A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [405]
He had risen to go and call Allan; at this, he froze, staring at me with his mouth open. Then he slowly lowered himself back into his chair.
“What do you mean?”
Having finally got his attention, I was pleased to lay out the facts before him; I had them neatly to hand, having given them considerable thought over the last few days.
While several families on the Ridge had suffered the depredations of amoebic dysentery, I hadn’t. I had had a dangerously high fever, accompanied by dreadful headache and—so far as I could tell from Malva’s excited account—convulsions. But it certainly wasn’t dysentery.
“Are you certain of this?” He was twiddling his discarded quill, frowning.
“It’s rather hard to mistake bloody flux for headache and fever,” I said tartly. “Now—did you have flux?”
He hesitated a moment, but curiosity got the better of him.
“No,” he said. “It was as you say—a headache fit to split the skull, and fever. A terrible weakness, and . . . and extraordinarily unpleasant dreams. I had no notion that it was not the same illness afflicting the others.”
“No reason you should, I suppose. You didn’t see any of them. Unless—did Malva describe the illness to you?” I asked only from curiosity, but he shook his head.
“I do not wish to hear of such things; she does not tell me. Still, why have you come?” He tilted his head to one side, narrowing his eyes. “What difference does it make whether you and I suffered an ague, rather than a flux? Or anyone else, for that matter?” He seemed rather agitated, and got up, moving about the cabin in an unfocused, bumbling sort of way, quite unlike his usual decisive movements.
I sighed, rubbing a hand over my forehead. I’d got the basic information I came for; explaining why I’d wanted it was going to be uphill work. I had enough trouble getting Jamie, Young Ian, and Malva to accept the germ theory of disease, and that was with the evidence visible through a microscope to hand.
“Disease is catching,” I said a little tiredly. “It passes from one person to another—sometimes directly, sometimes by means of food or water shared between a sick person and a healthy one. All of the people who had the flux lived near a particular small spring; I have some reason to think that it was the water of that spring that carried the amoeba—that made them ill.
“You and I, though—I haven’t seen you in weeks. Nor have I been near anyone else who’s had the ague. How is it that we should both fall ill of the same thing?”
He stared at me, baffled and still frowning.
“I do not see why two persons cannot fall ill without seeing each other. Certainly I have known such illnesses as you describe: gaol fever, for instance, spreads in close quarters—but surely not all illnesses behave in the same fashion?”
“No, they don’t,” I admitted. I wasn’t in a fit state to try to get across the basic notions of epidemiology or public health, either. “It’s possible, for instance, for some diseases to be spread by mosquitoes. Malaria, for one.” Some forms of viral meningitis, for another—my best guess as to the illness I’d just recovered from.
“Do you recall being bitten by a mosquito any time recently?”
He stared at me, then uttered a brief sort of bark I took for laughter.
“My dear woman, everyone in this festering climate is bitten repeatedly during the hot weather.” He scratched at his beard, as though by reflex.
That was true. Everyone but me and Roger. Now and then, some desperate insect would have a go, but for the most part, we escaped unbitten, even when there were absolute plagues of the creatures and everyone around us was scratching. As a theory, I suspected that blood-drinking mosquitoes had evolved so closely with mankind through the years that Roger and I simply didn’t smell right to them, having come from too far away in time. Brianna and Jemmy, who shared my genetic material but also Jamie’s, were bitten, but not as frequently as most people.
I didn’t recall having been bitten any time recently, but it was possible that I had been and had simply been too busy