“He’ll be all right,” I said firmly. “Why don’t you go outside and keep an eye out for visitors, hm?”
Rollo ignored this advice, though, and instead sat patiently watching as I wrung out a rag in cool water and bathed Ian. I nudged him half awake, brushed his hair, gave him the chamber pot, and coaxed bee-balm syrup into him—all the time listening for the sound of hooves, and Clarence’s joyful announcement that company was coming.
* * *
It was a long day. After several hours of starting at every sound and looking over my shoulder at every step, I finally settled into the day’s work. I nursed Ian, who was feverish and miserable, fed the stock, weeded the garden, picked tender young cucumbers for pickling, and set Lord John, who was disposed to be helpful, to work shelling beans.
I looked into the woods with longing, on my way from privy to goat-pen. I would have given a lot simply to walk away into those cool green depths. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d had such an impulse. But the autumn sun beat down on the Ridge, and the hours wore on in tranquil peace, without a sign of Gerhard Mueller.
“Tell me about this Mueller,” Lord John said. His appetite was coming back; he’d finished his helping of fried mush, though he pushed aside the salad of dandelion greens and pokeweed.
I plucked a tender stalk of pokeweed from the bowl and nibbled it myself, enjoying the sharp taste.
“He’s the head of a large family; German Lutherans, as you no doubt gathered. They live about fifteen miles from here, down in the river valley.”
“Yes?”
“Gerhard is big, and he’s stubborn, as you no doubt gathered. Speaks a few words of English, but not much. He’s old, but my God, he’s strong!” I could still see the old man, shoulders corded with stringy muscle, tossing fifty-pound sacks of flour into his wagon like so many sacks of feathers.
“This fight he had with Jamie—did he appear the sort to hold a grudge?”
“He’s very definitely the sort to hold a grudge, but not about that. It wasn’t really a fight. It—” I shook my head, searching for a way to describe it. “Do you know anything about mules?”
His fair brows lifted and he smiled.
“A bit, yes.”
“Well, Gerhard Mueller is a mule. He’s not really bad-tempered, and he isn’t precisely stupid—but he doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to anything other than what’s in his head, and it takes a good deal of force to switch his attention to anything else.”
I had not been present at the altercation in the mill, but had had it described to me by Ian. The old man had got it firmly stuck into his head that Felicia Woolam, one of the mill owner’s three daughters, had given him short weight and owed him another sack of flour.
In vain, Felicia protested that he had brought her five bags of wheat; she had ground them, and filled four bags with the resulting flour. The difference, she insisted, was due to the chaff and hulls removed from the grain. Five bags of wheat equalled four bags of flour.
“Fünf!” Mueller had said, waving his open hand in her face. “Es gibt fünf!” He would not be persuaded otherwise, and began to curse volubly in German, glowering and backing the girl into a corner.
Ian, having tried without success to distract the old man’s attention, had dashed outside to fetch Jamie from his conversation with Mr. Woolam. Both men had come hurriedly inside, but had no more success than Ian in changing Mueller’s conviction that he had been cheated.
Ignoring their exhortations, he had advanced on Felicia, clearly intent on taking by force an extra bag of flour from the stack behind her.
“At that point, Jamie gave up trying to reason with him, and hit him,” I said.
He had at first been reluctant to do so, Mueller being nearly seventy, but rapidly changed his mind when his first blow bounced off Mueller’s jaw as though it had been made of seasoned oakwood.
The old man had turned on him like a cornered boar, whereupon Jamie had struck him first in the stomach, and then in the mouth as hard as possible, knocking Mueller down and splitting his own knuckles on the old man’s teeth.
With a word to Woolam—who was a Quaker and thus opposed to violence—he had then seized Mueller by the legs and dragged the dazed farmer outside, where one of the Mueller sons was waiting patiently in the wagon. Hauling the old man up by the collar, Jamie had pinned him against the wagon and held him there, talking pleasantly in German, until Mr. Woolam—having hastily rebagged the flour—came out and loaded five sacks into the wagon, under the gimlet eye of the old man.
Mueller had counted them twice, carefully, then turned to Jamie, and said with dignity, “Danke, mein Herr.” He had then climbed into the wagon beside his bemused son, and driven away.
Grey scratched at the remnants of his rash, smiling.
“I see. So he appeared to hold no ill will?”
I shook my head, chewing, then swallowed.
“Not at all. He was kindness itself to me, when I went to the farm to help with Petronella’s baby.” My throat closed suddenly on the renewed realization that they were gone, and I choked on the bitter taste of the dandelion leaves, bile rising in my throat.
“Here.” Grey pushed the pot of ale across the table toward me.
I drank deeply, the cool sourness soothing for a moment the deeper bitterness of spirit. I set the pot down and sat for a moment, eyes closed. There was a fresh-smelling breeze from the window, but the sun was warm on the tabletop under my hands. All the tiny joys of physical existence were still mine, and I was the more acutely aware of them, for the knowledge that they had been so abruptly taken from others—from those who had barely tasted them.
“Thank you,” I said, opening my eyes.
Grey was watching me, with an expression of deep sympathy.
“You’d think it wouldn’t be such a shock,” I said, needing suddenly to try to explain. “They die here so easily. The young ones, especially. It isn’t as though I haven’t seen it before. And there’s so seldom anything I can do.”
I felt something warm on my cheek, and was surprised to find it was a tear. He reached into his sleeve, pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. It wasn’t especially clean, but I didn’t mind.
“I did sometimes wonder what he saw in you,” he said, his tone deliberately light. “Jamie.”
“Oh, you did? How flattering.” I sniffed, and blew my nose.
“When he began to speak of you, both of us thought you dead,” he pointed out. “And while you are undoubtedly a handsome woman, it was never of your looks that he spoke.”
To my surprise, he picked up my hand and held it lightly.
“You have his courage,” he said.
That made me laugh, if only halfheartedly.
“If you only knew,” I said.
He didn’t reply to that, but smiled faintly. His thumb ran lightly over the knuckles of my hand, his touch light and warm.
“He doesn’t hold back for fear of skinned knuckles,” he said. “Neither do you, I think.”
“I can’t.” I took a deep breath and wiped my nose; the tears had stopped. “I’m a doctor.”
“So you are,” he said quietly, and paused. “I have not thanked you for my life.”