22
ENSORCELLMENT
TOM CHRISTIE didn’t come back to the surgery, but he did send his daughter, Malva, to get the ointment. The girl was dark-haired, slender, and quiet, but seemed intelligent. She paid close attention as I quizzed her on the look of the wound—so far, so good, a bit of redness, but no suppuration, no reddish streaks up the arm—and gave her instructions on how to apply the ointment and change the dressing.
“Good, then,” I said, giving her the jar. “If he should begin a fever, come and fetch me. Otherwise, make him come in a week, to have the stitches taken out.”
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll do that.” She didn’t turn and go, though, but lingered, her gaze flickering over the mounds of drying herbs on the gauze racks and the implements of my surgery.
“Do you need something else, dear? Or did you have a question?” She’d seemed to understand my instructions perfectly well—but perhaps she wanted to ask something more personal. After all, she had no mother . .
“Well, aye,” she said, and nodded at the table. “I only wondered—what is it that ye write in yon black book, ma’am?”
“This? Oh. It’s my surgical notes, and recipes . . . er . . . receipts, I mean, for medicines. See?” I turned the book round and opened it so that she could see the page where I had drawn a sketch of the damage to Miss Mouse’s teeth.
Malva’s gray eyes were bright with curiosity, and she leaned forward to read, hands carefully folded behind her back as though afraid she might touch the book by accident.
“It’s all right,” I said, a little amused by her caution. “You can look through it, if you like.” I pushed it toward her, and she stepped back, startled. She glanced up at me, a look of doubt wrinkling her brow, but when I smiled at her, she took a tiny, excited breath, and reached out to turn a page.
“Oh, look!” The page she’d turned to wasn’t one of mine, but one of Daniel Rawlings’s—it showed the removal of a dead child from the uterus, via the use of assorted tools of dilatation and curettage. I glanced at the page, and hastily away. Rawlings hadn’t been an artist, but he had had a brutal knack for rendering the reality of a situation.
Malva didn’t seem to be distressed by the drawings, though; she was bug-eyed with interest.
I began to be interested, too, watching covertly as she turned pages at random. She naturally paid most attention to the drawings—but she paused to read the descriptions and recipes, as well.
“Why d’ye write things down that ye’ve done?” she asked, glancing up with raised eyebrows. “The receipts, aye, I see ye might forget things—but why d’ye draw these pictures and write down the bits about how ye took off a toe wi’ the frost-rot? Would ye do it differently, another time?”
“Well, sometimes you might,” I said, laying aside the stalk of dried rosemary I’d been stripping of its needles. “Surgery isn’t the same each time. All bodies are a bit different, and even though you may do the same basic procedure a dozen times, there will be a dozen things that happen differently—sometimes only tiny things, sometimes big ones.
“But I keep a record of what I’ve done for several reasons,” I added, pushing back my stool and coming round the table to stand beside her. I turned another few pages, stopping at the record I kept of old Grannie MacBeth’s complaints—a list so extensive that I had alphabetized it for my own convenience, beginning with Arthritis—all joints, running through Dyspepsia, Earache, and Fainting, and then onward for most of two pages, terminating with Womb, prolapsed.
“Partly, it’s so that I’ll know what’s been done for a particular person, and what happened—so that if they need treatment later, I can look back and have an accurate description of their earlier state. To compare, you see?”
She nodded eagerly.
“Aye, I see. So ye’d know were they getting better or worse. What else, then?”
“Well, the most important reason,” I said slowly, seeking the right words, “is so that another doctor—someone who might come later—so that person could read the record, and see how I’d done this or that. It might show them a way to do something they hadn’t done themselves—or a better way.”
Her mouth pursed up in interest.
“Ooh! Ye mean someone might learn from this”—she touched a finger to the page, delicately—“how to do what it is ye do? Without ’prenticing himself to a doctor?”
“Well, it’s best if you have someone to teach you,” I said, amused at her eagerness. “And there are things you can’t really learn from a book. But if there’s no one to learn from—” I glanced out the window, at the vista of green wilderness swarming over the mountains. “It’s better than nothing,” I concluded.
“Where did you learn?” she asked, curious. “From this book? I see there’s another hand, besides yours. Whose was it?”
I ought to have seen that one coming. I hadn’t quite bargained on Malva Christie’s quickness, though.
“Ah . . . I learned from a lot of books,” I said. “And from other doctors.”
“Other doctors,” she echoed, looking at me in fascination. “D’ye call yourself a doctor, then? I didna ken women ever could be.”
For the rather good reason that no women did call themselves physicians or surgeons now—nor were accepted as such.
I coughed.
“Well . . . it’s a name, that’s all. A good many people just say wisewoman, or conjure woman. Or ban-lichtne,” I added. “But it’s all the same, really. It only matters whether I know something that might help them.”
“Ban—” She mouthed the unfamiliar word. “I haven’t heard that before.”
“It’s the Gaelic. The Highland tongue, you know? It means ‘female healer’ or something like.”
“Oh, the Gaelic.” An expression of mild derision crossed her face; I expected she had absorbed her father’s attitude toward the Highlanders’ ancient language. She evidently saw something in my face, though, for she instantly erased the disdain from her own features and bent over the book again. “Who was it wrote these other bits, then?”
“A man named Daniel Rawlings.” I smoothed a creased page, with the usual sense of affection for my predecessor. “He was a doctor from Virginia.”
“Him?” She looked up, surprised. “The same who’s buried in the boneyard up the mountain?”
“Ah . . . yes, that’s him.” And the story of how he came to be there was not something to be shared with Miss Christie. I glanced out of the window, estimating the light. “Will your father be wanting his dinner?”
“Oh!” She stood up straight at that, glancing out the window, too, with a faint look of alarm. “Aye, he will.” She cast a last look of longing toward the book, but then brushed down her skirt and set her cap straight, ready to go. “I thank ye, Mrs. Fraser, for showing me your wee book.”
“Happy to,” I assured her sincerely. “You’re welcome to come again and look at it. In fact . . . would you—” I hesitated, but plunged on, encouraged by her look of bright interest. “I’m going to take a growth from Grannie Macbeth’s ear tomorrow. Would you like to come along with me, to see how? It would be a help to me, to have another pair of hands,” I added, seeing sudden doubt war with the interest in her eyes.
“Oh, aye, Mrs. Fraser—I’d dearly like it!” she said. “It’s only my father—” She looked uneasy as she said it, but then seemed to make up her mind. “Well . . . I’ll come. I’m sure I can talk him round.”
“Would it help if I were to send a note? Or come and speak with him?” I was suddenly quite desirous that she should come with me.
She gave a small shake of the head.
“Nay, ma’am, it’ll be all right, I’m sure.” She dimpled at me suddenly, gray eyes sparkling. “I’ll tell him I’ve had a keek at your black book, and it’s no by way of being spells in it, at all, but only receipts for teas and purges. I’ll maybe not say about the drawings, though,” she added.
“Spells?” I asked incredulously. “Is that what he thought?”
“Oh, aye,” she assured me. “He warned me not to touch it, for fear of ensorcellment.”
“Ensorcellment,” I murmured, bemused. Well, Thomas Christie was a schoolmaster, after all. In fact, he might have been right, I thought; Malva glanced back at the book as I went with her to the door, obvious fascination on her face.