Kindred Hearts (32 page)

Tristan stared at him, a deep thudding in his ears. He realized after a moment that it was his heartbeat. “Yes,” he said, finally, feeling as though he were saying something else, something far more meaningful. “Yes, I’d like that.”

Charles smiled. “Go get dressed. We’ll talk later.”

Dazed, Tristan obeyed.

It was
a full week before Tristan was able to take Charles up on his offer. A week of slowly dissipating weariness as his muscles recovered from their enforced idleness; a week of sobriety, obeying Charles’s dictates about drink slowing his recovery; a week of domesticity, playing with Jamie, talking to Ellen, listening to Charlotte reading from her copious correspondence. And a week of evenings with Charles, first in the library, poring over their books, and later, poring over something far more interesting, learning what pleased his lover.

It seemed to be true, what Charles had said about having an understanding of the human body. He did know it, both from his carnal experiences with women, and from his lessons with Jackson and Angelo. He knew the way muscles moved, where damage was most easily done, and most easily mended. He knew where a body was most or least sensitive, where it was strongest, and where it needed to be touched with the utmost delicacy. He used those lessons when exploring Charles, and helping Charles to explore him. Before long, they were equals in bed; both sure, both giving, both knowing how to coax the most pleasure out of each other. And the rightness of it dispelled Tristan’s old doubts about its morality: how could anything that brought such joy to both of them and hurt no one else be evil?

Reston took his new instructions—not to disturb Tristan in the mornings until he was rung for—with equanimity and said only that he would relay them to the rest of the household staff as well. “You do need your rest, sir,” he said understandingly. “May I be permitted to express the entire staff’s congratulations on your return to health?”

“I imagine they’re grateful I’m not still a demanding invalid,” Tristan said with a grin.

He grinned more easily these days. The dark cloud that had seemed to hover over him this past six-month was gone. He still had his dark moments, when Charles was at the hospital or in the depths of the small hours, or when the craving for brandy was at its worst, but they were moments, not the continuous feeling of grief and despair that had plagued him so long. For the first time in his life he began to think that perhaps his father was wrong; that it wasn’t so much that he was a failure as that he’d never really tried. Charles made him want to try.

Try what, he still wasn’t sure.

He lunched with Gibson and Berkeley one afternoon at a restaurant in the City, a place more than a few steps above their usual haunts. “What?” he said defensively at their disbelieving stares when he ordered coffee for himself.

“Coffee?
Coffee
?” Berkeley stuttered. He glanced at Gibson. “It’s not Woodsy,” he said confidingly to his friend. “He’s been abducted by fairies and replaced with a changeling.”

Tristan hit him with a bun. “Shut up, idiot,” he said cheerfully. “It’s my brother-in-law’s doing; he says I need to teetotal for a few weeks to get my blood back to its usual shape.”

“Didn’t know blood had a shape,” Gibs mused. “Thought it was just sort of liquid.”

Tris hit him with a bun, too.

“Aim’s not suffered,” Gibs said, picking it up off the table where it had bounced and eating it. “So when are you coming back to Jackson’s? He was askin’ about you the other day.”

“A few more days,” Tristan said. “I’ll need to get back into shape.”

“Why not tomorrow?” Berkeley bent over and fished around on the floor until he found the bun Tristan had thrown. He picked a few strands of carpet off it and ate it absently.

“I’m going to the hospital with Charles tomorrow.”

“Why? Is he sick?”

Tristan laughed. “No, he’s studying to become a physician, and he attends Dr. MacQuarrie at St. Joseph’s in Spitalfields. He invited me to come along with him and see what it’s all about.”

“Depressin’, I should think,” Gibs said. “Can’t imagine anything else. Blood and guts and whatnot.”

“Ah, we see plenty of that in the odd pub fight,” Berks opined. “Nothin’ new there.”

“I imagine it will be depressing,” Tristan acknowledged. “But I think it will be interesting, too. St. Joseph’s has been experimenting with some new surgical procedures and has had some success with them, and Charles has promised to introduce me to the Chief of Surgery there.”

His friends stared, Berks blinking like a fish. Tristan gave a laugh. “I’m done now,” he said. “Anyone for the eel pie?”

The
excursion was a success, at least as far as Tristan was concerned. St. Joseph’s might have been in one of the poorer areas of London, but it was well-endowed and had an excellent staff, overseen by MacQuarrie and the Chief of Surgery, a man named Crosby who was a physician by training, but had switched professions and become a member of the College of Surgeons instead. He had a strong opinion on the present division between surgery and medicine that he expounded on at length as he worked. “Learn more from actual cuttin’ than you ever do from
books
!” he roared as he surged through the halls of the hospital, Tristan and Charles and a half dozen students at his heels.

Tristan was able to witness an operation for the removal of a tumor, several bonesettings, the lancing of an abscess, and the amputation of an arm. Charles, who although he was in the physician program had battlefield surgery experience, assisted with the last, and came out of the operating theater unrolling the sleeves of his shirt. He pulled the blood-spattered apron over his head and tossed it into a basket waiting beside the door. “Well, that went better than I expected,” he said, sliding his arms into the waistcoat Tristan held for him. “It was the left arm, and he’s right-handed, and he swooned before we even got to the cauterization. That’s the worst part, I think.”

“It can’t be as bad as the sound of the bone saw,” Tristan said, grimacing. “That was dreadful.”

“I suppose there’s nothing good about amputation,” Charles acknowledged, “except the alternative—blood poisoning and death. That’s the last of the scheduled surgeries for today. Thank God. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a surgeon. Takes a steadier hand than I’ve got. And a steadier stomach. I’m to make the rounds with Mac in the wards. Are you ready to go home, or would you like to tag along?”

“I’d rather like to come with you, if you don’t mind,” Tristan said.

“I would have thought you would be disgusted by all of this.” Charles cocked his head. “But you’re not, are you?”

“Not in the slightest. It’s fascinating. Oh, the surgeries were gruesome, no doubt. But it’s amazing the way it all works; how a man can know precisely what to do with another person’s body to make it respond….” He realized that his words could be taken two ways and blushed scarlet, laughing. “You know what I mean,” he said.

“Oddly enough, I do. Come along, then.”

It wasn’t
the last trip of its kind. As the days went on, the staff and patients at St. Joseph’s gradually forgot that Tristan was only an observer and began accepting him as a fixture there. Perpetually shorthanded, they quickly found out that he had a steady hand, a stomach of cast-iron, and, once he’d built his strength back up from his illness, the muscles to manage—or sometimes manhandle—both twisted limbs and recalcitrant patients. The doctors, busy and distracted, paid no attention to his fashionable coats or quality boots; he was a strong hand when they needed one, and they seemed to always need one, and he was quick to respond to even the least courteous, harried demands. By early March, he’d unofficially joined the ranks of the students that followed Dr. Crosby on his rounds and in the operating theater, learning to set limbs and stitch wounds and draw teeth, and even, sometimes, to observe real surgeries. Although the hospital was a teaching one and affiliated with one of the schools that licensed physicians, the rules were often ignored in trauma situations, and willing hands meant more than official status at a place that treated the poor more than the affluent. He found it absorbing, if sometimes disturbing, and the hours flew. Charles, whose interest was leaning toward medicine rather than surgery, was usually off with MacQuarrie, but Tristan found his own niche among the surgical apprentices. Some days, he didn’t rejoin Charles until late in the evening as they climbed wearily into Tristan’s carriage for the ride home.

To his surprise, Tristan discovered a serenity, a quiet pleasure in working with the irascible surgeon and the dozens of people under his supervision. It was hard, bloody, exhausting work, but the sense of accomplishment over a well-set limb or a neat job of stitches was its own reward. Tristan was amazed at his delight when Crosby looked over a dislocated arm he’d just fixed (with the aid of two large orderlies) and grunted approval. He, son of the great Baron Ware, was pleased by the approval of a petit bourgeois? He was, and said so to Charlie.

Who only grinned, and said, “I told you that you would make an excellent surgeon.”

He didn’t spend every waking hour at the hospital. He still made time for the odd hour at Jackson’s and Angelo’s, and still went out with his friends to social events, but those were hours taken away from the hospital, and therefore, in his eyes, wasted. He drank very little, so that he would be clear-eyed and clearheaded the next day. Gibson and Berkeley and his other friends shook their heads over him, but Gibson took him aside and told him that whatever it was that had made him so happy, he was fully in support of it. When he told Gibs about the surgery and the fascination it had for him, Gibs had only patted his shoulder and said lugubriously, “Whatever makes you happy, Woods.”

And it did make him happy. He understood now what drove Charles to this, the sense of achievement, the desire to learn, the need to
know
and to
help
.

Oddly, this new undertaking meant that he and Charles actually saw less of each other even than they had before, when their lives and interests diverged. The comradely evenings in the library were shortened by the need for an early retiring, or by Tristan’s social calendar, even pared down as it was, but they still managed to find a little time to be together outside the bedroom, whether it was the hour at Jackson’s or a quick luncheon before heading off to the hospital. Once or twice, they’d made hurried love in the carriage as it was stuck in City traffic, but it was still winter, after all, and too cold for that sort of activity on a regular basis.

At night, though, they slept in each other’s arms, even if most nights it was only sleep. Sometimes, they would lie with each other, but instead of sleeping afterward, would talk about something that happened during the day at the hospital, or something one of them had heard that the other hadn’t. All in all, Tristan thought more than once, it was rather like the vision of domesticity that he’d once had before his marriage, only then, it had been an imaginary wife he’d envisioned sharing pillow talk with. Not a… what was Charles? A sort of husband? Was he a wife, then, or was Charles? True, more often than not it was Charles taking him, but they’d traded places on more than one occasion. Or was it just that it didn’t matter? Charles was his, and he was Charles’s, and that was it.