A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online Page A

auld woman, and burned the house above her head.”
    “And who did she say had done it?” Jamie had turned his stool to face the hearth, and was melting lead scrap in a ladle for the bullet mold.
    “Ah, mmphm.” MacDonald’s flush deepened, and the smoke fumed from his pipe with such ferocity that I could barely make out his features through the curling wreaths.
    It transpired, with much coughing and circumlocution, that the Major had not really believed the girl at the time—or had been too interested in availing himself of her charms to pay much attention. Putting the story down simply as one of the tales whores often told to elicit sympathy and the odd extra glass of geneva, he had not bothered to ask for further detail.
    “But when I heard by chance later of the other burnings . . . well, d’ye see, I’ve had the luck to be charged by the Governor with keeping an ear to the ground, as it were, in the backcountry, for signs of unrest. And I began to think that this particular instance of unrest was maybe not just sae much of a coincidence as might at first appear.”
    Jamie and I exchanged glances at that, Jamie’s tinged with amusement, mine with resignation. He’d bet me that MacDonald—a half-pay cavalry officer who survived by freelancing—would not only survive Governor Tryon’s resignation, but would succeed in worming his way promptly into some position with the new regime, now that Tryon had left to take up a superior position as governor of New York.
“He’s a gentleman o’ fortune, our Donald,”
he’d said.
    The militant smell of hot lead began to permeate the room, competing with the Major’s pipe smoke, and quite overpowering the pleasantly domestic atmosphere of rising bread, cooking, dried herbs, scouring rushes, and lye soap that normally filled the kitchen.
    Lead melts suddenly; one instant, a deformed bullet or a bent button sits in the ladle, whole and distinct; the next, it’s gone, a tiny puddle of metal shimmering dully in its place. Jamie poured the molten lead carefully into the mold, averting his face from the fumes.
    “Why Indians?”
    “Ah. Well, ’twas what the whore in Edenton said. She said some of those who burned her house and stole her away were Indians. But as I say, at the time I paid her story little mind.”
    Jamie made a Scottish noise indicating that he took the point, but with skepticism.
    “And when did ye meet this lassie, Donald, and hear her story?”
    “Near Christmas.” The Major poked at the bowl of his pipe with a stained forefinger, not looking up. “Ye mean when was her house attacked? She didna say, but I think . . . perhaps not too long before. She was still . . . fairly, er, fresh.” He coughed, caught my eye, caught his breath, and coughed again, hard, going red in the face.
    Jamie’s mouth pressed tight, and he looked down, flipping open the mold to drop a new-made ball onto the hearth.
    I put down my fork, the remnants of appetite vanished.
    “How?” I demanded. “How did this young woman come to be in the brothel?”
    “Why, they sold her, mum.” The flush still stained MacDonald’s cheeks, but he had recovered his countenance enough to look at me. “The brigands. They sold her to a river trader, she said, a few days after they’d stolen her. He kept her for a bit, on his boat, but then a man came one night to do business, took a fancy to her, and bought her. He brought her as far as the coast, but I suppose he’d tired of her by then. . . .” His words trailed off, and he stuck the pipe back into his mouth, drawing hard.
    “I see.” I did, and the half of the omelette I’d eaten lay in a small hard ball in the bottom of my stomach.
    “Still fairly fresh.”
How long did it take, I wondered? How long would a woman last, passed from hand to casual hand, from the splintered planks of a riverboat’s deck to the tattered mattress of a hired room, given only what would keep her alive? It was more than possible that the brothel in