* * *
Ian passed a bad night but dropped off into a fitful doze near dawn. I seized the chance of a little rest myself, and managed a few hours of delectable sleep on the floor before being roused by the the loud braying of Clarence the mule.
A sociable creature, Clarence was utterly delighted by the approach of anything he regarded as a friend—this category embracing virtually anything on four legs. He gave tongue to his joy in a voice that rang off the mountainside. Rollo, affronted at being thus upstaged in the watchdog department, leapt off Ian’s bed, soared over me, and out through the open window, baying like a werewolf.
Thus startled out of slumber, I staggered to my feet. Lord John, who was sitting in his shirt at the table, looked startled too, though whether at the racket or at my appearance, I couldn’t tell. I went outside, running my fingers hastily through my disheveled locks, heart beating faster in the hope that it might be Jamie returning.
My heart fell as I saw that it wasn’t Jamie and Willie, but my disappointment was quickly replaced by astonishment when I saw who the visitor was—Pastor Gottfried, leader of the Lutheran church in Salem. I had met the Pastor now and then, in the homes of parishioners where I had been paying medical calls, but I was more than surprised to find him so far afield.
It was nearly two days ride from Salem to the Ridge, and the nearest German Lutheran farm was at least fifteen miles away, over rough country. The Pastor was no natural horseman—I could see the mud and dust of repeated falls splashed over his black coat—and I thought that it must be a dire emergency indeed that brought him so far up the mountain.
“Down, wicked dog!” I said sharply to Rollo, who was baring his teeth and growling at the new arrival, much to the displeasure of the Pastor’s horse. “Be quiet, I say!”
Rollo gave me a yellow-eyed look and subsided with an air of offended dignity, as though to suggest that if I wished to welcome obvious malefactors onto the premises, he wouldn’t answer for the consequences.
The Pastor was a tubby little man with a huge, curly gray beard that surrounded his face like a storm cloud, through which his normally beaming face peered like the breaking sun. He wasn’t beaming this morning, though; his round cheeks were the color of suet, puffy lips pale, and his eyes red-rimmed with fatigue.
“Meine Dame,” he greeted me, doffing his broad-brimmed hat and bowing deeply from the waist. “Ist Euer Mann hier?”
I spoke no more than a few words of crude German, but could easily make out that he was looking for Jamie. I shook my head, gesturing vaguely toward the woods, to indicate Jamie’s absence.
The Pastor looked even more dismayed than before, nearly wringing his hands in his distress. He said several urgent things in German, then seeing that I didn’t understand him, repeated himself, speaking slower and louder, his stubby body straining for expression, trying by sheer force of will to make me understand.
I was still shaking my head helplessly when a voice spoke sharply from behind me.
“Was ist los?” demanded Lord John, emerging into the dooryard. “Was habt Ihr gesagt?” He had put on his breeches, I was glad to see, though he was still barefoot, with his fair hair streaming loose on his shoulders.
The Pastor gave me a scandalized look, plainly thinking The Worst, but this expression was wiped off his face at once by a further machine-gun rattle of German from Lord John. The Pastor bobbed in apology to me, then turned eagerly to the Englishman, waving his arms and stammering in his haste to tell his story.
“What?” I said, having failed to pluck more than a word or two from the Teutonic flood. “What on earth is he saying?”
Grey turned a grim face toward me.
“Do you know a family named Mueller?”
“Yes,” I said, immediate alarm flaring at the name. “I delivered a child to Petronella Mueller, three weeks ago.”
“Ah.” Grey licked dry lips and glanced at the ground; he didn’t want to tell me. “The—the child is dead, I am afraid. So is the mother.”
“Oh, no.” I sank down on the bench by the door, swept by a feeling of absolute denial. “No. They can’t be.”
Grey rubbed a hand over his mouth, nodding as the Pastor went on, waving his small, fat hands in agitation.
“He says it was Masern; I think that would be what we call the measle. Flecken, so ?hnlich wie diese?” he demanded of the Pastor, pointing at the remnants of rash still visible on his face.
The Pastor nodded emphatically, repeating “Flecken, Masern, ja!” and patting his own cheeks.
“But what does he want Jamie for?” I asked, bewilderment added to distress.
“Apparently he believes Jamie might be able to reason with the man—with Herr Mueller. Are they friends?”
“Not exactly, no. Jamie hit Gerhard Mueller in the mouth and knocked him down in front of the mill last spring.”
A muscle twitched in Lord John’s scabbed cheek.
“I see. I suppose he’s using the term ‘reason with’ rather loosely, then.”
“Mueller can’t be reasoned with by any means more sophisticated than an ax handle,” I said. “But what is he being unreasonable about?”
Grey frowned—he didn’t recognize my use of “sophisticated,” I realized, though he understood what I meant. He hesitated, then turned back to the small minister and asked something else, listening intently to the resulting torrent of Deutsch.
Little by little, with constant interruptions and much gesticulation, the story emerged in translation.
There was, as Lord John had told us earlier, an epidemic of measles in Cross Creek. This had evidently spread into the backcountry; several households in Salem were afflicted, but the Muellers, isolated as they were, had not suffered infection until recently.
However, the day before the first sign of measles appeared, a small band of Indians had stopped at the Mueller farm asking for food and drink. Mueller, with whose opinions of Indians I was thoroughly well acquainted, had driven them off with considerable abuse. The Indians, offended, had made—said Mueller—mysterious signs toward his house as they left.
When measles broke out among the family the next day, Mueller was positive that the disease had been brought upon them by means of a hex, placed on his house by the Indians he had rebuffed. He had at once painted antihexing symbols upon his walls, and summoned the Pastor from Salem to perform an exorcism…“I think that is what he said,” Lord John added doubtfully. “Though I am not sure whether he means by that…”
“Never mind,” I said impatiently. “Go on!”
None of these precautions availed Mueller, though, and when Petronella and the new baby succumbed to the disease, the old man had lost what little mind he had. Vowing revenge upon the savages who had brought such devastation to his household, he had forced his sons and sons-in-law to accompany him, and ridden off into the woods.
From this expedition they had returned three days ago, the sons whitefaced and silent, the old man burning with cold satisfaction.
“Ich war dort. Ich habe ihn geschen,” said Herr Gottfried, sweat trickling down his cheeks at the recollection. I was there. I saw.
Summoned by a hysterical message from the women, the Pastor had ridden into the stableyard, to find two long tails of dark hair hanging from the barn door, stirring gently in the wind above the crudely painted legend Rache.
“That means ‘revenge,’ ” Lord John translated for me.
“I know,” I said, my mouth so dry I could barely speak. “I’ve read Sherlock Holmes. You mean he…”
“Evidently so.”
The Pastor was still speaking; he seized me by the arm and shook it, trying to communicate his urgency. Grey’s look sharpened at whatever the minister was saying, and he broke in with an abrupt question, answered by frenzied noddings.
“He’s coming here. Mueller.” Grey swung round to me, his face set in alarm.
Terribly upset by the scalps, the Pastor had gone in search of Herr Mueller, only to find that the patriarch had nailed his grisly trophies to the barn and then left the farm, bound—he had said—for Fraser’s Ridge, to see me.
If I hadn’t been sitting down already, I might have collapsed at this. I could feel the blood draining from my cheeks, and was sure I looked as pale as Pastor Gottfried.
“Why?” I said. “Is he—he couldn’t! He couldn’t think I had done anything to Petronella or the baby. Could he?” I turned in appeal toward the Pastor, who pushed a pudgy, trembling hand through his gray-streaked hair, disordering its carefully larded strands.
“The clerical gentleman doesn’t know what Mueller thinks, or what his purpose is in coming here,” said Lord John. He cast an interested eye over the pastor’s unprepossessing form. “Much to his credit, he set off alone, hell-for-leather after Mueller, and found him two hours later—insensible by the side of the road.”
The huge old farmer had evidently gone for days without food on his hunt for revenge. Intemperance was not a common failing among the Lutherans, but under the stimulus of fatigue and emotion, Mueller had drunk deeply upon his return, and the enormous draughts of beer he had consumed had been too much for him. Overcome, he had contrived to hobble his mule, but then had wrapped himself in his coat and fallen asleep among the trailing arbutus by the road.
The Pastor had made no attempt to rouse Mueller, being well acquainted with the man’s temper and feeling it would not be improved by drink. Instead, Gottfried had mounted his own horse and ridden as quickly as he could, trusting to Providence to bring him here in time to warn us.
He had had no doubt that my Mann would be competent to deal with Mueller, no matter what his state or intentions, but with Jamie gone…
Pastor Gottfried looked helplessly from me to Lord John, and back again.
“Vielleicht solten Sie gehen?” he suggested, making his meaning clear with a jerk of his head toward the paddock.
“I can’t leave,” I said, and gestured toward the house. “Mein—Christ, what’s nephew?—Mein junger Mann ist nicht gut.”
“Ihr Neffe ist krank” Lord John corrected briskly. “Haben Sie jemals Masern gehabt?”
The Pastor shook his head, distress altering to alarm.
“He hasn’t had the measles,” Lord John said, turning to me. “He mustn’t stay here, then, or he will put himself in danger of contracting the disease, is that so?”
“Yes.” The shock was beginning to recede slightly, and I was starting to pull myself together. “Yes, he should go at once. It’s safe for him to be near you, you aren’t contagious any longer. Ian is, though.” I made a vain attempt at smoothing my hair, which was standing on end—little wonder if it was, I thought. Then I thought of the scalps on Mueller’s barn door and my hair actually did stand on end, my own scalp rippling with horror.
Lord John was speaking authoritatively to the little Pastor, urging him toward his horse by means of a grip on his sleeve. Gottfried was making protests, but increasingly weak ones. He glanced back at me, round face full of trouble.
I tried to smile reassuringly at him, though I felt as distressed as he did.
“Danke,” I said. “Tell him it will be all right, will you?” I said to Lord John. “He won’t go, otherwise.” He nodded briefly.
“I have. I told him I am a soldier; that I will not let any harm come to you.”
The Pastor stood for a moment, hand on his horse’s bridle, talking earnestly to Lord John. Then he dropped the bridle, turned with decision and crossed the dooryard to me. Reaching up, he laid a hand gently on my tousled head.
“Seid gesegnet,” he said. “Benedicite.”
“He said—” began Lord John.
“I understand.”
We stood silently in the dooryard, watching Gottfried make his way through the chestnut grove. It seemed incongruously peaceful out here, with a soft autumn sun warm on my shoulders, and birds going about their business overhead. I heard the far-off knocking of a woodpecker, and the liquid duet of the mockingbirds that lived in the big blue spruce. No owls, but naturally there would be no owls now; it was midmorning.
Who? I wondered, as another aspect of the tragedy belatedly occurred to me. Who had been the target of Mueller’s blind revenge? The Mueller farm was several days ride from the mountain line that separated Indian territory from the settlements, but he could have reached several Tuscarora or Cherokee villages, depending on his direction.
Had he entered a village? If so, what carnage had he and his sons left behind? Worse, what carnage might ensue?
I shuddered, cold in spite of the sun. Mueller was not the only man who believed in revenge. The family, the clan, the village of whomever he had murdered—they would seek vengeance for their slain, as well; and they might not stop with the Muellers—if they even knew the identity of the killers.
And if they did not, but only knew the murderers to be white…I shuddered again. I had heard enough massacre stories to realize that the victims very seldom did anything to provoke their fate; they only had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fraser’s Ridge lay directly between Mueller’s farm and the Indian villages—which at the moment seemed distinctly the wrong place to be.
“Oh, God, I wish Jamie were here.” I wasn’t aware that I had spoken aloud, until Lord John replied.
“So do I,” he said. “Though I begin to think that William may be far safer with him than the boy might be here—and not only by reason of the illness.”
I glanced at him, realizing suddenly how weak he still was; this was the first time he had been out of bed in a week. He was white-faced under the remnants of his rash, and he was gripping the doorjamb for support, to keep from falling down.
“You shouldn’t even be up!” I exclaimed, and grasped him by the arm. “Go in and lie down at once.”
“I am quite all right,” he said irritably, but he didn’t jerk away, or protest when I insisted he get back into bed.
I knelt to check Ian, who was tossing restlessly on the trundle, blazing with fever. His eyes were shut, his features swollen and disfigured with the emergent rash, the glands in his neck round and hard as eggs.
Rollo poked an inquiring nose under my elbow, nudged his master gently and whined.
“He’ll be all right,” I said firmly. “Why don’t you go outside and keep an eye out for visitors, hm?”
Rollo ignored this advice, though, and instead sat patiently watching as I wrung out a rag in cool water and bathed Ian. I nudged him half awake, brushed his hair, gave him the chamber pot, and coaxed bee-balm syrup into him—all the time listening for the sound of hooves, and Clarence’s joyful announcement that company was coming.
* * *
It was a long day. After several hours of starting at every sound and looking over my shoulder at every step, I finally settled into the day’s work. I nursed Ian, who was feverish and miserable, fed the stock, weeded the garden, picked tender young cucumbers for pickling, and set Lord John, who was disposed to be helpful, to work shelling beans.
I looked into the woods with longing, on my way from privy to goat-pen. I would have given a lot simply to walk away into those cool green depths. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d had such an impulse. But the autumn sun beat down on the Ridge, and the hours wore on in tranquil peace, without a sign of Gerhard Mueller.
“Tell me about this Mueller,” Lord John said. His appetite was coming back; he’d finished his helping of fried mush, though he pushed aside the salad of dandelion greens and pokeweed.
I plucked a tender stalk of pokeweed from the bowl and nibbled it myself, enjoying the sharp taste.
“He’s the head of a large family; German Lutherans, as you no doubt gathered. They live about fifteen miles from here, down in the river valley.”
“Yes?”
“Gerhard is big, and he’s stubborn, as you no doubt gathered. Speaks a few words of English, but not much. He’s old, but my God, he’s strong!” I could still see the old man, shoulders corded with stringy muscle, tossing fifty-pound sacks of flour into his wagon like so many sacks of feathers.
“This fight he had with Jamie—did he appear the sort to hold a grudge?”
“He’s very definitely the sort to hold a grudge, but not about that. It wasn’t really a fight. It—” I shook my head, searching for a way to describe it. “Do you know anything about mules?”
His fair brows lifted and he smiled.
“A bit, yes.”
“Well, Gerhard Mueller is a mule. He’s not really bad-tempered, and he isn’t precisely stupid—but he doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to anything other than what’s in his head, and it takes a good deal of force to switch his attention to anything else.”
I had not been present at the altercation in the mill, but had had it described to me by Ian. The old man had got it firmly stuck into his head that Felicia Woolam, one of the mill owner’s three daughters, had given him short weight and owed him another sack of flour.
In vain, Felicia protested that he had brought her five bags of wheat; she had ground them, and filled four bags with the resulting flour. The difference, she insisted, was due to the chaff and hulls removed from the grain. Five bags of wheat equalled four bags of flour.
“Fünf!” Mueller had said, waving his open hand in her face. “Es gibt fünf!” He would not be persuaded otherwise, and began to curse volubly in German, glowering and backing the girl into a corner.
Ian, having tried without success to distract the old man’s attention, had dashed outside to fetch Jamie from his conversation with Mr. Woolam. Both men had come hurriedly inside, but had no more success than Ian in changing Mueller’s conviction that he had been cheated.
Ignoring their exhortations, he had advanced on Felicia, clearly intent on taking by force an extra bag of flour from the stack behind her.
“At that point, Jamie gave up trying to reason with him, and hit him,” I said.
He had at first been reluctant to do so, Mueller being nearly seventy, but rapidly changed his mind when his first blow bounced off Mueller’s jaw as though it had been made of seasoned oakwood.
The old man had turned on him like a cornered boar, whereupon Jamie had struck him first in the stomach, and then in the mouth as hard as possible, knocking Mueller down and splitting his own knuckles on the old man’s teeth.
With a word to Woolam—who was a Quaker and thus opposed to violence—he had then seized Mueller by the legs and dragged the dazed farmer outside, where one of the Mueller sons was waiting patiently in the wagon. Hauling the old man up by the collar, Jamie had pinned him against the wagon and held him there, talking pleasantly in German, until Mr. Woolam—having hastily rebagged the flour—came out and loaded five sacks into the wagon, under the gimlet eye of the old man.
Mueller had counted them twice, carefully, then turned to Jamie, and said with dignity, “Danke, mein Herr.” He had then climbed into the wagon beside his bemused son, and driven away.
Grey scratched at the remnants of his rash, smiling.
“I see. So he appeared to hold no ill will?”
I shook my head, chewing, then swallowed.
“Not at all. He was kindness itself to me, when I went to the farm to help with Petronella’s baby.” My throat closed suddenly on the renewed realization that they were gone, and I choked on the bitter taste of the dandelion leaves, bile rising in my throat.
“Here.” Grey pushed the pot of ale across the table toward me.
I drank deeply, the cool sourness soothing for a moment the deeper bitterness of spirit. I set the pot down and sat for a moment, eyes closed. There was a fresh-smelling breeze from the window, but the sun was warm on the tabletop under my hands. All the tiny joys of physical existence were still mine, and I was the more acutely aware of them, for the knowledge that they had been so abruptly taken from others—from those who had barely tasted them.
“Thank you,” I said, opening my eyes.
Grey was watching me, with an expression of deep sympathy.
“You’d think it wouldn’t be such a shock,” I said, needing suddenly to try to explain. “They die here so easily. The young ones, especially. It isn’t as though I haven’t seen it before. And there’s so seldom anything I can do.”
I felt something warm on my cheek, and was surprised to find it was a tear. He reached into his sleeve, pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to me. It wasn’t especially clean, but I didn’t mind.
“I did sometimes wonder what he saw in you,” he said, his tone deliberately light. “Jamie.”
“Oh, you did? How flattering.” I sniffed, and blew my nose.
“When he began to speak of you, both of us thought you dead,” he pointed out. “And while you are undoubtedly a handsome woman, it was never of your looks that he spoke.”
To my surprise, he picked up my hand and held it lightly.
“You have his courage,” he said.
That made me laugh, if only halfheartedly.
“If you only knew,” I said.
He didn’t reply to that, but smiled faintly. His thumb ran lightly over the knuckles of my hand, his touch light and warm.
“He doesn’t hold back for fear of skinned knuckles,” he said. “Neither do you, I think.”
“I can’t.” I took a deep breath and wiped my nose; the tears had stopped. “I’m a doctor.”
“So you are,” he said quietly, and paused. “I have not thanked you for my life.”
“It wasn’t me. There isn’t really anything much I can do, for something like a disease. All I can do is to…be there.”
“A little more than that,” he said dryly, and released my hand. “Will you have more ale?”
I was beginning to see quite clearly what Jamie saw in John Grey.
The afternoon passed quietly. Ian tossed and moaned, but by late afternoon, the rash was fully developed, and his fever seemed to drop a little. He wouldn’t be wanting food, but perhaps I could induce him to take a little milk broth. The thought reminded me that it was nearly milking time, and I stood up, with a murmured word to Lord John, and put aside my mending.
I opened the cabin door and stepped out, directly in front of Gerhard Mueller, who was standing in the dooryard.
Mueller’s eyes were a reddish brown, and seemed always to be burning with an inner intensity. They burned more brightly now, for the bruised frailty of the flesh surrounding them. The deep-set eyes fixed on me, and he nodded, once, and then again.
Mueller had shrunk since I had last seen him. All his flesh had fallen away; still a huge man, he was more bone than muscle now, cadaverous and ancient. His eyes were fixed on mine, the only spark of life in a face like crumpled paper.
“Herr Mueller,” I said. My voice sounded calm to my own ears; I hoped it sounded the same to him. “Wie geht es Euch?”
The old man stood swaying in front of me, as though the evening breeze might knock him down. I didn’t know if he had lost his mount, or left it down below the ridge, but there was no sign of horse or mule.
He took a step toward me, and I took one back, involuntarily.
“Frau Klara,” he said, and there was a note of pleading in his voice.
I stopped, wanting to call out to Lord John, but hesitant. He wouldn’t call me by my first name if he meant to do me harm.
“They are dead,” he said. “Mein M?dchen. Mein Kind.” Tears welled suddenly in the bloodshot eyes, and ran slowly down the weather-beaten grooves of his face. The misery in his eyes was so acute that I reached out and took his huge, work-scarred old hand in mine.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded again, his old mouth working. He let me lead him to the bench by the door, where he sat down quite suddenly, as though all the strength had gone out of his legs.
The door opened, and John Grey came out. He had his pistol in his hand, but when I shook my head at him, he slid it at once into his shirt. The old man had not let go of my hand; he pulled, forcing me to sit down beside him.
“Gn?dige Frau,” he said, and suddenly turned and embraced me, hugging me tight against his filthy coat. He shook with soundless crying, and even knowing what he had done, I put my own arms around him.
He smelled dreadful, sour and reeking with old age and sorrow, with beer and sweat and filth, and somewhere under all the other odors was the fetor of dried blood. I shuddered, caught in a web of pity, horror, and revulsion, but could not pull away.
He let go, finally, and seemed suddenly to see John Grey, who was hovering nearby, not sure whether to intervene or not. The old man started at sight of him.
“Mein Gott!” he exclaimed, in tones of horror. “Er hat Masern!” The sun was sinking fast, bathing the dooryard in bloody light. It struck Grey full in the face, highlighting the darkened spots on his face, flushing his skin with red.
Mueller turned to me, and frantically seized my face between his huge, horny paws. His thumbs scraped across my cheeks, and an expression of relief came into his sunken eyes, as he saw that my skin was still clear.
“Gott sei dank’,” he said, and letting go of my face, began to rummage in his coat, saying something in German so urgent and so mumbled that I could make out no more than the occasional word.
“He says he was afraid he would be too late, and is glad that he was not,” Grey said, seeing my bewilderment. He eyed the old farmer with suspicious dislike. “He says he’s brought you something—a charm of some kind. It will ward off the curse, and keep you safe from the illness.”
The old man withdrew an object wrapped in cloth from the recesses of his coat, and laid it in my lap, still babbling in German.
“He thanks you for all your help to his family—he thinks you are a fine woman, as dear to him as one of his daughters-in-law—he says that…” Mueller unfolded the cloth with shaking hands, and the words died in Grey’s throat.
I opened my mouth, but made no sound. I must have made some involuntary movement, for the cloth slipped suddenly to the ground, spilling out the sheaf of white-streaked hair to which a small silver ornament still clung. With it was the leather pouch, the woodpecker’s feathers draggled with blood.
Mueller was still speaking, and Grey was trying to, but I was only dimly aware of their words. Inside my ears echoed the words I had heard a year before, down by the stream, in Gabrielle’s soft voice, translating for Nayawenne.
Her name meant. “It may be; it will happen.” Now it had, and all that was left me for consolation was her words: “She says you must not be troubled; sickness is sent from the gods. It won’t be your fault.”