An Echo in the Bone (139 page)

Maybe she’d been waiting for him, having heard his gun. Maybe she just couldn’t move. She stood straight-backed but empty-eyed and watched him come, her shawls wrapped like rusty armor round her.

“Are ye all right, lass?” he asked, setting down his rifle by the big pine where she’d read to him and Ian in the long summer nights when the sun barely set from dusk to dawn.

“Aye, fine,” she said, her voice colorless.

“Aye, right,” he said, sighing. Coming close, he insisted upon taking her hands in his; she didn’t give them to him but didn’t resist. “I heard ye scream.”

“I didna mean anyone to hear.”

“Of course ye didn’t.” He hesitated, wanting to ask again was she all right, but that was foolish.

He knew fine well what the trouble was and why she needed to come and scream in the wood, where no one would hear her and ask stupidly was she all right.

“D’ye want me to go away?” he asked instead, and she grimaced, pulling at her hand, but he didn’t let go.

“No. What difference does it make? What difference does anything make?” He heard the note of hysteria in her voice.

“At least… we brought the lad home in time,” he said, for lack of anything else to offer her.

“Aye, ye did,” she said, with an effort at self-control that shredded like old silk. “And ye brought your wife back, too.”

“Ye blame me for bringing my wife?” he said, shocked. “Why, for God’s sake? Should ye no be happy she’s come back? Or d’ye—” He choked off the next words fast; he’d been about to demand whether she resented him still having a wife when she was about to lose her husband, and he couldn’t say
that
.

But that wasn’t what Jenny had meant, at all.

“Aye, she’s come back. But for what?” she cried. “What good is a faery-woman too coldhearted to lift a finger to save Ian?”

He was so staggered by this that he couldn’t do anything but repeat “Coldhearted? Claire?” in a dazed fashion.

“I asked, and she denied me.” His sister’s eyes were tearless, frantic with grief and urgency.

“Can ye not make her help me, Jamie?”

The life in his sister, always bright and pulsing, thrummed under his fingers like chained lightning now. Better if she let it loose on him, he thought. She couldn’t hurt him.

“ Mo pìuthar
, she’d heal him if she could,” he said, as gently as possible without letting go of her. “She told me ye’d asked—and she wept in the telling. She loves Ian as much—”

“Don’t ye
dare
be telling me she loves my husband as much as I do!” she shouted, jerking her hands out of his with such violence that he was sure she meant to strike him. She did, slapping his face so hard that his eye watered on that side.

“I wasna going to tell ye that at all,” he said, keeping his temper. He touched the side of his face gingerly. “I was
going
to say that she loves him as much—”

He’d intended to say, “
as she loves me,”
but didn’t get that far. She kicked him in the shin hard enough to buckle his leg, and he stumbled, flailing to keep his balance, which gave her the opportunity to turn and fly down the hill like a witch on a broomstick, her skirts and shawls whirling out like a storm around her.

DISPOSITIONS

CLEANSING OF WOUNDS
, I wrote carefully, and paused, marshaling my thoughts. Boiling water, clean rags, removal of foreign matter. Use of maggots on dead flesh (with a note of caution regarding blowfly and screwworm larvae? No, pointless; no one would be able to tell the difference without a magnifying glass). The stitching of wounds (sterilization of needle and thread). Useful poultices. Ought I to put in a separate section on the production and uses of penicillin?

I tapped the quill on the blotter, making tiny stars of ink, but finally decided against it. This was meant to be a useful guide for the common person. The common person was not equipped for the painstaking process of making penicillin, nor yet likely to have an injection apparatus—though I did think briefly of the penis syringe Dr. Fentiman had shown me, with a faint twinge of amusement.

That in turn made me think—briefly but vividly—of David Rawlings and his jugum penis. Did he really use it himself? I wondered, but hastily dismissed the vision conjured up by the thought and flipped over a few sheets, looking for my list of main topics.

Masturbation
, I wrote thoughtfully. If some doctors discussed it in a negative light—and they most certainly did—I supposed there was no reason why I shouldn’t give the opposing view—discreetly.

I found myself still making inky stars a few moments later, thoroughly distracted by the problem of talking discreetly about the benefits of masturbation. God, what if I said in print that women did it?

“They’d burn the whole printing, and likely Andy Bell’s shop, too,” I said aloud.

There was a sharp intake of breath, and I glanced up to see a woman standing in the door of the study.

“Oh, are you looking for Ian Murray?” I said, pushing back from the desk. “He’s—”

“No, it’s you I was looking for.” There was a very odd tone to her voice, and I stood up, feeling suddenly defensive without knowing why.

“Ah,” I said. “And you are… ?”

She stepped out of the shadowed hall into the light.

“Ye’ll not know me, then?” Her mouth twitched in an angry half smile. “Laoghaire MacKenzie… Fraser,” she added, almost reluctantly.

“Oh,” I said.

I would have recognized her at once, I thought, save for the incongruity of context. This was the last place I would have expected her to be, and the fact that she was here… A recollection of what had happened the last time she had come to Lallybroch made me reach inconspicuously for the letter opener on the desk.

“You were looking for me,” I repeated warily. “Not Jamie?”

She made a contemptuous gesture, pushing the thought of Jamie aside, and reached into the pocket at her waist, bringing out a folded letter.

“I’ve come to ask ye a favor,” she said, and for the first time I heard the tremor in her voice.

“Read that. If ye will,” she added, and pressed her lips tight together.

I looked warily at her pocket, but it was flat; if she’d brought a pistol, she wasn’t carrying it there. I picked up the letter and motioned her to the chair on the other side of the desk. If she took it into her head to attack me, I’d have a little warning.

Still, I wasn’t really afraid of her. She was upset; that was clear. But very much in control of herself.

I opened the letter, and, with the occasional glance to be sure she stayed where she was, began to read.

15 February 1778

Philadelphia

“Philadelphia?” I said, startled, and looked up at Laoghaire. She nodded.

“They went there in the summer last year, himself thinking ’twould be safer.” Her lips twisted a little. “Two months later, the British army came a-marching into the city, and there they’ve been since.”

“Himself,” I supposed, was Fergus. I noted the usage with interest; evidently Laoghaire had become reconciled to her older daughter’s husband, for she used the word without irony.

Dear Mam,

I must ask you to do something for love of me and my children. The trouble is
with Henri-Christian. Because of his oddness of form, he has always had some
trouble in breathing, particularly when suffering from the catarrh, and has snored
like a grampus since he was born. Now he has taken to stopping breathing
altogether when he sleeps, save he is propped up with cushions in a particular
position. Mother Claire had looked in his throat when she and Da saw us in New
Bern and said then that his adenoids—this being something in his throat—were
overlarge and might give trouble in future. (Germain has these, also, and
breathes with his mouth open a good deal of the time, but it is not a danger to him
as it is to Henri-Christian.)

I am in mortal terror that Henri-Christian will stop breathing one night and no
one will know in time to save him. We take it in turns to sit up with him, to keep
his head just right and to wake him when he stops breathing, but I do not know
how long we can contrive to keep it up. Fergus is worn out with the work of the
shop and I with the work of the house (I help in the shop, as well, and so of course
does Germain. The little girls are great help to me in the house, bless them, and
so willing to care for their little brother—but they cannot be left to sit up with him
by night alone).

I have had a physician to look at Henri-Christian. He agrees that the adenoids
are likely to blame for the obstruction of breathing, and he bled the wee lad and
gave me medicine to shrink them, but this was of no use at all and only made
Henri-Christian cry and vomit. Mother Claire—-forgive me for speaking of her to
you, for I know your feelings, but I must—had said that it might be necessary to
remove Henri-Christian’s tonsils and adenoids at some point, to ease his
breathing, and plainly this point has been reached. She did this for the Beardsley
twins some time ago on the Ridge, and I would trust no one else to attempt such
an operation on Henri-Christian.

Will you go to see her, Mam? I think she must be at Lallybroch now, and I will
write to her there, begging her to come to Philadelphia as soon as possible. But I
fear my inability to communicate the horror of our situation.

As you love me, Mam, please go to her and ask her to come as quickly as may be.

Your most affectionate daughter,

Marsali

I set down the letter.
I fear my inability to communicate the horror of our situation
. No, she’d done that, all right.

Sleep apnea, they called it; the tendency to stop breathing suddenly when asleep. It was common—and much more common in some sorts of dwarfism, where the respiratory airways were constricted by the skeletal abnormalities. Most people who had it would wake themselves, thrashing and snorting as they breathed again. But the enlarged adenoids and tonsils obstructing his throat—probably a hereditary problem, I thought distractedly, for I’d noted them in Germain and to a lesser extent in the girls, as well—would aggravate the difficulty, since even if the reflex that causes a person short of oxygen to breathe kicked in belatedly, Henri-Christian likely couldn’t draw the immediate deep breath that would waken him.

The vision of Marsali and Fergus—and probably Germain—taking it in turns to sit up in a dark house, watching the little boy sleep, perhaps nodding off themselves in the cold and quiet, jerking awake in terror lest he have shifted in his sleep and stopped breathing… A sick knot of fear had formed under my ribs, reading the letter.

Laoghaire was watching me, blue eyes direct under her cap. For once, the anger, hysteria, and suspicion with which she had always regarded me was gone.

“If ye’ll go,” she said, and swallowed, “I’ll give up the money.”

I stared at her.

“You think that I—” I began incredulously, but stopped. Well, yes, she plainly
did
believe I would require to be bribed. She thought that I had abandoned Jamie after Culloden, returning only when he had become prosperous again. I struggled with the urge to try to tell her… but that was pointless, and quite beside the point now, too. The situation was clear and sharp as broken glass.

She leaned forward abruptly, her hands on the desk, pressed down so hard that her fingernails were white.

“Please,” she said.
“Please.”

I was conscious of strong, conflicting urges: on the one hand, to smack her, and on the other, to put a sympathetic hand over hers. I fought down both and forced myself to think calmly for a moment.

I would go, of course; I’d have to. It had nothing to do with Laoghaire, or with what lay between us. If I did not go, and Henri-Christian died—he well
might—
I’d never be able to live with myself. If I came in time, I could save him; no one else could. It was as simple as that.

My heart sank precipitously at the thought of leaving Lallybroch now. How horrible; how could I, knowing that I left Ian for the last time, perhaps leaving them all and the place itself for the last time. But even as I thought these things, the part of my mind that was a surgeon had already grasped the necessity and was setting about the business of planning the quickest way to Philadelphia, contemplating how I should acquire what I needed once there, the possible obstructions and complications that might arise—all the practical analysis of how I should do what had so suddenly been asked of me.

And as my mind clicked through these things, the ruthless logic overwhelming shock, subduing emotion, it began to dawn upon me that this sudden disaster might have other aspects.

Laoghaire was waiting, eyes fixed on me, her mouth firm, willing me to do it.

“All right,” I said, leaning back in my chair and fixing her in turn with a level look. “Let’s come to terms, then, shall we?”

“SO,” I SAID, eyes fixed on the flight of a gray heron as it crossed the loch, “we made a bargain.

I’ll go to Philadelphia as quickly as I can to take care of Henri-Christian. She’ll marry Joey, give up the alimony—and give her permission for Joan to go to the convent. Though I suppose we’d best get it in writing, just in case.”

Jamie stared at me, speechless. We were sitting in the long rough grass at the side of the loch, where I’d brought him to tell him what had happened—and what was going to happen.

“She—Laoghaire—has kept Joan’s dowry intact; Joan will have that, for traveling and for her entry to the convent,” I added. I took a deep breath, hoping to keep my voice steady. “I’m thinking that—well, Michael will be leaving in a few days. Joan and I could go with him to France; I could sail from there on a French ship, and he could see her safely to her convent.”

“You—” he began, and I reached to squeeze his hand, to stop him speaking.

“You can’t go now, Jamie,” I said softly. “I know you can’t.”