Page 66 of Highland Crown
“Thirty-four. Which means when you’re thirty-six, I’ll beforty.”
“So you predict I’ll live for at least six more years.” He cheered as if she’d awarded him a prize. “Then that means there’ll be no trouble when I go for Jean’s nephew next week.”
“Your logic may need a wee bit of polishing,” she scoffed.
“In any event, after I free him and the lads outside take him into the mountains, I’ll come back for you. The following morning we’ll join him and your lasses at Dalmigavie. And by then, I should have a better idea about when our ship will be ready to sail.”
He was, indeed, a master of distraction, and Isabella had to accept it. He didn’t care about her age. And he was going through with his plan of attacking an English prisoner escort regardless of what she said. He was pretending it would be as simple as fetching John Gordon fromsome minister’s house or meeting him at the mail coach arriving from Edinburgh.
“Now you tell me about my wife.” He touched her chin, drawing her gaze to him. “And I’m not talking about anything as trifling as her age.”
“What do you want to know?”
He caressed her face, tucking the loose strands of hair behind her ear. “A physician. Not an easy job for a woman. What made you become one?”
“Where do I begin?” she replied. “I always wanted to know about medicine. I always wanted to heal people.”
“You’ve done a fine job of it with this old sea dog, as our Jean says. But where did it start?”
Isabella thought for a moment. “For as long as I can remember, I followed my father about, watching him with his patients. I was always drawn to his study. The smell of the leather-bound books, pipe tobacco, and whiskey. Other smells, too, intrigued me. Chemicals and fluids that filled large glass jars containing organs and body parts and oddities of nature that I couldn’t identify. Even the dusty scrolls and anatomical diagrams on parchment filling work tables by a tall window.” She laughed. “He didn’t know what to do with me, so he allowed me to be and do as I wished. Because he didn’t discourage me, I suppose, my path was set.”
“You went to the university as a woman?”
“Indeed. I studied at the university in Wurzburg, where my father held a professor’s chair.”
“Were there other women there, or were you the first?”
“There were no other women there while I attended,but many others have taken their degrees before me. Women have been practicing medicine for centuries in many parts of the world. But the direct precedent for my education was a woman named Dorothea Erxleben. She was the first female medical doctor in Germany. Like me, Erxleben was instructed in medicine by her father from an early age.”
“So, while other lasses were being taught to do needlework and sketch, you were studying?”
“I would have found that quite gratifying, but I had to learn to paint and arrange flowers and play the pianoforte, as well. I was never proficient in any of those skills, but my efforts with music were particularly horrifying,” she admitted. “In fact, I believe because of me there is a music master out there who gave up his art to become a baker.”
Cinaed laughed. “I’m very happy your sewing lessons were more successful. I’m a walking sampler of your proficiency.”
“Thank you. And I did far better work with my father’s tutorials in basic science, Latin, and medicine.”
Those years were filled with happiness and hard work, she thought. She never imagined that her life would take her so far from there. Or bring her here to the Highlands of Scotland, to the bed of a man who wanted to marry her.
“And the university accepted you?”
“Not without a fight. But we drew on Erxleben for our argument. In her time, some sixty years before me, the point was made that since women were not allowed by law to hold public office, they also should not hold a medical degree or practice medicine.”
“How did they get around that?”
“Three doctors accused her of quackery and demanded she sit for an examination, expecting she would never pass. The rector of the university at Halle decided that practicing medicine was not the same as holding public office. He allowed Erxleben to take her examination. She passed the test brilliantly and was awarded her degree.”
“As were you.”
She nodded happily. Her father was so proud. “Even now, so many years after Erxleben, my taking of a degree was considered an amazing achievement.” She rolled onto her back and gazed up into the darkness above. “Later, I realized the hardest part of the path I’d chosen was not to earn a degree but to be allowed to practice.”
“I imagine men could be a problem.”
Isabella smiled at him. “And the women. For some reason, we don’t trust our own sex. If it weren’t for my father and then Archibald, I never would have been able to practice. Though I found that the poor always needed proper care.”
“So you provided it.”
“Willingly. And I shall always help them. But I couldn’t survive on what they could afford to pay, if they had anything at all. My inheritance was modest, and I didn’t have only myself to worry about.” She thought of her younger sister. “What do you do with a fourteen-year-old who has no dowry? Marrying Archibald was a matter of survival, for Maisie, and for me.”
