Morris brought water, rags torn to strips, and a tin of salve that smelled of butternut bark and something I couldn’t distinguish. Van Tassel’s daughter trailed after him, bearing two blankets and a curious expression.
“It’ll keep the rot from your wounds and even numb the pain some,” Morris said of the salve.
“He’s dead,” the girl said, prodding the general’s boot with her foot. “Look at him.”
I did, and he wasn’t, though her words sent ice shooting through my veins.
“He’s just hit his head,” I said. “He’ll wake and we’ll leave.”
She shrugged and dropped the blankets beside him.
“I will try to bring some food later. Father’s having a party. I may not be able to slip away.” The girl was pretty, maybe seventeen, and she’d probably seen plenty, growing up in the middle of a battleground, but if her heart was soft, I saw no sign of it. She left the barn with bouncing curls and swishing skirts.
“You’d best stay out of sight,” Morris warned, as if he thought I might brandish my pistol and enter the house. “I’ll keep an eye out and make sure nobody wanders in here, but if the general doesn’t wake, you should go, and go as soon as you’re able. These folks are not friendly to the regimentals.”
“Thank you, Morris.”
He nodded and left me with a lantern, closing the door and latching it behind him.
I cleaned the general’s wound, layered it with salve, and covered him with a blanket, helpless to do more. Then I took the knife from his mess kit and doused it with brandy, the way I’d seen others do. It was flat with a pointed end, good for scooping and stabbing both. It was the only utensil a soldier carried.
I dumped the blood from my boot and peeled off my sock, dreading what I would find when I removed my breeches. They were stuck to my skin, and my fear was even worse than the pain.
My vision narrowed and my stomach revolted, but I peeled back the cloth and stared down at the oozing black hole in the meat of my left thigh. It didn’t look too terrible, though I knew the bullet was still lodged in there somewhere.
One thing at a time. The wound that had filled my boot with blood was a different bullet altogether. It had clipped the flesh of my calf, creating a furrow not unlike the one on the general’s head. It was ugly and jagged, but not deep. I gulped back the brandy, wiped a bit of ointment on the gash, and wrapped a length of bandage around it, certain a doctor could not have done any more for it than that.
I felt around the hole in my thigh with terrified fingers, hoping to find the bullet right beneath the surface and coax it out without having to dig for it. Digging might present a problem.
The breath hissed through my teeth, and the moan I denied myself burned in my chest. I sloshed a bit of brandy into the hole and almost lost my grip on the here and now.
I could not faint when I wasn’t wearing any bottoms. I folded my belt and put it between my teeth, something to bite down upon when I wanted to shriek. If a man could hold back his cries, I could hold back mine.
It took me several attempts. The small, spoon-shaped tool became slick in my hand, and sweat stung my eyes. I threw up once and had to pause, but on the fifth try, tears of agony streaming down my cheeks, I spit the belt from my mouth and freed the lead intruder from my thigh.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you, Lord. Thank you,” I whispered. Blood bubbled from the hole, but my relief was so great I almost laughed. I doused it in brandy again, drained the rest of the bottle to ease the pain, and slathered the wound with Maggie’s salve. I bandaged it with shaking hands before inching my caked breeches back up my legs and over my hips, securing them around my waist before I fell into an exhausted stupor, huddled at my general’s side.
17
JUST POWERS
I awoke much later to the sound of voices on the other side of the barn wall. Night had fallen, and icy moonlight streamed through a high opening above our heads.
The pain in my leg reminded me immediately where I was and the danger I was in, along with the man beside me.
The voices receded—likely Morris and his boy—and I bolted upright, terrified that the general had left me while I slept. His skin was warm, but not overly so, and his lips were parted. The barn was cold enough that his breath was visible, and I took comfort in that sign of life though his continued stillness terrified me.
I willed myself to take stock of our circumstances, though I wanted only to sleep. I lit the lantern, drank some water, relieved my bladder into the dirt, and rubbed a bit more salve on my wounds. They looked terrible and felt even worse, but I wasn’t bleeding or burning up with fever, and I righted my breeches and returned to the general.