‘Better that,’ she said softly and he saw the lip tremble, just the once.
‘So – this is why you study the medical?’ he asked hastily, levering matters back on track.
‘At first,’ she answered flatly, ‘but that was not for a daughter, let alone one of Fife. I contrived a deal of it on my own, though books and treatises are hard to come by – and none of it was any help. Strangely, as the Countess of Buchan I had better freedom to indulge it and my own house at Balmullo.’
She stopped and he saw the beautiful eyes of her pool with tears, which she shook away with an impatient gesture.
‘I have books there and kept Balius stabled at it,’ she went on. ‘My husband will want to burn it to the ground after this unless I prevent him.’
Hal did not want to know how she would prevent him. He did not want to know that she was returning to Buchan at all, or that he was the jailer taking her. Yet the thought of what might happen if the English stormed into this camp, all vengeance and victory, made him take her by the hand, so suddenly that it was moot who was more surprised by it.
‘We could leave,’ he declared. ‘Tonight – afore the battle . . .’
She blinked once or twice, disbelieving – then the great warm rush of it hit her like a wave and it did not matter if they stayed or left, only that he had offered. She took her hand back, gently.
‘You have done enough, Lord Hal,’ she said and meant it. ‘Go home. As I must.’
There was silence, long and aching.
‘I even contrived to have a master from Bologna visit once,’ she declared, suddenly brittle bright. ‘The Earl was pleased, since it would keep me from shaming him at home.’
‘Bologna?’
‘Buchan no doubt hoped I would find humility, but I was gulling him. I said he was a priest from Rome.’
She broke off, sighed and shook her head.
‘I have treated Buchan poorly and have sympathy for the man,’ she added bleakly, ‘but only to the point when he goes red in the face and punishes me, one way or another. Yet I have treated him as ill, in my way.’
‘Does this excuse beatings?’ Hal growled. ‘A knight is supposed to protect a lady.’
Isabel smiled sadly.
‘Ah, would it not be nice if the world was Camelot,’ she answered. ‘It is not, of course, so I cheated him to get this Master Schiatti from Bologna, for the best medical teachers are there at the University. What in the name of God and all His Saints I thought to do with what he taught I do not know -but I learned, among other matters, that even the most recalcitrant can be persuaded, for a price, to teach some of their art to a woman. Some of it was valuable, other aspects less so. I was good with the astrology, but mediocre with pigs at best.’
‘Pigs?’ asked Hal. Talking to this woman was like learning to skate on thin ice.
‘Nearest to humans in anatomy and skin and bone,’ Isabel replied. ‘In Bologna, real corpses are kept for examinations and most everyday work is done on pigs. Strangled, burned, poisoned and buried for a day, a week, longer. Bologna is a dangerous place to be a pig, sir Hal.’
‘If I ever take sim Craw to the Italies, I will bear it in mind,’ Hal said laconically, ‘since his manners clearly endanger him with dissection. Mark you – it seems Balmullo is no place to root for acorns either.’
she looked at him sideways a little.
‘You are not fond of physickers?’
Hal started to deny it, unwilling to annoy this woman, but the truth choked him. The ague was a pest which began as innocent as a shiver on a warm day, as if some sudden unseen breeze had caressed the spine. In three days or less, the shiverers were rattling their teeth on a rack of sweat-soaked bedding, the air in their chest wheezing like leaky forge bellows. They complained of the cold and burned away to a greasy husk before your eyes.
Others got it, too – from the vapours of the fetid, warm marshes according to the physickers and lazar priests – and some of them died swiftly, while others were abandoned even by their fearful priests and died of neglect.
One, the lovely young Mary of the saltoun Mill, crawled from her sickbed and slipped into the river, drawing the cool water over her like a balming coverlet. After they found her, the same saltoun priests who had abandoned her refused her consecrated burial, since she had taken her own life.
Not that they were any use when they found the courage to remain with their charges. Rosemary and onions, wormwood and cloves, vinegar and lemons, all mixed with henshit like some bad pudding or capon stuffing and smeared on the forehead and under the arms.
A live toad, fastened to the head. A live pullet, cut in two and held, bleeding and squawking, to anything that looked like a sore – though sores were no part of the ague that took Hal’s wife and son, only a shaking sickness that boiled them away to wasted sweat, to where death was a merciful release.