I could slow my heart, slow enough to count the beats… slow the flowing of my blood ’til my heart echoed in my ears with the doom of distant drums.
There were pathways in the dark. I knew; I had seen people die. Despite physical decay, there was no dying until the pathway was found. I couldn’t—yet—find mine.
NUMBNESS
THE NEW MEDICAL CHEST sat on the table in my room, gleaming softly in the candlelight. Beside it were the gauze bags of dried herbs I had bought during the morning, the fresh bottles of the tinctures I had brewed in the afternoon, much to Mrs. Figg’s displeasure at having her kitchen’s purity so perverted. Her slitted eyes said that she knew me for a rebel and thought me likely a witch; she’d retreated to the doorway of the cookhouse while I worked but wouldn’t leave altogether, instead keeping silent suspicious watch over me and my cauldron.
A large decanter of plum brandy was keeping me company. Over the course of the last week, I had found that a glass of it at night would let me find surcease in sleep, at least for a little. It wasn’t working tonight. I heard the clock on the mantelpiece downstairs chime softly, once.
I stooped to pick up a box of dried chamomile that had spilled, sweeping the scattered leaves carefully back into their container. A bottle of syrup of poppies had fallen over, too, lying on its side, the aromatic liquid oozing round the cork. I set it upright, wiped the golden droplets from its neck with my kerchief, blotted up the tiny puddle from the floor. A root, a stone, a leaf. One by one, I picked them up, set them straight, put them away, the accoutrements of my calling, the pieces of my destiny.
The cool glass seemed somehow remote, the gleaming wood an illusion. Heart beating slowly, erratically, I put a hand flat on the box, trying to steady myself, to fix myself in space and time. It was becoming more difficult by the day.
I remembered, with sudden, painful vividness, a day on the retreat from Ticonderoga. We had reached a village, found momentary refuge in a barn. I’d worked all day then, doing what could be done with no supplies, no medicines, no instruments, no bandages save what I made from the sweat-sodden, filthy clothes of the wounded. Feeling the world recede further and further as I worked, hearing my voice as though it belonged to someone else. Seeing the bodies under my hands, only bodies. Limbs. Wounds. Losing touch.
Darkness fell. Someone came, pulled me to my feet, and sent me out of the barn, into the little tavern. It was crowded, overwhelmed with people. Someone—Ian?—said that Jamie had food for me outside.
He was alone there, in the empty woodshed, dimly lit by a distant lantern.
I’d stood in the doorway, swaying. Or perhaps it was the room that swayed.
I could see my fingers dug into the wood of the doorjamb, nails gone white.
A movement in the dimness. He rose fast, seeing me, came toward me. What was his—
“Jamie.” I’d felt a distant sense of relief at finding his name.
He’d seized me, drawn me into the shed, and I wondered for an instant whether I was walking or whether he was carrying me; I heard the scrape of the dirt floor under my feet but didn’t feel my weight or the shift of it.
He was talking to me, the sound of it soothing. It seemed a dreadful effort to distinguish words. I knew what he must be saying, though, and managed to say, “All right. Just… tired,” wondering even as I spoke them whether these sounds were words at all, let alone the right ones.
“Will ye sleep, then, lass?” he’d said, worried eyes fixed on me. “Or can ye eat a bit first?” He let go of me, to reach for the bread, and I put out a hand to the wall to support myself, surprised to find it solid.
The sense of cold numbness had returned.
“Bed,” I said. My lips felt blue and bloodless. “With you. Right now.”
He’d cupped my cheek, calloused palm warm on my skin. Big hand. Solid. Above all, solid.
“Are ye sure, a nighean?” he’d said, a note of surprise in his voice. “Ye look as though—”
I’d laid a hand on his arm, half fearing that it would go through his flesh.
“Hard,” I’d whispered. “Bruise me.”
My glass was empty, the decanter halfway full. I poured another and took hold of the glass carefully, not wanting to spill it, determined to find oblivion, no matter how temporary.
Could I separate entirely? I wondered. Could my soul actually leave my body without my dying first? Or had it done so already?
I drank the glass slowly, one sip at a time. Another. One sip at a time.
There must have been some sound that made me look up, but I wasn’t aware of having raised my head. John Grey was standing in the doorway of my room. His neckcloth was missing and his shirt hung limp on his shoulders, wine spilled down the front of it. His hair was loose and tangled, and his eyes as red as mine.
I stood up, slow, as though I were underwater.
“I will not mourn him alone tonight,” he said roughly, and closed the door.
I WAS SURPRISED to wake up. I hadn’t really expected to and lay for a bit trying to fit reality back into place around me. I had only a slight headache, which was almost more surprising than the fact that I was still alive.
Both those things paled in significance beside the fact of the man in bed beside me.
“How long has it been since you last slept with a woman, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He didn’t appear to mind. He frowned a little and scratched his chest thoughtfully.
“Oh… fifteen years? At least that.” He glanced at me, his expression altering to one of concern. “Oh. I do apologize.”
“You do? For what?” I arched one brow. I could think of a number of things he might apologize for, but probably none of those was what he had in mind.
“I am afraid I was perhaps not…” he hesitated. “Very gentlemanly.”
“Oh, you weren’t,” I said, rather tartly. “But I assure you that I wasn’t being at all ladylike myself.”
He looked at me, and his mouth worked a bit, as though trying to frame some response to that, but after a moment or two he shook his head and gave it up.
“Besides, it wasn’t me you were making love to,” I said, “and both of us know it.”
He looked up, startled, his eyes very blue. Then the shadow of a smile crossed his face, and he looked down at the quilted coverlet.
“No,” he said softly. “Nor were you, I think, making love to me. Were you?”
“No,” I said. The grief of the night before had softened, but the weight of it was still there. My voice was low and husky, because my throat was halfway closed, where the hand of sorrow clutched me unawares.
John sat up and reached to the table, where a carafe stood along with a bottle and a glass. He poured something out of the bottle and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said, and lifted it to my lips. “Good grief, is that beer?”
“Yes, and very good beer, too,” he said, tilting back the bottle. He took several hearty gulps, eyes half closed, then lowered it with a sigh of satisfaction. “Clears the palate, freshens the breath, and prepares the stomach for digestion.”
Despite myself, I was amused—and shocked.
“Do you mean to tell me that you are in the habit of drinking beer for breakfast every day?”
“Of course not. I have food with it.”
“I am amazed that you have a single tooth in your head,” I said severely—but risked a small sip. It was good beer: heavy-bodied and sweet, with just the right sour edge.
At this point, I noticed a certain tenseness in his posture, which the content of the conversation didn’t account for. Slow-witted as I was, it took a moment for me to realize what was amiss.
“Oh. If you need to fart,” I said, “don’t trouble on my account. Go ahead.”
He was sufficiently startled by my observation that he did.
“I do beg your pardon, madam!” he said, his fair skin flushing up to the hairline.
I tried not to laugh, but suppressed amusement jiggled the bed, and he went redder still.
“Would you have any hesitation about it were you in bed with a man?” I asked, out of idle curiosity.
He rubbed his knuckles against his mouth, the color fading a bit from his cheeks.
“Ah. Well, that would depend upon the man. By and large, though, no.”
The man. I knew that Jamie was the man in his mind—just as he was in mine. At the moment, I wasn’t disposed to resent it.
He knew what I was thinking, too.
“He offered me his body once. You knew that?” His voice was dry.
“I take it you didn’t accept.” I knew he hadn’t but was more than curious to hear his side of that encounter.
“No. What I wanted from him was not that—or not entirely that,” he added, with honesty. “I wanted all of it—and was young and proud enough to think that if I could not have that, then I would accept no less. And that, of course, he couldn’t give me.”
I was silent for a time, thinking. The window was open, and the long muslin curtains moved in the breeze.
“Did you regret it?” I asked. “Not taking him up on his offer, I mean?”
“Ten thousand times, at the very least,” he assured me, breaking into a rueful grin. “At the same time… refusing him was one of the few acts of true nobility to which I would lay claim for myself. It’s true, you know,” he added, “selflessness does carry its own reward—for if I had taken him, that would have destroyed forever what did exist between us.
“To have given him instead the gift of my understanding, hard come by as it was,” he added ironically, “left me with his friendship. So I am left with momentary regret on the one hand, but satisfaction on the other. And in the end it was the friendship that I valued most.”
After a moment’s silence, he turned to me.
“May I… You will think me odd.”
“Well, you are a bit odd, aren’t you?” I said tolerantly. “I don’t really mind, though. What is it?”
He gave me a look, strongly suggesting that if one of us was indeed odd, he didn’t think it was himself. Gentlemanly instincts suppressed any remark he might have made to this effect, though.
“Will you allow me to see you? Ah… naked?”
I closed one eye and looked at him.
“This certainly isn’t the first time you’ve slept—I do mean slept with—a woman, is it?” I asked. He had been married, though I seemed to recall that he had spent much of his married life living separately from his wife.
He pursed his lips thoughtfully, as though trying to recall.
“Well, no. I do think it may be the first time I’ve done it entirely voluntarily, though.”
“Oh, I am flattered!”
He glanced at me, smiling slightly.
“So you should be,” he said quietly.
I was of an age, after all, where… Well, on the other hand, he presumably didn’t have the same instinctive reactions that the majority of men did, in terms of feminine attractions. Which rather left open the question …
“Why?”
A shy smile touched the corner of his mouth, and he hitched himself up against the pillow.