He opened his eyes and clenched his fists around the frayed edges of his blanket. James Henderson wanted to be in the wide brass bed of his townhouse in Edinburgh. He thought of the soft embroidered quilt and the lace-edged pillows that Meg always removed from the bed when James or she were ill. How sumptuous it would be to sink into that luxury, with the fire going in the hearth and the maid bringing tea. Even Meg’s contempt would be better than this hell of loneliness and despair.

Sweet Jesus, was God testing him? Was he being punished?

The man of reason was calling to him over his abyss of fear and he held a hand out to it.

He was suffering from a fever and Hunting Wolf had sent his wife to tend him in that fever. He was not mad. The world was not ending. He sat up and tried to compose his face and recall his grasp of Siouan. ‘Hunting Wolf?’

Singing Tree wrung out the cloth and pressed it to his head, forcing him to lie back down. ‘He is strong. He will win.’

The boy looked on with eyes like a woodland animal.

To avoid the closeness of Singing Tree’s pretty face, which made the man in the Scottish minister uncomfortable, he turned to the child. ‘You help your father?’

The boy looked back silently. Singing Tree answered. ‘Walks Alone does not speak. Not since …’ She broke off, looked at the boy quickly, and then back at her charge. ‘He is a shaman child. He needs no words.’

A shaman child. Little wonder that Henderson’s brain was fevered, surrounded as he was by so much primitive fear and superstition. The very air he breathed was charged with it. His resolve must be to avoid its seduction.

Hunting Wolf’s wife lifted the cloth from his head, pulled back Henderson’s blanket and began to undo his shirt. He grabbed her hand round the wrist with a roughness he had not intended, but she looked at him with barely disguised mirth again. ‘The balsam must be laid on the skin of the whole body. Is it the cold you fear or your nakedness?’

Henderson was reddening. Her proximity, and the physical link that his hand made on her thin wrist, was already approaching what he would have classed as improper. But to have her strip him and lay her hands on his body would be an outrage. He loosened his grip on her wrist, and wrestled for vocabulary. ‘No. You must not,’ was all he could manage.

Singing Tree pulled her hand away, kept her eyes on his florid face and bent to dip her cloth in the steaming water again. ‘White men are shy like women, are they not?’

Walks Alone was smiling. She looked once at her son, then again at Henderson, who had curled his body into a defensive arc.