* * *
Ewan Cameron was in charge of what passed for intelligence operations at Holyrood. His quarters were at the end of the west wing, tucked away near the kitchens. On purpose, I suspected, having witnessed the man’s appetite in action. Possibly a tapeworm, I thought, viewing the officer’s cadaverous countenance as he opened the packet and scanned the dispatches.
“All in order?” I asked after a moment. I had to repress the automatic urge to add “sir.”
Startled from his train of thought, he jerked his head up from the dispatches and blinked at me.
“Um? Oh!” Recalled to himself, he smiled and hastened to make apologies.
“I’m sorry, Mistress Fraser. How impolite of me to forget myself and leave you standing there. Yes, everything appears to be in order—most interesting,” he murmured to himself. Then, snapping back to an awareness of me, “Would you be so kind as to tell your husband that I wish to discuss these with him as soon as possible? I understand that he is unwell,” he added delicately, carefully avoiding my eye. Apparently it hadn’t taken Aeneas MacDonald long to relay an account of my interview with the Prince.
“He is,” I said unhelpfully. The last thing I wanted was Jamie leaving his bed and sitting up poring over intelligence dispatches all night with Cameron and Lochiel. That would be nearly as bad as staying up dancing all night with the ladies of Edinburgh. Well, possibly not quite as bad, I amended to myself, recalling the three Misses Williams.
“I’m sure he will attend upon you as soon as he’s able,” I said, pulling the edges of the cloak together. “I’ll tell him.” And I would—tomorrow. Or possibly the next day. Wherever the English forces presently were, I was positive they weren’t within a hundred miles of Edinburgh.
* * *
A quick peek into the bedroom upon my return showed two lumps, immobile beneath the bedclothes, and the sounds of breathing—slow and regular, if a trifle congested—filled the room. Reassured, I removed my cloak and sat down in the sitting room with a preventative cup of hot tea, to which I had added a fair dollop of medicinal brandy.
Sipping slowly, I felt the liquid heat flow down the center of my chest, spread comfortably through my abdomen, and begin working its steady way down toward my toes, quick-frozen after a dash across the courtyard, undertaken in preference to the circuitous inside passage with its endless stairs and turnings.
I held the cup below my chin, inhaling the pleasant, bitter smell, feeling the heated fumes of the brandy clarify my sinuses. Sniffing, it occurred to me to wonder exactly why, in a city and a building plagued with colds and influenza, my own sinuses remained unclogged.
In fact, aside from the childbed fever, I had not been ill once since my passage through the stone circle. That was odd, I thought; given the standards of hygiene and sanitation, and the crowded conditions in which we frequently lived, I ought surely to have come down at least with a case of sniffles by this time. But I remained as disgustingly healthy as always.
Plainly I was not immune to all diseases, or I would not have had the fever. But the common communicable ones? Some were explainable on the basis of vaccination, of course. I couldn’t, for example, catch smallpox, typhus, cholera, or yellow fever. Not that yellow fever was likely, but still. I set down the cup and felt my left arm, through the cloth of the sleeve. The vaccination scar had faded with time, but was still prominent enough to be detectable; a roughly circular patch of pitted skin, perhaps a half-inch in diameter.
I shuddered briefly, reminded again of Geillis Duncan, then pushed the thought away, diving back into a contemplation of my state of health in order to avoid thinking either of the woman who had gone to a death by fire, or of Colum MacKenzie, the man who had sent her there.
The cup was nearly empty, and I rose to refill it, thinking. An acquired immunity, perhaps? I had learned in nurses’ training that colds are caused by innumerable viruses, each distinct and ever-evolving. Once exposed to a particular virus, the instructor had explained, you became immune to it. You continued to catch cold as you encountered new and different viruses, but the chances of meeting something you hadn’t been exposed to before became smaller as you got older. So, he had said, while children caught an average of six colds per year, people in middle age caught only two, and elderly folk might go for years between colds, only because they had already met most of the common viruses and become immune.
Now there was a possibility, I thought. What if some types of immunity became hereditary, as viruses and people co-evolved? Antibodies to many diseases could be passed from mother to child, I knew that. Via the placenta or the breast milk, so that the child was immune—temporarily—to any disease to which the mother had been exposed. Perhaps I never caught cold because I harbored ancestral antibodies to eighteenth-century viruses—benefiting from the colds caught by all my ancestors for the past two hundred years?
I was pondering this entertaining idea, so caught up in it that I hadn’t bothered to sit down, but was sipping my tea standing in the middle of the room, when a soft knock sounded on the door.
I sighed impatiently, annoyed at being distracted. I didn’t bother to set the cup down, but came to the door prepared to receive—and repel—the expected inquiries about Jamie’s health. Likely Cameron had come across an unclear passage in a dispatch, or His Highness had thought better of his generosity in dismissing Jamie from attendance at the ball. Well, they would get him out of bed tonight only over my dead and trampled body.
I yanked open the door, and the words of greeting died in my throat. Jack Randall stood in the shadows of the doorway.