He made a low noise, indicating that I should stop apologizing and get on with it. So I took a deep breath and did, whispering the words into his chest.
“Master Raymond was there. What if—if he found … Faith … and was able to … somehow bring her … back?”
Dead silence. I swallowed and went on.
“People … aren’t always dead, even though it looks like it. Look at old Mrs. Wilson! Every doctor knows—or has heard—about people who’ve been declared dead and wake up later in the morgue.”
“Or in a coffin.” He sounded grim, and a shudder went over me. “Aye, I’ve heard stories like that. But—a wee babe and one born too soon—how—”
“I don’t know how!” I burst out. “I said it’s complete fantasy, it can’t be true! But—but—” My throat thickened and my voice squeaked.
“But ye wish it were?” His hand cupped the back of my head and his voice was quiet again. “Aye. But … if it was, mo chridhe, why would he not have told ye? Ye saw him again, no? After he’d healed ye, I mean.”
“Yes.” I shuddered, momentarily feeling the King of France’s Star Chamber close around me, the smell of the King’s perfume, of dragon’s blood and wine in the air—and two men before me, awaiting my sentence of death.
“Yes, I know. But—when the Comte died, Raymond was banished, and they took him away. He couldn’t have told me then, and he might not have been able to come back before we left Paris.”
It sounded insane, even to me. But I could—just—see it: Master Raymond, stealing out of L’Hôpital des Anges after leaving me, perhaps ducking aside to avoid notice, hiding in the place where the nuns had, perhaps, laid Faith on a shelf, wrapped in her swaddling clothes. He would have known her, as he’d known me …
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.
One of his. The thought came out of nowhere, and I stiffened.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.” What if—all right, I was insane, but too late for that to make a difference.
“What if he—if I, we—what if Master Raymond is—was—somehow related to me?”
Jamie said nothing, but I felt his hand move, under my hair. His middle finger folded down and the outer ones stood up straight, making the sign of the horns, against evil.
“And what if he’s not?” he said dryly. He rolled me off him and turned toward me so we were face-to-face. The darkness was slowly fading and I could see his face, drawn with tiredness, touched with sorrow and tenderness, but still determined.
“Even if everything ye’ve made yourself think was somehow true—and it’s not, Sassenach; ye ken it’s not—but if it were somehow true, it wouldna make any difference. The woman in Frances’s locket is dead now, and so is our Faith.”
His words touched the raw place in my heart, and I nodded, tears welling.
“I know,” I whispered.
“I know, too,” he whispered, and held me while I wept.
25
Voulez-vous Coucher Avec Moi
THE WEATHER WAS STILL fine in the daytime, but the smoke shed stood in the shade of a rocky cliff. No fire had been lit in here for over a month, and the air smelled of bitter ash and the tang of old blood.
“How much do you think this thing weighs?” Brianna put both hands on the shoulder of the enormous black-and-white hog lying on the crude table by the back wall and leaned her own weight experimentally against it. The shoulder moved slightly—rigor had long since passed—but the hog itself didn’t budge an inch.
“At a guess, it originally weighed somewhat more than your father. Maybe four hundred pounds on the hoof?” Jamie had bled and gralloched the hog when he killed it; that had probably lightened his load by a hundred pounds or so, but it was still a lot of meat. A pleasant thought for the winter’s food, but a daunting prospect at the moment.
I unrolled the pocketed cloth in which I kept my larger surgical tools; this was no job for an ordinary kitchen knife.
“What do you think about the intestines?” I asked. “Usable, do you think?”
She wrinkled her nose, considering. Jamie hadn’t been able to carry much beyond the carcass itself—and in fact had dragged that—but had thoughtfully salvaged twenty or thirty pounds of intestine. He’d roughly stripped the contents, but two days in a canvas pack hadn’t improved the condition of the uncleaned entrails, not savory to start with. I’d looked at them dubiously, but put them to soak overnight in a tub of salt water, on the off chance that the tissue hadn’t broken down too far to prevent their use as sausage casing.
“I don’t know, Mama,” Bree said reluctantly. “I think they’re pretty far gone. But we might save some of it.”
“If we can’t, we can’t.” I pulled out the largest of my amputation saws and checked the teeth. “We can make square sausage, after all.” Cased sausages were much easier to preserve; once properly smoked, they’d last indefinitely. Sausage patties were fine, but took more careful handling, and had to be packed into wooden casks or boxes in layers of lard for keeping … we hadn’t any casks, but—
“Lard!” I exclaimed, looking up. “Bloody hell—I’d forgotten all about that. We don’t have a big kettle, bar the kitchen cauldron, and we can’t use that.” Rendering lard took several days, and the kitchen cauldron supplied at least half our cooked food, to say nothing of hot water.
“Can we borrow one?” Bree glanced toward the door, where a flicker of movement showed. “Jem, is that you?”
“No, it’s me, Auntie.” Germain stuck his head in, sniffing cautiously. “Mandy wanted to visit Rachel’s petit bonbon, and Grand-père said she could go if Jem or me would take her. We threw bones and he lost.”
“Oh. Fine, then. Will you go up to the kitchen and fetch the bag of salt from Grannie’s surgery?”
“There isn’t any,” I said, grasping the pig by one ear and setting the saw in the crease of the neck. “There wasn’t much, and we used all but a handful soaking the intestines. We’ll need to borrow that, too.”
I dragged the saw through the first cut, and was pleased to find that while the fascia between skin and muscle had begun to give way—the skin slipped a little with rough handling—the underlying flesh was still firm.
“I tell you what, Bree,” I said, bearing down on the saw as I felt the teeth bite between the neck bones, “it’s going to take a bit of time before I’ve got this skinned and jointed. Why don’t you call round and see which lady might lend us her rendering kettle for a couple of days, and a half pound of salt to be going on with?”
“Right,” Bree said, seizing the opportunity with obvious relief. “What should I offer her? One of the hams?”
“Oh, no, Auntie,” said Germain, quite shocked. “That’s much too much for the lend of a kettle! And ye shouldna offer anyway,” he added, small fair brows drawing together in a frown. “Ye dinna bargain a favor. She’ll ken ye’ll give her what’s right.”