Written in My Own Heart's Blood (131 page)

FANNY’S FRENULUM

J
AMIE HAD SENT
word ahead, and preparations had been made for our coming. Jamie and I would stay with Bobby and Amy Higgins; Rachel and Ian with the MacDonalds, a young married couple who lived up the Ridge a way; and Jenny, Fanny, and Germain would bide for the nonce with Widow MacDowall, who had a spare bed.

There was a modest party thrown in our honor the first night—and in the morning we rose and were once more part of Fraser’s Ridge. Jamie disappeared into the forest, coming back at nightfall to report that his cache of whisky was safe, and brought a small cask back with him to use as trade goods for what we might need to set up housekeeping, once we had a house to keep again.

As to said house—he’d begun the preparations for building a new house before we had left the Ridge, selecting a good site at the head of the wide cove that opened just below the ridge itself. The site was elevated but the ground there fairly level, and thanks to Bobby Higgins’s industry, it had been cleared of trees, timber for the framing of the house laid in stacks, and an amazing quantity of large stones lugged uphill and piled, ready to be used for the foundation.

For Jamie, the first order of business was to see that his house—or the beginnings of it—was as it should be, and the second was to visit every household on the Ridge, hearing and giving news, listening to his tenants, reestablishing himself as the founder and proprietor of Fraser’s Ridge.

My first order of business was Fanny’s frenulum. I spent a day or two in organizing the various things we had brought with us, in particular my medical equipment, while visiting with the various women who came to call at the Higginses’ cabin—our own first cabin, which Jamie and Ian had built when we first came to the Ridge. But once that was done, I summoned my troops and commenced the action.

“YE MAY PUT
the poor lass off drinking whisky for good,” Jamie observed, casting a worried look at the cup full of amber liquid sitting on the tray next to my embroidery scissors. “Would it not be easier for her to have the ether?”

“In one way, yes,” I agreed, sliding the scissors point-first into a second cup, this one filled with clear alcohol. “And if I were going to do a lingual frenectomy, I’d have to. But there
are
dangers to using ether, and I don’t mean merely burning down the house. I’m going to do just a frenotomy, at least for now. That
is
a very simple operation; it will literally take five seconds. And, besides, Fanny says she doesn’t want to be put to sleep—perhaps she doesn’t trust me.” I smiled at Fanny as I said this; she was sitting on the oak settle by the hearth, solemnly taking note of my preparations. At this, though, she looked at me abruptly, her big brown eyes surprised.

“Oh, doh,” she said. “I twust oo. I zhust wanna thee.”

“Don’t blame you a bit,” I assured her, handing her the cup of whisky. “Here, then, take a good mouthful of that and hold it in your mouth—let it go down under your tongue—for as long as you can.”

I had a tiny cautery iron, its handle wrapped in twisted wool, heating on Amy’s girdle. I supposed it didn’t matter if it tasted like sausages. I had a fine suture needle, threaded with black silk, too, just in case.

The frenulum is a very thin band of elastic tissue that tethers the tongue to the floor of the mouth, and in most people it is exactly as long as it needs to be to allow the tongue to make all the complex motions required for speaking and eating, without letting it stray between the moving teeth, where it could be badly damaged. In some, like Fanny, the frenulum was too long and, by fastening most of the length of the tongue to the floor of her mouth, prevented easy manipulations of that organ. She often had bad breath because, while she cleaned her teeth nightly, she couldn’t use her tongue to dislodge bits of food that stuck between cheek and gum or in the hollows of the lower jaw below the tongue.

Fanny gulped audibly, then coughed violently.

“Tha’th . . .
thtrong
!” she said, her eyes watering. She wasn’t put off, though, and at my nod took another sip and sat stoically, letting the whisky seep into her buccal tissues. It would in fact numb the frenulum, at least a bit, and at the same time provide disinfection.

I heard Aidan and Germain calling outside; Jenny and Rachel had come down for the operation.

“I think we’d better do this outside,” I said to Jamie. “They’ll never all fit in here—not with Oglethorpe.” For Rachel’s belly had made considerable strides in the last few weeks and was of a size to make men shy nervously away from her lest she go off suddenly, like a bomb.

We took the tray of instruments outside and set up our operating site on the bench that stood by the front door. Amy, Aidan, Orrie, and wee Rob clustered together behind Jamie, who was charged with holding the looking glass—both to direct light into Fanny’s mouth to assist me and so that Fanny could indeed watch what was going on.

As Oglethorpe precluded Rachel being called into service as a back brace,
though, we reshuffled the staff a bit and ended with Jenny holding the looking glass and Jamie sitting on the bench, holding Fanny on his knee, his arms wrapped comfortingly around her. Germain stood by, holding a stack of clean cloths, solemn as an altar boy, and Rachel sat beside me, the tray between us, so that she could hand me things.

“All right, sweetheart?” I asked Fanny. She was round-eyed as a sun-stunned owl, and her mouth hung open just a little. She heard me, though, and nodded. I took the cup from her limp hand—it was empty, and I handed it to Rachel, who refilled it briskly.

“Mirror, please, Jenny?” I knelt on the grass before the bench, and with no more than a little trial and error, we had a beam of sunlight trained on Fanny’s mouth. I took the embroidery scissors from their bath, wiped them, and, with a pledget of cloth, took hold of Fanny’s tongue with my left hand and lifted it.

It didn’t take even three seconds. I’d examined her carefully several times, making her move her tongue as far as she could, and knew exactly where I thought the point of attachment should be. Two quick snips and it was done.

Fanny made a surprised little noise and jerked in Jamie’s arms, but didn’t seem to be in acute pain. The wound was bleeding, though, suddenly and profusely, and I hurriedly pushed her head down, so that the blood could run out of her mouth onto the ground and not choke her.

I had another pledget waiting; I dipped this quickly into the whisky and, seizing Fanny’s chin, brought her head up and tucked the pledget under her tongue.
That
made her emit a stifled
“Owy!”
but I cupped her chin and shut her mouth, adjuring her sternly to press down on the pledget with her tongue.

Everyone waited breathlessly while I counted silently to sixty. If the bleeding showed no sign of stopping, I’d have to put in a suture, which would be messy, or cauterize the wound, which would certainly be painful.

“. . . fifty-nine . . . sixty!” I said aloud, and peering into Fanny’s mouth, found the pledget substantially soaked with blood but not overwhelmed by it. I extracted it and put in another, repeating my silent count. This time, the pledget was stained, no more; the bleeding was stopping on its own.

“Hallelujah!” I said, and everyone whooped. Fanny’s head bobbed a bit and she smiled, very shyly.

“Here, sweetheart,” I said, handing her the half-filled cup. “Finish that, if you can—just sip it slowly and let it go onto the wound if you can; I know it burns a bit.”

She did this, rather quickly, and blinked. If it had been possible to stagger sitting down, she would have.

“I’d best put the lassie to bed, aye?” Jamie stood up, gently holding her against his shoulder.

“Yes. I’ll come and see to it that her head stays upright—just in case it should bleed again and run down her throat.” I turned to thank the assistants and spectators, but Fanny beat me to it.

“Missus . . . Fraser?” she said drowsily. “I—d-t-dth—” The tip of her tongue was sticking out of her mouth, and she looked cross-eyed toward it, astounded. She’d never been able to stick her tongue out before and now wiggled it to and fro, like a very tentative snake testing the air. “T-th—” She stopped, then, contorting her brow in a fearsome expression of concentration, said, “Th-ank y-y-YOU!”

Tears came to my eyes, but I managed to pat her head and say, “You’re very welcome, Frances.” She smiled at me then, a small, sleepy smile, and the next instant was asleep, her head on Jamie’s shoulder and a tiny drooling line of blood trickling from the corner of her mouth onto his shirt.

A VISIT TO THE TRADING POST

B
EARDSLEY’S TRADING POST
was perhaps no great establishment by comparison to the shops of Edinburgh or Paris—but in the backcountry of the Carolinas, it was a rare outpost of civilization. Originally nothing but a run-down house and small barn, the place had expanded over the years, the owners—or rather, her managers—adding additional structures, some attached to the original buildings, other sheds standing free. Tools, hides, live animals, feed corn, tobacco, and hogsheads of everything from salt fish to molasses were to be found in the outbuildings, while comestibles and dry goods were in the main building.

People came to Beardsley’s from a hundred miles—literally—in every direction. Cherokee from the Snowbird villages, Moravians from Salem, the multifarious inhabitants of Brownsville, and—of course—the inhabitants of Fraser’s Ridge.

The trading post had grown amazingly in the eight years since I had last set foot in the place. I saw campsites in the forest nearby, and a sort of free-lance flea market had sprung up alongside the trading post proper—people who brought small things to trade directly with their neighbors.

The manager of the trading post, a lean, pleasant man of middle years named Herman Stoelers, had wisely welcomed this activity, understanding that the more people who came, the greater the variety of what was available, and the more attractive Beardsley’s became overall.

And the wealthier became the owner of Beardsley’s trading post—an eight-year-old mulatto girl named Alicia. I wondered whether anyone besides Jamie and myself knew the secret of her birth, but if anyone did, they had wisely decided to keep it to themselves.

It was a two-day trek to the trading post, particularly as we had only Clarence, Jamie having taken Miranda and the pack mule—a jenny named
Annabelle—to Salem. But the weather was good, and Jenny and I could walk, accompanied by Germain and Ian, leaving Clarence to carry Rachel and our trade goods. I’d left Fanny with Amy Higgins. She was still shy of talking in front of people; it would take a good deal of practice before she could speak normally.

Even Jenny, sophisticate as she now was after Brest, Philadelphia, and Savannah, was impressed by the trading post.

“I’ve never seen sae many outlandish-looking people in all my born days,” she said, making no effort not to stare as a pair of Cherokee braves in full regalia rode up to the trading post, followed by several women on foot in a mixture of doeskins and European shifts, skirts, breeches, and jackets, these dragging bundles of hides on a travois or carrying huge cloth bundles full of squash, beans, corn, dried fish, or other salables on their heads or backs.

I came to attention, seeing the knobbly bulges of ginseng root protruding from one lady’s pack.

“Keep an eye on Germain,” I said, shoving him hastily at Jenny, and dived into the throng.

I emerged ten minutes later with a pound of ginseng, having driven a good bargain for a bag of raisins. They were Amy Higgins’s raisins, but I would get her the calico cloth she wanted.

Jenny suddenly raised her head, listening.

“Did ye hear a goat just now?”

“I hear several. Do we want a goat?” But she was already making her way toward a distant shed. Evidently we
did
want a goat.

I shoved my ginseng into the canvas bag I’d brought and followed hastily.

“WE DON’T NEED
that,” a scornful voice said. “Piece o’ worthless trash, that is.”

Ian looked up from the mirror he was inspecting and squinted at a pair of young men on the other side of the store, engaged in haggling with a clerk over a pistol. They seemed somehow familiar to him, but he was sure he’d never met them. Small and wiry, with yellowish hair cropped short to their narrow skulls and darting eyes, they had the air of stoats: alert and deadly.

Then one of them straightened from the counter and, turning his head, caught sight of Ian. The youth stiffened and poked his brother, who looked up, irritated, and in turn caught sight of Ian.

“What the devil . . . ? Cheese and rice!” the second youth said.

Plainly they knew
him;
they were advancing on him, shoulder to shoulder, eyes gleaming with interest. And seeing them side by side, suddenly he recognized them.

“A Dhia,”
he said under his breath, and Rachel glanced up.

“Friends of thine?” she said mildly.

“Ye might say so.” He stepped out in front of his wife, smiling at the . . . well, he wasn’t sure what they
were
just now, but they weren’t wee lassies any longer.

He’d thought they were boys when he’d met them: a pair of feral Dutch
orphans named—they said—Herman and Vermin, and they
thought
their last name was Kuykendall. In the event, they’d turned out to be in actuality Hermione and Ermintrude. He’d found them a temporary refuge with . . . oh, Christ.

“God, please, no!” he said in Gaelic, causing Rachel to look at him in alarm.

Surely they weren’t still with . . . but they were. He saw the back of a very familiar head—and a still more familiar arse—over by the pickle barrel.

He glanced round quickly, but there was no way out. The Kuykendalls were approaching fast. He took a deep breath, commended his soul to God, and turned to his wife.

“Do ye by chance recall once tellin’ me that ye didna want to hear about every woman I’d bedded?”

“I do,” she said, giving him a deeply quizzical look. “Why?”

“Ah. Well . . .” He breathed deep and got it out just in time. “Ye said ye
did
want me to tell ye if we should ever meet anyone that I . . . er—”

“Ian Murray?” said Mrs. Sylvie, turning round. She came toward him, a look of pleasure on her rather plain, bespectacled face.

“Her,” Ian said hastily to Rachel, jerking his thumb in Mrs. Sylvie’s direction before turning to the lady.

“Mrs. Sylvie!” he said heartily, seizing her by both hands in case she might try to kiss him, as she had occasionally been wont to do upon their meeting. “I’m that pleased to see ye! And even more pleased to present ye to my . . . er . . . wife.” The word emerged in a slight croak, and he cleared his throat hard. “Rachel. Rachel, this is—”

“Friend Sylvie,” Rachel said. “Yes, I gathered as much. I’m pleased to know thee, Sylvie.” Her cheeks were somewhat flushed, but she spoke demurely, offering a hand in the Friends’ manner rather than bowing.

Mrs. Sylvie took in Rachel—and Oglethorpe—at a glance and smiled warmly through her steel-rimmed spectacles, shaking the offered hand.

“My pleasure entirely, I assure you, Mrs. Murray.” She gave Ian a sidelong look and a quivering twitch of the mouth that said as clearly as words,
“You?
You
married a
Quaker?”

“It
is
him! Toldja so!” The Kuykendalls surrounded him—he didn’t know how they managed it, there being only two of them, but he
felt
surrounded. Rather to his surprise, one of them seized him by the hand and wrung it fiercely.

“Herman Wurm,” he—
he?
—told Ian proudly. “Pleased to meetcha again, sir!”

“Worm?” Rachel murmured, watching them in fascination.

“Aye, Herman, I’m that fettled to see ye doing so . . . er . . . well. And you, too . . .” Ian extended a cautious hand toward what used to be Ermintrude, who responded in a high-pitched but noticeably gruff voice.

“Trask Wurm,” the youth said, repeating the vigorous handshake. “It’s German.”

“ ‘Wurm,’ they mean,” Mrs. Sylvie put in, pronouncing it
“Vehrm.”
She was pink with amusement. “They couldn’t ever get the hang of spelling ‘Kuykendall,’ so we gave it up and settled for something simpler. And as
you’d made it
quite
clear that you didn’t want them to become prostitutes, we’ve reached a useful understanding. Herman and Trask provide protection for my . . . establishment.” She looked directly at Rachel, who went a shade pinker but smiled.

“Anybody messes with the girls, we’ll take care of him right smart,” the elder Wurm assured Ian.

“It’s not that hard,” the other said honestly. “Break just one of them bastards’ noses with a hoe handle and the rest of ’em settle right down.”

THERE WERE A
dozen or so milch goats to choose from in the shed, in varying states of pregnancy. The Higginses had a good billy, though, so I needn’t trouble about that. I chose two friendly young unbred nannies, one all brown, the other brown and white, with an odd marking on her side that looked like the rounded fit of two jigsaw-puzzle pieces, one brown and one white.

I pointed out my choices to the young man in charge of the livestock and, as Jenny was still deliberating over her own choice, stepped outside to look over the chickens.

I had some hopes of spotting a Scots Dumpy but found only the usual run of Dominiques and Nankins. Well enough of their kind, but I thought I must wait until Jamie had time to build a chicken coop. And while we could lead the goats home easily enough, I wasn’t going to carry chickens for days.

I came out of the chicken yard and looked about, slightly disoriented. That’s when I saw him.

At first, I had no idea who he was. None. But the sight of the big, slow-moving man froze me in my tracks and my stomach curled up in instant panic.

No
, I thought.
No. He’s dead; they’re all dead
.

He was a sloppily built man, with sloping shoulders and a protruding stomach that strained his threadbare waistcoat, but big. Big. I felt again the sense of sudden dread, of a big shadow coming out of the night beside me, nudging me, then rolling over me like a thundercloud, crushing me into the dirt and pine needles.

Martha
.

A cold swept over me, in spite of the warm sunshine I stood in.

“Martha,”
he’d said. He’d called me by his dead wife’s name and wept into my hair when he’d finished.

Martha
. I had to be mistaken. That was my first conscious thought, stubbornly articulated, each word spoken aloud inside my mind, each word set in place like a little pile of stones, the first foundation of a bulwark.
You. Are. Mistaken
.

But I wasn’t. My skin knew that. It rippled, a live thing, hairs rising in recoil, in vain defense, for what could skin do to keep such things out?

You. Are. Mistaken!

But I wasn’t. My breasts knew that, tingling in outrage, engorged against their will by rough hands that squeezed and pinched.

My thighs knew it, too; the burn and weakness of muscles strained past bearing, the knots where punches and brutal thumbs left bruises that went to the bone, left a soreness that lingered when the bruises faded.

“You are mistaken,” I said, whispering but aloud. “Mistaken.”

But I wasn’t. The deep soft flesh between my legs knew it, slippery with the sudden helpless horror of recollection—and so did I.