“Aye,” he began. “But still . . .”
“It’s different,” I said, and put a hand on his wrist, as much for my own comfort as his.
The transient coolness of the morning air touched face and mind alike, dispelling the warm tangle of dreams. The grass and trees were still lit with a chilly dawn glow, blue-shadowed and mysterious, and Jamie seemed a solid point of reference, fixed in the shifting light.
“Different,” I repeated. “For her, I mean.” I took a breath of the sweet morning air, smelling of wet grass and morning glories.
“I was born at the end of a war—the Great War, they called it, because the world had never seen anything like it. I told you about it.” My voice held a slight question, and he nodded, eyes fixed on mine, listening.
“The year after I was born,” I said, “there was a great epidemic of influenza. All over the world. People died in hundreds and thousands; whole villages disappeared in the space of a week. And then came the other, my war.”
The words were quite unconscious, but hearing them, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch with irony. Jamie saw it and a faint smile touched his own lips. He knew what I meant—that odd sense of pride that comes of living through a terrible conflict, leaving one with a peculiar feeling of possession. His wrist turned, his fingers wrapping tight around my own.
“And she has never seen plague or war,” he said, beginning to understand. “Never?” His voice held something odd. Nearly incomprehensible, to a man born a warrior, brought up to fight as soon as he could lift a sword; born to the idea that he must—he would—defend himself and his family by violence. An incomprehensible notion—but a rather wonderful one.
“Only as pictures. Films, I mean. Television.” That one he would never understand, and I could not explain. The way in which such pictures focused on war itself; bombs and planes and submarines, and the thrilling urgency of blood shed on purpose; a sense of nobility in deliberate death.
He knew what battlefields were really like—battlefields, and what came after them.
“The men who fought in those wars—and the women—they didn’t die of the killing, most of them. They died like this—” A lift of my mug toward the open window, toward the peaceful mountains, the distant hollow where Padraic MacNeill’s cabin lay hidden. “They died of illness and neglect, because there wasn’t any way to stop it.”
“I have seen that,” he said softly, with a glance at the stoppered bottles. “Plague and ague run rampant in a city, half a regiment dead of flux.”
“Of course you have.”
Butterflies were rising among the flowers in the dooryard, cabbage whites and sulfur yellows, here and there the great, lazy sail of a late tiger swallowtail out of the shadow of the wood. My thumb still rested on his wrist, feeling his heartbeat, slow and powerful.
“Brianna was born seven years after penicillin came into common use. She was born in America—not this one”—I nodded toward the window again—“but that one, that will be. There, it isn’t usual for lots of people to die of contagious illness.” I glanced at him. The light had reached his waist, and glowed on the metal cup in his hand.
“Do you remember the first person you knew of who had died?”
His face went blank with surprise, then sharpened, thinking. After a moment, he shook his head.
“My brother was the first who was important, but I kent others before him, surely.”
“I can’t remember, either.” My parents, of course; their deaths had been personal—but born in England, I had lived in the shadow of cenotaphs and memorials, and people just beyond the bounds of my own family died regularly; I had a sudden vivid memory, of my father putting on a homburg and dark coat to go to the baker’s wife’s funeral. Mrs. Briggs, her name had been. But she hadn’t been the first; I knew already about death and funerals. How old had I been then—four, perhaps?
I was very tired. My eyes felt grainy from lack of sleep, and the delicate early light was brightening to full sun.
“I think Frank’s was the first death Brianna ever experienced personally. Maybe there were others; I can’t be sure. But the point is—”
“I see the point.” He reached to take the empty cup from my hand, and set it on the counter, then drained his own and set it down, too.
“But it’s no herself she fears for, aye?” he asked, his eyes penetrating. “It’s the wean.”
I nodded. She would have known, of course, in an academic sort of way, that such things were possible. But to have a child die suddenly before you, from something like a simple case of diarrhea . . .
“She’s a good mother,” I said, and yawned suddenly. She was. But it would never have struck her in any visceral way that something so negligible as a germ could suddenly snatch away her child. Not until yesterday.
Jamie stood up suddenly, and pulled me to my feet.
“Go to bed, Sassenach,” he said. “That will wait.” He nodded at the microscope. “I’ve never known shit spoil with keeping.”
I laughed, and collapsed slowly against him, my cheek pressed against his chest.
“Maybe you’re right.” Still, I didn’t push away. He held me, and we watched the sunlight grow, creeping slowly up the wall.
62
AMOEBA
I TURNED THE MIRROR OF the microscope a fraction of an inch further, to get as much light as I could.
“There.” I stepped back, motioning Malva to come and look. “Do you see it? The big, clear thing in the middle, lobed, with the little flecks in it?”
She frowned, squinting one-eyed into the ocular, then drew in her breath in a gasp of triumph.
“I see it plain! Like a currant pudding someone’s dropped on the floor, no?”
“That’s it,” I said, smiling at her description in spite of the general seriousness of our investigation. “It’s an amoeba—one of the bigger sorts of microorganisms. And I very much think it’s our villain.”
We were looking at slides made from the stool samples I had retrieved from all the sick so far—for Padraic’s family was not the only one affected. There were three families with at least one person ill with a vicious bloody flux—and in all of the samples I had looked at so far, I had found this amoebic stranger.
“Is it really?” Malva had looked up when I spoke, but now returned to the eyepiece, absorbed. “However can something so small cause such a stramash in something so big as a person?”
“Well, there is an explanation,” I said, swishing another slide gently through the dye bath and setting it to dry. “But it would take me a bit of time to tell you, all about cells—you remember, I showed you the cells from the lining of your mouth?”
She nodded, frowning slightly, and ran her tongue along inside her cheek.
“Well, the body makes all kinds of different cells, and there are special kinds of cells whose business it is to fight bacteria—the small, roundish sorts of things, you remember those?” I gestured at the slide, which being fecal matter, had the usual vast quantities of Escherichia coli and the like.
“But there are millions of different sorts, and sometimes a microorganism comes along that the special cells aren’t able to deal with. You know—I showed you the Plasmodium in Lizzie’s blood?” I nodded toward the stoppered vial on the counter; I had taken blood from Lizzie only a day or two before, and shown the malarial parasites in the cells to Malva. “And I do think that this amoeba of ours may well be one like that.”
“Oh, well. Will we give the sick folk the penicillin, then?” I smiled a little at the eager “we,” though there was little enough to smile at in the situation overall.
“No, I’m afraid penicillin isn’t effective against amoebic dysentery—that’s what you call a very bad flux, a dysentery. No, I’m afraid we’ve nothing much to be going on with save herbs.” I opened the cupboard and ran an eye over the ranks of bottles and gauze-wrapped bundles, puzzling.
“Wormwood, for a start.” I took the jar down and handed it to Malva, who had come to stand beside me, looking with interest into the mysteries of the cupboard. “Garlic, that’s generally useful for infections of the digestive tract—but it makes quite a good poultice for skin things, as well.”
“What about onions? My grannie would steam an onion, and put it to my ear, when I was a wee bairn and had the earache. It smelt something dreadful, but it did work!”
“It can’t hurt. Run out to the pantry, then, and fetch . . . oh, three big ones, and several heads of garlic.”
“Oh, at once, ma’am!” She set down the wormwood and dashed out, sandals flapping. I turned back to the shelves, trying to calm my own sense of urgency.
I was torn between the urge to be with the sick, nursing them, and the need to make medicines that might be of help. But there were other people who could do the nursing, and no one but me who knew enough to try to compound an antiparasitic remedy.
Wormwood, garlic . . . agrimony. And gentian. Anything with a very high content of copper or sulfur—oh, rhubarb. We were past the growing season, but I’d had a fine crop and had put up several dozen bottles of the boiled pulp and syrup, as Mrs. Bug liked it for pies, and it provided some vitamin C for the winter months. That would make a splendid base for the medicine. Add perhaps slippery elm, for its soothing effects on the intestinal tract—though such effects were likely to be so slight as to be unnoticeable against the ravages of such a virulent onslaught.
I began pounding wormwood and agrimony in my mortar, meanwhile wondering where the bloody hell the thing had come from. Amoebic dysentery was normally a disease of the tropics, though God knew, I’d seen any number of peculiar tropical diseases on the coast, brought in with the slave and sugar trade from the Indies—and not a few further inland, too, since any such disease that wasn’t instantly fatal tended to become chronic and move along with its victim.
It wasn’t impossible that one of the fisher-folk had contracted it during the journey from the coast, and while being one of the fortunate persons who suffered only a mild infection, was now carrying the encysted form of the amoeba around in his or her digestive tract, all ready to shed infective cysts right and left.
Why this sudden outbreak? Dysentery was almost always spread via contaminated food or water. What—
“Here, ma’am.” Malva was back, breathless from her hurry, several large brown onions in hand, crackling and glossy, and a dozen garlic heads bundled in her apron. I set her to slicing them up, and had the happy inspiration of telling her to stew them in honey. I didn’t know whether the antibacterial effect of honey would be likewise effective against an amoeba, but it couldn’t hurt—and might conceivably make the mixture a little more palatable; it was shaping up to be more than a trifle eye-watering, between the onions, the garlic, and the rhubarb.
“Phew! What are you guys doing in here?” I looked up from my macerating to see Brianna in the door, looking deeply suspicious, nose wrinkled against the smell.