Julie Anne Long (24 page)

Across the camp, Connor was sliding from his horse. Whatever envy she may have felt about his day on horseback vanished when he paused and touched his forehead against the saddle briefly, as though waiting for a dizzy spell to pass.

She was next to him in an instant.

He turned to her when she placed a hand to his arm. Even in the rapidly purpling evening light, she could see his face had gone ashen.

“Connor—”

“I’m merely tired, wee Becca.”

“You are still somewhat weak. You should—”

“I am NOT weak.”

And though Rebecca knew the edge in his voice had been honed by exhaustion and injury and frustration over the events of the past few days, she still flinched.

Connor was instantly the picture of contrition. He drew in a deep breath, and began again.

“Wee Becca, forgive me. I am more weary than weak; please believe me. I merely need to sleep. I am sorry to worry you.”

“Will you see Leonora about your arm?”

He sighed. “Oh, aye, if it will make you feel better.”

“It will make me feel better,” she said firmly.

He smiled crookedly. “Then take me to her, wee Becca, by all means, so we can get it over with and I can spend the rest of the evening sleeping.”

Leonora unwound Connor’s bandage with a sense of solemn ceremony, as though she were unveiling a public statue.

In a nod to modesty, Connor’s shirt, now woefully bloodstained and haphazardly mended, remained draped over his uninjured arm and shoulder. Martha, unsurprisingly, had watched the unbuttoning of his shirt raptly, and was now tracking the progress of the unwinding bandage with the same held-breath fascination. Rebecca had to admit there
was
a certain prurience to the proceedings; even she had felt a certain heightened anticipation as Connor’s bare skin came into view, and she already knew exactly what that skin looked—and smelled and tasted—like. But the slow revelation of Connor’s gorgeous contours was also like watching someone else unwrap a gift that rightfully belonged to her. A gift certainly not meant for Martha’s eyes.

Why was the bloody girl allowed to remain in the tent at all? It seemed unlikely that Rom proprieties were lenient enough to allow unmarried girls to ogle half-dressed male strangers. Perhaps Martha had spent many an hour watching the dressing and undressing of men, young and old alike, while her mother poked and prodded and healed them. Rebecca wondered whether Martha’s fascination with Connor had to do with a curiosity about men that remained unfulfilled . . . or one that was all
too
fulfilled.

Leonora grunted appreciatively when the wound was at last exposed, and motioned for Martha to hold the lamp higher so she could look at it more closely. Martha moved in nearer to Connor, her bosom perhaps a hairsbreadth away from his shoulder, and lifted the lamp. If Connor so much as exhaled, his arm was certain to brush against at least one large round breast.

Rebecca sent Martha a look that could have mowed down Napoleon’s front line. Martha ignored her. Connor, happily, seemed oblivious of any bosoms at the moment.

Leonora gently touched the edges of the wound, and Rebecca leaned in for a look. It was still oozing a little, but the edges were pink, not red or angry or swollen, and no streaks radiated from it, which meant no poisoning of the blood. Leonora peered into Connor’s eyes, examined his fingernails, felt his pulse, all of which Connor submitted to with a certain stoic amusement.

Rebecca watched Leonora, her heart hammering in anticipation of a verdict.

At last, Leonora turned to her, smiling.

“Well done, Rebecca. We will clean it gently once more, apply a salve of—”

“Saint-John’s-wort,” Rebecca and Martha said simultaneously, Rebecca sounding eager, Martha sounding bored.

“—yes, Saint-John’s-wort, and then we will rebind the wound. Ye’re lucky to have such a talented healer for a fiancée,” Leonora clucked to Connor.

“I know,” Connor said proudly.

But Rebecca hadn’t heard him at all.

Healer
. Leonora had called her a
healer!
Elation nearly sent her out of her shoes. She felt as if she had just been knighted.

Connor was watching her face, a soft smile playing at his lips.

“Aye,” he repeated warmly, “she is very talented.”

This time she heard, and she turned to beam at him.

From behind Connor’s head, Martha lowered the lamp and scowled.

Leonora swabbed the edges of Connor’s wound, applied the salve of Saint-John’s-wort, and wound a length of clean bandage around his arm.

“Now, try to use yer other arm, not your injured one, for a few days. And if you feel feverish, come to me.”

“He needs to rest,” Rebecca said proprietarily.

“He needs to rest,” Leonora confirmed, smiling at her.

“And as I need to rest,” Connor said, smiling, rebuttoning his shirt, “I will thank you ladies for your attentions, and bid you good night.”

He made bows all around. As he backed from the tent, he caught and held Rebecca’s eyes in a tenderly smoldering gaze, and then he was gone. It took all of her self-control not to run after him.

“Now,
Gadji
,” Leonora said briskly, “I have work to do to prepare my medicines, and I wonder if you would like to help. Supper will be brought to us when it is ready.”

Rebecca could scarcely believe her good fortune.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Yes, please.”

Martha gave a nearly inaudible snort.

Leonora fished about in the trunks and extracted several of the dark bottles Rebecca had seen earlier, which were nestled in a bed of straw to prevent breakage. A little more rooting about in the trunk yielded a mortar and pestle, some folded muslin, several little cloth bags pulled shut with string, and startlingly, a bottle of whiskey.

“Martha, if you would bring the lantern here,” Leonora said. Martha did as bid, albeit sluggishly. A soft corona of light pulsed about the trunk.

“So we can see our work,” Leonora murmured. She fussed with her things a moment more, lining up the bottles, opening the bags to sniff the contents. Rebecca waited impatiently.

“Now, these herbs have been in their bath of whiskey for one course of the moon—”

“Why whiskey?” Rebecca said.

Martha sighed loudly. Leonora shot her a quelling look.

“The healing power of the herbs is drawn into the whiskey, and then we can use it for medicine for a very long time. These are strong medicines, for strong ailments, when a tea will not do.”

“Tinctures,” Rebecca and Martha said at the same time, Rebecca eagerly, Martha sounding exasperated that anyone could be so ignorant about healing.

“Tinctures,” Leonora repeated, agreeing. “They have been in their bath of whiskey, and they are now ready to become medicines. We must pour them through the muslin to catch the herbs. What is left behind in the pitcher is the medicine, like so.”

Leonora settled a square of muslin over the mouth of the pitcher and poked it in the center to tuck it in, then tipped one of the dark bottles over it. A dark broth dotted with shreds of herb gurgled out slowly over the muslin, sending a greenish stain spreading across it. The little shreds of herb were caught as the liquid passed through.

When she had emptied the bottle, Leonora gave the muslin square a hard twist to extract as much liquid as possible. Then she placed the stained muslin aside and poured the contents of the pitcher back into the dark bottle.

“Shepherd’s purse,” she announced with satisfaction as she stoppered the bottle. It was already labeled; clearly, it was a bottle she had used for shepherd’s purse time and again.

“Now, Rebecca, if you would wipe the pitcher with this muslin, then strain each of these bottles as I have done. Use a different piece of muslin for each herb, for it is not good to mix them.”

Martha knelt down next to her mother with her own packets of herbs, settling into the work as if it were something that took place every evening.

For several minutes, Rebecca and Leonora and Martha worked side by side in absorbed silence, Leonora shaking herbs from the bags and examining them carefully, mea-suring them in her palm, sorting them into little piles. Rebecca felt quietly powerful as she pressed the herbs through the muslin and poured the fresh tinctures back into their bottles. Aside from extracting a musket ball from Connor, everything else she knew of healing was theory, information derived from her father’s journal and books. But
this . . . an ailing person would someday taste the medicine she was helping to create, and then they would become, with God’s help, healthy again. It was magic, nothing short. It was a vast, humbling responsibility. Still, all things considered, she felt equal to it; it felt right, more profoundly right than the keys of a pianoforte had ever felt beneath her fingers. She was hungry to learn.

But there was a precariousness to it, too; she half expected Leonora to announce that it had all been a terrible mistake, tear the muslin from her hands and force her instead to practice the pianoforte. She was afraid to move too abruptly, or breathe too emphatically, lest the moment dissolve like a dream.

By stark contrast, there was Martha, whose utter indifference to the art of healing was apparent in her every motion, in the slump of her shoulders, in the the stiff, almost angry movement of her fingers as she poked about in the piles of herbs, in the grim set of her plump mouth. In Martha, Rebecca saw herself, hunched glumly over a pianoforte, poking at it apathetically, and she felt an errant twinge of sympathy again. Opportunities to rebel must be few and far between for Martha; her mother was ever-present, and perhaps the Gypsy family group felt suffocatingly insular. Perhaps Martha was simply waiting for someone, anyone, to take her away. And perhaps Connor looked like that someone.

Rebecca stole a sideways glance at Martha, whose skin was glowing a soft gold in the lamplight. Martha was beautiful in an extravagant, very singular way, utterly convinced of her own superiority, and no doubt accustomed to turning any man’s head. She probably found Connor’s inattention maddening and inexplicable.

Funny how short-lived her twinges of sympathy toward Martha tended to be.

Rebecca forced her own concentration back to the herbs.

“What are you making, Leonora?” she asked, breaking the silence, after she had stoppered her third bottle.

“Tonight I make a special medicine of many herbs. For dropsy,” she said, gesturing to a little mound of herbs she had collected. “Tansy leaves, dandelion root, parsley, and—”

The face of an older woman appeared in the opening of the tent, and rattled a few words in anxious-sounding Rom to Leonora, who nodded and gave her a short answer that sounded like an affirmation.

“I will return in an hour or so,” Leonora told Rebecca and Martha. She tucked the bottle of shepherd’s purse into her apron pocket and ducked out of the tent before Rebecca could say, “Please do not leave me alone with your horrible daughter.”

It was quiet in the tent for a moment except for the rustle of dried herbs and the gurgle of tinctures as Rebecca and Martha continued their chores.

She’s like a snake, Rebecca thought, tensing.
She’ll wait, and then she’ll strike. Any minute now . . .

“Rebecca, shall I
dukker for ye?”

Aha! There it was, the strike. Still, Rebecca
was
curious to know what her palms had to say about her life.
Good heavens,
she told herself firmly,
if you can handle highwaymen, you can certainly handle Martha Heron.

“Of course, Martha. I would like that. How do we go about it?”

Martha scooted toward Rebecca on her knees.

“Give me your hands,” she said.

Rebecca presented her hands, palms up. Martha grasped them in her own unusually soft hands and smoothed her thumbs over them, spreading them flat. She peered into each one intently for a while, occasionally tracing a line with her forefinger, or tilting one closer to the lamplight.

“First I will ask of you, Rebecca: do ye want me to be honest?”

“What would you be otherwise?”

“The
Gorgio
who pay to hear their futures read in their palms only want to hear one kind of fortune. But I think you are brave enough to hear the whole truth.”

“By all means, tell me the whole truth.”

Martha spent a few more moments examining her hands, as if deciding where to begin.

“This line, this long line that curves so, here? It means you will have a long life,” Martha mused. “And right here, the fork in this line? It means you will go on a journey, far from your home . . .”

“Ah,” Rebecca said politely, unimpressed. It would be abundantly clear to anyone who looked at her that she was on a long journey, far from home.

“It looks as though you have two lovers, one dark and one fair . . .”

“Mmm.” This was a little more plausible, given the existence of Edelston.

Martha drew her finger across the line that bisected Rebecca’s right palm, as if following a map.

“. . . but the dark lover is faithless. He will leave you for another and your life will take yet another turn, one of hardship and confusion.”

“And it says that
where
, precisely?” Rebecca didn’t bother to keep the skepticism from her voice.

“Oh, here and here.” Martha gestured over her hand vaguely. “As I said, the dark lover is faithless, but you will have a happy home with your fair-haired lover when you are . . . when you are . . .” Martha peered closely at Rebecca’s left hand. “Oh, many years older. You and your fair-haired lover will be blessed with child after child after child—”

Rebecca snatched her hands away.

“Thank you, Martha,” she said slowly, through gritted teeth. “But I suspect that
dukkering
actually means ‘nonsense’ in English.”

Martha stared at her wonderingly. Then a look of pitying comprehension crossed her face.

“I only tell you this, the truth, because I am concerned for you, Rebecca.”

“Concerned,” Rebecca repeated flatly.