Diana Gabaldon · @Writer_DG
7th Jan 2014 from TwitLonger
#DailyLines #MOBY #WrittenINMyOWNHeartsBLOOD #Book8 #OutJUNE10th #RogerANDBuck #onthetrail #yesCumberpatchisarealname
Mr. Cumberpatch proved to be a tall, ascetic person with an incongruous crop of red curls that sat on his head like a small, inquisitive animal. He had, he said, taken the item in trade for a sucking pig, along with a tin pan whose bottom had been burnt through but could easy be patched, six horse shoes, a looking-glass and half a dresser.
“Not really a tinker by trade, see?” he said. “Don’t travel. But things come and find me, they do.”
Evidently they did. Mr. Cumberpatch’s tiny cottage was crammed to its rafters with objects that had once been useful and might be so again, once Mr. Cumberpatch got round to fixing them.
“Sell much?” Buck asked, raising an eyebrow at a disassembled carriage clock that sat on the hearth, its internal organs neatly piled into a Sheffield-plated comfit dish whose silver had mostly worn away.
“Happen,” Mr. Cumberpatch said laconically. “See anything ye like?”
In the interests of cooperation, Roger haggled politely for a dented canteen and a canvas bed-sack with only a few small charred holes at one end, these the result of some soldier taking his rest too close to a campfire. And received in turn the name and general direction of the person from whom Mr. Cumberpatch had got the item.
“Flimsy sort of a thing,” his host said, with a shrug. “And t’old woman said she wouldn’t have it in t’house, all those numbers might be to do with magic, aye? Her not holdin’ with sorcery and t’like.”
The old woman in question was possibly twenty-five, Roger thought, a tiny, dark-eyed creature like a vole, who—summoned to provide tea—sized them up with a shrewd glance and proceeded to sell them a small, flabby-looking cheese, four turnips and a large raisin tart, at an extortionate price. But the price included her own observations on her husband’s transaction—well worth it, so far as Roger was concerned.