The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (475 page)

“Why is Joe Hobson going to New Bern?” I asked, peering over the top of my medicine chest.

“To present a petition to the Governor,” Abel MacLennan said. “Much good it will do.” He smiled at Marsali, a little sadly. “No, lassie. I dinna ken where I’m bound, tell ye the truth. ’Twon’t be to New Bern, though.”

“Nor back to your wife at Drunkard’s Creek?” Marsali looked at him in concern.

“My wife’s dead, lass,” MacLennan said softly. He smoothed the red kerchief across his knee, easing out the wrinkles. “Dead two months past.”

“Oh, Mr. Abel.” Marsali leaned forward and clasped his hand, her blue eyes full of pain. “I’m that sorry!”

He patted her hand, not looking up. Tiny drops of rain gleamed in the sparse strands of his hair, and a trickle of moisture ran down behind one large red ear, but he made no move to wipe it away.

Jamie had stood up while questioning Marsali. Now he sat down on the log beside MacLennan, and laid a hand gently on the smaller man’s back.

“I hadna heard,
a charaid,
” he said quietly.

“No.” MacLennan looked blindly into the transparent flames. “I—well, the truth of it is, I’d not told anyone. Not ’til now.”

Jamie and I exchanged looks across the fire. Drunkard’s Creek couldn’t possibly harbor more than two dozen souls, in a scatter of cabins spread along the banks. Yet neither the Hobsons nor the Fowleses had mentioned Abel’s loss—evidently he really hadn’t told anyone.

“What was it happened, Mr. Abel?” Marsali still clasped his hand, though it lay quite limp, palm-down on the red kerchief.

MacLennan looked up then, blinking.

“Oh,” he said vaguely. “So much happened. And yet … not really very much, after all. Abby—Abigail, my wife—she died of a fever. She got cold, and … she died.” He sounded faintly surprised.

Jamie poured a bit of whisky into an empty cup, picked up one of MacLennan’s unresisting hands, and folded it around the cup, holding the fingers in place with his own, until MacLennan’s hand tightened its grasp.

“Drink it, man,” he said.

Everyone was silent, watching as MacLennan obediently tasted the whisky, sipped, sipped again. Young Private Ogilvie shifted uneasily on his stone, looking as though he should like to return to his regiment, but he too stayed put, as though fearing an abrupt departure might somehow injure MacLennan further.

MacLennan’s very stillness drew every eye, froze all talk. My hand hovered uneasily over the bottles in my chest, but I had no remedy for this.

“I had enough,” he said suddenly. “I did.” He looked up from his cup and glanced round the fire, as though challenging anyone to dispute him. “For the taxes, aye? It was no so good a year as it might have been, but I was careful. I’d ten bushels of corn put aside, and four good deer hides. It was worth more than the six shillings of the tax.”

But the taxes must be paid in hard currency; not in corn and hides and blocks of indigo, as the farmers did their business. Barter was the common means of trade—I knew that well enough, I thought, glancing down at the bag of odd things folk had brought me in payment for my herbs and simples. No one ever paid for anything in money—save the taxes.

“Well, that’s only reasonable,” said MacLennan, blinking earnestly at Private Ogilvie, as though the young man had protested. “His Majesty canna well be doing wi’ a herd of pigs, or a brace of turkeys, now, can he? No, I see quite well why it must be hard money, anyone could. And I had the corn; it would ha’ brought six shillings, easy.”

The only difficulty, of course, lay in turning ten bushels of corn into six shillings of tax. There were those in Drunkard’s Creek who might have bought Abel’s corn, and were willing—but no one in Drunkard’s Creek had money, either. No, the corn must be taken to market in Salem; that was the closest place where hard coin might be obtained. But Salem lay nearly forty miles from Drunkard’s Creek—a week’s journey, there and back.

“I’d five acres in late barley,” Abel explained. “Ripe and yellochtie, achin’ for the scythe. I couldna leave it to be spoilt, and my Abby—she was a wee, slight woman, she couldna be scything and threshing.”

Unable to spare a week from his harvest, Abel had instead sought help from his neighbors.

“They’re guid folk,” he insisted. “One or two could spare me the odd penny—but they’d their ain taxes to pay, hadn’t they?” Still hoping somehow to scrape up the necessary coin without undertaking the arduous trip to Salem, Abel had delayed—and delayed too long.

“Howard Travers is Sheriff,” he said, and wiped unconsciously at the drop of moisture that formed at the end of his nose. “He came with a paper, and said he mun’ put us oot, and the taxes not paid.”

Faced with necessity, Abel had left his wife in their cabin, and gone posthaste to Salem. But by the time he returned, six shillings in hand, his property had been seized and sold—to Howard Travers’s father-in-law—and his cabin was inhabited by strangers, his wife gone.

“I kent she’d no go far,” he explained. “She’d not leave the bairns.”

And that in fact was where he found her, wrapped in a threadbare quilt and shivering under the big spruce tree on the hill that sheltered the graves of the four MacLennan children, all dead in their first year of life. In spite of his entreaties, Abigail would not go down to the cabin that had been theirs, would seek no aid from those who had dispossessed her. If it was madness from the fever that gripped her, or only stubbornness, he could not tell; she had clung to the branches of the tree with demented strength, crying out the names of her children—and there had died in the night.

His whisky cup was empty. He set it carefully on the ground by his feet, ignoring Jamie’s gesture toward the bottle.

“They’d given her leave to carry awa what she could. She’d a bundle with her, and her grave-claes in it. I ken weel her sitting down the day after we were wed, to spin her winding-sheet. It had wee flowers all along one edge, that she’d made; she was a good hand wi’ a needle.”

He had wrapped Abigail in her embroidered shroud, buried her by the side of their youngest child, and then walked two miles down the road, intending, he thought, to tell the Hobsons what had happened.

“But I came to the house, and found them all abuzzing like hornets—Hugh Fowles had had a visit from Travers, come for the tax, and no money to pay. Travers grinned like an ape and said it was all one to him—and sure enough, ten days later he came along wi’ a paper and three men, and put them oot.”

Hobson had scraped up the money to pay his own taxes, and the Fowleses were crowded in safely enough with the rest of the family—but Joe Hobson was foaming with wrath over the treatment of his son-in-law.

“He was a-rantin’, Joe, bleezin’ mad wi’ fury. Janet Hobson bid me come and sit, and offered me supper, and there was Joe shoutin’ that he’d take the price of the land out of Howard Travers’s hide, and Hugh slumped down like a trampled dog, and his wife greetin’, and the weans all squealin’ for their dinners like a brood o’ piglets, and … well, I thought of telling them, but then …” He shook his head, as though confused anew.

Sitting half-forgotten in the chimney-corner, he had been overcome by a strange sort of fatigue, one that made him so tired that his head nodded on his neck, lethargy stealing over him. It was warm, and he was overcome with a sense of unreality. If the crowded confines of the Hobsons’ one-roomed cabin were not real, neither was the quiet hillside and its fresh grave beneath the spruce tree.

He slept under the table, and woke before dawn, to find that the sense of unreality persisted. Everything around him seemed no more than a waking dream. MacLennan himself seemed to have ceased to exist; his body rose, washed itself, and ate, nodded and spoke without his cognizance. None of the outer world existed any longer. And so it was that when Joe Hobson had risen and announced that he and Hugh would go to Hillsborough, there to seek redress from the Court, that Abel MacLennan had found himself marching down the road along with them, nodding and speaking when spoken to, with no more will than a dead man.

“It did come to me, walkin’ doon the road, as we were all dead,” he said dreamily. “Me and Joe and Hugh and the rest. I might sae well be one place as anither; it was only moving ’til the time came to lay my bones beside Abby. I didna mind it.”

When they reached Hillsborough, he had paid no great mind to what Joe intended; only followed, obedient and unthinking. Followed, and walked the muddy streets sparkling with broken glass from shattered windows, seen the torchlight and mobs, heard the shouts and screams—all quite unmoved.

“It was no but dead men, a-rattling their bones against one anither,” he said with a shrug. He was still for a moment, then turned his face to Jamie, and looked long and earnestly up into his face.

“Is it so? Are ye dead, too?” One limp, callused hand floated up from the red kerchief, and rested lightly against the bone of Jamie’s cheek.

Jamie didn’t recoil from the touch, but took MacLennan’s hand and brought it down again, held tight between his own.

“No,
a charaid
,” he said softly. “Not yet.”

MacLennan nodded slowly.

“Aye. Give it time,” he said. He pulled his hands free and sat for a moment, smoothing his kerchief. His head kept bobbing, nodding slightly, as though the spring of his neck had stretched too far.

“Give it time,” he repeated. “It’s none sae bad.” He stood up then, and put the square of red cloth on his head. He turned to me and nodded politely, his eyes vague and troubled.

“I thank ye for the breakfast, ma’am,” he said, and walked away.

3

BILIOUS HUMOURS

Abel MacLennan’s departure put an abrupt end to breakfast. Private Ogilvie excused himself with thanks, Jamie and Fergus went off in search of scythes and astrolabes, and Lizzie, wilting in the absence of Private Ogilvie, declared that she felt unwell and subsided palely into one of the lean-to shelters, fortified with a large cup of tansy and rue decoction.

Fortunately, Brianna chose to reappear just then, sans Jemmy. She and Roger had breakfasted with Jocasta, she assured me. Jemmy had fallen asleep in Jocasta’s arms, and since both parties appeared content with that arrangement, she had left him there, and come back to help me with the morning’s clinic.

“Are you sure you want to help me this morning?” I eyed Bree dubiously. “It’s your wedding day, after all. I’m sure Lizzie or maybe Mrs. Martin could—”

“No, I’ll do it,” she assured me, swiping a cloth across the seat of the tall stool I used for my morning surgery. “Lizzie’s feeling better, but I don’t think she’s up to festering feet and putrid stomachs.” She gave a small shudder, closing her eyes at the memory of the elderly gentleman whose ulcerated heel I had debrided the day before. The pain had caused him to vomit copiously on his tattered breeches, which in turn had caused several of the people waiting for my attention to throw up too, in sympathetic reflex.

I felt a trifle queasy at the memory myself, but drowned it with a final gulp of bitter coffee.

“No, I suppose not,” I agreed reluctantly. “Still, your gown isn’t quite finished, is it? Perhaps you should go—”

“It’s fine,” she assured me. “Phaedre’s hemming my dress, and Ulysses is ordering all the servants around up there like a drill sergeant. I’d just be in the way.”

I gave way without further demur, though I wondered a little at her alacrity. While Bree wasn’t squeamish about the exigencies of normal life, like skinning animals and cleaning fish, I knew the proximity of people with disfiguring conditions or obvious illness bothered her, though she did her best to disguise it. It wasn’t distaste, I thought, but rather a crippling empathy.

I lifted the kettle and poured freshly boiled water into a large, half-full jar of distilled alcohol, narrowing my eyes against hot clouds of alcoholic steam.

It
was
difficult to see so many people suffering from things that could have been easily treated in a time of antiseptics, antibiotics, and anesthesia—but I had learned detachment in the field hospitals of a time when such medical innovations were not only new but rare, and I knew both the necessity and the value of it.

I could not help anyone, if my own feelings got in the way. And I must help. It was as simple as that. But Brianna had no such knowledge to use as a shield. Not yet.

She had finished wiping down the stools, boxes, and other impedimenta for the morning surgery, and straightened up, a small frown between her brows.

“Do you remember the woman you saw yesterday? The one with the retarded little boy?”

“Not something you’d forget,” I said, as lightly as possible. “Why? Here, can you deal with this?” I gestured at the folding table I used, which was stubbornly declining to fold up properly, its joints having swollen with the damp.

Brianna frowned slightly, studying it, then struck the offending joint sharply with the side of her hand. It gave way and collapsed obediently at once, recognizing superior force.

“There.” She rubbed the side of her hand absently, still frowning. “You were making a big thing of telling her to try not to have any more children. The little boy—was it an inheritable condition, then?”

“You might say that,” I replied dryly. “Congenital syphilis.”

She looked up, blanching.

“Syphilis? You’re sure?”

I nodded, rolling up a length of boiled linen for bandaging. It was still very damp, but no help for it.

“The mother wasn’t showing overt signs of the late stages—yet—but it’s quite unmistakable in a child.”

The mother had come simply to have a gumboil lanced, the little boy clinging to her skirts. He’d had the characteristic “saddle nose,” with its pushed-in bridge, as well as a jaw so malformed that I wasn’t surprised at his poor nutrition; he could barely chew. I couldn’t tell how much of his evident backwardness was due to brain damage and how much to deafness; he appeared to have both, but I hadn’t tested their extent—there being exactly nothing I could do to remedy either condition. I had advised the mother to give him pot liquor, which might help with the malnutrition, but there was little else to be done for him, poor mite.

“I don’t see it so often here as I did in Paris or Edinburgh, where there were a lot of prostitutes,” I told Bree, tossing the ball of bandages into the canvas bag she held open. “Now and then, though. Why? You don’t think Roger has syphilis, do you?”

She looked at me, openmouthed. Her look of shock was obliterated by an instant flood of angry red.

“I do
not
!” she said. “Mother!”

“Well, I didn’t really think so,” I said mildly. “Happens in the best of families, though—and you
were
asking.”

She snorted heavily.

“I was
asking
about contraception,” she said, through her teeth. “Or at least I meant to, before you started in with the
Physician’s Guide to Venereal Disease.
”

“Oh, that.” I eyed her thoughtfully, taking in the dried milk stains on her bodice. “Well, breast-feeding is reasonably effective. Not absolute, by any means, but fairly effective. Less so, after the first six months”—Jemmy was now six months old—“but still effective.”

“Mmphm,” she said, sounding so like Jamie that I had to bite my lower lip in order not to laugh. “And exactly what
else
is effective?”

I hadn’t really discussed contraception—eighteenth-century style—with her. It hadn’t seemed necessary when she first appeared at Fraser’s Ridge, and then it
really
wasn’t necessary, she being already pregnant. So she thought it was now?

I frowned, slowly putting rolls of bandage and bundles of herbs into my bag.

“The most common thing is some sort of barrier. A piece of silk or a sponge, soaked with anything from vinegar to brandy—though if you have it, tansy oil or oil of cedar is supposed to work the best. I
have
heard of women in the Indies using half a lemon, but that’s obviously not a suitable alternative here.”

She uttered a short laugh.

“No, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t think the tansy oil works all that well, either—that’s what Marsali was using when she got pregnant with Joan.”

“Oh, she
was
using it? I thought perhaps she’d just not bothered once—and once is enough.”

I felt, rather than saw her stiffen, and bit my lip again, this time in chagrin. Once
had
been enough—we just didn’t know
which
once. She hunched her shoulders, though, then let them fall, deliberately dismissing whatever memories my thoughtless remark had conjured.

“She said she’d been using it—but she might have forgotten. It doesn’t work all the time, though, does it?”

I slung the bag of surgical linens and dried herbs over my shoulder and picked up the medical chest by the leather strap Jamie had made for it.

“The only thing that always works is celibacy,” I said. “I suppose that isn’t a satisfactory option in the present case?”

She shook her head, her eyes fixed broodingly on a cluster of young men visible through the trees below, taking turns at pitching stones across the creek.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said, and bent to pick up the folding table and a pair of stools.

I looked round the clearing, considering. Anything else? No worry about leaving the campfire, even if Lizzie fell asleep; nothing on the mountainside would burn in this weather; even the kindling and firewood we had stored at the end of our lean-to the day before were damp. Something was missing, though … what? Oh, yes. I put down the box for a moment and knelt to crawl into the lean-to. I dug about in the jumble of quilts, coming out finally with my tiny leather medicine pouch.

I said a brief prayer to St. Bride and slipped it round my neck and down inside the bodice of my dress. I was so much in the habit of wearing the amulet when I set out to practice medicine that I had almost ceased to feel ridiculous about this small ritual—almost. Bree was watching me, a rather odd look on her face, but she said nothing.

I didn’t, either; merely picked up my things and followed her across the clearing, stepping carefully round the boggiest spots. It wasn’t raining now, but the clouds sat on the tops of the trees, promising more at any moment, and wisps of mist rose from fallen logs and dripping bushes.

Why was Bree worrying about contraception? I wondered. Not that I didn’t think it sensible—but why now? Perhaps it was to do with the imminence of her wedding to Roger. Even if they had been living as man and wife for the last several months—and they had—the formality of vows spoken before God and man was enough to bring a new sobriety to even the giddiest of young people. And neither Bree nor Roger was giddy.

“There is another possibility,” I said to the back of her neck, as she led the way down the slippery trail. “I haven’t tried it on anyone yet, so I can’t say how reliable it may be. Nayawenne—the old Tuscaroran lady who gave me my medicine bag—she said there were ‘women’s herbs.’ Different mixtures for different things—but one plant in particular for that; she said the seeds of it would keep a man’s spirit from overwhelming a woman’s.”

Bree paused, half-turning as I came up beside her.

“Is that how the Indians see pregnancy?” One corner of her mouth curled wryly. “The man wins?”

I laughed.

“Well, in a way. If the woman’s spirit is too strong for the man’s, or won’t yield to it, she can’t conceive. So if a woman wants a child and can’t have one, most often the shaman will treat her husband, or both of them, rather than just her.”

She made a small throaty noise, partly amusement—but only partly.

“What’s the plant—the women’s herb?” she asked. “Do you know it?”

“I’m not positive,” I admitted. “Or not sure of the name, I should say. She did show it to me, both the growing plant and the dried seeds, and I’m sure I’d know it again—but it wasn’t a plant I knew by an English name. One of the Umbelliferae, though,” I added helpfully.

She gave me an austere look that reminded me once more of Jamie, then turned to the side to let a small stream of Campbell women go by, clattering with empty kettles and pails, each one bobbing or bowing politely to us as they passed on their way down to the creek.

“Good day to ye, Mistress Fraser,” said one, a neat young woman that I recognized as one of Farquard Campbell’s younger daughters. “Is your man about? My faither would be glad of a word, he says.”

“No, he’s gone off, I’m afraid.” I gestured vaguely; Jamie could be anywhere. “I’ll tell him if I see him, though.”

She nodded and went on, each of the women behind her pausing to wish Brianna happiness on her wedding day, their woolen skirts and cloaks brushing small showers of rainwater from the bayberry bushes that lined the path here.

Brianna accepted their good wishes with gracious politeness, but I saw the small line that formed between her thick red brows. Something was definitely bothering her.

“What?” I said bluntly, as soon as the Campbells were out of earshot.

“What’s what?” she said, startled.

“What’s troubling you?” I asked. “And don’t say ‘nothing,’ because I see there is. Is it to do with Roger? Are you having second thoughts about the wedding?”

“Not exactly,” she replied, looking wary. “I want to marry Roger, I mean—
that’s
all right. It’s just … I just … thought of something …” She trailed off, and a slow flush rose in her cheeks.

“Oh?” I asked, feeling rather alarmed. “What’s that?”

“Venereal disease,” she blurted. “What if I have it? Not Roger, not him, but—from Stephen Bonnet?”

Her face was flaming so hotly that I was surprised not to see the raindrops sizzle into steam when they struck her skin. My own face felt cold, my heart tight in my chest. The possibility had occurred to me—vividly—at the time, but I hadn’t wanted even to suggest such a thing, if she hadn’t thought of it herself. I remembered the weeks of watching her covertly for any hint of malaise—but women often showed no symptoms of early infection. Jemmy’s healthy birth had been a relief in more ways than one.

“Oh,” I said softly. I reached out and squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry, lovey. You haven’t.”

She took a deep breath, and let it out in a pale misty cloud, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.

“You’re sure?” she said. “You can tell? I feel all right, but I thought—women don’t always have symptoms.”

“They don’t,” I said, “but men most certainly do. And if Roger had contracted anything nasty from
you
, I’d have heard about it long since.”

Her face had faded somewhat, but the pinkness came back at that. She coughed, mist rising from her breath.

“Well, that’s a relief. So Jemmy’s all right? You’re sure?”