A Breath of Snow and Ashes

  “Ban—” She mouthed the unfamiliar word. “I haven’t heard that before.”

  “It’s the Gaelic. The Highland tongue, you know? It means ‘female healer’ or something like.”

  “Oh, the Gaelic.” An expression of mild derision crossed her face; I expected she had absorbed her father’s attitude toward the Highlanders’ ancient language. She evidently saw something in my face, though, for she instantly erased the disdain from her own features and bent over the book again. “Who was it wrote these other bits, then?”

  “A man named Daniel Rawlings.” I smoothed a creased page, with the usual sense of affection for my predecessor. “He was a doctor from Virginia.”

  “Him?” She looked up, surprised. “The same who’s buried in the boneyard up the mountain?”

  “Ah . . . yes, that’s him.” And the story of how he came to be there was not something to be shared with Miss Christie. I glanced out of the window, estimating the light. “Will your father be wanting his dinner?”

  “Oh!” She stood up straight at that, glancing out the window, too, with a faint look of alarm. “Aye, he will.” She cast a last look of longing toward the book, but then brushed down her skirt and set her cap straight, ready to go. “I thank ye, Mrs. Fraser, for showing me your wee book.”

  “Happy to,” I assured her sincerely. “You’re welcome to come again and look at it. In fact . . . would you—” I hesitated, but plunged on, encouraged by her look of bright interest. “I’m going to take a growth from Grannie Macbeth’s ear tomorrow. Would you like to come along with me, to see how? It would be a help to me, to have another pair of hands,” I added, seeing sudden doubt war with the interest in her eyes.

  “Oh, aye, Mrs. Fraser—I’d dearly like it!” she said. “It’s only my father—” She looked uneasy as she said it, but then seemed to make up her mind. “Well . . . I’ll come. I’m sure I can talk him round.”

  “Would it help if I were to send a note? Or come and speak with him?” I was suddenly quite desirous that she should come with me.

  She gave a small shake of the head.

  “Nay, ma’am, it’ll be all right, I’m sure.” She dimpled at me suddenly, gray eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell him I’ve had a keek at your black book, and it’s no by way of being spells in it, at all, but only receipts for teas and purges. I’ll maybe not say about the drawings, though,” she added.

  “Spells?” I asked incredulously. “Is that what he thought?”

  “Oh, aye,” she assured me. “He warned me not to touch it, for fear of ensorcellment.”

  “Ensorcellment,” I murmured, bemused. Well, Thomas Christie was a schoolmaster, after all. In fact, he might have been right, I thought; Malva glanced back at the book as I went with her to the door, obvious fascination on her face.

  23

  ANESTHESIA

  I CLOSED MY EYES AND, holding my hand a foot or so in front of my face, wafted it gently toward my nose, like one of the parfumeurs I’d seen in Paris, testing a fragrance.

  The smell hit me in the face like an ocean wave, and with approximately the same effect. My knees buckled, black lines writhed through my vision, and I ceased to make any distinction between up and down.

  In what seemed an instant later, I came to, lying on the floor of the surgery with Mrs. Bug staring down at me in horror.

  “Mrs. Claire! Are ye all right, mo gaolach? I saw ye fall—”

  “Yes,” I croaked, shaking my head gingerly as I got up on one elbow. “Put—put the cork in.” I gestured clumsily at the large open flask on the table, its cork lying alongside. “Don’t get your face near it!”

  Face averted and screwed into a grimace of caution, she got the cork and inserted it, at arm’s length.

  “Phew, what is yon stuff?” she said, stepping back and making faces. She sneezed explosively into her apron. “I’ve never smelt anything like that—and Bride kens I’ve smelt a good many nasty things in this room!”

  “That, my dear Mrs. Bug, is ether.” The swimming sensation in my head had almost disappeared, replaced by euphoria.

  “Ether?” She looked at the distilling apparatus on my counter in fascination, the alcohol bath bubbling gently away in its great glass bubble over a low flame and the oil of vitriol—later to be known as sulfuric acid—slicking its slow way down the slanted tubing, its malign hot scent lurking below the usual surgery smells of roots and herbs. “Fancy! And what’s ether, then?”

  “It puts people asleep, so they won’t feel pain when you cut them,” I explained, thrilled by my success. “And I know exactly who I’m going to use it on first!”

  “TOM CHRISTIE?” Jamie repeated. “Have ye told him?”

  “I told Malva. She’s going to work on him; soften him up a bit.”

  Jamie snorted briefly at the thought.

  “Ye could boil Tom Christie in milk for a fortnight, and he’d still be hard as a grindstone. And if ye think he’ll listen to his wee lass prattle about a magic liquid that will put him to sleep—”

  “No, she isn’t to tell him about the ether. I’ll do that,” I assured him. “She’s just going to pester him about his hand; convince him he needs it mended.”

  “Mm.” Jamie still appeared dubious, though not, it seemed, entirely on Thomas Christie’s account.

  “This ether ye’ve made, Sassenach. Might ye not kill him with it?”

  I had, in fact, worried considerably about that very possibility. I’d done operations frequently where ether was used, and it was on the whole a fairly safe anesthetic. But homemade ether, administered by hand . . . and people did die of anesthetic accidents, even in the most careful settings, with trained anesthetists and all sorts of resuscitating equipment to hand. And I remembered Rosamund Lindsay, whose accidental death still haunted my dreams now and then. But the possibility of having a reliable anesthetic, of being able to do surgery without pain—

  “I might,” I admitted. “I don’t think so, but there’s always some risk. Worth it, though.”

  Jamie gave me a slightly jaundiced look.

  “Oh, aye? Does Tom think so?”

  “Well, we’ll find out. I’ll explain it all carefully to him, and if he won’t—well, he won’t. But I do hope he does!”

  The edge of Jamie’s mouth curled up and he shook his head tolerantly.

  “Ye’re like wee Jem wi’ a new toy, Sassenach. Take care the wheels dinna come off.”

  I might have made some indignant reply to this, but we had come in sight of the Bugs’ cabin, and Arch Bug was sitting on his stoop, peacefully smoking a clay pipe. He took this from his mouth and made to stand up when he saw us, but Jamie motioned him back.

  “Ciamar a tha thu, a charaid?”

  Arch replied with his customary “Mmp,” infused with a tone of cordiality and welcome. A raised white brow in my direction, and a twiddle of the pipe stem toward the trail indicated that his wife was at our house, if that’s who I was looking for.

  “No, I’m just going into the woods to forage a bit,” I said, lifting my empty basket by way of evidence. “Mrs. Bug forgot her needlework, though—may I fetch it for her?”

  He nodded, eyes creasing as he smiled round his pipe. He shifted his lean buttocks courteously to allow me to go past him into the cabin. Behind me, I heard a “Mmp?” of invitation, and felt the boards of the stoop shift as Jamie sat down beside Mr. Bug.

  There were no windows, and I was obliged to stand still for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dimness. It was a small cabin, though, and it took no more than half a minute before I could make out the contents: little more than the bed frame, a blanket chest, and a table with two stools. Mrs. Bug’s workbag hung from a hook on the far wall, and I crossed to get it.

  On the porch behind me, I heard the murmur of male conversation, featuring the quite unusual sound of Mr. Bug’s voice. He could and did talk, of course, but Mrs. Bug talked so volubly that when she was present, her spouse’s contribution was generally not much more than a smile and an
occasional “mmp” of accord or disagreement.

  “Yon Christie,” Mr. Bug was saying now, in a meditative tone of voice. “D’ye find him strange, a Sheaumais?”

  “Aye, well, he’s a Lowlander,” Jamie said, with an audible shrug.

  A humorous “mmp” from Mr. Bug indicated that this was a perfectly sufficient explanation, and was succeeded by the sucking noises of a pipe being encouraged to draw.

  I opened the bag, to be sure that the knitting was inside; in fact, it was not, and I was obliged to poke round the cabin, squinting in the dimness. Oh—there it was; a dark puddle of something soft in the corner, fallen from the table and knocked aside by someone’s foot.

  “Is he stranger than he might be, Christie?” I heard Jamie ask, his own tone casual.

  I glanced through the door in time to see Arch Bug nod toward Jamie, though he didn’t speak, being engaged in a fierce battle with his pipe. However, he raised his right hand and waggled it, displaying the stumps of his two missing fingers.

  “Aye,” he said finally, releasing a triumphant puff of white smoke with the word. “He wished to ask me whether it hurt a good deal, when this was done.”

  His face wrinkled up like a paper bag, and he wheezed a little—high hilarity for Arch Bug.

  “Oh, aye? And what did ye tell him, then, Arch?” Jamie asked, smiling a little.

  Arch sucked meditatively on his pipe, now fully cooperative, then pursed his lips and blew a small, perfect ring of smoke.

  “Weeel, I said it didna hurt a bit—at the time.” He paused, blue eyes twinkling. “Of course, that may have been because I was laid out cold as a mackerel from the shock of it. When I came round, it stung a bit.” He lifted the hand, looking it over dispassionately, then glanced through the door at me. “Ye didna mean to use an ax on poor old Tom, did ye, ma’am? He says ye’re set to mend his hand next week.”

  “Probably not. May I see?” I stepped out on the porch, bending to him, and he let me take the hand, obligingly switching his pipe to the left.

  The index and middle finger had been severed cleanly, right at the knuckle. It was a very old injury; so old that it had lost that shocking look common to recent mutilations, where the mind still sees what should be there, and tries vainly for an instant to reconcile reality with expectation. The human body is amazingly plastic, though, and will compensate for missing bits as well as it can; in the case of a maimed hand, the remnant often undergoes a subtle sort of useful deformation, to maximize what function remains.

  I felt along the hand carefully, fascinated. The metacarpals of the severed digits were intact, but the surrounding tissues had shrunk and twisted, withdrawing that part of the hand slightly, so that the remaining two fingers and the thumb could make a better opposition; I’d seen old Arch use that hand with perfect grace, holding a cup to drink, or wielding the handle of a spade.

  The scars over the finger stumps had flattened and paled, forming a smooth, calloused surface. The remaining finger joints were knobbed with arthritis, and the hand as a whole was so twisted that it really didn’t resemble a hand anymore—and yet it was not at all repulsive. It felt strong and warm in mine, and in fact, was oddly attractive, in the same way that a piece of weathered driftwood is.

  “It was done with an ax, you said?” I asked, wondering exactly how he had managed to inflict such an injury on himself, given that he was right-handed. A slippage might have gashed an arm or leg, but to take two fingers of the same hand right off like that . . . Realization dawned and my grasp tightened involuntarily. Oh, no.

  “Oh, aye,” he said, and exhaled a plume of smoke. I looked up, straight into his bright blue eyes.

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  “The Frasers,” he said. He squeezed my hand gently, then withdrew his own and turned it to and fro. He glanced at Jamie.

  “Not the Frasers of Lovat,” he assured him. “Bobby Fraser of Glenhelm, and his nephew. Leslie, his name was.”

  “Oh? Well, that’s good,” Jamie replied, one eyebrow lifted. “I shouldna like to hear it was close kin of mine.”

  Arch chuckled, almost soundlessly. His eyes still gleamed bright in their webs of wrinkled skin, but there was something in that laugh that made me want suddenly to step back a little.

  “No, ye wouldna,” he agreed. “Nor me. But this was maybe the year ye would have been born, a Sheaumais, or a bit before. And there are no Frasers at Glenhelm now.”

  The hand itself had not troubled me at all, but the imagined vision of how it had got that way was making me a trifle faint. I sat down beside Jamie, not waiting for invitation.

  “Why?” I said bluntly. “How?”

  He drew on his pipe, and blew another ring. It struck the remnants of the first and both disintegrated in a haze of fragrant smoke. He frowned a little, and glanced down at the hand, now resting on his knee.

  “Ah, well. It was my choice. We were bowmen, see,” he explained to me. “All the men of my sept, we were brought up to it, early. I’d my first bow at three, and could strike a grouse through the heart at forty feet by the time I was six.”

  He spoke with an air of simple pride, squinting a little at a small flock of doves that were foraging under the trees nearby, as though estimating how easily he could have bagged one.

  “I did hear my father tell of the archers,” Jamie said. “At Glenshiels. Many of them Grants, he said—and some Campbells.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, interested in the story, but wary.

  “Aye, that was us.” Arch puffed industriously, smoke wreathing up round his head. “We’d crept down through the bracken in the night,” he explained to me, “and hid among the rocks above the river at Glenshiels, under the bracken and the rowans. Ye could have stood a foot away and not seen one of us, so thick as it was.

  “A bit cramped,” he added confidentially to Jamie. “Ye couldna stand up to take a piss, and we’d had our suppers—with a bit o’ beer—before we came up the other side o’ the mountain. All squatting like women, we were. Trying like the devil to keep our bowstrings dry in our shirts, too, what wi’ the rain coming down and dripping down our necks through the fern.

  “But come the dawn,” he went on cheerfully, “and we stood on the signal and let fly. I will say ’twas a bonny sight, our arrows hailing down from the hills on the poor sods camped there by the river. Aye, your faither fought there, too, a Sheaumais,” he added, pointing the stem of his pipe at Jamie. “He was one o’ those by the river.” A spasm of silent laughter shook him.

  “No love lost, then,” Jamie replied, very dryly. “Between you and the Frasers.”

  Old Arch shook his head, not at all discomposed.

  “None,” he said. He turned his attention back to me, his manner sobering a little.

  “So when the Frasers would capture a Grant alone on their land, it was their habit to give him a choice. He could lose his right eye, or the twa fingers of his right hand. Either way, he wouldna draw a bow again against them.”

  He rubbed the maimed hand slowly to and fro against his thigh, stretching it out, as though his phantom fingers reached and yearned for the touch of singing sinew. Then he shook his head, as though dismissing the vision, and curled his hand into a fist. He turned to me.

  “Ye werena intending to take Christie’s fingers straight off, were ye, Mrs. Fraser?”

  “No,” I said, startled. “Of course not. He doesn’t think . . . ?”

  Arch shrugged, bushy white brows raised toward his receding hairline.

  “I couldna say for sure, but he seemed verra much disturbed at the thought of being cut.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I’d have to speak to Tom Christie.

  Jamie had stood up to take his leave, and I followed suit automatically, shaking out my skirts and trying to shake out of my head the mental image of a young man’s hand, pinned to the ground, and an ax chunking down.

  “No Frasers at Glenhelm, ye said?” Jamie asked thoughtfully, looking down at Mr. Bug. “Leslie, the nephew—he w
ould have been Bobby Fraser’s heir, would he?”

  “Aye, he would.” Mr. Bug’s pipe had gone out. He turned it over and knocked the dottle neatly out against the edge of the porch.

  “Both killed together, were they? I mind my father telling of it, once. Found in a stream, their heads caved in, he said.”

  Arch Bug blinked up at him, eyelids lowered, lizardlike, against the sun’s glare.

  “Weel, ye see, a Sheaumais,” he said, “a bow’s like a good-wife, aye? Knows her master, and answers his touch. An ax, though—” He shook his head. “An ax is a whore. Any man can use one—and it works as well in either hand.”

  He blew through the stem of the pipe to clear it of ash, wiped the bowl with his handkerchief, and tucked it carefully away—left-handed. He grinned at us, the remnants of his teeth sharp-edged and yellowed with tobacco.

  “Go with God, Seaumais mac Brian.”

  LATER IN THE WEEK, I went to the Christies’ cabin, to take the stitches out of Tom’s left hand and explain to him about the ether. His son, Allan, was in the yard, sharpening a knife on a foot-treadled grindstone. He smiled and nodded to me, but didn’t speak, unable to be heard above the rasping whine of the grindstone.

  Perhaps it was that sound, I thought, a moment later, that had aroused Tom Christie’s apprehensions.

  “I have decided that I shall leave my other hand as it is,” he said stiffly, as I clipped the last stitch and pulled it free.

  I set down my tweezers and stared at him.

  “Why?”

  A dull red rose in his cheeks, and he stood up, lifting his chin and looking over my shoulder, so as not to meet my eye.

  “I have prayed about it, and I have come to the conclusion that if this infirmity be God’s will, then it would be wrong to seek to change it.”

  I suppressed the strong urge to say “Stuff and nonsense!”, but with great difficulty.

  “Sit down,” I said, taking a deep breath. “And tell me, if you would, just why you think God wants you to go about with a twisted hand?”

  He did glance at me then, surprised and flustered.

  “Why . . . it is not my place to question the Lord’s ways!”

  “Oh, isn’t it?” I said mildly. “I rather thought that’s what you were doing last Sunday. Or wasn’t it you I heard, inquiring as to what the Lord thought He was about, letting all these Catholics flourish like the green bay tree?”

  The dull red color darkened substantially.

  “I am sure you have misunderstood me, Mistress Fraser.” He straightened himself still further, so that he was nearly leaning over backward. “The fact remains that I shall not require your assistance.”

  “Is it because I’m a Catholic?” I asked, settling back on the stool and folding my hands on my knee. “You think perhaps I’ll take advantage of you, and baptize you into the church of Rome when you’re off your guard?”

  “I have been suitably christened!” he snapped. “And I will thank you to keep your Popish notions to yourself.”

  “I have an arrangement with the Pope,” I said, giving him stare for stare. “I issue no bulls on points of doctrine, and he doesn’t do surgery. Now, about your hand—”

  “The Lord’s will—” he began stubbornly.

  “Was it the Lord’s will that your cow should fall into the gorge and break her leg last month?” I interrupted him. “Because if it was, then you presumably ought to have left her there to die, rather than fetching my husband to help pull her out, and then allowing me to set her leg. How is she, by the way?”

  I could see the cow in question through the window, peacefully grazing at the edge of the yard, and evidently untroubled either by her nursing calf, or by the binding I had applied to support her cracked cannon bone.

  “She is well, I thank you.” He was beginning to sound a little strangled, though his shirt was loose at the collar. “That is—”

  “Well, then,” I said. “Do you think the Lord regards you as less deserving of medical help than your cow? It seems unlikely to me, what with Him regarding sparrows and all that.”

  He’d gone a sort of dusky purple round the jowls by this point, and clutched the defective hand with the sound one, as though to keep it safe from me.

  “I see that you have heard something of the Bible,” he began, very pompous.

  “Actually, I’ve read it for myself,” I said. “I read quite well, you know.”

  He brushed this remark aside, a dim light of triumph gleaming in his eye.

  “Indeed. Then I am sure you will have read the Letter of St. Paul to Timothy, in which he says, Let a woman be silent—”