Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [350]
I held the cup below my chin, inhaling the pleasant, bitter smell, feeling the heated fumes of the brandy clarify my sinuses. Sniffing, it occurred to me to wonder exactly why, in a city and a building plagued with colds and influenza, my own sinuses remained unclogged.
In fact, aside from the childbed fever, I had not been ill once since my passage through the stone circle. That was odd, I thought; given the standards of hygiene and sanitation, and the crowded conditions in which we frequently lived, I ought surely to have come down at least with a case of sniffles by this time. But I remained as disgustingly healthy as always.
Plainly I was not immune to all diseases, or I would not have had the fever. But the common communicable ones? Some were explainable on the basis of vaccination, of course. I couldn’t, for example, catch smallpox, typhus, cholera, or yellow fever. Not that yellow fever was likely, but still. I set down the cup and felt my left arm, through the cloth of the sleeve. The vaccination scar had faded with time, but was still prominent enough to be detectable; a roughly circular patch of pitted skin, perhaps a half-inch in diameter.
I shuddered briefly, reminded again of Geillis Duncan, then pushed the thought away, diving back into a contemplation of my state of health in order to avoid thinking either of the woman who had gone to a death by fire, or of Colum MacKenzie, the man who had sent her there.
The cup was nearly empty, and I rose to refill it, thinking. An acquired immunity, perhaps? I had learned in nurses’ training that colds are caused by innumerable viruses, each distinct and ever-evolving. Once exposed to a particular virus, the instructor had explained, you became immune to it. You continued to catch cold as you encountered new and different viruses, but the chances of meeting something you hadn’t been exposed to before became smaller as you got older. So, he had said, while children caught an average of six colds per year, people in middle age caught only two, and elderly folk might go for years between colds, only because they had already met most of the common viruses and become immune.
Now there was a possibility, I thought. What if some types of immunity became hereditary, as viruses and people co-evolved? Antibodies to many diseases could be passed from mother to child, I knew that. Via the placenta or the breast milk, so that the child was immune—temporarily—to any disease to which the mother had been exposed. Perhaps I never caught cold because I harbored ancestral antibodies to eighteenth-century viruses—benefiting from the colds caught by all my ancestors for the past two hundred years?
I was pondering this entertaining idea, so caught up in it that I hadn’t bothered to sit down, but was sipping my tea standing in the middle of the room, when a soft knock sounded on the door.
I sighed impatiently, annoyed at being distracted. I didn’t bother to set the cup down, but came to the door prepared to receive—and repel—the expected inquiries about Jamie’s health. Likely Cameron had come across an unclear passage in a dispatch, or His Highness had thought better of his generosity in dismissing Jamie from attendance at the ball. Well, they would get him out of bed tonight only over my dead and trampled body.
I yanked open the door, and the words of greeting died in my throat. Jack Randall stood in the shadows of the doorway.
* * *
The wetness of the spilled tea soaking through my skirt brought me to my senses, but he had already stepped inside. He looked me up and down with his usual air of disdainful appraisal, then glanced at the closed bedroom door.
“You are alone?”
“Yes!”
The hazel glance flickered back and forth between me and the door, assessing my truthfulness. His face was lined from ill health, pale from poor nutrition and a winter spent indoors, but showed