“It was that? You mean that you … couldn’t hear music anymore, after you were hurt?”
His shoulders lifted briefly in a shrug.
“I hear no music but the sound of drums,” he said simply. “I’ve the rhythm of it still, but the tune is gone.”
I stopped, my hands on his shoulders, and he turned to look back at me, smiling, trying to make a joke of it.
“Dinna be troubled for it, Sassenach; it’s no great matter. I didna sing well even when I could hear it. And Dougal didna kill me, after all.”
“Dougal? You do think it was Dougal, then?” I was surprised at the certainty in his voice. He had thought at the time that it might perhaps have been his uncle Dougal who had made the murderous attack upon him—and then, surprised by his own men before being able to finish the job, had pretended instead to have found him wounded. But there had been no evidence to say for sure.
“Oh, aye.” He looked surprised, too, but then his face changed, realizing.
“Oh, aye,” he said again, more slowly. “I hadna thought—you couldna tell what he said, could you? When he died, I mean—Dougal.” My hands were still resting on his shoulders, and I felt an involuntary shiver run through him. It spread through my hands and up my arms, raising the hairs all the way to the back of my neck.
As clearly as though the scene took place before me now, I could see that attic room in Culloden House. The bits and pieces of discarded furniture, things toppled and rolling from the struggle—and on the floor at my feet, Jamie crouching, grappling with Dougal’s body as it bucked and strained, blood and air bubbling from the wound where Jamie’s dirk had pierced the hollow of his throat. Dougal’s face, blanched and mottled as his lifeblood drained away, eyes fierce black and fixed on Jamie as his mouth moved in Gaelic silence, saying … something. And Jamie’s face, as white as Dougal’s, eyes locked on the dying man’s lips, reading that last message.
“What did he say?” My hands were tight on his shoulders, and his face was turned away as my thumbs rose up under his hair to seek the ancient scar again.
“Sister’s son or no—I would that I had killed you, that day on the hill. For I knew from the beginning that it would be you or me.” He spoke calm and low-voiced, and the very emotionlessness of the words made the shudder pass again, this time from me to him.
It was quiet in the study. The sound of voices in the kitchen had died to a murmur, as though the ghosts of the past gathered there to drink and reminisce, laughing softly among themselves.
“So that was what you meant,” I said quietly. “When you said you’d made your peace with Dougal.”
“Aye.” He leaned back in his chair and reached up, his hands wrapping warmly round my wrists. “He was right, ken. It was him or me, and would have been, one way or the other.”
I sighed, and a small burden of guilt dropped away. Jamie had been fighting to defend me, when he killed Dougal, and I had always felt that death to be laid at my door. But he was right, Dougal; too much lay between them, and if that final conflict had not come then, on the eve of Culloden, it would have been another time.
Jamie squeezed my wrists, and turned in his chair, still holding my hands.
“Let the dead bury the dead, Sassenach,” he said softly. “The past is gone—the future is not come. And we are here together, you and I.”
36
WORLDS UNSEEN
The household was quiet; it was the perfect opportunity for my experiments. Mr. Bug had gone to Woolam’s Mill, taking the Beardsley twins; Lizzie and Mr. Wemyss had gone to help Marsali with the new mash; and Mrs. Bug, having left a pot of porridge and a platter of toast in the kitchen, was out, too, combing the woods for the half-wild hens, catching them one by one and dragging them in by the feet to be installed in the handsome new chicken coop her husband had built. Bree and Roger sometimes came up to the big house for their breakfast, but more often chose to eat by their own hearth, as was the case this morning.
Enjoying the peace of the empty house, I made up a tray with cup, teapot, cream, and sugar, and took it with me to my surgery, along with my samples. The early morning light was perfect, pouring through the window in a brilliant bar of gold. Leaving the tea to steep, I took a couple of small glass bottles from the cupboard and went outside.
The day was chilly but beautiful, with a clear pale sky that promised a little warmth later in the morning. At the moment, though, it was cold enough that I was glad of my warm shawl, and the water in the horses’ trough was frigid, rimmed with sheets of fragile ice. Not cold enough to kill the microbes, I supposed; I could see long strands of algae coating the boards of the trough, swaying gently as I buckled the thin crust of ice and disturbed the water, scraping one of my bottles along the slimy edge of the trough.
I scooped up further samples of liquid from the springhouse and from a puddle of muddy standing water near the privy, then hurried back to the house to make my trials while the light was still good.
The microscope stood by the window where I had set it up the day before, all gleaming brass and bright mirrors. A few seconds’ work to place droplets on the glass slides I’d laid ready, and I bent to peer through the eyepiece with rapt anticipation.
The ovoid of light bulged, diminished, went out altogether. I squinted, turning the screw as slowly as I could, and … there it was. The mirror steadied and the light resolved itself into a perfect pale circle, window to another world.
I watched, enchanted, as the madly beating cilia of a paramecium bore it in hot pursuit of invisible prey. Then a quiet drifting, the field of view itself in constant movement as the drop of water on my slide shifted in its microscopic tides. I waited a moment more, in hopes of spotting one of the swift and elegant Euglena, or even a hydra, but no such luck; only bits of mysterious black-green, daubs of cellular debris and burst algal cells.
I shifted the slide to and fro, but found nothing else of interest. That was all right; I had plenty of other things to look at. I rinsed the glass rectangle in a cup of alcohol, let it dry for a moment, then dipped a glass rod into one of the small beakers I had lined up before my microscope, dabbing a drop of liquid onto the clean slide.
It had taken some experimentation to put the microscope together properly; it wasn’t much like a modern version, particularly when reduced to its component parts for storage in Dr. Rawlings’s handsome box. Still, the lenses were recognizable, and with that as a starting point, I had managed to fit the optical bits into the stand without much trouble. Obtaining sufficient light, though, had been more difficult, and I was thrilled finally to have got it working.
“What are ye doing, Sassenach?” Jamie, with a piece of toast in one hand, paused in the doorway.
“Seeing things,” I said, adjusting the focus.
“Oh, aye? What sorts of things?” He came into the room, smiling. “Not ghosties, I trust. I will have had enough o’ those.”
“Come look,” I said, stepping back from the microscope. Mildly puzzled, he bent and peered through the eyepiece, screwing up his other eye in concentration.
He squinted for a moment, then gave an exclamation of pleased surprise.
“I see them! Wee things with tails, swimming all about!” He straightened up, smiling at me with a look of delight, then bent at once to look again.
I felt a warm glow of pride in my new toy.
“Isn’t it marvelous?”
“Aye, marvelous,” he said, absorbed. “Look at them. Such busy wee strivers as they are, all pushing and writhing against one another—and such a mass of them!”
He watched for a few moments more, exclaiming under his breath, then straightened up, shaking his head in amazement.
“I’ve never seen such a thing, Sassenach. Ye’d told me about the germs, aye, but I never in life imagined them so! I thought they might have wee teeth, and they don’t—but I never kent they would have such handsome, lashing wee tails, or swim about in such numbers.”
“Well, some microorganisms do,” I sai
d, moving to peer into the eyepiece again myself. “These particular little beasts aren’t germs, though—they’re sperms.”
“They’re what?”
He looked quite blank.
“Sperms,” I said patiently. “Male reproductive cells. You know, what makes babies?”
I thought he might just possibly choke. His mouth opened, and a very pretty shade of rose suffused his countenance.
“Ye mean seed?” he croaked. “Spunk?”
“Well … yes.” Watching him narrowly, I poured steaming tea into a clean beaker and handed it to him as a restorative. He ignored it, though, his eyes fixed on the microscope as though something might spring out of the eyepiece at any moment and go writhing across the floor at our feet.
“Sperms,” he muttered to himself. “Sperms.” He shook his head vigorously, then turned to me, a frightful thought having just occurred to him.
“Whose are they?” he asked, his tone one of darkest suspicion.
“Er … well, yours, of course.” I cleared my throat, mildly embarrassed. “Who else’s would they be?”
His hand darted reflexively between his legs, and he clutched himself protectively.
“How the hell did ye get them?”
“How do you think?” I said, rather coldly. “I woke up in custody of them this morning.”
His hand relaxed, but a deep blush of mortification stained his cheeks dark crimson. He picked up the beaker of tea and drained it at a gulp, temperature notwithstanding.
“I see,” he said, and coughed.
There was a moment of deep silence.
“I … um … didna ken they could stay alive,” he said at last. “Errrrm … outside, I mean.”
“Well, if you leave them in a splotch on the sheet to dry out, they don’t,” I said, matter-of-factly. “Keep them from drying out, though”—I gestured at the small, covered beaker, with its small puddle of whitish fluid—“and they’ll do for a few hours. In their proper habitat, though, they can live for up to a week after … er … release.”
“Proper habitat,” he repeated, looking pensive. He darted a quick glance at me. “Ye do mean—”
“I do,” I said, with some asperity.
“Mmphm.” At this point, he recalled the piece of toast he still held, and took a bite, chewing meditatively.
“Do folk know about this? Now, I mean?”
“Know what? What sperm look like? Almost certainly. Microscopes have been around for well over a hundred years, and the first thing anyone with a working microscope does is to look at everything within reach. Given that the inventor of the microscope was a man, I should certainly think that … Don’t you?”
He gave me a look, and took another bite of toast, chewing in a marked manner.
“I shouldna quite like to refer to it as ‘within reach,’ Sassenach,” he said, through a mouthful of crumbs, and swallowed. “But I do take your meaning.”
As though compelled by some irresistible force, he drifted toward the microscope, bending to peer into it once more.
“They seem verra fierce,” he ventured, after a few moments’ inspection.
“Well, they do need to be,” I said, suppressing a smile at his faintly abashed air of pride in his gametes’ prowess. “It’s a long slog, after all, and a terrific fight at the end of it. Only one gets the honor, you know.”
He looked up, blank-faced. It dawned on me that he didn’t know. He’d studied languages, mathematics, and Greek and Latin philosophy in Paris, not medicine. And even if natural scientists of the time were aware of sperm as separate entities, rather than a homogenous substance, it occurred to me that they probably didn’t have any idea what sperm actually did.
“Wherever did you think babies came from?” I demanded, after a certain amount of enlightenment regarding eggs, sperms, zygotes, and the like, which left Jamie distinctly squiggle-eyed. He gave me a rather cold look.
“And me a farmer all my life? I ken precisely where they come from,” he informed me. “I just didna ken that … er … that all of this daffery was going on. I thought … well, I thought a man plants his seed into a woman’s belly, and it … well … grows.” He waved vaguely in the direction of my stomach. “You know—like … seed. Neeps, corn, melons, and the like. I didna ken they swim about like tadpoles.”
“I see.” I rubbed a finger beneath my nose, trying not to laugh. “Hence the agricultural designation of women as being either fertile or barren!”
“Mmphm.” Dismissing this with a wave of his hand, he frowned thoughtfully at the teeming slide. “A week, ye said. So it’s possible that the wee lad really is the Thrush’s get?”
Early in the day as it was, it took half a second or so for me to make the leap from theory to practical application.
“Oh—Jemmy, you mean? Yes, it’s quite possible that he’s Roger’s child.” Roger and Bonnet had lain with Brianna within two days of each other. “I told you—and Bree—so.”
He nodded, looking abstracted, then remembered the toast and pushed the rest of it into his mouth. Chewing, he bent for another look through the eyepiece.
“Are they different, then? One man’s from another, I mean?”
“Er … not to look at, no.” I picked up my cup of tea and had a sip, enjoying the delicate flavor. “They are different, of course—they carry the characteristics a man passes to his offspring.…” That was about as far as I thought it prudent to go; he was sufficiently staggered by my description of fertilization; an explanation of genes and chromosomes might be rather excessive at the moment. “But you can’t see the differences, even with a microscope.”
He grunted at that, swallowed the mouthful of toast, and straightened up.
“Why are ye looking, then?”
“Just curiosity.” I gestured at the collection of bottles and beakers on the countertop. “I wanted to see how fine the resolution of the microscope was, what sorts of things I might be able to see.”
“Oh, aye? And what then? What’s the purpose of it, I mean?”
“Well, to help me diagnose things. If I can take a sample of a person’s stool, for instance, and see that he has internal parasites, then I’d know better what medicine to give him.”
Jamie looked as though he would have preferred not to hear about such things right after breakfast, but nodded. He drained his beaker and set it down on the counter.
“Aye, that’s sensible. I’ll leave ye to get on with it, then.”
He bent and kissed me briefly, then headed for the door. Just short of it, though, he turned back.
“The, um, sperms …” he said, a little awkwardly.
“Yes?”
“Can ye not take them out and give them decent burial or something?”
I hid a smile in my teacup.
“I’ll take good care of them,” I promised. “I always do, don’t I?”
There they were. Dark stalks, topped with clublike spores, dense against the pale bright ground of the microscope’s field of view. Confirmation.
“Got them.” I straightened up, slowly rubbing the small of my back as I looked over my preparations.
A series of slides lay in a neat fan beside the microscope, each bearing a dark smear in the middle, a code written on the end of each slide with a bit of wax from a candle stub. Samples of mold, taken from damp corn bread, from spoiled biscuit, and a bit of discarded pastry crust from the Hogmanay venison pie. The crust had yielded the best growth by far; no doubt it was the goose grease.
Of the various test substrates I had tried, those were the three resultant batches of mold that had contained the highest proportion of Penicillium—or what I could be fairly sure was Penicillium. There were a dismaying number of molds that would grow on damp bread, in addition to several dozen different strains of Penicillium, but the samples I had chosen contained the best matches for the textbook pictures of Penicillium sporophytes that I had committed to memory, years ago, in another life.
I could only hope that my memory wasn�
�t faulty—and that the strains of mold I had here were among those species that produced a large quantity of penicillin, that I had not inadvertently introduced any virulent bacteria into the meat-broth mixture, and that—well, I could hope for a lot of things, but there came a point when one abandoned hope for faith, and trusted fate for charity.
A line of broth-filled bowls sat at the back of the countertop, each covered with a square of muslin to prevent things—insects, airborne particles, and mouse droppings, to say nothing of mice—from falling in. I had strained the broth and boiled it, then rinsed each bowl with boiling water before filling it with the steaming brown liquid. That was as close as I could come to a sterile medium.
I had then taken scrapings from each of my best mold samples, and swished the knife blade gently through the cooled broth, dissipating the clumps of soft blue as best I could before covering the bowl with its cloth and leaving it to incubate for several days.
Some of the cultures had thrived; others had died. A couple of bowls showed hairy dark green clumps that floated beneath the surface like submerged sea beasts, dark and sinister. Some intruder—mold, bacterium, or perhaps a colonial alga—but not the precious Penicillium.
Some anonymous child had spilled one bowl; Adso had knocked another onto the floor, maddened by the scent of goose broth, and had lapped up the contents, mold and all, with every evidence of enjoyment. There obviously hadn’t been anything toxic in that one; I glanced down at the little cat, curled up in a pool of sunshine on the floor, the picture of somnolent well-being.
In three of the remaining bowls, though, spongy velvet mats of mottled blue covered the surface, and my examination of a sample taken from one of them had just confirmed that I did indeed have what I sought. It wasn’t the mold itself that was antibiotic—it was a clear substance secreted by the mold, as a means of protecting itself from attack by bacteria. That substance was penicillin, and that was what I wanted.
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