“I’ll take it from here, thank you,” Felicity says. She’s already pushed up the sleeves of her Brunswick and dropped her gladstone on the side table, atop a set of surgical tools so clean they look decorative.
Sim and I watch in silence as she unwinds the bandages around Monty’s leg. He stirs faintly, but beyond a small groan of pain, doesn’t wake. Perhaps it’s only the trick of a few hours’ absence, but he looks so much sicker than he did when I left. In the gray light, his skin looks thin and translucent, like the wings of a newborn bat. Every breath he takes is so heavy, I fear his ribs will break through his chest.
Felicity does a quick examination of the wound, which Sim and I look away from. When she finishes her examination, she snaps her bag shut and turns to us. Her nails are stained rust colored, and I can’t remember if they were that way before. “What are the terms?”
I glance at Sim, who is lingering in the doorway with Seb. “Terms?” I repeat.
“I can’t leave the boat, can’t leave the town, will be shot as soon as he wakes—what?”
Sim cracks her knuckles, considering her words for a moment before she says simply, “Saad is here.”
Felicity lets out a huffing sigh through her nose, like an agitated bull. “Brilliant. I’m definitely going to be shot.”
“No one is getting shot!” I interrupt. “There are no terms, please. We need to help him.”
Felicity unwinds her hair, damp from the rain, then winds it back up again, a nervous habit executed with seemingly no actual nerves behind it. She seems less afraid at the prospect of being shot and more resigned to it, like she’s making a deal with Death, the end inevitable but the path negotiable. “Both of you.” She indicates Sim and Seb. “Go to the Convent of Santo André. They’ll have a stretcher there for you if you give my name.”
“This would be easier if you could treat him here—” Sim starts, but Felicity interrupts.
“I’ll not be doing any surgery on your brother’s pleasure barge.” She casts a look down her upturned nose at Badis in the corner, snuffling like a badger in his sleep. “I don’t even want to know what bodily fluids already coat these hallowed halls.” She nods to the hall. “Go on. I promise I won’t run away.”
Sim leaves, Seb on her heels, and I start to follow, but Felicity barks, “Not you, Adrian.” I stop. She speaks with such authority, I suspect she could have told me to chew off my own hand and I would have started gnawing at once. “Help me get him sitting,” she says. “He needs water. And get his coat off, he’s burning up.”
“Are you going to have to amputate his leg?” I ask as I tug Monty’s arm from his sleeve. She ignores me, which seems like a poor sign. “Is he going to die?”
She stops and considers this, and I wonder if she can already tell I am as sensitive as a new bruise, one good poke all it would take for complications to arise. “If he doesn’t,” she replies at last, turning back to her work, “I’m going to kill him myself.”
Back at her house, Felicity shows the sailors carrying Monty into what might have once been a summer kitchen that’s been converted into a doctor’s office. There’s a wall of shelves lined with medicine bottles, each carefully labeled, and a table beneath them spread with instruments, each clean and terrifying. I cannot decide whether the bone saw or the vaginal speculum makes me more uncomfortable. There’s a cot against one wall, draped in a white sheet, where the sailors leave Monty. Felicity instructs me to stoke the fire while she unbuttons her jacket and tosses it with no ceremony over a chair before pulling on an apron. When she notices me standing awkwardly, my single task completed, she says, “Make tea,” and I have never been more grateful for something to do.
I stay in the kitchen, letting the water boil, then cool, then boil again, trying not to listen for any sound from the next room and pulling the sleeves of my shirt over my hand again and again until the seams begin to unravel. The feeling of forgetting something is tugging at the edge of my thoughts with an insistent hand, and it takes reaching for my pocket several times to remind myself it’s the weight of the spyglass that I’m missing. Even then, I can’t seem to settle, my fear in search of a cause to justify its presence.
A clock somewhere in the house chimes the hour twice before Felicity comes into the kitchen, wearing only her shirt tucked into the waistband of the plain skirt of her Brunswick. She pulls up short when she sees me sitting by the hearth. She’s undone her red tie so that it hangs around her neck, the same color as the blood dotting her front. Her hands look raw and freshly scrubbed. “Is the tea ready?” she asks.
“Oh, I . . .” I glance at the pot, which has gone cold again. “Thought you were just trying to get rid of me.”
“I was, but I also need it. Antipyretics are easier to keep down with mint or ginger.”
I nod, like I know what that means, and nudge the kettle back over the fire. As we wait for it to boil, I grind my teeth together, trying to force myself to stay quiet. Monty had told me not to immediately show my hand to everyone I met, advice that I’m sure extends beyond the connection to the Dutchman and to my mental state as a whole.
She doesn’t need to know you’re obsessive, you just got here, you just met her, don’t say it, don’t give her a reason to think—
“Did I do something wrong?” I blurt.
Felicity looks up from scrubbing at one of the spots on her blouse. “You?”
“For Monty. I should have . . .” I pull my hands into my sleeves and stare at the soft grain of the floor. The boards beneath the stove are black and studded with charred spots where hot coals have bounced from the tray. “On the ship, I should have done more for him. Or taken better care of him. Or known what to do. I should have made him drink something but he didn’t want spirits and we didn’t have any clean water and I thought it might make things worse. Or maybe we . . .” My voice is starting to buckle between my breaths. Don’t tell her it was your fault. “Maybe we shouldn’t have brought him to you but that was Sim’s idea, so I didn’t do—”
“You did the best you could,” she interrupts. “Particularly with the circumstances in which you were operating. None of this is your fault.”
Sim told me the same thing. Why can’t I believe either of them? Probably because they don’t know the full truth of why Monty was where he was on the deck during the storm. If I told her, her answer would have changed. It’s the same way I sometimes fret that anyone who likes me simply doesn’t know me well enough.
Felicity spits onto her thumb and rubs the spot on her blouse more insistently. “Monty has a broken ankle and a compound fracture in his tibia, which became infected due to initial contamination of the wound. It’s a bad break—it was a son of a bitch to set, even with the proper tools. And without sedatives, you wouldn’t have been able to keep him still. I’d never do it on a ship, if I could help it. Medicine at sea is an entirely different skill than on land.” She glances up at me, and it must be obvious how little this has done to reassure me, for she adds plainly, “It’s not your fault. Don’t go looking for reasons it could be.”