“H,” she said, watching me to see if that was right, and I nodded. “O, R, D . . .” I nodded again, and saw her lips move silently. “Hor-de-o-lum,” I repeated helpfully, and she nodded, more confident. “E, O, L, U, M!”
“Excellent!” I said, beaming at her. “How about . . .” I cast about for another good one, long but strictly phonetic. “Hepatitis?”
“What’s that?”
“Viral infection of the liver. Do you know where your liver is?” I was looking through my medicine chest, but appeared to be out of aloe salve. I should ride over to Bartram’s Garden tomorrow, I thought, weather permitting. I was out of almost everything, in the wake of the battle. The usual small twinge came in my side at thought of it, but I pushed it firmly away. It would fade, and so would the thoughts.
Marsali appeared suddenly in the kitchen door, as Joanie was carefully spelling “acanthocytosis,” and I looked up from my grinding. She was holding a letter in her hand and looked worried.
“Is it the Indian they call Joseph Brant that Young Ian kens?” she asked.
“I expect he knows quite a few of them,” I replied, setting down my pestle. “But I’ve heard him mention Joseph Brant, yes. The man’s Mohawk name starts with a ‘T,’ I think, but that’s as much as I feel sure of. Why?” I felt a slight uneasiness at the name. Ian’s Mohawk wife, Emily, had been living in a settlement in New York founded by Brant; Ian had mentioned it, very briefly, when he’d gone up there to visit her last year.
He hadn’t said what the purpose of his visit was, and neither Jamie nor I had asked, but I assumed it to have had something to do with his fear that he couldn’t sire children, as all his babies with Emily had either been stillborn or miscarried. He’d asked me about the matter, and I’d told him what I could, offering what reassurance I could that he might be able to have children with another woman.
I offered up a quick prayer for Rachel’s chances, then returned abruptly to what Marsali was saying.
“They did what?”
“This gentleman”—she tapped the letter—“says that Brant and his men fell upon a wee place called Andrustown. No but seven families living there.” Her lips pressed tight, and she glanced at Joanie, who was listening with her ears flapping. “They plundered and burnt the place, he says, and massa—er . . . did awa wi’ a number of the folk who lived there.”
“What’s that word, Mam?” Joanie asked brightly. “The one that means ‘did awa’ with?”
“‘Massacred,’” I told her, saving her mother the embarrassment. “It means indiscriminate and brutal slaughter. Here.” I handed her the fresh compress, which she applied without protest, frowning in thought.
“Is that different than just killin’ someone?”
“Well,” I said judiciously, “it depends. You might kill someone by accident, for instance, and that wouldn’t be a massacre, though it would certainly be lamentable. You might kill someone who was trying to kill you, and that would be self-defense.”
“Rachel says ye oughtn’t do that,” Joanie observed, but merely for the sake of thoroughness. “What about if ye’re with an army and have to kill the soldiers on the other side?”
Marsali made a low Scottish noise of disapproval but answered tersely.
“If a man’s gone to the army, then killin’ is his job,” she said. “He does it—mostly—” she added fairly, with a raised brow to me, “to protect his ain family and property. So that’s more like self-defense, aye?”
Joanie glanced from her mother to me, still frowning.
“I ken what ‘bru-tal’ is,” she said. “That’s bein’ mean when ye havena got to. But what’s ‘in-dis-crim-in-ate’?” She sounded it out carefully, as though about to spell it.
“Without choosing,” I said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “It means you do something without taking much notice who you do it to and probably without much reason to do it to that particular person.”
“Did Cousin Ian’s Indian friend have nay reason for burning yon place and killing the folk, then?”
Marsali and I exchanged a glance.
“We dinna ken that,” Marsali said. “But it’s no a good thing, whatever he meant by it. Now, ye’re done. Go along and find Félicité and start in fillin’ up the washtub.” She took the compress from Joanie and shooed her out.
She stood watching until Joanie had gone out through the back door, then turned to me and handed me the letter.
It was from a Mr. Johansen, apparently one of Fergus’s regular correspondents, and the contents were as Marsali had said, though adding a few gruesome details that she hadn’t mentioned in Joanie’s hearing. It was fairly factual, with only the barest of eighteenth-century ornaments, and the more hair-raising—literally, I thought; some of the Andrustown residents had been scalped, by report—for that.
Marsali nodded as I looked up from the letter.
“Aye,” she said. “Fergus wants to publish the account, but I’m nay so sure he ought to. Because of Young Ian, ken?”
“What’s because of Young Ian?” said a Scottish voice from the printshop doorway, and Jenny came through, a marketing basket over one arm. Her eyes went to the letter in my hand, and her sharp dark brows rose.
“Has he told ye much about her?” Marsali asked, having explained the letter. “The Indian lass he wed?”