The Winter Sisters Page 7

  Had I come to the right place? Where were the atmospheric crows? The eerie wisps of Spanish moss and spider silk? I’d met a patient on the road, so that must have been Hope Hollow.

  I climbed the steps to the cabin’s porch. The door was open, spilling candlelight into the purple evening. My hobbled footfalls were louder than a knock. I stepped up, forward, and inside. A weathered pine table filled much of the room. Two benches flanked it. They were yellow and decorated with vines and little purple flowers. Lanterns hanging from the ceiling burned cool and white. On the mantel were corn-husk dolls, some fresh and green, others moth-eaten, which depicted men and women at their labors. One chap pushed a straw broom. An older woman peered down the sights of a rifle. Flanking the fire were iron implements: the standard poker, pot handle, and spoon, but also a wicked serrated device three feet long and a polished scythe a full head taller than me.

  Drying on a rack near the fire was women’s laundry, including the unmentionables. Before I could avert my eyes, I heard movement. A woman was entering through the back door. She was no more than thirty. Her hands held her apron up before her, into which she’d gathered a dozen yellow-speckled eggs. She started when she saw me, but she didn’t drop the eggs.

  “I’m sorry, the door was open,” I said, stepping back toward the threshold. “I shouldn’t have—”

  The servant woman composed herself and dismissed my apology. “No, it’s all right. We have people in and out at all hours. Middle of the night, sometimes.”

  Her face was angular and fetching. Her nose—straight, sharp, a bit long—introduced intelligent brown eyes that had stared too long at small jobs. When she saw I was lost for words, her expression turned kindly. I suddenly wished she were a town lady rather than a housemaid for witch doctors. Would that I could make her acquaintance in more fitting circumstances.

  “Let me put down these eggs, and I’ll help you,” she said.

  “But ma’am, I’m not here for help. Dr. Aubrey Waycross, at your service.”

  “The new doctor.” The woman put the eggs into straw-lined containers. She worked very deliberately, taking great care with each egg. Something about her work was ominous. “Did you come for supper, then?”

  “No, not that either.” I shifted on my feet, which reawakened the pain in my joints.

  “Well, I’ll be serving supper soon. And if you don’t need any help…”

  My righteous anger had survived the long walk, the dousing in the Alcovy, and the off-puttingly pleasant appearance of the house, but then it caught in my throat. “That is, ma’am, I don’t believe the Winter sisters should be giving out any help. They need to leave off their practice. Let the townsfolk get proper treatment. This is what I mean to tell the old women. Where are they?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. Her voice held a minor lilt of curiosity, as though she’d discovered an unusual red corn kernel in a pile of yellow ones. She brushed her hands on her apron. The blue and white checks in her dress were vivid and sharp. When she moved, I caught a flash of iridescence, of firefly wings.

  “What happened to your leg, Doctor?” she asked while studying one of the eggs. It was too small to be a chicken’s. Partridge? Quail?

  “I fell in the creek,” I said. “Now, please, I need to say my piece to the Winter sisters.”

  “You already have.”

  “Ah, but… What?”

  “I’m Rebecca Winter.” The young woman fixed me with a hard stare. “My sister Sarah’s upstairs. And Effie is… Well, who knows where Effie gets to.”

  I felt like I’d been hit by a dockside boxer. “I am so sorry. I didn’t know that you… I thought you were granny women. I’d heard from the people in Lawrenceville, and I had a particular vision in my head…”

  “You’re not the first one to make that mistake, Aubrey.” She turned back to her work, freeing me of her transfixing glare. “And you’re not the first one who’s told us to take our evil herbs and get out of town. Others have been much more intimidating than a damp doctor. But we get a lot more patients than protests. I think, on balance, that the town would rather we stay around, so long as we stay up in Hope Hollow.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “The town isn’t sensible enough to know what’s best for itself.” My sally against the Winter sisters was fizzling just as completely as my sally against Thumb. Fortunately, it was less public. “I don’t intend to be intimidating, only rational.”

  Rebecca picked up a rolling pin. I was alarmed until she applied it to a mound of dough.

  “Mm-hmm,” she repeated.

  The dough stuck to the rolling pin. Rebecca tossed on more flour. The puff of white issuing from her fingers was like a trick of prestidigitation.

  “Aubrey, I need to finish supper, which I can’t do while you’re here. But I also can’t let you limp back to your hayloft like a wounded deer.”

  I did not want to be eaten. And how did she know that I lived in the hayloft? I supposed no distance was too far for gossip.

  Rebecca left her cooking and perused her shelves. Above some molasses and coffee were other jars, whose contents I could not identify. She took a squat glass container down from a high shelf, unscrewed the top, and smelled it. “Slippery elm, peppermint leaves, apple vinegar, and red-oak bark. The poultice doesn’t smell so good, but it will help.”

  “I don’t believe, mademoiselle, that such a cataplasm will work for me. And I haven’t come for treatment. Quite the opposite, Miss Winter…”

  Rebecca already had a glob of the thick brownish goo on her fingertips. “Aubrey, if it’s medicine, it doesn’t matter whether you believe in it or not. Now, take down your trousers so I can apply the poultice.”

  “Miss Winter, I cannot! We’ve hardly met!”

  From above us, a paroxysm of laughter exploded between every plank in the ceiling. It felt as if the whole house was laughing.

  Rebecca’s expression turned stormy. “Sarah!” she cried.

  Above us was a dancing of feet and sliding sounds of stockings on wood. Boards creaked. A mist of dust came from the floorboards overhead. Then a younger sister came down the ladder, touching none of the rungs, only sliding down the rails. She alit on the tips of her feet and then turned on them, facing us.

  “You called, Sister?” asked Sarah. Her blond hair looked like flaxen straw on a broom. Sarah looked at least five years the junior of her sister. I could read that from the skin around her eyes. She had a small nose and small eyes. I would not have immediately marked her as Rebecca’s sister. Even their coloration was different, but I did have a flash of recognition. This Sarah had been the one hiding behind a red handkerchief at Thumb’s medicine show. She’d stuck her tongue out at me when she caught me staring.

  “Dr. Waycross is suffering,” said Rebecca. “Don’t make my patient feel worse.”

  Sarah grinned wickedly. “Your patient, is he? Well, he’s not behaving like one. Nor much like a gentleman, either. Wouldn’t it be better, sister, to kick him out on his rump? Then he could try coming in again, and with the benefit of practice, he might make a better first impression.”

  “It would do no good. He sprained his rump falling down in the creek.”

  “But what do you want me for?” said Sarah. “He’s not the sort for my remedies. You can tell that just by looking at him. By the company he keeps. I saw him talking with Boatwright.”

  I held up my hand. “The town’s doctor and the town’s pastor must be acquainted, mustn’t they?”

  “You’re the town’s doctor already, are you?” said Sarah. “How many veins have you bled, and how many limbs have you lopped off? Any fevers broken? Any dyspepsia eased? Nothing. Can’t even cure your own sprained ankle. And you won’t let Rebecca do it. And you won’t trust my remedies.”

  “What sorts of remedies are those?” I asked. I was unable to defend myself on any of the other charges.

  “Horseshit,” said Sarah.

  “Beg pardon?” I sai
d.

  “Horseshit,” she repeated, exaggerating each vowel. “Though not actual horseshit. That’s Rebecca’s medicine.”

  Rebecca lifted a finger. “Sheep nanny tea is—”

  Sarah cut her off. “It’s much better to go to a real doctor, right, Aubrey? A Hippocratic who’ll bleed you out of your feet and rinse your asshole with ipecac.”

  She was trying to rile me up with her foul mouth and uneducated opinions. I diagnosed her with a bilious humor, likely to manifest as a sour stomach and persistent joint pains, besides her acid temperament. “If by ‘Hippocratic,’ you mean a student of rigorous medicine, and if by ‘ipecac,’ you mean a scientific and time-tested remedy, then yes, it is much better to go to that sort of doctor.” I took a breath. “We bleed and blister because it’s what our patients need to get well. I wish I had my lancet with me right now. Extracting a few ounces of blood would put me right again.”

  Sarah grinned. “Everybody thinks his horseshit is the only kind that doesn’t stink.”

  “That’s enough, you two,” Rebecca interrupted. She’d wiped the glob of medicinal goo on the corner of her apron and had picked up the fire poker. She broke a cindered log with a sharp jab, sending sparks up the chimney. “Aubrey, she talks that way to be provocative. She succeeds only in raising arterial pressure.”

  “Which is good for you, isn’t it, Aubrey? Makes the heart beat faster, fonder?”

  I nodded. She was right, unfortunately. I tried to put my weight on my injured leg and vainly hoped again for my lancet.

  “Has he seen Effie yet?” Sarah asked.

  “No,” snapped Rebecca. “No, he hasn’t. Is she even here?”

  “She came back. She’s outside. Look, he’s not going to be the type for breaking chicken bones with me and burying them. And if he won’t take your herbal poultice, then it’s either Effie or he goes away with a bum leg and a busted rump.”

  I started to mention how they’d let that poor waif with the gray hair go, but then I stopped. I supposed not all ailments could be cured in a single visit. Perhaps they’d given her a poultice on her rump, and all had supposed that to be a good cure. Good intentions, bad medicine.

  I didn’t know what choice I had. I couldn’t permit Rebecca to apply her poultice, and Sarah’s cursing wasn’t going to cure anything. Dare I suggest that either Rebecca or Sarah escort me back to town? I daren’t. It was unthinkable, a gentleman and a lady alone on the road at night. Nor could I ask for lodging. A gentleman staying overnight, unchaperoned, in the home of strange women was a greater scandal. I would have to take my chances on the road. Even with wild animals sniffing at my heels, that was preferable to dishonor. I wished then that I’d taken Snell’s rusted gun.

  Rebecca fixed me with her eyes, considering. “All right, go see Effie,” she said, exhaling. “Tell her to come in for supper.” She indicated the back door with a nod of her head.

  “Thank you, Miss Winter.” I bowed to her. How improbable my thanks felt. I’d stormed down with notions of driving out the Winter sisters like serpents from the Emerald Isle, yet there I was, meekly agreeing to meet Effie rather than exiting with dignity.

  “If she prefers to,” Rebecca added.

  “Excuse me?”

  “If she can,” corrected Sarah, with strange insistence.

  Sarah’s words did not placate her older sister, and I could make no sense of them.

  “Come on, city doc, come meet the youngest.” Sarah opened the back door of the cabin, inviting me to leave.

  I took the invitation, not at all sure what I would find there.

  “Hey, did you see a deer on the way up here? Dead deer, dying deer?”

  “Nothing of the sort.”

  Sarah nodded slowly. Then she called into the night. “Effie. Someone to see you.” She didn’t wait for a response. The cabin’s back door closed behind me.

  The purple evening had vanished, replaced by a denser air. The stars were weak behind the mist. The yard around the Winters’ cabin was lifeless. The animals had gone to their folds.

  A girl was sitting at the edge of the porch, her legs dangling so that her toes brushed the ground. She leaned against the horizontal rail, her chin placed upon her crossed arms. Beside her was an enormous washtub filled to the brim with water.

  It was the woman I’d seen on the road to Hope Hollow, the one I took for a patient, so sickly did she look. This was Effie, the third sister, and supposedly a healer! She couldn’t cure her own phlegmatic humors, so how was she supposed… but then I remembered how I could not bleed my own swollen ankle, and I exhaled, letting out my surprise and confusion.

  “Good evening,” I managed to say to her.

  Her graying hair was pulled back in a bun. She would have achieved a more haunting effect had she let it fall in loose, dirty waves past her shoulders.

  “I hadn’t known we’d meet again so soon. You were going the other way, you see…”

  “Did Rebecca and Sarah send you?” she asked, not turning toward me.

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I believe I have been swept here by confusion.”

  “Lots of people are.”

  For a moment, we contemplated the evening side by side. Last year’s withered leaves crinkled beneath the hoof-falls of deer. A flashing white stripe showed the trail of a skunk. Up in the canopy must have been thousands of birds, or millions, but they were silent and invisible. In front of those, fireflies circled and traced the breezes.

  “I thought you were a patient, not a healer,” I confessed. “You looked so—”

  “Are doctors never sick, Dr. Waycross?” Effie untangled herself from the railing and stood up. Unfolded, she was taller than me and taller than Rebecca. Her color was better, too, or she’d found a better light. She looked more ordinary.

  “I’m sorry, Aubrey. I’ve got to go in for supper,” she said.

  “I don’t mean to trouble you. I’ve got a long and limping return to Lawrenceville ahead of me—”

  “I hope you feel better.” Effie started toward the door.

  “But you haven’t… What I mean is—not that I would accept—your sisters told me you were going to offer me some type of cure? For my swollen joints and bruised coccyx. It’s nothing, my leg will hold out, but—”

  “Nothing’s good for you,” said Effie.

  For the first time, she turned to face me, and I caught my breath. Her eyes—I knew her eyes. They were the same pale gray as Eva’s eyes. The face and body around them could not be more different, though. Eva’s red hair and sanguine constitution would have evaporated Effie’s phlegmatic humor like a puddle beneath the noonday sun, but in their eyes, they were the same, the very same, down to the faint lines of yellow that traced the outlines of the irises.

  I said nothing. Her pronouncement had no rational reply. Wordlessly, Effie went inside for supper, and I was alone in the night.

  The doctor was gone. The sisters had eaten their supper. Effie had only two spoonfuls, and Rebecca had eaten even less than that. They were cleaning the dishes out on the porch in the candle- and starlit twilight. Sarah watched Effie fetch the water up from the spring in two enormous tin pitchers. It was confounding to see such a slight girl carry so much weight without wrenching her arms out of joint. Effie set the pitchers on the porch, and it felt to Sarah as if the cabin groaned with the weight.

  “Thank you,” said Rebecca. “That’s more than I need.”

  “I can do the washing up,” said Effie. “It’s no trouble.”

  A faint color touched Effie’s temples. The doctor’s visit had disturbed the delicate equilibrium of her mood. Sarah’s own balance had been disturbed ever since that deer. The deer had been dead. Sarah knew a dead deer from a live one even better than she knew a dead person from a live one. No animal could come back from such a terrible mauling. But when Effie had knelt beside it, the creature had stood up and gamboled away.

  “No, Effie,” said Rebecca as a breeze came unexpectedly from the mountainsi
de, tousling the trees. Loose leaves fluttered. A pigeon started from its roost. Its neighbors cooed and scratched.

  “Oh, let her do the washing if she wants,” Sarah said.

  “You could help,” said Rebecca, who picked up a serving platter from the pile of dirty dishes. “With your hands, I mean, and not your opinions.”

  “I never saw much good in a plate,” Sarah said. “Best thing is to throw ’em into the woods and let the squirrels lick ’em clean.” She glanced at Effie then tucked her thumbs into her elbows and puffed up her chest, to speechify. “A plate doesn’t do anything that your hands can’t do just as well. Give ’em a quick rinse, wipe ’em on your sides, and what dishes have you got left? Nothing, that’s what.”

  Effie picked up one of the pewter plates and dipped it in the washbasin.

  Rebecca reclaimed the plate from her and began working it with a cloth. “How very civilized. Why do we even bother to cook our meat? We could gnaw it right off the bone.”

  “Nobody would care,” Sarah said.

  “I would,” said Rebecca. “Mother would if she were here.”

  A feline howl broke the night. Ten thousand unseen birds took wing, and the wind, which had been blowing down from the mountain, reversed as the pigeons fled from the sound.

  “Why,” Sarah said, “there’s Mother now. Think she’s using a plate?”

  Effie dropped a cup. It bounced twice against the pine boards and rolled off the porch.

  “Aw, Effie, I didn’t mean—”

  Effie folded her fingers together and brought them close to her face. Sarah knew it wasn’t a prayer. None of them knew how to pray.

  “That is why I don’t want her to do the washing up,” snapped Rebecca. “She can’t keep her mind on it.”

  Sarah hopped the porch rail and grabbed the cup from a mud puddle. “Not broken!”

  “Give it here, Sarah.” Rebecca reached out her hand. “I’ll wash it.”