An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (книги без регистрации бесплатно полностью txt) 📗
“In case they fire the house.” Who? I wondered, feeling a chill. The British army? Loyalists? And however was she managing, running a business and a family alone, with a husband in hiding and a sick child who couldn’t be left alone while he slept? The horror of our situation, she’d said in her letter to Laoghaire. And that had been months ago, when Fergus was still at home.
Well, she wasn’t alone now. For the first time since I’d left Jamie in Scotland, I felt something more than the pull of grim necessity in my situation. I’d write to him this evening, I decided. He might—I hoped he would—leave Lallybroch before my letter reached him there, but if so, Jenny and the rest of the family would be glad to know what was going on here. And if by chance Ian was still alive… but I didn’t want to think of that; knowing that his death meant Jamie’s release to come to me made me feel like a ghoul, as though I wished for his death to come sooner. Though in all honesty, I thought Ian himself might wish it to be sooner rather than later.
These morbid thoughts were interrupted by Marsali’s return, Henri-Christian scampering beside her.
“Grandmere!” he shouted, seeing me, and leapt into my arms, nearly knocking me over. He was a very solid little boy.
He nuzzled me affectionately, and I felt a remarkable rush of warm joy at seeing him. I kissed and hugged him fiercely, feeling the hole left in my heart by Mandy and Jem’s departure fill up a bit. Isolated from Marsali’s family in Scotland, I had nearly forgotten that I still had four lovely grandchildren left and was grateful to be reminded of it.
“Want to see a trick, Grandmere?” Henri-Christian croaked eagerly. Marsali was right; he did sound like a constipated bullfrog. I nodded, though, and, hopping off my lap, he pulled three small leather bags stuffed with bran out of his pocket and began at once to juggle them with amazing dexterity.
“His da taught him,” Marsali said, with a certain amount of pride.
“When I’m big like Germain, Da will teach me to pick pockets, too!”
Marsali gasped and clapped a hand over his mouth.
“Henri-Christian, we dinna ever speak o’ that,” she said sternly. “Not to anybody. D’ye hear?”
He glanced at me, bewildered, but nodded obediently.
The chill I had felt earlier returned. Was Germain picking pockets professionally, so to speak? I looked at Marsali, but she shook her head slightly; we’d talk about it later.
“Open your mouth and stick out your tongue, sweetheart,” I suggested to Henri-Christian. “Let Grannie see your sore throat—it sounds very ouchy.”
“Owg-owg-owg,” he said, grinning widely, but obligingly opened up. A faint putrid smell wafted out of his wide-open mouth, and even lacking a lighted scope, I could see that the swollen tonsils nearly obstructed his throat altogether.
“Goodness gracious,” I said, turning his head to and fro to get a better view. “I’m amazed that he can eat, let alone sleep.”
“Sometimes he can’t,” Marsali said, and I heard the strain in her voice. “Often enough, he canna manage to swallow anything but a bit o’ milk, and even that’s like knives in his throat, poor bairn.” She crouched beside me, smoothing the fine dark hair off Henri-Christian’s flushed face. “Can ye help, d’ye think, Mother Claire?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, with much more confidence than I actually felt. “Absolutely.”
I felt the tension drain out of her like water, and, as though it were a literal draining, tears began to run quietly down her face. She pulled Henri-Christian’s head into her bosom so he couldn’t see her cry, and I reached out to embrace both of them, laying my cheek against her capped head, smelling the stale musky tang of her terror and exhaustion.
“It’s all right now,” I said softly, rubbing her thin back. “I’m here. You can sleep.”
MARSALI SLEPT the rest of the day and all through the night. I was tired from the journey but managed to doze in the big chair by the kitchen fire, Henri-Christian cradled in my lap, snoring heavily. He did stop breathing twice during the night, and while I got him started again with no difficulty, I could see that something had to be done at once. Consequently, I had a brief nap in the morning and, having washed my face and eaten a bit, went out in search of what I’d need.
I had the most rudimentary of medical instruments with me, but the fact was, tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy didn’t really require anything complex in that line.
I wished that Ian had come into the city with me; I could have used his help, and so could Marsali. But it was dangerous for a man of his age; he couldn’t enter the city openly without being stopped and questioned by British patrols, likely arrested as a suspicious character—which he most assuredly was. Beyond that… he’d been afire to look for Rachel Hunter.
The task of finding two people—and a dog—who might be almost anywhere between Canada and Charleston, with no means of communication other than the foot and the spoken word, would have daunted anyone less stubborn than a person of Fraser blood. Agreeable as he might be, though, Ian was as capable as Jamie of pursuing a chosen course, come hell, high water, or reasonable suggestions.
He did, as he’d pointed out, have one advantage. Denny Hunter was presumably still an army surgeon. If so, he was obviously with the Continental army—some part of the Continental army. So Ian’s notion was to discover where the closest part of the army might be just now and begin his inquiries there. To which end he proposed to skulk round the edges of Philadelphia, creeping into taverns and shebeens on the outskirts, and, by means of local gossip, discover where some part of the army presently was.
The most I had been able to persuade him to do was to send word to Fergus’s printshop telling us where he was bound, once he’d discovered anything that gave him a possible destination.
In the meantime, all I could do was say a quick prayer to his guardian angel—a most overworked being—then have a word with my own (whom I envisioned as a sort of grandmotherly shape with an anxious expression) and set about doing what I’d come to do.
I now walked through the muddy streets, pondering the procedure. I had done a tonsillectomy only once—well, twice, if you counted the Beardsley twins separately—in the last ten years. It was normally a straightforward, quick procedure, but then again, it wasn’t normally performed in a gloomy printshop on a dwarf with a constricted airway, a sinus infection, and a peritonsillar abscess.
Still… I needn’t do it in the printshop, if I could find a better-lighted place. Where would that be? I wondered. A rich person’s house, most likely; one where candle wax was squandered profligately. I’d been in many such houses, particularly during our time in Paris, but knew no one even moderately well-to-do in Philadelphia. Neither did Marsali; I’d asked.
Well, one thing at a time. Before I worried any more about an operating theater, I needed to find a blacksmith capable of fine work, to make the wire-loop instrument I required. I could, in a pinch, cut the tonsils with a scalpel, but it would be more than difficult to remove the adenoids, located above the soft palate, that way. And the last thing I wanted was to be slicing and poking round in Henri-Christian’s severely inflamed throat in the dark with a sharp instrument. The wire loop would be sharp enough but was unlikely to damage anything it bumped into; only the edge surrounding the tissue to be removed would cut, and then only when I made the forceful scooping motion that would sever a tonsil or adenoid neatly.
I wondered uneasily whether he had a strep infection. His throat was bright red, but other infections could cause that.
No, we’d have to take our chances with the strep, I thought. I had set some penicillin bowls to brew, almost the moment I arrived. There was no way of telling whether the extract I might get from them in a few days was active or not—nor, if it was, just how active. But it was better than nothing, and so was I.
