Murtagh gloomily scanned the clouds, hanging black-bellied over the harbor, their freight of snow wastefully melting into the frigid waves. "Aye, well. We'll hope for a smooth crossing. If not, we'll likely get there wi' a corpse on our hands."
Half an hour later, launched on the choppy waters of the English Channel, I discovered what he had meant by this remark.
"Seasick?" I said incredulously. "Scotsmen aren't seasick!"
Murtagh was testy. "Then mayhap he's a red-heided Hottentot. All I know is he's green as a rotten fish and pukin' his guts out. Are ye goin' to come down and help me stop him puttin' his ribs out through his chest?"
"Damn it," I said to Murtagh, as we hung over the rail for fresh air during a brief hiatus in the unpleasantness belowdecks, "if he knows he's seasick, why in the name of God did he insist on a boat?"
The basilisk stare was unwinking. "Because he knows bluidy well we'd never make it overland wi' him in the state he's in, and he'd no stay at Eldridge for fear o' bringin' the English down on MacRannoch."
"So he's going to kill himself quietly at sea, instead," I said bitterly.
"Aye. He figures this way he'll only kill himself, and no take anyone else along wi' him. Unselfish, see. Nothin' quiet about it, though," added Murtagh, heading for the companionway in response to unmistakable sounds from below.
"Congratulations," I said to Jamie an hour or two later, pushing dank wisps away from my cheeks and forehead. "I believe you're going to make medical history by being the only documented person ever actually to die of seasickness."
"Oh, good," he mumbled into the wreck of pillows and blankets, "I'd hate to think it was all a waste." He heaved himself suddenly to one side. "God, here it comes again." Murtagh and I sprang once more to our stations. The job of holding a large man immobile while he succumbs to merciless spasms of retching is not one for the weak.
Afterward, I took his pulse yet again, and rested a hand briefly on the clammy forehead. Murtagh read my face, and followed me unspeaking up the gangway to the top deck. "He's no doin' verra weel, is he?" he said quietly.
"I don't know," I said helplessly, shaking out my sweat-drenched hair in the sharp wind. "I've honestly never heard of anyone dying of seasickness, but he's bringing up blood now." The little man's hands tightened on the rail, knuckles knifing through the sun-speckled skin. "I don't know if he's damaged himself internally with the sharp rib ends, or if it's just that his stomach is raw with the vomiting. Either way, it's not a good sign. And his pulse is much weaker, and irregular. It's a strain on his heart, you know."
"He's a heart like a lion." It was quietly said, and I wasn't sure I'd heard it at first. It might only have been the salt wind making the tears stand in his eyes. He turned abruptly to me. "And a heid like an ox. Have ye any o' that laudanum left that Lady Annabelle gave ye?"
"Yes, all of it. He wouldn't take it; doesn't want to sleep, he said."
"Aye, well. For most folk, what they want and what they get are no the same thing; I dinna see why he should be any different. Come on."
I followed him anxiously back belowdecks. "I don't think he can keep it down."
"Leave that to me. Get the bottle and help me sit him up."
Jamie was half-unconscious as it was, an unwieldy burden who protested being manhandled upright against the bulkhead. "I'm going to die," he said weakly but precisely, "and the sooner the better. Go away and let me do it in peace."
Taking firm hold of Jamie's blazing hair, Murtagh forced his head up and applied the flask to his lips. "Swallow this, me bonny wee dormouse, or I'll break yer neck. And forbye ye'll keep it down, too. I'm goin' to hold shut yer nose and yer mouth; if ye bring it up, it comes out yer ears."
By the concerted force of our wills, we transferred the contents of the flask slowly but inexorably into the young laird of Lallybroch. Choking and gagging, Jamie manfully drank as much as he could manage before subsiding, green-faced and gasping, against the bulkhead. Murtagh forestalled each threatened explosion of nausea by vicious nose-pinching, an expedient not uniformly successful, but one which allowed a gradual accumulation of the opiate in the patient's bloodstream. At length we laid him slack on the bed, the vivid flames of hair, brows, and lashes the only color on the pillow.
Murtagh came up beside me on deck a bit later. "Look," I said pointing. The dim light of sunset, shining in fugitive rays beneath the clouds, gilded the rocks of the French coast ahead. "The master says we'll be ashore in three or four hours."