An Echo in the Bone, Page 22

  appearance—time to think of that later—and ran a hand slowly through his hair, considering. The fact that they were girls didn’t change anything, really, but the fact that they knew he had gold hidden did. He didn’t dare leave them with anyone now, because if he did …

  “If you leave us, we’ll tell about the gold,” Hermione said promptly. “We don’t want to live in a stinky cabin. We want to go to London.”

  “What?” He stared at her, incredulous. “What d’ye ken of London, for God’s sake?”

  “Our mam came from there,” Herman—no, Hermione—said, and bit her lip to stop it trembling at mention of her mother. It was the first time she had spoken of her mother, Ian noted with interest. Let alone displayed any sign of vulnerability. “She told us about it.”

  “Mmphm. And why would I no just kill ye myself?” he demanded, exasperated. To his astonishment, Herman smiled at him, the first halfway-pleasant expression he’d ever seen on her face.

  “The dog likes you,” she said. “He wouldn’t like you if you killed people.”

  “That’s all you know,” he muttered, and stood up. Rollo, who had been off about his own business, chose this opportune moment to saunter out of the underbrush, sniffing busily.

  “And where were you when I needed ye?” Ian demanded. Rollo smelled carefully round the spot where Arch Bug had stood, then lifted his leg and urinated on a bush.

  “Would that bad old man have killed Hermie?” the little one asked suddenly, as he boosted her onto the mule behind her sister.

  “No,” he said, with certainty. But as he swung up into his own saddle, he wondered. He had the very uncomfortable feeling that Arch Bug understood the nature of guilt much too well. Enough to kill an innocent child, only because her death would make Ian feel guilty for it? And Ian would; Arch knew that.

  “No,” he repeated more strongly. Arch Bug was both vengeful and vindictive—and had a right to be, he’d admit that. But Ian had nay grounds to think the man a monster.

  Still, he made the little girls ride in front of him, until they made camp that night.

  THERE WAS NO further sign of Arch Bug, though Ian felt now and then the crawling sensation of being watched, when they camped. Was the man following him? Very likely he was, Ian thought—for surely it wasn’t accident that had made him appear so suddenly.

  So. He’d gone back to the ruins of the Big House, then, thinking to retrieve the gold after Uncle Jamie had left, only to find it gone. He wondered briefly whether Arch had managed to kill the white sow, but dismissed that notion; his uncle said the creature was plainly from the infernal regions and thus indestructible, and he was himself inclined to believe it.

  He glanced at Rollo, who was dozing by his feet, but the dog gave no sign that anyone was near, though his ears were half cocked. Ian relaxed a little, though he kept the knife on his person, even while sleeping.

  Not entirely in respect of Arch Bug, marauders, or wild beasts, either. He looked across the fire, to where Hermione and Trudy lay rolled up together in his blank—only they weren’t. The blanket was cunningly wadded so as to appear to contain bodies, but a gust of wind had pulled a corner loose, and he could see that it lay flat.

  He closed his eyes in exasperation, then opened them and glanced down at the dog.

  “Why did ye no say something?” he demanded. “Surely ye saw them leave!”

  “We ain’t gone,” said a gruff, small voice behind him, and he whirled to find the two of them crouched on either side of his open saddlebag, busily rifling it for food.

  “We ’uz hungry,” said Trudy, matter-of-factly stuffing the remains of a journeycake into her face.

  “I fed ye!” He’d shot a few quail and baked them in mud. Granted, it wasn’t a feast, but—

  “We’s still hungry,” Hermione said, with impeccable logic. She licked her fingers and burped.

  “Have ye drunk all the beer?” he demanded, snatching up a stone bottle rolling near her feet.

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said dreamily, and sat down, quite suddenly.

  “Ye canna be thieving food,” he said severely, taking the depleted saddlebag from Trudy. “If ye eat it all now, we’ll be starving before I get ye to—wherever we’re going,” he ended, rather weakly.

  “If we don’t eat it, we’ll starve now,” Trudy said logically. “Best starve later.”

  “Where are we going?” Hermione was swaying gently to and fro, like a small filthy flower in the wind.

  “To Cross Creek,” he said. “It’s the first good-sized town we’ll come to, and I ken folk there.” Whether he knew anyone who might be of help in this present circumstance … too bad about his great-auntie Jocasta. Were she still at River Run, he could easily have left the girls there, but as it was, Jocasta and her husband, Duncan, had immigrated to Nova Scotia. There was Jocasta’s body slave, Phaedre … He thought she was employed as a barmaid in Wilmington. But, no, she couldn’t—

  “Is it as big as London?” Hermione collapsed gently onto her back and lay with her arms spread out. Rollo got up and came and sniffed her; she giggled—the first innocent sound he’d heard from her.

  “You all right, Hermie?” Trudy scampered over to her sister and squatted next to her in concern. Rollo, having smelled Hermione thoroughly, turned his attention to Trudy, who merely pushed aside his inquisitive nose. Hermione was now humming tunelessly to herself.

  “She’s fine,” Ian said, after a quick glance. “She’s no but a bit drunk. It’ll pass.”

  “Oh.” Reassured, Trudy sat down next to her sister, hugging her knees. “Pap used to get drunk. He hollered and broke things, though.”

  “Did he?”

  “Uh-huh. He broke my mam’s nose once.”

  “Oh,” Ian said, having no idea how to answer this. “Too bad.”

  “You think he’s dead?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Me, too,” she said, satisfied. She yawned hugely—he could smell her rotting teeth from where he sat—and then curled herself on the ground, cuddling close to Hermione.

  Sighing, Ian got up and fetched the blanket, and covered them both, tucking it gently round their small, limp bodies.

  Now what? He wondered. The recent exchange was the closest thing he’d had yet to an actual conversation with the girls, and he was under no illusions that their brief foray into amiability would last past daylight. Where would he find someone willing and able to deal with them?

  A tiny snore, like the buzzing of a bee’s wings, came from the blanket, and he smiled involuntarily. Wee Mandy, Bree’s daughter, had made a noise like that when she slept.

  He’d held Mandy, sleeping, now and then—once for more than an hour, not wanting to surrender the tiny, warm weight, watching the flicker of the pulse in her throat. Imagining, with longing and a pain tempered by distance, his own daughter. Stillborn, her face a mystery to him. Yeksa’a, the Mohawk had called her—“little girl,” too young to have a name. But she did have a name. Iseabaìl. That’s what he’d called her.

  He wrapped himself in the ragged plaid Uncle Jamie had given him when he’d chosen to be a Mohawk and lay down by the fire.

  Pray. That’s what his uncle, his parents, would have advised. He was unsure who to pray to, really, or what to say. Should he speak to Christ, or His mother, or perhaps one of the saints? The spirit of the red cedar that stood sentinel beyond the fire, or the life that moved in the wood, whispering on the night breeze?

  “A Dhia,” he whispered at last to the open sky, “cuidich mi,” and slept.

  Whether it was God or the night itself who answered him, at dawn he woke with a notion.

  HE’D BEEN EXPECTING the walleyed maid, but Mrs. Sylvie came to the door herself. She recalled him; he saw a flicker of recognition and—he thought—pleasure in her eyes, though it didn’t go so far as a smile, of course.

  “Mr. Murray,” she said, cool and calm. She looked down then, and lost a trifle of her composure. She pushed the wire-rimmed spectacles up on h
er nose for a better look at what accompanied him, then raised her head and fixed him with suspicion.

  “What’s this?”

  He’d been expecting this reaction and was ready for it. Without answering, he held up the fat wee pouch he’d made ready and shook it, so she could hear the metal clink inside.

  Her face changed at that, and she stood back to let them in, though she went on looking wary.

  Not so wary as the little heathens—he still had trouble thinking of them as girls—who hung back until he took them each by a scrawny neck and propelled them firmly into Mrs. Sylvie’s parlor. They sat—under compulsion—but looked as though they had something in mind, and he kept a beady gaze on them, even as he talked with the proprietor of the establishment.

  “Maids?” she said, in open disbelief, looking at the girls. He’d washed them in their clothes—forcibly, and had several bites to show for it, though luckily none had festered yet—but there had been nothing to do about their hair save chop it off, and he wasn’t about to come near either one with a knife, for fear of injuring them or himself in the subsequent struggle. They sat and glared through the mats of their hair like gargoyles, red-eyed and malignant.

  “Well, they dinna want to be whores,” he said mildly. “And I dinna want them to be, either. Not that I’ve any objection to the profession personally,” he added for the sake of politeness.

  A muscle twitched by her mouth and she shot him a sharp glance—tinged with amusement—through her spectacles.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said dryly. And dropped her eyes to his feet and raised them slowly, almost appraisingly, up the length of his body in a way that made him feel suddenly as though he’d been dipped in hot water. The eyes came to rest on his face again, and the look of amusement had intensified considerably.

  He coughed, recollecting—with a mixture of embarrassment and lust—a number of interesting images from their encounter more than two years before. Outwardly, she was a plain woman past thirty, her face and manner much more those of an autocratic nun than a whore. Beneath the unassuming calico gown and muslin apron, though … she gave fair value, did Mistress Sylvie.

  “I’m no asking as a favor, aye?” he said, and nodded at the pouch, which he had put down on the table by his chair. “I had it in mind to apprentice them, maybe?”

  “Apprentice girls. In a brothel.” She didn’t make it a question, but her mouth twitched again.

  “Ye could start them as maids—surely ye’ve cleaning to be done? Chamber pots to be emptied, and the like? And then if they should be clever enough”—he shot them a narrow glance of his own, and Hermione stuck out her tongue at him—“ye could maybe train them up to be cooks. Or sempstresses. Ye must need a deal of mending done, aye? Torn sheets and the like?”

  “Torn shifts, more like,” she said, very dryly. Her eyes flickered toward the ceiling, where a sound of rhythmic squeaking indicated the presence of a paying customer.

  The girls had sidled off their stools and were prowling the parlor like wild cats, nosing things and bristling with caution. He realized suddenly that they’d never seen a town, let alone a civilized person’s house.

  Mrs. Sylvie leaned forward and picked up the pouch, her eyes widening in surprise at the weight of it. She opened it and poured a handful of greasy black shot into her hand, glancing sharply up from it to him. He didn’t speak, but smiled and, reaching forward, took one of the balls from the palm of her hand, dug his thumbnail hard into it, and dropped it back into her hand, the scored line glinting bright gold amid the darkness.

  She pursed her lips, weighing the bag again.

  “All of it?” It was, he’d estimated, more than fifty pounds’ worth of gold: half what he’d been carrying.

  He made a long reach and took a china ornament out of Hermione’s hands.

  “It’ll no be an easy job,” he said. “Ye’ll earn it, I think.”

  “I think so, too,” she said, watching Trudy, who—with extreme nonchalance—had lowered her breeches and was relieving herself in a corner of the hearth. The secret of their sex revealed, the girls had quite abandoned their requirements of privacy.

  Mrs. Sylvie rang her silver bell, and both girls turned toward the sound in surprise.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  “I couldna think of anyone else who might be able to deal with them,” Ian said simply.

  “I’m very flattered.”

  “Ye should be,” he said, smiling. “Have we a bargain, then?”

  She drew a deep breath, eyeing the girls, who had their heads together, whispering, as they viewed her with the deepest suspicion. She let it out again, shaking her head.

  “I think it’s likely a bad bargain—but times are hard.”

  “What, in your business? I should think the demand must be fairly constant.” He’d meant to joke, but she rounded on him, eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, the customers are ready enough to knock on my door, no matter what,” she said. “But they’ve no money these days—no one does. I’ll take a chicken or a flitch of bacon—but half of them haven’t got so much as that. They’ll pay with proclamation money, or Continentals, or scrip from a militia unit—want to guess how much any of those are worth in the market?”

  “Aye, I—” But she was steaming like a kettle, and turned on him, hissing.

  “Or they don’t pay at all. When times are fair, so are men, mostly. But pinch them a bit, and they stop seeing just why they need to pay for their pleasure—after all, what does it cost me? And I cannot refuse, or they will simply take what they want and then burn my house or hurt us for my temerity. You see that, I suppose?”

  The bitterness in her voice stung like a nettle, and he abruptly abandoned a half-formed impulse to propose that they seal their bargain in a personal way.

  “I see that,” he replied, as evenly as he could. “Is such a thing not always a risk of your profession, though? And ye’ve prospered so far, aye?”

  Her mouth compressed for an instant.

  “I had a … patron. A gentleman who offered me protection.”

  “In return for … ?”

  A hot flush rose in her thin cheeks.

  “None of your business, sir.”

  “Is it not?” He nodded at the pouch in her hand. “If I’m placing my—these—well, them”—he gestured at the girls, now fingering the fabric of a curtain—“with you, surely I am entitled to ask whether I might be placing them in danger by doing so?”

  “They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.” But her hand had tightened on the pouch, knuckles white. He was that bit impressed that she was so honest, given that she plainly did need the money badly. In spite of her bitterness, though, he was rather enjoying the joust.

  “D’ye think life’s no dangerous for a man, then?” he asked, and without pausing, “What happened to your pimp?”

  The blood washed abruptly from her face, leaving it white as bleached bone. Her eyes flashed in it like sparks.

  “He was my brother,” she said, and her voice dropped to a furious whisper. “The Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered him and left him on my doorstep to die. Now, sir—have you any further questions regarding my affairs, or is our business done?”

  Before he could make shift to find any response at all to this, the door opened and a young woman came in. He felt a visceral shock at seeing her, and the edges of his vision went white. Then the room steadied round him and he found he could draw breath again.

  It wasn’t Emily. The young woman—looking curiously from him to the little savages wrapped in the curtains—was part-Indian, small and gracefully built, with Emily’s long, thick, raven’s-wing hair flowing loose down her back. With Emily’s broad cheekbones and delicate round chin. But she wasn’t Emily.

  Thank God, he thought, but at the same time suffered a hollowness of the wame. He felt as though the sight of her had been a cannonball that had
struck him and, having passed straight through his body, left a gaping hole in its wake.

  Mrs. Sylvie was giving the Indian girl brisk instructions, pointing at Hermione and Trudy. The girl’s black brows rose briefly, but she nodded, and smiling at the girls, invited them to accompany her to the kitchen for some food.

  The little girls promptly disentangled themselves from the curtains; it had been a long time since breakfast, and he’d had nothing for them then save a bit of drammach and some jerked bear meat, hard as shoe leather.

  They followed the Indian girl to the door of the room, sparing him not a glance. At the door, though, Hermione turned, and hitching up her baggy-seated breeches, fixed him with a glare and pointed a long, skinny finger of accusation at him.

  “If we turns out to be whores after all, you fucker, I’m gonna hunt you down, cut your balls off, and stuff ’em up your arse.”

  He took his leave with what dignity he could, the peals of Mrs. Sylvie’s laughter ringing in his ears.

  PULLING TEETH

  New Bern, colony of North Carolina

  April 1777

  I HATED PULLING TEETH. The figure of speech that likens something of extreme difficulty to pulling teeth is not hyperbole. Even in the best of situations—a large person with a big mouth and a placid temperament, the affected tooth one of those toward the front of the mouth and in the upper jaw (less in the way of roots and much easier of access)—it was a messy, slippery, bone-crack business. And underlying the sheer physical unpleasantness of the job was usually an inescapable feeling of depression at the probable outcome.

  It was necessary—beyond the pain of an abscessed tooth, a bad abscess could release bacteria into the bloodstream, causing septicemia and even death—but to remove a tooth, with no good means of replacing it, was to compromise not merely the patient’s appearance but also the function and structure of the mouth. A missing tooth allowed all those near it to shift out of place, altering the bite and making chewing much less efficient. Which in turn affected the patient’s nutrition, general health, and prospects for a long and happy life.

  Not, I reflected grimly, changing position yet again in hopes of gaining a view of the tooth I was after, that even the removal of several teeth would greatly damage the dentition of the poor little girl whose mouth I was working on.

  She couldn’t be more than eight or nine, with a narrow jaw and a pronounced overbite. Her canine baby teeth had not fallen out on time, and the permanent ones had come in behind them, giving her a sinister double-fanged appearance. This was aggravated by the unusual narrowness of her upper jaw, which had forced the two emergent front incisors to buckle inward, turning toward each other in such a way that the front surfaces of each tooth almost touched each other.

  I touched the abscessed upper molar and she jerked against the straps that bound her to the chair, letting out a shriek that ran under my fingernails like a bamboo splinter.

  “Give her a bit more, please, Ian.” I straightened up, feeling as though my lower back had been squeezed in a vise; I’d been working for several hours in the front room of Fergus’s printshop, and had a small bowl full of bloodstained teeth at my elbow and a rapt crowd outside the window to show for it.

  Ian made a dubious Scottish noise, but picked up the bottle of whisky and made an encouraging clucking noise toward the little girl, who screamed again at sight of his tattooed face and clamped her mouth shut. The girl’s mother, out of patience, slapped her briskly, snatched the bottle from Ian’s hand, and inserting it into her daughter’s mouth, upended it, pinching the girl’s nose shut with the other hand.

  The child’s eyes went round as pennies and an explosion of whisky droplets sprayed from the corners of her mouth—but her scrawny little neck bobbed convulsively as she swallowed, nonetheless.

  “I really think that’s enough,” I said, rather alarmed at the quantity of whisky the child was swallowing. It was very bad whisky, acquired locally, and while Jamie and Ian had both tasted it and, after some discussion, decided that it probably wouldn’t make anyone go blind, I had reservations about using it in any great amount.

  “Hmm,” said the mother, examining her daughter critically, but not removing the bottle. “That’ll do it, I suppose.”

  The child’s eyes had rolled back in her head, and the straining little body suddenly relaxed, falling limp against the chair. The mother removed the whisky bottle, wiped the mouth of it tidily on her apron, and handed it back to Ian with a nod.

  I hastily examined her pulse and breathing, but she seemed in reasonably good shape—so far, at least.

  “Carpe diem,” I muttered, grabbing my tooth pliers. “Or perhaps I mean carpe vinorum? Watch to see she keeps breathing, Ian.”

  Ian laughed and tilted the bottle, wetting a tiny swab of clean cloth with whisky for the mopping up.

  “I think ye’ll have time to take more than the one tooth, Auntie, if ye want. Ye could likely pull every tooth in the poor lassie’s head and she wouldna twitch.”