The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [339]
The vial contained pine oil, sharp and reeking of resin. He wasn’t sure how much to use, but poured a generous dollop into the water. Then he pried the cork out of the jar, and the pungent scent of camphor rose up like a genie from the bottle. Not really crystals, he saw; lumps of some sort of dried resin, grainy and slightly sticky. He poured some into the palm of his hand, then rubbed them hard between his hands before dropping them into the water, wondering even as he did so at the instinctive familiarity of the gesture.
“Oh, that’s it,” he said, realizing.
“What’s it?”
“This.” He waved a hand round the snug sanctuary, rapidly filling with pungent steam. “I remember being in my cot, with a blanket over my head. My mother put this stuff in hot water—smelled just like this. That’s why it seemed familiar.”
“Oh.” The thought seemed to reassure her. “Did you have croup when you were little?”
“I suppose so, though I don’t remember it. Just the smell.” Steam had quite filled the little tent by now, moist and pungent. He drew a deep breath, pulling in a penetrating lungful, then patted Brianna’s leg.
“Don’t worry; this’ll do the trick,” he said.
Jemmy promptly started coughing his guts out with more seal noises, but they seemed less alarming now. Whether it was the darkness, the smell, or simply the homely racket of the renewed kitchen noises outside the tent, things seemed calmer. He heard Bree take in a deep breath, too, and let it out, and felt rather than saw the subtle shift of her body as she relaxed a little, patting Jemmy’s back.
They sat quietly for a bit, listening to Jemmy cough, wheeze, gasp, cough, and finally catch his breath, hiccupping slightly. He’d stopped whimpering, seeming soothed by the proximity of his parents.
Roger had dropped the cork to the camphor jar; he patted round on the floor until he found it, then pushed it firmly back in.
“I wonder what your mother’s done with her rings?” he said, looking for some easy subject of conversation to break the steam-filled silence.
“Why should she have done anything with them?” Brianna brushed back a lock of hair; she’d had it put up for the evening, but it was slipping out of its pins, clinging damply to her face.
“She wasn’t wearing them when she gave me the stuff.” He nodded at the camphor jar, set out of harm’s way near the wall. He had a clear memory of her hands, the fingers long, white, and bare; they’d struck him, since he’d never seen her hands without the gold and silver rings.
“Are you sure? She never takes them off, except to do something really nasty.” She giggled, a nervous, unexpected sound. “The last time I remember was when Jem dropped his bawbee in the chamber pot.”
Roger gave a brief snort of amusement. A bawbee was any sort of small object, but that’s what they’d taken to calling the iron ring—originally meant for leading cattle by the nose—that Jem liked to chew on. It was his favorite toy, and he didn’t like to go to bed without it.
“Ba-ba?” Jem raised his head, eyes half-closed. He was still breathing thickly, but beginning to display an interest in something besides his own discomfort. “Ba-ba!”
“Oops, shouldn’t have mentioned it.” Bree joggled him gently on her knee, and began to sing softly, half under her breath, to distract him.
“In a can-yon, in a cav-ern, exca-va-ting for a mine . . . Dwelt a min-er, forty-nin-er, and his daugh-ter, Clementine . . .”
The dark privacy of the tent reminded Roger of something; he realized that it had something of the same feeling of peaceful enclosure that the bench beneath the willows had had, though the tent was a lot hotter. The linen of his shirt was already limp on his shoulders, and he could feel sweat trickling down his back from under the hair tied at his