“And a rattlesnake is smaller yet,” her father replied. “Ye wouldna walk into a room with one of those, only because ye outweigh him, I hope?”
Ian snickered at that, and Brianna gave him an elbow, hard in the ribs.
“Anyway,” Jamie said, ignoring them, “I’ve a bit of news. And a letter from Roger Mac,” he said. He pulled it out of his shirt, smiling at Bree. “If ye’re no too distracted to read it?”
She lit up like a candle and grabbed it. Ian made a teasing snatch at it, and she slapped his hand away, laughing, and ran out of the room to read it in privacy.
“What sort of news?” I asked. Ulysses had left the tray and decanter; I poured a tot into my empty glass and gave it to Jamie.
“Someone’s seen Manfred McGillivray,” he replied. “Slàinte.” He drained the glass, looking contented.
“Oh, aye? Where?” Ian looked less than pleased at this news. For myself, I was thrilled.
“In a brothel, where else?”
Unfortunately, his informant had not been able to supply the exact location of said brothel—having likely been too drunk at the time to know precisely where he was, as Jamie cynically observed—but had been reasonably sure that it was in Cross Creek or Campbelton. Also unfortunately, the sighting was several weeks old. Manfred might well have moved on.
“It’s a start, though,” I said, hopeful. Penicillin was effective, even against more advanced cases of syphilis, and I had some brewing in the winter kitchen, even now. “I’ll go with you, when you go to the gaol. Then after we’ve spoken with Donner, we can go look for the brothel.”
Jamie’s look of contentment lessened appreciably.
“What? Why?”
“I dinna think Manfred would be still there, Auntie,” Ian said, patently amused. “I doubt he’d have the money, for one thing.”
“Oh, ha ha,” I said. “He might have said where he was staying, mightn’t he? Besides, I want to know whether he was showing any symptoms.” In my own time, it might be ten, twenty, or even thirty years after the appearance of the initial chancre before further syphilitic symptoms developed; in this time, though, syphilis was a much more fulminant disease—a victim could die within a year of infection. And Manfred had been gone for more than three months; God knew how long since he had first contracted the infection.
Jamie looked distinctly unenthused about the idea of searching for brothels; Ian seemed rather more interested.
“I’ll help look,” he volunteered. “Fergus can come, too; he kens a great deal about whores—they’d likely talk to him.”
“Fergus? Fergus is here?”
“He is,” Jamie said. “That was the other bit of news. He’s payin’ his respects to my aunt at the moment.”
“Why is he here, though?”
“Well, ye heard the talk at the barbecue, aye? About Mr. Simms, the printer, and his troubles? It seems they’ve got worse, and he thinks of selling up, before someone burns his shop to the ground and him in it. It struck me that perhaps it would suit Fergus and Marsali, better than the farming. So I sent word for him to come down, and maybe have a word wi’ Simms.”
“That’s a brilliant idea!” I said. “Only . . . what would Fergus use for money to buy it?”
Jamie coughed and looked evasive.
“Aye, well. I imagine some sort of bargain might be struck. Particularly if Simms is anxious to sell up.”
“All right,” I said, resigned. “I don’t suppose I want to know the gory details. But Ian—” I turned to him, fixing him with a beady eye. “Far be it from me to offer you moral advice. But you are not—repeat, not—to be questioning whores in any deeply personal manner. Do I make myself clear?”
“Auntie!” he said, pretending shock. “The idea!” But a broad grin spread across his tattooed face.
56
TAR AND FEATHERS
IN THE EVENT, I let Jamie go alone to the gaol to make arrangements for seeing Donner. He had assured me that this would be simpler without my presence, and I had several errands in Cross Creek. Besides the usual salt, sugar, pins, and other household goods needing replenishment, I urgently needed more cinchona bark for Lizzie. The gallberry ointment worked to treat malarial attacks, but was not nearly so effective as Jesuit bark in preventing them.
The British trade restrictions were having their effect, though. There was, of course, no tea to be found—I had expected that; there had been none for nearly a year—but neither was there any sugar, save at an exorbitant price, and steel pins were not to be found at all.
Salt, I could get. With a pound of this in my basket, I made my way up from the docks. The day was hot and humid; away from the slight breeze off the river, the air was motionless and thick as treacle. The salt had solidified in its burlap bags, and the merchant had had to chip off lumps of it with a chisel.
I wondered how Ian and Fergus were coming with their researches; I had a scheme in mind regarding the brothel and its inhabitants, but first, we had to find it.
I hadn’t mentioned the idea to Jamie. If anything came of it, that would be time enough. A side street offered shade, in the form of a number of large elms that had been planted so as to overhang the street. I stepped into the welcome shadow of one of these, and found myself at the edge of the fashionable district—about ten houses, all told—of Cross Creek. From where I stood, I could see Dr. Fentiman’s fairly modest abode, distinguished by a small hanging shingle decorated with a caduceus. The doctor was not in when I called, but his servant, a neat, plain young woman with badly crossed eyes, admitted me and showed me to the consulting room.
This was a surprisingly cool and pleasant room, with large windows and a worn canvas cloth on the floor, painted in blue and yellow chequers, and furnished with a desk, two comfortable chairs, and a chaise longue on which patients might recline for examination. He had a microscope standing on the desk, through which I peered with interest. It was a fine one, though not quite so good as my own, I thought with some complacency.
I was possessed of a strong curiosity about the rest of his equipment, and was debating with myself as to whether it would be an abuse of the doctor’s hospitality to snoop through his cupboards, when the doctor himself arrived, borne on the wings of brandywine.
He was humming a little tune to himself, and carrying his hat under one arm, his battered medical case in the crook of the other. Seeing me, he dropped these carelessly on the floor and hastened to grasp me by the hand, beaming. He bowed over my hand and pressed moistly fervent lips to my knuckles.
“Mrs. Fraser! My dear lady, I am so pleased to see you! You are in no physical distress, I trust?”
I was in some danger of being overwhelmed by the fumes of alcohol on his breath, but kept as cordial a countenance as possible, unobtrusively wiping my hand upon my gown, whilst assuring him that I was entirely well, as were all the members of my immediate family.
“Oh, splendid, splendid,” he said, plumping down quite suddenly upon a stool and giving me an enormous grin, revealing tobacco-stained molars. His oversize wig had slid round sideways, causing him to peer out from under it like a dormouse under a tea cozy, but he seemed not to have noticed. “Splendid, splendid, splendid.”
I took his rather vague wave as invitation and sat down, as well. I had brought a small present in order to sweeten the good doctor, and now removed this from my basket—though in all truth, I rather thought he was so well-marinated as to require little more attention before I broached the subject of my errand.
He was, however, thrilled with my gift—a gouged-out eyeball, which Young Ian had thoughtfully picked up for me following a fight in Yanceyville, hastily preserved in spirits of wine. Having heard something of Doctor Fentiman’s tastes, I thought he might appreciate it. He did, and went on saying, “Splendid!” at some length.
Eventually trailing off, he blinked, held the jar up to the light, and turned it round, viewing it with great admiration.
“Splendid,” he said once more. “It will have a most particularly honorable place in my collection, I do assure you, Mrs. Fraser!”
“You have a collection?” I said, affecting great interest. I’d heard about his collection.
“Oh, yes, oh, yes! Would you care to see it?”
There was no possibility of refusal; he was already up and staggering toward a door at the back of his study. This proved to lead into a large closet, the shelves of which held thirty or forty glass containers, filled with alcoholic spirits—and a number of objects which could indeed be described as “interesting.”
These ranged from the merely grotesque to the truly startling. One by one, he brought out a big toe sporting a wart the size and color of an edible mushroom, a preserved tongue which had been split—apparently during the owner’s lifetime, as the two halves were quite healed—a cat with six legs, a grossly malformed brain (“Removed from a hanged murderer,” as he proudly informed me. “I shouldn’t wonder,” I murmured in reply, thinking of Donner and wondering what his brain might look like), and several infants, presumably stillborn, and exhibiting assorted atrocious deformities.
“Now, this,” he said, lifting down a large glass cylinder in trembling hands, “is quite the prize of my collection. There is a most distinguished physician in Germany, a Herr Doktor Blumenbach, who has a world-renowned collection of skulls, and he has been pursuing me—nay, absolutely pestering me, I assure you!—in an effort to persuade me to part with it.”
“This” was the defleshed skulls and spinal column of a double-headed infant. It was, in fact, fascinating. It was also something that would cause any woman of childbearing age to swear off sex immediately.
Grisly as the doctor’s collection was, though, it offered me an excellent opportunity for approaching my true errand.
“That is truly amazing,” I said, leaning forward as though to examine the empty orbits of the floating skulls. They were separate and complete, I saw; it was the spinal cord that had divided, so that the skulls hung side by side in the fluid, ghostly white and leaning toward each other so that the rounded heads touched gently, as though sharing some secret, only separating when a movement of the jar caused them momentarily to float apart. “I wonder what causes such a phenomenon?”
“Oh, doubtless some dreadful shock to the mother,” Doctor Fentiman assured me. “Women in an expectant condition are fearfully vulnerable to any sort of excitement or distress, you know. They must be kept quite sequestered and confined, well away from any injurious influences.”
“I daresay,” I murmured. “But you know, some malformations—that one, for instance?—I believe are the result of syphilis in the mother.”
It was; I recognized the typical malformed jaw, the narrow skull, and the caved-in appearance of the nose. This child had been preserved with flesh intact, and lay curled placidly in its bottle. By the size and lack of hair, it had likely been premature; I hoped for its own sake that it had not been born alive.