Drums of Autumn

  Roger went white under his tan, and his hands clenched on the wooden frame of the bed, but he didn’t make a sound.

  “You’re lucky,” I said, still working his foot back and forth, flexing the tiny joints of the metacarpals. “You’ve been breaking open the abscesses and partially draining them by walking on it. They re-form, of course, but the movement’s kept the infection from moving much deeper, and it’s kept your foot flexible.”

  “Oh, good,” he said faintly.

  “Bree, I need you to help,” I said, turning casually toward the far end of the room, where the two girls sat, taking turns between baby and spinning wheel.

  “I could; let me do it.” Lizzie sprang up, eager to help. Remorseful over her part in Roger’s ordeal, she had been trying to make amends in any way possible, constantly bringing him bits of food, offering to mend his clothes, and driving him mad generally with her expressions of contrition.

  I smiled at her.

  “Yes, you can help. Take the baby so Brianna can come here. Why don’t you take him outside for a little air?”

  With a dubious glance, Lizzie did as I said, scooping little Gizmo into her arms and murmuring endearments to him as they went out. Brianna came to stand beside me, carefully keeping her eyes off Roger’s face.

  “I’m going to open this up and drain it the best I can,” I said, indicating the long black-crusted slit. “Then we’ll have to debride the dead tissue, disinfect it, and hope for the best.”

  “And what exactly does ‘debride’ mean?” Roger asked. I let go of his foot and his body relaxed, very slightly.

  “Cleansing of a wound by the surgical or nonsurgical removal of dead tissue or bone,” I said. I touched his foot. “Luckily, I don’t think the bone’s been affected, though there may be a bit of damage in the cartilage between the metacarpals. Don’t worry,” I said, patting his leg. “The debridement isn’t going to hurt.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. It’s the draining and disinfecting that will hurt.” I glanced up at Bree. “Go take hold of his hands, please.”

  She hesitated no more than a second, then moved to the head of the couch and held out her hands to him. He took them, his eyes on her. It was the first time they had touched each other in nearly a year.

  “Hold on tight,” I instructed them. “This is the nasty part.”

  I didn’t look up, but worked quickly, opening the half-healed wounds cleanly with a scalpel, pressing out as much pus and dead matter as I could. I could feel the tension quivering in his leg muscles, and the slight arcing of his body as the pain lifted and bent him, but he didn’t say a word.

  “Do you want something to bite down on, Roger?” I asked, taking out my bottle of dilute alcohol-water mixture for irrigating. “It’s going to sting a bit, now.”

  He didn’t answer; Brianna did.

  “He’s all right,” she said steadily. “Go ahead.”

  He made a muffled noise when I began to wash out the wounds, and rolled halfway onto his side, his leg convulsing. I kept tight hold of his foot and finished the job as quickly as possible. When I let go and recorked the bottle, I looked up toward the head of the bed. She was sitting on the bed, her arms locked tight around his shoulders. His face was buried in her lap, his arms around her waist. Her face was white, but she gave me a strained smile.

  “Is it over?”

  “The bad part is. Just a little more to do,” I assured them. I had made my preparations two days before; at this time of year, there was no difficulty. I went outside to the smoking shed. The venison carcass hung in the shadows, bathing in clouds of protectively fragrant hickory smoke. My goal was less thoroughly preserved meat, though.

  Good, it had been out long enough. I picked up the small saucer from its place near the door and carried it back to the house.

  “Phew!” Brianna wrinkled her nose as I came in. “What’s that? It smells like rotten meat.”

  “That’s what it is.” The partial remains of a snare-killed rabbit, to be exact, retrieved from the edge of the garden and set out to wait for visitors.

  She was still holding his hands. I smiled to myself and resumed my place, picking up the wounded foot and reaching for my long-nosed forceps.

  “Mama! What are you doing?”

  “It won’t hurt,” I said. I squeezed the foot slightly, spreading one of my surgical incisions. I picked one of the small white grubs out of the stinking scraps of rabbit meat and inserted it deftly into the gaping slit.

  Roger’s eyes had been closed, his forehead sheened with sweat.

  “What?” he said, lifting his head and squinting over his shoulder in an effort to see what I was doing. “What are you doing?”

  “Putting maggots in the wounds,” I said, intent on my work. “I learned it from an old Indian lady I used to know.”

  Twin sounds indicative of shock and nausea came from the bedhead, but I kept a tight hold on his foot and went on with it.

  “It works,” I said, frowning slightly as I opened another incision and deposited three of the wriggling white larvae. “Much better than the usual means of debridement; for that, I’d have to open up your foot much more extensively, and physically scrape out as much dead tissue as I could reach—which would not only hurt like the dickens, it would likely cripple you permanently. Our little friends here eat dead tissue, though; they can get into tiny places where I couldn’t reach, and do a nice, thorough job.”

  “Our friends the maggots,” Brianna muttered. “God, Mama!”

  “What, exactly, is going to stop them eating my entire leg?” Roger asked with a thoroughly spurious attempt at detachment. “They…um…they spread, don’t they?”

  “Oh, no,” I assured him cheerfully. “Maggots are larval forms; they don’t breed. They also don’t eat live tissue—only the nasty dead stuff. If there’s enough to get them through their pupal cycle, they’ll develop into tiny flies and fly off—if not, when the food’s exhausted, they’ll simply crawl out, searching for more.”

  Both faces were a pale green by now. Finished with the work, I wrapped the foot loosely in gauze bandages, and patted Roger’s leg.

  “There now,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it before. One brave told me that they tickle a bit, gnawing, but it doesn’t hurt at all.”

  I picked up the saucer and took it outside to wash. At the edge of the dooryard I met Jamie, coming down from the new house, Ruaidh in his arms.

  “There’s Grannie,” he informed the baby, removing his thumb from Ruaidh’s mouth and wiping saliva from it against the side of his kilt. “Is she no a bonny woman?”

  “Gleh,” said Ruaidh, focusing a slightly cross-eyed look on his grandfather’s shirt button, which he began to mouth in a meditative fashion.

  “Don’t let him swallow that,” I said, standing on tiptoe and kissing first Jamie, then the baby. “Where’s Lizzie?”

  “I found the lassie sitting on a stump, greetin’,” he said. “So I took the lad and sent her off to be by herself for a bit.”

  “She was crying? What’s the matter?”

  A small shadow crossed Jamie’s face.

  “She’ll be grieving for Ian, won’t she?” Putting that and his own grief aside, he took my arm and turned back toward the trail up the ridge.

  “Come up wi’ me, Sassenach, and see what I’ve done the day. I’ve laid the floor for your surgery; all that’s needed now is a bit of a temporary roof, and it’ll do for sleeping.” He glanced back toward the cabin. “I was thinking that MacKenzie might be put there—for the time being.”

  “Good idea.” Even with the additional small room to the cabin that he had built for Brianna and Lizzie, conditions were more than crowded. And if Roger was to be bedridden for several days, I would as soon not have him lying in the middle of the cabin.

  “How are they faring?” he asked, with assumed casualness.

  “Who? Brianna and Roger, you mean?”

  “Who else?” he asked, dropping the casualn
ess. “Is it well between them?”

  “Oh, I think so. They’re getting used to each other again.”

  “They are?”

  “Yes,” I said, with a glance back at the cabin. “He’s just thrown up in her lap.”

  67

  THE TOSS OF A COIN

  Roger rolled onto his side and sat up. There was no glass in the windows as yet—none needed, so long as the summer weather kept fine—and the surgery was at the front of the new house, facing the slope. If he craned his neck to one side, he could watch Brianna most of the way down to the cabin, before the chestnut trees hid her from view.

  A last flick of rusty homespun, and she was gone. She’d come without the baby this evening; he didn’t know whether that was progress or the reverse. They’d been able to talk without the incessant interruptions of wet diapers, squawking, fussing, feeding, and spitting up; that was a rare luxury.

  She hadn’t stayed as long as usual, though—he could feel the presence of the child pulling her away, as though she were tethered to it by a rubber band. He did not resent the little bugger, he told himself grimly. It was only that…well, only that he resented the little bugger. Didn’t mean he didn’t like him.

  He hadn’t eaten yet; hadn’t wanted to waste any of their rare solitude. He uncovered the basket she’d brought and inhaled the warm, rich scent of squirrel stew and salt-rising bread with fresh butter. Apple tart, too.

  His foot still throbbed, and it took considerable effort not to think of the helpful maggots, but in spite of that, his appetite had returned with a vengeance. He ate slowly, savoring both the food and the quiet dusk creeping over the mountainside below.

  Fraser had known what he was about when he’d chosen the site of this house. It commanded the entire slope of the mountain, with a view that ran to the distant river and beyond, with mist-filled valleys in the distance and dark peaks that touched a star-strewn sky. It was one of the most solitary, magnificent, heart-wrenchingly romantic spots he had ever seen.

  And Brianna was down below, nursing a small bald parasite, while he was here—alone with a few dozen of his own.

  He put the empty basket on the floor, hopped to the slop jar in the corner, then back to his lonely bed on the new surgery table. Why in hell had he told her he didn’t know, when she’d asked why he’d come back?

  Well, because just then, he hadn’t known. He’d been wandering in the bloody wilderness for months, half starved and off his head with solitude and pain. He hadn’t seen her in nearly a year—a year in which he’d gone through hell and back. He’d sat on the cliff above that bloody stone circle for three solid days without food or fire, thinking things over, trying to decide. And in the end he’d simply gotten up and begun walking, knowing that it was the only possible choice.

  Obligation? Love? How in hell could you have love without obligation?

  He turned restlessly onto his other side, turning his back on the glorious night of scent and sun-warmed winds. The trouble with being restored to health was that some parts of him were getting a damn sight too healthy for comfort, given that the chance of their having any proper exercise was something below nil.

  He couldn’t even suggest such a thing to Brianna. One, she might think he’d come back solely for that, and two, the bloody Great Scot had not been joking about the pig.

  He knew now. He’d come back because he couldn’t live on the other side. If it were guilt over abandoning them—or the simple knowledge that he would die without her…either or both, take your choice. He knew what he was giving up, and none of it bloody mattered; he had to be here, that was all.

  He flopped onto his back, staring up at the dim paleness of the pine boards that roofed his shelter. Thumps and skitterings announced the nightly visitation of squirrels from the nearby hickory tree, who found it a convenient shortcut.

  How to tell her that, so she would believe it? Christ, she was so jumpy that she’d barely let him touch her. A brush of lips, a touch of hands, and she was sidling away. Except for the day when she’d held him while Claire had tortured his foot. Then, she’d been truly there for him, hanging on with all her strength. He could still feel her arms around him, and the memory gave him a small thump of satisfaction in the pit of his stomach.

  Thinking on that, he wondered a bit. True, the doctoring had hurt like buggery, but it was nothing he couldn’t have stood with a little tooth-gritting, and Claire, with her battlefield experience, would certainly have known that.

  Done it on purpose, had she? Given Bree a chance to touch him without feeling pressured or pursued? Given him a chance to remember just how strong the pull between them was? He rolled again, onto his stomach this time, and lay with his chin on his folded arms, looking out into the soft dark outside.

  She could have the other foot, if she’d do it again.

  * * *

  Claire looked in on him once or twice each day, but he waited until the end of the week, when she came to remove the bandages, the maggots having presumably done their dirty work and—he hoped to God—cleared out.

  “Oh, lovely,” she said, poking his foot with a surgeon’s ghoulish delight. “Granulating beautifully; almost no inflammation left.”

  “Great,” he said. “Are they gone?”

  “The maggots? Oh, yes,” she assured him. “They pupate within a few days. Did a nice job, didn’t they?” She ran a delicate thumbnail along the side of his foot, which tickled.

  “I’ll take your word for it. I’m clear to walk on it, then?” He flexed the foot experimentally. It hurt a bit, but nothing compared to what it had before.

  “Yes. Don’t wear shoes for a few more days, though. And for God’s sake, don’t step on anything sharp.”

  She began to put away her things, humming to herself. She looked happy but tired; there were shadows under her eyes.

  “Kid still howling at night?” he asked.

  “Yes, poor thing. Can you hear him up here?”

  “No. You just look tired.”

  “I’m not surprised. Nobody’s had a good night’s sleep all week, especially poor Bree, since she’s the only one who can feed him.” She yawned briefly and shook her head, blinking. “Jamie’s got the back bedroom here nearly floored; he wants to move up here as soon as it’s ready—give Bree and the baby more room, and, not incidentally, have a little peace and quiet ourselves.”

  “Good idea. Ah—speaking of Bree…”

  “Mm?”

  No use dragging it out; better say it straight.

  “Look—I’m trying all I can. I love her, and I want to show her that, but—she sheers off. She comes and we talk, and it’s great, but then I go to put an arm around her or kiss her, and suddenly she’s across the room, picking leaves off the floor. Is there something wrong, something I should do?”

  She gave him one of those disconcerting yellow looks of hers; straightforward and ruthless as a hawk.

  “You were her first, weren’t you? The first man she slept with, I mean.”

  He felt the blood rising his cheeks.

  “I—ah—yes.”

  “Well, then. So far her entire experience of what one might call the delights of sex consists of being deflowered—and I don’t care how gentle you were about it, it tends to hurt—being raped two days later, then giving birth. You think this is calculated to make her fall swooning into your arms in anticipation of your reclaiming your marital rights?”

  You asked for it, he thought, and you got it. Right between the eyes. His cheeks burned hotter than they ever had with fever.

  “I never thought of that,” he muttered to the wall.

  “Well, naturally not,” she said, sounding torn between exasperation and amusement. “You’re a bloody man. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  He took a deep breath, and reluctantly turned back to face her.

  “And just what are you telling me?”

  “That she’s afraid,” she said. She cocked her head to one side, evaluating him. “Though it’s not yo
u she’s afraid of, by the way.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No,” she said bluntly. “She may have convinced herself that she has to know why you came back, but that’s not it—a regiment of blind men could see that. It’s that she’s afraid she won’t be able to—mmphm.” She raised one brow at him, encompassing a wealth of indelicate suggestion.

  “I see,” he said, taking a deep breath. “And just what do you suggest I do about it?”

  She picked up her basket and put it over her arm.

  “I don’t know,” she said, giving him another yellow look. “But I think you should be careful.”

  * * *

  He had just about recovered his equanimity after this unsettling consultation, when another visitor darkened his door. Jamie Fraser, bearing gifts.

  “I’ve brought ye a razor,” Fraser said, looking critically at him. “And some hot water.”

  Claire had clipped his beard short with her surgical scissors a few days earlier, but he had felt too shaky then to attempt shaving with what was called a “cutthroat” razor for good reason.

  “Thanks.”

  Fraser had brought a small looking glass and a pot of shaving soap as well. Very thoughtful. He could have wished that Fraser might have left him alone, rather than leaning against the doorframe, lending a critical eye to the proceedings, but under the circumstances Roger could scarcely ask him to leave.

  Even with the unwelcome spectator, it was a sublime relief to get rid of the beard. It itched like a fiend, and he hadn’t seen his own face in months.

  “Work going well?” He tried for a bit of polite conversation, rinsing the blade between strokes. “I heard you hammering in the back this morning.”

  “Oh, aye.” Fraser’s eyes followed his every move with interest—sizing him up, he thought. “I’ve got the floor laid, and a bit of roof on. Claire and I will sleep up here tonight, I think.”

  “Ah.” Roger stretched his neck, negotiating the turn of his jaw. “Claire’s told me I can walk again; let me know which chores I can take over.”

  Jamie nodded, arms crossed.

  “Are ye handy wi’ tools?”

  “Haven’t done a lot of building,” Roger admitted. A birdhouse done in school didn’t count, he suspected.

  “I dinna suppose you’ll be much hand wi’ a plow, or a farrowing hog?” There was a definite glimmer of amusement in Fraser’s eyes.

  Roger lifted his chin, clearing the last of the stubble from his neck. He’d thought about it, the last few days. Not much call for the skills of either a historian or a folk singer, on an eighteenth-century hill farm.

  “No,” he said evenly, putting down the razor. “Nor do I know how to milk a cow, build a chimney, split shingles, drive horses, shoot bears, gut deer, or spit someone with a sword.”

  “No?” Overt amusement.

  Roger splashed water on his face and toweled it dry, then turned to face Fraser.

  “No. What I’ve got is a strong back. That do you?”

  “Oh, aye. Couldna ask better, could I?” One side of Fraser’s mouth curled up. “Know one end of a shovel from the other, do ye?”

  “That much I know.”

  “Then ye’ll do fine.” Fraser shoved himself away from the doorframe. “Claire’s garden needs spading, there’s barley to be turned at the still, and there’s an almighty heap of manure waitin’ in the stable. After that, I’ll show ye how to milk a cow.”

  “Thanks.” He wiped the razor, put it back in the bag, and handed the lot over.

  “Claire and I are going to Fergus’s place the eve,” Fraser said casually, accepting it. “Takin’ the wee maid to help Marsali for a bit.”

  “Ah? Well…enjoy yourselves.”

  “Oh, I expect we will.” Fraser paused in the doorway. “Brianna thought she’d stay; the bairn’s settled a bit, and she doesna want to upset him wi’ the walk.”

  Roger stared hard at the other man. You could read anything—or nothing—in those slanted blue eyes.

  “Oh, aye?” he said. “So you’re telling me they’ll be alone? I’ll keep an eye