115

NOSEPICKER

July 4, 1776

It was close and hot in the Inn room, but I couldn’t go out; little Amanda had finally fussed herself to sleep—she had a rash on her bottom, poor thing—and was curled in her basket, tiny thumb in her mouth and a frown on her face.

I unfolded the gauze mosquito netting and draped it carefully over the basket, then opened the window. The air outside was hot, too, but fresh, and moving. I pulled off my cap—without it, Mandy was fond of clutching my hair in both her hands and yanking; she had an amazing amount of strength, for a child with a heart defect. For the millionth time, I wondered whether I could have been wrong.

But I wasn’t. She was asleep now, with the delicate rose bloom of a healthy baby on her cheeks; awake and kicking, that soft flush faded, and an equally beautiful but unearthly blue tinge showed now and then in her lips, in the beds of her tiny nails. She was still lively—but tiny. Bree and Roger were both large people; Jemmy had put on weight like a small hippopotamus through his first several years of life. Mandy weighed scarcely more than she had at birth.

No, I wasn’t wrong. I moved her basket to the table, where the warm breeze could play over her, and sat down beside it, laying my fingers gently on her chest.

I could feel it. Just as I had in the beginning, but stronger now that I knew what it was. If I had had a proper operating suite, the blood transfusions, the calibrated and carefully administered anesthesia, the oxygen mask, the swift, trained nurses … No surgery on the heart is a minor thing, and surgery on an infant is always a great risk—but I could have done it. Could feel in the tips of my fingers exactly what needed to be done, could see in the back of my eyes the heart, smaller than my fist, the slippery, pumping, rubbery muscle and the blood washing through the ductus arteriosus, a small vessel, no bigger than an eighth of an inch in circumference. A small nick in the axillary vessel, a quick ligation of the ductus itself with a number-8 silk ligature. Done.

I knew. But knowledge is not, alas, always power. Nor is desire. It wouldn’t be me who would save this precious granddaughter.

Would anyone? I wondered, giving way momentarily to the dark thoughts I fought to keep at bay when anyone else was near. Jemmy might not be right. Any baby might grab at a brightly colored shiny thing like a ruby ring—but then I remembered her cooing, batting at my decrepit leather amulet pouch with the raw sapphire inside.

Perhaps. I didn’t want to think about the dangers of the passage—or the certainty of permanent separation, no matter whether the journey through the stones was successful or not.

There were noises outside; I looked toward the harbor, and saw the masts of a large ship, far out to sea. Another, still farther out. My heart skipped a beat.

They were oceangoing ships, not the little packet boats and fishing smacks that sailed up and down the coast. Could they be part of the fleet, sent in answer to Governor Martin’s plea for help to suppress, subdue, and reclaim the colony? The first ship of that fleet had arrived at Cape Fear in late April—but the troops it carried had been lying low, waiting for the rest.

I watched for some time, but the ships didn’t come in closer. Perhaps they were hanging off, waiting for the rest of the fleet? Perhaps they weren’t British ships at all, but Americans, escaping the British blockade of New England by sailing south.

I was distracted from my thoughts by the clumping of male feet on the stairs, accompanied by snorts and that peculiarly Scottish sort of giggling usually depicted in print—but by no means adequately—as “Heuch, heuch, heuch!”

It was clearly Jamie and Ian, though I couldn’t understand what was giving rise to so much hilarity, since when last seen they had been bound for the docks, charged with dispatching a shipment of tobacco leaves, obtaining pepper, salt, sugar, cinnamon—if findable—and pins—somewhat rarer than cinnamon—for Mrs. Bug, and procuring a large fish of some edible sort for our supper.

They’d got the fish, at least: a large king mackerel. Jamie was carrying it by the tail, whatever it had been wrapped in having evidently been lost in some accident. His queue had come undone, so that long red strands frayed out over the shoulder of his coat, which in turn had a sleeve half wrenched off, a fold of white shirt protruding through the torn seam. He was covered with dust, as was the fish, and while the latter’s eyes both bulged accusingly, one of his own was swollen nearly shut.

“Oh, God,” I said, burying my face in one hand. I looked up at him through splayed fingers. “Don’t tell me. Neil Forbes?”

“Ach, no,” he said, dropping the fish with a splat on the table in front of me. “A wee difference of opinion wi’ the Wilmington Chowder and Marching Society.”

“A difference of opinion,” I repeated.

“Aye, they thought they’d throw us in the harbor, and we thought they wouldn’t.” He slung a chair round with his boot and sat down on it backward, arms crossed on its back. He looked indecently cheerful, face flushed with sun and laughter.

“I don’t want to know,” I said, though of course I did. I glanced at Ian, who was still sniggering quietly to himself, and observed that while he was slightly less battered than Jamie, he had one forefinger lodged in his nose up to the knuckle.

“Have you got a bloody nose, Ian?”

He shook his head, still giggling. “No, Auntie. Some o’ the Society do, though.”

“Well, why have you got your finger up your nose, then? Have you picked up a tick or something?”

“No, he’s keepin’ his brains from falling out,” Jamie said, and went off into another fit. I glanced at the basket, but Mandy slept peacefully on, quite used to racket.

“Well, maybe you’d best stick both your own fingers up your nose, then,” I suggested. “Keep you out of trouble for a moment or two, at least.” I tilted up Jamie’s chin to get a better look at the eye. “You hit someone with that fish, didn’t you?”

The giggling had died down to a subterranean vibration between them, but threatened at this to break out anew.

“Gilbert Butler,” Jamie said with a masterful effort at self-control. “Smack across the face. Sent him straight across the quay and into the water.”

Ian’s shoulders shook with remembered ecstasy.

“Bride, what a splash! Oh, it was a braw fight, Auntie! I thought I’d broke my hand on a fellow’s jaw, but it’s all right now the deadness has worn off. Just a bit numb and tingly.” He wiggled the free fingers of his hand at me in illustration, wincing only slightly as he did so.

“Do take your finger out of your nose, Ian,” I said, anxiety over their condition fading into annoyance at how they’d got that way. “You look like a half-wit.”

For some reason, they both found that hysterically funny and laughed like loons. Ian did, however, eventually withdraw the finger, with an expression of wary cautiousness, as though he truly expected his brains to follow in its wake. Nothing did emerge, though, not even the ordinary bits of unsavory excreta one might expect from such a maneuver.

Ian looked puzzled, then mildly alarmed. He sniffed, prodding experimentally at his nose, then stuck the finger back into his nostril, rooting vigorously.

Jamie went on grinning, but his amusement began to fade as Ian’s explorations became more frantic.

“What? Ye’ve not lost it, have ye, lad?”

Ian shook his head, frowning.

“Nay, I feel it. It’s …” He stopped, giving Jamie a panic-stricken look over the embedded finger. “It’s stuck, Uncle Jamie! I canna get it out!”

Jamie was on his feet at once. He pulled the finger from its resting-place with a moist, sucking noise, then tilted back Ian’s head, peering urgently up his nose with his one good eye.

“Bring a light, Sassenach, will ye?”

There was a candlestick on the table, but I knew from experience that the only likely effect of using a candle to look up someone’s nose was to set their nose hairs on fire. Instead, I bent and pulled my medical kit out from under the settle where I had stowed it.

“I’ll get it,” I said, with the confidence of one who has removed everything from cherry pits to live insects from the nasal cavities of small children. I drew out my longest pair of thin forceps, and clicked the slender blades together in token of assurance. “Whatever it is. Just keep quite still, Ian.”

The whites of Ian’s eyes showed briefly in alarm as he looked at the shining metal of the forceps, and he looked pleadingly at Jamie.

“Wait. I’ve a better idea.” Jamie laid a quelling hand on my arm for an instant, then disappeared out the door. He thundered downstairs, and I heard a sudden burst of laughter from below, as the door to the taproom opened. The sound was as suddenly cut off as the door closed, like the valve on a faucet.

“Are you all right, Ian?” There was a smear of red on his upper lip; his nose was beginning to bleed, aggravated by his jabbings and pokings.

“Well, I do hope so, Auntie.” His original jubilation was beginning to be replaced by a certain expression of worry. “Ye dinna think I can have pushed it into my brain, do ye?”

“I think it very unlikely. What on earth—”

But the door below had opened and closed again, spilling another brief spurt of talk and laughter into the stairwell. Jamie took the stairs two at a time and popped back into the room, smelling of hot bread and ale, and holding a small, battered snuffbox in his hand.

Ian seized on this with gratitude and, sprinkling a quick pinch of black, dusty grains on the back of his hand, hastily inhaled it.

For an instant, all three of us held breathless—and then it came, a sneeze of gargantuan proportions that rocked Ian’s body back on its stool, even as his head flew forward—and a small, hard object struck the table with a ping! and bounced off into the hearth.

Ian went on sneezing, in a fusillade of hapless snorts and explosions, but Jamie and I were both on our knees, scrabbling in the ashes, heedless of filth.

“I’ve got it! I think,” I added, sitting back on my heels and peering at the handful of ashes I held, in the midst of which was a small, round, dust-covered object.

“Aye, that’s it.” Jamie seized my neglected forceps from the table, plucked the object delicately from my hand, and dropped it into my glass of water. A delicate plume of ash and soot floated up through the water to form a dusty gray film on the surface. Below, the object glittered up at us, serene and glowing, its beauty at last revealed. A faceted clear stone, the color of golden sherry, half the size of my thumbnail.

“Chrysoberyl,” Jamie said softly, a hand on my back. He looked at Mandy’s basket, the silky black curls lifting gently in the breeze. “D’ye think it will serve?”

Ian, still wheezing and watery-eyed, and with a red-stained handkerchief pressed to his much-abused proboscis, came to look over my other shoulder.

“Half-wit, is it?” he said in tones of deep satisfaction. “Ha!”

“Wherever did you get that? Or rather,” I corrected myself, “who did you steal it from?”

“Neil Forbes.” Jamie picked the gem up, turning it gently over in his fingers. “There were a good deal more o’ the Chowder Society than there were of us, so we ran down the street and round the corner, down between the warehouses there.”

“I kent Forbes’s place, aye, because I’d been there before,” Ian put in. One of Mandy’s feet was sticking up out of the basket; he touched the sole of it with a fingertip, and smiled to see her toes extend in reflex. “There was a great hole in the back where someone had broken down the wall, just covered over with a sheet of canvas, nailed over it, like. So we pulled it loose and ducked inside.”

Where they had found themselves standing next to the small enclosed space Forbes used for an office—and for the moment, deserted.

“It was sitting in a bittie wee box on the desk,” Ian said, coming to look proprietorially at the chrysoberyl. “Just sitting there! I’d just picked it up to look at, when we hear the watchman coming. So—” He shrugged and smiled at me, happiness momentarily transforming his homely features.

“And you think the watchman won’t tell him you were there?” I asked skeptically. The two of them could scarcely be more conspicuous.

“Oh, I imagine he will.” Jamie bent over Mandy’s basket, holding the chrysoberyl between thumb and forefinger. “Look what Grandda and Uncle Ian have brought ye, a muirninn,” he said softly.

“We decided that it was a small enough ransom to pay for what he did to Brianna,” Ian said, sobering somewhat. “I expect Mr. Forbes may feel it reasonable, too. And if not—” He smiled again, though not with happiness, and put his hand to his knife. “He’s got another ear, after all.”

Very slowly, a tiny fist rose through the netting, fingers flexing as they grasped at the stone.

“Is she still asleep?” I whispered. Jamie nodded, and gently withdrew the stone.

On the far side of the table, the fish stared austerely at the ceiling, ignoring everything.