No one was in sight, nor was there any response to my tentative “Hallo!”, but when I knocked at the door, I heard Tom Christie’s voice, gruff and dispirited, bid me enter.
He was at the table, writing, but from the looks of him, ought still to have been in bed. His eyes widened in surprise at sight of me, and he hastily tried to straighten the grubby shawl round his shoulders.
“Mrs. Fraser! Are you—that is—what in the name of God . . .” Deprived of speech, he pointed at me, eyes round as saucers. I had taken off my broad-brimmed hat when I entered, forgetting momentarily that I looked like nothing so much as an excited bottle brush.
“Oh,” I said, passing a self-conscious hand over my head. “That. You ought to be pleased; I’m not going about outraging the public by a wanton display of my flowing locks.”
“You look like a convict,” he said bluntly. “Sit down.”
I did, being rather in need of the stool he offered me, owing to the exertions of the walk.
“How are you?” I inquired, peering at him. The light in the cabin was very bad; he had been writing with a candle, and had put it out upon my appearance.
“How am I?” He seemed both astonished and rather put out at the inquiry. “You have walked all the way here, in a dangerously enfeebled condition, to ask after my health?”
“If you care to put it that way,” I replied, rather nettled by that “dangerously enfeebled.” “I don’t suppose you would care to step out into the light, so that I can get a decent look at you, would you?”
He drew the ends of the shawl protectively across his chest.
“Why?” He frowned at me, peaked brows drawing together so that he looked like an irritable owl.
“Because I want to know a few things regarding your state of health,” I replied patiently, “and examining you is likely the best way of finding them out, since you don’t seem able to tell me anything.”
“You are most unaccountable, madam!”
“No, I am a doctor,” I countered. “And I want to know—” A brief wave of giddiness came over me, and I leaned on the table, holding on ’til it passed.
“You are insane,” he stated, having scrutinized me for a moment. “You are also still ill, I believe. Stay there; I shall call my son to go and fetch your husband.”
I flapped a hand at him and took a deep breath. My heart was racing, and I was a trifle pale and sweaty, but essentially all right.
“The fact of the matter, Mr. Christie, is that while I’ve certainly been ill, I wasn’t ill with the same sickness that’s been afflicting people on the Ridge—and from what Malva was able to tell me, I don’t think you were, either.”
He had risen to go and call Allan; at this, he froze, staring at me with his mouth open. Then he slowly lowered himself back into his chair.
“What do you mean?”
Having finally got his attention, I was pleased to lay out the facts before him; I had them neatly to hand, having given them considerable thought over the last few days.
While several families on the Ridge had suffered the depredations of amoebic dysentery, I hadn’t. I had had a dangerously high fever, accompanied by dreadful headache and—so far as I could tell from Malva’s excited account—convulsions. But it certainly wasn’t dysentery.
“Are you certain of this?” He was twiddling his discarded quill, frowning.
“It’s rather hard to mistake bloody flux for headache and fever,” I said tartly. “Now—did you have flux?”
He hesitated a moment, but curiosity got the better of him.
“No,” he said. “It was as you say—a headache fit to split the skull, and fever. A terrible weakness, and . . . and extraordinarily unpleasant dreams. I had no notion that it was not the same illness afflicting the others.”
“No reason you should, I suppose. You didn’t see any of them. Unless—did Malva describe the illness to you?” I asked only from curiosity, but he shook his head.
“I do not wish to hear of such things; she does not tell me. Still, why have you come?” He tilted his head to one side, narrowing his eyes. “What difference does it make whether you and I suffered an ague, rather than a flux? Or anyone else, for that matter?” He seemed rather agitated, and got up, moving about the cabin in an unfocused, bumbling sort of way, quite unlike his usual decisive movements.
I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. I’d got the basic information I came for; explaining why I’d wanted it was going to be uphill work. I had enough trouble getting Jamie, Young Ian, and Malva to accept the germ theory of disease, and that was with the evidence visible through a microscope to hand.
“Disease is catching,” I said a little tiredly. “It passes from one person to another—sometimes directly, sometimes by means of food or water shared between a sick person and a healthy one. All of the people who had the flux lived near a particular small spring; I have some reason to think that it was the water of that spring that carried the amoeba—that made them ill.
“You and I, though—I haven’t seen you in weeks. Nor have I been near anyone else who’s had the ague. How is it that we should both fall ill of the same thing?”
He stared at me, baffled and still frowning.
“I do not see why two persons cannot fall ill without seeing each other. Certainly I have known such illnesses as you describe: gaol fever, for instance, spreads in close quarters—but surely not all illnesses behave in the same fashion?”
“No, they don’t,” I admitted. I wasn’t in a fit state to try to get across the basic notions of epidemiology or public health, either. “It’s possible, for instance, for some diseases to be spread by mosquitoes. Malaria, for one.” Some forms of viral meningitis, for another—my best guess as to the illness I’d just recovered from.
“Do you recall being bitten by a mosquito any time recently?”
He stared at me, then uttered a brief sort of bark I took for laughter.
“My dear woman, everyone in this festering climate is bitten repeatedly during the hot weather.” He scratched at his beard, as though by reflex.
That was true. Everyone but me and Roger. Now and then, some desperate insect would have a go, but for the most part, we escaped unbitten, even when there were absolute plagues of the creatures and everyone around us was scratching. As a theory, I suspected that blood-drinking mosquitoes had evolved so closely with mankind through the years that Roger and I simply didn’t smell right to them, having come from too far away in time. Brianna and Jemmy, who shared my genetic material but also Jamie’s, were bitten, but not as frequently as most people.
I didn’t recall having been bitten any time recently, but it was possible that I had been and had simply been too busy to notice.
“Why does it matter?” Christie asked, seeming now merely baffled.
“I don’t know. I just—need to find things out.” I’d also needed both to get away from the house and to make some move to reclaim my life by the most direct means I knew—the practice of medicine. But that wasn’t anything I meant to share with Tom Christie.
“Hmph,” he said. He stood looking down at me, frowning and undecided, then suddenly extended a hand—the one I had operated on, I saw; the “Z” of the incision had faded to a healthy pale pink, and the fingers lay straight.
“Come outside, then,” he said, resigned. “I will see you home, and if ye insist upon asking intrusive and bothersome questions regarding my health along the way, I suppose I cannot stop you.”
Startled, I took his hand, and found his grip solid and steady, despite the haggard look of his face and the slump of his shoulders.
“You needn’t walk me home,” I protested. “You ought to be in bed, by the looks of you!”
“So should you,” he said, leading me to the door with a hand beneath my elbow. “But if ye choose to risk your health and your life by undertaking such inappropriate exertion—why, so can I. Though you must,” he added sternly, “put on your hat before we go.”
WE MADE IT BACK to the house, stopping frequently for rest, and arrived panting, dripping with sweat, and generally exhilarated by the adventure. No one had missed me, but Mr. Christie insisted upon delivering me inside, which meant that everyone observed my absence ex post facto, and in the irrational way of people, at once became very annoyed.
I was scolded by everyone in sight, including Young Ian, frog-marched upstairs virtually by the scruff of the neck, and thrust forcibly back into bed, where, I was given to understand, I should be lucky to be given bread and milk for my supper. The most annoying aspect of the whole situation was Thomas Christie, standing at the foot of the stairs with a mug of beer in his hand, watching as I was led off, and wearing the only grin I had ever seen on his hairy face.
“What in the name of God possessed ye, Sassenach?” Jamie jerked back the quilt and gestured peremptorily at the sheets.
“Well, I felt quite well, and—”
“Well! Ye’re the color of bad buttermilk, and trembling so ye can scarcely—here, let me do that.” Making snorting noises, he pushed my hands away from the laces of my petticoats, and had them off me in a trice.
“Have ye lost your mind?” he demanded. “And to sneak off like that without telling anyone, too! What if ye’d fallen? What if ye got ill again?”
“If I’d told anyone, they wouldn’t have let me go out,” I said mildly. “And I am a physician, you know. Surely I can judge my own state of health.”
He gave me a look, strongly suggesting that he wouldn’t trust me to judge a flower show, but merely gave a louder than usual snort in reply.
He then picked me up bodily, carried me to the bed, and placed me gently into it—but with enough demonstration of restrained strength as to let me know that he would have preferred to drop me from a height.
He then straightened up, giving me a baleful look.
“If ye didna look as though ye were about to faint, Sassenach, I swear I would turn ye over and smack your bum for ye.”
“You can’t,” I said, rather faintly. “I haven’t got one.” I was in fact a little tired . . . well, to be honest, my heart was beating like a kettledrum, my ears were ringing, and if I didn’t lie down flat at once, I likely would faint. I did lie down, and lay with my eyes closed, feeling the room spin gently round me, like a merry-go-round, complete with flashing lights and hurdy-gurdy music.
Through this confusion of sensations, I dimly sensed hands on my legs, then a pleasant coolness on my heated body. Then something warm and cloudlike enveloped my head, and I flailed my hands about wildly, trying to get it off before I smothered.
I emerged, blinking and panting, to discover that I was naked. I glanced at my pallid, sagging, skeletal remains, and snatched the sheet up over myself. Jamie was bending to collect my discarded gown, petticoat, and jacket from the floor, adding these to the shift he had folded over his arm. He picked up my shoes and stockings and added these to his bag.