The Fiery Cross (46 page)

N
OW, HOLD THIS over your left eye, and read the smallest line you can see clearly.”
With a long-suffering air, Roger held the wooden spoon over his right eye and narrowed his left, concentrating on the sheet of paper I had pinned to the kitchen door. He was standing in the front hall, just inside the door, as the length of the corridor was the only stretch of floor within the house approaching twenty feet.

“Et tu Brute?”
he read. He lowered the spoon and looked at me, one dark eyebrow raised. “I’ve never seen a literate eye chart before.”

“Well, I always did think the ‘f, e, 5, z, t, d’ things on the regular charts rather boring,” I said, unpinning the paper and flipping it over. “Other eye, please. What’s the smallest line you can read easily?”

He reversed the spoon, squinted at the five lines of hand-printing—done in such even decrements of size as I could manage—and read the third one, slowly.

“
Eat no onions
. What’s that from?”

“Shakespeare, of course,” I said, making a note. “
Eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath
. That’s the smallest you can read, is it?”

I saw Jamie’s expression alter subtly. He and Brianna were standing just behind Roger, out on the porch, watching the proceedings with great interest. Brianna was leaning slightly toward Roger, a faintly anxious expression on her face, as though willing him to see the letters.

Jamie’s expression, though, showed slight surprise, faint pity—and an undeniable glint of satisfaction.
He
, evidently, could read the fifth line without trouble.
I honor him
. One from
Julius Caesar: As he was valiant, I honor him; as he was ambitious, I slew him.

He felt my gaze on him, and the expression vanished, his face instantly resuming its usual look of good-humored inscrutability. I narrowed my eyes at him, with a “You’re not fooling
me
” sort of look, and he looked away, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly.

“You can’t make out any of the next line?” Bree had moved close to Roger, as though drawn by osmosis. She stared intently at the paper, then at him, with an encouraging look. Obviously she could see the last two lines without difficulty, too.

“No,” Roger said, rather shortly. He’d agreed to let me check his eyes at her request, but he obviously wasn’t happy about it. He slapped the palm of his hand lightly with the spoon, impatient to be done with this. “Anything else?”

“Just a few small exercises,” I said, as soothingly as possible. “Come in here, where the light is better.” I put a hand on his arm and drew him toward my surgery, giving Jamie and Bree a hard look as I did so. “Brianna, why don’t you go and lay the table for supper? We won’t be long.”

She hesitated for a moment, but Jamie touched her arm and said something to her in a low voice. She nodded, glanced once more at Roger with a small, anxious frown, and went. Jamie gave me an apologetic shrug, and followed her.

Roger was standing among the litter in my surgery, looking like a bear that hears barking hounds in the distance—simultaneously annoyed and wary.

“There’s no need for this,” he said, as I closed the door. “I see fine. I just don’t shoot very well yet. There’s nothing the matter with my eyes.” Still, he made no move to escape, and I picked up the hint of doubt in his voice.

“Shouldn’t think there is,” I said lightly. “Let me have just a quick look, though . . . just curiosity on my part, really. . . .” I got him sat down, however reluctantly, and for lack of the standard small flashlight, lit a candle.

I brought it close to check the dilation of his pupils. His eyes were the most lovely color, I thought; not hazel at all, but a very clear dark green. Dark enough to look almost black in shadow, but a startling color—almost emerald—when seen directly in bright light. A disconcerting sight, to one who had known Geilie Duncan and seen her mad humor laugh out of those clear green depths. I did hope Roger hadn’t inherited anything
but
the eyes from her.

He blinked once, involuntarily, long black lashes sweeping down over them, and the memory disappeared. These eyes were beautiful—but calm, and above all, sane. I smiled at him, and he smiled back in reflex, not understanding.

I passed the candle before his face, up, down, right, left, asking him to keep looking at the flame, watching the changes as his eyes moved to and fro. Since no answers were required in this exercise, he began to relax a bit, his fists gradually uncurling on his thighs.

“Very nice,” I said, keeping my voice low and soothing. “Yes, that’s good . . . can you look up, please? Yes, now look down, toward the corner by the window. Mm-hm, yes . . . Now, look at me again. You see my finger? Good, now close your left eye and tell me if the finger moves. Mm-hmmm . . .”

Finally, I blew out the candle, and straightened up, stretching my back with a small groan.

“So,” Roger said lightly, “what’s the verdict, Doctor? Shall I go and be making myself a white cane?” He waved away the drifting wisps of smoke from the blown-out candle, making a good attempt at casualness—belied only by the slight tension in his shoulders.

I laughed.

“No, you won’t need a Seeing Eye dog for some time yet, nor even spectacles. Though speaking of that—you said you’d never seen a literate eye chart before. But you have seen eye charts, I take it. Did you ever wear glasses as a child?”

He frowned, casting his mind back.

“Aye, I did,” he said slowly. “Or rather”—a faint grin showed on his face—“I
had
a pair of specs. Or two or three. When I was seven or eight, I think. They were a nuisance, and gave me a headache. So I was inclined to leave them on the public bus, or at school, or on the rocks by the river . . . I can’t recall actually
wearing
them for more than an hour at a time, and after I’d lost the third pair, my father gave up.” He shrugged.

“I’ve never felt as though I needed spectacles, to be honest.”

“Well, you don’t—now.”

He caught the tone of my voice and looked down at me, puzzled.

“What?”

“You’re a bit shortsighted in the left eye, but not by enough to cause you any real difficulty.” I rubbed the bridge of my nose, as though feeling the pinch of spectacles myself. “Let me guess—you were good at hockey and football when you were at school, but not at tennis.”

He laughed at that, eyes crinkling at the corners.

“Tennis? At an Inverness grammar school? Soft Southron sport, we’d have called it; game for poofters. But I take your point—no, you’re right, I was fine at the football, but not much at rounders. Why?”

“You don’t have any binocular vision,” I said. “Chances are that someone noticed it when you were a child, and made an effort to correct it with prismatic lenses—but it’s likely that it would have been too late by the time you were seven or eight,” I added hastily, seeing his face go blank. “If that’s going to work, it needs to be done very young—before the age of five.”

“I don’t . . . binocular vision? But doesn’t everyone? . . . I mean, both my eyes do work, don’t they?” He looked mildly bewildered. He looked down into the palm of his hand, closing one eye, then the other, as though some answer might be found among the lines there.

“Your eyes are fine,” I assured him. “It’s just that they don’t work
together
. It’s really a fairly common condition—and many people who have it don’t realize it. It’s just that in some people, for one reason or another, the brain never learns to merge the images coming in from both eyes in order to make a three-dimensional image.”

“I don’t see in three dimensions?” He looked at me, now, squinting hard, as though expecting me suddenly to flatten out against the wall.

“Well, I haven’t quite got a trained oculist’s kit”—I waved a hand at the burned-out candle, the wooden spoon, the drawn figures, and a couple of sticks I had been using—“nor yet an oculist’s training. But I’m reasonably sure, yes.”

He listened quietly as I explained what I could. His vision seemed fairly normal, in terms of acuity. But since his brain was not fusing the information from his eyes, he must be estimating the distance and relative location of objects simply by unconscious comparison of their sizes, rather than by forming a real 3-D image. Which meant . . .

“You can see perfectly well for almost anything you want to do,” I assured him. “And you very likely can learn to shoot all right; most of the men I see shooting close one eye when they fire, anyway. But you might have trouble hitting moving targets. You can see what you’re aiming at, all right—but without binocular vision, you may not be able to tell
precisely
where it is in order to hit it.”

“I see,” he said. “So, if it comes to a fight, I’d best rely on straightforward bashing, is that it?”

“In my humble experience of Scottish conflicts,” I said, “most fights amount to no more than bashing, anyway. You only use a gun or arrow if your goal is murder—and in that case, a blade is usually the weapon of preference. So much surer, Jamie tells me.”

He gave a small grunt of amusement at that, but said nothing else. He sat quietly, considering what I’d told him, while I tidied up the disorder left by the day’s surgery. I could hear thumping and clanging from the kitchen, and the pop and sizzle of fat that went with the tantalizing aroma of frying onions and bacon that floated down the corridor.

It was going to be a hasty meal; Mrs. Bug had been busy all day with the preparations for the militia expedition. Still, even Mrs. Bug’s least elaborate spreads were well worth the eating.

Muffled voices came through the wall—Jemmy’s sudden wail, a brief exclamation from Brianna, another from Lizzie, then Jamie’s deep voice, evidently comforting the baby while Bree and Lizzie dealt with dinner.

Roger heard them, too; I saw his head turn toward the sound.

“Quite a woman,” he said, with a slow smile. “She can kill it
and
cook it. Which looks like being a good thing, under the circumstances,” he added ruefully. “Evidently I won’t be putting much meat on the table.”

“Pah,” I said briskly, wishing to forestall any attempt on his part to feel sorry for himself. “I’ve never shot a thing in my life, and I put food on this table every day. If you really feel you must kill things, you know, there are plenty of chickens and geese and pigs. And if you can catch that damnable white sow before she undermines the foundation entirely, you’ll be a local hero.”

That made him smile, though with a wry twist to it nonetheless.

“I expect my self-respect will recover, with or without the pigs,” he said. “The worst of it will be telling the sharpshooters”—he jerked his head toward the wall, where Brianna’s voice mingled with Jamie’s in muffled conversation—“what the problem is. They’ll be very kind—like one is to somebody who’s missing a foot.”

I laughed, finished swabbing out my mortar, and reached up to put it away in the cupboard.

“Bree’s only worrying about you, because of this Regulation trouble. But Jamie thinks it won’t amount to anything; the chances of you needing to shoot someone are very small. Besides, birds of prey haven’t got binocular vision, either,” I added, as an afterthought. “Except for owls. Hawks and eagles can’t have; their eyes are on either side of their heads. Just tell Bree and Jamie I said you have eyes like a hawk.”

He laughed outright at that, and stood up, dusting off the skirts of his coat.

“Right, I will.” He waited for me, opening the door to the hall for me. As I reached it, though, he put a hand on my arm, stopping me.

“This binocular thing,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward his eyes. “I was born with it, I suppose?”

I nodded.

“Yes, almost certainly.”

He hesitated, clearly not knowing quite how to put what he wanted to say.

“Is it . . . inherited, then? My father was in the RAF; he can’t have had it, surely—but my mother wore spectacles. She kept them on a chain round her neck; I remember playing with it. I might have gotten the eye thing from her, I mean.”

I pursed my lips, trying to recall what—if anything—I had ever read on the subject of inherited eye disorders, but nothing concrete came to mind.

“I don’t know,” I said at last. “It might be. But it might not, too. I really don’t know. Are you worried about Jemmy?”

“Oh.” A faint look of disappointment crossed his features, though he blotted it out almost at once. He gave me an awkward smile, and opened the door, holding it for me to pass through.

“No, not worried. I was just thinking—if it was inherited, and if the little fella should have it, too . . . then I’d know.”

The corridor was full of the savory scents of squirrel stew and fresh bread, and I was starving, but I stood still, staring up at him.

“I wouldn’t wish it on him,” Roger said hastily, seeing my expression. “Not at all! Just, if it should be that way—” He broke off and looked away, swallowing. “Look, don’t tell Bree I thought of it, please.”

I touched his arm lightly.

“I think she’d understand. Your wanting to know—for sure.”

He glanced at the kitchen door, from which Bree’s voice rose, singing “Clementine,” to Jemmy’s raucous pleasure.

“She might understand,” he said. “That doesn’t mean she wants to hear it.”