Carla Kelly (27 page)

Her eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom at the same time she heard someone whisper her name. Surprised, she looked around. “Yes?” she whispered.

“Over here.”

She followed the sound and noticed a man sitting between two cots. “Monsieur Leger?” she asked, uncertain.

“Come closer.”

She moved slowly toward him, not sure if she was hesitant still about his location, or if she dreaded his presence after his outburst last night. “You are the last person I thought I would find here,” she whispered, not wanting to wake anyone, but not willing to move closer.

“Forgive my intemperance last night,” he said simply, and motioned her forward. She knelt beside him, and he touched her head. “Elinore, I thought I should do a little penance for my rudeness.” He looked to his left, and she noticed that he was holding one of the patient’s hands. “He was crying and wanted his mother,” Leger explained. “I am a poor substitute, but he did not seem to mind.”

“I thought you did not want anything to do with your countrymen anymore,” she said. “In fact, weren’t you rather adamant on the subject?”

“We are all of us a long way from home,” he countered. When she said nothing, he looked down at her. “You’ll get cold sitting on the floor.”

She shook her head, unwilling to disrupt him.

“I have sat here most of the night, watching this poor man. I watched your husband, too. I need to apologize to him for my rudeness.”

“I doubt he is too concerned about it, monsieur.” His hand was still on her head, but she decided she did not mind.

“And I have been thinking,
cherie
.” He smiled at her. “Do you mind if I call you that? I used to call Charlotte and Eugenie
cherie
. How many times I have wished in the last twenty years that I had taken my family to England
with me on my diplomatic excursions! But I did not, and you know the results.”

He chuckled, and she listened, holding her breath, for any bitterness. There was none this time. “That man across the way, the older soldier with but one leg?”

She nodded.

“He says
‘c’est la vie’
all the time! Perhaps traipsing all over Europe with Napoleon has made him more philosophical than most. The smart salon set I used to lounge about with would have called him simple, but I say now that he is right. That
is
life, and haven’t the last twenty-five years been an adventure! I daresay we will all make the history books, if someone lives to write them.” He lifted his hand from her head and rested it gently on her shoulder. “Perhaps my countrymen do need me. Am I a fool?”

“Not anymore,” she replied.

Jesse was sitting up on his cot when she tiptoed back. He scratched at his week-old beard and patted the space beside him. She sat down, supremely content when he put his arm around her.

“A long night?” she whispered, leaning close to him.

He nodded. “You saw that cleaned out burn. I hate to inflict that much punishment, but I know he’ll feel some relief now.” He looked toward Leger. “Monsieur Le Gross Complaint actually asked me what he could do to help, so I told him to hold hands with that poor fusilier.”

“He cannot be requiring any medical assistance.”

“No, more’s the pity, but he starts to cry for his ‘
maman
,’ and it upsets the others.” He directed his gaze at the cot close to him. “And our surgeon? Elinore, I cannot believe he still lives.”

“Why not?” she asked. “He had an excellent surgeon, and you know he wants to see his family again.”

He moved his hand to her neck and began to massage it gently. “Remember when the Chief used to call me Dr. Hackensaw?”

“Now, be fair,” she chided him. “As I recall, he referred to both you
and
him as the Doctors Hackensaw after Ciudad Rodrigo.” She closed her eyes with the pleasure of his fingers.
He
is tired, and
I
am the beneficiary, she thought. How strange.

“I felt like such a caricature of a surgeon last night!” His fingers left her neck, and he leaned forward on the cot, his hands dangling between his knees. “He broke both his tibia and fibula in two places, but I had to amputate rather high up on his thigh because of the infection.” He sighed and gently ran his hand along Barzun’s arm. “If he lives, I have rendered him an invalid.”

“Would he have lived without your surgery?”

“No.”

“Did he want you to operate?”

“He insisted upon it.”

“And you did the best you could?”

“The very best.” He turned his attention to her, and the weariness in his eyes brought tears to her own. “I suppose you will tell me to go lie down and really sleep?”

“You can trust Monsieur Barzun with me,” she said quietly.

He smiled, took her hand, and raised it to his lips. “I’ve known for years that I could trust you with anything. When the Chief used to ask you to sweep out the tent—I doubt you were more than ten, dear wife—I wish I could have preserved that look of determination in your eyes to do the job well! I would have prescribed a dose of it three times daily to every soldier in Wellington’s army.”

She laughed softly at the image his words presented, then put her hand to her mouth when Barzun stirred and muttered. Jesse leaned closer and watched him intently. He put his fingers against the surgeon’s neck and frowned. “So thready,” he said. “I’d give all my back pay for a steady pulse.” He took her hand again. “I know I can trust you.” He turned on the cot until he was facing her. “Would you trust me with something?”

“You know I will. What is it?” she asked.

“Your heart, my dearest.”

She looked at him, so tired that his eyes were half closed; so dirty she could see dried blood under his fingernails. The front of his uniform was flecked with particles better left undescribed. He was a far cry from the quiet, shy surgeon that the other officers from glamorous and famous regiments chuckled over until the dreadful moment when they needed him. I may be the luckiest woman in the world, she thought, the wonder of it so far beyond her imagination
that she felt light-headed. How did this good thing happen to
me
?

She had to say something, because doubt was starting to creep into his eyes. Sitting there in a row of cots with the wounded of Napoleon’s army, she couldn’t imagine a place farther removed from this setting that a woman in love would wish for a proper declaration.
C’est la vie
, she thought. “There may be some slight problem with giving you my heart, Jesse,” she said simply. “You already have it. How could I possibly give it to you again?”

She closed her eyes when he pulled her into a tight embrace. She locked her arms across his back, unwilling to let him go, even if every patient in the refectory should suddenly demand his attention, or all three French armies burst through the front door. She would hold him tight until…Elinore started to smile. He was breathing deep and even against her shoulder, heavier by the moment as he began to relax against her breast. Gently, softly, so she would not waken him, she kissed his hair and lowered him to the cot. When she had covered him with his overcoat again, she sat on the floor between the two cots, her eyes on Philippe Barzun, her heart on Jesse Randall.

E
linore woke him soon, and Sister Maria Josefina escorted him to the room his wife had vacated. The nun asked him something that he agreed to without understanding a single word. He sat there, staring at her stupidly until her beautiful Italian finally penetrated his skull. “You want my clothes,” he repeated. He took off his uniform blouse and began to unbutton his trousers. He winced at the shrillness of her voice then, until it dawned on him that she preferred him to wait until she left the room, and then put them outside the door. He nodded, but continued to unbutton his trousers. He was stepping out of them when he heard the door slam forcefully.

He took off everything until he was bare and shivering. The distance from the bed to the door looked like the distance across St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. He gave it up as a bad business and crawled into bed. If Sister Maria Josefina wanted his clothes, she could come and get them, or send Lorenzo the slow boy. His eyes closed.

He woke hours later as he always woke, sitting bolt upright, instantly alert and wired like the key to the kite in Dr. Franklin’s famous experiment. He knew the moment of absolute panic would pass, reminding himself that if something earth-shattering had occurred in the refectory, Elinore would have sent Harper or Wilkie running.

He sank down slowly into the blankets again, wide awake but unwilling to stir. He glanced at the floor and smiled to see that his clothes were gone. “What a dilemma this is, Hippocrates,” he said out loud. “I think I’m chained to this bed until my clothes return.”

He knew the thought gave him leave to drift back to
sleep, but he couldn’t, not with his brain alert now. Instead, he did what he always did and thought about his patients. He lay there, the blanket tight to his chin, watching his breath and revisiting every decision, every treatment, every consolation he had extended with his puny arsenal of supplies.

“Hippocrates, I hate my job,” he said out loud. “Did you ever hate it?” Tears welled in his eyes. Did you ever stand over living, twitching flesh with blood up to your elbows and wonder why you had to do the world’s dirty work? His stomach queasy, he relived every detail of last night’s surgery, from Harper’s wide-eyed revulsion to Barzun’s attempt not to scream as he probed, prodded, retracted, ligated, and set saw to bone. He wondered how many surgeons for how many years would have given their own lives for something to deaden pain in surgery. I would, he told himself, I would.

Despite his own doubts, he knew he had done his best. An amputation was a fairly straightforward surgical procedure, if done soon after the injury. Barzun’s three-week-old calamity fit all the specifications of worst cases that Sheffield drilled him with during those hours on horseback with the army on the move, or during rare moments of inactivity. Thanks to Sheffield’s understanding of rough-and-ready surgery, Jesse knew what to do. Only afterward did the regret seep in and return now to plague his sleep.

There had been one sweet moment, and he owed it to Barzun’s insistence on waiting for the priest from a parish close to Salamanca. While Harper had watched with that evident distaste that all Protestants, however lapsed, seemed to feel in the presence of a priest, Jesse had bowed his own head, listened to Barzun’s faint confession, and felt the overpowering need to purge his own soul. The priest had taken him to a corner of the small room, and he had knelt beside the man, pouring out all the sins he could remember since his last confession years ago before he left for Milan and medical school. His Spanish was so poor he doubted he could be understood. He switched to Latin, which had been the second language at medical school. He listened to himself speak of anger, directed sometimes at the French, and other times at the cruelty of venal quartermasters and commanders who did not care about their low-born
men. In this modern age of medical science, his scientist’s brain may have listened askance at his babblings, but his heart spoke this time.

The list had seemed so long to him, but the priest granted him absolution after penance of but one Hail Mary. Father did you understand all my sins? he had asked himself as he rose from his knees and opened the door for the priest to leave. He could not deny that his heart was lighter, despite the fact that Philippe Barzun, his enemy, had given him an impossible task. He was not such a hypocrite to pray for a miracle where his scientist’s brain told him none was possible. As he picked up the probe and told Harper to hold the surgeon, he only asked for wisdom to remember all he had been taught. In a moment of crystal clarity, his first probe told him that Barzun’s surgery was his real penance. Such a wise priest.

I did my best, Mary Mother of God, he told himself. If my hand was steady, all honor to Thee, who watched a dying son and did not quail, and the saint of surgeons, whoever that poor sod is. Hippocrates, I fear you and I have run our course now. In deep peace, he closed his eyes and returned to sleep.

When he woke, the afternoon shadows hung low in the room. He dreamed of water, and sure enough, there was Lorenzo, pouring water with steam rising from it into a tin tub. He sat up slowly this time, wonder of wonders, and looked around. His clothes were laid across the foot of the bed, shirt and smallclothes washed, the uniform brushed as clean as possible. The butcher’s apron he had left in the room where Barzun had parted company with his leg was also washed and neatly folded beside them.

The water looked incredibly inviting. He knew Lorenzo hadn’t the wit to expect anything in exchange for his services, but he dug around in Elinore’s satchel until he found the necklace of blue beads. Forgive me, dearest, he thought as he extracted two beads and handed them to Lorenzo with as much ceremony as he could muster, considering that he was standing there barefoot and wearing nothing but a smile. He waved away Lorenzo’s profuse thanks and lowered himself into the warm water. He leaned back in satisfaction, and reached for the soap.

His cleanliness rendered him almost self-conscious when
he entered the refectory an hour later, after first searching out Harper and Wilkie and finding them in the toils of rudimentary carpentry, under the command of Sister Maria Josefina. “There’s no one to help her except Lorenzo, and he’s a bit barmy,” Wilkie had explained.

“I have no objections, Private,” Jesse said. “Carry on, please.”

Harper nodded to him and touched a finger against his forehead in a most casual salute. Jesse felt another twinge of regret at forcing his services last night. He came closer to the hulking private, who was hammering a wooden frame into a ruined window. “Private, accept my apologies for putting you through the mill last night,” he said. “I needed your strength more than I needed Elinore’s experience right then.”

“I know, Chief,” Harper said. “We couldn’t have her in there, could we?”

“No,” he agreed, warm with the confederacy their conversation had created. “Never that. As you were, Private.”