Dragonfly In Amber - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги бесплатно полностью без регистрации сокращений txt) 📗
“Longer than that,” he said firmly, and pulled me to him once more.
“Frank,” he said at last, with a sigh. “Well, I leave it to you what ye shall tell him about me. Likely he’ll not want to hear. But if he does, if ye find ye can talk to him of me, as you have to me of him – then tell him… I’m grateful. Tell him I trust him, because I must. And tell him-” His hands tightened suddenly on my arms, and he spoke with a mixture of laughter and absolute sincerity. “Tell him I hate him to his guts and the marrow of his bones!”
We were dressed, and the dawn light had strengthened into day. There was no food, nothing with which to break our fast. Nothing left that must be done… and nothing left to say.
He would have to leave now, to make it to Drumossie Moor in time. This was our final parting, and we could find no way to say goodbye.
At last, he smiled crookedly, bent, and kissed me gently on the lips.
“They say…” he began, and stopped to clear his throat. “They say, in the old days, when a man would go forth to do a great deed – he would find a wisewoman, and ask her to bless him. He would stand looking forth, in the direction he would go, and she would come behind him, to say the words of the prayer over him. When she had finished, he would walk straight out, and not look back, for that was ill-luck to his quest.”
He touched my face once, and turned away, facing the open door. The morning sun streamed in, lighting his hair in a thousand flames. He straightened his shoulders, broad beneath his plaid, and drew a deep breath.
“Bless me, then, wisewoman,” he said softly, “and go.”
I laid a hand on his shoulder, groping for words. Jenny had taught me a few of the ancient Celtic prayers of protection; I tried to summon the words in my mind.
“Jesus, Thou Son of Mary,” I started, speaking hoarsely, “I call upon Thy name; and on the name of John the Apostle beloved, And on the names of all the saints in the red domain, To shield thee in the battle to come…”
I stopped, interrupted by a sound from the hillside below. The sound of voices, and of footsteps.
Jamie froze for a second, shoulder hard beneath my hand, then whirled, pushing me toward the rear of the cottage, where the wall had fallen away.
“That way!” he said. “They are English! Claire, go!”
I ran toward the opening in the wall, heart in my throat, as he turned back to the doorway, hand on his sword. I stopped, just for a moment, for the last sight of him. He turned his head, caught sight of me, and suddenly he was with me, pushing me hard against the wall in an agony of desperation. He gripped me fiercely to him. I could feel his erection pressing into my stomach and the hilt of his dagger dug into my side.
He spoke hoarsely into my hair. “Once more. I must! But quick!” He pushed me against the wall and I scrabbled up my skirts as he raised his kilts. This was not lovemaking; he took me quickly and powerfully and it was over in seconds. The voices were nearer; only a hundred yards away.
He kissed me once more, hard enough to leave the taste of blood in my mouth. “Name him Brian,” he said, “for my father.” With a push, he sent me toward the opening. As I ran for it, I glanced back to see him standing in the middle of the doorway, sword half-drawn, dirk ready in his right hand.
The English, unaware that the cottage was occupied, had not thought to send a scout round the back. The slope behind the cottage was deserted as I dashed across it and into the thicket of alders below the hillcrest.
I pushed my way through the brush and the branches, stumbling over rocks, blinded by tears. Behind me I could hear shouts and the clash of steel from the cottage. My thighs were slick and wet with Jamie’s seed. The crest of the hill seemed never to grow nearer; surely I would spend the rest of my life fighting my way through the strangling trees!
There was a crashing in the brush behind me. Someone had seen me rush from the cottage. I dashed aside the tears and scrabbled upward, groping on all fours as the ground grew steeper. I was in the clear space now, the shelf of granite I remembered. The small dogwood growing out of the cliff was there, and the tumble of small boulders.
I stopped at the edge of the stone circle, looking down, trying desperately to see what was happening. How many soldiers had come to the cottage? Could Jamie break free of them and reach his hobbled horse below? Without it, he would never reach Culloden in time.
All at once, the brush below me parted with a flash of red. An English soldier. I turned, ran gasping across the turf of the circle, and hurled myself through the cleft in the rock.
PART SEVEN
Hindsight
47 LOOSE ENDS
“He was right, of course. Bloody man, he was almost always right.” Claire sounded half-cross as she spoke. A rueful smile crossed her face, then she looked at Brianna, who sat on the hearthrug, gripping her knees, her face completely blank. Only the faint stir of her hair, lifting and moving in the rising heat of the fire, showed any motion at all.
“It was a dangerous pregnancy – again – and a hazardous birth. Had I risked it there, it would almost certainly have killed us both.” She spoke directly to her daughter, as though they were alone in the room. Roger, waking slowly from the spell of the past, felt like an intruder.
“The truth, then, all of it. I couldn’t bear to leave him,” Claire said softly. “Even for you… I hated you for a bit, before you were born, because it was for you that he’d made me go. I didn’t mind dying – not with him. But to have to go on, to live without him – he was right, I had the worst of the bargain. But I kept it, because I loved him. And we lived, you and I, because he loved you.”
Brianna didn’t move; didn’t take her eyes from her mother’s face. Only her lips moved, stiffly, as though unaccustomed to talking.
“How long… did you hate me?”
Gold eyes met blue ones, innocent and ruthless as the eyes of a falcon.
“Until you were born. When I held you and nursed you and saw you look up at me with your father’s eyes.”
Brianna made a faint, strangled sound, but her mother went on, voice softening a little as she looked at the girl at her feet.
“And then I began to know you, something separate from myself or from Jamie. And I loved you for yourself, and not only for the man who fathered you.”
There was a blur of motion on the hearthrug, and Brianna shot erect. Her hair bristled out like a lion’s mane, and the blue eyes blazed like the heart of the flames behind her.
“Frank Randall was my father!” she said. “He was! I know it!” Fists clenched, she glared at her mother. Her voice trembled with rage.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this. Maybe you did hate me, maybe you still do!” Tears were beginning to make their way down her cheeks, unbidden, and she dashed them angrily away with the back of one hand.
“Daddy… Daddy loved me – he couldn’t have, if I weren’t his! Why are you trying to make me believe he wasn’t my father? Were you jealous of me? Is that it? Did you mind so much that he loved me? He didn’t love you, I know that!” The blue eyes narrowed, cat-like, blazing in a face gone dead-white.
Roger felt a strong desire to ease behind the door before she noticed his presence and turned that molten wrath on him. But beyond his own discomfort he was conscious of a sense of growing awe. The girl that stood on the hearthrug, hissing and spitting in defense of her paternity, flamed with the wild strength that had brought the Highland warriors down on their enemies like shrieking banshees. Her long, straight nose lengthened still further by the shadows, eyes slitted like a snarling cat’s, she was the image of her father – and her father was patently not the dark, quiet scholar whose photo adorned the jacket of the book on the table.
