Free The Unquiet Bones by Mel Starr Page B

and followed the old woman to her house, leading Bruce by the halter. The house was wattle and daub, like most in the town, and showed signs of neglect, as did its owner. The thatching of the roof was thin, and chunks of daub had fallen from the walls, exposing decaying wattles. A widow’s home, I thought.
    I tied Bruce to a fencepost and approached the door. It opened before I could raise my hand to knock. The woman saw me standing before her and started back so violently that I feared she would fall.
    “Oh – you’ve nearly made me drop me eggs!” she exclaimed.
    The woman clung to a basket. From the rear of the decaying house I heard hens clucking. They were apparently a source of income, perhaps along with turnips her only source of cash.
    “Forgive me. I had no wish to frighten you. Do you remember me?”
    “Aye. You asked of Margaret, the smith’s girl, a few days back.”
    “I did, although I did not know her name until you told me. I would ask a few more questions about her.”
    “I promised these eggs to the vicar before noon. Father Geoffrey likes his eggs fresh.” The woman’s house was but three streets from the church and vicarage.
    “Will you return when your errand is done?”
    “Aye, straight away.”
    “I’ll wait.”
    The woman kept her word. I spent the time observing the house and street. It was a duplicate of hundreds I had seen across England, and France, too, in my travels there. The streets were similar, but the stories of the people inhabiting them all different. The crone; was she a widow? Never wed? Children? Grandchildren? Had she loved and laughed once? The crinkled skin about her eyes said “yes,” but the downturned corners of her mouth revealed sorrow in her life. As I mused, the wrinkled eyes and downcast mouth rounded the corner and limped toward me.
    I had not noticed her hobble as she walked away. Now she returned shuffling, nearly halting each time her left foot struck the ground. When she came closer I could see a grimace, too, when her weight shifted to her left foot. Her condition aroused my medical curiosity.
    “You walk with pain,” I observed when she approached.
    “Aye. Since Easter last I’ve suffered.”
    “What is the cause?” I suspected the disease of the bones. She was of the age for it. It was unlikely her diet was rich enough to cause gout.
    “It’s me toe. Swole up an’ red. ’At’s right, you be t’surgeon from Bampton. ’Eard of you.”
    I wondered what she’d heard, but decided it could not have been too bad, as with her next breath she asked if I might examine the offending digit.
    I followed her into her house, but the light there was too dim to properly diagnose either wound or injury. I carried a bench out to the sunlight, bade her sit upon it, and knelt before her to remove her shoe. I could see the swelling through the cracked, ancient leather, and heard her giggle softly behind her hand as I took her ankle to pull off the shoe. The giggle concluded with a gasp as the shoe abraded her toe.
    Her pain was due to a badly infected ingrown toenail; one of the worst I’ve seen. The wonder is she could walk at all.
    “Can you do aught for me?” she asked.
    “Aye. But not now. I’ve no instruments with me.”
    “Instruments?” She said it as a question, with a trace of alarm in her voice.
    “You have an ingrown toenail. I must trim it back, and remove some putrefied flesh from about it.”
    “Can’t you put somethin’ on it – a poultice, like?”
    “I could, but that would serve only temporarily. The swelling might subside for a day, and the pain with it, but it would surely return. It does little good to treat pain. I must treat the cause of the pain.”
    “I see; sore toes is much like other sorrows God’s children must endure.”
    The old woman did not look like a philosopher, but surviving sixty or seventy years of the assorted trials common to mankind must turn all but the most shallow to contemplative thought now and