“That’s all right.” I stooped to pick up the hoe I had dropped. “Are you looking for Lizzie? She’s in—”
“Ach, no, ma’am. That is, I—do ye think I might have a word, ma’am?” he asked abruptly. “Alone, like?”
“Of course. Come along in; we can talk while I hoe.”
He nodded, and went round to let himself in by the gate. What might he want with me? I wondered. He had on a coat and boots, both covered in dust, and his breeches were badly creased. He’d been riding some way, then, not just from his family’s cabin—and he hadn’t been into the house yet; Mrs. Bug would have dusted him off, forcibly.
“Where have you come from?” I asked, offering him the gourd dipper from my water bucket. He accepted it, drinking thirstily, then wiped his mouth politely on his sleeve.
“Thank ye, ma’am. I’ve been to Hillsboro, for to fetch the . . . er . . . the things for Mr. Fraser.”
“Really? That seems a long way,” I said mildly.
A look of profound uneasiness crossed his face. He was a nice-looking boy, tanned and handsome as a young faun under his crop of dark, curly hair, but he looked almost furtive now, glancing back over his shoulder toward the house, as though fearful of interruption.
“I . . . um . . . well, ma’am, that’s to do, a bit, with what I meant to speak to ye about.”
“Oh? Well . . .” I made a cordial gesture, indicating that he should feel free to unburden himself, and turned away to begin my hoeing, so that he might feel less self-conscious. I was beginning to suspect what he wanted to ask me, though I wasn’t sure what Hillsboro had to do with it.
“It’s . . . ah . . . well, it’s to do with Mrs. Lizzie,” he began, folding his hands behind him.
“Yes?” I said encouragingly, nearly sure that I was right in my suppositions. I glanced toward the western end of the garden, where the bees were buzzing happily among the tall yellow umbels of the dauco plants. Well, it was better than the eighteenth-century notion of condoms, at least.
“I can’t marry her,” he blurted.
“What?” I stopped hoeing and straightened up, staring at him. His lips were pressed tightly together, and I saw now that what I had taken for shyness had been his attempt to mask a deep unhappiness that now showed plainly in the lines of his face.
“You’d better come and sit down.” I led him to the small bench Jamie had made me, set beneath the shade of a black gum tree that overhung the north side of the garden.
He sat, head drooping and hands trapped between his knees. I took off my broad-brimmed sun hat, wiped my face on my apron, and pinned up my hair more neatly, breathing in the cool freshness of the spruce and balsam trees that grew on the slope above.
“What is it?” I asked gently, seeing that he did not know how to start. “Are you afraid that perhaps you don’t love her?”
He gave me a startled look, then turned his head back to the studied contemplation of his knees.
“Oh. No, ma’am. I mean—I don’t, but that’s no matter.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. I mean—I’m sure we should grow to be fond of one another, meine Mutter says so. And I like her well enough now, to be sure,” he added hastily, as though fearing this might sound insulting. “Da says she’s a tidy wee soul, and my sisters are verra fond of her indeed.”
I made a noncommittal sound. I had had my doubts about this match to begin with, and it was beginning to sound as though they were justified.
“Is there . . . perhaps someone else?” I asked delicately.
Manfred shook his head slowly, and I heard him swallow hard.
“No, ma’am,” he said in a low voice.
“You’re sure?”
“Aye, ma’am.” He drew a deep breath. “I mean—there was. But that’s all done with now.”
I was puzzled by this. If he had decided to renounce this mysterious other girl—whether out of fear of his mother, or for some other reason—then what was stopping him from going through with the marriage to Lizzie?
“The other girl—is she by chance from Hillsboro?” Things were coming a little clearer. When I had first met him and his family at the Gathering, his sisters had exchanged knowing glances at mention of Manfred’s visits to Hillsboro. They had known about it then, even if Ute had not.
“Aye. That’s why I went to Hillsboro—I mean, I had to go, for the . . . er . . . But I meant to see . . . Myra . . . and tell her that I would be married to Miss Wemyss and couldna come to see her anymore.”
“Myra.” So she had a name, at least. I sat back, tapping my foot meditatively. “You meant to—so you didn’t see her, after all?”
He shook his head again, and I saw a tear drop and spread suddenly on the dusty homespun of his breeches.
“No, ma’am,” he said, his voice half-choked. “I couldn’t. She was dead.”
“Oh, dear,” I said softly. “Oh, I am so sorry.” The tears were falling on his knees, making spots on the cloth, and his shoulders shook, but he didn’t make a sound.
I reached out and gathered him into my arms, holding him tight against my shoulder. His hair was soft and springy and his skin flushed with heat against my neck. I felt helpless to deal with his grief; he was too old to comfort with mere touch, too young—perhaps—to find any solace in words. There was nothing I could do for the moment save hold him.
His arms went round my waist, though, and he clung to me for several minutes after his weeping was spent. I held him quietly, patting his back and keeping watch through the flickering green shadows of the vine-twined palisades, lest anyone else come looking for me in the garden.
At last he sighed, let go, and sat up. I groped for a handkerchief, and not finding one, pulled off my apron and handed it to him to wipe his face.
“You needn’t marry right away,” I said, when he seemed to have regained possession of himself. “It’s only right that you should take a little time to—to heal. But we can find some excuse to put the wedding off; I’ll speak to Jamie—”
But he was shaking his head, a look of sad determination taking the place of tears.
“No, ma’am,” he said, low-voiced but definite. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Myra was a whore, ma’am. She died of the French disease.”
He looked up at me then, and I saw the terror in his eyes, behind the grief.
“And I think I’ve got it.”
“YE’RE SURE?” Jamie set down the hoof he had been trimming, and looked bleakly at Manfred.
“I’m sure,” I said tartly. I had obliged Manfred to show me the evidence—in fact, I had taken scrapings from the lesion to examine microscopically—then took him straight to find Jamie, barely waiting for the boy to do up his breeches.
Jamie looked fixedly at Manfred, plainly trying to decide what to say. Manfred, purple-faced from the double stress of confession and examination, dropped his own eyes before this basilisk gaze, staring at a crescent of black hoof paring that lay on the ground.
“I’m that sorry, sir,” he murmured. “I—I didna mean to . . .”
“I shouldna suppose anyone does,” Jamie said. He breathed deeply and made a sort of subterranean growling noise that caused Manfred to hunch his shoulders and try to withdraw his head, turtlelike, into the safer confines of his clothing.
“He did do the right thing,” I pointed out, trying to put the best face possible on the situation. “Now, I mean—telling the truth.”
Jamie snorted.
“Well, he couldna be poxing wee Lizzie, now, could he? That’s worse than only going wi’ a whore.”
“I suppose some men would just keep quiet about it, and hope for the best.”
“Aye, some would.” He narrowed his eyes at Manfred, evidently looking for overt indications that Manfred might be a villain of this description.
Gideon, who disliked having his feet messed about and was consequently in bad temper, stamped heavily, narrowly missing Jamie’s own foot. He tossed his head, and emitted a rumbling noise that I thought was roughly the equivalent of Jamie’s growl.
“Aye, well.” Jamie left off glaring at Manfred, and grabbed Gideon’s halter. “Go along to the house with him, Sassenach. I’ll finish here, and then we’ll have Joseph in and see what’s to do.”
“All right.” I hesitated, unsure whether to speak in front of Manfred. I didn’t want to raise his hopes too much, until I’d had a chance to look at the scrapings under the microscope.
The spirochetes of syphilis were very distinctive, but I didn’t think I had a stain that would allow me to see them with a simple light microscope such as mine was. And while I thought my homemade penicillin could likely eliminate the infection, I would have no way of knowing for certain, unless I could see them, and then see that they had disappeared from his blood.
I contented myself with saying, “I have got penicillin, mind.”
“I ken that well enough, Sassenach.” Jamie switched his baleful look from Manfred to me. I’d saved his life with the penicillin—twice—but he hadn’t enjoyed the process. With a Scottish noise of dismissal, he bent and picked up Gideon’s enormous hoof again.
Manfred seemed a bit shell-shocked, and said nothing on the way to the house. He hesitated at the door to the surgery, glancing uneasily from the gleaming microscope to the open box of surgical tools, and then toward the covered bowls lined up on the counter, in which I grew my penicillin colonies.
“Come in,” I said, but was obliged to reach out and take him by the sleeve before he would step across the threshold. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been to the surgery before; it was a good five miles to the McGillivrays’ place, and Frau McGillivray was entirely capable of dealing with her family’s minor ills.
I wasn’t feeling terribly charitable toward Manfred at the moment, but gave him a stool and asked if he would like a cup of coffee. I thought he could probably use a stiff drink, if he was about to have an interview with Jamie and Joseph Wemyss, but supposed I had better keep him clear-headed.
“No, ma’am,” he said, and swallowed, white-faced. “I mean, thank ye, no.”
He looked extremely young, and very frightened.
“Roll up your sleeve then, please. I’m going to draw a bit of blood, but it won’t hurt much. How did you come to meet the, er, young lady? Myra, that was her name?”
“Aye, ma’am.” Tears welled in his eyes at her name; I suppose he really had loved her, poor boy—or thought he had.
He had met Myra in a tavern in Hillsboro. She had seemed kind, he said, and was very pretty, and when she asked the young gunsmith to buy her a glass of geneva, he had obliged, feeling dashing.
“So we drank a bit together, and she laughed at me, and . . .” He seemed rather at a loss to explain how matters had progressed from there, but he had waked up in her bed. That had sealed the matter, so far as he was concerned, and he had seized every excuse to go to Hillsboro thereafter.