Fanny’s description of the wound had been completely accurate; it was a deep slash that ran downward from the middle of his right clavicle, across the center of his chest—I could see a faint shadow of white bone under the raw red scrape where the cutlass had almost touched his sternum—and ended two inches below his left nipple—which demonstrated its resiliency by hardening into a tiny dark-pink nub when I brushed it. By reflex, I touched the other one.
“They both work,” he assured me, squinting down his chest. “So does my cock, if ye’re reckoning such things.”
“Glad to hear it.”
I picked up his wrist to check his pulse, though I could see it plainly in his neck, banging steadily along at a tranquil rate. The feel of him, warm and solid, was restoring my sense of my own body. I yawned suddenly, without warning, and the rush of oxygen spiked my blood. I began to feel somewhat more alert.
“That’s going to hurt like the devil if you try to get up by yourself,” I observed. Putting any pressure on his arms would tighten the severed muscles and skin.
“I know,” he said, and immediately started trying to do it anyway.
“And you’ll make it bleed more,” I added, putting a hand on his throat to stop him. “And you haven’t an ounce of blood to spare, my lad. Stay,” I said sternly, as though to a dog, and he laughed—or started to. He went white—well, whiter—and stopped breathing for a moment.
“See?” I said, and got awkwardly to my feet. “Don’t laugh. I’ll be back.”
I was moving much better on my way back to the surgery, my head clearing and my brain beginning to work again. Aside from the impressive knife wound across his chest, he seemed uninjured. No signs of shock or disorientation, and the wound was clean, that was good …
Elspeth was still sitting in my surgery chair, but she was awake. My Merck Manual lay open on her lap. I stopped dead in the doorway, but she’d heard me coming. She looked up at me, the skin of her face white and stretched so tight across her bones that I could see plainly what she’d look like dead.
“Where did you get this?” she whispered, one hand spread across the page as though to hide it. I could see the words “Spinal Cord Injuries” at the top of the page.
“My daughter brought it to me from—er … Scotland,” I said, improvising out of a momentary panic. But then I remembered: I’d destroyed the copyright page. No one outside the family knew, or could know, and I breathed again.
“I can ask Fanny to copy out some of the passages for you, if you’d like. Though I don’t know how much use they might be,” I added reluctantly. “Some of the procedures they mention just aren’t available in the colonies—nor yet in most of Europe.” I crossed my fingers under my apron, thinking, Nor anywhere else in the world. “And even as advanced as some of the things mentioned there are … they might not be useful to—to your particular concerns.”
I looked at Charles Cunningham as I said this, and wanted to cross my fingers again—for luck, this time. Instead, I drifted to the foot of the table and gently lifted the bottom of the vomit-yellow coverlet to expose his bare feet. They looked perfectly normal.
But of course they would. Even if his spinal cord hadn’t been severed—and I didn’t think it had—it had clearly been compressed and damaged to some extent. And spinal cord injuries were often permanent. But it would take a little time for the visible effects—wasting of muscles, twisting of limbs—to become apparent. A sharp stink made my nostrils twitch and compress.
Loss of bowel and bladder control. Expected, but not good.
“Have you seen anyone like this before?” Elspeth’s voice was sharp and she rose to her feet, as though drawn to defend her son.
“Yes,” I said, and she heard everything in my voice and sat down again as though she, too, had been shot in the back.
Jesus, who shot him? Please, God, don’t let it have been Jamie …
I pushed back the coverlet and cleaned him gently with a wet cloth. He was unconscious and didn’t stir. Nothing stirred under my hands, and my lips tightened. Men have very little conscious control over their erectile responses, as Jamie had just demonstrated to me, and I’d had a lot of men with quite severe wounds stiffen at my touch. Not this one. Still, it might be the laudanum … that really did affect libidinal response.
I held on to that minuscule shred of hope for the moment and covered the captain again. Elspeth was sitting upright now, but her attention was inward, and I knew she was envisioning the same things I was: caring for a beloved child for whom there was no real hope. Her last child. Months, years—Five years, came the searing thought—of wiping his arse and changing his sheets, moving his dead legs four times a day to prevent atrophy. Of dealing with the bitterness of a man who had lost his life, but had not died.
There was light behind the shutters now, though it was pale and watery; the sound of the rain had settled to the steady drumming of an all-day downpour. I walked behind Elspeth and opened the shutters, then cracked the window enough to bring a waft of cold, clean, damp air into the room.
I had to go and see to Jamie; there was nothing more I could do here. I turned and put my hands on Elspeth’s shoulders and felt her bones, hard and brittle under the black of her shawl.
“He’ll be able to talk and to feed himself,” I said. “Beyond that … time will tell.”
“It always does,” she said, her voice colorless as the rain.
112
We Met on the Level …
AS I LEFT THE surgery, the front door opened behind me, admitting Lieutenant Esterhazy. He looked as shocked and disordered as everyone else this morning, but was at least on his feet and not visibly damaged.
“Come with me,” I said, seizing him by the arm. “Your captain is sleeping and won’t need you for a bit, but I do.”
“Of course, ma’am,” he muttered, and shook his head as though to throw off some heavy thought before following me to the kitchen.
“Where is Lieutenant Bembridge?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. I half-expected him to come through the door; the two lieutenants were so seldom apart that I sometimes forgot which was which.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, his voice quivering a little. “He—didn’t come back to the rendezvous last night, nor this morning—I went down by the Meeting House and walked round, calling out. So I came to report to the captain, before I go back to look for him some more.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, sincerely. “I heard there was a landslide last night—were you there when that happened?”
“No, ma’am. But I heard. So when Gilbert didn’t come back, I thought perhaps …”
“I see. What about this landslide I hear so much about?” I said to Jamie, who had managed to get himself up on one elbow and was eyeing the lieutenant with some wariness. “What happened?”
“A good bit of hillside came down wi’ the rain,” he said. “Trees and rocks and mud. But I canna say more than that. I dinna even ken where we were when it happened. Maybe somewhere near the wagon road.” He touched his chest gingerly, grimacing.