He pulled the covers back, and took her feet in his hands. They were so cold that it was painful to touch them as if—as if she had, indeed, been walking in snow.
She was fixated on a point inside the fire now, as if she saw a figure moving through the flames. And then she spoke, the words a toneless whisper, uttered it seemed in another realm.
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
The words frightened him, uttered as they were to that third party whom she clearly believed was in the room.
“Casey!” Her voice was high and frantic. “Wait for me—slow down—wait, please wait!” She had pushed herself to the edge of the bed and was trying to stand, reaching out for a phantom. Jamie grabbed her and pulled her back, afraid she was going to walk straight into the fire. She tried to pull away, crying out in frustration. She turned and looked right into his eyes, yet hers seemed to be looking far beyond this room, and he knew she was not seeing him at all.
“He won’t wait for me, please make him wait for me.” She clutched at his hand. “Please!”
A ripple went up his backbone, as if small icy hooves skimmed along every vertebra, fleet as a deer crossing a frozen pond. He could feel another entity in the room, as though the man stood there by the fire, waiting for his wife to come to him. That big dark man, who, if anyone could, might well be able to call this woman to him across time and space, across the line between life and death. He felt a surge of anger, the bastard was not taking her. He could not have her.
“Please, Jamie, hurry, he’s getting too far away! Tell him!”
Feeling only a tad foolish, for the night was very odd in its lineaments, he spoke to the spot near the fire.
“Wait for her.” Wait a hundred years, you bastard, he thought to himself, because she isn’t coming any time soon. I will fight you every fucking step of the way.
“The tub is ready. It’s going to be a big shock for her body so ease her in a bit at a time.” Shura was standing in the doorway of the bath, the exhaustion of the night showing in his dark eyes. “Do you need my help?”
“No, I can manage.”
Shura left the room, closing the door behind him.
Jamie began to turn toward Pamela only to have his gaze halt at the hearth. He felt something strange tug at him, like an invisible thread connected him to that spot by the fire, a thread that pulled at his nerve endings. He was aware suddenly that every hair on his body was standing up, acknowledging that something other was indeed in the room with them. And then the tug stopped and the presence was gone. Jamie squelched the desire to go look up the chimney, to see if that something was on its way out.
He took a deep, shuddering breath and turned back to Pamela to find her looking up at him and though her gaze was still far away, he knew she could now see him. Her eyes beseeched him, the skin beneath them bruised with the fever and her restless roving in and out of that strange dream landscape that was causing her such agitation.
He picked her up and she struggled against him, her head turning back to that spot by the fire. He took her into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. He stripped her down and then picked her back up. Her skin was like fire against him and he prayed they hadn’t waited too long.
“I’m sorry, angel,” he said and then took a deep breath and put her in the water.
She screamed when the water touched her skin, trying hard to hang onto him and get away from the cold her nerves could sense. He was much stronger than her though, and pushed her relentlessly down and into the water. He got soaked in the process, as she did not go quietly and there was almost as much water on the floor as in the tub by the time he got her fully submerged.
“Jamie that hurts, please stop it! The water is freezing.”
“Too goddamn bad,” he said ruthlessly, still shaken by the presence in the other room. He was going to bring her back to the here and now even if he had to shock her into it. He did not like the look in her eyes at all; it was as if she was shuffling off her mortal coil right in front of him. He held her by the shoulders, until she stopped struggling and started to cry, silent tears that ran unceasing from those eyes that stood out stark as bruises in the pale face, heavy with fever and pain. She had calmed enough that he noticed other things too, like the way her ribs were sharp against the ivory skin, her legs gleaming lengths of bone with too little flesh. She was far too thin. She was going to damn well start eating after she recovered, he’d had enough of this wasting away in grief. She was going to embrace life if it bloody killed him.
“I just wanted him to wait for me, even for a second, he was right there, Jamie. I could smell him. I swear to you I could almost touch him.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he muttered grimly, still feeling a rage towards the entity that had been pulling her to it, out of this world, and into his.
He made her stay in the water for another ten minutes, until he felt her forehead and was convinced that her temperature had come down a few degrees at least. Then he helped her out, toweled her down and wrapped her up in his robe, tying the belt snug.
Her teeth were clacking together, and he picked her up and took her back into the bedroom, put her in the bed and covered her up.
“You’re a high-handed bastard, James Kirkpatrick,” she said weakly, falling back into the pillows.
“Yes, I am,” he said, “try not to forget it.”
Shura came in with the mug of his foul fever brew just then, took one look at the two of them, put the mug down and exited posthaste.
“Now drink this,” Jamie said, picking up the piping hot mug and putting it to her lips.
“It smells awful,” she said, turning her head away. She looked horribly frail, her neck like the stem of a flower that had been crushed under a careless foot.
“I don’t give a damn if it smells like the floor of the stable, you’re drinking it.”
She looked up at him, and then meekly submitted to having it poured down her throat, sip by sip. She was right, it did smell revolting, but he had been subjected to Shura’s cures more than once, and knew that while they smelled poisonous they worked extremely well. He would pour a gallon of it down her if necessary.
“Jamie,” she said quietly, when the drink was done, “I know you’re angry with me, but do you think you could hold me for a little bit. I feel so weak right now, as if I could slip away if someone doesn’t keep me tied to the earth.”
He swallowed. It was the illness asking, but he knew she needed human touch, needed it while she rode out the specters of this fever. He got into the bed with her and put his arms around her, holding her fast against the night and its ghosts. She sighed and put her head to his chest. He could feel the exhaustion in her, could feel the loss and grief that was making her ill.
She fell asleep there in his arms, fairly quickly, not yet cool to the touch, but at least not the temperature of a lit coal anymore. He relaxed a little, the feeling of her solid in his arms, reassuring him. He spoke low and fierce, looking toward the dying fire. “Let her go. If you can’t come back to her, you have to let her go, or you’ll kill her.”
The fire flared, a small uprush of flame, and then it died back to a glowing bed of coals. If it was an answer, he did not understand it.
Chapter Forty
Prayers and Penicillin
THE NEXT MORNING the household awoke to a wind that screeched about the corners of the house like a banshee and at least another two feet of snow that had accumulated during the night’s storm. The wind was the first thing Jamie heard as he slowly regained consciousness. The second thing was the hoarse breathing of the woman beside him. He did not need to put a hand to her forehead for he could feel the heat of her body through the material of his robe. His arms were still around her, her head on his chest. She was cooler now, but that was of small comfort considering the hoarse sounds coming from her chest.
He became aware of stirrings elsewhere in the room, and opened his eyes t
o find Shura bustling about. He also became aware that his body was very clear about the fact that a desirable woman, the desirable woman, was in his bed. He could feel every inch of her along his skin, every curve fitted to his every hollow. He was in the usual state of the male in the morning, and was trying to find a way to ease away from her and not have Shura notice his discomfort.
Shura merely, in the way of a medical man, updated him on what he’d missed during the time he’d slept and, as it turned out, he had slept for some time. He glanced at the clock by the bed—six hours of unbroken sleep. He was slightly horrified that he had slept so deeply while Pamela burned like a coal in his arms all night.
“It is fine, Yasha,” Shura said clearly interpreting the look on his face. “I would have woken you if there was any great change for better or worse.”
Despite his words, Jamie saw worry there in the dark, soulful eyes. It frightened him perhaps more than any event since Pamela had hallucinated the butterfly in the snow. He got up from the bed, trying hard not to disturb Pamela, who rolled over and moaned a little, her brow furrowed in pain.
“Could it kill her, Shura? Just tell me.”
Shura nodded, just a tiny concession to the possibility that she might succumb, that with the snow too deep to pass through and with the shadows gathered thick and deep upon the land, he might not be able to fight off the most formidable opponent of all.
Shura sighed. “Yasha, I have tried all remedies I can think of. She needs penicillin. I think she has—how do you say—an infection of the brain lining.”
“Meningitis—is that what you mean?”
Shura nodded. “Da, that is what I am meaning.”
Jamie sat down, abruptly. Shura was no mean diagnostician and Jamie had known fully-fledged GPs who were far less capable than this man. If he said Pamela had meningitis, then she probably did. The question, of course, was what to do about it. The biggest worry is that it might be bacterial rather than viral, and therefore serious enough to kill her. He got up again a few moments later. He was not going to allow this damn sickness to kill her, he would fight with the last ounce of stubbornness he had in his body before he allowed it to happen.
He went to the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, ran his fingers through his hair and then returned to the bedroom. It was a scene of disarray—basins of water, damp towels, mugs half empty, packets of herbs and a bottle of paracetamol without a lid. The blankets were half off the bed and all the linens were crumpled. He thought if he tidied a little it might give an illusion of control. The view out the window was much worse and destroyed any illusions he might have about getting Pamela to the hospital any time soon. The phone line was still out, and there was no way to get a car through the endless drifts which had drowned the paddock and yard and lay in great piles against the house. There was no way for a helicopter to land, unless they could manage to somehow hover long enough to take her up in a basket. It was unlikely anything was moving right now, though, weather this unexpected ground everything to a complete halt. He had considered every way to get her down the mountain and somehow then make it through the streets that would be hopelessly impassible to get her to the medical help that was needed. Except there was no phone to call for help, which was where his useless cycle of thought came back to each time.
The day passed quietly enough, considering there were children to feed and entertain and snow to be shoveled, even while it still fell in great white sheets. Shura stayed with Pamela much of the day as she drifted in and out of sleep, sometimes crying out in pain and confusion, and at others lying so still that Jamie, when he looked in, had the desire to stick a mirror under her nose just to be sure she was breathing.
Between the snowfall and the time of year, night fell early and it was full dark by four in the afternoon. Jamie, having managed a bath, fresh clothes and a meal, returned to his vigil at Pamela’s bedside and bid Shura, who looked completely exhausted, to go have his dinner and then get some sleep. He checked her temperature and found no comfort in that task. She was still hot, and her skin was dry and taut, with nary a bead of sweat to portend the breaking of her fever.
His thoughts circled back to how to get her to hospital, or even find a way to get a doctor here, culminating in a rather mad vision of bundling her up and flying down the mountainside with her on a sled.
“Jamie.” Her voice startled him, intent as he was on crazy plans. She hadn’t spoken all day, and he was relieved at her sudden consciousness.
“Yes?” he turned and walked over to the bed. She looked up at him and smiled weakly and he smiled back in reassurance though she looked terribly small and fragile in the big bed, her skin almost whiter than the sheets upon which she had spent a restless day.
“Am I dying? I heard you and Shura before,” she said. Her words were barely audible but he could hear the fear in them only too well. He damned himself for speaking in the room; he ought to have known better.
He sat down on the side of the bed and took her hand. “No, Pamela, you’re not dying. You are very sick and I’m afraid we’re stuck for the foreseeable future as the snow is several feet deep and still falling. The path to the stables is shoulder high with snow.”
“Jamie, don’t lie to me, please. If I’m dying I need to know. I have always trusted you to tell me the truth.”
“No, you’re not dying,” he said with grim determination.
She looked up at him, her hand tightening on his. Her eyes were fever-bright and pale green rather than their normal deep-water emerald. The intensity in her gaze worried him. Mind you, everything she did and said was worrying him just now. Still, he wasn’t quite prepared for what she did say.
“If I die, Jamie, I would have you look after my children.”
“I won’t allow it to happen, Pamela. You said it yourself, I’m a high-handed bastard. Death won’t be allowed admittance here, not today, not tonight, not this month or year—d’you understand?”
“I understand, Jamie. Only, if something were to happen, would you raise Conor and Isabelle?”
He saw that she meant it and that she needed an answer before she was going to be able to rest. He would have to tell her the truth because even in her fevered state she would know if he was less than honest with her.
“Yes, if that is what you want, Pamela, then I will raise them. You know I love them both dearly.”
She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze that was meant, he thought, to be reassuring.
“Would you read to me, Jamie?”
“Of course, I will,” he said, feeling somewhat relieved by this want of comfort, because comfort was for the living and the striving, and not for the wraiths that haunted the places in between—the places guarded by the elements: fire and water, air and earth.
“What would you have me read, sweetheart?”
“Keats,” she said, her voice drifting Lethe-wards, the one word barely audible.
Keats was one of the poets he had long held fast in the storehouse of his mind, and so he did not need pages in front of him. He settled beside her, his eyes on the fire as it hissed high and bright, an open casement between worlds.
He spoke the lines as they were meant to be spoken, soft and then with force where it was necessary and the words climbed the ether of night and became the ghosts of castles long crumbled, of fairy lands once glimpsed from the corner of a child’s eyes, glimmering visions which had disappeared along with childhood. And as he spoke he watched and saw other things, the translucent delicacy of her hand against the midnight blue of the quilt, the shadows of her veins so close to the surface of that luminous skin, like rose petals in its soft febrile flush.
He realized in that moment that part of him had always been waiting, like the specter on the edge of the feast, waiting for her to beckon him in out of the shadows into the light of her warmth. He had waited and then had not, and now it seemed with him neither wishing nor willing it, here he was again—waiting. Waiting for what though? That he loved her he admitted
to himself, and for a time, it had been the love of a friend for one who was very dear, but now—now, something had once again shifted. Yes, he loved her. He had, he supposed, never truly stopped. Some things were born in a man’s cells and beyond that to the inner place that each man must hold sacred or risk losing his soul forever. Or perhaps that which a man held sacred was his soul. This woman was tangled up inextricably in all of it, she his soul beyond the confines of narrow flesh.
When he came to the line: ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain…’ She murmured the words along with him, chilling him to his core, despite the heat of her body, despite the fire, burning high and hot. His voice flowed on, up and down, ribboning through the night like some aerial creature, apart from him, giving her thread-by-thread, a skein by which to hold to life, to beauty, to the people who needed her to stay here and not cross that chasm, across which called the phantoms of grief, of joy and love remembered, now beyond human touch, but not beyond a heart that could not accept nor understand such loss.
He stayed with her until she fell back into the phantom sleep that came with fever, her breath sounding like the rasp of sandpaper against wood. He went to the window after, along the same well-worn path he had walked the night before. He stood watching the snow fall relentlessly into the dark bowl of night and he prayed that he had told her the truth and that he would be able to keep the promise he had made her. The one thing he knew for certain was that he was going to have to find help outside this house, even if he died trying to reach it. He sighed; he knew just whose help he needed.
Long ago, his grandmother would have been a bean fasa—a wise woman—meaning—like most Irish terms—more than the literal translation. It was understood that such a personage had truck with the fairies, that they had trained her in the ways of medicine and healing and that they would continue to guide and help her throughout her career. If he could believe it of anyone, it would be Finola, for there had long been something of the witch about her—a green witch, steeped in the lore of herbs and their uses, and using methods that could at best be called unconventional to effect her cures. He might not entirely understand how his grandmother practiced her healing, but he trusted her skills implicitly.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 43
