“Eh?” His attention was still fixed on the pair outside.
“Crate,” I repeated patiently. “That one.” I nudged it with my toe.
“Crate . . . oh! Oh, aye, mum, to be sure.” Pulling his gaze from the window, he set about the task, looking glum.
I took the rest of the glassware from the open crate, shaking off the straw and putting globes, retorts, flasks, and coils carefully into a high cupboard—but I kept an eye on Bobby as I did so, pondering this newly revealed situation. I hadn’t thought his feelings for Lizzie were more than a passing attraction.
And perhaps it was no more than that, I reminded myself. But if it was . . . Despite myself, I glanced through the window, only to discover that the pair had become a trio.
“Ian!” I exclaimed. Bobby glanced up, startled, but I was already heading for the door, hastily brushing straw from my clothes.
If Ian was back, Jamie was—
He came through the front door just as I barreled into the hallway, and grabbed me round the waist, kissing me with sun-dusty enthusiasm and sandpaper whiskers.
“You’re back,” I said, rather inanely.
“I am, and there are Indians just behind me,” he said, clutching my bottom with both hands and rasping his whiskers fervently against my cheek. “God, what I’d give for a quarter of an hour alone wi’ ye, Sassenach! My balls are burst—ah. Mr. Higgins. I, um, didna see ye there.”
He let go and straightened abruptly, sweeping off his hat and smacking it against his thigh in an exaggerated pantomime of casualness.
“No, zur,” Bobby said morosely. “Mr. Ian’s back, as well, is he?” He didn’t sound as though this was particularly good news; if Ian’s arrival had distracted Lizzie from Manfred—and it had—it did nothing to redirect her attention to Bobby.
Lizzie had abandoned her churn to poor Manfred, who was turning the crank with an air of obvious resentment, as she went laughing off in the direction of the stable with Ian, presumably to show him the new calf that had arrived during his absence.
“Indians,” I said, belatedly catching what Jamie had said. “What Indians?”
“A half-dozen of the Cherokee,” he replied. “What’s this?” He nodded at the trail of loose straw leading out of my surgery.
“Oh, that. That,” I said happily, “is ether. Or going to be. We’re feeding the Indians, I suppose?”
“Aye. I’ll tell Mrs. Bug. But there’s a young woman with them that they’ve fetched along for ye to tend.”
“Oh?” He was already striding down the hall toward the kitchen, and I hurried to keep up. “What’s the matter with her?”
“Toothache,” he said briefly, and pushed open the kitchen door. “Mrs. Bug! Cá bhfuil tú? Ether, Sassenach? Ye dinna mean phlogiston, do you?”
“I don’t think that I do,” I said, trying to recall what on earth phlogiston was. “I’ve told you about anesthesia, though, I know—that’s what ether is, a sort of anesthetic; puts people to sleep so you can do surgery without hurting them.”
“Verra useful in case of the toothache,” Jamie observed. “Where’s the woman gone to? Mrs. Bug!”
“So it would be, but it will take some time to make. We’ll have to make do with whisky for the moment. Mrs. Bug is in the summer kitchen, I expect; it’s bread day. And speaking of alcohol—” He was already out the back door, and I scampered across the stoop after him. “I’ll need quite a bit of high-quality alcohol, for the ether. Can you bring me a barrel of the new stuff tomorrow?”
“A barrel? Christ, Sassenach, what d’ye mean to do, bathe in it?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes. Or rather not me—the oil of vitriol. You pour it gently into a bath of hot alcohol, and it—”
“Oh, Mr. Fraser! I did think as how I heard someone a-callin’.” Mrs. Bug appeared suddenly with a basket of eggs over one arm, beaming. “It’s pleased I am to see ye home again safe!”
“And glad to be so, Mrs. Bug,” he assured her. “Can we be feeding a half-dozen guests for supper?”
Her eyes went wide for a moment, then narrowed in calculation.
“Sausage,” she declared. “And neeps. Here, wee Bobby, come and make yourself useful.” Handing me the eggs, she seized Bobby, who had come out of the house after us, by the sleeve and towed him off toward the turnip patch.
I had the feeling of having been caught in some rapidly revolving apparatus like a merry-go-round, and took hold of Jamie’s arm in order to steady myself.
“Did you know that Bobby Higgins is in love with Lizzie?” I asked.
“No, but it’ll do him little good if he is,” Jamie replied callously. Taking my hand on his arm as invitation, he took the eggs from me and set them on the ground, then pulled me in and kissed me again, more slowly, but no less thoroughly.
He let go with a deep sigh of content, and glanced at the new summer kitchen we had erected in his absence: a small framed structure consisting of coarse-woven canvas walls and a pine-branch roof, erected round a stone hearth and chimney—but with a large table inside. Enticing scents of rising dough, fresh-baked bread, oatcakes, and cinnamon rolls wafted through the air from it.
“Now, about that quarter of an hour, Sassenach . . . I believe I could manage wi’ a bit less, if necessary. . . .”
“Well, I couldn’t,” I said firmly, though I did allow my hand to fondle him for a thoughtful instant. My face was burning from contact with his whiskers. “And when we do have time, you can tell me what on earth you’ve been doing to bring this on.”
“Dreaming,” he said.
“What?”
“I kept havin’ terrible lewd dreams about ye, all the night long,” he explained, twitching his breeks into better adjustment. “Every time I rolled over, I’d lie on my c**k and wake up. It was awful.”
I burst out laughing, and he affected to look injured, though I could see reluctant amusement behind it.
“Well, you can laugh, Sassenach,” he said. “Ye havena got one to trouble ye.”
“Yes, and a great relief it is, too,” I assured him. “Er . . . what sort of lewd dreams?”
I could see a deep blue gleam of speculation at the back of his eyes as he looked at me. He extended one finger, and very delicately ran it down the side of my neck, the slope of my breast where it disappeared into my bodice, and over the thin cloth covering my nipple—which promptly popped up like a puffball mushroom in response to this attention.
“The sort that make me want to take ye straight into the forest, far enough that no one will hear when I lay ye on the ground, lift your skirts, and split ye like a ripe peach,” he said softly. “Aye?”
I swallowed, audibly.
At this delicate moment, whoops of greeting came from the trailhead on the other side of the house.
“Duty calls,” I said, a trifle breathless.
Jamie drew a deep breath of his own, squared his shoulders, and nodded.
“Well, I havena died of unrequited lust yet; I suppose I shallna do it now.”
“Don’t suppose you will,” I said. “Besides, didn’t you tell me once that abstinence makes . . . er . . . things . . . grow firmer?”
He gave me a bleak look.
“If it gets any firmer, I’ll faint from a lack of blood to the heid. Dinna forget the eggs, Sassenach.”
It was late afternoon, but plenty of light left for the job, thank goodness. My surgery was positioned to take advantage of morning light for operations, though, and was dim in the afternoons, so I set up an impromptu theater of operation in the dooryard.
This was an advantage, insofar as everyone wished to watch; Indians always regarded medical treatment—and almost anything else—as a community affair. They were particularly enthusiastic about operations, as these held a high degree of entertainment value. Everyone crowded eagerly around, commenting on my preparations, arguing with each other and talking to the patient, whom I had the greatest difficulty in discouraging from talking back.
Her name was Mouse, and I could only assume that she had been given it for some metaphysical reason, as it certainly wasn’t suited either to appearance or personality. She was round-faced, unusually snub-nosed for a Cherokee, and if she wasn’t precisely pretty, she had a force of character that is often more attractive than simple beauty.
It was certainly working on the males present; she was the only woman in the Indian party, the others consisting of her brother, Red Clay Wilson, and four friends who had come along, either to keep the Wilsons company, offer protection on the journey—or to vie for Miss Mousie’s attention, which seemed to me the most likely explanation of their presence.
Despite the Wilsons’ Scottish name, none of the Cherokee spoke any English beyond a few basic words—these including “no,” “yes,” “good,” “bad,” and “whisky!” Since the Cherokee equivalent of these terms was the extent of my own vocabulary, I was taking little part in the conversation.
We were at the moment waiting for whisky, in fact, as well as translators. A settler named Wolverhampton, from some nameless hollow to the east, had inadvertently amputated one and a half toes a week before, while splitting logs. Finding this state of things inconvenient, he had proceeded to try to remove the remaining half-digit himself with a froe.
Say what you will regarding general utility; a froe is not a precision instrument. It is, however, sharp.
Mr. Wolverhampton, a burly sort with an irascible temper, lived on his own, some seven miles from his nearest neighbor. By the time he had reached this neighbor—on foot, or what remained of it—and the neighbor had bundled him onto a mule for transport to Fraser’s Ridge, nearly twenty-four hours had passed, and the partial foot had assumed the dimensions and appearance of a mangled raccoon.
The requirements of the cleanup surgery, the multiple subsequent debridements to control the infection, and the fact that Mr. Wolverhampton refused to surrender the bottle, had quite exhausted my usual surgical supply. As I needed a keg of the raw spirit for my ether-making in any case, Jamie and Ian had gone to fetch more from the whisky spring, which was a good mile from the house. I hoped they would return while there was still enough light to see what I was doing.
I interrupted Miss Mousie’s loud remonstrance with one of the gentlemen, who was evidently teasing her, and indicated by means of sign language that she should open her mouth for me. She did, but went on expostulating by means of rather explicit hand signals, which seemed to be indicating various acts she expected the gentleman in question to perform upon himself, judging from his flushed countenance, and the way his companions were falling about with hilarity.
The side of her face was puffed and obviously tender. She didn’t wince or shy away, though, even when I turned her face farther toward the light for a better view.
“Toothache, forsooth!” I said, involuntarily.
“Ooth?” Miss Mouse said, cocking an eyebrow at me.