"You're not. I looked." With some hesitation, I asked, "Do you want to be?"
He smiled slowly, eyes half-closing. "No, Sassenach, I don't." His face was gaunt and shadowed with illness and fatigue, but peaceful, the lines around his mouth smoothed out and the blue eyes clear. "But I'm damned close to it, want to or not. The only reason I think I'm not dying now is that I'm hungry. I wouldna be hungry if I were about to die, do ye think? Seems a waste." One eye closed altogether, but the other stayed half-open, fixed on my face with a quizzical expression.
"You can't stand up?"
He considered carefully. "If my life depended on it, I might possibly lift my head again. But stand up? No."
With a sigh, I wriggled out from under him and righted the bed before trying to lever him into a vertical position. He managed to stand for only a few seconds before his eyes rolled back and he fell across the bed. I groped frantically for the pulse in his neck, and found it, slow and strong, just below the three-cornered scar at the base of his throat. Simple exhaustion. After a month of imprisonment and a week of intense physical and mental stress, starvation, injury, sickness and high fever, even that vigorous frame had finally come to the end of its resources.
"The heart of a lion," I said, shaking my head, "and the head of an ox. Too bad you haven't also got the hide of a rhinoceros." I touched a freshly bloodied weal on his shoulder.
He opened one eye. "What's a rhinoceros?"
"I thought you were unconscious!"
"I was. I am. My head's spinning like a top."
I drew a blanket up over him. "What you need now are food and rest."
"What you need now," he said, "are clothes." And shutting the eye again, he fell promptly asleep.
* * *
40
Absolution
I had no memory of finding my way to bed, but I must have done so, because I woke up there. Anselm was sitting by the window, reading.
I sat bolt upright in bed.
"Jamie?" I croaked.
"Asleep," he said, putting the book aside. He glanced at the hour-candle on the table. "Like you. You have been with the angels for the last thirty-six hours, ma belle." He filled a cup from the earthenware jug and held it to my lips. At one time I would have considered drinking wine in bed before brushing one's teeth to be the last word in decadence. Performed in a monastery, in company with a robed Franciscan, the act seemed somewhat less degenerate. And the wine did cut through the mossy feeling in my mouth.
I swung my feet over the side of the bed, and sat swaying. Anselm caught me by the arm and eased me back onto the pillow. He seemed suddenly to have four eyes, and altogether more noses and mouths than strictly necessary.
"I'm a bit dizzy," I said, closing my eyes. I opened one. Somewhat better. At least there was only one of him, if a trifle blurry around the edges.
Anselm bent over me, concerned.
"Shall I fetch Brother Ambrose or Brother Polydore, madame? I have little skill in medicine, unfortunately."
"No, I don't need anything. I just sat up too suddenly." I tried again, more slowly. This time the room and its contents stayed relatively still. I became aware of numerous bruises and sore spots earlier submerged in the dizziness. I tried to clear my throat and discovered that it hurt. I grimaced.
"Really, ma chère, I think perhaps…" Anselm was poised by the door, ready to fetch assistance. He looked quite alarmed. I reached for the looking glass on the table and then changed my mind. I really wasn't ready for that. I grasped the wine jug instead.
Anselm came slowly back into the room and stood watching me. Once convinced that I wasn't going to collapse after all, he sat down again. I sipped the wine slowly as my head cleared, trying to shake off the aftereffects of opium-induced dreams. So we were alive, after all. Both of us.
My dreams had been chaotic, filled with violence and blood. I had dreamed over and over that Jamie was dead or dying. And somewhere in the fog had been the image of the boy in the snow, his surprised round face overlying the image of Jamie's bruised and battered one. Sometimes the pathetic, fuzzy mustache seemed to appear on Frank's face. I distinctly remembered killing all three of them. I felt as though I had spent the night in stabbing and butchery, and I ached in every muscle with a sort of dull depression.
Anselm was still there, patiently watching me, hands on his knees.
"There is something you could do for me, Father," I said.
He rose at once, eager to help, reaching for the jug.
"Of course? More wine?"