Not Quite a Husband (22 page)

He let go of her jacket. She panted, thankful for the reprieve. Now he was fighting with both hands.
His weight leaned hard to the right—too much. He would topple from the horse. But he didn’t. The strength of his legs held him mounted.

He parried. He smashed. He shoved. Good Lord, how many more of them were there? Had she ever known a time when her hearing wasn’t saturated with grunts of effort, grunts of pain, and the creaks and snaps of miscellaneous bones under assault?

Then suddenly they were in the clear. Leo slumped back into the saddle, breathing heavily.

There was the smell of blood in the air. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” Bryony called anxiously. She turned around to look at him, but could see little beyond his form.

“Pay attention to the road and don’t slow down.”

He
was
injured. “Where are you hurt and how badly?”

“Just ride!”

The hoarseness of his voice frightened her. She pushed the mare the last half mile to the river and maneuvered it up the hillock, barely turning in time to avoid a thicket of barbed wires, which she’d first taken to be badly maintained shrubbery.

The gate of the fort was in the shadow of the suspension bridge that spanned the Swat River. At their approach, it opened silently from inside, revealing a
quietly lit bailey. Bryony urged the pony across the last few yards of open space.

Safety, at last.

Leo did not even realize he’d been injured until not one but two sepoys sprang forward to help him dismount. Only then did he look down at himself and see blood everywhere. Bryony took one look at him, swayed, and gripped the saddle for support.

He smiled weakly at her. “Don’t tell me you faint at the sight of blood.”

“Of course not,” she said. “I only faint at the sight of
your
blood. You idiot, why didn’t you shoot at them?”

“I didn’t want them shooting back at us.” He could protect her from swords better than he could from bullets.

“Gentlemen,” said a young English lieutenant. “What happened?”

Bryony turned and extended her hand. “Mrs. Quentin Marsden, sir. My husband is injured. Please take us to your surgery immediately.”

“Lieutenant Wesley,” said the subaltern, once he got over his surprise at speaking to a woman. “Please follow me. I’m sorry to say our surgeon-captain is at the south camp in Malakand—filling in for the
surgeon-major who is ill. I hope our hospital assistant would be equal to the task of mending your husband.”

“Not to worry, sir,” Leo said, as Lieutenant Wesley shook hands with him. “My wounds are superficial. Mrs. Marsden can take care of them.”

The walk to the surgery in the rear of the fort, however, let him know that his wounds weren’t quite as superficial as he’d hoped. Now that their lives were no longer in immediate danger, his left side burned, and every step, even leaning on a helpful sepoy, sent a jagged pain through his right leg.

The hospital assistant, a small, quiet Sikh named Ranjit Singh, was already waiting for them. Leo was instructed to lie down on the operating table. Bryony, in her element in a place full of jars and drawers and the smell of disinfectant, asked for a pair of scissors and cut away at his clothes.

He was injured in two places on his left, one a long but relatively shallow cut down the length of his upper arm, the other a more serious cut along his rib cage. The worst, however, was on his right thigh. As she peeled away the blood-soaked wool of his trousers, she sucked in a breath at the nasty slash she revealed.

“It just missed the aorta,” she said, her voice on the verge of shaking. She turned to Ranjit Singh. “I
need a beta-eucaine solution for infiltration anesthesia. I also need a sterilized needle and thread and a pair of sterilized gloves.”

As she washed her hands in a corner of the room, the hospital assistant looked to Lieutenant Wesley. Lieutenant Wesley in turn looked to Leo. “Mrs. Marsden is a surgeon by profession. She knows what needs to be done,” Leo said impatiently.

That settled it. While Bryony pushed her hair under a cap the hospital assistant provided for her, Ranjit Singh set himself to prepare everything else she needed.

“One part beta-eucaine to one thousand parts water,
memsahib?”

“Also eight parts chloride of sodium, to prevent irritating the tissues.”

She donned the gloves and cleaned Leo’s wounds, first with sterilized water, then with carbolic acid. He gritted his teeth against the harsh stinging. Once his wounds had been disinfected, she tapped lightly on a syringe Ranjit Singh handed her and injected the beta-eucaine solution into the tissue beneath his thigh wound.

“That’s it?” Leo asked as she reached for the needle.

“That’s it. Infiltration anesthesia takes effect instantly.”

She was right. As her needle stuck into him, he felt absolutely nothing. He watched in fascination as she began to close his flesh as if it were but a torn sleeve.

A man in a polo kit hurtled into the surgery. “Captain Bartlett,” said Lieutenant Wesley. “You are back! I was beginning to wonder whether my message reached you.”

So it really was true that the officers still played polo, even to this very day.

“I received your message and started back right away,” said Captain Bartlett, sounding completely out of breath. He was of medium height, a somewhat portly build, and a ruddy complexion. “Surgeon-Captain Gibbs, good to see you back too. And, sir, I see you have survived your initial encounter with the Pathans. Captain Bartlett of the Forty-fifth Sikhs, at your service, Mr.—”

“Marsden,” replied Leo. “And the good doctor here is Mrs. Marsden, rather than Surgeon-Captain Gibbs.”

The captain’s eyes widened. He looked at Bryony again. His already pink face reddened further.

“I apologize, madam. I don’t know how I made the mistake.”

“It would be the men’s clothes and the men’s profession, I imagine, Captain,” Bryony said dryly.

Captain Bartlett chuckled. “Quite true. Quite true.”

“We seem to have picked a most inconvenient time to tour the North-West Frontier,” said Leo.

“I apologize for that too, sir,” said Captain Bartlett. “It has been so singularly peaceful since ninety-five that I’m at a loss to explain these extraordinary events. Now, sir, if you don’t mind, what do you estimate to be the strength of the gathering tribals?”

“Thousands. I should be astonished there isn’t a contingent at least two thousand strong.”

Lieutenant Wesley drew in a dismayed breath. “My God. We have only two hundred men in the fort.”

For a moment nobody spoke. Then Captain Bartlett turned to Lieutenant Wesley. “Quick, send a cable to the main camp to let them know. A large mob is marching on the fort.”

“Captain, I will be glad to remain and assist you and your men in any capacity I may,” said Leo. “But I should like to see my wife escorted south to safety.”

Bryony looked at him and mouthed “No!” He ignored her.

“That is not advisable,” replied Captain Bartlett. “Coming back from the polo field, I passed a very large crowd of Pathans south of the river. Fortunately they took no notice of me—just then I believed it was to be my last hour on earth.”

For a moment Leo thought he must have lost too much blood, because he couldn’t think. But no, it was not that. Judging by the blood on his clothes, which looked worse than it was, he’d lost about a pint and no more. The reason he couldn’t think was because he couldn’t think. The situation had become such that it was impossible for one man to think his way out of it.

“I wouldn’t worry, Mr. Marsden,” said Captain Bartlett gallantly. “We hold the advantage in weaponry and position. My men are well practiced. And we have all the might of the government of India, and ultimately that of the entire British Empire, behind us.”

Leo supposed Captain Bartlett was right. He would have preferred not being anywhere near the Swat Valley tonight. But since he was here, the fort of Chakdarra was not the worst place to be, with its well-practiced men and its advantage in weaponry and position. He nodded. “Let’s hope it will be no more than a minor skirmish.”

“Once you’ve been patched up, sir, you can recuperate in Surgeon-Captain Gibbs’s quarters,” said the captain. “And if you feel up to it, the officers and I would be glad to have you and Mrs. Marsden join us for dinner and—”

“Captain!” Lieutenant Wesley returned, running. “The telegraph line! The line has been cut.”

“Bloody hell. Beg your pardon, Mrs. Marsden,” Captain Bartlett said hastily. “Did our warning go through to Malakand, Lieutenant?”

“It did. And the line was cut as they were wiring the beginning of a return message.”

“Intolerably rude,” huffed Captain Bartlett. “You’d think since the Pathans have no plan to open the first salvo til morning, they’d at least have the courtesy to let us keep telegraph service for the night.”

“Perhaps they intend to attack sooner?” asked Leo. “The men we passed along the way were primed for a fight, not for a nighttime vigil.”

“Unlikely,” Captain Bartlett said decisively. “The Pathans always attack at first light—these men of the hills are completely beholden to their outmoded ways.”

Almost before he’d finished speaking, a collective shout went up around the fort, the kind of shout that Leo imagined greeted the sighting of a pirate ship. The two officers sprinted out of the surgery, Ranjit Singh in their wake.

The hospital assistant came back a minute later. “The flare has been lit.”

“What flare?” Leo and Bryony asked in unison.

“The Khan of Dir’s men promised to light a flare from their position in the hills to warn us of an attack.”

And now the flare had been lit.

“I need you to lie with your head where your feet are now, so I can stitch the cut on your side,” Bryony instructed, white-faced.

He looked down at his leg, which he’d forgotten about entirely. Not only had she finished stitching the wound, she’d dressed it too. She helped him turn around, injected him with more local anesthesia, and set to work.

“Do you keep any crutches around here?” he asked Ranjit Singh.

“In storage, I think. I will look,
sahib.”

“Are you all right, Bryony?” Leo asked, when the hospital assistant had gone.

She did not look at him. “Would you let me apologize now?”

He sighed. “No. We are safe.”

“We are going to be attacked.”

“The
fort
is going to be attacked.
We
will be fine.”

“You
are
not
fine. You could be fighting for your life now, had the cut on your leg gone any deeper.”

“But it didn’t go any deeper. And I’ll be able to get around with a crutch as soon as you are done.”

She set down the needle and thread, lifted him very gently to a sitting position, and bandaged his side and his arm. “Don’t move. I’m not done yet.”

She took off the rubber gloves and wetted a towel. There was still much dried blood on him, in patches, rivulets, and smears along his arm, his side, and his leg. She cleaned him carefully, thoroughly.

“Listen,” he said. “It’s not your fault. I thought staying behind was more prudent, but I didn’t believe for a moment that by going forward we’d end up in the middle of an uprising. So it wasn’t as if you coerced me into this.”

“I did coerce you into this.”

“But I was responsible for our safety. I should have known better.”

She sighed, a long, unsteady exhalation. “If anything happens to you, I am going to kill Callista with my bare hands.”

“I think the headline would be far more interesting if it read ‘Lady surgeon attacks sister with scalpel.’”

She laughed, startled.

He placed a hand on her cheek. “Do you still trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Then trust me when I say that nothing will
happen to me and nothing will happen to you.” He kissed her lightly on her forehead. “This too shall pass.”

Surgeon-Captain Gibbs’s quarters was as neat as his surgery, with a bed, wardrobe, desk, chair, and two laden bookshelves. There was also an attached bathroom with a flat tub and a bath stool inside, to stand on while washing.

Their few things had been brought in already and laid in a corner of the room. Leo’s rifle was there, looking as if it had been gnawed by an iron-jawed beast, full of nicks, cuts, and gouges both on the stock and along the barrel.