Tòtis was normally a rather solemn little boy, but at this suggestion, he grinned hugely, displaying the gap where a late baby tooth had recently fallen out.
“Yes, please, Great-auntie Witch,” he said.
Fanny giggled.
“Great-auntie Witch?” I said, giving Ian an eye as I got up to fetch the pie.
He shrugged. “Well, the Sachem calls ye …”
The Sachem lived by himself, in a small dwelling he’d built that looked like part of the forest, but I gathered that he spent a great deal of time with the Murrays.
The Sachem was one thing; the inhabitants of the Ridge were something else. I couldn’t stop the more suspicious-minded tenants thinking—or saying—that I was a witch, but it was another thing to have my own great-nephew saying so in public.
“Hmm,” I said to Tòtis. “Perhaps you could call me by the Mohawk name for witch?”
He frowned at me, puzzled. Ian, with a slightly odd look on his face, bent down and whispered something in the boy’s ear. Both of them then looked at me, Tòtis in awe and Ian with circumspection.
“I dinna think so, Auntie,” he said. “There is a Mohawk word for it, but it’s a word that means ye have powers, without sayin’ quite what kind of powers.”
“Oh. Well, just Great-auntie, then, please.” I smiled at Tòtis, who returned the smile, but with an expression of caution.
“Aye, that’ll do fine.” Ian got up and brushed crumbs off his buckskins. “Tell Uncle Jamie I’ve gone to have a wee keek at Ulysses. I want to make sure he’s really got off the mountain and isna lurkin’ about. And I want to ken which way he’s going. So as we can find him when we want him.”
132
Man’s Medicine
THE HOUSE BEGAN TO breathe again, as things eased gradually through the evening. Ian hadn’t returned, but I’d sent Jem and Tòtis up to tell Rachel where he’d gone, and both boys returned for supper. The weather cleared and warmed, and a wonderful sunset spread a blazing curtain of bright-gold cloud in the western sky. Everyone went to sit on the porch and enjoy it, and I told Jamie—who had come down to eat—where Ian was. He’d paused for a moment, brow furrowed, but then nodded and relaxed, taking my hand. The vibrations of Ulysses’s visitation were still with us but beginning to fade, though the presence of Corporal Sipio Jackson in my surgery was an uneasy reminder.
I organized the four older girls into shifts to sit with Corporal Jackson and administer food, if wanted, honey-water, whether wanted or not, and laudanum, if needed. Then I fumbled my way upstairs, my eyes already closing, and fell asleep with no memory of undressing.
When I woke, somewhere past midnight, I discovered that this was because I hadn’t undressed at all but merely collapsed onto the bed. Jamie was sleeping deeply and didn’t stir when I got up and went down to relieve the watch and check on my patient.
Agnes was dozing in my rocking chair, but stirred and rose groggily when I came into the surgery. I put a finger to my lips and waved her back. Her knees folded at once; she was asleep again almost before her bottom hit the cushion. The chair rocked gently back under her weight—she was visibly pregnant by now—then came to rest. The only light came from the smothered embers in the tiny brazier on the counter, but the diffuse glow made the surgery seem soft and dreamlike, glimmering among the bottles, hazy among the hanging herbs drying overhead.
Corporal Jackson was asleep now, too; I’d looked in twice before going to bed, and finding him the last time wakeful, feverish, and in what hospital personnel tactfully call “discomfort,” had given him a tea of willow bark and valerian, with a few drops of laudanum. His face was slack and calm, mouth a little open, breathing with a slight congestive sound. I put both hands gently on his leg; one below the plaster dressing, a thumb on the pulse in his ankle, and the other on his thigh. His flesh was still noticeably warm, but not alarmingly so. I could feel the pulse of his femoral artery, slow and strong, and felt my own pulse in the fingertips of the hand on his ankle. I stood still, breathing slowly, and felt the pulses equalize between my hands.
The slow beat of the mingled pulses made me think suddenly of Roger’s throat—and of Brianna’s heart. And then of William. So she’d met her brother, at last.
That thought made me smile and at the same time experience a deep pang of regret. I’d have given a great deal to see that meeting.
From John’s carefully composed letter, it had been clear that that meeting was what he really wanted. Not that he wouldn’t want to help Bree to a fat commission, or have her there for the sake of her own company—but I recognized the commission as being merely the shimmering fly on the surface of his pond. Jamie, who probably knew John a lot better than I did, quite clearly saw that, too—and yet he’d simply picked up the baited hook, examined it, and then deliberately swallowed it.