Outlander aka Cross Stitch - Gabaldon Diana - Страница 41

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A short, middle-aged serving woman with a face like a winter apple popped out of a door I hadn’t noticed, concealed as it was in the bend of the chimney.

“Take Mistress Claire up to the stillroom,” Geilie ordered, “and then go and fetch us a bucket of spring water. From the spring, mind, not the well in the square!” She turned to Dougal. “I’ve the tonic put by that I promised your brother. If you’ll come out to the kitchen with me for a moment?”

I followed the serving woman’s pumpkin-shaped rear up a set of narrow wooden stairs, emerging unexpectedly into a long, airy loft. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was furnished with casement windows, shut now against the damp, but still providing a great deal more light than had been available in the fashionably gloomy parlor downstairs.

It was clear that Geilie knew her business as an herbalist. The room was equipped with long drying frames netted with gauze, hooks above the small fireplace for heat-drying, and open shelves along the walls, drilled with holes to allow for air circulation. The air was thick with the delicious, spicy scent of drying basil, rosemary, and lavender. A surprisingly modern long counter ran along one side of the room, displaying a remarkable assortment of mortars, pestles, mixing bowls, and spoons, all immaculately clean.

It was some time before Geilie appeared, flushed from climbing the stairs, but smiling in anticipation of a long afternoon of herb-pounding and gossip.

It began to rain lightly, drops spattering the long casements, but a small fire was burning on the stillroom hearth, and it was very cozy. I enjoyed Geilie’s company immensely; she had a wry-tongued, cynical viewpoint that was a refreshing contrast to the sweet, shy clanswomen at the castle, and clearly she had been well educated, for a woman in a small village.

She also knew every scandal that had occurred either in village or castle in the last ten years, and she told me endless amusing stories. Oddly enough, she asked me few questions about myself. I thought perhaps that was not her way; she would find out what she wanted to know about me from other people.

For some time, I had been conscious of noises coming from the street outside, but had attributed them to the traffic of villagers coming from Sunday Mass; the kirk was located at the end of the street by the well, and the High Street ran from kirk to square, spreading from there into a fan of tiny lanes and walks.

In fact, I had amused myself on the ride to the smithy by imagining an aerial view of the village as a representation of a skeletal forearm and hand; the High Street was the radius, along which lay the shops and businesses and the residences of the more well-to-do. St. Margaret’s Lane was the ulna, a narrower street running parallel with the High, tenanted by smithy, tannery, and the less genteel artisans and businesses. The village square (which, like all village squares I had ever seen, was not square at all, but roughly oblong) formed the carpals and metacarpals of the hand, while the several lanes of cottages made up the phalangeal joints of the fingers.

The Duncans’ house stood on the square, as behooved the residence of the procurator fiscal. This was a matter of convenience as well as status; the square could be used for those judicial matters which, by reason of public interest or legal necessity, overflowed the narrow confines of Arthur Duncan’s study. And it was, as Dougal explained, convenient to the pillory, a homely wooden contraption that stood on a small stone plinth in the center of the square, adjacent to the wooden stake used – with thrifty economy of purpose – as whipping post, maypole, flagstaff and horse tether, depending upon requirements.

The noise outside was now much louder, and altogether more disorderly than seemed appropriate to people coming soberly home from church to their dinners. Geilie put aside the jars with an exclamation of impatience and threw open the window to see what caused the uproar.

Joining her at the window, I could see a crowd of folk dressed in church-going garb of gown, kirtle, coat, and bonnet, led by the stocky figure of Father Bain, the priest who served both village and castle. He had in his custody a youth, perhaps twelve years old, whose ragged trews and smelly shirt proclaimed him a tanner’s lad. The priest had the boy gripped by the nape of the neck, a hold made somewhat difficult to maintain by the fact that the lad was slightly taller than his minatory captor. The crowd followed the pair at a small distance, rumbling with disapproving comment like a passing thunder cloud in the wake of a lightning bolt.

As we watched from the upper window, Father Bain and the boy disappeared beneath us, into the house. The crowd remained outside, muttering and jostling. A few of the bolder souls chinned themselves on the window ledges, attempting to peer within.

Geilie shut the window with a slam, making a break in the anticipatory rumble below.

“Stealing, most like,” she said laconically, returning to the herb table. “Usually is, wi’ the tanners’ lads.”

“What will happen to him?” I asked curiously. She shrugged, crumbling dried rosemary between her fingers into the mortar.

“Depends on whether Arthur’s dyspeptic this morning, I should reckon. If he’s made a good breakfast, the lad might get off with a whipping. But happen he’s costive or flatulent” – she made a moue of distaste – “the boy’ll lose an ear or a hand, most like.”

I was horrified, but hesitant to interfere directly in the matter. I was an outlander, and an Englishwoman to boot, and while I thought I would be treated with some respect as an inhabitant of the castle, I had seen many of the villagers surreptitiously make the sign against evil as I passed. My intercession might easily make things worse for the boy.

“Can’t you do anything?” I asked Geilie. “Speak to your husband, I mean; ask him to be, er, lenient?”

Geilie looked up from her work, surprised. Clearly the thought of interfering in her husband’s affairs had never crossed her mind.

“Why should you care what happens to him?” she asked, but curiously, not with any hostile meaning.

“Of course I care!” I said. “He’s only a lad; whatever he did, he doesn’t deserve to be mutilated for life!”

She raised pale brows; plainly this argument was unconvincing. Still, she shrugged and handed me the mortar and pestle.

“Anything to oblige a friend,” she said, rolling her eyes. She scanned her shelves and selected a bottle of greenish stuff, labeled, in fine cursive script, EXTRACT OF PEPPERMINT.

“I’ll go and dose Arthur, and whilst I’m about it, I’ll see if aught can be done for the lad. It may be too late, mind,” she warned. “And if that poxy priest’s got a hand in, he’ll want the stiffest sentence he can get. Still, I’ll try. You keep after the pounding; rosemary takes forever.”

I took up the pestle as she left, and pounded and ground automatically, paying little heed to the results. The shut window blocked the sound both of the rain and the crowd below; the two blended in a soft, pattering susurrus of menace. Like any schoolchild, I had read Dickens. And earlier authors, as well, with their descriptions of the pitiless justice of these times, meted out to all illdoers, regardless of age or circumstance. But to read, from a cozy distance of one or two hundred years, accounts of child hangings and judicial mutilation, was a far different thing than to sit quietly pounding herbs a few feet above such an occurrence.

Could I bring myself to interfere directly, if the sentence went against the boy? I moved to the window, carrying the mortar with me, and peered out. The crowd had increased, as merchants and housewives, attracted by the gathering, wandered down the High Street to investigate. Newcomers leaned close as the standees excitedly relayed the details, then merged into the body of the crowd, more faces turned expectantly to the door of the house.

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