“No, of course ye couldn’t,” he whispered to her. “Dinna fash, Bree. Ye did right.”
She sniffed and groped among the cloaks for something to blow her nose on, settling at last for a stained cloth from Dr. McEwan’s table. It smelled of some pungent medicine, thank God, not blood.
“But there’s Da, too,” she said, taking a deep, tremulous breath. “What will happen to him . . . the scars on his back . . . I—can’t stand to think about that and us doing nothing, but we—”
“We can’t,” Roger agreed quietly. “We daren’t. God only knows what I may have done already, finding Jerry and sending him—wherever I did send him.” Taking the cloth, he dipped it in the water bucket and wiped her face, the cold of it soothing on her hot cheeks, though it made her shiver.
“Come lie down,” he said, putting an arm round her shoulders. “Ye need rest, mo chridhe. It’s been a terrible day.”
“No,” she murmured, easing down and laying her head in the curve of his shoulder, feeling the strength and warmth of his body. “It’s been a wonderful day. I have you back.”
THE SOUNDS THAT MAKE UP SILENCE
ROGER FELT HER begin to relax, and quite suddenly she let go her stubborn hold on consciousness and fell asleep like someone breathing ether. He held her and listened to the tiny sounds that made up silence: the distant hiss of the peat fire in the bedroom, a cold wind rattling at the window, the rustling and breathing of the sleeping kids, the slow beating of Brianna’s valiant heart.
Thank you, he said silently to God.
He had expected to fall asleep himself at once; tiredness covered him like a lead blanket. But the day was still with him, and he lay for some time looking up into the dark.
He was at peace, too tired to think coherently of anything. All the possibilities drifted round him in a slow, distant swirl, too far away to be troublesome. Where they might go . . . and how. What Buck might have said to Dougal MacKenzie. What Bree had brought in her bag, heavy as lead. Whether there would be porridge for breakfast—Mandy liked porridge.
The thought of Mandy made him ease out of the quilts to check on the children. To reassure himself that they were really there.
They were, and he stood by the bed for a long time, watching their faces in wordless gratitude, breathing the warm childish smell of them—still tinged with a slight tang of goat.
At last he turned, shivering, to make his way back to his warm wife and the beckoning bliss of sleep. But as he reentered the surgery, he glanced through the window into the night outside.
Cranesmuir slept, and mist lay in her streets, the cobbles beneath gleaming with wet in the half-light of a drowning moon. On the far side of the square, though, a light showed in the attic window of Arthur Duncan’s house.
And in the shadow of the square below, a small movement betrayed the presence of a man. Waiting.
Roger closed his eyes, cold rising from his bare feet up his body, seeing in his mind the sudden vision of a green-eyed woman, lazy in the arms of a fair-haired lover . . . and a look of surprise and then of horror on her face as the man vanished from her side. And an invisible blue glow rose in her womb.
With his eyes tight shut, he put a hand on the icy windowpane, and said a prayer to be going on with.
PART SEVEN
Before I Go Hence
A DISTANT MASSACRE
September 5, 1778
IFOLDED THE CLOTH into a tidy square and used the tongs to dip it in the steaming cauldron, then stood waving it gently to and fro until the compress should cool enough for me to wring it out and use it. Joanie sighed, fidgeting on her stool.
“Don’t rub your eye,” I said automatically, seeing her curled fist steal toward the large pink sty on her right eyelid. “Don’t fret; it won’t take long.”
“Yes, it does take long,” she said crossly. “It takes forever!”
“Dinna be giving your grannie sauce,” Marsali told her, pausing in her stride on the way from kitchen to printshop, a cheese roll for Fergus in her hand. “Hauld your wheesht and be grateful.”
Joanie groaned and writhed, and stuck her tongue out after her departing mother, but whipped it back into her mouth again and looked rather shame-faced when she caught sight of my raised brow.
“I know,” I said, with some sympathy. Holding a warm compress on a sty for ten minutes did feel like forever. Particularly if you’d been doing it six times a day for the last two days. “Maybe you can think of something to pass the time. You could recite me the multiplication tables while I grind valerian root.”
“Oh, Grannie!” she said, exasperated, and I laughed.
“Here you go,” I said, handing her the warm poultice. “Do you know any good songs?”
She exhaled moodily, small nostrils flaring.
“I wish Grandda was here,” she said. “He could tell me a story.” The note of comparative accusation was clear in her voice.
“Spell ‘hordeolum’ for me and I’ll tell you the one about the water horse’s wife,” I suggested. That made her unaffected eye fly open with interest.
“What’s a hordeolum?”
“That’s the scientific name for a sty.”
“Oh.” She seemed unimpressed by this, but her forehead creased a little in concentration, and I could see her lips move as she sounded out the syllables. Both Joanie and Félicité were good spellers; they’d been playing with discarded lead type since they were toddlers and loved stumping each other with new words.
That was a thought; maybe I could get her to spell unusual words for me during the compress treatments. The sty was a big, nasty one; her entire eyelid had been red and swollen in the beginning, the eye no more than a gleaming, resentful slit. Now the sty itself had shrunk to the size of a pea, and at least three-quarters of the eye was visible.