered charcoal, it had been in use for some time. In fact, several different people were using it now; the mingled scents of fowl, pork, mutton, and possum rose up in a cloud of apple-wood and hickory smoke, a savory incense that made my mouth water.

  The sight of the pit was somewhat less appetizing. Clouds of white smoke billowed up from the damp wood, half-obscuring a number of shapes that lay upon their smoldering pyres-many of these looking faintly and hair-raisingly human through the haze. It reminded me all too vividly of the charnel pits 'on' Jamaica, where the bodies of slaves who had not survived the rigors of the Middle Passage were burned, and I swallowed heavily, trying not to recall the macabre roasting-meat smell of those funeral fires.

  Rosamund was working down in the pit at the moment, her skirt kirtled well above plump knees and sleeves rolled back to bare her massive arms as she la-

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  dled a reddish sauce onto the exposed ribs of a huge hog's carcass. Around her lay five more gigantic shapes, shrouded in damp burlap, with the wisps of fragrant smoke curling up around them, vanishing into the soft drizzle.

  "It's poison, is what it is!" Ronnie Sinclair was saying hotly, as I came up behind him. "She'll ruin it-it'll no be fit for pigs when she's done!"

  "It is pigs, Ronnie," Jamie said, with considerable patience. He rolled an eye at me, then glanced at the pit, where sizzling fat dripped onto the biers of hickory coals below. "Myself, I shouldna think ye could do anything to a pig-in the way of cooking, that is-that would make it not worth the eating."

  "Quite true," I put in helpfully, smiling at Ronnie. "Smoked bacon, grilled chops, roasted loin, baked ham, headcheese, sausage, sweetbreads, black pudding ... somebody once said you could make use of everything in a pig but the squeal."

  "Aye, well, but this is the barbecue, isn't it?" Ronnie said stubbornly, ignoring my feeble attempt at humor. "Anyone kens that ye sass a barbecued hog wi' vinegar-that's the proper way of it! After all, ye wouldna put gravel into your sausage meat, would ye? Or boil your bacon wi' sweepings from the henhouse? Tcha!" He jerked his chin toward the white pottery basin under Rosamund's arm, making it clear that its contents fell into the same class of inedible adulterants, in his opinion.

  I caught a savory whiff as the wind changed. So far as I could tell from smell alone, Rosamund's sauce seemed to include tomatoes, onions, red pepper, and enough sugar to leave a thick blackish crust on the meat and a tantalizing caramel aroma in the air.

  "I expect the meat will be very juicy, cooked like that," I said, feeling my stomach begin to knot and growl beneath my laced bodice.

  "Aye, a wonderful fat lot of pigs they are, too," Jamie said ingratiatingly, as Rosamund glanced up, glowering. She was black to the knees and her squarejowled face was streaked with rain, sweat, and soot. "Will they have been wild hogs, ma'am, or gently reared?"

  "Wild," she said, with a certain amount of pride, straightening up and wiping a strand of wet, graying hair off her brow. "Fattened on chestnut mastnothin' like it to give a flavor to the meat!"

  Ronnie Sinclair made a Scottish noise indicative of derision and contempt. "Aye, the flavor's so good ye must hide it under a larding o' yon grisly sauce that makes it t
ook as though the meat's no even cooked yet, but bleeding raw!"

  Rosamund made a rather earthy comment regarding the supposed manhood of persons who felt themselves squeamish at the thought of blood, which Ronnie seemed disposed to take personally. Jamie skillfully maneuvered himself between the two, keeping the ax well out of reach.

  "Oh, I'm sure it's verra well cooked indeed," he replied soothingly. "Why, Mistress Lindsay has been hard at work since dawn, at least."

  "Long before that, Mr. Fraser," the lady replied, with a certain grim satisfaction. "You want decent barbecue, you start at least a day before, and tend it all through the night. I been a-minding of these hogs since yesterday afternoon." She drew in a great sni 'ff of the rising smoke, wearing a beatific expression.

  "Ah, that's the stuff! Not but what a savory sass like this 'un is wasted on you bastardly Scots," Rosamund said, replacing the burlap and patting it

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  tenderly into place. "You've pickled your tongues with that everlastin' vinegar you slop on your victuals. It's all I can do to stop Kenny a-puttin' it on his corn bread and porridge of a mornin'."

  Jamie raised his voice, drowning out Ronnie's incensed response to this calumny.

  "And was it Kenny that hunted the hogs for ye, mistress? Wild hogs have a chancy nature; surely it's a dangerous business to be stalking beasts of that size. Like the wild boar that we hunted in Scotland, aye?"

  "Ha." Rosamund cast a look of good-natured scorn toward the slope above, where her husband-roughly half her size-presumably was engaged in less strenuous pursuits. "No, indeed, Mr. Fraser, I kilt this lot myself. With that ax," she added pointedly, nodding toward the instrument in question and narrowing her eyes in a sinister fashion at Ronnie. "Caved in their skulls with one blow, I did."

  Ronnie, not the most perceptive of men, declined to take the hint.

  "It's the tomato fruits she's using, Mac Dubb," he hissed, tugging at Jamie's sleeve and pointing at the red-crusted bowl. "Devil's apples! She'll poison us all! 51

  Cc Oh, I shouldna think so, Ronnie." Jamie took a firm grip on Ronnie's arm, and smiled engagingly at Rosamund. "Ye mean to sell the meat, I suppose, Mrs. Lindsay? It's a poor merchant that would kill her customers, aye?"

  "I ain't yet lost a one, Mr. Fraser," Rosamund agreed, turning back another sheet of burlap and leaning over to dribble sauce from a wooden ladle over a steaming haunch. "Ain't never had but good words about the taste, neither," she said, "though a-course that would be in Boston, where I come from."

  Wherefolk bave sense, her tone clearly implied.

  "I met a man from Boston, last time I went to Charlotteville," Ronnie said, his foxy brows drawn down in disapproval. He tugged, trying to free his arm from Jamie's grip, but to no avail. "He said to me as it was his custom to have beans at his breakfast, and oysters to his supper, and so he'd done every day since he was a wean. A wonder he hadna blown up like a pig's bladder, filled wi' such wretched stuff as that!"

  "Beans, beans, they're good for your heart," I said cheerily, seizing the opening. "The more you eat, the more you fart. The more you fart, the better you feel-so let's have beans for every meal!"

  Ronnie's mouth dropped open, as did Mrs. Lindsay's. Jamie whooped with laughter, and Mrs. Lindsay's look of astonishment dissolved into a booming laugh. After a moment, Ronnie rather reluctantly joined in, a small grin twisting up the corner of his mouth.

  "I lived in Boston for a time," I said mildly, as the hilarity died down a bit. "Mrs. Lindsay, that smells wonderfiil!"

  Rosamund nodded with dignity, gratified.

  "Why, so it does, ma'am, and I say so." She leaned toward me, lowering her voice-slightly-from its normal stentorian range. "It's my private receipt what does it," she said, %rith a proprietorial pat of the pottery bowl. "Brings out the flavor, see?"

  Ronnie's mouth opened, but only a small yelp emerged, the evident result of

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  Jamie's hand tightening about his biceps. Rosamund ignored this, engaging in an amiable discussion with Jamie that terminated in her agreeing to reserve an entire carcass for use at the wedding feast.

  I glanced at Jamie, hearing this. Given that Father Kenneth was probably at present en route either back to Baltimore or to the gaol in Edenton, I had my doubts as to whether any marriages would in fact take place tonight.

  On the other hand, I had learned never to underestimate Jamie, either. With a final word of compliment to Mrs. Lindsay, he dragged Ronnie bodily away from the