Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [141]
“Claire! Wake up, lass! What’s amiss?” The shaking and calling roused me at last to a fuzzy apprehension of my surroundings. I was in bed, and it was Jamie’s hand on my shoulder, and the linen sheets over me. But the snakes continued to writhe in my belly, and I moaned loudly, the sound alarming me almost as much as it did Jamie.
He flung back the sheets and rolled me onto my back, trying to push my knees down. I stayed stubbornly rolled into a ball, clutching my stomach, trying to contain the pangs of sharp agony that stabbed through me.
He yanked the quilt back over me and rushed out of the room, barely pausing to snatch his kilt from the stool.
I had little attention to spare for anything other than my inner turmoil. My ears were ringing, and a cold sweat soaked my face.
“Madame? Madame!”
I opened my eyes enough to see the maid assigned to our appartement, eyes frantic and hair awry, bending over the bed. Jamie, half-naked and still more frantic, was behind her. I shut my eyes, groaning, but not before I saw him grab the maid by the shoulder, hard enough to shake her curls loose from her nightcap.
“Is she losing the child? Is she?”
It seemed extremely likely. I twisted on the bed, grunting, and doubled tighter, as though to protect the burden of pain I contained.
There was an increasing babble of voices in the room, mostly female, and a number of hands poked and prodded at me. I heard a male voice speaking amid the babble; not Jamie, someone French. At the voice’s direction, a number of hands fastened themselves to my ankles and shoulders and stretched me flat upon the bed.
A hand reached under my nightdress and probed my belly. I opened my eyes, panting, and saw Monsieur Flèche, the Royal Physician, kneeling by the bed as he frowned in concentration. I should have felt flattered at this evidence of the King’s favor, but had little attention to spare for it. The character of the pain seemed to be changing; while it grew stronger in spasms, it was more or less constant, and yet it seemed to be almost moving, traveling from somewhere high up in my abdomen to a lower spot.
“Not a miscarriage,” Monsieur Flèche was assuring Jamie, who hovered anxiously over his shoulder. “There is no bleeding.” I saw one of the attending ladies staring in rapt horror at the scars on his back. She grasped a companion by the sleeve, calling her attention to them.
“Perhaps an inflammation of the gallbladder,” Monsieur Flèche was saying. “Or a sudden chill of the liver.”
“Idiot,” I said through clenched teeth.
Monsieur Flèche stared haughtily down his rather large nose at me, belatedly adding his gold-rimmed pince-nez to increase the effect. He laid a hand upon my clammy brow, incidentally covering my eyes so that I could no longer glare at him.
“Most likely the liver,” he was saying to Jamie. “Impaction of the gallbladder causes this accumulation of bilious humors in the blood, which cause pain—and temporary derangement,” he added authoritatively, pressing down harder as I thrashed to and fro. “She should be bled at once. Plato, the basin!”
I yanked one hand free and batted the restraining hand off my head.
“Get away from me, you bloody quack! Jamie! Don’t let them touch me with that!” Plato, Monsieur Flèche’s assistant, was advancing upon me with lancet and basin, while the ladies in the background gasped and fanned each other, lest they be overcome with excitement at this drama.
Jamie, white-faced, glanced helplessly between me and Monsieur Flèche. Coming to a sudden decision, he grabbed the hapless Plato and pulled him back from the bed,