Free Gravelight by Marion Zimmer Bradley

harshly.
    Luned launched into a rambling explanation so filled with euphemism and dialect that Wycherly couldn’t really understand it. “Haven’t you seen a doctor?” he demanded, cutting through her words.
    â€œDoctors just want to put you into the hospital,” Luned said scornfully. “Doctor Standish comes around four times a year from the County so the babies can get their shots for school and all, but he won’t do nothing. There’s the sanatorium up the hill a ways—if you go on up the ridge you can probably see it, if you go in daylight—but it don’t do folks around here much good.”

    â€œWhy not?” A sanatorium implied a medical staff of some sort, and the doctors there should at least be willing to refer local emergencies—though if Luned’s assessment of the County Medical Service’s Dr. Standish was any indication, the inhabitants of Morton’s Fork would do anything rather than be sent out of the area to the hospital.
    â€œWildwood Sanatorium burned down eighty year ago next month. Ain’t nothing there now but ha’ants and brambles,” Luned explained simply.
    They don’t go because it isn’t there.
    Feeling as if he’d been played for a fool, Wycherly snarled, “So what do you expect me to do for you?” He was hungry, and he wanted a hot bath that it didn’t look as if he was going to get, and he felt an uneasy sense of responsibility that he didn’t like, as if merely by virtue of coming from a privileged background he had some responsibility to those who had less.
    Luned stared at the floor, biting her lower lip to keep from crying, something that irritated Wycherly even more.
    â€œI thought … maybe … if you were a conjureman like old Miss Rahab … you could maybe fix me up a tonic so’s I didn’t feel so poorly all the time,” she finally said.
    That’s ALL? Wycherly nearly said. But there was no “all” to it; that something was wrong with Luned was clear, from her pallid complexion to the fact that it had been so easy to mistake her for a child half a dozen years younger. He could tell her to eat better food, to rest more, but was there any way for her to follow such orders, living as she did?
    â€œI better go,” Luned said.
    â€œNo.” Though Wycherly hated the thought of getting entangled with some ignorant mountain girl, still less did he like the thought of being a man just like his father: someone who used people and then threw them aside when they were no longer useful.
    And ignored them until they were.
    â€œSit down. Eat your soup. I may be able to do something for you. And quit sniveling,” he snapped.

    Though Luned had said the soup had burned, there was more than enough for dinner. Even though most of the ingredients had come out of cans, it was surprisingly good, enough to awaken even Wycherly’s flagging appetite. As they are, Luned pattered on about her housekeeping skills, demanding that he give her his shirt so she could clean and mend it for him.
    â€œâ€”and I’m a powerful good seamstress, Mister Wych—you’ll see.”
    He supposed that he would, like it or not. But at least he had a solution for some of her problems.
    â€œWait here,” Wycherly said, when dinner was over.
    He got up from the table and went back into the other room, not waiting to see if she obeyed. His shoulder bag was right where he’d left it, on the floor beneath the window. She hadn’t touched it when she’d cleaned—at least, he hoped she hadn’t. He slung it onto the bed and opened it.
    In it were all the necessities of a wastrel’s life: his shaving kit with its rechargeable electric razor, a bottle of “1903” cologne. An address book, containing the telephone numbers of enough doctors and lawyers to keep the police away from him for at least a little while, if the need came. A cellular