I frowned, tapping a finger on the countertop.
“His chief difficulty is that he doesn’t shit,” I said. “Not often enough, I mean, and not with the proper consistency. Horrible diet,” I said, pointing an accusatory finger at him. “He told me. Bread, meat, and ale. No vegetables, no fruit. Constipation is absolutely rife in the British army, I don’t doubt. I shouldn’t be surprised if every man jack of them has piles hanging out of his arse like grape clusters!”
Jamie nodded, one eyebrow raised.
“There are a great many things I admire about ye, Sassenach—especially the delicate manner of your conversation.” He coughed, glancing downward. “But if ye say it’s costiveness that causes piles—”
“It is.”
“Aye, well. It’s only—what ye were saying about John Grey. I mean, ye don’t think the state of Bobby’s arse is to do with … mmphm.”
“Oh. Well, no, not directly.” I paused. “It was more that Lord John said in his letter that he wanted me to—how did he put it?—I might suggest treatment for his other ills. I mean, he might possibly know about Bobby’s difficulty, without … er … personal inspection, shall we say? But as I say, piles are so commonplace an affliction, why ought he be concerned to the point of asking me to do something about them—unless he thought that they might hamper his own eventual … er … progress?”
Jamie’s face had resumed its normal hue during the discussion of leeches and constipation, but at this point, went red again.
“His—”
“I mean,” I said, folding my arms beneath my bosom, “I’m just a trifle put off … by the notion that he’s sent Mr. Higgins down for repair, you might say.” I had been suffering from a niggling feeling of unease regarding the matter of Bobby Higgins’s backside, but hadn’t put this notion into words before. Now that I had, I realized precisely what was bothering me.
“The thought that I’m meant to be fixing up poor little Bobby, and then sending him home to be—” I pressed my lips tight together, and turned abruptly back to my roots, needlessly turning them.
“I don’t like the thought,” I said, to the cupboard door. “I’ll do what I can for Mr. Higgins, mind. Bobby Higgins hasn’t many prospects; no doubt he’d do … whatever his Lordship required. But perhaps I’m wronging him. Lord John, I mean.”
“Perhaps ye are.”
I turned round, to find Jamie sitting on my stool, fiddling with a jar of goose grease that seemed to have his full attention.
“Well,” I said uncertainly. “You know him better than I do. If you think he isn’t …” My words trailed off. Outside, there was a sudden soft thump as a falling spruce cone struck the wooden stoop.
“I ken more about John Grey than I wish I did,” Jamie said finally, and glanced at me, a rueful smile in the corner of his mouth. “And he kens a great deal more about me than I like to think on. But”—he leaned forward, setting down the jar, then put his hands on his knees and looked at me—“I ken the one thing beyond doubt. He’s an honorable man. He wouldna take advantage of Higgins, nor any other man under his protection.”
He sounded very definite about it, and I felt reassured. I did like John Grey. And still … the appearance of his letters, regular as clockwork, always gave me a faint sense of unease, like the hearing of distant thunder. There was nothing about the letters themselves to evoke such a response; they were like the man himself—erudite, humorous, and sincere. And he had reason to write, of course. More than one.
“He does still love you, you know,” I said quietly.
He nodded, but didn’t look at me, his gaze still fixed somewhere beyond the trees that edged the dooryard.
“Would you rather he didn’t?”
He paused, then nodded again. This time, though, he did turn to look at me.
“I would, aye. For myself. For him, certainly. But for William?” He shook his head, uncertain.
“Oh, he may have taken William on for your sake,” I said, leaning back against the counter. “But I’ve seen the two of them, remember. I’ve no doubt he loves Willie for his own sake now.”
“No, I dinna doubt that, either.” He got up, restless, and beat imaginary dust from the pleats of his kilt. His face was closed, looking inward at something he didn’t wish to share with me.
“Do you—” I began, but stopped when he glanced up at me. “No. It doesn’t matter.”
“What?” He tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing.
“Nothing.”
He didn’t move, merely intensified the stare.
“I can see from your face that it’s not, Sassenach. What?”
I breathed deeply through my nose, fists wrapped in my apron.
“It’s only—and I’m sure it isn’t true, it’s only a passing thought—”
He made a low Scottish noise, indicating that I had better stop blethering and cough it up. Having enough experience to realize that he wouldn’t leave the matter ’til I did, I coughed.
“Did you ever wonder whether Lord John might have taken him because … well, William does look terribly like you, and evidently did from an early age. Since Lord John finds you physically … attractive …” The words died, and I could have cut my throat for speaking them, seeing the look on his face.
He closed his eyes for a moment, to stop me looking in. His fists were curled up so tightly that the veins stood out from knuckle to forearm. Very slowly, he relaxed his hands. He opened his eyes.
“No,” he said, complete conviction in his voice. He gave me a straight, hard look. “And it’s no that I canna bear the thought of it, either. I know.”
“Of course,” I said hastily, eager to leave the subject.
“I know,” he repeated more sharply. His two stiff fingers tapped, once, against his leg, and then stilled. “I thought of it, too. When he first told me he meant to wed Isobel Dunsany.”
He turned away, staring out through the window. Adso was in the dooryard, stalking something in the grass.
“I offered him my body,” Jamie said abruptly, not looking round. The words were steady enough, but I could see from the knotted shoulders how much it cost him to speak them. “In thanks, I said. But it was—” He made an odd convulsive movement, as though trying to free himself from some constraint. “I meant to see, ken, what sort of man he might be, for sure. This man who would take my son for his own.”
His voice shook, very slightly, when he said, “take my son,” and I moved to him by instinct, wanting somehow to patch the open wound beneath those words.
He was stiff when I touched him, not wanting to be embraced—but he took my hand and squeezed it.
“Could you … really tell, do you think?” I was not shocked; John Grey had told me of that offer, years before, in Jamaica. I didn’t think he had realized the true nature of it, though.
Jamie’s hand tightened on mine, and his thumb traced the outline of mine, rubbing lightly over the nail. He looked down at me, and I felt his eyes search my face—not in question, but in the way one does when seeing anew some object grown familiar—seeing with the eyes what has been seen for a long time only with the heart.
His free hand rose and traced the line of my brows, two fingers resting for an instant on the bone of my cheek, then moved up, back, cool in the warmth of my hair.
“Ye canna be so close to another,” he said finally. “To be within each other, to smell their sweat, and rub the hairs of your body with theirs and see nothing of their soul. Or if ye can do that …” He hesitated, and I wondered whether he thought of Black Jack Randall, or of Laoghaire, the woman he had married, thinking me dead. “Well … that is a dreadful thing in itself,” he finished softly, and his hand dropped away.
There was silence between us. A sudden rustle came from the grass outside as Adso lunged and disappeared, and a mockingbird began to shriek alarm from the big red spruce. In the kitchen, something was dropped with a clang, and then the rhythmic shoosh of sweeping began. All the homely sounds of this life w
e had made.
Had I ever done that? Lain with a man, and seen nothing of his soul? Indeed I had, and he was right. A breath of coldness touched me, and the hairs rose, silent on my skin.
He heaved a sigh that seemed to come from his feet, and rubbed a hand over his bound hair.
“But he wouldna do it. John.” He looked up then, and gave me a crooked smile. “He loved me, he said. And if I couldna give him that in return—and he kent I couldn’t—then he’d not take counterfeit for true coin.”
He shook himself, hard, like a dog coming out of the water.
“No. A man who would say such a thing is not one who’d bugger a child for the sake of his father’s bonny blue eyes, I’ll tell ye that for certain, Sassenach.”
“No,” I said. “Tell me …” I hesitated, and he looked at me, one eyebrow up. “If—if he had … er … taken you up on that offer—and you’d found him …” I fumbled for some reasonable wording. “Less, um, decent than you might hope—”
“I should have broken his neck there by the lake,” he said. “It wouldna have mattered if they’d hanged me; I’d not have let him have the boy.
“But he didn’t, and I did,” he added with a half-shrug. “And if wee Bobby goes to his Lordship’s bed, I think it will be of his own free will.”
No man is really at his best with someone else’s hand up his arse. I had noticed this before, and Robert Higgins was no exception to the general rule.
“Now, this won’t hurt much at all,” I said as soothingly as possible. “All you need to do is to keep quite still.”
“Oh, I s’all do that, mum, indeed I will,” he assured me fervently.
I had him on the surgery table, wearing only his shirt, and situated foursquare on hands and knees, which brought the area of operation conveniently to eye level. The forceps and ligatures I should need were placed on the small table to my right, with a bowl of fresh leeches alongside, in case of need.
He emitted a small shriek when I applied a wet cloth soaked in turpentine to the area, in order to cleanse it thoroughly, but was as good as his word and didn’t move.
“Now, we are going to obtain a very good effect here,” I assured him, taking up a pair of long-nosed forceps. “But if the relief is to be permanent, there will have to be a drastic change in your diet. Do you understand me?”
He gasped deeply, as I grasped one of the hemorrhoids and pulled it toward me. There were three, a classic presentation, at nine, two, and five o’clock. Bulbous as raspberries, and quite the same color.
“Oh! Y-yes, mum.”
“Oatmeal,” I said firmly, transferring the forceps to my other hand without lessening the grip, and taking up a needle threaded with silk thread in my right. “Porridge every morning, without fail. Have you noticed a change for the better in your bowel habits, since Mrs. Bug has been feeding you parritch for breakfast?”
I passed the thread loosely round the base of the hemorrhoid, then delicately pushed the needle up beneath the loop, making a small noose of it, and pulled tight.
“Ahhh … oh! Erm … tell ’ee truth, mum, it’s like shitting house bricks covered with hedgehog skin, makes no matter what I eat.”
“Well, it will,” I assured him, securing the ligature with a knot. I released the hemorrhoid, and he breathed deeply. “Now, grapes. You like grapes, don’t you?”
“No’m. Sets me teeth on edge to bite ’em.”
“Really?” His teeth didn’t look badly decayed; I should have a closer look at his mouth; he might be suffering from marginal scurvy. “Well, we’ll have Mrs. Bug make a nice raisin pie for you; you can eat that with no difficulty. Does Lord John have a capable cook?” I took aim with my forceps and got hold of the next one. Now accustomed to the sensation, he only grunted a bit.
“Yessum. Be an Indian, he is, named Manoke.”
“Hmm.” Round, up, tighten, tie off. “I’ll write out a receipt for the raisin pie, for you to carry back to him. Does he cook yams, or beans? Beans are quite good for the purpose.”
“I b’lieve he does, mum, but his Lordship—”
I had the windows open for ventilation—Bobby was no filthier than the average, but he was certainly no cleaner—and at this point, I heard sounds from the trailhead; voices, and the jingle of harness.
Bobby heard them, too, and glanced wildly at the window, hindquarters tensing as though to spring off the table like a grasshopper. I grasped him by one leg, but then thought better of it. There was no way of covering the window, bar closing the shutters, and I needed the light.
“Go ahead and stand up,” I told him, letting go and reaching for a towel. “I’ll go and see who it is.” He followed this direction with alacrity, scrambling down and reaching hastily for his breeches.
I stepped out onto the porch, in time to greet the two men who led their mules up over the last arduous slope and into the yard. Richard Brown, and his brother Lionel, from the eponymously named Brownsville.
I was surprised to see them; it was a good three-day ride to Brownsville from the Ridge, and there was little commerce between the two settlements. It was at least that far to Salem, in the opposite direction, but the inhabitants of the Ridge went there much more frequently; the Moravians were both industrious and great traders, taking honey, oil, salt fish, and hides in trade for cheese, pottery, chickens, and other small livestock. So far as I knew, the denizens of Brownsville dealt only in cheap trade goods for the Cherokee, and in the production of a very inferior type of beer, not worth the ride.
“Good day, mistress.” Richard, the smaller and elder of the brothers, touched the brim of his hat, but didn’t take it off. “Is your husband to home?”
“He’s out by the hay barn, scraping hides.” I wiped my hands carefully on the towel I was carrying. “Do come round to the kitchen; I’ll bring up some cider.”
“Don’t trouble.” Without further ado, he turned and set off purposefully round the house. Lionel Brown, a bit taller than his brother, though with the same spare, almost gangly build and the same tobacco-colored hair, nodded briefly to me as he followed.
They had left their mules, reins hanging, evidently for me to tend. The animals were beginning to amble slowly across the yard, pausing to crop the long grass that edged the path.
“Hmpf!” I said, glaring after the brothers Brown.
“Who are they?” said a low voice behind me. Bobby Higgins had come out and was peering off the corner of the porch with his good eye. Bobby tended to be wary of strangers—and no wonder, given his experiences in Boston.
“Neighbors, such as they are.” I lunged off the porch and caught one of the mules by the bridle as he reached for the peach sapling I had planted near the porch. Disliking this interference in his affairs, he brayed ear-splittingly in my face, and attempted to bite me.
“Here, mum, let me.” Bobby, already holding the other mule’s reins, leaned past to take the halter from me. “Hark at ’ee!” he said to the obstreperous mule. “Hush tha noise, else I take a stick to ’ee, then!”
Bobby had been a foot soldier rather than cavalry, it was clear to see. The words were bold enough, but ill-matched with his tentative manner. He gave a perfunctory yank on the mule’s reins. The mule promptly laid back its ears and bit him in the arm.
He screamed and let go both sets of reins. Clarence, my own mule, hearing the racket, set up a loud bray of greeting from his pen, and the two strange mules promptly trotted off in that direction, stirrup leathers bouncing.
Bobby wasn’t badly hurt, though the mule’s teeth had broken the skin; spots of blood seeped through the sleeve of his shirt. As I was turning back the cloth to have a look at it, I heard footsteps on the porch, and looked up to see Lizzie, a large wooden spoon in hand, looking alarmed.
“Bobby! What’s happened?”
He straightened at once, seeing her, assuming nonchalance, and brushed a lock of curly brown hair off his brow.
“Ah, oh! Naught, miss. Bit o’ trouble with tha sons o’ Belial,
like. No fear, it’s fine.”
Whereupon his eyes rolled up in his head and he fell over in a dead faint.
“Oh!” Lizzie flew down the steps and knelt beside him, urgently patting his cheek. “Is he all right, Mrs. Fraser?”
“God knows,” I said frankly. “I think so, though.” Bobby appeared to be breathing normally, and I found a reasonable pulse in his wrist.
“Shall we carry him inside? Or should I fetch a burnt feather, do you think? Or the spirits of ammonia from the surgery? Or some brandy?” Lizzie hovered like an anxious bumblebee, ready to fly off in any of several different directions.
“No, I think he’s coming round.” Most faints last only a few seconds, and I could see his chest lift as his breathing deepened.
“Bit o’ brandy wouldn’t come amiss,” he murmured, eyelids beginning to flutter.
I nodded to Lizzie, who vanished back into the house, leaving her spoon behind on the grass.
“Feeling a bit peaky, are you?” I inquired sympathetically. The injury to his arm was no more than a scratch, and I certainly hadn’t done anything of a shocking nature to him—well, not physically shocking. What was the trouble here?
“I dunno, mum.” He was trying to sit up, and while he was white as a sheet, seemed otherwise all right, so I let him. “It’s only, every now and again, I gets these spots, like, whirring round me head like a swarm o’ bees, and then it all goes black.”
“Now and again? It’s happened before?” I asked sharply.
“Yessum.” His head wobbled like a sunflower in the breeze, and I put a hand under his armpit, lest he fall over again. “His Lordship was in hopes you might know summat would stop it.”
“His Lord—oh, he knew about the fainting?” Well, of course he would, if Bobby were in the habit of falling over in front of him.
He nodded, and took a deep, gasping breath.
“Doctor Potts bled me regular, twice a week, but it didn’t seem to help.”
“I daresay not. I hope he was of somewhat more help with your piles,” I remarked dryly.
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