The Fiery Cross (177 page)

I found myself nodding approvingly. I didn’t always agree with Rawlings, either in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but I thought he was likely spot-on on this occasion. What about Jocasta, though?

There she was, on the next page.

Jocasta Cameron, Sixty-four years in age, tri-gravida, well-nourished and in good Health generally, very youthful in Aspect.

Tri-gravida?
I paused for a moment at that matter-of-fact remark. So plain, so stark a term, to stand for the bearing—let alone the loss—of three children. To have raised three children past the dangers of infancy, only to lose them all at once, and in such cruel fashion. The sun was warm, but I felt a chill on my heart, thinking of it.

If it was Brianna? Or little Jemmy? How did a woman bear such loss? I had done it, myself, and still had no idea. It had been a long time, and yet still, now and then, I would wake in the night, feeling a child’s warm weight sleeping on my breast, her breath warm on my neck. My hand rose and touched my shoulder, curved as though the child’s head lay there.

I supposed that it might be easier to have lost a daughter at birth, without the years of acquaintance that would leave ragged holes in the fabric of daily life. And yet I knew Faith to the last atom of her being; there was a hole in my heart that fit her shape exactly. Perhaps it was that that had been a natural death, at least; it gave me the feeling that she was still with me in some way, was taken care of, and not alone. But to have children slain in blood, butchered in war?

So many things could happen to children in this time. I returned to my persual of her case history with a troubled mind.

No sign of organic Illness, nor external Damage to the Eyes. The White of the Eye is clear, the lashes free of any Matter, no Tumor visible. The Pupils respond normally to a Light passed before them, and to shading of the Light. A candle held close to one side illuminates the vitreous Humor of the Eye, but shows no Defect therein. I note a slight Clouding, indicating incipient Cataract in the lens of the right eye, but this is insufficient to explain the gradual loss of Sight.

“Hum,” I said aloud. Both Rawlings’ observations and his conclusions matched mine. He briefly noted the length of time over which sight had failed—roughly two years—and the process of its failure—nothing abrupt, but a gradual shrinking of the field of vision.

I thought it likely had taken longer; sometimes the loss was so gradual that people didn’t notice the tiny decrements at all, until the sight was seriously threatened.

. . . bits of the vision whittled away like cheese parings. Even the small remnant of sight remaining is of use only in dim light, as patient exhibits great irritation and pain when the eye is exposed to strong sunlight.

I have seen this condition twice before, always in persons of some age, though not so far advanced. Gave it as my opinion that sight would soon be completely obliterated, with no amelioration possible. Fortunately, Mr. Cameron has a black servant capable of reading, whom he has given to his wife to accompany her and warn her of obstacles, likewise to read to her and apprise her of her surroundings.

It had gone further than that now; the light had gone, and Jocasta was entirely blind. So, a progressive condition—that didn’t tell me much, most of them were. When had Rawlings seen her?

It could be any number of conditions—macular degeneration, tumor of the optic nerve, parasitic damage, retinitis pigmentosa, temporal arteritis—probably not retinal detachment, that would have happened abruptly—but my own preliminary suspicion was of glaucoma. I remembered Phaedre, Jocasta’s body servant, wringing out cloths in cold tea, observing that her mistress was suffering from headache
“again,”
in a tone of voice that suggested this was a frequent occurrence—and Duncan asking me to make up a lavender pillow, to ease his wife’s “megrims.”

The headaches might have nothing to do with Jocasta’s eyesight, though—and I had not inquired at the time as to the nature of the headaches; they might be simple tension headaches or migraines, rather than the pressure-band type that might—or might not—attend glaucoma. Arteritis would cause frequent headache, too, after all. The frustrating thing about it was that glaucoma by itself had absolutely no predictable symptoms—save eventual blindness. It was caused by a failure of proper drainage of the fluid inside the eyeball, so that pressure inside the eye increased to the point of damage, with no warning at all to the patient or her physician. But other kinds of blindness were largely symptomless as well . . .

I was still contemplating the possibilities, when I became aware that Rawlings had continued his notes onto the back of the page—in Latin.

I blinked at that, a little surprised. I could tell that he had written it as a continuation of the earlier passage; quill-writing shows a characteristic darkening and fading of words, as the ink is renewed with each dip of the pen, and the shading of each passage tended to be different, as different inks were used. No, this had been written at the same time as the passage on the preceding page.

But why drop suddenly into Latin? Rawlings knew some Latin, plainly—which argued some degree of formal education, even if not formal medical education—but he didn’t normally use it in his clinical notes, beyond the occasional word or phrase required for the formal description of some condition. Here was a page and a half of Latin, though, and written in scrupulous letters, smaller than his usual writing, as though he had thought carefully about the contents of the passage—or perhaps as though he felt secretive about it, as the Latin itself seemed to argue.

I flipped back through the casebook, checking to verify my impression. No, he had written in Latin here and there—but not often, and always as he did here; as the continuation of a passage begun in English. How odd. I turned back to the passage concerning River Run and began to try to puzzle it out.

Within a sentence or two, I abandoned the effort and went to find Jamie. He was in his own study, across the hall, writing letters. Or not.

The inkstand—made of a small gourd with a cork to keep the ink from drying—stood at hand, freshly filled; I could smell the woody reek of oak galls brewed with iron filings. A new turkey quill lay on the desk, trimmed to a point of such sharpness that it looked more suitable for stabbing than writing, and a fresh sheet of paper lay on the blotter, three words black and lonely at its head. It took no more than a glance at his face to know what they said.

My dear Sister.

He looked up at me, smiled wryly, and shrugged.

“What shall I say?”

“I don’t know.” At sight of him, I had shut the casebook, clasping it under one arm. I came in and stood behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder. I squeezed gently, and he laid his own hand over mine for a moment, then reached to pick up the quill.

“I canna go on saying that I’m sorry.” He rolled the quill slowly to and fro between his thumb and middle finger. “I’ve said it in each letter. If she was disposed to forgive me . . .”

If she was, Jenny would have replied by now to at least one of the letters that he sent faithfully to Lallybroch each month.

“Ian’s forgiven you. And the children.” Missives from Jamie’s brother-in-law arrived sporadically—but they did come, along with occasional notes from his namesake, Young Jamie, and now and then a line from Maggie, Kitty, Michael, or Janet. But the silence from Jenny was so deafening as to drown out all other communications.

“Aye, it would be worse if . . .” he trailed off, staring at the blank paper. In fact, nothing could be worse than this estrangement. Jenny was closer to him, more important to him, than anyone in the world—with the possible exception of myself.

I shared his bed, his life, his love, his thoughts. She had shared his heart and soul since the day he was born—until the day when he had lost her youngest son. Or so she plainly saw it.

It pained me to see him go on carrying the guilt of Ian’s disappearance—and I felt some small resentment toward Jenny. I understood the depth of her loss, and sympathized with her grief, but still, Ian wasn’t dead—so far as we knew. She alone could absolve Jamie, and surely she must know it.

I pulled up a stool and sat down by him, laying the book aside. A small stack of papers lay to one side, covered with his labored writing. It cost him dearly to write, wrong-handed, and that hand crippled—and yet he wrote stubbornly, almost every evening, recording the small events of the day. Visitors to the Ridge, the health of the animals, progress in building, new settlers, news from the Eastern counties . . . He wrote it down, one word at a time, to be sent off when some visitor arrived who would take the accumulated pages away, on the first stage of their precarious journey to Scotland. All the letters might not arrive at their destination, but some would. Likewise, most letters from Scotland would reach us, too—if they were sent.

For a time, I had hoped that Jenny’s letter had simply been mis-sent, misplaced, lost somewhere in transit. But it had been too long, and I had stopped hoping. Jamie hadn’t.

“I thought perhaps I should send her this.” He shuffled through the stack of papers at the side of the desk, and withdrew a small sheet, stained and grubby, ragged along one edge where it had been torn from a book.

It was a message from Ian; the only concrete evidence we had that the boy was still alive and well. It had reached us at the Gathering in November, through the agency of John Quincy Myers, a mountain man who roamed the wilderness, as much at home with Indian as with settler, and more at home with deer and possum than with anyone who lived in a house.

Written in clumsy Latin as a joke, the note assured us that Ian was well, and happy. Married to a girl “in the Mohawk fashion” (meaning, I thought, that he had decided to share her house, bed, and hearth, and she had decided to let him), he expected to become a father himself “in the spring.” And that was all. Spring had come and gone, with no further word. Ian wasn’t dead, but the next thing to it. The chances of us ever seeing him again were remote, and Jamie knew it; the wilderness had swallowed him.

Jamie touched the ratty paper gently, tracing the round, still-childish letters. He’d told Jenny what the note said, I knew—but I also knew why he hadn’t sent the original before. It was the only physical link with Ian; to give it up was in some final way to relinquish him to the Mohawk.

“Ave!”
said the note, in Ian’s half-formed writing.
“Ian salutat avunculus Jacobus.”
Ian salutes his uncle James.

Ian was more to Jamie than one of his nephews. Much as he loved all of Jenny’s children, Ian was special—a foster-son, like Fergus; but unlike Fergus, a son of Jamie’s blood, replacement in a way for the son he had lost. That son wasn’t dead, either, but could not ever be claimed. The world seemed suddenly full of lost children.

“Yes,” I said, my throat tight. “I think you should send it. Jenny should have it, even if . . .” I coughed, reminded suddenly by the note of the casebook. I reached for it, hoping it would distract him.

“Um. Speaking of Latin . . . there’s an odd bit in here. Could you have a look at it, perhaps?”

“Aye, of course.” He set Ian’s note aside and took the book from me, moving it so the last of the afternoon sun fell across the page. He frowned slightly, a finger tracing the lines of writing.

“Christ, the man’s no more grasp of Latin grammar than ye have yourself, Sassenach.”

“Oh, thanks. We can’t all be scholars now, can we?” I moved closer, peering over his shoulder as he read. I’d been right, then; Rawlings didn’t drop casually into Latin for the fun of it, or merely to show off his erudition.

“An oddity . . .” Jamie said, translating slowly as his finger moved across the page. “I am awake—no, he means ‘I was wakened,’ I think—by sounds in the chamber adjoining that where I lay. I am thinking—‘I thought’—that my patient went to make water, and am risen to follow . . . Why should he do that, I wonder?”

“The patient—it’s Hector Cameron, by the way—had a problem with his bladder. Rawlings would have wanted to watch him urinate, to see what sort of difficulty he had, whether he had pain, or blood in the urine, that sort of thing.”

Jamie gave me a side-long glance, one brow raised, then shook his head and returned to the casebook, murmuring something about the peculiar tastes of physicians.

“
Homo procediente
. . . the man proceeds . . . Why does he call him ‘the man,’ rather than his name?”

“He was writing in Latin to be secret,” I said, impatient to hear what came next. “If Cameron saw his name in the book, he’d be curious, I expect. What happened?”

“The man goes out—outdoors, does he mean, or only out of his chamber?—outdoors, it must be . . . goes out, and I follow. He walks steadily, quickly . . . Why should he not? Oh, here—I am puzzled. I give—have given—the man twelve grains of laudanum . . .”

“Twelve
grains
? Are you sure that’s what he says?” I leaned over Jamie’s arm, peering, but sure enough—he pointed to the entry, inscribed in clear black and white. “But that’s enough laudanum to fell a horse!”

“Aye, ‘twelve grains of laudanum to assist sleep,’ he says. No wonder the doctor was puzzled, then, to see Cameron scampering about the lawn in the middle of the night.”

I nudged him with an elbow.

“Get on!”

“Mmphm. Well, he says he went to the necessary house—no doubt thinking to find Cameron—but no one was there, and there wasna any smell of . . . er . . . he didna think anyone had been there recently.”

“You needn’t be delicate on my account,” I said.

“I know,” he said, grinning. “But my own sensibilities are no quite coarsened yet, in spite of my long association with you, Sassenach. Ow!” He jerked away, rubbing his arm where I had pinched him. I lowered my brows and gave him a stare, though inwardly pleased to have lightened the mood for both of us.

“Less about your sensibilities,
if
you please,” I said, tapping my foot. “Besides, you haven’t got any in the first place, or you’d never have married me. Where was Cameron, then?”