Outlander aka Cross Stitch - Gabaldon Diana (библиотека электронных книг txt) 📗

I reached out a hand impulsively to stop him. “How did you know-” I began. Old Alec snorted derisively.

“I may ha’ but one eye, lass; it doesna mean I’m blind.” He creaked off, snorting as he went. I found the stairs and went up to my room, contemplating what, if anything, the old horsemaster had meant by his final remark.

Chapter 9. THE GATHERING

My life seemed to be assuming some shape, if not yet a formal routine. Rising at dawn with the rest of the castle inhabitants, I breakfasted in the great hall, then, if Mrs. Fitz had no patients for me to see, I went to work in the huge castle gardens. Several other women worked there regularly, with an attending phalanx of lads in varying sizes, who came and went, hauling rubbish, tools, and loads of manure. I generally worked through the day there, sometimes going to the kitchens to help prepare a newly picked crop for eating or preserving, unless some medical emergency called me back to the Skulkery, as I called the late Beaton’s closet of horrors.

Once in a while, I would take up Alec’s invitation and visit the stables or paddock, enjoying the sight of the horses shedding their shaggy winter coats in clumps, growing strong and glossy with spring grass.

Some evenings I would go to bed immediately after supper, exhausted by the day’s work. Other times, when I could keep my eyes open, I would join the gathering in the Great Hall to listen to the evening’s entertainment of stories, song, or the music of harp or pipes. I could listen to Gwyllyn the Welsh bard for hours, enthralled in spite of my total ignorance of what he was saying, most times.

As the castle inhabitants grew accustomed to my presence, and I to them, some of the women began to make shy overtures of friendship, and to include me in their conversations. They were plainly very curious about me, but I replied to all their tentative questions with variations of the story I had told Colum, and after a bit, they accepted that as all they were likely to know. Having found out that I knew something of medicine and healing, though, they grew still more interested in me, and began to ask questions about the ailments of their children, husbands, and beasts, in most cases making little distinction between the latter two in level of importance.

Besides the normal questions and gossip, there was considerable talk of the coming Gathering that I had heard Old Alec mention at the paddock. I concluded that this was an occasion of some importance, and grew more convinced by the extent of the preparations for it. A constant stream of foodstuffs poured into the great kitchens, and more than twenty skinned carcasses hung in the slaughter shed, behind a screen of fragrant smoke that kept the flies away. Hogsheads of ale were delivered by wagon and carted down to the castle cellars, bags of fine flour were brought up from the village mill for baking, and baskets of cherries and apricots were fetched daily from the orchards outside the castle wall.

I was invited to go on one of these fruit-picking expeditions with several of the young women of the castle, and accepted with alacrity, eager to get out from under the forbidding shadow of the stone walls.

It was beautiful in the orchard, and I greatly enjoyed wandering through the cool mist of the Scottish morning, fingering through the damp leaves of the fruit trees for the bright cherries and smooth, plump apricots, squeezing gently to judge the ripeness. We plucked only the best, dropping them into our baskets in juicy heaps, eating as much as we could hold, and carrying back the remainder to be made into tarts and pies. The enormous pantry shelves were nearly filled now with pastries, cordials, hams, and assorted delicacies.

“How many people customarily come to a Gathering?” I asked Magdalen, one of the girls with whom I had become friendly.

She wrinkled a snub freckled nose in thought. “I dinna ken for sure. The last great Gathering at Leoch was over twenty year past, and then there were oh, maybe ten score of men come then – when old Jacob died, ye ken, and Colum was made laird. Might be more this year; been a good year for the crops and folk will ha’ a bit more money put by, so a good many will bring their wives and bairns along.”

Visitors were already beginning to arrive at the castle, though I had heard that the official parts of the Gathering, the oath-taking, the tynchal, and the games, would not take place for several days. The more illustrious of Colum’s tacksmen and tenants were housed in the castle proper, while the poorer men-at-arms and cottars set up camp on a fallow field below the stream that fed the castle’s loch. Roving tinkers, gypsies, and sellers of small goods had set up a sort of impromptu fair near the bridge. The inhabitants of both castle and nearby village had begun to visit the spot in the evenings, when the day’s work was done, to buy tools and bits of finery, watch the jugglers and catch up on the latest gossip.

I kept a close eye on the comings and goings, and made a point of paying frequent visits to stable and paddock. There were horses in plenty now, those of the visitors being accommodated in the castle stables. Among the confusion and disturbance of the Gathering, I thought, I should have no difficulty in finding my chance to escape.

It was on one of the fruit-picking expeditions to the orchard that I first met Geillis Duncan. Finding a small patch of Ascaria beneath the roots of an alder, I was hunting for more. The scarlet caps grew in tiny clumps, only four or five mushrooms in a group, but there were several clumps scattered through the long grass in this part of the orchard. The voices of the women picking fruit grew fainter as I worked my way toward the edge of the orchard, stooping or dropping on hands and knees to gather the fragile stalks.

“Those kind are poison,” said a voice from behind me. I straightened up from the patch of Ascaria I had been bending over, thumping my head smartly on a branch of the pine they were growing under.

As my vision cleared, I could see that the peals of laughter were coming from a tall young woman, perhaps a few years older than myself, fair of hair and skin, with the loveliest green eyes I had ever seen.

“I am sorry to be laughing at you,” she said, dimpling as she stepped down into the hollow where I stood. “I could not help it.”

“I imagine I looked funny,” I said rather ungraciously, rubbing the sore spot on top of my head. “And thank you for the warning, but I know those mushrooms are poisonous.”

“Och, you know? And who is it you’re planning to do away with, then? Your husband, perhaps? Tell me if it works, and I’ll try it on mine.” Her smile was infectious, and I found myself smiling back.

I explained that though the raw mushroom caps were indeed poisonous, you could prepare a powdered preparation from the dried fungi that was very efficacious in stopping bleeding when applied topically. Or so Mrs. Fitz said; I was more inclined to trust her than Davie Beaton’s Physician’s Guide.

“Fancy that!” she said, still smiling. “And did you know that these” – she stooped and came up with a handful of tiny blue flowers with heart-shaped leaves – “will start bleeding?”

“No,” I said, startled. “Why would anyone want to start bleeding?”

She looked at me with an expression of exasperated patience. “To get rid of a child ye don’t want, I mean. It brings on your flux, but only if ye use it early. Too late, and it can kill you as well as the child.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” I remarked, still stung by having appeared stupid.

“A bit. The girls in the village come to me now and again for such things, and sometimes the married women too. They say I’m a witch,” she said, widening her brilliant eyes in feigned astonishment. She grinned. “But my husband’s the procurator fiscal for the district, so they don’t say it too loud.”