An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги TXT) 📗
“I don’t,” Rachel said. “What?”
Dorothea looked from one to the other. “I have been to a Quaker meeting. Two, in fact. I know how it’s done. Let us hold a meeting and ask the Lord to guide us.”
Denny’s mouth fell open, greatly entertaining Rachel, who was seldom able to dumbfound her brother but was beginning to enjoy seeing Dorothea do it.
“That—” he began, sounding stunned.
“Is an excellent idea,” Rachel said, already dragging another chair near to the fire.
Denny could hardly argue. Looking remarkably discombobulated, he sat, though Rachel noticed that he put her between Dorothea and himself. She wasn’t sure whether he was afraid to be too close to Dorothea, lest the power of her presence overwhelm him, or whether it was only that sitting across the hearth from her gave him the best view.
They all settled slowly, shifting a bit for comfort, and lapsed into silence. Rachel closed her eyes, seeing the warm redness of the fire inside her lids, feeling the comfort of it on her hands and feet. She gave silent thanks for it, remembering the constant griping of cold in the camp, the nails of her fingers and toes on fire with it, and the continual shivering that lessened but did not stop when she huddled into her blankets at night and left her muscles fatigued and sore. It was no wonder Denny didn’t want Dorothea to go with them. She didn’t want to go back, would give almost anything not to go—anything but Denny’s well-being. She hated being cold and hungry, but it would be much worse to be warm and well-fed and know that he suffered alone.
Did Lady Dorothea have any idea what it would be like? she wondered, and opened her eyes. Dorothea sat quiet but upright, graceful hands folded in her lap. She supposed Denny was imagining, as Rachel was, those hands reddened and marred by chilblains, that lovely face gaunt with hunger and blotched with dirt and cold.
Dorothea’s eyes were shadowed by her lids, but Rachel was sure she was looking at Denny. This was a considerable gamble on Dorothea’s part, she thought. For what if the Lord spoke to Denny and said it was impossible, that he must send her away? What if the Lord spoke to Dorothea now, she thought suddenly, or what if He had already? Rachel was quite taken back at the thought. It wasn’t that Friends thought that the Lord spoke only to them; it was only that they weren’t sure other folk listened very often.
Had she been listening herself? In all honesty, she was forced to admit that she had not. And she knew why: out of a disinclination to hear what she was afraid she must—that she must turn away from Ian Murray and abandon the thoughts of him that warmed her body and heated her dreams in the freezing forest, so she woke sometimes sure that if she put out her hand to the falling snow, it would hiss and vanish from her palm.
She swallowed hard and closed her eyes, trying to open herself to the truth but trembling in fear of hearing it.
All she heard, though, was a steady panting noise, and an instant later Rollo’s wet nose nudged her hand. Disconcerted, she scratched his ears. Surely it wasn’t seemly to be doing that in meeting, but he would keep nudging her until she complied, she knew. He half-closed his yellow eyes in pleasure and rested his heavy head upon her knee.
The dog loves him, she thought, rubbing gently through the thick, coarse fur. Can he be a bad man, if that is so? It wasn’t God she heard in reply but her brother, who would certainly say, “While dogs are worthy creatures, I think they are perhaps no judge of character.”
But I am, she thought to herself. I know what he is—and I know him for what he might be, too. She looked at Dorothea, motionless in her gray bag of a dress. Lady Dorothea Grey was prepared to abandon her former life, and very likely her family, to become a Friend, for Denny’s sake. Might it not be, she wondered, that Ian Murray could turn from violence for hers?
Well, there is a proud thought, she scolded herself. What sort of power does thee think thee has, Rachel Mary Hunter? No one has that sort of power, save the Lord.
But the Lord did have it. And if the Lord should be so inclined, anything was possible. Rollo’s tail moved gently, thumping thrice upon the floor.
Denzell Hunter straightened a little on his stool. It was the slightest movement, but coming as it did out of utter stillness, it surprised both the women, who lifted their heads like startled birds.
“I love thee, Dorothea,” he said. He spoke very quietly, but his soft eyes burned behind his spectacles, and Rachel felt her chest ache. “Will thee marry me?”
SEVERANCE AND REUNION
April 20, 1778
AS TRANSATLANTIC VOYAGES went—and after our adventures with Captains Roberts, Hickman, and Stebbings, I considered myself something of a connoisseur of seagoing disaster—the trip to America was quite dull. We did have a slight brush with an English man-of-war but fortunately outran her, did run into two squalls and a major storm but luckily didn’t sink, and while the food was execrable, I was much too distracted to do more than knock weevils out of the biscuit before eating it.
Half my mind was on the future: Marsali and Fergus’s precarious situation, the danger of Henri-Christian’s condition, and the logistics of dealing with it. The other half—well, to be fair, seven-eighths—was still at Lallybroch with Jamie.
I felt raw and bruised. Severed in some vital part, as always when parted from Jamie for very long, but also as though I had been violently ejected from my home, like a barnacle ripped from its rock and heedlessly tossed into boiling surf.
The greater part of that, I thought, was Ian’s impending death. Ian was so much a part of Lallybroch, his presence there so much a constant and a comfort to Jamie all these years, that the sense of his loss was in a way the loss of Lallybroch itself. Oddly enough, Jenny’s words, hurtful as they might have been, didn’t really trouble me; I knew only too well the frantic grief, the desperation that one turned to rage because it was the only way to stay alive. And in truth, I understood her feelings, too, because I shared them: irrational or not, I felt that I should have been able to help Ian. What good was all my knowledge, all my skill, if I couldn’t help when help was truly vital?
But there was a further sense of loss—and a further nagging guilt—in the fact that I could not be there when Ian died, that I had had to leave him for the last time knowing that I would not see him again, unable to offer comfort to him, or to be with Jamie or his family when the blow fell, or even simply to bear witness to his passing.
Young Ian felt this, too, to an even greater degree. I often found him sitting near the stern, staring into the ship’s wake with troubled eyes.
“D’ye think he’s gone yet?” he asked me abruptly on one occasion when I’d come to sit beside him there. “Da?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “I’d think so, on the basis of how ill he was—but people do sometimes hang on amazingly. When is his birthday, do you know?”
He stared at me in bafflement. “It’s in May sometime, near Uncle Jamie’s. Why?”
I shrugged and pulled my shawl tighter against the chill of the wind.
“Often people who are very ill, but are near their birthday, seem to wait until it’s passed before dying. I read a study of it once. For some reason, it’s more likely if the person is famous or well known.”
That made him laugh, though painfully.
“Da’s never been that.” He sighed. “Right now I wish I’d stayed for him. I know he said to go—and I wanted to go,” he added fairly. “But I feel bad that I did.”
I sighed, too. “So do I.”
“But you had to go,” he protested. “Ye couldna let poor wee Henri-Christian choke. Da would understand that. I know he did.”
I smiled at his earnest attempt to make me feel better.
