Chapter Text
It was summer in the year 1692, and Dana Scully had never endured such heat.
They came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony the previous autumn, when the area was awash with fiery leaves and crisp, bright blue skies, which made a very pleasant backdrop for the backbreaking work of building a life in a new land. A brutal winter followed, however, during which they lost her father and sister to a throat distemper, which became putrid despite their best efforts. Dana, her mother, and both brothers had lived through it, though, due in great part to Dana’s unusual skill in herbal medicine and intuition about the way the disease spread.
For this reason and others, Dana had quickly developed quite a reputation in the little village of Beverly, about eight hours by foot from the burgeoning metropolis of Boston. She had never wed, in spite of her mother’s increasingly desperate attempts over the years, and was exceptionally intelligent and forthright–her opinions were as loud as her vivid red hair.
Her father had educated her well in Ireland, prior to the influx of English colonists that finally pushed them across the sea to become colonists themselves, and she was not shy about publicly thrashing any man in a battle of wits–much to the chagrin of her family, particularly her brother William, who was not eager to bear the burden of a widow and a spinster now that their father was gone. They had dissolved all their wealth in Ireland to pay passage to the New World, and the winter had been exceptionally cruel.
But now it was summer and the wheat was high, and while there was still pressure from her family to find a husband, it seemed less urgent in the bright beating sun, watching the fruit grow. Her younger brother Charles was apprenticing for the town blacksmith, and William worked in the shipyard. Between them they were comfortable, and Dana herself was developing quite a burgeoning apothecary out of their home in the village.
All in all, while it was much too hot for Dana’s liking, life in the New World appeared to be falling into a comfortable rhythm for the Scully clan.
That is, until he came knocking on her door.
+++
“Come in,” she called from the kitchen, where she was bundling calendula to dry. When the stranger came through the door, she was taken aback at first–by his height, by his somewhat swarthy complexion, and by the fact that he was a stranger, and a Jew. While strangers were common in a port town like Beverly, Jews were not, and she wondered where he had come from.
“Hello,” he said shyly, and for some reason the sound of his voice immediately put her at ease in his presence. “My name is Mulder, Fox Mulder. I’ve heard there is a woman apothecary here in Beverly who is unusually gifted with corrupted wounds. Would you be her?” Dana couldn’t help but smile.
“I suppose I must be, since I am the only woman apothecary in Beverly,” she said, gesturing towards the small, scrubbed pine table in her kitchen. “Please, Mr. Mulder, have a seat. Where is the wound?”
“My foot,” he said, gratefully dropping himself into a chair. She drew closer to him, and that was when she realized he was sweating rather profusely. Her eyebrows drew together in concern.
“Where have you come from?” she asked, as he began unlacing one of his leather shoes.
“Essex,” he said, gingerly removing the shoe and revealing a stocking soaked through with blood and purulence. Dana gasped.
“Essex? That’s miles from here! Have you been walking since before daybreak on that foot?” she asked as she swatted his hands away and pushed his shoulder gently, forcing him to relax back into the chair as she peeled away the stocking from his leg. He gave her a funny look–something like humor–and nodded.
“More or less,” he confirmed.
“Have you no doctor or apothecary in Essex?” she asked, fully uncloaking the wound on his foot. It was indeed corrupted, it exuded a thick, purulent drainage tinged with blood, and the edges of the wound were black. She reached up and felt his forehead; he was not just warm from travel, he was properly feverish. She crouched back down to press her thumb into the calf of the affected leg, to test for water collection on the limb.
“None that will see me,” he said, and she paused, looking up at him with confusion.
“None who will see you? Why wouldn’t they see you? Are they so busy in the metropolis of tiny Essex that they cannot tend to a wounded foot?” She placed a hand on her hip as she asked, and the cumulative effect of her stern expression and her arm askance made Mulder feel as though he were under interrogation by a magistrate.
“Well…” he began, then lowered his voice so as not to carry, “because I am a Jew.” He almost flinched as the words came out of his mouth, as though he were waiting to be hoisted up by his breeches and defenestrated through the kitchen window. Instead, however, the woman shook her head and rolled her eyes with obvious frustration.
“Filthy louses,” she muttered in response. “Did their God not call the Israelites to Him first? Was Christ not a Jew? Who are they to decide medicine should be withheld from those they deem unworthy of it?” She continued to curse the medical establishment of Essex prodigiously as she bustled around the kitchen, drawing water from a large cistern outside the back door and filling a pot over the merry little fire in the corner. As the water warmed, she poured in a measure of what smelled like vinegar, and added dried plant matter–some of which Mulder recognized, some he did not.
Once a fine steam rose off the top and the room was thick with humidity, she finally stopped fuming and withdrew the pot from the flame, bringing it to where he sat and placing it on the floor before him.
“This is going to hurt,” she said plainly, “but it helps to draw the corruption out. You should have come to see me a week ago, and you should not be walking on this foot right now. You’ll have to stay with us for at least a few days.”
“No, I couldn’t impose…” he immediately began to demure, but she crossed her arms and frowned.
“Do you want to get better, or should I just lop it off now and let you hop back to Essex?” she asked, raising her eyebrows in a manner that suggested he shouldn’t answer that question, but acquiesce, which is exactly what he decided to do. Nodding, he lowered his foot into the pot, and hissed as it burned the wound terribly. She tapped his arm with a wooden spoon, which he took and held between his teeth, fighting against the scream rising in his throat.
“I’m sorry, I know it pains,” she said, and this time her tone was much more gentle, as she rested her hand on his forearm and gave him a gentle squeeze. Her touch was soothing, and he instantly felt some of the pain dissipate, as though drawn out with the infection.
“Distract me,” he pleaded. “What’s your name?” He looked up into her pale blue eyes, which seemed to be reading his face like a book, scanning his features carefully.
“Dana Scully,” she finally answered. “And your name is Fox?” He grimaced again, but not from the pain of his foot.
“Unfortunately, yes,” he lamented with a small smile, and she couldn’t help but grin in response. “It’s Yiddish, more like fuchs , but I’d rather you called me Mulder, if it’s all the same.” A flick of a smile touched her features, and she nodded.
“Okay, Mulder,” she said. “Then you can call me Scully. Dana is the girl my family has tried to foist onto any and every eligible bachelor with four or more teeth on either side of the Atlantic, and frankly, I’m tired of being her.” She said this like a joke, but the frustration behind it was real. Mulder eyed her curiously.
“I don’t mean to be forward, but I have to ask, why is a woman as beautiful and as gifted as yourself still wanting for a husband?” he asked. She placed her hands on her hips and looked down her nose at him.
“Who says I’m wanting for a husband to begin with?” she snapped back. “Is it possible that a woman can exist in this world without wanting or needing the shelter of a man? That she might want, rather, her own achievements, her own ambitions, and her own interests?” He held his hands up immediately in surrender.
“Yes, okay, I’m sorry!” he said, laughing in spite of himself. “I’m sorry, I did not mean to offend.” She cooled off a little, making a soft harrumph sound as she pulled his foot out of the hot bath and examined the wound again. She placed it back into the water, and removed herself to the pantry, returning with her apron filled with various plant matter. He watched her curiously as she mashed them with her mortar and pestle, adding a splash of decanted red wine and a healthy drizzle of honey.
When the water had grown lukewarm, the poultice had been worked into a homogenous mush, which was evidently how she wanted it, because she brought it over to the table and began applying it gingerly to his wound.
“How did you hurt your foot to begin with?” she asked, her earlier anger finally gone.
“Putting out a fire,” he said with a grimace, trying to focus on his breathing as she applied the paste to his foot and wrapped it firmly with strips of clean linen. “Someone threw a burning torch into our home a few weeks ago while we were sleeping. I woke, and when I saw it, stomped down on it instinctively without thinking. It burned the sole of my foot.”
“A torch?” she repeated in shock. “Into your home? Why? Oh–because…” He nodded.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “Because.” She looked at him, cradling his wounded foot in her lap, her expression sad.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he felt that she truly was, as though she had done it herself. “I truly am.”
“You’ve done nothing,” he said, attempting to wave her off, but she was firm.
“But my countrymen have,” she said. “And I am truly sorry for how you’ve been treated. I just want you to know that they… they don’t speak for me.” She was so earnest that Mulder couldn’t help but smile.
“Thank you,” he half-whispered, then added, “It’s better here than it was in the old country. Our entire shtetl was burned to the ground, my father was killed, and my sister…” He stopped, as though his throat was stuck, as though he were choking on the words. Scully watched him intently, patiently, until he could finish. “... she was taken. We don’t know what happened to her.”
“I’m so sorry,” Scully said, swallowing hard against the emotion rising in her chest. “I lost my father and sister this past winter, too. It’s… never easy.” Mulder just nodded, their eyes locked on each other, the magnetic draw between them so intense that they seemed to forget the world around them. They just sat that way and stared at one another for an indeterminable amount of time, until a woman’s voice interrupted the silence and snapped both of them back to the present.
“Dana, I need you to go kill one of the hens, we’re having compa–” An older woman, who looked so like Dana that she could only be her mother, stopped speaking abruptly as she entered the room and registered the presence of a strange man. “Oh! I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you had a patron.”
“Mom, this is Fox Mulder, by way of Essex,” Scully introduced. “He’s injured, and in need of ongoing care. He will have to stay with us for several nights.” Mulder looked up at the woman warily, waiting for her response. Whatever he was expecting didn’t happen, because she just smiled kindly at him, nodding her head.
“Of course,” she said cheerfully. “Mr. Mulder, I’m Margaret Scully, and you will be more than welcome in our home for as long as you need.”