The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [65]
Jamie couldn’t even sit quietly in his room. If someone wasn’t coming in to air the sheets, someone else was coming in to build the fire or take away the rug to be beaten or bring fresh candles or ask whether his stockings needed darning. They did, but still.
What he needed, he thought suddenly, was a fridstool. As though the thought had released him in some way, he got up and set off with determination to find one, narrowly avoiding embranglement with two footmen who were carrying an enormous settee up the front stair, it being too wide for the back.
Not the park. Aside from the possibility of lurking Quinns, the place teemed with people. And while none of them would likely trouble him, the essence of a fridstool was solitude. He turned toward the hall that led toward the back of the house and the garden.
It was an elderly Anglican nun who’d told him what a fridstool was, just last year. Sister Eudoxia was a distant connection of Lady Dunsany’s, who’d come to Helwater to recuperate from what Cook said was the dropsical dispersion.
Glimpsing Sister Eudoxia sitting in a wicker elbow chair on the lawn, wrinkled eyelids closed against the sun like a lizard’s, he’d wondered what Claire would have said of the lady’s condition. She wouldn’t have called it a dropsical dispersion, he supposed, and smiled involuntarily at the thought, recalling his wife’s outspokenness on the matter of such complaints as iliac passions, confined bowels, or what one practitioner called “the universal relaxation of the solids.”
The sister did have the dropsy, though. He’d learned that when he came upon her one evening, quite unexpectedly, leaning on the paddock fence, wheezing, her lips blue.
“Shall I fetch ye someone, Sister?” he said, alarmed at her appearance. “A maid—shall I send for Lady Dunsany?”
She didn’t answer at once but turned toward him, struggling for breath, and lost her grip on the fence. He seized her as she began to fall and, from sheer necessity, picked her up in his arms. He apologized profusely, much alarmed—what if she were about to die?—looking wildly round for help, but then realized that she was not in fact expiring. She was laughing. Barely able to catch breath but laughing, bony shoulders shaking slightly under the dark cloak she wore.
“No … young … man,” she managed at last, and coughed a bit. “I’ll be all … right. Take me—” She ran out of air but pointed a trembling finger toward the little folly that roosted among the trees beyond the stable.
He was disconcerted but did what she wanted. She relaxed quite naturally against him, and he was moved at sight of the neat parting in her gray hair, just visible at the edge of her veil. She was frail but heavier than he’d thought, and as he lowered her carefully onto the little bench in the folly, he saw that her lower legs and feet were grossly swollen, the flesh puffing over the straps of the sandals she wore. She smiled up at him.
“Do you know, I believe that is the first time I’ve found myself in a young man’s arms? Quite a pleasant experience; perhaps if I’d had it earlier, I should not have been a nun.”
Dark eyes twinkled up at him from a network of deep wrinkles, and he couldn’t help smiling back.
“I shouldna like to think myself a threat to your vow o’ chastity, Sister.”
She laughed outright at that, wheezing gently, then coughed, pounding her chest with one hand.
“I dinna want to be responsible for your death, either, Sister,” he said, eyeing her with concern. Her lips were faintly blue. “Should I not fetch someone for ye? Or at least tell someone to bring ye a bit of brandy?”
“You should not,” she said definitely, and reached into a capacious pocket at her waist, withdrawing a small bottle. “I haven’t drunk spirits in more than fifty years, but the doctor says I must have a drop for the sake of my health, and who am I to say him nay? Sit down,