A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [275]
“I’m sure,” I said tartly. I had obliged Manfred to show me the evidence—in fact, I had taken scrapings from the lesion to examine microscopically—then took him straight to find Jamie, barely waiting for the boy to do up his breeches.
Jamie looked fixedly at Manfred, plainly trying to decide what to say. Manfred, purple-faced from the double stress of confession and examination, dropped his own eyes before this basilisk gaze, staring at a crescent of black hoof paring that lay on the ground.
“I’m that sorry, sir,” he murmured. “I—I didna mean to . . .”
“I shouldna suppose anyone does,” Jamie said. He breathed deeply and made a sort of subterranean growling noise that caused Manfred to hunch his shoulders and try to withdraw his head, turtlelike, into the safer confines of his clothing.
“He did do the right thing,” I pointed out, trying to put the best face possible on the situation. “Now, I mean—telling the truth.”
Jamie snorted.
“Well, he couldna be poxing wee Lizzie, now, could he? That’s worse than only going wi’ a whore.”
“I suppose some men would just keep quiet about it, and hope for the best.”
“Aye, some would.” He narrowed his eyes at Manfred, evidently looking for overt indications that Manfred might be a villain of this description.
Gideon, who disliked having his feet messed about and was consequently in bad temper, stamped heavily, narrowly missing Jamie’s own foot. He tossed his head, and emitted a rumbling noise that I thought was roughly the equivalent of Jamie’s growl.
“Aye, well.” Jamie left off glaring at Manfred, and grabbed Gideon’s halter. “Go along to the house with him, Sassenach. I’ll finish here, and then we’ll have Joseph in and see what’s to do.”
“All right.” I hesitated, unsure whether to speak in front of Manfred. I didn’t want to raise his hopes too much, until I’d had a chance to look at the scrapings under the microscope.
The spirochetes of syphilis were very distinctive, but I didn’t think I had a stain that would allow me to see them with a simple light microscope such as mine was. And while I thought my homemade penicillin could likely eliminate the infection, I would have no way of knowing for certain, unless I could see them, and then see that they had disappeared from his blood.
I contented myself with saying, “I have got penicillin, mind.”
“I ken that well enough, Sassenach.” Jamie switched his baleful look from Manfred to me. I’d saved his life with the penicillin—twice—but he hadn’t enjoyed the process. With a Scottish noise of dismissal, he bent and picked up Gideon’s enormous hoof again.
Manfred seemed a bit shell-shocked, and said nothing on the way to the house. He hesitated at the door to the surgery, glancing uneasily from the gleaming microscope to the open box of surgical tools, and then toward the covered bowls lined up on the counter, in which I grew my penicillin colonies.
“Come in,” I said, but was obliged to reach out and take him by the sleeve before he would step across the threshold. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been to the surgery before; it was a good five miles to the McGillivrays’ place, and Frau McGillivray was entirely capable of dealing with her family’s minor ills.
I wasn’t feeling terribly charitable toward Manfred at the moment, but gave him a stool and asked if he would like a cup of coffee. I thought he could probably use a stiff drink, if he was about to have an interview with Jamie and Joseph Wemyss, but supposed I had better keep him clear-headed.
“No, ma’am,” he said, and swallowed, white-faced. “I mean, thank ye, no.”
He looked extremely young, and very frightened.
“Roll up your sleeve then, please. I’m going to draw a bit of blood, but it won’t hurt much. How did you come to meet the, er, young lady? Myra, that was her name?”
“Aye, ma’am.” Tears welled in his eyes at her name; I suppose he really had loved her, poor boy—or thought he had.
He had met Myra in a tavern in Hillsboro. She had seemed kind, he said, and was very pretty, and when she asked