She was, and she did, though not hard. Jem yelped, then giggled. “Thilly thing,” he said. “Shall we call her Thilly?”
“No,” said Fanny, giggling, too. “That’s a thilly name.”
“That poor dog will never get her mouth taken care of if the lot of you don’t stop stirring her up,” I said severely—for Brianna and Jamie were laughing, too. Roger was smiling but not laughing, not wanting to wake Mandy, now sound asleep on his shoulder.
Bree calmed the incipient riot by going to the pie safe and extracting half of a large dried-apple pie, which she distributed to everyone, including a small piece of crust to the dog, who wolfed it happily.
“All right.” I swallowed the last flaky, cinnamon-scented bite of my own slice, dusted crumbs off my fingers—the dog promptly snuffled them up off the floor—and laid out my small splinter-forceps, my smallest tenaculum, a square of thick gauze, and—after a moment’s thought—the bottle of honey-water, the mildest antibacterial I had. “Let’s go, then.”
Once we’d got the dog immobilized on her side—no easy matter; she writhed like an eel, but Jem flung himself on top of her back half and Jamie pressed her down with one hand on her shoulder and one on her neck—it took no more than a couple of minutes to work the bone chip loose, with Fanny carefully holding the candle so as not to drip wax on me or the dog.
“There!” I held it up in the forceps, to general applause, then tossed it into the fire. “Now just a bit of cleanup …” I pressed the gauze over the gum, firmly. The dog whined a little but didn’t struggle. A small amount of blood from the lacerated gum, and what might be a trace of pus—hard to tell, by candlelight, but I brought the gauze to my nose and couldn’t detect any scent of putrefaction. Meat scraps, apple pie, and dog breath, but no noticeable smell of infection.
Once the bone chip was out, interest in my activities waned, and the conversation turned back to dog names. Lulu, Sassafras, Ginny, Monstro （this from Bree, and I looked up and met her eye with a smile, visualizing the toothy whale from Disneyland as plainly as she did）， “Seasaidh …”
Jamie didn’t take part in the naming controversy, but he did—for the first time—stroke the dog’s head gently. Did he already know what her name was? I wondered. I rinsed the gum well with the honey-water—the dog lapped and swallowed, even lying down—but most of my attention was on Jamie.
“I left her howling on her master’s grave.” Something too faint to be a shiver ran over me, and I felt the hairs on my forearms lift, stirring in the warm draft from the fire. I was morally sure that Jamie had put the dog’s master in his grave—and that I was the unwilling cause of it.
His face was calm now, shadowed by the fire. Whatever he might be thinking, nothing showed. And his hand was gentle on the dog’s spotted fur. “Absolution,” he’d said.
“What was your dog’s name, Fanny?” Jem said, behind me. “The one you had on the ship.”
“Ssspotty,” she said, making an effort with the “s.” It was only a few months since I had clipped her tongue-tie, and she still struggled with some sounds. “He had a white spot. On his nose.”
“We could call this one Spotty, too,” Jem offered generously. “If you want. She’s got lots of spots. Lots of spots,” he repeated, giggling at the rhyme. “Lots and lots of spots and spots.”
“Now you’re a thilly thing,” Fanny said to him, laughing.
“Maybe you should wait and see if your grandda means to keep her, Jem,” Roger said. “Before you give her a name.”
Plainly, the possibility that we might not keep the dog hadn’t entered the children’s heads, and they were aghast at the notion.
“Oh, please, Mr. Fraser!” Fanny said, urgent. “I’ll feed her, I promise I will!”
“And I’ll take the ticks out of her fur, Grandda!” Jemmy put in. “Please, please, can’t we keep her?”
Jamie’s eyes met mine, and his mouth turned up a little at one side—in resignation, I thought, rather than humor.
“She came to me for help,” he said to me. “I canna very well turn her away.”
“Then maybe you should name her, Da,” Bree put in, quelling Jem’s and Fanny’s exhibitions of relieved delight. “What would you call her?”
“Bluebell,” he said without hesitation, surprising me. “It’s a good Scottish name—and it fits her, aye?”