So this week I’ve got two Teaser Tuesdays for the price of one (that price being $0, of course). First up is this little bit from the short story “The Jewel of Seven Stones”, which appears in the Seabury Quinn omnibus The Horror on The Links*:

The Horror on the Links is the first of five omnibus editions of Seabury Quinn’s short stories about Jules de Grandin, a French physician-slash-detective, and his sidekick Samuel Trowbridge, another physician, who very much follows in the “idiot friend” model of Hercule Poirot’s sidekick Col. Hastings, except he is, to be honest, even more of an idiot than most idiot friends.

A flurry of snowflakes, wind-driven by the January tempest, assaulted de Grandin and me as we alighted from the late New York train. “Cordieu,” the Frenchman laughed as he snuggled into the farther corner of the station taxicab, “to attend the play in the metropolis is good, Friend Trowbridge, but we pay a heavy price in chilled feet and frosted noses when we return in such a storm as this!”

“Yes, getting chilblains is one of the favorite winter sports among us suburbanites,” I replied, lighting a cigar and puffing mingled smoke and vaporized breath from my nostrils.

Seabury Quinn, The Horror on the Links

I’ve already got the second book in this series, The Devil’s Rosary, but I’m probably going to stop there. There’s only so much idiot friending one can take.

The second of this week’s Teaser Tuesdays comes from Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis, the first of the “Oxford Time Travel” books:

In this book, a young student, Kivrin, has been sent back in time to the Middle Ages for research purposes. Naturally things go awry, starting with a (maybe) epidemic that kicks into gear in the future Oxford** at the exact same time Kivrin departs for the past.*** In this Teaser, we are listening to a voice memo that Kivrin has made on a recording device implanted in her hands, which she activates by putting her palms together and then whispering to them as if in prayer, which is, quite honestly, just about the cleverest way I’ve ever seen to have somebody from the future keep a log of their observations without having any of the locals ask them what the hell they are doing and then burn them as a witch or try to perform an exorcism on them or whatever.

The language isn’t the only thing off. My dress is all wrong, of far too fine a weave, and the blue is too bright, dyed with woad or not. I haven’t seen any bright colors at all. I’m too tall, my teeth are too good, and my hands are wrong, in spite of my muddy labors at the dig. They should not only have been dirtier, but I should have chilblains. Everyone’s hands, even the children’s, are chapped and bleeding. It is, after all, December.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

Now, the astute reader may have noticed that both of those Teasers involve chilblains. Why is that, astute reader? Well, it’s because I have a chilblain story, of course! So, being a couple of New Yorkers living in Southern California, during the wintertime, we have a tendency to leave our heat off, because winter weather in the San Diego area looks an awful lot like mild spring weather back in New York. However, some years back, we had a winter that was unusually damp and unusually cold (not unlike this recent winter, actually), over the course of which I started to notice small itchy bumps on my hands. I took pictures of them, which I no longer have, but they looked kind of like this:

I had no idea what these might be, so after a few weeks I went to see my doctor. He also had no idea what they might be, so he forwarded me along to a dermatologist, who took one look at them and said:

Dermatologist: “Chilblains.”

Of course, I was like, “Whaddya mean, chilblains? Am I in a Dickens novel?” But the dermatologist explained that long-term exposure to weather that is damp and cold but not freezing can cause chilblains, through a mechanism that is, apparently, not well understood. The dermatologist hadn’t seen them in years, so this was a nice little nostalgia trip for him I guess. The prescribed treatment for them was, basically, “Turn the heat on.” (Being a work-from-home computer person, there was literally no way for me to keep my hands warm by, say, wearing gloves. Typing while wearing gloves is not going to do much for your accuracy, and typing while wearing fingerless gloves is not going to do much for your chilblains.) So now, on those damp and chilly winter days, we keep the heat at like 64 instead of letting it get down into the 50s the we we did when we were young and hot-blooded.

I know. So decadent.

* No, this book is not about everyone’s favorite or least-favorite golfer.
** This epidemic is occurring not long after an earlier, as-yet-unexplained pandemic swept the future world, killing untold numbers of people and resulting in this equally memorable bit that I almost used for the Teaser:

“Explain! Perhaps you’d like to explain it to me, too. I’m not used to having my civil liberties taken away like this. In America, nobody would dream of telling you where you can or can’t go.”

And over thirty million Americans died during the Pandemic as a result of that sort of thinking, he thought.

Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

And here I thought I was reading fiction (again).
*** You might think this was good timing on her part, but it’s probably not.