The air was still stifling, still thick with odor and flies and the sound of Lizzie’s prayers—but the cabin seemed empty, and curiously silent.

There was a shuffling noise outside; the sound of something being dragged, a grunt of pain and dreadful exertion. Then the soft sound of falling, a gasp of breath. Padraic had made it back to his own doorstep. Brianna looked to the door, but she still held the older girl in her arms, still alive.

I set down the limp hand that I held, carefully, and went to help.

61



A NOISOME PESTILENCE

THE DAYS WERE GROWING SHORTER, but light still came early. The windows at the front of the house faced east, and the rising sun glowed on the scrubbed white oak of my surgery floor. I could see the brilliant bar of light advancing across the hand-hewn boards; had I had an actual timepiece, I could have calibrated the floor like a sundial, marking the seams between the boards in minutes.

As it was, I marked them in heartbeats, waiting through the moments until the sun should have reached the counter where my microscope stood ready, slides and beaker beside it.

I heard soft footsteps in the corridor, and Jamie pushed the door open with his shoulder, a pewter mug of something hot held in each hand, wrapped with rags against the heat.

“Ciamar a tha thu, mo chridhe,” he said softly, and handed one to me, brushing a kiss across my forehead. “How is it, then?”

“It could be worse.” I gave him a smile of gratitude, though it was interrupted by a yawn. I didn’t need to tell him that Padraic and his elder daughter still lived; he would have known at once by my face if anything dire had happened. In fact, bar any complications, I thought both would recover; I had stayed with them all night, rousing them hourly to drink a concoction of honeyed water, mixed with a little salt, alternating with a strong infusion of peppermint leaf and dogwood bark to calm the bowels.

I lifted the mug—goosefoot tea—closing my eyes as I inhaled the faint, bitter perfume, and feeling the tight muscles of my neck and shoulders relax in anticipation.

He had seen me twist my head to ease my neck; Jamie’s hand came down on my nape, large and wonderfully warm from holding the hot tea. I gave a small moan of ecstasy at the touch, and he laughed low in his throat, massaging my sore muscles.

“Should ye not be abed, Sassenach? Ye’ll not have slept at all the night.”

“Oh, I did … a bit.” I had dozed fitfully, sitting up by the open window, roused periodically by the startling touch on my face of the moths that flew in, drawn to the light of my candle. Mrs. Bug had come at dawn, though, fresh and starched, ready to take over the heavy nursing.

“I’ll go lie down in a bit,” I promised. “But I wanted to have a quick look first.” I waved vaguely toward my microscope, which stood assembled and ready on the table. Next to it were several small glass bottles, plugged with twists of cloth, each containing a brownish liquid. Jamie frowned at them.

“Look? At what?” he said. He lifted his long, straight nose, sniffing suspiciously. “Is that shit?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, not bothering to stifle a jaw-cracking yawn. I had—as discreetly as possible—collected samples from Hortense and the baby and, later, from my living patients, as well. Jamie eyed them.

“Exactly what,” he inquired cautiously, “are ye looking for?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I admitted. “And in fact, I may not find anything—or anything I can recognize. But it’s possible that it was either an amoeba or a bacillus that made the MacNeills sick—and I think I would recognize an amoeba; they’re quite big. Relatively speaking,” I added hastily.

“Oh, aye?” His ruddy brows drew together, then lifted. “Why?”

That was a better question than he knew.

“Well, partly for the sake of curiosity,” I admitted. “But also, if I do find a causative organism that I can recognize, I’ll know a bit more about the disease—how long it lasts, for instance, and whether there are any complications to look out for specially. And how contagious it is.”

He glanced at me, cup half-raised to his mouth.

“Is it one you can catch?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Though I’m fairly sure it is. I’ve been vaccinated against typhus and typhoid—but this doesn’t look like either one of those. And there are no vaccines for dysentery or Giardia poisoning.”

The brows drew together and stayed that way, knotted as he sipped his tea. His fingers gave my neck a final squeeze and dropped away.

I sipped cautiously at my own tea, sighing in pleasure as it gently scalded my throat and ran hot and comforting down into my stomach. Jamie lounged on his stool, long legs thrust out. He glanced down into the steaming cup between his hands.

“D’ye think this tea is hot, Sassenach?” he asked.

I raised my own brows at that. Both cups were still wrapped in rags, and I could feel the heat seeping through to my palms.

“I do,” I said. “Why?”

He lifted the mug and took a mouthful of tea, which he held for a moment before swallowing; I could see the long muscles move in his throat.

“Brianna came into the kitchen whilst I was brewing the pot,” he said. “She took down the basin, and the pannikin of soap—and then she took a dipper of water steaming from the kettle, and poured it over her hands, one and then the other.” He paused a moment. “The water was boiling when I took it off the fire a moment before.”

The mouthful of tea I had taken went down crooked, and I coughed.

“Did she burn herself?” I said, when I had got my breath back.

“She did,” he said, rather grimly. “She scrubbed herself from fingertips to elbows, and I saw the blister on the side of her hand where the water fell.” He paused for a moment, and his eyes met mine over the mugs, dark blue with worry.

I took another sip of my un-honeyed tea. The room was cool enough, just past dawn, that my hot breath made tiny wisps of steam as I sighed.

“Padraic’s baby died in Marsali’s arms,” I said quietly. “She held the other child. She knows it’s contagious.” And knowing, could not touch or pick up her own child without doing her best to wash away her fear.

Jamie moved uneasily.

“Aye,” he began. “But still …”

“It’s different,” I said, and put a hand on his wrist, as much for my own comfort as his.

The transient coolness of the morning air touched face and mind alike, dispelling the warm tangle of dreams. The grass and trees were still lit with a chilly dawn glow, blue-shadowed and mysterious, and Jamie seemed a solid point of reference, fixed in the shifting light.

“Different,” I repeated. “For her, I mean.” I took a breath of the sweet morning air, smelling of wet grass and morning glories.

“I was born at the end of a war—the Great War, they called it, because the world had never seen anything like it. I told you about it.” My voice held a slight question, and he nodded, eyes fixed on mine, listening.

“The year after I was born,” I said, “there was a great epidemic of influenza. All over the world. People died in hundreds and thousands; whole villages disappeared in the space of a week. And then came the other, my war.”

The words were quite unconscious, but hearing them, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch with irony. Jamie saw it and a faint smile touched his own lips. He knew what I meant—that odd sense of pride that comes of living through a terrible conflict, leaving one with a peculiar feeling of possession. His wrist turned, his fingers wrapping tight around my own.

“And she has never seen plague or war,” he said, beginning to understand. “Never?” His voice held something odd. Nearly incomprehensible, to a man born a warrior, brought up to fight as soon as he could lift a sword; born to the idea that he must—he would—defend himself and his family by violence. An incomprehensible notion—but a rather wonderful one.