Dragonfly In Amber - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги бесплатно полностью без регистрации сокращений txt) 📗
Always touching, never hurrying, he brought his hands back over the shallow curve of my collarbone and down the meridian of my body, splaying his palms across my ribs.
The oddest thing about all this was that I was not at all astonished. It seemed an infinitely natural thing, and my tortured body relaxed gratefully into the hard mold of his hands, melting and reforming like molded wax. Only the lines of my skeleton held firm.
An odd feeling of warmth now emanated from those broad, square, workman’s hands. They moved with painstaking slowness over my body, and I could feel the tiny deaths of the bacteria that inhabited my blood, small explosions as each scintilla of infection disappeared. I could feel each interior organ, complete and three-dimensional, and see it as well, as though it sat on a table before me. There the hollow-walled stomach, here the lobed solidness of my liver, and each convolution and twist of intestine, turned in and on and around itself, neatly packed in the shining web of its mesentery membrane. The warmth glowed and spread within each organ, illuminating it like a small sun within me, then died and moved on.
Raymond paused, hands pressed side by side on my swollen belly. I thought he frowned, but it was hard to tell. The cowled head turned, listening, but the usual noises of the hospital continued in the distance, with no warning heeltaps coming our way.
I gasped and moved involuntarily, as one hand moved lower, cupped briefly between my legs. An increase in pressure from the other hand warned me to be silent, and the blunt fingers eased their way inside me.
I closed my eyes and waited, feeling my inner walls adjust to this odd intrusion, the inflammation subsiding bit by bit as he probed gently deeper.
Now he touched the center of my loss, and a spasm of pain contracted the heavy walls of my inflamed uterus. I breathed a small moan, then clamped my lips as he shook his head.
The other hand slid down to rest comfortingly on my belly as the groping fingers of the other touched my womb. He was still then, holding the source of my pain between his two hands as though it were a sphere of crystal, heavy and fragile.
“Now,” he said softly. “Call him. Call the red man. Call him.”
The pressure of the fingers within and the palm without grew harder, and I pressed my legs against the the bed, fighting it. But there was no strength left in me to resist, and the inexorable pressure went on, cracking the crystal sphere, freeing the chaos within.
My mind filled with images, worse than the misery of the fever-dreams, because more real. Grief and loss and fear racked me, and the dusty scent of death and white chalk filled my nostrils. Casting about in the random patterns of my mind for help, I heard the voice still muttering, patiently but firmly, “Call him,” and I sought my anchor.
“Jamie! JAMIE!”
A bolt of heat shot through my belly, from one hand to the other, like an arrow through the center of the basin of my bones. The pressing grip relaxed, slid free, and the lightness of harmony filled me.
The bedframe quivered as he ducked beneath it, barely in time.
“Milady! Are you all right?” Sister Angelique shoved through the drapes, round face creased with worry beneath her wimple. The concern in her eyes was underlaid with resignation; the sisters knew I would die soon – if this looked to be my last struggle, she was prepared to summon the priest.
Her small, hard hand rested briefly against my cheek, moved quickly to my brow, then back. The sheet still lay crumpled around my thighs, and my gown lay open. Her hands slid inside it, into my armpits, where they remained for a moment before withdrawing.
“God be praised!” she cried, eyes moistening. “The fever is gone!” She bent close, peering in sudden alarm, to be sure that the disappearance of the fever was not due to the fact that I was dead. I smiled at her weakly.
“I’m all right,” I said. “Tell Mother.”
She nodded eagerly, and pausing only long enough to draw the sheet modestly over me, she hurried from the room. The drapes had hardly swung closed behind her when Raymond emerged from under the bed.
“I must go,” he said. He laid a hand upon my head. “Be well, madonna.”
Weak as I was, I rose up, grasping his arm. I slid my hand up the length of forge-tough muscle, seeking, but not finding. The smoothness of his skin was unblemished, clear to the crest of the shoulder. He stared down at me in astonishment.
“What are you doing, madonna?”
“Nothing.” I sank back, disappointed. I was too weak and too light-headed to be careful of my words.
“I wanted to see whether you had a vaccination scar.”
“Vaccination?” Skilled as I was at reading faces by now, I would have seen the slightest twitch of comprehension, no matter how swiftly it was concealed. But there was none.
“Why do you call me madonna still?” I asked. My hands rested on the slight concavity of my stomach, gently as though not to disturb the shattering emptiness. “I’ve lost my child.”
He looked mildly surprised.
“Ah. I did not call you madonna because you were with child, my lady.”
“Why, then?” I didn’t really expect him to answer, but he did. Tired and drained as we both were, it was as though we were suspended together in a place where neither time nor consequence existed; there was room for nothing but truth between us.
He sighed.
“Everyone has a color about them,” he said simply. “All around them, like a cloud. Yours is blue, madonna. Like the Virgin’s cloak. Like my own.”
The gauze curtain fluttered briefly and he was gone.
26 FONTAINEBLEAU
For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep.
A few days later I woke to the sound of insistent voices near my ear, and the touch of hands lifting me from the bed. The arms that held me were strong and masculine, and for a moment, I felt afloat in joy. Then I woke all the way, struggling feebly against a wave of tobacco and cheap wine, to find myself in the grasp of Hugo, Louise de La Tour ’s enormous footman.
“Put me down!” I said, batting at him weakly. He looked startled at this sudden resurrection from the dead, and nearly dropped me, but a high, commanding voice stopped both of us.
“Claire, my dear friend! Do not be afraid, ma chere, it’s all right. I am taking you to Fontainebleau. The air, and good food – it’s what you need. And rest, you need rest…”
I blinked against the light like a newborn lamb. Louise’s face, round, pink, and anxious, floated nearby like a cherub on a cloud. Mother Hildegarde stood behind her, tall and stern as the angel at the gates of Eden, the heavenly illusion enhanced by the fact that they were both standing in front of the stained-glass window in the vestibule of the Hopital.
“Yes,” she said, her deep voice making the simplest word more emphatic than all Louise’s twittering. “It will be good for you. Au revoir, my dear.”
And with that, I was borne down the steps of the Hopital and stuffed willy-nilly into Louise’s coach, with neither strength nor will to protest.
The bumping of the coach over potholes and ruts kept me awake on the journey to Fontainebleau. That, and Louise’s constant conversation, aimed at reassurance. At first I made some dazed attempt to respond, but soon realized that she required no answers, and in fact, talked more easily without them.
After days in the cool gray stone vault of the Hopital, I felt like a freshly unwrapped mummy, and shrank from the assault of so much brightness and color. I found it easier to deal with if I drew back a bit, and let it all wash past me without trying to distinguish its elements.
