The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [69]
“Why, thank you. How lovely!” I held the cap up to admire, privately thinking a few choice things about Grannie Bacon.
I had encountered that redoubtable lady a few months earlier, at Farquard Campbell’s plantation, where she was visiting Farquard’s aged and obnoxious mother. Mrs. Bacon was almost as old as the ancient Mrs. Campbell, and quite as capable of annoying her descendants, but also possessed of a lively sense of humor.
She had disapproved, audibly, repeatedly, and eventually to my face, of my habit of going about with my head uncovered, it being her opinion that it was unseemly for a woman of my age not to wear either cap or kerch, reprehensible for the wife of a man of my husband’s position—and furthermore, that only “backcountry sluts and women of low character” wore their hair loose upon their shoulders. I had laughed, ignored her, and given her a bottle of Jamie’s second-best whisky, with instructions to have a wee nip with her breakfast and another after supper.
A woman to acknowledge a debt, she had chosen to repay it in characteristic fashion.
“Will ye not put it on?” Eglantine and Pansy were looking trustfully up at me. “Grannie told us to be sure ye put it on, so as we could tell her how it suited ye.”
“Did she, indeed.” No help for it, I supposed. I shook the object out, twisted up my hair with one hand, and pulled the mobcap on. It drooped over my brow, almost reaching the bridge of my nose, and draped my cheeks in ribboned swathes, so that I felt like a chipmunk peering out from its burrow.
Eglantine and Patsy clapped their hands in paroxysms of delight. I thought I heard muffled sounds of amusement from somewhere behind me, but didn’t turn to see.
“Do tell your grannie I said thank you for the lovely present, won’t you?” I patted the girls gravely on their blond heads, offered them each a molasses toffee from my pocket, and sent them off to their mother. I was just reaching up to pull off the excrescence on my head, when I realized that their mother was present—had probably been there all along, in fact, lurking behind a persimmon tree.
“Oh!” I said, converting my reach into an adjustment of the floppy chapeau. I held the overhanging flap up with one finger, the better to peer out. “Mrs. Bacon! I didn’t see you there.”
“Mrs. Fraser.” Polly Bacon’s face was flushed a delicate rose color—no doubt from the chill of the day. She had her lips pressed tight together, but her eyes danced under the ruffle of her own very proper cap.
“The girls wanted to give ye the cap,” she said, tactfully averting her gaze from it, “but my mother-in-law did send ye another wee gift. I thought perhaps I’d best bring that myself, though.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with any more of Grannie Bacon’s gifts, but took the proffered parcel with as much grace as I could manage. It was a small bag of oiled silk, plumply stuffed with something, with a faintly sweet, slightly oily botanical scent about it. A crude picture of a plant had been drawn on the front in brownish ink; something with an upright stalk and what looked like umbels. It looked faintly familiar, but I could put no name to it. I undid the string, and poured a small quantity of tiny dark-brown seeds out into my palm.
“What are these?” I asked, looking up at Polly in puzzlement.
“I don’t know what they’re called in English,” she said. “The Indians call them dauco. Grannie Bacon’s own grannie was a Catawba medicine woman, aye? That’s where she learnt the use of them.”
“Was she really?” I was more than interested now. No wonder the drawing seemed familiar; this must be the plant that Nayawenne had once shown me—the women’s plant. To be sure of it, though, I asked.
“What is the use of them?”
The color rose higher in Polly’s cheeks, and she glanced round the clearing