The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (980 page)

She knows what she’s doing
, he thought.

She looked at him then, and he straightened his shoulders, instinctively awaiting orders—to his utter amazement.

“Do you want to stay?” she asked.

“Yes, of course.” He felt a little breathless, but there was no doubt in his voice. She’d told him frankly what Henry’s chances were—not good, but there
was
a chance—and he was determined to be with his nephew, no matter what happened. If Henry died, he would at least die with someone who loved him there. Though, in fact, he was quite determined that Henry would not die. Grey would not let him.

“Sit over there, then.” She nodded him to a stool on the far side of the bed, and he sat down, giving Henry a reassuring smile as he did so. Henry looked terrified but determined.

“I can’t live like this anymore,”
he’d said the night before, finally making up his mind to allow the operation.
“I just can’t.”

Mrs. Woodcock had insisted upon being present, too, and after a close catechism, Mrs. Fraser had declared that she might administer the ether. This mysterious substance sat in a dropping bottle on the bureau, a faint sickly odor drifting from it.

Mrs. Fraser gave Dr. Hunter something that looked like a handkerchief,
and raised another to her face. It
was
a handkerchief, Grey saw, but one with strings affixed to its corners. She tied these behind her head, so the cloth covered her nose and mouth, and Hunter obediently followed suit.

Used as Grey was to the swift brutality of army surgeons, Mrs. Fraser’s preparations seemed laborious in the extreme: she swabbed Henry’s belly repeatedly with an alcoholic solution she had concocted, talking to him through her highwayman’s mask in a low, soothing voice. She rinsed her hands—and made Hunter and Mrs. Woodcock do the same—and her instruments, so that the whole room reeked like a distillery of low quality.

Her motions were in fact quite brisk, he realized after a moment. But her hands moved with such sureness and … yes, grace, that was the only word … that they gave the illusion of gliding like a pair of gulls upon the air. No frantic flapping, only a sure, serene, and almost mystic movement. He found himself quieting as he watched them, becoming entranced and half forgetting the ultimate purpose of this quiet dance of hands.

She moved to the head of the bed, bending low to speak to Henry, smooth the hair away from his brow, and Grey saw the hawk’s eyes soften momentarily into gold. Henry’s body relaxed slowly under her touch; Grey saw his clenched, rigid hands uncurl. She had yet another mask, he saw, this one a stiff thing made of basket withes lined with layers of soft cotton cloth. She fitted this gently to Henry’s face and, saying something inaudible to him, took up her dropping bottle.

The air filled at once with a pungent, sweet aroma that clung to the back of Grey’s throat and made his head swim slightly. He blinked, shaking his head to dispel the giddiness, and realized that Mrs. Fraser had said something to him.

“I beg your pardon?” He looked up at her, a great white bird with yellow eyes—and a gleaming talon that sprouted suddenly from her hand.

“I said,” she repeated calmly through her mask, “you might want to sit back a little farther. It’s going to be rather messy.”

William, Rachel, and Dorothea sat on the edge of the porch like birds on a fence rail, Rollo sprawled on the brick walk at their feet, enjoying the spring sun.

“It’s bloody quiet up there,” William said, glancing uneasily at the window above, where Henry’s room lay. “D’you think they’ve started yet?” He thought, but didn’t say, that he would have expected to hear Henry making a certain amount of noise if they had, despite Rachel’s description of her brother’s account of the marvels of Mrs. Fraser’s ether. A man lie quietly asleep while someone cut open his belly with a knife? All stuff, he would have said. But Denzell Hunter wasn’t a man who could be easily beguiled—though he supposed Dottie had somehow managed it. He gave his cousin a sideways glance.

“Have you written Uncle Hal yet? About you and Denny, I mean?” He knew she hadn’t—she’d told Lord John, perforce, but persuaded him to let her break the news to her father—but wanted to distract her if he could. She was white to the lips, and her hands had bunched the fabric over her knees
into nests of creases. He still hadn’t got used to seeing her in dove and cream instead of her usual brilliant plumage—though he thought in fact that the quiet colors suited her, particularly as Rachel had assured her that she might still wear silk and muslin if she liked, rather than sacking material.

“No,” Dottie said, giving him a look that thanked him for the distraction, even while acknowledging that she knew what he was doing. “Or, yes, but I haven’t sent it yet. If all’s well with Henry, I’ll write at once with the news and add the bit about Denny and me at the bottom, as a postscript. They’ll be so overjoyed about Henry that perhaps they won’t notice—or at least won’t be as upset about it.”

“I rather think they’ll notice,” William said thoughtfully. “Papa did.” Lord John had gone quite dangerously quiet when told and had given Denzell Hunter a look suggesting swords at dawn. But the fact was that Denny had saved Henry’s life once and was now helping—with luck and Mrs. Fraser—to save it again. And Lord John was, above all, a man of honor. Besides, William thought that his father was actually relieved to finally know what it was that Dottie had been up to. He hadn’t said anything directly to William regarding William’s own role in her adventure—yet. He would.

“May the Lord hold thy brother in his hand,” Rachel said, ignoring William’s remark. “And mine and Mrs. Fraser, as well. But what if all should not go as we wish? Thee will still have to tell thy parents, and they may see news of thy impending marriage as adding insult to injury.”

“You are the most tactless plain-spoken creature,” William told her, rather irritably, seeing Dottie go whiter still at the reminder that Henry might die in the next minutes, hours, or days. “Henry will be fine. I know it. Denny is a great physician, and Mrs. Fraser … she’s … er …” In all honesty, he wasn’t sure what Mrs. Fraser was, but she scared him a little. “Denny says she knows what she’s doing,” he ended lamely.

“If Henry dies, nothing will matter,” Dottie said softly, looking at the toes of her shoes. “Not to any of us.”

Rachel made a small, sympathetic sound and reached to put her arm round Dottie’s shoulder. William added his own gruff clearing of the throat and for an instant thought the dog had done the same.

Rollo’s intent, though, was not sympathetic. He had lifted his head suddenly, and the hackles half-rose at his neck, a low growl rumbling through his chest. William glanced automatically in the direction the dog was looking and felt a sudden tightening of his muscles.

“Miss Hunter,” he said casually. “Do you know that man? The one down there, near the end of the street, talking to the butter-and-egg woman?”

Rachel shaded her eyes with her hand, looking where he nodded, but shook her head.

“No. Why? Is he what’s troubling the dog, does thee think?” She prodded Rollo in the side with her toe. “What’s amiss, then, Friend Rollo?”

“I don’t know,” William said honestly. “It might be the cat; one ran across the road just behind the woman. But I’ve seen that man before; I’m sure of it. I saw him by the roadside, somewhere in New Jersey. He asked me if I knew Ian Murray—and where he might be.”

Rachel gave a little gasp at that, making William look sideways at her in surprise.

“What?” he said. “Do you know where Murray is?”

“No,” she said sharply. “I have not seen him since the autumn, at Saratoga, and I have no notion where he is. Does thee know this man’s name?” she added, frowning. The man had disappeared now, walking off down a side street. “For that matter, is thee sure he is the same?”

“No,” William admitted. “But I think so. He had a staff with him, and so did this man. And there’s something about the way he stands—a little stooped. The man I met in New Jersey was very old, and this one walks the same way.” He didn’t mention the missing fingers; no need to remind Dottie of violence and mutilation just this minute, and he couldn’t see the man’s hand at this distance anyway.

Rollo had left off growling and settled himself with a brief grunt, but his yellow eyes were still watchful.

“When do you mean to be married, Dottie?” William asked, wishing to keep her mind occupied. A strange smell was coming from the window above them; the dog was wrinkling his nose, shaking his head in a confused sort of way, and William didn’t blame him. It was a nasty, sickly kind of thing—but he could distinctly smell blood, as well, and the faint stink of shit. It was a battlefield smell, and it made his insides shift uneasily.

“I want to be married before the fighting starts again in earnest,” his cousin answered seriously, turning to face him, “so that I can go with Denny—and Rachel,” she added, taking her prospective sister-in-law’s hand with a smile.

Rachel returned the smile, but briefly.

“What a strange thing,” she said to both of them, but her hazel eyes were fixed on William, soft and troubled. “In only a little while we shall be enemies again.”

“I have never felt myself your enemy, Miss Hunter,” he replied, just as softly. “And I shall always be your friend.”

A smile touched her lips, but the trouble stayed in her eyes.

“Thee knows what I mean.” Her eyes slid from William to Dottie, on her other side, and it occurred to William with a jolt that his cousin was about to wed a rebel—to become one herself, in fact. That he must in fact soon be directly at war with a part of his own family. The fact that Denny Hunter would not take up arms would not protect him—or Dottie. Or Rachel. All three of them were guilty of treason. Any of them might be killed, captured, imprisoned. What would he do, he thought suddenly, appalled, if he had to see Denny hanged one day? Or even Dottie?

“I know what you mean,” he said quietly. But he took Rachel’s hand, and she gave it him, and the three of them sat in silence, linked, awaiting the verdict of the future.

INK-STAINED WRETCH

I made my way to the printshop, dead tired and in that state of mind in which one feels drunk—euphoric and uncoordinated. I was in truth somewhat physically drunk, too; Lord John had insisted upon plying both Denzell Hunter and myself with his best brandy, seeing how done up we both were in the wake of the surgery. I hadn’t said no.

It was one of the most hair-raising pieces of surgery I’d done in the eighteenth century. I’d done only two other abdominal surgeries: the successful removal of Aidan McCallum’s appendix, under the influence of ether—and the very unsuccessful cesarean I’d performed with a garden knife upon the murdered body of Malva Christie. The thought of that gave me the usual pang of sadness and regret, but it was oddly tempered. What I remembered now, walking home in the cool evening, was the feeling of the life I’d held in my hands—so brief, so fleeting—but
there
, unmistakable and intoxicant, a brief blue flame.

I’d held Henry Grey’s life in my hands two hours before and felt that blaze again. Once more I’d willed all my strength into the burning of that flame—but this time had felt it steady and rise in my palms, like a candle taking hold.

The bullet had entered his intestine but had not encysted. Instead, it remained embedded but mobile, not able to leave the body but moving enough to irritate the lining of the intestine, which was badly ulcerated. After a quick discussion with Denzell Hunter—who was so fascinated with the novelty of examining a person’s working insides while they lay unconscious that he could barely keep his mind on the business at hand, exclaiming in awe at the vivid colors and pulsating throb of live organs—I had decided that the ulceration was too extensive. To excise it would narrow the small intestine dramatically and risk scarring—constricting it further and perhaps obstructing it altogether.

We’d done a modest resection instead, and I felt a twinge of something between laughter and dismay at the recollection of Lord John’s face when I severed the ulcerated segment of intestine and dropped it with a
splat
on the floor at his feet. I hadn’t done it on purpose; I’d simply needed both my hands and Denzell’s to control the bleeding, and we’d lacked a nurse to help.