Page 117 of The Outlaw Viking

“Did you wear gloves? And make sure your mouth was covered when you drained the sores? Was the cow already dead?”

“Yea, yea, yea,” Ubbi said wearily.

“Don’t sit down,” she ordered with a screech, “and don’t touch anything.”

Ubbi jumped from where he was about to plop wearily onto a bench before the fire. “Now what?”

“Take off all your clothes so that I can burn them. I don’t want to take any chances of contagion.”

He was too tired at that point to argue with her.

The next day, she vaccinated all the children, along with a horrified Ubbi and Blanche, who’d become downright hostile toward her since coming to the barn. Using a sharply pointed knife, Rain made a small scratch on each of their arms and inserted only a tiny amount of the pox substance—enough to fit on the head of a needle. Over the next few days, other than slight fevers and some nausea, everyone seemed to survive the ordeal without any lasting harm.

Satisfied with the results of that project, she decided to return to the hospitium. Besides, she needed to buy more supplies in the city—thick fabric and heavy thread to make additional mattress covers for the pallets, special seasonings that Blanche requested, more wooden trenchers and spoons, and yarn for knitting hose for the children. Gyda had promised to come out one day to instruct the girls in that fine craft, which Rain had never mastered.

Ubbi, sick of her constant queries about Selik and his fate, encouraged her. “Please go. Give us some rest from yer constant blatherin’ about the master. He kin take care of hisself, I tell ye.”

Adam insisted on coming along to protect her. She started to protest but decided it wouldn’t hurt him to see the hospitium. Maybe he could even be of help. But first she had to warn him not to give away her male disguise as a monk. He thought that a grand jest on the minster priests, many of whom were less than generous with the city orphans.

Adam’s street urchin skills proved invaluable. He maneuvered her through all the shortcuts of the city, bargained mercilessly with the vendors, and showed her an out-of-the-way shop that specialized in imports from the East, including exotic spices.

Later, he sat on a high stool in Ella’s shop, waiting for the shop workers to bundle up the fabric and thread that Rain had ordered, munching on honey cakes and watered mead like the lord of the castle.

“Someone ought to knock the little bugger down a peg or two,” Ella grumbled as Adam chastised one of her workers for being too stingy in measuring the fabric lengths, but her voice held a tone of admiration as well. “Lord, if the pup lives to manhood, he should be somethin’ to see.”

Rain agreed, especially when they went to the hospitium. Adam followed her around, not like a puppy, but a colleague. He was like a dwarf physician as he soaked in all he saw around him with fascination, asked intelligent question after question, and seemed to glow with wonder.

Rain saw a doctor in the making. Too bad Adam would never have the chance to realize that dream in this primitive society.

Father Bernard was not so pleased with Adam’s presence. “Really, Brother Godwine, must ye bring all your companions onto the holy church grounds. First that brutish giant, Brother Ethelwolf. Now, this heathen gutter rat.”

“Who sez I be a heathen?” Adam snarled pugnaciously. “I say me prayers ev’ry night. And besides, I be part Saxon jist like you, Bernie. Was yer mother a whore, too?” He asked the last with the wide-eyed innocence of a well-fed cat.

Father Bernard sputtered and almost choked on his outraged tongue. “Why, you, little—” He grabbed for Adam’s arm, intending to teach him a lesson.

“Did Brother Godwine tell ye he jist spread cow pox over the skin of us poor orphans?”

“What?” Father Bernard dropped Adam’s arm like a hot ember and rushed to the washbowl, where he began to scrub his hands over and over, muttering, “God is punishing me for my sins. Oh, I must go to confession at once.”

Rain had a feeling she wouldn’t be welcome at the hospitium for some time. She flashed a look of chagrin at Adam, not really angry. Truthfully, she was beginning to think she might be of more help opening her own clinic in the spring. And she had enough to do over the winter months worrying about her orphans. And Selik.

More than a month passed, and still Selik hadn’t returned. Rain carried on her “normal” life—caring for the children’s needs in the cavernous barn which had become more a home to her than her plush city apartment in the future, going into the hospitium on the occasions when the blustery winter weather permitted, and visiting with Ella and Gyda.

Rain tried to remain hopeful as Christmas approached, telling the children all the Yuletide stories she remembered from her youth. A Christmas Carol. The Night Before Christmas. Frosty the Snow Man. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. And to their delight, she talked a grumbling Ubbi into helping her bring a huge evergreen tree inside the barn, where they decorated it with pine cones and strings of holly berries.

On her last trip to Jorvik, she’d come across a merchant selling sugar—a very expensive commodity in this primitive society which relied on honey for its sweetening. Suddenly inspired, she poured out the precious coins and took the sugar home with her, hugging it to her chest, along with a small crock of Gyda’s preserved cherries and another of molasses. If Selik came for Christmas, as she hoped, she would have a special present for him.

“Are ye barmy?” Ubbi asked later that day as she poured all her ingredients in a pot with water over the open fire. “Wastin’ all that sugar! On what?”

“Lifesavers,” Rain said, raising her chin defensively. “I’m going to make cherry Lifesavers for Selik for Christmas.”

Her first batch was a disaster. Not only did the shapes, which she poured on a greased piece of marble, resemble anything but circles, but they didn’t harden properly, and they tasted horrible.

She heard Adela whisper to Adam, “Tastes like chicken droppings,” before surreptitiously slipping hers into a chamber pot.

Rain and her mother had made lollipops once when she was a little girl. They’d turned out wonderfully, and she’d figured Lifesavers had to be somewhat the same. Her mother’s recipe had called for corn syrup, though. Maybe it was the molasses she’d substituted. Or perhaps she hadn’t used the correct amounts. And maybe an open fire wasn’t the best cooking method.

So she tried again. This time the candies hardened, but they tasted more like molasses than cherry, and they weren’t sweet enough.