The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [32]
I could not help anyone, if my own feelings got in the way. And I must help. It was as simple as that. But Brianna had no such knowledge to use as a shield. Not yet.
She had finished wiping down the stools, boxes, and other impedimenta for the morning surgery, and straightened up, a small frown between her brows.
“Do you remember the woman you saw yesterday? The one with the retarded little boy?”
“Not something you’d forget,” I said, as lightly as possible. “Why? Here, can you deal with this?” I gestured at the folding table I used, which was stubbornly declining to fold up properly, its joints having swollen with the damp.
Brianna frowned slightly, studying it, then struck the offending joint sharply with the side of her hand. It gave way and collapsed obediently at once, recognizing superior force.
“There.” She rubbed the side of her hand absently, still frowning. “You were making a big thing of telling her to try not to have any more children. The little boy—was it an inheritable condition, then?”
“You might say that,” I replied dryly. “Congenital syphilis.”
She looked up, blanching.
“Syphilis? You’re sure?”
I nodded, rolling up a length of boiled linen for bandaging. It was still very damp, but no help for it.
“The mother wasn’t showing overt signs of the late stages—yet—but it’s quite unmistakable in a child.”
The mother had come simply to have a gumboil lanced, the little boy clinging to her skirts. He’d had the characteristic “saddle nose,” with its pushed-in bridge, as well as a jaw so malformed that I wasn’t surprised at his poor nutrition; he could barely chew. I couldn’t tell how much of his evident backwardness was due to brain damage and how much to deafness; he appeared to have both, but I hadn’t tested their extent—there being exactly nothing I could do to remedy either condition. I had advised the mother to give him pot liquor, which might help with the malnutrition, but there was little else to be done for him, poor mite.
“I don’t see it so often here as I did in Paris or Edinburgh, where there were a lot of prostitutes,” I told Bree, tossing the ball of bandages into the canvas bag she held open. “Now and then, though. Why? You don’t think Roger has syphilis, do you?”
She looked at me, openmouthed. Her look of shock was obliterated by an instant flood of angry red.
“I do not!” she said. “Mother!”
“Well, I didn’t really think so,” I said mildly. “Happens in the best of families, though—and you were asking.”
She snorted heavily.
“I was asking about contraception,” she said, through her teeth. “Or at least I meant to, before you started in with the Physician’s Guide to Venereal Disease.”
“Oh, that.” I eyed her thoughtfully, taking in the dried milk stains on her bodice. “Well, breast-feeding is reasonably effective. Not absolute, by any means, but fairly effective. Less so, after the first six months”—Jemmy was now six months old—“but still effective.”
“Mmphm,” she said, sounding so like Jamie that I had to bite my lower lip in order not to laugh. “And exactly what else is effective?”
I hadn’t really discussed contraception—eighteenth-century style—with her. It hadn’t seemed necessary when she first appeared at Fraser’s Ridge, and then it really wasn’t necessary, she being already pregnant. So she thought it was now?
I frowned, slowly putting rolls of bandage and bundles of herbs into my bag.
“The most common thing is some sort of barrier. A piece of silk or a sponge, soaked with anything from vinegar to brandy—though if you have it, tansy oil or oil of cedar is supposed to work the best. I have heard of women in the Indies using half a lemon, but that’s obviously not a suitable alternative here.”
She uttered a short laugh.
“No, I wouldn’t think so. I don’t think the tansy oil works all that well, either—that’s what Marsali was using when