"It's gone," he said, unnecessarily. He climbed back into bed. "Come back to bed, Sassenach."
"What was it?" I asked, climbing in beside him.
"A joke, reckon," he said. "A nasty one, but only a joke." He raised himself on one elbow and blew out the candle. "Come here, mo duinne," he said. "I'm cold."
Despite the unsettling ill-wish, I slept well, secure in the dual protection of a bolted door and Jamie's arms. Toward dawn, I dreamed of grassy meadows filled with butterflies. Yellow, brown, white, and orange, they swirled around me like autumn leaves, lighting on my head and shoulders, sliding down my body like rain, the tiny feet tickling on my skin and the velvet wings beating like faint echoes of my own heart.
I floated gently to the surface of reality, and found that the butterfly feet against my stomach were the flaming tendrils of Jamie's soft red thatch, and the butterfly trapped between my thighs was his tongue.
"Mmm," I said, sometime later. "Well, that's all very well for me, but what about you?"
"About three-quarters of a minute, if you keep on in that fashion," he said, putting my hand away with a grin. "But I'd rather take my time over it—I'm a slow and canny man by nature, d'ye see. Might I ask the favor of your company for this evening, mistress?"
"You might," I said. I put my arms behind my head, and fixed him with a half-lidded look of challenge. "If you mean to tell me that you're so decrepit you can't manage more than once in a day anymore."
He regarded me narrowly from his seat on the edge of the bed. There was a sudden flash of white as he lunged, and I found myself pressed deep into the featherbed.
"Aye, well," he said into the tangles of my hair, "you'll no say I didna warn ye."
Two and a half minutes later, he groaned and opened his eyes. He scrubbed his face and head vigorously with both hands, making the shorter ends stick up like quills. Then, with a muffled Gaelic oath, he slid reluctantly out from under the blankets and began to dress, shivering in the chilly morning air.
"I don't suppose," I asked hopefully, "that you could tell Alec you're sick, and come back to bed?"
He laughed and bent to kiss me before groping under the bed for his stockings. "Would that I could, Sassenach. I doubt much short of pox, plague, or grievous bodily harm would answer as an excuse, though. If I weren't bleeding, old Alec would be up here in a trice, dragging me off my deathbed to help wi' the worming."
I eyed his graceful long calves as he pulled a stocking up neatly and folded the top. " 'Grievous bodily harm,' eh? I might manage something along those lines," I said darkly.
He grunted as he reached across for the other stocking. "Well, watch where ye toss your elf-darts, Sassenach." He tried a lewd wink, but wound up squinting at me instead. "Aim too high, and I'll be no good to you, either."
I arched one eyebrow and snuggled back under the quilts. "Not to worry. Nothing above the knee, I promise."
He patted one of my rounder bulges and left for the stables, singing rather loudly the air from "Up Among the Heather." The refrain floated back from the stairwell:
"Sittin' wi' a wee girl, holdin' on my knee—
When a bumblebee stung me, weel above the kneeeee—
Up among the heather, at the head o' Bendikee!"
He was right, I decided; he didn't have any ear for music.
I relapsed temporarily into a state of satisfied somnolence, but roused myself shortly to go down for breakfast. Most of the castle inhabitants had eaten and gone to their work already; those still in the hall greeted me pleasantly enough. There were no sidelong looks, no expressions of veiled hostility, of someone wondering how well their nasty little trick had worked. But I watched the faces, nonetheless.
The morning was spent alone in the garden and fields with my basket and digging stick. I was running short of some of the most popular herbs. Generally the village people went to Geillis Duncan for help, but there had been several patients from the village turning up of late in my dispensary, and the traffic in nostrums had been heavy. Maybe her husband's illness was keeping her too busy to care for her regular customers.
I spent the latter part of the afternoon in my dispensary. There were few patients to be seen; only a case of persistent eczema, a dislocated thumb, and a kitchen boy who had spilled a pot of hot soup down one leg. Having dispensed ointment of yawroot and blue flag and reset and bound the thumb, I settled down to the task of pounding some very aptly named stoneroot in one of the late Beaton's smaller mortars.