I TOLD MY RACING HEART it couldn’t be Master Peter. A skilled and lucky archer could pick off several ogres. Probably such a one was the hero.
“I killed two of my band of six, and the rest are dead, too. That’s when I saved Udaak, the giant you heard about.” I told the master what had happened. “I stole the meat sticks for the band. Master Peter must have been eaten. I should have prevented it.”
“A healer yet again.”
That brought on my anger. “Healers don’t kill.”
“Could Master Peter have survived somehow and taken the heads?”
“He’d have had to sever them from the bodies, slow work with only a rapier. Then he’d have had to take them out of the Fens. He’d have been eaten himself.” I hated imagining it all. “Did Squire Jerrold mention the name of the hero?”
The master frowned. “No, though he didn’t trust the fellow. He wrote, ‘My doubts will seem to arise out of envy, so I’ll keep them to myself.’ But in the next paragraph he added, ‘Grandfather, I am envious. I would emulate the deed if I knew how it had been accomplished.’” The master blushed. “After a day or two, I know each letter by heart. He’ll tell us more when he comes.”
“May I stay until then?” Please don’t cast me out.
“You can live here as long as you like. After sharing my secret, I feel lighter than I have in years, and I have you to thank. What’s more, the closest healer is thirty miles away.”
I hugged his words. A home. And being a healer again. I really could send for Mother. Soon we could set up our own household. “How long will Squire Jerrold stay?”
“His knight is kind enough to spare him for a month.” The master chuckled. “I’ll take an hour of the time to accustom him to the idea of you. Then I’m sure he’ll be happy to meet you.”
He’d be extraordinary if he were happy.
I didn’t have a full month left, but if we were often in each other’s company . . . If we esteemed each other . . . If I tingled with more than hunger and could tell the difference . . . If . . . If . . . Perhaps.
Following dinner, the master and I talked all afternoon and late into the night. We ranged over many subjects: the monarchy, healing, farming, my childhood, and even his. I doubt he would have conversed so long with a girl my age, but my shape hid my youth.
Afterward, I retired to the pigsty, where I wasted sleep time in wishing that Wormy had stayed longer. He’d hardly told me anything of home or Mother or himself.
In the morning, I set up an apothecary in the master’s kitchen, with my dried herbs and a vial of purpline on a small table between the shiny copper sink and the marvelous stove, where I kept a kettle of ginger tea simmering.
My first patient was Mistress Winnet, the kitchen wench, who consulted me at Trunk’s urging. She was the young girl who’d come to the drying shed on the night I’d taken the master hostage, and she suffered from a wart on the bottom of her foot. “I thought it was a stone in my shoe, but it’s a stone in my foot, Mistress Ogre.”
“Mistress Evie.”
“Mistress, if you don’t mind, what is your price for one foot?”
As I spoke, I scrubbed my hands in the sink. “This foot is free. If the other gets a wart, too, we’ll decide between us.” I spread a paste of corn-cockle seeds and warm water on the spot and covered it with a thin bandage. “The wart will collapse in a few days.”
“Thank you, Mistress Ogre.”
I swallowed my anger.
Trunk brought me the master’s weasel terrier. “Moozy has a desperate cough.” Trunk, holding the dog in his arms, looked desperate himself. “He’s stopped eating. He can’t stand up. Look at his ribs, Mistress Ogre.”
“Mistress Evie.”
The entire dog rattled with each cough. I put my hand on his chest and felt his laboring heart.
“He isn’t afraid of you! Brave puppy!”
“Beasts are smarter than that.”
My elecampane would take a week to work, but Moozy could be dead by then. I shook a drop of purpline into a tablespoon of cream. Trunk opened the dog’s mouth and I poured in the concoction. Moozy breathed deeply.
“Look at that!” Trunk brought meat scraps.
The dog gobbled them, and my stomach rumbled so loud that Trunk fetched me some, too.
The master’s groom suffered from dizziness, a serious affliction in someone often on a horse. I gave him a packet of hartshorn powder and told him to inhale it when he felt unsteady. He asked, and I told him, too, that there would be no charge.
Just one person—Mistress Dosia—had anything I wanted, and I worried that she might be healthy, but at dusk she came forward, reeking of cleanliness and confessing to a boil behind her ear. She agreed to my fee. I washed my hands again. Ogre hands, and especially fingernails, seemed to be magnets for dirt and grime.
While Trunk looked away, I had her remove her voluminous unbleached apron and the faded mulberry gown beneath it. Then I lanced the boil and cleaned the wound. When I finished, I gave her herbs to add to the baths she was to take thrice daily for a month. Finally, I held her gown up, near enough to me to get an idea of the fit but not so close it would absorb my odor.
Mistress Dosia said, “It should do, Mistress Ogre.”
“Mistress Evie.” I asked her to fetch the second gown and the shifts she’d agreed to pay me with as well. As soon as she left, I slipped out for another bath.
The second gown turned out to be faded brown. I put it on and saved the mulberry for the next day, when Squire Jerrold was expected. The gown was tight in the shoulders and loose around the waist and hips, but it declared that I was female.
When Mistress Dosia served me supper, she said, “It becomes you better than it ever did me, Mistress Ogre.”
I nodded graciously. Lies infuriated me.
In the morning, after my bath, I shaved and endured the sight of my face: mottled, pitiless, savage. Afterward, I proceeded to my neck, my ears, and the back of my hands. The ears required the light touch of a healer. I managed without gushing blood.
Temporarily clean and temporarily shaved, I donned Mistress Dosia’s mulberry dress. Then, hoping that Squire Jerrold might not arrive until I was ready, I boiled rose hips and rosemary in water and let the brew cool while I mashed bergamot rind and added walnut oil. Everything mixed together gave me a perfume, which I dabbed behind my ears and in the hollow of my throat. I struggled not to gag.
Trunk said, “You smell as sweet as a maiden, Mistress Ogre. Fancy that!”
Half the morning was over by the time I joined the master in his library, which looked out on the road.
He raised his eyebrows at the sight and smell of me but said nothing. I went to his shelves. The books about gardening didn’t interest me, but I was drawn to a novel, Daniel the Foe.
The master said, when I opened the book, “I confess, Mistress Evie, the sight of you reading is no less fantastic than if my oak trees began to waltz.”
I swallowed my irritation and wondered if I already needed another shave. My nose announced that my ogre smell had begun to encroach on the perfume. My stomach rumbled. I read:
In childhood I was called Daniel the Friend, but, after the murder of my beloved, rage possessed me. I hungered for revenge.
Promising.
The master peered out the window. I continued reading. An hour later, I bathed again.
Soapy—naked!—I heard hooves.
I stifled my alarm. The visitor might not be Squire Jerrold, but if it was he, he’d go in the manor, not around it, and the master wanted time to introduce the idea of me. I massaged soap into my scalp. I’d shave again, too.
What was that? I heard wood crack and splinter.
Something heavy—a body?—thudded to the ground.
“Mistress Evie! Come! Hurry!”