“Tea?” she asked skeptically.
“As a matter of fact, the active principle in willow-bark tea is exactly the same chemical that you find in aspirin. And while people mostly use it for pain relief, it has the interesting side effect of thinning the blood.”
“Oh. So … if my heart starts twitching, I should brew up a cup of willow-bark tea and it will at least keep my blood from clotting?” She was trying to keep her dubious tone, but I could see that a tiny ray of hope had been kindled. Now it was my job to blow on it and try to encourage it to take hold and burn.
“Yes, exactly. Now, the tea won’t do away with the disturbing symptoms, but there are a few sorts of ad hoc things you can try for those.”
“Such as?”
“Well, plunging the face into cold water sometimes works—”
“Or so you’re told? I bet you’ve never seen anybody do that, have you?” She was definitely interested, though.
“In fact, I have. At L’Hôpital des Anges, in Paris.” Plunging various body parts in cold—or sometimes hot—water was a widely prescribed treatment for a lot of different maladies at the hôpital, water being both widely available and cheap. And surprisingly, it often worked, at least in the short term.
“Or—if you happen not to be near any cold water—you can try one of the vagal maneuvers.”
That caught her unaware, and she gave me a cat-eyed look.
“If you mean having sex—”
“Not vaginal maneuvers,” I said, “though I’d think the fibrillating might be too distracting to want to do that, in any case. I said vagal maneuvers—as in, stimulating the vagus nerve. There are a few different ways of doing that, but the simplest—and probably the best—is something called the Valsalva maneuver. That sounds rather grand, but it’s basically just taking a deep breath and holding it, as though you were trying to cure hiccups, then pressing your abdominal muscles down as hard as you can—like trying to force out an uncooperative bowel movement while holding your breath.”
She gave me a long, considering stare, exactly the sort of look Jamie would have given me in receipt of this sort of advice. Deeply suspicious that I was practicing upon him, but inwardly fearful that I wasn’t.
“Well, that should make me very popular at parties,” she said.
37
Maneuvers Beginning with the Letter “v”
NEITHER JAMIE NOR I had said anything to each other regarding Lord John Grey, sexual jealousy, or general pigheadedness since he had stamped off in the midst of our argument—whether to put a stop to the argument or merely in order to muffle the urge to throttle me, I didn’t know.
He’d been perfectly calm and outwardly amiable when he came in for supper, but I bloody knew him. He bloody knew me, too, and we lay down to sleep side by side, wished each other good night and oidhche mhath, respectively, turned our backs on each other, and took turns breathing heavily until we fell asleep, me thinking that whichever sage had urged not letting the sun go down on your wrath obviously didn’t know any Scots.
I’d meant to find him alone and have it out with him the next day, but what with the roof, Geordie McHugh’s smashed thumb, and the worrying news of Brianna’s disturbed heartbeat, there hadn’t been an opportunity.
Supper was outwardly peaceful; there was no company, no culinary disasters, and no emergencies like one of the children catching fire—which had actually happened to Mandy a few days before, though she had been saved by Jamie noticing her dress sparking, whereupon he dived across the table, tackled her, rolled her on the hearth rug, and then picked her up and stuffed her into the water-filled cauldron, which was half-full of sliced potatoes and carrots, but fortunately not yet boiling. She and Esmeralda had emerged from the ordeal dripping, hysterical, and slightly singed around the edges, but basically sound.
I was feeling slightly singed around the edges myself, and was determined to extinguish the smoldering embers we were presently walking on.
So when we rose from supper, I left the dishes on the table and invited Jamie to come for a stroll with me—ostensibly in search of a night-blooming begonia I’d found. Fanny, who had some idea of what a begonia was, glanced sharply at me, then Jamie, then down at her empty plate with her face studiously blank.
“Are begonias the stuff ye plant around the privy?” he asked, breaking the silence in which we’d come from the house. We were passing the main house privy at the moment, and the bitter scent of tomatoes had begun to overwhelm the heady smell of jasmine. “Is that what I smell?”
“No, that’s jasmine; the flowers don’t bloom past August, though, so I have tomato plants coming up under the vines. Tomato plants have a strong scent and it comes from the leaves, so you have that almost up until the truly cold weather—when nothing smells anyway, because it’s all frozen.”
“So is anyone who spends more than thirty seconds in a privy in January,” Jamie said. “Ye wouldna linger to smell flowers when ye think your shit might turn to ice before ye’ve got it all the way out.”
I laughed, and felt the tension between us ease, feeble as the joke was. He wanted to resolve it, too, then.
“One of the unappreciated aspects of female clothes,” I said. “Insulation. When the temperature goes down, you just add another petticoat. Or two. Of course,” I added, looking back at the house to be sure we hadn’t picked up any outriders, “not having private parts that can be exposed to the elements is rather a help, too.”
A sliver of moon gleamed briefly on the top rail of the paddock, the wood polished by long use. Beyond, the house was huge against the half-dark sky, only a few of the lower windows lit. Solid and handsome, like the man who’d made it.
I stopped by the paddock fence and turned to face him.
“I could have lied, you know.”
“No, ye couldn’t. Ye canna lie to anybody, Sassenach, let alone me. And given that his lordship had already told me the truth—”
“You wouldn’t have been sure it was the truth,” I said. “Given what both parties told me about that fight. I could have told you John was talking out his backside because he wanted to annoy you, and you would have believed me.”
“Ye could choose your words wi’ a bit more care, Sassenach,” he said, a hint of grimness in his voice. “I dinna want to hear anything about his lordship’s backside. Why d’ye think I would have believed ye, though? I never believe anything ye tell me that I havena seen with my own eyes.”
“Now who’s being annoying?” I said, rather coldly. “And you would have believed me because you would have wanted to—and don’t tell me otherwise, because I won’t believe that.”
He made a huh sort of sound under his breath. We were leaning back against the paddock rails, and the smells of jasmine, tomatoes, and human excrement had been replaced with the sweeter odor of manure and the slow, heavy exhalations of the forest beyond: the spiciness of dying leaves overlaid by the sharp, clean resins of the firs and pines.
“Why didn’t ye lie, then?” he asked, after a long silence. “If ye thought I’d believe it.”
I paused, choosing my words. The air was still and warm and filled with cricket songs. Find me, come to me, love me … stridulations of the heart? Or merely grasshopper lust?