“Tis already near a boil,” the housewife assured him. “Now come and see Leith. He’s waiting for ye.”
The boy’s gloomy expression lightened as soon as he saw Magnus. “You’ll fix everything, aye?” he asked, but it was not really a question. His eyes were full to the brim of confidence and hope.
“I’ll do my best, lad.” Magnus’s voice was gravelly and he bent his head, digging into his bag of herbs and bottles and carefully separated leaves. He became preoccupied while spreading the wound with basil salve, despite his awkward fingers. “It doesn’t matter if it goes beyond the edges,” he explained to Leith and Caitlin. “The more medicine it spreads to keep away infection, the better. It will also keep the swelling down.”
Mother and son nodded solemnly. Settling Caitlin in a chair with a mug of tea, the laird returned to see to Leith. “So, my lad, I hear ye had a struggle with a pylon.
The boy smiled weakly. “I want ye to know I won.”
“I’d expect no less.” Magnus answered without thinking; he was busy examining the lad’s leg. He determined, by Leith’s yelps of pain, that the bone in the front of his calf was broken.
He’d already asked several MacLeods to bring in snow packed down to ice in some kind of cloth they could tie around Leith’s leg. It was swollen and purple, and he had to get that swelling down in order to set the broken bone. Magnus was happy to see how many were involved in the process of switching the cloths as the ice melted and replacing them with new. The men and women on the Isle of Lewis did not like to see their widows and children suffer.
Sitting with his back against the settee, Magnus nodded at them one-by-one.
“Tis, indeed a broken bone,” he said softly. In an instant half a dozen townsmen rose to collect what he needed: two long narrow boards, many more or less clean rags to hold them in place. He waited to numb the deep slice on the boy’s knee but he couldn’t do the stitches alone.
“Can someone find young Sam for me?” he added. “Leith needs her skill here today.” A woman close to the door scurried off to seek out the small girl who resembled a street thug without the requisite size or muscles.
Magnus simply could not manipulate needle and thread through injured skin; his hands had always been too big. He had always been too big, though not as large as his brothers. But as muscular soldiers, women and men both admired Graeme and Hugh’s size, because it represented strength of body and purpose. In sharp contrast, Magnus’s hands were too large, the fingers too clumsy to perform many of the tasks a healer and a hunter and a scientist had to execute.
Sighing in frustration, he folded in upon himself—but it did not help. Thank God he had found Sam. He’d been able to save her from rats and starvation, and the bullies who lived hidden in the rocks and in the alleys between the facades of shops that had never quite been finished. He had fed her and given her clothes, which she hoarded rather than wearing, until the ones on her back fell apart at the seams. She had returned his favor to her a hundredfold. Magnus had taught her how to assist when more than one person was needed, how to prepare the simplest herbs, how to sew the critical stitches that held the edges of a wound together so it could heal properly.
He could always find her when he needed her, and vice versa. It was altogether a comfortable relationship. When she finally appeared in the doorway, looking as if she’d been adrift on a mud-spotted windy sea, Magnus could not help but smile. She wore a man’s shirt, buttoned from top to bottom and tucked in thoroughly, but the sleeves hung down well past her wrists. Her breeks were torn at both knees and fit her badly, making her appear round where she was not and much more slender than she was. Her hair, dark-auburn-brown, stuck out round her head in a prickly halo, with half hanging loose, and half still contained in a careless braid.
Blinking once, Magnus got on his knees and bowed her in. “Join us, won’t ye? I’m in need of your expertise.”
Sam had been hoping for a more dramatic reaction, but she could never tell with the laird. Shrugging, she followed the path the townspeople cleared for her.
“First ye go back outside and wash in the trough, and ask Caitlin for a special clean bucket for your head,” he whispered so no one else could hear. “Ye might even comb your hair. Then return to me, lass, for I could really use your help stitching this lad’s wound and setting his leg.
Sam wanted to snap that she was fine as she was, but she knew it was a lie. She’d only come like this to test him. Once she saw how he bent his head so his hair fell forward over his face, but not in time to hide his quickly suppressed smile, she turned and was once again swallowed by the crowd.
Returning swiftly, hair combed, sleeves considerably less muddy and pushed high up on her arms, face and hands washed, she knelt on the other side of Leith and took the clean needle and unique thread Magnus handed her. The laird grinned at her transformation, nodding in approval.
Magnus had already given the lad a tincture of black willow and hops to sedate him, and decoction of yew for pain. Sam pursed her lips in concentration and began to sew, while Magnus did what he could to hold the sides of the wound together. Even with her small hands, the stitches were larger than they should be; she was always a bit nervous, and her fingers shook, though rarely did she lose control of the needle.
Leith held still, so as not to dislodge the ice packed around his leg. He kept his face expressionless while Caitlin held his shoulders, massaging his neck and looking away from the wound.
Magnus cursed inwardly, wishing he could do this more painlessly and effectively, but he did not yet know how. Still, he was learning, experimenting, teaching himself new things. At least the bullies left Samantha alone because she was his assistant. He wished he could do more for her too.
Once she was finished, Magnus examined the swelling in Leith’s leg. It had gone down enough, and even if it had not, he did not want the boy to suffer anymore while he waited for the worst part.
Caitlin and Sam sat on his chest while two men held his leg and Magnus worked at fitting the broken ends of bone together. The young lad moaned and cried out, but the three men hastily put the narrow boards for the splint on either side and tied them firmly into place.
Forehead covered in sweat, Leith turned pale and fell unconscious against the arm of the settee.
“Let him rest,” the laird told Caitlin. “He’s had to face enough this day.”
“As have ye, from the look of ye,” Sam remarked outside the house.
“Och, ye need no’ worry about me.” Magnus was often surprised by her perception. This time it made him uneasy. He could not let the turbulence between him and his family show. He was strong enough to handle it alone. Or so he thought. “I’m weary is all.”
Looking skeptical, Sam nevertheless held her tongue—for the time being.
~ * ~
Magnus managed to avoid Graeme and Hugh for the rest of the day. Come nightfall, he glanced outside his room to make sure no one was near, made a final check of the room itself, and satisfied himself that he was unobserved. He slipped behind the purple velvet curtain at the far side of the room, making certain it was closed behind him, before he turned up the oil lamp in the narrow stone room beyond. It opened into a corridor only he knew about, because he had gone through the ruins bit by bit after the family decided to restore them.
He had chosen this room specifically for this hidden corridor, where he had built long tables with small rings of stone for heating, drying stands, shelves full of bottles and various containers in strange shapes.
Magnus released his breath in relief. He felt at home here where he did his real work at night, partly because he did not wish to be disturbed, partly because he did not think others would understand what he was doing.
He took his avocation as a healer very seriously, and was always trying new herbs, new combinations, and using different parts of the herbs and wildflowers he’d asked Sam to gather last spring and summer, and even into the fall. He’d dried some, boiled some down, kept some
moist, and practiced preserving some in the various receptacles he kept in his private room. He was often in there, curtain closed behind him, torches burning in the plain sconces on the battered stone walls. He tested and tasted, brewed and made poultices, teas and tisanes as he tried to extend his knowledge.
He had bought many books on the subject when he was last in Edinburgh, and he poured over these whenever he had a spare half hour. He was fascinated by what he was learning, and eager to put it to use.
There are still those who’d think you’re casting evil spells here, he thought, with your vials and your burners and the wood oven always fragrant with new and strange smells. “Let them think it!” he challenged the smoke-stained walls. “They’ll be glad in the end when I rid them of their pain or their illness or infection.” But would they? he wondered. The churches did not approve of such experiments. It seemed to him Anglicans in 1820 were looking forward in a tried-and-true way, and the Presbyterians forward, while the Catholics clung to their Latin and their ancient Church. The people were letting go of their belief in the ancient Celtic gods, and the spells of the fey and the kelpies. They were letting go, too, of their history, a little at a time.
Magnus wasn’t certain whether or not that was a good thing. Ye think too much, he told himself silently. “Better that than thinking too little,” he said out loud.
Chapter Five
Several days later Esmé dreamed about a doe that radiated gentleness, a sense of healing warmth, and a connection to the verdant, fecund forest full of life. Even the rustle of water on stones had a voice and a breathing energy. On tiptoe, the girl followed the doe through copse and vale, over moor and brae and stream, up mountains and down fields alive with wild flowers. Esmé paused there and spun among the cotton grass and bluebells and twinflowers and creeping ladies tresses. Spring will come again, she thought, and the winter disappear. Somewhere inside, she sensed the dream foretold a new beginning, a rebirth, which filled her with euphoria and hope.
The dream was the vivid life and beauty and caress upon her skin. She felt she was not alone, though she could see no one about. She felt a strength protecting her—a hidden presence she knew in her body and her heart was male, full of yearning and dreams of his own. She was not safe, for the sense of his existence raced across her skin, awakening a need and a desire she had never felt before. And yet, somehow, she was not afraid. Instead she was starving for his touch, for the brush of his finger across her open lips. Not now, her heart whispered, but soon. He will be there for you—waiting.
For the longest time there was only stillness. And then The Voice began to whisper in her ear: to whisper of the Highlands many, many years in the past, to speak of the animals and how precious they were to the Gods, to speak of the Ancients and the Old Ways and the magic, of the power and the indescribable beauty—of the mist and gloaming and dawn and the strength of the changing sun. Of the time before when the Ancients had held sway.
And, caught up in the sweetness and the sovereignty of The Voice, Esmé listened, deep within a world beyond and before her own. A world where the dulcet tones of The Voice wove a pattern in the light, an invitation on the wall, a drawing in the tinted mist.
Come, it said melodiously. Find me. You will find what you seek only with me. The words and the meaning were harmonious, in the soft resilience of The Voice, which reached for her, called for her, sang for her, the song that held her fast, clasped her close, released a million kisses upon her, and a deep yearning inside her, and it burst upon her skin like the music she could not hear, and upon her ears like a touch she could not feel. But she sorrowed for the voice of many colors and songs and strokes, and secrets she wanted to know that were deeply hidden. Forgotten as the world moved on. The Voice has questions. It has a heart. It is missing; it misses, you. She half-awoke in the darkness, yearning for something she’d once known but long forgotten: that rush of excitement in her blood, the desire for adventure, a touch upon her skin so light it was barely there, but so intense it made her burn—inside and out. Someone was there; his shadow fell across her as he reached out to offer his hand. Even before he touched her, her body was alive with desire, with heat, with longing. She tried to speak, but no sound came. She tried to move but felt she had been turned to stone.
Esmé awoke standing outside the Hill in her night rail, barefoot and shivering. Every muscle in her body stiffened. “How…” she stuttered. “Why?”
I told ye I would show ye the way, The Voice whispered. This is the first step.
The girl stood unmoving, terrified, until her grandfather saw her through a window, rushed outside and whisked her up into his arms.
~ * ~
No one spoke of her inexplicable foray into the snow wearing her night rail. Everyone in the family knew it must have been a nightmare—the only thing strong enough to wrench Esmé from the safety of her bed into the treachery of the midnight snow. So her family waited to see if she mentioned what had happened. When she did not, they kept their questions to themselves.
“There’s to be a small party tonight at the Hill,” Breda informed her sister breathlessly. “And you’re not to sit in the corner or be otherwise occupied.”
Brow furrowed, Esmé replied, “I take pleasure in other people, Breda. Tis just the outdoors I’m no’ very fond of. I always enjoy Grandmother and Grandfather’s parties.” She finished the last stitch in the hem of her pale lilac muslin gown. She had trimmed Breda’s pale yellow one yesterday with some dainty gold lace. It lay across the bed in her sister’s room, ready, Esmé suspected, for the party.
With an intensity Esmé had never seen in her sister before, Breda blurted out, “Ye must take a beau this very night. Ye simply must!” Breda was much the prettiest of the two sisters; at 16-years old, her strawberry blonde hair was thick and lustrous, and her sparkling golden eyes most striking. But just then, they were wide with determination, her rosy skin pale, and her grip on her sister’s wrist tight.
Esmé was shocked by her apparent desperation. “Why must I?”
Breda rolled her eyes. “Because I can no’ be betrothed until ye are married, and it’ll take ye forever even once ye have a beau. I know ye, Esmé Rose Fraser.” Breda pointed at her in accusation.
Putting her sewing scissors away in her basket, Esmé collected the snipped threads from her skirt and placed them in the small dish on her bedside table. She removed a piece of embroidery work she was doing as a gift for her grandmother and began to form the tiny colorful patterns of stitches. At last she sank into her four-poster bed and stared up at the pale green canopy while she worked. “Ye know I’m no’ interested in looking for a man just now.” She sighed, deeply immersed, for an instant, in the dream she did seek. The mysterious—something—she could neither name nor visualize, but which made her body quiver with sparks of anticipation.
“Exactly!” Breda stretched out beside her on the green duvet.
“Besides, you’re too young to marry.”
“You’re not paying attention. It will take ye years to marry, even when ye do take a beau. You’d have to leave the house, for one thing,” her younger sister pointed out practically, “and go live at his.”
Esmé went pale and a tiny gasp escaped her. She felt her sister had struck her in the stomach. All at once she understood Breda’s concern. She had not realized until that moment how much her fear of leaving the house affected the rest of the family. She had thought them all safe because she was taking no risks. But there was a different kind of risk in choosing security. She was hurt by her sister’s matter-of-fact assumptions about how Esmé would hurt Breda’s chances, and yet she wanted to apologize.
She wondered who else she had hurt by her hermit’s ways, and how much they resented her for it. More than anything, she wanted, right then, to be back in the middle of the dream that seemed to cherish her. But that would be running away from the truth, and frightened as she was by the world beyond her door, that was one thing Esmé never did. She clasped the medallion
in her hand and a faint, lingering warmth reassured her.
~ * ~
Perched on a stool in her grandmother’s rooms on the top floor while Caelia sketched, Esmé breathed more easily. The girl had found comfort there, as she always did. The ceilings were sharply slanted with heavy carved beams to hold them up. The plaster walls were painted cream, but most of the space was taken up by the many-layered green ferns, starflowers, purple foxglove and rocks covered in lichen that Caelia had painted on the walls. A quite realistic image of a stream flowed over clear round stones, disappearing when it met the floor. Caelia had also added a small green pool, reflecting blue sky and clouds above the bed. She had done all that when she was only a girl. Esmé was also fascinated by the paintings and sketches and books piled on floor and tabletop. Somehow in this room, Esmé felt protected by her grandmother’s ‘gift’. The studio was across the hall, but the girl liked it here better. She even slept here sometimes when she was particularly restless.
“Whatever are ye thinking of, lassie?” Caelia asked after too much silence.
Despite her reluctance, Esmé glanced up. “Tis nothing. Just something Breda said.”
Holding a black pastel in midair, her grandmother. “What could your sister possibly say to make ye look so baffled—and sad as well?”
Raising her chin as she gathered her courage, Esmé let out her breath on a long sigh. “If I ask ye a question, do ye promise to tell me the truth? Tis important.” She looked down and toyed with the end of her braid.
Highland Awakening Page 4
