“Come and sit down, Sassenach,” he murmured, and lifted a finger vaguely at a nearby stool. “Ye look worse than I do.”
“Not possible,” I said. But I did sit down. Tiredness flooded up from the aching soles of my feet, closing my eyes as it rose through my body like a spring tide—filled with churning sand and fragments of sharp shell and seaweed. A warm hand curled around my ankle and rested there.
“How do you feel?” I murmured. I did want to know, but was having trouble opening my eyes to look.
“I’ll do. Hand me the wee jar, Sassenach.” The hand left my ankle and rose up to my lap, where I was holding the small jar of alcohol and sutures. “I’ll do it.”
“You’ll do what?” I opened my eyes and stared at him. “Stitch your own chest back together?”
“I thought that might wake ye up.” He dropped his arm. “Help me get up, a nighean. I’m stiff as parritch on the third day and I dinna want ye crouchin’ on the floor to stitch me. Besides, I might wake the wee lassie if ye make me howl.”
“Howl, forsooth,” I said, rather cross. “Serve you right if I did. Let me see it, at least, before I try to get you on your feet.” The floor around him was littered with wadded cloths, rusty with drying blood, and there were smears of it across a wide swath of floorboards. I slid gingerly down onto my knees beside him.
“It smells like an abattoir in here.” He smelled of blood and mud and smoke, but most strongly of the curdled sweat of violence.
He put his head back, sighed, and closed his eyes, letting me look at his chest. The girls had put his wet plaid over him for warmth, and underneath was a folded linen towel soaked in water. A faint scent of lavender and meadowsweet drifted up, along with the sharp copper tang of fresh blood. I was surprised and wondered which one of them had thought to use a wet compress to keep the edges of the wound moist. Whoever it was had also thought to take his shoes off and put the bundle of his rolled-up jacket and shirt under his feet to raise them. Or maybe Jamie had told them, I thought vaguely.
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.