“Thank you,” I said, rubbing my thumb over the object. It felt like a well-polished bit of hard root, but I wasn’t feeling any particular sense of anything from it. “Your great-grandmother is a … hoodoo? Would that be a sort of healer?”
He nodded, though his mouth shifted sideways, slightly dubious.
“Mos’ly, madam.”
Jamie cleared his throat in a meaningful sort of way. He was standing near the fire, and small wisps of steam were rising from his hair and clothes.
“Well, then.” I tucked the bit of root into my amulet, cleared my throat, and picked up the mask again. “Lie down, Mr. Jackson. This won’t take a moment.”
IT DID, OF course, take somewhat longer than that—but the look of amazement on Corporal Jackson’s face when he blinked and opened his eyes to see his leg, straightened, bandaged, and wrapped in drying strips of linen soaked in a mixture of gypsum, lime, and water was very gratifying.
“Hau!” he said, and added something in a language I didn’t recognize, almost to himself.
“You might feel a little dizzy,” I said, smiling at him. “Just close your eyes and rest for a bit. The plaster on your leg needs to dry before we can move you.”
I eased a folded towel under his head and covered him with my trusty surgery blanket.
“I’ll send you something warm to drink that will help the pain,” I told him, tucking the blanket round his shoulders. “And I’ll be back to check on you soon.”
Fanny was in the kitchen, chopping bacon into small bits, watched closely by Bluebell, but she amiably stopped doing this in order to make Mr. Jackson a posset.
“Warm milk with an egg beaten up in it—if we have any eggs?”
“Yes’m, there are,” she said proudly. “I found three this morning. But I think they might be duck eggs,” she added dubiously. “’Twas near the creek, and they’re summat bigger than your Scotch dumpys lay.”
“So much the better, as long as they’re moderately fresh,” I said. “If there’s an embryo—you know, the beginnings of a duck?—in the egg, just lift it out and give it to Bluebell; it won’t hurt the posset. Not that Corporal Jackson is likely to notice,” I added reflectively, “once you’ve added two jiggers of whisky and a spoonful of sugar. I think he’ll fall asleep right away; if he doesn’t, though, you can give him one spoonful of the laudanum.”
I left her with instructions to come fetch me if the corporal seemed feverish or disturbed in any way, and went upstairs to take care of my second patient.
JAMIE WAS SITTING on the bed naked, rubbing his loosened wet hair with a towel. I came to him, took the towel, kissed him on the back of the neck, and took over the toweling, massaging his scalp. He sighed and let his shoulders slump in relief.
He wasn’t shivering, but he was cold. Too cold even for goose bumps; his flesh had a smooth nacreous look and was damp and chilly to the touch.
“You look like the inside of an oyster shell,” I said, rubbing my hands together to generate some warmth before applying them to his shoulders. “Let’s try a little friction.”
He made a small sound of amusement and leaned forward, stretching his back in invitation.
“If ye thought I looked like an oyster, I’d worry,” he said. “Oh, God, that feels good. How’s your man, then?”
“I think he’ll be fine, as long as he can be kept off the leg for a few weeks. Complex fracture is always a touchy thing, because of the chance of infection or displacement, but the break itself was relatively clean.”
I caught sight of his discarded clothes. His greatcoat lay on the floor in a sopping pile, oozing water, and his hunting shirt, buckskin breeches, and woolen stockings lay in a smaller wet pile beside it.
“What on earth did you do?” I asked, continuing to rub his back, but more slowly. “Fall into the water?”
“Aye, I did,” he said, in a tone of voice indicating that he didn’t want to talk about it. So he hasn’t got the letter. It made me look more closely at him, though, and now with his hair pulled back, I noticed that his left ear was bright red—and swollen, when I got a closer look at it.
“The boar?” I asked, touching it gingerly.
“Ulysses,” he said tersely, moving his head away from my touch.
“Indeed. What else?”
“A horse kicked me,” he said, reluctantly. “It’s nothing, Sassenach.”
“Ha,” I said, taking my hands off him. “I’ve heard that one before. Show me.”
He made a disgruntled noise but leaned to the side and moved his arm. There was a fresh pale-blue bruise that ran from his hip down the side of his leg for eight inches or so. I prodded it, eliciting a few more disgruntled noises, but so far as I could tell, no bones were broken.
“I told ye,” he said. “Can I lie down now?”
He didn’t wait for permission, but stretched out on the bed with a luxurious groan, flexed his toes, and closed his eyes.
“D’ye maybe want to finish drying me off?” One eye cracked open. “A wee bit o’ friction wouldna come amiss.”
“And what if Fanny comes up while I’m applying this friction, to say Mr. Jackson’s dying?”
“Could ye save him if he was?” One hand was idly combing through the damp reddish-blond bush of his pubic hair, in case I’d missed his point, which I hadn’t.
“Probably not, unless he was choking on the posset.”
“Well, he’ll ha’ finished the posset long before ye reach the point of no return here …”
He’d told me long ago that fighting gave one—a male one, I assumed—a terrible cockstand, assuming you weren’t too badly wounded. I supposed this desire for friction should be reassuring.
I sat down beside him and took a thoughtful grasp of the point in question. It was also cold, blanched, and shrunken, but seemed to be thawing rapidly in my hand.
“It would help me think,” he suggested.
“I don’t believe men think at all in such circumstances,” I said, but began to apply a very tentative sort of friction. His body hair had dried and begun to rise in its usual exuberant fuzz.
“Of course we think,” he said, closing his eyes again. An expectant look was beginning to bloom on his face; I’d definitely got his circulation restarted.
“About what, exactly …?” I lay down beside him and nuzzled his shoulder, not letting go. A large, cold hand rose up the back of my thigh, pushed under petticoat and shift, and grasped my bottom, with intent. I gasped, but didn’t—quite—shriek.
“That,” he said, with satisfaction. “Would ye maybe like to be on top, Sassenach? Or maybe bent over a pillow—for the view?”
I WASN’T SURE whether the adrenaline of battle just didn’t diffuse immediately, the recent nearness of death inducing a strong need to reproduce— or whether the desire for sex merely expressed a need to reassure oneself that one was still alive and in reasonable working order. Regardless, I had to admit that it had a settling effect.
I shook and patted myself back into some sort of order, looked at my reflection in the glass, then shook my head, and wound my hair up into a makeshift bun, precariously fastened by a couple of quills stolen from Jamie’s desk as I passed the study. I could hear voices in the kitchen, and one of them was Ian’s, which lifted my heart.