Band of Angel (59 page)

“Broken ribs,” he murmured, “seventh, possibly eighth.” Deio gave a gasp of pain and tried to push him away, but an orderly held him down. “Lie still, sir,” snapped Cavendish. “Bayonet wound; query gunshot wound near spine. He’s lucky not to be paralyzed,” he said to her. Deio was deeply asleep again, and deathly pale.

“Those lamps are hopeless,” he grumbled, and told her to bring the candle closer. “I can’t see a thing in this.”

She rushed to get the candle; under its flickering light she saw that part of the wound had split and was leaking blood.

His fingers probed for the track of the bullet. “Lacerations to abdomen caused by Christ knows what. I’ll work on the spine first, but I’ll need help to turn him over.”

The old orderly gripped Deio’s arm.

“Be careful!” The words were out before she knew she’d said them.

“It’s her friend,” said Cavendish. “She’s going up in the world.”

His eyes met hers over Deio’s exposed belly and the other medical staff smirked as they did at any banal joke that came out of his mouth. She didn’t care; every atom of her being craved for his fingers to be careful. He was frowning again, deciding what to do.

There was a popping sound from a lamp. She could feel her body wet with sweat, but struggled to look calm; Deio’s life depended on it. Cavendish was usually decisive but tonight he was fiddling, first picking up a curved knife from a bowl of rusty water, then a straight one; he stared at it. Then, at last, “The narrow probe,” he told the orderly. “It’s second from the left in my case.”

Deio’s legs were starting to twitch and he was groaning. His lips,
were pale with shock; his stomach wound oozed brackish blood. Catherine wiped his lips with vinegar and water; she looked at Cavendish and felt herself close to pleading with him.

“We need more charcoal for that fire.” Cavendish was holding the wound together now, his hands covered in Deio’s blood.

“This won’t take long,” he told them. “I’ll get that bullet out and then do the ribs. Nurse Carreg”—he nodded toward the chloroform bottle—“a small amount on the rag, please.

“You’ll feel drowsy, and then you’ll fall asleep,” he told Deio. He took the bottle from her hand.
All good surgeons need a touch of the murderer in them,
he’d told her once.

“Here, let me do this. A friend,” he asked pleasantly under his breath, “what sort of friend?”

The pensioner orderly was out of earshot; an exhausted Sister Clara sat like a broken puppet in the corner.

“He’s a neighbor from home,” she told him. The rag was soaking up the green liquid. “Nothing more.”

“Are you sure?” His voice was a playful whisper. “When I asked you before you wouldn’t say.”

“Please don’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t. I wish I did.”

“Please go on, you’re better than the others at this.”

His great big, exhausted, blank eyes swept over her and he suddenly smiled, sincerely and warmly. “I’m very tired though; I don’t know how I’ve got so tired.”

“But the good thing is you go on working, and your work is good. Finish the operation and I’ll come round; I’ll tuck you in.” She added, “Thank you for doing this.”

It nearly killed her to say it, but time was running out for all of them.

The orderly was now looking strangely at them, something had to be done. As Cavendish held the chloroform over Deio’s face, she inhaled the dense perfumey smell and saw Deio’s face become white and clammy. His breathing became deeper and more even and, for a moment as she watched, she died with him.

“I’m glad it worked,” Cavendish said to one of the orderlies. “The new lot is about as useful as shit.” She heard their voices as though from a distance, coming and going. When Deio was sound asleep Cavendish, who had stopped to light up one of his cigars, put it out. He adjusted the lanterns and swiftly felt along the tracks of the bullet, first with his probe then with the tip of his index finger. As he flipped the mucus-and blood-covered bullet out, it bounced along the floor and was caught in the corner by the orderly.

“Howzat?” he said. “That’s a good one, sir.”

His teeth bared under the lights and he gave her a little wink. Then, when he’d checked there was no other bullet, he took a curved knife, laid it against Deio’s belly, and sliced off a piece of rotten flesh, staunching the blood as he did so with a bundle of rags. He took the needle he kept in the lapel of his frockcoat, got her to thread it, and sutured the jagged wound, working deep through the skin and cellular tissue. The surrounding abrasions were treated with a lint dressing doused in vinegar. Finally, he looked at Deio’s ribs again, which, after careful manipulation, he bandaged. The relief when he stopped, looked up, and said, “It’s done,” was so great she almost fainted. “The fractures,” he said, “are quite straightforward, but it’s important to check the tension of the bandage tomorrow.”

“Deio! Deio,” Sister Clara was gently tapping his face, “you’ve had your operation, you can wake up now.”

“Catrin,” he murmured, “Catrin,” and went to sleep again.

“That’s nice.” Cavendish lit his cigar. “He remembers you.”

After the operation she went outside with the stretcher-bearers. A man with a thin gray horse was waiting. He said his name was Arkwright.

“Is he going to be all right?” he asked anxiously.

“I think so.” He said he was Deio’s friend, and could take him back to his hut if he was well enough to travel.

She asked the two stretcher-bearers to wait for a moment, then asked what kind of hut and how far away?

“A tidy one,” he said. “Bring him home.”

To her surprise, the stretcher men agreed, saying an officer could do what he liked, and that he’d probably be better off in his own hut than in hospital anyway. She asked him to guard Deio for as long as it took her to get back to the hospital and collect her things.

Running back to the kitchen through a clear and starry night, she was aware of an immense sense of relief, of an exultation so strong she felt she could fly. Deio was alive; he hadn’t died. She could hear herself gasping with joy.

In the nurses’ quarters, she crept around in the half light, taking some money—twenty pounds—from the loose floorboard under the bed where she had hidden it in a tin. She put on as many clothes as she could wear, bundling the rest into a carpetbag, and went barefoot downstairs, her boots in her hand, to slip a note under the kitchen door for Betsy. She’d made up her mind now: Deio was safer away from the hospital, and so was she.

* * *

When she got back to Deio, Arkwright and the stretcher-bearers had wrapped him in four blankets like a mummy and covered him with a tarpaulin. All you could see was his hat, pulled down to his nose, his lips already purpling with cold.

They set off toward the hills. It was hard going under foot with the track rutted and colandered with shot-craters, and deathly cold; every now and then a tree unloaded a packet of snow down her collar. Arkwright told her to get in the cart with Deio, but the horse, a shambling collection of articulated bones in the moonlight, looked so exhausted that she chose to walk behind him. She thought of hanging on to his tail, but it was so gnawed and pathetic, she feared it could be pulled off as easily as a rag doll’s arms.

Halfway up the slope, the horse stopped, its head nearly on the ground. It was gasping for breath. She kneaded its neck and thanked it for trying so hard. Then she saw with a terrible sense of foreboding, the white snip between its eyes.

“Moonshine.” Hearing his groan, made the tears pour down her face. “What’s happened to you?” She pulled at his freezing ears; let him rest for a while in her hands, then she went back to check on Deio, tucking his hands deeper under the blankets.

His lips were bluer now, and his teeth chattering. There wasn’t much time.

She thanked God that dawn was coming—it was creeping over the horizon, lighting up inky puddles and trees—and that soon the temperature would rise. In the distance, Balaclava Harbor was a vaporous pot of silver and blue light.

“How much farther?” she asked Arkwright. They’d already been out in this deadly weather for over an hour.

He pointed vaguely toward the hill ahead of them. “The other side of that,” he said. “Not far if nothing happens.”

Her ears rang with the cold and her feet were soaking blocks of ice. She knew this was a risk, too. The hospital was dirty, and Deio’s position there precarious, but this was cold, too cold.

He should have been coming around now from the chloroform
but he’d only opened his eyes once, when the cartwheel jammed in a rut, and she’d seen a brief blink, the gleam of his irises in the moonlight. He’d gone straight back to sleep again.

They came to the top of the hill and then, going down on the other side, she had to run so fast to keep up, she got drenched in muddy water. Finally, she saw a line of muddy tents, where a few men were moving around in the early dawn. One was stropping his razor; others just lay there smoking their pipes and looking at them. About a quarter of a mile past the tents, the cart stopped outside a modest log cabin. It was built into a hillside with a makeshift corral outside.

“Here we are,” said Arkwright. “Home sweet home.”

She saw the silhouettes of four horses, munching from frozen hay nets. When they whickered at Moonshine, he looked back blankly. He was exhausted; they all were.

They lifted Deio, a frozen bundle of blankets, from the cart into the shadowy hut. Arkwright, who hadn’t said more than two words to her on the way up, told her there was a stove inside; when they’d got Deio into bed, he’d light it for them. He came back with some wood, a little pile of charcoal, and some tongs and laid a fire. She unwrapped Deio from his crunchy-sounding shroud and put him to bed. Arkwright blew on the fire; he showed her the container where the water was and a small side room behind a torn blue and white curtain; he said there was a mattress there she could sleep on.

Before he left, he mashed his forage hat in his hands and looked at her with his large, appalled eyes.

“Will he like— Will he— Is he all right?”

“I’m hopeful” was all she could say.

He said nothing. He seemed fresh out of hope.

Deio’s bed was in the corner of the room, flush up against raw planks of wood stuck together with daubing. It had a collection of goat and sheepskins on top of it, some saddles and a gun underneath. It was wide enough for two, so, when Arkwright was gone, she took off her cloak, lay down beside Deio and fell asleep, still wearing her boots.

She’d never slept like that before, and never did again. It was like falling through a gap in time into some place of vast pillowy ease, for ten, then eleven, then twelve hours. Deep and sweet and hungry.

When she woke at three the next afternoon, she had a thumping headache and Deio was staring at her.

And then he slept again and while he did, she crept around the hut. She poked at the fire, which had gone out, then sat in a chair and looked at him. He was still deathly pale and had lost a lot of weight. He almost looked like a stranger with his odd expression and all that wild hair poking out of the red hat, and his beard still matted. She suddenly realized she was frightened of him—and of herself. What had she agreed to by being here?

To stop herself panicking, she got up and made an inventory of the hut so she could decide what she needed to bring back from the hospital.

Behind the curtain, she found a collection of cooking pots, a large skillet, some flour, a glass jar full of tea, some dried peas, a jar of nails, and some molasses, all carefully stored in a wooden box and with a rat trap nearby.

On the floor beside the mattress were some blankets and dirty shirts, a whip, a pair of cracked but well-oiled riding boots stuffed with paper, and some gaiters, so stiff with horse sweat they stood on their own.

The sight of his uniform hanging on the wall above his bed disturbed her. How unreal it seemed: those bits of braid, the cherry-colored jacket, blotched here and there with mud and blood, the gold epaulettes. Nothing to do with him really. Her wild boy with one foot permanently out the door.

Her own uniform was still soaked with the fear she’d felt during the operation. The ugly dress with its crude sash had been her mirror. Wearing it, she’d seen every bad thing about herself—her vanity, her snobbery, her cowardice, her weak moral character—for surely, and this must be faced soon, she had used herself to lure Cavendish, even to trick him.

She had to cling to simple thoughts about herself. She could make a proper fire. She would melt some snow and make some tea.
She would clean him up, and steel herself to look at him again carefully and dispassionately. If he needed to go back to the hospital, she would take him.

The fire roared into life in a crackle of flames. While she was putting water on to boil she saw, above her head, a squirrel and a couple of rabbits hanging from a hook in the ceiling. She’d skin them later and paunch them. “At least I’m useful now,” she thought with bleak satisfaction. “I know what I’m for.”

When the tea was made, she took off her boots, worn for the past twenty-four hours, and put her wet and purpling feet in the rest of the water. Wonderful! She soaked them, dried them, and put on a pair of Deio’s clean socks.