To her gentleman attendant she said something about “lie doe cain” which the phone dutifully attempted to translate, but botched it somehow—forgive me, Your Grace, but I was half delirious, and this bit was a sort of comedy of errors involving the phone and the various dialects. Magnus had a lot of questions—not of a suspicious nature, you’ll understand, but simple hunger to know. It was laboriously explained that “lie doe cain” is a potion, not magical in nature (since magic has no purchase in this time and place) but once injected into his shoulder with a wee needle, deadened the pain so that the woman sliced that birthmark off Magnus’s shoulder without him even needing a swig of whiskey! He watched this in fascination and wonder, like a child seeing a magician at his tricks. The assistant bandaged it neatly enough, and said to him, through the phone, “That might hurt after the lie doe cain wears off.”
Utterly baffled was Magnus, and he reached across to prod the bandage. “No pain?” he said.
“Don’t touch it,” she said with brisk compassion. “No touch.”
“No pain,” he repeated. “No nothing!”
The doctor had been dousing her hands with a sort of ointment they use, scented like bad gin. It is a ritual with them.
“Anesthetic,” she said slowly, and repeated it several times, syllable for syllable. “Makes it numb.”
“But how? Is it magic?”
I shook my head. “There is no magic in this time.” He looked astounded at this news, so now I knew I had some insight to offer him that sure would bind him to me.
The physician now turned her attention to me, and said she’d like to have a look at my skin, all over, as a precaution—for my freckly complexion was of a sort prone to just the sorts of moles she’d lately sliced off of Magnus, and it’s superstitious they are about such things. The assistant shot the curtain across to afford me a bit of privacy, and I pulled up my shift and let the doctor look me over.
“So the lie doe cain is a numbing agent, is it?” I asked the female physician. “Where does it come from? Seems a remarkable ointment.”
She shrugged. “It’s very commonplace in this era. You can buy it at any pharmacy. Do you know what a pharmacy is? You might know it as an apothecary, or chemist.”
“Aye I know it surely, but I doubt he does,” I say. “I’ll explain.”
No eldritch freckles were to be found on my person and so the lady and her assistant packed up their potions and bandages and absented themselves. This was only one such encounter, for don’t these people have a thousand varieties of doctor, each keen to inspect a different bit of you with a different contraption, and it’s shocked you’d be, my lady, if I told you everywhere they looked.
When they were leaving us alone, I brought Magnus up to date on all I knew (besides my own schemes, of course). His pale blue eyes were round as platters a fair bit of the time.
“But you must know,” I told him when I’d said all I knew, “I’ve never left my own age before. Well, not by more than a year or two, for sport. I’ve nothing left to explain, for all the rest will be as new to me as to you.”
After a few days of this, my fevers broke, and my vigor returned as I was growing accustomed to an existence without magic. When it seemed I was fit for conversation, Tristan returned. He had company: one older gentleman and two women, a bit younger than myself. The younger of the two was very beautiful and wore a dress; the other, plainer, and dressed similarly to the men, and the bearing of a scholar did she have about her, like an abbess.
“This is Gráinne,” said Tristan, looking tense about the mouth.
I smiled my charming smile and held out my hand to the gentleman. He stared at me. He was a dignified-enough looking chap, clearly of higher birth from Tristan by the way he carried himself. He had a short, thick mane of grey, swept back as if posing for a statue he was. He reminded me a bit of that right arse Les Holgate who triggered the lomadh and ruined my life. “This is Dr. Roger Blevins,” Tristan says to me, in a heavy-handed sort of way.
“Well met and God save you, milord,” I say, leaning forward from the divan to clasp his hand gingerly (as the back of my hand had all the needles still).
“It is good to meet you—but you have defied protocol in coming here,” he says sternly, with great anger in his eyes. So as usually is the case, I begin to cast a spell to soften him to me . . . and at once I realize, with a dreadful feeling in my guts, that it will not work! Tristan spoke true, there was no magic here at all. No wonder I felt at once so heavy and dull.
“I cry pardon,” I say, trying not to show my dismay. “Things do work best free and easy-like in London, I did not realize how regular in your habits you are here. Isn’t it good I came and learned that?”
The two men exchanged glances and each sighed, in different keys. Blevins made a gesture with his head, and Tristan nodded as if understanding a secret code he was.
“Mel,” he said, a bit wearily, to the plainer of the women. “Meet Gráinne. Gráinne, here is Doctor Melisande Stokes. And here is Erszebet.” That being the fine-looking one in the skirt, with the painted face.
Melisande, without a smile of greeting but a look of some checked amusement in her eye, held out her hand and shook mine. “It’s an honour to meet you, Gráinne. We are very much in your debt. Welcome to America.”
Much quieter is Melisande than I was anticipating her to be. She must be clever in hidden, subtle ways, not the way of educated women in Elizabeth’s court who are falling all over each other to outshine one another. Her light is a secret that she uses as a tool, and sure there is something tough there underneath it, which I do respect well enough. ’Tis clear enough from watching her and Tristan that there should be fire between them, certainly some congress, but just as clear that admitting to it is something you’ll find neither of them doing. Still the attraction hangs in the air almost visibly. I believe when I go back there—now that I have a plan, which shortly I shall tell you of—I must find a way to use that.
And as for Erszebet, their original witch, she is fair indeed, but she is not a happy lass. Her discontentment fairly radiates from her fiery dark eyes, and her face is fashioned, as if from birth, to have a bit of a pout or sneer. And yet strangely charming (excuse the term) I found her to be at once.
Rather than taking my proffered hand to shake, she took it and kissed my knuckles. “I greet you as a sister,” says she. “As I greet all the witches who dwell in my house, and come under my aegis.”
“Now wait a moment,” says Tristan. “We don’t know we’ll be keeping her on as an employee.”
“And I don’t know I’ll be staying,” says I, “if this is how I’m to be spoken of—like as if I weren’t even in the room.”
“Gráinne, don’t you understand, you can’t leave,” said Tristan with some irritation. “Once an historical agent has come forward, they cannot go back, they have too much knowledge of what is here to safely take back.”
“Then staying’s what I’ll do,” I said agreeably.