“No,” she said, closing the book. Her tone was deliberately casual, but I could see clearly how shaken she was. “It’s just the same as you said—administration of electric shock. I mean—they do have a medicine that they say works sometimes on some patients, but I’m sure that isn’t anything we can manage here, either. Digitalis?”

I shook my head. Penicillin was one thing—and even that was by no means dependable; I still had no way of producing a standard dosage, or of telling whether a given batch of the stuff was even potent.

“No,” I said regretfully. “I mean—you can extract digitalin from foxglove leaves, and people do. But it’s dreadfully dangerous, because you can’t predict the dosage, and even a bit too much will kill you. And we do have a few things to hand.” I tried to sound brightly helpful. “We’ll make sure to keep a good stock of the white willow tea on hand—it’s the most powerful.” White willow didn’t grow in North Carolina but was reasonably available from city apothecaries, and I had a good stock that Jamie had brought me from Salisbury.

“Tea?” she asked skeptically.

“As a matter of fact, the active principle in willow-bark tea is exactly the same chemical that you find in aspirin. And while people mostly use it for pain relief, it has the interesting side effect of thinning the blood.”

“Oh. So … if my heart starts twitching, I should brew up a cup of willow-bark tea and it will at least keep my blood from clotting?” She was trying to keep her dubious tone, but I could see that a tiny ray of hope had been kindled. Now it was my job to blow on it and try to encourage it to take hold and burn.

“Yes, exactly. Now, the tea won’t do away with the disturbing symptoms, but there are a few sorts of ad hoc things you can try for those.”

“Such as?”

“Well, plunging the face into cold water sometimes works—”

“Or so you’re told? I bet you’ve never seen anybody do that, have you?” She was definitely interested, though.

“In fact, I have. At L’Hôpital des Anges, in Paris.” Plunging various body parts in cold—or sometimes hot—water was a widely prescribed treatment for a lot of different maladies at the hôpital, water being both widely available and cheap. And surprisingly, it often worked, at least in the short term.

“Or—if you happen not to be near any cold water—you can try one of the vagal maneuvers.”

That caught her unaware, and she gave me a cat-eyed look.

“If you mean having sex—”

“Not vaginal maneuvers,” I said, “though I’d think the fibrillating might be too distracting to want to do that, in any case. I said vagal maneuvers—as in, stimulating the vagus nerve. There are a few different ways of doing that, but the simplest—and probably the best—is something called the Valsalva maneuver. That sounds rather grand, but it’s basically just taking a deep breath and holding it, as though you were trying to cure hiccups, then pressing your abdominal muscles down as hard as you can—like trying to force out an uncooperative bowel movement while holding your breath.”