CHAPTER 6
The door latch rattled, and the wooden door creaked open. Cat slowly opened her eyes; they felt like they had sandpaper stuck to the insides of the lids. Cold dawn light was filtering into the room. Had she been asleep? She must have been—and her arms still were. The baby felt heavy on her lap. Bibby’s thumb had slipped out of her mouth, a little bit of drool trickled down her cheek, and she was snoring very softly.
“Here, let me take her,” said Ouska quietly, after she had shut the door behind her. She lifted the sleeping little girl out of Cat’s arms and carried her back to her pallet on the other side of the room, then laid her down and tucked the blanket in around her.
Cat shivered—the cottage had become cold during the night, and the fire had gone out; the candles were long burnt down. Her neck was stiff and sore, her fingers like lifeless sausages on the ends of her hands, useless for massaging the kinks out of her neck. Then the pins and needles started as the feeling crept back into her arms. She shook her wrists, opening and closing her hands to speed up the process of getting sensation back and shorten the prickling as much as possible. The rocking chair might be the most comfortable piece of furniture she had ever sat in, but it was clearly not designed for spending a whole night in, sleeping. Cat groaned.
So did the man on the bed. With a rush, the midnight events flooded back into Cat’s memory.
“What happened between you two?” asked Ouska.
“Noth-nothing!” Cat replied, her voice scratchy and hoarse from sleepiness. Now where had the woman got the idea that something had happened? Nothing had happened, nothing! Only a sick man’s delirium, and a confused traveller’s attempt to calm him. She blushed. Nothing at all.
“Oh?” said Ouska, sceptically. “Doesn’t feel like ‘nothing’ to me in here.” She was a mind reader! “Very well, that’s for later. Now if you can move again, we’ll get on with this. He looks like he’s taken bad.”
“Yes,” Cat replied. “He woke up, sort of, in the night” (stop blushing!) “but I don’t think he was really conscious. And he was really hot, and restless, and…”
“But you got him quiet again?” Ouska gave her a searching look. “And the babe, too. Well done.”
Cat felt absurdly proud at this praise from this woman she hardly knew at all.
Ouska laid her palm on the man’s forehead, and Cat saw that she, too, nearly snatched her hand back again.
“Yes, he’s bad. Let’s look to that wound, and we’ll go from there.”
She pulled the blanket away from the injured leg and unwrapped the cloth from around the knee. The wound looked inflamed, sore.
“Hmm, the light isn’t very good yet, but we’ll have to make do. The sooner we get this done the better. I don’t like the look of him,” she said. Out of her satchel she brought a small pair of iron tongs and several clean cloths. “Now, Catriona. I need you ready to hold him if he wakes or moves. Can you do that?”
“I—I think so,” said Cat, hesitantly.
“Of course you can. Well, here we go.”
At the first touch of the tongs, the man started up with a cry. Cat lunged across his body, trying to hold down his leg, but Ouska already had a firm grasp on his shin with her left hand, while her right wielded the tool. The man’s hands were wildly grasping, grabbing. Cat caught his right hand in both of hers, and her touch seemed to give him focus. His eyes opened; he stared at her without seeing. His fingers were wrapped around hers, squeezing convulsively. Cat clenched her teeth, and barely avoided crying out herself at the pain of his grip, when suddenly he screamed, nearly crushed her hand—and then mercifully lost consciousness again.
“Got it,” said Ouska in a satisfied tone, holding up her tongs with a vicious-looking, sharp piece of stick gripped in the points. “However he got that in there is more than I can tell.” Cat could not see what she was doing next; the pain in her hand had driven tears into her eyes. Suddenly she smelled something familiar, something like—Italian food?
“What are you doing?” she said, wiping her cheeks with her uncrushed hand.
Ouska had apparently used the cloths to clean up the injury, and now she was sprinkling something powdery on the knee. “Oil of garlic,” she said briefly, “and basilicum powder.”
“Oh…” Garlic and basil, no wonder she smelled pesto. She remembered reading about those. “They’re good against infection, aren’t they?”
“Right. Although it’s already gone a ways. I hope we can keep it from getting worse,” the older woman said, wrapping a clean bandage around the wound. “Now that that piece of wood is out, I think we have a chance.” She gave Cat a searching glance, pointedly looking at how the young woman was nursing her right hand in her left. “What’s he done to you? Got a grip on your hand, did he?”
Cat just nodded, biting her lip to keep the tears from starting again.
“Hmph. Not what you needed. But it helped at that moment, or he would have kept me from doing what I had to. Here, let me see.” Cat extended her hand across the bed, laying it in Ouska’s brown work-worn one. The older woman gently rubbed her thumb across the bruised joints, then took out another jar.
“Comfrey ointment, should keep it from bruising too much,” she explained, as she spread some salve on a cloth and tied it around Cat’s hand. “No bones broken; you’ll do.” She packed up her tools into her satchel again, then briskly stood up.
“Ouska? What… what happens now?”
“Now we wait. The next few hours should tell us where this will go. But I doubt that it will go poorly with him in the end; in spite of all, something seems right about this. It has a lot to do with your being here, I believe.”
“Here? Ouska—Ouska, where are we? What is this place? I don’t even know what I am doing here, what happened—” Cat swallowed hard to keep down the lump in her throat, to keep the tears from spilling out. The events of the evening and night threatened to overwhelm her.
The older woman gave her a long, kindly look.
“No, I don’t suppose you do know, do you? Very well,” she said. “I think it’s time we had a talk.”