A Breath of Snow and Ashes

  his hands behind him.

  “Yes?” I said encouragingly, nearly sure that I was right in my suppositions. I glanced toward the western end of the garden, where the bees were buzzing happily among the tall yellow umbels of the dauco plants. Well, it was better than the eighteenth-century notion of condoms, at least.

  “I can’t marry her,” he blurted.

  “What?” I stopped hoeing and straightened up, staring at him. His lips were pressed tightly together, and I saw now that what I had taken for shyness had been his attempt to mask a deep unhappiness that now showed plainly in the lines of his face.

  “You’d better come and sit down.” I led him to the small bench Jamie had made me, set beneath the shade of a black gum tree that overhung the north side of the garden.

  He sat, head drooping and hands trapped between his knees. I took off my broad-brimmed sun hat, wiped my face on my apron, and pinned up my hair more neatly, breathing in the cool freshness of the spruce and balsam trees that grew on the slope above.

  “What is it?” I asked gently, seeing that he did not know how to start. “Are you afraid that perhaps you don’t love her?”

  He gave me a startled look, then turned his head back to the studied contemplation of his knees.

  “Oh. No, ma’am. I mean—I don’t, but that’s no matter.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. I mean—I’m sure we should grow to be fond of one another, meine Mutter says so. And I like her well enough now, to be sure,” he added hastily, as though fearing this might sound insulting. “Da says she’s a tidy wee soul, and my sisters are verra fond of her indeed.”

  I made a noncommittal sound. I had had my doubts about this match to begin with, and it was beginning to sound as though they were justified.

  “Is there . . . perhaps someone else?” I asked delicately.

  Manfred shook his head slowly, and I heard him swallow hard.

  “No, ma’am,” he said in a low voice.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Aye, ma’am.” He drew a deep breath. “I mean—there was. But that’s all done with now.”

  I was puzzled by this. If he had decided to renounce this mysterious other girl—whether out of fear of his mother, or for some other reason—then what was stopping him from going through with the marriage to Lizzie?

  “The other girl—is she by chance from Hillsboro?” Things were coming a little clearer. When I had first met him and his family at the Gathering, his sisters had exchanged knowing glances at mention of Manfred’s visits to Hillsboro. They had known about it then, even if Ute had not.

  “Aye. That’s why I went to Hillsboro—I mean, I had to go, for the . . . er . . . But I meant to see . . . Myra . . . and tell her that I would be married to Miss Wemyss and couldna come to see her anymore.”

  “Myra.” So she had a name, at least. I sat back, tapping my foot meditatively. “You meant to—so you didn’t see her, after all?”

  He shook his head again, and I saw a tear drop and spread suddenly on the dusty homespun of his breeches.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, his voice half-choked. “I couldn’t. She was dead.”

  “Oh, dear,” I said softly. “Oh, I am so sorry.” The tears were falling on his knees, making spots on the cloth, and his shoulders shook, but he didn’t make a sound.

  I reached out and gathered him into my arms, holding him tight against my shoulder. His hair was soft and springy and his skin flushed with heat against my neck. I felt helpless to deal with his grief; he was too old to comfort with mere touch, too young—perhaps—to find any solace in words. There was nothing I could do for the moment save hold him.

  His arms went round my waist, though, and he clung to me for several minutes after his weeping was spent. I held him quietly, patting his back and keeping watch through the flickering green shadows of the vine-twined palisades, lest anyone else come looking for me in the garden.

  At last he sighed, let go, and sat up. I groped for a handkerchief, and not finding one, pulled off my apron and handed it to him to wipe his face.

  “You needn’t marry right away,” I said, when he seemed to have regained possession of himself. “It’s only right that you should take a little time to—to heal. But we can find some excuse to put the wedding off; I’ll speak to Jamie—”

  But he was shaking his head, a look of sad determination taking the place of tears.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, low-voiced but definite. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Myra was a whore, ma’am. She died of the French disease.”

  He looked up at me then, and I saw the terror in his eyes, behind the grief.

  “And I think I’ve got it.”

  “YE’RE SURE?” Jamie set down the hoof he had been trimming, and looked bleakly at Manfred.

  “I’m sure,” I said tartly. I had obliged Manfred to show me the evidence—in fact, I had taken scrapings from the lesion to examine microscopically—then took him straight to find Jamie, barely waiting for the boy to do up his breeches.

  Jamie looked fixedly at Manfred, plainly trying to decide what to say. Manfred, purple-faced from the double stress of confession and examination, dropped his own eyes before this basilisk gaze, staring at a crescent of black hoof paring that lay on the ground.

  “I’m that sorry, sir,” he murmured. “I—I didna mean to . . .”

  “I shouldna suppose anyone does,” Jamie said. He breathed deeply and made a sort of subterranean growling noise that caused Manfred to hunch his shoulders and try to withdraw his head, turtlelike, into the safer confines of his clothing.

  “He did do the right thing,” I pointed out, trying to put the best face possible on the situation. “Now, I mean—telling the truth.”

  Jamie snorted.

  “Well, he couldna be poxing wee Lizzie, now, could he? That’s worse than only going wi’ a whore.”

  “I suppose some men would just keep quiet about it, and hope for the best.”

  “Aye, some would.” He narrowed his eyes at Manfred, evidently looking for overt indications that Manfred might be a villain of this description.

  Gideon, who disliked having his feet messed about and was consequently in bad temper, stamped heavily, narrowly missing Jamie’s own foot. He tossed his head, and emitted a rumbling noise that I thought was roughly the equivalent of Jamie’s growl.

  “Aye, well.” Jamie left off glaring at Manfred, and grabbed Gideon’s halter. “Go along to the house with him, Sassenach. I’ll finish here, and then we’ll have Joseph in and see what’s to do.”

  “All right.” I hesitated, unsure whether to speak in front of Manfred. I didn’t want to raise his hopes too much, until I’d had a chance to look at the scrapings under the microscope.

  The spirochetes of syphilis were very distinctive, but I didn’t think I had a stain that would allow me to see them with a simple light microscope such as mine was. And while I thought my homemade penicillin could likely eliminate the infection, I would have no way of knowing for certain, unless I could see them, and then see that they had disappeared from his blood.

  I contented myself with saying, “I have got penicillin, mind.”

  “I ken that well enough, Sassenach.” Jamie switched his baleful look from Manfred to me. I’d saved his life with the penicillin—twice—but he hadn’t enjoyed the process. With a Scottish noise of dismissal, he bent and picked up Gideon’s enormous hoof again.

  Manfred seemed a bit shell-shocked, and said nothing on the way to the house. He hesitated at the door to the surgery, glancing uneasily from the gleaming microscope to the open box of surgical tools, and then toward the covered bowls lined up on the counter, in which I grew my penicillin colonies.

  “Come in,” I said, but was obliged to reach out and take him by the sleeve before he would step across the threshold. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been to the surgery before; it was a good five miles to the McGillivrays’ place, and Frau McGillivray was en
tirely capable of dealing with her family’s minor ills.

  I wasn’t feeling terribly charitable toward Manfred at the moment, but gave him a stool and asked if he would like a cup of coffee. I thought he could probably use a stiff drink, if he was about to have an interview with Jamie and Joseph Wemyss, but supposed I had better keep him clear-headed.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, and swallowed, white-faced. “I mean, thank ye, no.”

  He looked extremely young, and very frightened.

  “Roll up your sleeve then, please. I’m going to draw a bit of blood, but it won’t hurt much. How did you come to meet the, er, young lady? Myra, that was her name?”

  “Aye, ma’am.” Tears welled in his eyes at her name; I suppose he really had loved her, poor boy—or thought he had.

  He had met Myra in a tavern in Hillsboro. She had seemed kind, he said, and was very pretty, and when she asked the young gunsmith to buy her a glass of geneva, he had obliged, feeling dashing.

  “So we drank a bit together, and she laughed at me, and . . .” He seemed rather at a loss to explain how matters had progressed from there, but he had waked up in her bed. That had sealed the matter, so far as he was concerned, and he had seized every excuse to go to Hillsboro thereafter.

  “How long did this affair go on?” I asked, interested. Lacking a decent syringe for drawing blood, I’d merely pierced the vein inside his elbow with a fleam, and drained off the welling blood into a small vial.

  For the better part of two years, apparently.

  “I kent I couldna wed her,” he explained earnestly. “Meine Mutter would never . . .” He trailed off, assuming the look of a startled rabbit hearing hounds in its immediate vicinity. “Gruss Gott!” he said. “My mother!”

  I’d been wondering about that particular aspect of the affair myself. Ute McGillivray wasn’t going to be at all pleased to hear that her pride and joy, her only son, had contracted a disreputable disease, and furthermore, one which was about to lead to the breaking of his carefully engineered engagement and very likely to a scandal that the entire backcountry would hear about. The fact that it was generally a fatal disease would probably be a secondary concern.

  “She’ll kill me!” he said, sliding off his stool and rolling his sleeve down hastily.

  “Probably not,” I said mildly. “Though I suppose—”

  At this fraught moment came the sound of the back door opening and voices in the kitchen. Manfred stiffened, dark curls quivering with alarm. Then heavy footsteps started down the hall toward the surgery, and he dived across the room, flung a leg across the windowsill, and was off, running like a deer for the trees.

  “Come back here, you ass!” I bellowed through the open window.

  “Which ass is that, Auntie?” I turned to see that the heavy footsteps belonged to Young Ian—heavy, because he was carrying Lizzie Wemyss in his arms.

  “Lizzie! What’s the matter? Here, put her on the table.” I could see at once what the matter was: a return of the malarial fever. She was limp, but shivered nonetheless with chill, the contracting muscles shaking her like jelly.

  “I found her in the dairy shed,” Ian said, laying her gently on the table. “The deaf Beardsley came rushin’ out as though the devil was chasing him, saw me, and dragged me in. She was on the floor, wi’ the churn overturned beside her.”

  This was very worrying—she hadn’t had an attack for some time, but for a second time, the attack had come upon her too suddenly for her to go for help, causing almost immediate collapse.

  “Top shelf of the cupboard,” I said to Ian, hastily rolling Lizzie on her side and undoing her laces. “That bluish jar—no, the big one.”

  He grabbed it without question, removing the lid as he brought it to me.

  “Jesus, Auntie! What’s that?” He wrinkled his nose at the smell from the ointment.

  “Gallberries and cinchona bark in goose grease, among other things. Take some and start rubbing it into her feet.”

  Looking bemused, he gingerly scooped up a dollop of the purplish-gray cream and did as I said, Lizzie’s small bare foot nearly disappearing between the large palms of his hands.

  “Will she be all right, d’ye think, Auntie?” He glanced at her face, looking troubled. The look of her was enough to trouble anyone—the clammy color of whey, and the flesh gone slack so that her delicate cheeks juddered with the chills.

  “Probably. Close your eyes, Ian.” I’d got her clothes loosened, and now pulled off her gown, petticoats, pocket, and stays. I threw a ratty blanket over her before working the shift off over her head—she owned only two, and wouldn’t want one spoiled with the reek of the ointment.

  Ian had obediently closed his eyes, but was still rubbing the ointment methodically into her feet, a small frown drawing his brows together, the look of concern lending him for a moment a brief but startling resemblance to Jamie.

  I drew the jar toward me, scooped up some ointment, and, reaching under the blanket, began to rub it into the thinner skin beneath her armpits, then over her back and belly. I could feel the outlines of her liver distinctly, a large, firm mass beneath her ribs. Swollen, and tender from the way she grimaced at my touch; there was some ongoing damage there, certainly.

  “Can I open my eyes now?”

  “Oh—yes, of course. Rub more up her legs, please, Ian.” Shoving the jar back in his direction, I caught a glimpse of movement in the doorway. One of the Beardsley twins stood there, clinging to the jamb, dark eyes fixed on Lizzie. Kezzie, it must be; Ian had said “the deaf Beardsley” had come to fetch help.

  “She’ll be all right,” I said to him, raising my voice, and he nodded once, then disappeared, with a single burning glance at Ian.

  “Who was it ye were shouting at, Auntie Claire?” Ian looked up at me, clearly as much to preserve Lizzie’s modesty as from courtesy to me; the blanket was turned back and his big hands were smoothing ointment into the skin above her knee, thumbs gently circling the small rounded curves of her patella, her skin so thin that the pearly bone seemed almost visible through it.

  “Who—oh. Manfred McGillivray,” I said, suddenly recollecting. “Damn! The blood!” I leapt up and wiped my hands hurriedly on my apron. Thank God, I’d corked the vial; the blood inside was still liquid. It wouldn’t keep long, though.

  “Do her hands and arms, would you please, Ian? I’ve got to manage this quickly.”

  He moved obligingly to do as I said, while I hastily spilled a drop of blood on each of several slides, dragging a clean slide across each one to make a smear. What sort of stain might work on spirochetes? No telling; I’d try them all.

  I explained the matter disjointedly to Ian, as I pulled stain bottles out of the cupboard, made up the solutions, and set the slides to soak.

  “The pox? Poor lad; he must be nearly mad wi’ fright.” He eased Lizzie’s arm, gleaming with ointment, under the blanket and tucked it gently round her.

  I was momentarily surprised at this show of sympathy, but then remembered. Ian had been exposed to syphilis some years before, after his abduction by Geillis Duncan; I hadn’t been sure that he had the disease, but had dosed him with the last of my twentieth-century penicillin, just in case.

  “Did ye not tell him ye could cure him, though, Auntie?”

  “I hadn’t the chance. Though I’m not absolutely sure that I can, to be honest.” I sat down on a stool, and took Lizzie’s other hand, feeling for her pulse.

  “Ye’re not?” His feathery brows went up at that. “Ye told me I was cured.”

  “You are,” I assured him. “If you ever had the disease in the first place.” I gave him a sharp look. “You’ve never had a sore on your prick, have you? Or anywhere else?”

  He shook his head, mute, a dark wave of blood staining his lean cheeks.

  “Good. But the penicillin I gave you—that was some that I’d brought from . . . well, from before. That was purified—very strong and certainly potent. I’m never sure, when I use this stuff”—I gestured
at the culturing bowls on the counter—“whether it’s strong enough to work, or even the right strain. . . .” I rubbed the back of my hand under my nose; the gallberry ointment, had a most penetrating smell.

  “It doesn’t always work.” I had had more than one patient with an infection that didn’t respond to one of my penicillin concoctions—though in those cases, I had often succeeded with another attempt. In a few instances, the person had recovered on his own before the second brew was ready. In one instance, the patient had died, despite applications of two different penicillin mixtures.

  Ian nodded slowly, his eyes on Lizzie’s face. The first bout of chills had spent itself and she lay quiet, the blanket barely moving over the slight round of her chest.

  “If ye’re no sure, then . . . ye’d not let him marry her, surely?”

  “I don’t know. Jamie said he’d speak to Mr. Wemyss, see what he thought of the matter.”

  I rose and took the first of the slides from its pinkish bath, shook off the clinging drops, and, wiping the bottom of the slide, placed it carefully on the platform of my microscope.

  “What are ye looking for, Auntie?”

  “Things called spirochetes. Those are the particular kind of germ that causes syphilis.”

  “Oh, aye.” Despite the seriousness of the situation, I smiled, hearing the note of skepticism in his voice. I’d shown him microorganisms before, but—like Jamie—like almost everyone—he simply couldn’t believe that something so nearly invisible was capable of harm. The only one who had seemed to accept the notion wholeheartedly was Malva Christie, and in her case, I thought the acceptance was due simply to her faith in me. If I told her something, she believed me; very refreshing, after years of assorted Scots looking at me with varying degrees of squiggle-eyed suspicion.

  “Has he gone home, d’ye think? Manfred?”

  “I don’t know.” I spoke absently, slowly moving the slide to and fro, searching. I could make out the red blood cells, pale pink discs that floated past my field of view, drifting lazily in the watery stain. No deadly spirals visible—but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, only that the stain I had used might not reveal them.

  Lizzie stirred and moaned, and I looked round to see her eyes flutter open.

  “There, lass,” Ian said softly, and smiled at her. “Better, is it?”

  “Is it?” she said faintly. Still, the corners of her mouth lifted slightly, and she put a hand out from under her blanket, groping. He took it in his, patting it.

  “Manfred,” she said, turning her head to and fro, eyes half-lidded. “Is Manfred here?”

  “Um . . . no,” I said, exchanging a quick glance of consternation with Ian. How much had she heard? “No, he was here, but he’s—he’s gone now.”

  “Oh.” Seeming to lose interest, she closed her eyes again. Ian looked down at her, still stroking her hand. His face showed deep sympathy—with perhaps a tinge of calculation.

  “Shall I maybe carry the lassie up to her bed?” he asked softly, as though she might be sleeping. “And then maybe go and find . . . ?” He tilted his head toward the open window, raising one eyebrow.

  “If you would, please, Ian.” I hesitated, and his eyes met mine, deep hazel and soft with worry and the shadow of remembered pain. “She’ll be all right,” I said, trying to infuse a sense of certainty into the words.

  “Aye, she will,” he said firmly, and stooped to gather her up, tucking the blanket under her. “If I’ve anything to say about it.”

  46

  IN WHICH THINGS

  GANG AGLEY

  MANFRED MCGILLIVRAY did not come back. Ian did, with a blackened eye, skinned knuckles, and the terse report that Manfred had declared a set intention of going off and hanging himself, and good riddance to the fornicating son of a bitch, and might his rotten bowels gush forth like Judas Iscariot’s, the traitorous, stinking wee turd. He then stamped upstairs, to stand silent over Lizzie’s bed for a time.

  Hearing this, I hoped that Manfred’s statement was merely the counsel of temporary despair—and cursed myself for not having told him at once and in the strongest terms that he could be cured, whether it was absolutely true or not. Surely he wouldn’t . . .

  Lizzie was half-conscious, prostrated with the burning fevers and shaking agues of malaria, and in no fit state to be told of her betrothed’s desertion, nor the cause of it. I would have to make some delicate inquiries, though, so soon as she was fit, because there was the possibility that she and Manfred had anticipated their marriage vows, and if so . . .

  “Well, there’s the one thing about it,” Jamie observed grimly. “The Beardsley twins were making ready to track our poxed lad down and castrate him, but now they’ve heard he means to hang himself, they’ve magnanimously decided that will do.”

  “Thank the Lord for small blessings,” I said, sinking down at the table. “They might really do it.” The Beardsleys, particularly Josiah, were excellent trackers—and not given to idle threats.

  “Oh, they would,” Jamie assured me. “They were most seriously sharpening their knives when I found them at it and told them not to trouble themselves.”