“Rooks, eh?” I said, sliding into the bed and stretching out with a groan. “Are you going to dream about chess tonight?”

Jamie nodded, with a jaw-cracking yawn that made his eyes water.

“Aye, I’m sure I will. I hope it willna disturb ye, Sassenach, if I castle in my sleep.”

My feet curled in the sheer joy of being unfettered and relieved of my increasing weight, and my lower spine sent out sharp jolts of a mildly pleasant pain as it readjusted to lying down.

“You can stand on your head in your sleep if you want,” I said, yawning myself. “Nothing will bother me tonight.”

I have seldom been more wrong.

I was dreaming of the baby. Grown almost to the birthing, it kicked and heaved in my swollen belly. My hands went to the mound, massaging the stretched skin, trying to quiet the turmoil within. But the squirming went on, and in the unexcited fashion of dreams, I realized that it was not a baby, but a snake that writhed in my belly. I doubled, drawing up my knees as I wrestled the serpent, my hands groping and pummeling, searching for the head of the beast that darted and thrust under my skin. My skin was hot to the touch, and my intestines coiled, turning into snakes themselves, biting and thrashing as they twined together.

“Claire! Wake up, lass! What’s amiss?” The shaking and calling roused me at last to a fuzzy apprehension of my surroundings. I was in bed, and it was Jamie’s hand on my shoulder, and the linen sheets over me. But the snakes continued to writhe in my belly, and I moaned loudly, the sound alarming me almost as much as it did Jamie.

He flung back the sheets and rolled me onto my back, trying to push my knees down. I stayed stubbornly rolled into a ball, clutching my stomach, trying to contain the pangs of sharp agony that stabbed through me.

He yanked the quilt back over me and rushed out of the room, barely pausing to snatch his kilt from the stool.

I had little attention to spare for anything other than my inner turmoil. My ears were ringing, and a cold sweat soaked my face.

“Madame? Madame!”

I opened my eyes enough to see the maid assigned to our appartement, eyes frantic and hair awry, bending over the bed. Jamie, half-naked and still more frantic, was behind her. I shut my eyes, groaning, but not before I saw him grab the maid by the shoulder, hard enough to shake her curls loose from her nightcap.

“Is she losing the child? Is she?”

It seemed extremely likely. I twisted on the bed, grunting, and doubled tighter, as though to protect the burden of pain I contained.

There was an increasing babble of voices in the room, mostly female, and a number of hands poked and prodded at me. I heard a male voice speaking amid the babble; not Jamie, someone French. At the voice’s direction, a number of hands fastened themselves to my ankles and shoulders and stretched me flat upon the bed.

A hand reached under my nightdress and probed my belly. I opened my eyes, panting, and saw Monsieur Fleche, the Royal Physician, kneeling by the bed as he frowned in concentration. I should have felt flattered at this evidence of the King’s favor, but had little attention to spare for it. The character of the pain seemed to be changing; while it grew stronger in spasms, it was more or less constant, and yet it seemed to be almost moving, traveling from somewhere high up in my abdomen to a lower spot.

“Not a miscarriage,” Monsieur Fleche was assuring Jamie, who hovered anxiously over his shoulder. “There is no bleeding.” I saw one of the attending ladies staring in rapt horror at the scars on his back. She grasped a companion by the sleeve, calling her attention to them.

“Perhaps an inflammation of the gallbladder,” Monsieur Fleche was saying. “Or a sudden chill of the liver.”

“Idiot,” I said through clenched teeth.

Monsieur Fleche stared haughtily down his rather large nose at me, belatedly adding his gold-rimmed pince-nez to increase the effect. He laid a hand upon my clammy brow, incidentally covering my eyes so that I could no longer glare at him.

“Most likely the liver,” he was saying to Jamie. “Impaction of the gallbladder causes this accumulation of bilious humors in the blood, which cause pain – and temporary derangement,” he added authoritatively, pressing down harder as I thrashed to and fro. “She should be bled at once. Plato, the basin!”

I yanked one hand free and batted the restraining hand off my head.

“Get away from me, you bloody quack! Jamie! Don’t let them touch me with that!” Plato, Monsieur Fleche’s assistant, was advancing upon me with lancet and basin, while the ladies in the background gasped and fanned each other, lest they be overcome with excitement at this drama.

Jamie, white-faced, glanced helplessly between me and Monsieur Fleche. Coming to a sudden decision, he grabbed the hapless Plato and pulled him back from the bed, turned him and propelled him toward the door, lancet stabbing the air. The maids and ladies fell back shrieking before him.

“Monsieur! Monsieur le chevalier!” The physician was expostulating. He had clapped his wig professionally upon his head when called, but had not taken time to dress, and the sleeves of his bedgown flapped like wings as he followed Jamie across the room, waving his arms like a demented scarecrow.

The pain increased once more, a vise squeezing my insides, and I gasped and doubled up once more. As it eased a bit, I opened my eyes and saw one of the ladies, her eyes fixed alertly on my face. A look of dawning realization passed over her features, and still looking at me, she leaned over to whisper to one of her companions. There was too much noise in the room to hear, but I read her lips clearly.

“Poison,” she said.

The pain shifted abruptly lower with an ominous interior gurgle, and I realized finally what it was. Not a miscarriage. Not appendicitis, still less a chilled liver. Nor was it poison, precisely. It was bitter cascara.

“You,” I said, advancing menacingly on Master Raymond, crouched defensively behind his worktable, beneath the protective aegis of his stuffed crocodile. “You! You bloody frog-faced little worm!”

“Me, madonna? I have done you no harm, have I?”

“Aside from causing me to have violent diarrhea in the presence of thirty-odd people, making me think I was having a miscarriage, and scaring my husband out of his skin, no harm at all!”

“Oh, your husband was present?” Master Raymond looked uneasy.

“He was,” I assured him. It was in fact with considerable difficulty that I had succeeded in preventing Jamie from coming up to the apothecary’s shop and extracting, by force, such information as Master Raymond possessed. I had finally persuaded him to wait with the coach outside, while I talked to the amphibious proprietor.

“But you aren’t dead, madonna,” the little herbalist pointed out. He had no brows to speak of, but one side of his wide, heavy forehead crinkled upward. “You could have been, you know.”

In the stress of the evening and the physical shakiness that followed, I had rather overlooked this fact.

“So it wasn’t just a practical joke?” I said, a little weakly. “Someone really meant to poison me, and I’m not dead only because you have scruples?”

“Perhaps my scruples are not entirely responsible for your survival, madonna; it is possible that it was a joke – I imagine there are other purveyors from whom one might obtain bitter cascara. But I have sold that substance to two persons within the last month – and neither of them asked for it.”

“I see.” I drew a long breath, and wiped the perspiration from my brow with my glove. So we had two potential poisoners loose; just what I needed.

“Will you tell me who?” I asked bluntly. “They might buy from someone else, next time. Someone without your scruples.”