“Where am I?” she said in a quavering voice. Her gaze passed disbelievingly round the room, settling at last on her daughter’s face.

“Mairi?” she said dubiously, and Mrs. Crombie rushed forward and fell on her knees, bursting into tears as she gripped her mother’s hands.

“A Màthair! A Màthair!” she cried. The old woman set a trembling hand on her daughter’s hair, looking as though she were not quite sure she was real.

I, meanwhile, had been doing my best to check the old lady’s vital signs, which were not all that vital, but nonetheless fairly good for someone who had been dead a moment before. Respiration very shallow, labored, a color like week-old oatmeal, cold, clammy skin despite the heat in the room, and I couldn’t find a pulse at all—though plainly she must have one. Mustn’t she?

“How do you feel?” I asked.

She put a trembling hand to her belly.

“I do feel that wee bit poorly,” she whispered.

I put my own hand on her abdomen, and felt it instantly. A pulse, where no pulse should be. It was irregular, stumbling, and bumping—but most assuredly there.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. I didn’t say it loudly, but Mrs. Crombie gasped, and I saw her apron twitch, as she doubtless made the horns beneath it.

I hadn’t time to bother with apology, but stood and grabbed Roger by the sleeve, pulling him aside.

“She has an aortic aneurysm,” I said to him very softly. “She must have been bleeding internally for some time, enough to make her lose consciousness and seem cold. It’s going to rupture very soon, and then she’ll die for real.”

He swallowed audibly, his face very pale, but said only, “Do you know how long?”

I glanced at Mrs. Wilson; her face was the same gray as the snow-laden sky, and her eyes were going in and out of focus like the flickering of a candle in a wind.

“I see,” Roger said, though I hadn’t spoken. He took a deep breath and cleared his throat.

The crowd, which had been hissing amongst themselves like a flock of agitated geese, ceased at once. Every eye in the place was riveted on the tableau before them.

“This our sister has been restored to life, as we all shall be one day by the grace of God,” Roger said softly. “It is a sign to us, of hope and faith. She will go soon again to the arms of the angels, but has come back to us for a moment, to bring us assurance of God’s love.” He paused a moment, obviously groping for something further to say. He cleared his throat and bent his head toward Mrs. Wilson’s.

“Did you … wish to say anything, O, mother?” he whispered in Gaelic.

“Aye, I do.” Mrs. Wilson seemed to be gaining strength—and with it, indignation. A faint pinkness showed in her waxy cheeks as she glared round at the crowd.

“What sort of wake is this, Hiram Crombie?” she demanded, fixing her son-in-law with a gimlet eye. “I see nay food laid out, nay drink—and what is this?” Her voice rose in a furious squeak, her eye having fallen on the plate of bread and salt, which Roger had hastily set aside when he lifted her.

“Why—” She looked wildly round at the assembled crowd, and the truth of it dawned upon her. Her sunken eyes bulged. “Why … ye shameless skinflint! This is nay wake at all! Ye’ve meant to bury me wi’ nothing but a crust o’ bread and a drap o’ wine for the sin-eater, and a wonder ye spared that! Nay doot ye’ll thieve the winding claes from my corpse to make cloots for your snotty-nosed bairns, and where’s my good brooch I said I wanted to be buried with?” One scrawny hand closed on her shrunken bosom, catching a fistful of wilted linen.

“Mairi! My brooch!”

“Here it is, Mother, here it is!” Poor Mrs. Crombie, altogether undone, was fumbling in her pocket, sobbing and gasping. “I put it away to be safe—I meant to put it on ye before—before …” She came out with an ugly lump of garnets, which her mother snatched from her, cradling it against her breast, and glaring round with jealous suspicion. Clearly she suspected her neighbors of waiting the chance to steal it from her body; I heard an offended inhalation from the woman standing behind me, but had no time to turn and see who it was.

“Now, now,” I said, using my best soothing bedside manner. “I’m sure everything will be all right.” Aside from the fact that you’re going to die in the next few minutes, that is, I thought, suppressing a hysterical urge to laugh inappropriately. Actually, it might be in the next few seconds, if her blood pressure rose any higher.

I had my fingers on the thumping big pulse in her abdomen that betrayed the fatal weakening of her abdominal aorta. It had to have begun to leak already, to make her lose consciousness to such a degree as to seem dead. Eventually, she would simply blow a gasket, and that would be it.

Roger and Jamie were both doing their best to soothe her, muttering in English and Gaelic and patting her comfortingly. She seemed to be responding to this treatment, though still breathing like a steam engine.

Jamie’s production of the bottle of whisky from his pocket helped still further.

“Well, that’s more like it!” Mrs. Wilson said, somewhat mollified, as he hastily pulled the cork and waved the bottle under her nose so she could appreciate the quality of it. “And ye’ve brought food, too?” Mrs. Bug had bustled her way to the front, basket held before her like a battering ram. “Hmph! I never thought I should live to see Papists kinder than my ain kin!” This last was directed at Hiram Crombie, who had so far been opening and closing his mouth, without finding anything whatever to say in reply to his motherin-law’s tirade.

“Why … why …” he stammered in outrage, torn between shock, obvious fury, and a need to justify himself before his neighbors. “Kinder than your ain kin! Why, have I not given ye a hame, these twenty years past? Fed and clothed ye as ye were my ain mither? B-borne your wicked tongue and foul t-tempers for years, and never—”

Jamie and Roger both leapt in to try to stifle him, but instead interrupted each other, and in the confusion, Hiram was allowed to go on speaking his mind, which he did. So did Mrs. Wilson, who was no slouch at invective, either.

The pulse in her belly was throbbing under my hand, and I was hard put to it to keep her from leaping off the table and dotting Hiram with the bottle of whisky. The neighbors were agog.

Roger took matters—and Mrs. Wilson—firmly into his own hands, seizing her by her scrawny shoulders.

“Mrs. Wilson,” he said hoarsely, but loudly enough to drown Hiram’s indignant rebuttal of Mrs. Wilson’s most recent depiction of his character. “Mrs. Wilson!”

“Eh?” She paused for breath, blinking up at him in momentary confusion.

“Cease. And you, too!” He glared at Hiram, who was opening his mouth again. Hiram shut it.

“I’ll no have this,” Roger said, and thumped the Bible down on the table. “It’s not fitting, and I’ll not have it, d’ye hear me?” He glowered from one to the other of the combatants, black brows low and fierce.

The room was silent, bar Hiram’s heavy breathing, Mrs. Crombie’s small sobs, and Mrs. Wilson’s faint, asthmatic wheeze.

“Now, then,” Roger said, still glaring round to prevent any further interruptions. He put a hand over Mrs. Wilson’s thin, age-spotted one.

“Mrs. Wilson—d’ye not ken that you stand before God this minute?” He darted a look at me, and I nodded; yes, she was definitely going to die. Her head was wobbling on her neck and the glow of anger fading from her eyes, even as he spoke.

“God is near to us,” he said, lifting his head to address the congregation at large. He repeated this in Gaelic, and there was a sort of collective sigh. He narrowed his eyes at them.

“We will not profane this holy occasion with anger nor bitterness. Now—sister.” He squeezed her hand gently. “Compose your soul. God will—”

But Mrs. Wilson was no longer listening. Her withered mouth dropped open in horror.