“A handy sort, is he?” Geilie looked after him, amused. “My husband Barnabas was that sort—couldna keep his hands off any kind of machine. Or off the slave girls, either,” she added. “Come along, the sick ones are back o’ the kitchen.”
The kitchen was in a separate small building of its own, connected to the house by a breezeway covered with blooming jasmine. Walking through it was like floating through a cloud of perfume, surrounded by a hum of bees loud enough to be felt on the skin, like the low drone of a bagpipe.
“Ever been stung?” Geillis swiped casually at a low-flying furry body, batting it out of the air.
“Now and then.”
“So have I,” she said. “Any number of times, and nothing worse than a red welt on my skin to show for it. One of these wee buggers stung one o’ the kitchen slaves last spring, though, and the wench swelled up like a toad and died, right before my eyes!” She glanced at me, eyes wide and mocking. “Did wonders for my reputation, I can tell ye. The rest o’ the slaves put it about I’d witched the lass; put a spell on her to kill her for burning the sponge cake. I havena had so much as a scorched pot, since.” Shaking her head, she waved away another bee.
While appalled at her callousness, I was somewhat relieved by the story. Perhaps the other gossip I had heard at the Governor’s ball had as little foundation in fact.
I paused, looking out through the jasmine’s lacy leaves at the cane fields below. Jamie was in the clearing by the sugar press, looking up at the gigantic crossbars of the machine while a man I assumed to be the overseer pointed and explained. As I watched, he said something, gesturing, and the overseer nodded emphatically, waving his hands in voluble reply. If I didn’t find any trace of Ian in the kitchen quarters, perhaps Jamie would learn something from the overseer. Despite Geilie’s denials, every instinct I had insisted that the boy was here—somewhere.
There was no sign of him in the kitchen itself; only three or four women, kneading bread and snapping peas, who looked up curiously as we came through. I caught the eye of one young woman, and nodded and smiled at her; perhaps I would have a chance to come back and talk, later. Her eyes widened in surprise, and she bent her head at once, eyes on the bowl of peapods in her lap. I saw her steal a quick glance at me as we crossed the long room, and noticed that she balanced the bowl in front of the small bulge of an early pregnancy.
The first sick slave was in a small pantry off the kitchen itself, lying on a pallet laid under shelves stacked high with gauze-wrapped cheeses. The patient, a young man in his twenties, sat up blinking at the sudden ray of light when I opened the door.
“What’s the trouble with him?” I knelt down beside the man and touched his skin. Warm, damp, no apparent fever. He didn’t seem in any particular distress, merely blinking sleepily as I examined him.
“He has a worm.”
I glanced at Geilie in surprise. From what I had seen and heard so far in the islands, I thought it likely that at least three-quarters of the black population—and not a few of the whites—suffered from internal parasites. Nasty and debilitating as these could be, though, most were actively threatening only to the very young and the very old.
“Probably a lot more than one,” I said. I pushed the slave gently onto his back and began to palpate his stomach. The spleen was tender and slightly enlarged—also a common finding here—but I felt no suspicious masses in the abdomen that might indicate a major intestinal infestation. “He seems moderately healthy; why have you got him in here in the dark?”
As though in answer to my question, the slave suddenly wrenched himself away from my hand, let out a piercing scream, and rolled up into a ball. Rolling and unrolling himself like a yo-yo, he reached the wall and began to bang his head against it, still screaming. Then, as suddenly as the fit had come on, it passed off, and the young man sank back onto the pallet, panting heavily and soaked with sweat.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said. “What was that?”
“A loa-loa worm,” Geilie said, looking amused at my reaction. “They live in the eyeballs, just under the lining. They cross back and forth, from one eye to the other, and when they go across the bridge o’ the nose, I’m told it’s rather painful.” She nodded at the slave, still quivering slightly on his pallet.
“The dark keeps them from moving so much,” she explained. “The fellow from Andros who told me about them says ye must catch them when they’ve just come in one eye, for they’re right near the surface, and ye can lift them out with a big darning needle. If ye wait, they go deeper, and ye canna get them.” She turned back to the kitchen and shouted for a light.
“Here, I brought the needle, just in case.” She groped in the bag at her waist and drew out a square of felt, with a three-inch steel needle thrust through it, which she extended helpfully to me.
“Are you out of your mind?” I stared at her, appalled.
“No. Did ye not say ye were a good healer?” she asked reasonably.
“I am, but—” I glanced at the slave, hesitated, then took the candle one of the kitchenmaids was holding out to me.
“Bring me some brandy, and a small sharp knife,” I said. “Dip the knife—and the needle—in the brandy, then hold the tip in a flame for a moment. Let it cool, but don’t touch it.” As I spoke, I was gently pulling up one eyelid. The man’s eye looked up at me, an oddly irregular, blotched brown iris in a bloodshot sclera the yellow of heavy cream. I searched carefully, bringing the candle flame close enough to shrink the pupil, then drawing it away, but saw nothing there.
I tried the other eye, and nearly dropped the candle. Sure enough, there was a small, transparent filament, moving under the conjunctiva. I gagged slightly at the sight, but controlled myself, and reached for the freshly sterilized knife, still holding back the eyelid.
“Take him by the shoulders,” I said to Geilie. “Don’t let him move, or I may blind him.”
The surgery itself was horrifying to contemplate, but surprisingly simple to perform. I made one quick, small incision along the inside corner of the conjunctiva, lifted it slightly with the tip of the needle, and as the worm undulated lazily across the open field, I slipped the tip of the needle under the body and drew it out, neat as a loop of yarn.
Repressing a shudder of distaste, I flicked the worm away. It hit the wall with a tiny wet splat! and vanished in the shadows under the cheese.
There was no blood; after a brief debate with myself, I decided to leave it to the man’s own tear ducts to irrigate the incision. That would have to be left to heal by itself; I had no fine sutures, and the wound was small enough not to need more than a stitch or two in any case.
I tied a clean pad of cloth over the closed eye with a bandage round the head, and sat back, reasonably pleased with my first foray into tropical medicine.
“Fine,” I said, pushing back my hair. “Where’s the other one?”
The next patient was in a shed outside the kitchen, dead. I squatted next to the body, that of a middle-aged man with grizzled hair, feeling both pity and outrage.
The cause of death was more than obvious: a strangulated hernia. The loop of twisted, gangrenous bowel protruded from one side of the belly, the stretched skin over it already tinged with green, though the body itself was still nearly as warm as life. An expression of agony was fixed on the broad features, and the limbs were still contorted, giving an unfortunately accurate witness to just what sort of death it had been.