All the wiry tension went out of him in a rush, and he subsided on my chest like a limp balloon. I could feel his young heart pounding like a steam hammer, and his temple was pressed against my cheek, damp with sweat.
I found the intimacy of this contact quite as objectionable as the softening presence wedged between my thighs, and rolled abruptly to the side, dumping him off. He came to life suddenly, and scrambled to his knees, yanking at his drooping breeches.
He swayed to and fro for a moment, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled up close beside me.
“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” he whispered.
I made no move, and after a moment, he reached out a tentative hand and patted me gently on the shoulder.
“I’m real sorry,” he repeated, still whispering, and then was gone, leaving me lying on my back in a puddle, wondering whether such an incompetent assault could legitimately be termed rape.
Distant rustling in the bushes, accompanied by muffled whoops of young male delight, decided me firmly that it could. Christ, the rest of the obnoxious little beasts would be at me in no time. Panicked, I sat up, mindful of the noose.
The glow from the fire was irregular and flickering, barely enough to make out the trunks of trees and the pale layer of needles and leaf mold on the ground. Enough to see the protrusions of granite boulders through the leaf layer, and the occasional hump of a fallen twig. Not that the lack of potential weapons mattered, given that my hands were still firmly tied.
The weight of the young assailant had made things worse; the knots had pulled tighter during my struggles, and my hands throbbed with lack of circulation. My fingers were beginning to go numb at the tips. Bloody hell. Was I about to lose several fingers to gangrene, as a result of this absurdity?
For an instant, I contemplated the wisdom of behaving compliantly with the next horrible little boy, in hopes that he would remove the gag. If he would, I could at least beg him to loosen the ropes—and then scream for help, in hopes that Tebbe would come and stop further assault, out of fear of my eventual supernatural revenge.
Here he came, a stealthy rustling in the bushes. I gritted my teeth on the gag and looked up, but the shadowy form in front of me wasn’t one of the young boys.
The only thought that came to mind when I realized who the new visitor was was, Jamie Fraser, you bastard, where are you?
I froze, as though not moving might somehow render me invisible. The man moved in front of me, squatting down so as to look into my face.
“Not laughin’ so much now, are you?” he said conversationally. It was Boble, the erstwhile thieftaker. “You and your husband thought it was damn funny, didn’t you, what them German women did to me? And then Mr. Fraser tellin’ me as they meant to make sausage meat of me, and him with a face like a Christian readin’ the Bible. Thought that was funny, too, didn’t you?”
To be perfectly honest, it had been funny. He was quite correct, though; I wasn’t laughing now. He drew back his arm and slapped me.
The blow made my eyes water, but the fire lit him from the side; I could still see the smile on his pudgy face. A cold qualm ran through me, making me shudder. He saw that, and the smile broadened. His canine teeth were short and blunt, so the incisors stood out by contrast, long and yellowed, rodentlike.
“Reckon you’ll think this is even funnier,” he said, rising to his feet and reaching for his flies. “Hope Hodge don’t kill you right away, so you get to tell your husband about it. Bet you he’ll enjoy the joke, man with a sense of humor like he’s got.”
The boy’s se**n was still damp and sticky on my thighs. I jerked back by reflex, trying to scramble to my feet, but was brought up short by the noose round my neck. My vision went dark for an instant as the rope tightened on my carotids, then cleared, and I found Boble’s face inches from mine, his breath hot on my skin.
He seized my chin in his hand and rubbed his face over mine, biting at my lips and rasping the stubble of his beard hard across my cheeks. Then he drew back, leaving my face wet with his saliva, pushed me flat, and climbed on top of me.
I could feel the violence in him, pulsing like an exposed heart, thin-walled and ready to burst. I knew I couldn’t escape or prevent him—knew he would hurt me, given the slightest excuse. The only thing to do was be still and endure him.
I couldn’t. I heaved under him and rolled to the side, bringing up my knee as he pushed my shift aside. It hit him a glancing blow in the thigh, and he drew back his fist by reflex and punched me in the face, sharp and quick.
Red-black pain bloomed sudden from the center of my face, filled my head, and I went blind, shocked into momentary immobility. You utter fool, I thought, with total clarity. Now he’ll kill you. The second blow struck my cheek and snapped my head to the side. Perhaps I moved again in blind resistance, perhaps I didn’t.
Suddenly he was kneeling astride me, punching and slapping, blows dull and heavy as the thump of ocean waves on sand, too remote as yet for pain. I twisted, curling, bringing up my shoulder and trying to shield my face against the ground, and then his weight was gone.
He was standing. He was kicking me and cursing, panting and half-sobbing as his boot thudded into sides and back and thighs and bu**ocks. I panted in short gasps, trying to breathe. My body jerked and quivered with each blow, skidding on the leaf-strewn ground, and I clung to the sense of the ground below me, trying so hard to sink down, be swallowed by the earth.
Then it stopped. I could hear him panting, trying to speak. “Goddamn . . . goddamn . . . oh, goddamn . . . frig . . . friggin’ . . . bitch. . .”
I lay inert, trying to disappear into the darkness that enveloped me, knowing that he was going to kick me in the head. I could feel my teeth shatter, the fragile bones of my skull splinter and collapse into the wet soft pulp of my brain, and I trembled, clenching my teeth in futile resistance against the impact. It would sound like a melon being smashed, dull, sticky-hollow. Would I hear it?
It didn’t come. There was another sound, a fast, hard rustling that made no sense. A faintly meaty sound, flesh on flesh in a soft smacking rhythm, and then he gave a groan and warm gouts of fluid fell wet on my face and shoulders, splattering on bare skin where the cloth of my shift had torn away.
I was frozen. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the detached observer wondered aloud whether this was in fact the single most disgusting thing I had ever encountered. Well, no, it wasn’t. Some of the things I had seen at L’Hôpital des Anges, to say nothing of Father Alexandre’s death, or the Beardsleys’ attic . . . the field hospital at Amiens . . . heavens, no, this wasn’t even close.
I lay rigid, eyes shut, recalling various nasty experiences of my past and wishing I were in fact in attendance at one of those events, instead of here.
He leaned over, seized my hair, and banged my head several times against the tree, wheezing as he did so.
“Show you . . .” he muttered, then dropped his hand and I heard shuffling noises as he staggered away.
When I finally opened my eyes again, I was alone.
I REMAINED ALONE, a small mercy. Boble’s violent attack seemed to have frightened away the boys.
I rolled onto my side and lay still, breathing. I felt very tired, and utterly forlorn.
Jamie, I thought, where are you?
I wasn’t afraid of what might happen next; I couldn’t see any further than the moment I was in, a single breath, a single heartbeat. I didn’t think, and wouldn’t feel. Not yet. I just lay still, and breathed.
Very slowly I began to notice small things. A fragment of bark caught in my hair, scratchy on my cheek. The give of the thick dead leaves beneath me, cradling my body. The sense of effort as my chest lifted. Increasing effort.
A tiny nerve began to twitch near one eye.
I realized quite suddenly that with the gag in my mouth and my nasal tissues being rapidly congested by blood and swelling, I was in some actual danger of suffocation. I twisted as far onto my side as I could get without strangling, and rubbed my face first against the ground, then—with increasing desperation—dug my heels into the ground and wriggled upward, scraping my face hard against the bark of the tree, trying without success to loosen or dislodge the gag.
The bark rasped lip and cheek, but the kerchief tied round my head was so tight that it cut hard into the corners of my mouth, forcing it open so that saliva leaked constantly into the wad of fabric in my mouth. I gagged at the tickle of sodden cloth in my throat, and felt vomit burn the back of my nose.
You aren’t, you aren’t, you aren’tyouaren’tyou aren’t going to vomit! I dragged air bubbling through my bloody nose, tasted thick copper as it slimed down my throat, gagged harder, doubled up—and saw white light at the edge of vision, as the noose went tight around my throat.
I fell back, my head hitting hard against the tree. I hardly noticed; the noose loosened again, thank God, and I managed one, two, three precious breaths of blood-clogged air.
My nose was puffed from cheekbone to cheekbone, and swelling fast. I clenched my teeth on the gag and blew outward through my nose, trying to clear it, if only for a moment. Blood tinged with bile sprayed warm across my chin and splattered on my chest—and I sucked air fast, getting a bit.
Blow, inhale. Blow, inhale. Blow . . . but my nasal passages were almost swollen shut by now, and I nearly sobbed in panic and frustration, as no air came.
Christ, don’t cry! You’re dead if you cry, for God’s sake don’t cry!
Blow . . . blow . . . I snorted with the last reserve of stale air in my lungs, and got a hair of clearance, enough to fill them once more.
I held my breath, trying to stay conscious long enough to discover a way to breathe—there had to be a way to breathe.
I would not let a wretch like Harley Boble kill me by simple inadvertence. That wasn’t right; it couldn’t be.
I pressed myself, half-sitting, up against the tree to ease the strain on the noose around my neck as much as possible, and let my head fall forward, so that the blood from my nose ran down, dripping. That helped, a little. Not for long, though.
My eyelids began to feel tight; my nose was definitely broken, and the flesh all round the upper part of my face was puffing now, swelling with the blood and lymph of capillary trauma, squeezing my eyes shut, further constricting my thread of air.
I bit the gag in an agony of frustration, then, seized by desperation, began to chew at it, grinding the fabric between my teeth, trying to smash it down, compress it, shift it somehow inside my mouth. . . . I bit the inside of my cheek and felt the pain but didn’t mind, it wasn’t important, nothing mattered but breath, oh, God, I couldn’t breathe, please help me breathe, please. . . .
I bit my tongue, gasped in pain—and realized that I had succeeded in thrusting my tongue past the gag, reaching the tip of it to the corner of my mouth. By poking as hard as I could with my tongue tip, I had made a tiny channel of air. No more than a wisp of oxygen could ooze through it—but it was air, and that was all that mattered.
I had my head canted painfully to one side, forehead pressed against the tree, but was afraid to move at all, for fear of losing my slender lifeline of air, if the gag should shift when I moved my head. I sat still, hands clenched, drawing long, gurgling, horribly shallow breaths, and wondering how long I could stay this way; the muscles of my neck were already quivering from strain.