An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (книги без регистрации бесплатно полностью txt) 📗

She nodded to me and tossed the corn in handfuls. I tucked the last warm egg into my basket and waited. Obviously she wanted to talk to me and had made an excuse to do so in private. I had a deep feeling of foreboding.

Entirely justified, too, for she dropped the last handful of cracked corn and, with it, all pretense.

“I want to beg a favor,” she said to me, but she avoided my eye, and I could see the pulse in her temple going like a ticking clock.

“Jenny,” I said, helpless either to stop her or to answer her. “I know—”

“Will ye cure Ian?” she blurted, lifting her eyes to mine. I’d been right about what she meant to ask, but wrong about her emotion. Worry and fear lay behind her eyes, but there was no shyness, no embarrassment; she had the eyes of a hawk, and I knew she would rip my flesh like one if I denied her.

“Jenny,” I said again. “I can’t.”

“Ye can’t, or ye won’t?” she said sharply.

“I can’t. For God’s sake, do you think I wouldn’t have done it already if I had the power?”

“Ye might not, for the sake of the grudge ye hold against me. If that’s it—I’ll say I’m sorry, and I do mean it, though I meant what I did for the best.”

“You… what?” I was honestly confused, but this seemed to anger her.

“Dinna pretend ye’ve no notion what I mean! When ye came back before, and I sent for Laoghaire!”

“Oh.” I hadn’t quite forgotten that, but it hadn’t seemed important, in light of everything else. “That’s … all right. I don’t hold it against you. Why did you send for her, though?” I asked, both out of curiosity and in hopes of diffusing the intensity of her emotion a little. I’d seen a great number of people on the ragged edge of exhaustion, grief, and terror, and she was firmly in the grip of all three.

She made a jerky, impatient motion and seemed as though she would turn away but didn’t.

“Jamie hadn’t told ye about her, nor her about you. I could see why, maybe, but I kent if I brought her here, he’d have nay choice then but to take the bull by the horns and clear up the matter.”

“She nearly cleared him up,” I said, beginning to get somewhat hot myself. “She shot him, for God’s sake!”

“Well, I didna give her the gun, did I?” she snapped. “I didna mean him to say whatever he said to her, nor her to take up a pistol and put a ball in him.”

“No, but you told me to go away!”

“Why wouldn’t I? Ye’d broken his heart once already, and I thought ye’d do it again! And you wi’ the nerve to come prancing back here, fine and blooming, when we’d been … we’d been—it was that that gave Ian the cough!”

“That—”

“When they took him away and put him in the Tolbooth. But you werena here when that happened! Ye werena here when we starved and froze and feared for the lives of our men and our bairns! Not for any of it! You were in France, warm and safe!”

“I was in Boston, two hundred years from now, thinking Jamie was dead,” I said coldly. “And I can’t help Ian.” I struggled to subdue my own feelings, uncorked with a rush by this ripping of scabs off the past, and found compassion in the look of her, her fine-boned face gaunt and harrowed with worry, her hands clenched so hard that the nails bit into the flesh.

“Jenny,” I said more quietly. “Please believe me. If I could do anything for Ian, I’d give my soul to do it. But I’m not magic; I haven’t any power. Only a little knowledge, and not enough. I’d give my soul to do it,” I repeated, more strongly, leaning toward her. “But I can’t. Jenny… I can’t.”

She stared at me in silence. A silence that lengthened past bearing, and finally I stepped around her and walked toward the house. She didn’t turn around, and I didn’t look back. But behind me, I heard her whisper.

“You have nay soul.”

PURGATORY II

WHEN IAN FELT WELL enough, he came out walking with Jamie. Sometimes only as far as the yard or the barn, to lean on the fence and make remarks to Jenny’s sheep. Sometimes he felt well enough to walk miles, which amazed—and alarmed—Jamie. Still, he thought, it was good to walk side by side through the moors and the forest and down beside the loch, not talking much but side by side. It didn’t matter that they walked slowly; they always had, since Ian had come back from France with a wooden leg.

“I’m lookin’ forward to having back my leg,” Ian had remarked casually once, when they sat in the shelter of the big rock where Fergus had lost his hand, looking out over the small burn that ran down at the foot of the hill, watching for the stray flash of a leaping trout.

“Aye, that’ll be good,” Jamie had said, smiling a little—and a little wry about it, too, recalling when he’d waked after Culloden and thought his own leg missing. He’d been upset and tried to comfort himself with the thought that he’d get it back eventually, if he made it out of purgatory and into heaven. Of course, he’d thought he was dead, too, but that hadn’t seemed nearly as bad as the imagined loss of his leg.

“I dinna suppose ye’ll have to wait,” he said idly, and Ian blinked at him.

“Wait for what?”

“Your leg.” He realized suddenly that Ian had no notion what he’d been thinking, and hastened to explain.

“So I was only thinking, ye wouldna spend much time in purgatory—if at all—so ye’ll have it back soon.”

Ian grinned at him. “What makes ye sae sure I willna spend a thousand years in purgatory? I might be a terrible sinner, aye?”

“Well, aye, ye might be,” Jamie admitted. “Though if so, ye must think the devil of a lot of wicked thoughts, because if ye’d been doing anything, I’d know about it.”

“Oh, ye think so?” Ian seemed to find this funny. “Ye havena seen me in years. I might ha’ been doing anything, and ye’d never ken a thing about it!”

“Of course I would,” Jamie said logically. “Jenny would tell me. And ye dinna mean to suggest she wouldna ken if ye had a mistress and six bastard bairns, or ye’d taken to the highways and been robbing folk in a black silk mask?”

“Well, possibly she would,” Ian admitted. “Though come on, man, there’s nothing ye could call a highway within a hundred miles. And I’d freeze to death long before I came across anyone worth robbin’ in one o’ the passes.” He paused, eyes narrowed against the wind, contemplating the criminal possibilities open to him.

“I could ha’ been stealing cattle,” he offered. “Though there’re sae few beasts these days, the whole parish would ken it at once should one go missing. And I doubt I could hide it amongst Jenny’s sheep wi’ any hope of its not bein’ noticed.”

He thought further, chin in hand, then reluctantly shook his head.

“The sad truth is, Jamie, no one’s had a thing worth stealin’ in the Highlands these twenty years past. Nay, theft’s right out, I’m afraid. So is fornication, because Jenny would ha’ killed me already. What does that leave? There’s no really anything to covet…. I suppose lying and murder is all that’s left, and while I’ve met the odd man I would ha’ liked to kill, I never did.” He shook his head regretfully, and Jamie laughed.

“Oh, aye? Ye told me ye killed men in France.”

“Well, aye, I did, but that was a matter of war—or business,” he added fairly. “I was bein’ paid to kill them; I didna do it out o’ spite.”

“Well, then, I’m right,” Jamie pointed out. “Ye’ll sail straight through purgatory like a rising cloud, for I canna think of a single lie ye’ve ever told me.”

Ian smiled with great affection.

“Aye, well, I may ha’ told lies now and then, Jamie—but no, not to you.”

He looked down at the worn wooden peg stretched before him and scratched at the knee on that side.

“I wonder, will it feel different?”

“How could it not?”

“Well, the thing is,” Ian said, wiggling his sound foot to and fro, “I can still feel my missing foot. Always have been able to, ever since it went. Not all the time, mind,” he added, looking up. “But I do feel it. A verra strange thing. Do ye feel your finger?” he asked curiously, raising his chin at Jamie’s right hand.