"No!" He snatched the covers protectively up beneath his chin.
"Yes," I said firmly, advancing with purpose.
In the midst of my labors, I became aware that we had an audience. Fergus stood on the far side of the bed, watching the proceedings with fascination, his nose running freely. I removed my knee from Jamie's abdomen and reached for a handkerchief.
"And what are you doing here?" Jamie demanded, trying to yank the front of his nightshirt back into place.
Not noticeably disconcerted by the unfriendly tone of this greeting, Fergus ignored the proffered handkerchief and wiped his nose on his sleeve, meanwhile staring with round-eyed admiration at the broad expanse of muscular, gleaming chest on display.
"The skinny milord sent me to fetch a packet he says you have for him. Do all Scotsmen have such quantities of hair upon their chests, milord?"
"Christ! I forgot all about the dispatches. Wait, I'll take them to Cameron myself." Jamie began to struggle up in bed, a process that brought his nose close to the site of my recent endeavors.
"Phew!" He flapped the nightshirt in an effort to dispel the penetrating aroma, and glared accusingly at me. "How am I to get this reek off me? D'ye expect me to go out in company smellin' like a dead goose, Sassenach?"
"No, I don't," I said. "I expect you to lie quietly in bed and rest, or you'll be a dead goose." I uncorked a fairly high-caliber glare of my own.
"I can carry the package, milord," Fergus was assuring him.
"You will do nothing of the kind," I said, noting the boy's flushed cheeks and overbright eyes. I put a hand to his forehead.
"Don't tell me," said Jamie sarcastically. "He's got a fever?"
"Yes, he has."
"Ha," he said to Fergus with gloomy satisfaction. "Now you're for it. See how you like bein' basted."
A short period of intense effort saw Fergus tucked up in his pallet by the fire, goose grease and medicinal hot tea administered lavishly all round, and a clean handkerchief deposited beneath the chin of each sufferer.
"There," I said, fastidiously rinsing my hands in the basin. "Now, I will take this precious packet of dispatches across to Mr. Cameron. You will both rest, drink hot tea, rest, blow your nose, and rest, in that order. Got it, troops?"
The tip of a long, reddened nose was barely visible above the bedclothes. It oscillated slowly back and forth as Jamie shook his head.
"Drunk wi' power," he remarked disapprovingly to the ceiling. "Verra unwomanly attitude, that."
I dropped a kiss on his hot forehead and swung my cloak down from its hook.
"How little you know of women, my love," I said.
Ewan Cameron was in charge of what passed for intelligence operations at Holyrood. His quarters were at the end of the west wing, tucked away near the kitchens. On purpose, I suspected, having witnessed the man's appetite in action. Possibly a tapeworm, I thought, viewing the officer's cadaverous countenance as he opened the packet and scanned the dispatches.
"All in order?" I asked after a moment. I had to repress the automatic urge to add "sir."
Startled from his train of thought, he jerked his head up from the dispatches and blinked at me.
"Um? Oh!" Recalled to himself, he smiled and hastened to make apologies.
"I'm sorry, Mistress Fraser. How impolite of me to forget myself and leave you standing there. Yes, everything appears to be in order—most interesting," he murmured to himself. Then, snapping back to an awareness of me, "Would you be so kind as to tell your husband that I wish to discuss these with him as soon as possible? I understand that he is unwell," he added delicately, carefully avoiding my eye. Apparently it hadn't taken Aeneas MacDonald long to relay an account of my interview with the Prince.
"He is," I said unhelpfully. The last thing I wanted was Jamie leaving his bed and sitting up poring over intelligence dispatches all night with Cameron and Lochiel. That would be nearly as bad as staying up dancing all night with the ladies of Edinburgh. Well, possibly not quite as bad, I amended to myself, recalling the three Misses Williams.
"I'm sure he will attend upon you as soon as he's able," I said, pulling the edges of the cloak together. "I'll tell him." And I would—tomorrow. Or possibly the next day. Wherever the English forces presently were, I was positive they weren't within a hundred miles of Edinburgh.
A quick peek into the bedroom upon my return showed two lumps, immobile beneath the bedclothes, and the sounds of breathing—slow and regular, if a trifle congested—filled the room. Reassured, I removed my cloak and sat down in the sitting room with a preventative cup of hot tea, to which I had added a fair dollop of medicinal brandy.
Sipping slowly, I felt the liquid heat flow down the center of my chest, spread comfortably through my abdomen, and begin working its steady way down toward my toes, quick-frozen after a dash across the courtyard, undertaken in preference to the circuitous inside passage with its endless stairs and turnings.
I held the cup below my chin, inhaling the pleasant, bitter smell, feeling the heated fumes of the brandy clarify my sinuses. Sniffing, it occurred to me to wonder exactly why, in a city and a building plagued with colds and influenza, my own sinuses remained unclogged.
In fact, aside from the childbed fever, I had not been ill once since my passage through the stone circle. That was odd, I thought; given the standards of hygiene and sanitation, and the crowded conditions in which we frequently lived, I ought surely to have come down at least with a case of sniffles by this time. But I remained as disgustingly healthy as always.
Plainly I was not immune to all diseases, or I would not have had the fever. But the common communicable ones? Some were explainable on the basis of vaccination, of course. I couldn't, for example, catch smallpox, typhus, cholera, or yellow fever. Not that yellow fever was likely, but still. I set down the cup and felt my left arm, through the cloth of the sleeve. The vaccination scar had faded with time, but was still prominent enough to be detectable; a roughly circular patch of pitted skin, perhaps a half-inch in diameter.
I shuddered briefly, reminded again of Geillis Duncan, then pushed the thought away, diving back into a contemplation of my state of health in order to avoid thinking either of the woman who had gone to a death by fire, or of Colum MacKenzie, the man who had sent her there.
The cup was nearly empty, and I rose to refill it, thinking. An acquired immunity, perhaps? I had learned in nurses' training that colds are caused by innumerable viruses, each distinct and ever-evolving. Once exposed to a particular virus, the instructor had explained, you became immune to it. You continued to catch cold as you encountered new and different viruses, but the chances of meeting something you hadn't been exposed to before became smaller as you got older. So, he had said, while children caught an average of six colds per year, people in middle age caught only two, and elderly folk might go for years between colds, only because they had already met most of the common viruses and become immune.
Now there was a possibility, I thought. What if some types of immunity became hereditary, as viruses and people co-evolved? Antibodies to many diseases could be passed from mother to child, I knew that. Via the placenta or the breast milk, so that the child was immune—temporarily—to any disease to which the mother had been exposed. Perhaps I never caught cold because I harbored ancestral antibodies to eighteenth-century viruses—benefiting from the colds caught by all my ancestors for the past two hundred years?
I was pondering this entertaining idea, so caught up in it that I hadn't bothered to sit down, but was sipping my tea standing in the middle of the room, when a soft knock sounded on the door.
I sighed impatiently, annoyed at being distracted. I didn't bother to set the cup down, but came to the door prepared to receive—and repel—the expected inquiries about Jamie's health. Likely Cameron had come across an unclear passage in a dispatch, or His Highness had thought better of his generosity in dismissing Jamie from attendance at the ball. Well, they would get him out of bed tonight only over my dead and trampled body.
I yanked open the door, and the words of greeting died in my throat. Jack Randall stood in the shadows of the doorway.
The wetness of the spilled tea soaking through my skirt brought me to my senses, but he had already stepped inside. He looked me up and down with his usual air of disdainful appraisal, then glanced at the closed bedroom door.
"You are alone?"
"Yes!"
The hazel glance flickered back and forth between me and the door, assessing my truthfulness. His face was lined from ill health, pale from poor nutrition and a winter spent indoors, but showed no diminution of alertness. The quick, ruthless brain had retreated a bit further back, behind the curtain of those ice-glazed eyes, but it was still there; no doubt of that.
Making his decision, he grasped me by the arm, scooping up my discarded cloak with his other hand.
"Come with me."
I would have allowed him to chop me in pieces before I made a sound that would cause the bedroom door to open.
We were halfway down the corridor outside before I felt it safe to speak. There were no guards stationed within the confines of the staff quarters, but the grounds were heavily patrolled. He couldn't hope to get me through the rockery or the side gates without detection, let alone through the main palace entrance. Therefore, whatever he wanted with me, it must be a business that could be conducted within the precincts of Holyrood.