He noticed she carefully avoided looking at him, and color was fading from her cheeks. Had the lad’s question embarrassed her, or was something else behind her reaction? Could she be interested in him, too?
“Flowers? Truly?”
Alastair was full of questions today.
“And those plants, and those bunches hanging by the window, too,” Aftyn pointed out.
“What are they?”
“My, ye ask excellent questions, Alastair,” Jamie told him with a grin. He wanted to say the lad's name as often as he could so the lad would know he mattered as a person. Then footsteps out in the hall alerted him. “And here comes Neve, I think. Are ye still hungry?” Like any growing lad, he was probably excited at the prospect of food arriving soon.
“Aye!” Alastair was emphatic on that point, questions forgotten for the moment, as Neve entered with a tray laden with bread and sliced venison, cheese, apples, and honey cakes.
“Cook thinks ye should eat as much of this as ye wish,” Neve announced as she set down the tray on an empty table. “How does that sound?”
Alastair’s eyes widened. “All of that is for me?”
Aftyn looked ready to tear up, her face flushed and her eyes glossy, so Jamie jumped in. “Aye, all of it. But if ye get full before ’tis gone, dinna fash. Ye can take what’s left home to yer ma.” That might prevent the tummy ache Jamie saw in the lad’s future if he tried to empty the tray.
Alastair nodded. “Then I willna eat all of it.”
Behind Alastair and Neve’s back, Aftyn gave Jamie a grateful smile. He savored it, holding her gaze as long as she was willing. She lifted a hand to her heart, then turned her gaze back to Alastair. It took Jamie a moment to break the spell. What had her gesture meant?
Neve was slicing an apple for the lad, but he went immediately for the honey cake. Jamie couldn’t blame him. They smelled buttery, sweet, and delicious. He might have to visit Cook himself once Alastair headed home.
Aftyn went to the lad’s other side and encouraged him to try the meat, then spread a bite of bread thick with butter and folded a thin slice of venison and another of apple on top. Alastair’s eyes lit up after he took a bite, but his mouth was too full to comment.
Aftyn had a gentle touch with the lad, and it was good to see his wariness around adults melt away under her tender care. Despite their rough beginning, it was now clear to Jamie that Aftyn had potential as a healer. How she dealt with Niall, with Alastair, and her other patients reminded him of his mother’s compassion for those she helped. Aftyn could learn the medicines, blades, and stitches, but her empathy came from within.
8
“What are ye doin’ to me wife?”
Jamie straightened at the husband’s sudden appearance in the croft’s doorway. Startled by his outraged demand, for it was surely a demand and not a question, he lifted his hands away from the woman’s diseased breasts and stepped back. The man’s echo of Mhairi’s husband’s challenge when he arrived home urged Jamie to rest one hand on the pommel of his dirk. He fought it. He hadn’t actually been touching her, though it was clear that distinction had escaped the irate highlander now moving toward him with a murderous gleam in his eye.
While he took measure of the man’s height and weight, Jamie told him, “I’m a healer,” and gestured toward the typical healer’s kit of small pots and packets of dried herbs he’d set out on a nearby table when he arrived.
“Who sent ye here?” The man stopped just out of arm’s reach, fists clenched.
Jamie eyed him, not letting down his guard. Big and angry, the husband would be a challenge to subdue in Jamie’s depleted condition.
The exhaustion that accompanied each healing session varied depending on its intensity and length, and this one had been extraordinarily difficult. He’d stopped to rest and was stepping away from her as her husband burst in.
Jamie had never seen anything like this woman’s condition. He now had a tangible reason to regret spurning his mother’s pleas that he accompany her when she went to deal with “women’s complaints.” She might recognize the wild growth. It had taken over one breast and spread like mold to the other, and into the woman’s lungs, causing her body and spirit to waste away. He’d done what little he could to attack the invader, but it wasn’t enough. He knew the basic anatomy of a woman’s body better than most men, no matter how sexually experienced they were, but this went much deeper. He feared doing more harm than good, and dismay compounded his exhaustion that he hadn’t been able to save her life. All the more reason he did not want to harm her husband. She’d need his care, rest, and good food if she was to have a brief respite from the trauma of her illness.
“Aftyn sent me,” he told the man. “She meant to come with me but was called to tend to someone else. She said yer wife was very ill. She was right.”
Her pain still tormented his own chest. He was having trouble breathing, and prayed the husband didn’t notice or he’d jump to the wrong conclusion. Jamie was in no condition to fight a man who thought he’d assaulted his dying wife.
“Aftyn sent a strange man to my wife?”
Where were Bhaltair and their horses? “She’s seen yer wife many times but said that she wasn’t getting better. She trusted me to try to help.” Would the man stop frothing at the mouth long enough to notice the simple robe Jamie wore over trews—though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the dirk slung at his hip and the claymore on his horse, outside.
“Aye? Are ye from the abbey?”
“Nay.”
“Well, then, I dinna trust ye. What kind of healer carries a sword?”
