“I can ask Fanny to copy out some of the passages for you, if you’d like. Though I don’t know how much use they might be,” I added reluctantly. “Some of the procedures they mention just aren’t available in the colonies—nor yet in most of Europe.” I crossed my fingers under my apron, thinking, Nor anywhere else in the world. “And even as advanced as some of the things mentioned there are … they might not be useful to—to your particular concerns.”
I looked at Charles Cunningham as I said this, and wanted to cross my fingers again—for luck, this time. Instead, I drifted to the foot of the table and gently lifted the bottom of the vomit-yellow coverlet to expose his bare feet. They looked perfectly normal.
But of course they would. Even if his spinal cord hadn’t been severed—and I didn’t think it had—it had clearly been compressed and damaged to some extent. And spinal cord injuries were often permanent. But it would take a little time for the visible effects—wasting of muscles, twisting of limbs—to become apparent. A sharp stink made my nostrils twitch and compress.
Loss of bowel and bladder control. Expected, but not good.
“Have you seen anyone like this before?” Elspeth’s voice was sharp and she rose to her feet, as though drawn to defend her son.
“Yes,” I said, and she heard everything in my voice and sat down again as though she, too, had been shot in the back.
Jesus, who shot him? Please, God, don’t let it have been Jamie …
I pushed back the coverlet and cleaned him gently with a wet cloth. He was unconscious and didn’t stir. Nothing stirred under my hands, and my lips tightened. Men have very little conscious control over their erectile responses, as Jamie had just demonstrated to me, and I’d had a lot of men with quite severe wounds stiffen at my touch. Not this one. Still, it might be the laudanum … that really did affect libidinal response.
I held on to that minuscule shred of hope for the moment and covered the captain again. Elspeth was sitting upright now, but her attention was inward, and I knew she was envisioning the same things I was: caring for a beloved child for whom there was no real hope. Her last child. Months, years—Five years, came the searing thought—of wiping his arse and changing his sheets, moving his dead legs four times a day to prevent atrophy. Of dealing with the bitterness of a man who had lost his life, but had not died.
There was light behind the shutters now, though it was pale and watery; the sound of the rain had settled to the steady drumming of an all-day downpour. I walked behind Elspeth and opened the shutters, then cracked the window enough to bring a waft of cold, clean, damp air into the room.
I had to go and see to Jamie; there was nothing more I could do here. I turned and put my hands on Elspeth’s shoulders and felt her bones, hard and brittle under the black of her shawl.
“He’ll be able to talk and to feed himself,” I said. “Beyond that … time will tell.”
“It always does,” she said, her voice colorless as the rain.
112
We Met on the Level …
AS I LEFT THE surgery, the front door opened behind me, admitting Lieutenant Esterhazy. He looked as shocked and disordered as everyone else this morning, but was at least on his feet and not visibly damaged.
“Come with me,” I said, seizing him by the arm. “Your captain is sleeping and won’t need you for a bit, but I do.”
“Of course, ma’am,” he muttered, and shook his head as though to throw off some heavy thought before following me to the kitchen.
“Where is Lieutenant Bembridge?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. I half-expected him to come through the door; the two lieutenants were so seldom apart that I sometimes forgot which was which.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” he said, his voice quivering a little. “He—didn’t come back to the rendezvous last night, nor this morning—I went down by the Meeting House and walked round, calling out. So I came to report to the captain, before I go back to look for him some more.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, sincerely. “I heard there was a landslide last night—were you there when that happened?”
“No, ma’am. But I heard. So when Gilbert didn’t come back, I thought perhaps …”
“I see. What about this landslide I hear so much about?” I said to Jamie, who had managed to get himself up on one elbow and was eyeing the lieutenant with some wariness. “What happened?”