Текст книги "An echo in the bone"

Автор книги: Diana Gabaldon

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 75 страниц)

“Oh, no, ma’am. My mother died birthing me, and my pa when I was seven.” He seemed untroubled by this. But after all, I reflected, ripping calico into bandage lengths, that was half his lifetime ago.

“Well, I hope the sea will continue to suit you,” I said. “Do you have any doubts, though—after today?”

He thought about that, his earnest young face furrowed in the lantern shadows.

“No,” he said slowly, and looked up at me, his eyes serious—and not nearly so young as they had been a few hours ago. “I knew when I signed on with Captain Hickman that there might be fighting.” His lips tightened, perhaps to keep them from quivering. “I don’t mind killing a man, if I have to.”

“Not now… you don’t,” said one of the wounded men, very softly. He was lying in the shadows, stretched across two crates of English china, breathing slowly.

“No, not now, you don’t,” I agreed dryly. “You might want to speak to my nephew or my husband about it, though, when things have settled a bit.”

I thought that would be the end of it, but Abram followed me as I laid out my rudimentary tools and set about such sterilization as could be managed, splashing out brandy with abandon, ’til the hold smelled like a distillery—this to the scandalization of the wounded men, who thought it waste to use good drink so. The galley fire had been put out during the battle, though; it would be some time before I had hot water.

“Are you a patriot, ma’am? If you don’t mind me asking,” he added, blushing with awkwardness.

The question took me back a bit. The straightforward answer would be “Yes, of course.” Jamie was, after all, a rebel, so declared by his own hand. And while he had made the original declaration out of simple necessity, I thought necessity had now become conviction. But me? Certainly I had been, once.

“Yes,” I said—I couldn’t very well say anything else. “Plainly you are, Abram. Why?”

“Why?” He seemed staggered that I would ask, and stood blinking at me over the top of the lantern he held.

“Tell me later,” I suggested, taking the lantern. I’d done what I could on deck; the wounded who needed further attention were being brought down. It was no time for political discussion. Or so I thought.

Abram bravely settled down to help me and did fairly well, though he had to stop now and then to vomit into a bucket. After the second occurrence of this, he took to asking questions of the wounded—those in any condition to answer. I didn’t know whether this was simple curiosity or an attempt to distract himself from what I was doing.

“What do you think of the Revolution, sir?” he earnestly asked one grizzled seaman from the Pitt with a crushed foot. The man gave him a distinctly jaundiced look but replied, probably in order to distract himself.

“Bloody waste of time,” he said gruffly, digging his fingers into the edge of the chest he sat on. “Better to be fighting the frogs than Englishmen. What’s to be gained by it? Dear Lord,” he said under his breath, going pale.

“Give him something to bite on, Abram, will you?” I said, busy picking shattered bits of bone out of the wreckage and wondering whether he might do better with a swift amputation. Perhaps less risk of infection, and he would always walk with a painful limp in any case, but still, I hated to …

“No, that’s all right, mum,” he said, sucking in a breath. “What do you think of it, then, youngster?”

“I think it is right and necessary, sir,” Abram replied stoutly. “The King is a tyrant, and tyranny must be resisted by all proper men.”

“What?” said the seaman, shocked. “The King, a tyrant? Who says such a naughty thing?”

“Why… Mr. Jefferson. And—and all of us! We all think so,” Abram said, taken aback at such vehement disagreement.

“Well, then, you’re all a pack of bleedin’ fools—saving your presence, mum,” he added, with a nod to me. He got a look at his foot and swayed a bit, closing his eyes, but asked, “You don’t think such a silly thing, do you, mum? You ought to talk sense into your boy here.”

“Talk sense?” cried Abram, roused. “You think it sense that we may not speak or write as we wish?”

The seaman opened one eye.

“Of course that’s sense,” he said, with an evident attempt to be reasonable. “You get silly buggers—your pardon, mum—a-saying all kinds of things regardless, stirrin’ folk up to no good end, and what’s it lead to? Riot, that’s what, and what you may call disorderliness, with folk having their houses burnt and being knocked down in the street. Ever hear of the Cutter riots, boy?”

Abram rather obviously had not, but countered with a vigorous denunciation of the Intolerable Acts, which caused Mr. Ormiston—we had got onto personal terms by now—to scoff loudly and recount the privations Londoners endured by comparison with the luxury enjoyed by the ungrateful colonists.

“Ungrateful!” Abram said, his face congested. “And what should we be grateful for, then? For having soldiers foisted upon us?”

“Oh, foisted, is it?” cried Mr. Ormiston in righteous indignation. “Such a word! And if it means what I think it does, young man, you should get down on your knees and thank God for such foistingness! Who do you think saved you all from being scalped by red Indians or overrun by the French? And who do you think paid for it all, eh?”

This shrewd riposte drew cheers—and not a few jeers—from the waiting men, who had all been drawn into the discussion by now.

“That is absolute … desolute … stultiloquy,” began Abram, puffing up his insignificant chest like a scrawny pigeon, but he was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Smith, a canvas bag in hand and an apologetic look on his face.

“I’m afraid your cabin was all ahoo, ma’am,” he said. “But I picked up what bits was scattered on the floor, in case they—”

“Jonah Marsden!” Mr. Ormiston, on the verge of standing up, plumped back onto the chest, openmouthed. “Bless me if it isn’t!”

“Who?” I asked, startled.

“Jonah—well, ’tisn’t his real name, what was it… oh, Bill, I think it was, but we took to calling him Jonah, owing to him being sunk so many times.”

“Now, Joe.” Mr. Smith—or Mr. Marsden—was backing toward the door, smiling nervously. “That was all a long time ago, and—”

“Not so long as all that.” Mr. Ormiston got ponderously to his feet, balancing with one hand on a stack of herring barrels so as not to put weight on his bandaged foot. “Not so long as would make the navy forget you, you filthy deserter!”

Mr. Smith disappeared abruptly up the ladder, pushing past two seamen attempting to come down these, handling a third like a side of beef between them. Muttering curses, they dropped him on the deck in front of me with a thud and stood back, gasping. It was Captain Stebbings.

“ ’e’s not dead,” one of them informed me helpfully.

“Oh, good,” I said. My tone of voice might have left something to be desired, for the captain opened one eye and glared at me.

“You’re leaving me… to be butchered… by this bitch?” he said hoarsely, between labored gasps. “I’d ra-rather die honhonorablblbl…” The sentiment gurgled off into a bubbling noise that made me rip open his smoke-stained, blood-soaked second-best coat and shirt. Sure enough, there was a neat round hole in his right breast and the nasty wet slurp of a sucking chest wound coming from it.

I said a very bad word, and the two men who had brought him to me shuffled and muttered. I said it again, louder, and, seizing Stebbings’s hand, slapped it over the hole.

“Hold that there, if you want a chance at an honorable death,” I said to him. “You!” I shouted at one of the men trying to edge away. “Bring me some oil from the galley. Now! And you—” My voice caught the other, who jerked guiltily to a halt. “Sailcloth and tar. Fast as you can!”

“Don’t talk,” I advised Stebbings, who seemed inclined to make remarks. “You have a collapsed lung, and either I get it reinflated or you die like a dog, right here.”

“Hg,” he said, which I took for assent. His hand was a nice meaty one, and doing a reasonably good job of sealing the hole for the moment. The trouble was that he undoubtedly had not only a hole in his chest but a hole in the lung, too. I had to provide a seal for the external hole so air couldn’t get into the chest and keep the lung compressed, but had also to make sure there was a way for air from the pleural space around the lung to make an exit. As it was, every time he exhaled, air from the injured lung went straight into that space, making the problem worse.

He might also be drowning in his own blood, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about that, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

“On the good side,” I told him, “it was a bullet, and not shrapnel or a splinter. One thing about red-hot iron: it sterilizes the wound. Lift your hand for a moment, please. Breathe out.” I grabbed his hand myself and lifted it for the count of two while he exhaled, then slapped it back over the wound. It made a squelching sound, owing to the blood. It was a lot of blood for a hole like that, but he wasn’t coughing or spitting blood…. Where—oh.

“Is this blood yours or someone else’s?” I demanded, pointing at it.

His eyes were half shut, but at this he turned his head and bared his bad teeth at me in a wolf’s grin.

“Your… husband’s,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

“Wanker,” I said crossly, lifting his hand again. “Breathe out.” The men had seen me dealing with Stebbings; there were other casualties from the Teal coming or being carried along, but most of them seemed ambulatory. I gave cursory directions to the able-bodied with them, regarding the application of pressure to wounds or the placement of broken limbs so as to avoid further injury.

It seemed an age before the oil and cloth arrived, and I had sufficient time to wonder where Jamie and Ian were, but the first-aid supplies came at last. I ripped off a patch of sailcloth with my knife, tore a longish strip of calico to use as field dressing, then pushed Stebbings’s hand away, wiped off the blood with a fold of my petticoat, sloshed lamp oil over his chest and the sailcloth patch, then pressed the cloth down to form a rudimentary seal, putting his hand back over it in such a way that one end of the patch remained free, while I wound the improvised field dressing round his torso.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll need to stick the patch down with tar for a better seal, but it will take a little time to warm that. You can go and be doing that now,” I advised the sailor who had brought the oil, who was once again trying to execute a quiet sneak. I scooted round to view the casualties squatting or sprawling on the deck. “Right. Who’s dying?”

For a wonder, only two of the men brought in from the Teal were dead, one with hideous head wounds from flying splinters and grapeshot, the other exsanguinated as a result of losing half his left leg, probably to a cannonball.

Might have saved that one, I thought, but the moment’s regret was subsumed in the needs of the next moment.

Not all that bad, I thought, working my way quickly down the line on my knees, doing a hasty triage and issuing instructions to my unwilling assistants. Splinter wounds, two grazed by musket balls, one with half an ear torn off, one with an embedded ball in the thigh, but nowhere near the femoral artery, thank God…

Bangings and shufflings were coming from the lower hold, where repairs were being effected. As I worked, I pieced together the actions of the battle from the remarks passed by the wounded men awaiting my attention.

Following a ragged exchange of broadsides, which had brought down the Teal’s cracked mainmast and holed the Asp above the waterline, the Teal—opinions differed on whether Captain Roberts had done it a-purpose or not—had veered sharply toward the Asp, scraping the side of the ship and bringing the two vessels railing to railing.

It seemed inconceivable that Stebbings had intended to board the Asp, with so few dependable men as he had; if it had been deliberate, he might have meant to ram us. I glanced down, but the captain’s eyes were closed, and he was a nasty color. I lifted his hand and heard a small hiss of air, then placed it back on his chest and went on with my work. Plainly he was in no shape to set the record straight regarding his intentions.

Whatever they had been, Captain Hickman had forestalled them, leaping over the Teal’s rail with a shriek, followed by a swarm of Asps. They had cut their way across the deck without much resistance, though the men from the Pitt had gathered together around Stebbings near the helm and fought ferociously. It was clear that the Asps must win the day, though—and then the Teal had struck heavily aground, throwing everyone flat on deck.

Convinced that the ship was about to sink, everyone who could move did, boarders and defenders together going back over the rail onto the Asp—which sheered abruptly away, with some benighted defender who remained on the Teal sending a last shot or two after her, only to scrape her own bottom on a gravel bar.

“Not to worry, ma’am,” one of the men assured me. “She’ll swim directly the tide comes in.”

The noises from below began to diminish, and I looked over my shoulder every few moments, in hopes of seeing Jamie or Ian.

I was examining one poor fellow who’d taken a splinter in one eyeball, when his other eye suddenly widened in horror, and I turned to find Rollo panting and dripping by my side, enormous teeth exposed in a grin that put Stebbings’s feeble attempt to shame.

“Dog!” I cried, delighted. I couldn’t hug him—well, I wouldn’t, really—but looked quickly round for Ian, who was limping in my direction, sopping wet, too, but with a matching grin.

“We fell into the water,” he said hoarsely, squatting on the deck beside me. A small puddle formed under him.

“So I see. Breathe deeply for me,” I said to the man with the splinter in his eye. “One … yes, that’s right… two … yes…” As he exhaled, I took hold of the splinter and pulled, hard. It slid free, followed by a gush of vitreous humor and blood that made me grit my teeth and made Ian retch. Not a lot of blood, though. If it hasn’t gone through the orbit, I might be able to stave off infection by removing the eyeball and packing the socket. That’ll have to wait, though. I slashed a ribbon of cloth from the man’s shirttail, folded it hastily into a wad, soaked it in brandy, pressed it to the ruined eye, and made him hold it firmly in place. He did, though he groaned and swayed alarmingly, and I feared he might fall over.

“Where’s your uncle?” I asked Ian, with a gnawing sense that I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Right there,” Ian said, nodding to one side. I swung round, one hand still bracing the shoulder of the one-eyed man, to see Jamie coming down the ladder, in heated argument with Captain Hickman, who was following him. Jamie’s shirt was soaked with blood, and he was holding a wad of something likewise blood-soaked against his shoulder with one hand. Possibly Stebbings hadn’t been merely trying to aggravate me. Jamie wasn’t falling down, though, and while he was white, he was also furious. I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t die while angry and seized another strip of sailcloth to stabilize a compound fracture of the arm.

“Dog!” said Hickman, coming to a stop beside the supine Stebbings. He didn’t say it with the same intonation I had used, though, and Stebbings opened one eye.

“Dog, yourself,” he said thickly.

“Dog, dog, dog! Fucking dog!” Hickman added for good measure, and aimed a kick at Stebbings’s side. I grabbed for his foot and managed to shove him off balance, so that he lurched sideways. Jamie caught him, grunting with pain, but Hickman struggled upright, pushing Jamie away.

“Ye canna murder the man in cold blood!”

“Can, too,” Hickman replied promptly. “Watch me!” He drew an enormous horse pistol out of a ratty leather holster and cocked it. Jamie took it by the barrel and plucked it neatly out of his hand, leaving him flexing his fingers and looking surprised.

“Surely, sir,” Jamie said, striving for reasonableness, “ye canna mean to kill a wounded enemy—one in uniform, taken under his own flag, and a man who has surrendered himself to ye. That couldna be condoned by any honorable man.”

Hickman drew himself up, going puce.

“Are you impugning my honor, sir?”

I saw the muscles in Jamie’s neck and shoulders tense, but before he could speak, Ian stepped up beside him, shoulder to shoulder.

“Aye, he is. So am I.”

Rollo, his fur still sticking up in wet spikes, growled and rolled back his black lips, showing most of his teeth in token of his support of this opinion.

Hickman glanced from Ian’s scowling, tattooed visage, to Rollo’s impressive carnassials, and back to Jamie, who had uncocked the pistol and put it in his own belt. He breathed heavily.

“On your head be it, then,” he said abruptly, and turned away.

Captain Stebbings was breathing heavily, too, a wet, nasty sound. He was white to the lips, and the lips themselves were blue. Still, he was conscious. His eyes had been fixed on Hickman throughout the conversation and followed him now as he left the cabin. When the door had closed behind Hickman, Stebbings relaxed a little, shifting his gaze to Jamie.

“Might’ve… saved yourself… the trouble,” he wheezed. “But you have… my thanks. For what…” He gave a strangled cough, pressed a hand hard against his chest, and shook his head, grimacing. “… what they’re worth,” he managed.

He closed his eyes, breathing slowly and painfully—but still, breathing. I rose stiffly to my feet and at last had a moment to look at my husband.

“No but a wee cut,” he assured me, in answer to my look of suspicious inquiry. “I’ll do for now.”

“Is all of that blood yours?” He glanced down at the shirt pasted to his ribs and lifted the non-wounded shoulder dismissively.

“I’ve enough left to be going on with.” He smiled at me, then glanced around the deck. “I see ye’ve got matters well in hand here. I’ll have Smith bring ye a bit of food, aye? It’s going to rain soon.”

It was; the smell of the oncoming storm swept through the hold, fresh and tingling with ozone, lifting the hair off my damp neck.

“Possibly not Smith,” I said. “And where are you going?” I asked, seeing him turn away.

“I need to speak wi’ Captain Hickman and Captain Roberts,” he said, with a certain grimness. He glanced upward, and the matted hair behind his ears stirred in the breeze. “I dinna think we’re going to Scotland in the Teal, but damned if I ken where we are going.”

THE SHIP EVENTUALLY grew quiet—or as quiet as a large object composed of creaking boards, flapping canvas, and that eerie hum made by taut rigging can get. The tide had come in, and the ship did swim; we were moving north again, under light sail.

I had seen off the last of the casualties; only Captain Stebbings remained, laid on a crude pallet behind a chest of smuggled tea. He was still breathing, and not in terrible discomfort, I thought, but his condition was much too precarious for me to let him out of my sight.

By some miracle, the bullet seemed to have seared its way into his lung, rather than simply severing blood vessels in its wake. That didn’t mean he wasn’t bleeding into his lung, but if so, it was a slow seep; I would long since have known about it, otherwise. He must have been shot at close range, I thought sleepily. The ball had still been red-hot when it struck him.

I had sent Abram to bed. I should lie down myself, for tiredness dragged at my shoulders and had settled in aching lumps at the base of my spine. Not yet, though.

Jamie had not yet come back. I knew he would come to find me when he’d finished his summit meeting with Hickman and Roberts. And there were a few preparations still to be made, just in case.

In the course of Jamie’s earlier rummaging through Hickman’s desk in search of food, I’d noticed a bundle of fresh goose quills. I’d sent Abram to beg a couple of these and to bring me the largest sailmaker’s needle to be found—and a couple of wing bones discarded from the chicken stew aboard the Pitt.

I chopped off the ends of a slender bone, looked to be sure the marrow had all been leached out by cooking, then shaped one end into a careful point, using the ship’s carpenter’s small sharpening stone for the purpose. The quill was easier; the tip had already been cut to a point for writing; all I had to do was to cut off the barbs, then submerge quill, bone, and needle in a shallow dish of brandy. That would do, then.

The smell of the brandy rose sweet and heavy in the air, competing with the tar, turpentine, tobacco, and the salt-soaked old timbers of the ship. It did at least partially obliterate the scents of blood and fecal matter left by my patients.

I’d discovered a case of bottled Meursault wine in the cargo, and now thoughtfully extracted a bottle, adding it to the half bottle of brandy and a stack of clean calico bandages and dressings. Sitting down on a keg of tar, I leaned back against a big hogshead of tobacco, yawning and wondering idly why it was called that. It did not appear to be shaped like a hog’s head, certainly not like the head of any hog I knew.

I dismissed that thought and closed my eyes. I could feel my pulse throbbing in fingertips and eyelids. I didn’t sleep, but I slowly descended into a sort of half consciousness, dimly aware of the sough of water past the ship’s sides, the louder sigh of Stebbings’s breath, the unhurried bellows of my own lungs, and the slow, placid thumping of my heart.

It seemed years since the terrors and uproar of the afternoon, and from the distance imposed by fatigue and intensity, my worry that I might have been having a heart attack seemed ridiculous. Was it, though? It wasn’t impossible. Surely it had been nothing more than panic and hyperventilation—ridiculous in themselves, but not threatening. Still…

I put two fingers on my chest and waited for the pulsing in my fingertips to equalize with the pulsing of my heart. Slowly, almost dreaming, I began to pass through my body, from crown to toes, feeling my way through the long quiet passages of veins, the deep violet color of the sky just before night. Nearby I saw the brightness of arteries, wide and fierce with crimson life. Entered into the chambers of my heart and felt enclosed, the thick walls moving in a solid, comforting, unending, uninterrupted rhythm. No, no damage, not to the heart nor to its valves.

I felt my digestive tract, tightly knotted up under my diaphragm for hours, relax and settle with a grateful gurgle, and a sense of well-being flowed down like warm honey through limbs and spine.

“I dinna ken what ye’re doing, Sassenach,” a soft voice said nearby. “But ye look well content.”

I opened my eyes and sat up. Jamie came down the ladder, moving carefully, and sat down.

He was very pale, and his shoulders were slumped with exhaustion. He smiled faintly at me, though, and his eyes were clear. My heart, solid and reliable as I just proved it to be, warmed and softened as though it had been made of butter.

“How do you—” I began, but he raised a hand, stopping me.

“I’ll do,” he said, with a glance at the pallet where the recumbent Stebbings lay, breathing shallowly and audibly. “Is he asleep?”

“I hope so. And you should be,” I observed. “Let me tend you so you can lie down.”

“It’s no verra bad,” he said, gingerly picking at the wad of crusty fabric tucked inside his shirt. “But it could use a stitch or two, I suppose.”

“I suppose so, too,” I said, eyeing the brown stains down the right side of his shirt. Given his customary inclination to understatement, he likely had a gaping slash down his breast. At least it would be easy to get at, unlike the awkward wound suffered by one of the Pitt’s sailors, who had somehow been struck just behind the scrotum by a pellet of grapeshot. I thought it must have struck something else first and bounced upward, for it luckily hadn’t penetrated deeply, but was flattened as a sixpence when I got it out. I’d given it to him as a souvenir.

Abram had brought a can of fresh hot water just before he left. I put a finger into it and was pleased to find it still warm.

“Right,” I said, with a nod at the bottles on the chest. “Do you want brandy, or wine, before we start?”

The corner of his mouth twitched, and he reached for the wine bottle.

“Let me keep the illusion of civilization for a wee bit longer.”

“Oh, I think that’s reasonably civilized stuff,” I said. “I haven’t a cork screw, though.”

He read the label, and his eyebrows rose.

“No matter. Is there something to pour it into?”

“Just here.” I pulled a small, elegant wooden box out of a nest of straw inside a packing case and opened it triumphantly to display a Chinese porcelain tea set, gilt-edged and decorated with tiny red and blue turtles, all looking inscrutably Asiatic, swimming through a forest of gold chrysanthemums.

Jamie laughed—no more than a breath, but definitely laughter—and, scoring the neck of the bottle with the point of his dirk, knocked it neatly off against the rim of a tobacco hogshead. He poured the wine carefully into the two cups I’d set out, nodding at the vivid turtles.

“The wee blue one there reminds me of Mr. Willoughby, aye?”

I laughed myself, then glanced guiltily at Stebbings’s feet—all that was showing of him at the moment. I’d taken his boots off, and the loose toes of his grimy stockings drooped comically over his feet. The feet didn’t twitch, though, and the slow, labored breathing went on as before.

“I haven’t thought of Mr. Willoughby in years,” I observed, lifting my cup in toast. “Here’s to absent friends.”

Jamie replied briefly in Chinese and touched the rim of his own cup to mine with a faint tink!

“You remember how to speak Chinese?” I asked, intrigued, but he shook his head.

“No much. I havena had occasion to speak it since I last saw him.” He breathed in the bouquet of the wine, closing his eyes. “That seems a verra long time ago.”

“Long ago and far away.” The wine smelled warmly of almonds and apples, and was dry but full-bodied, clinging richly to the palate. Jamaica, to be exact, and more than ten years ago. “Time flies when you’re having fun. Do you think he’s still alive—Mr. Willoughby?”

He considered that, sipping.

“Aye, I do. A man who escaped from a Chinese emperor and sailed halfway round the world to keep his balls is one wi’ a good deal of determination.”

He seemed disinclined to reminisce further about auld acquaintance, though, and I let him drink in silence, feeling the night settle comfortably around us with the gentle rise and fall of the ship. After his second cup of wine, I peeled his crusty shirt off and gingerly lifted the blood-caked wad of handkerchief that he’d used to stanch the wound.

Rather to my surprise, he was right: the wound was small, and wouldn’t need more than two or three stitches to put right. A blade had gone in deep, just under his collarbone, and ripped a triangular flap of flesh coming out.

“Is this all your blood?” I asked, puzzled, lifting the discarded shirt.

“Nay, I’ve got a bit left,” he said, eyes creasing at me over the teacup. “Not much, mind.”

“You know quite well what I mean,” I said severely.

“Aye, it’s mine.” He drained his cup and reached for the bottle.

“But from such a small… oh, dear God.” I felt slightly faint. I could see the tender blue line of his subclavian vein, passing just under the collarbone and running directly above the clotted gape of the wound.

“Aye, I was surprised,” he said casually, cradling the delicate china in both big hands. “When he jerked the blade out, the blood sprayed out like a fountain and soaked us both. I’ve never seen it do like that before.”

“You have probably not had anyone nick your subclavian artery before,” I said, with what attempt at calm I could muster. I cast a sideways glance at the wound. It had clotted; the edges of the flap had turned blue and the sliced flesh beneath was nearly black with dried blood. No oozing, let alone an arterial spray. The blade had thrust up from below, missing the vein and just piercing the artery behind it.

I took a long, deep breath, trying with no success whatever not to imagine what would have happened had the blade gone the barest fraction of an inch deeper, or what might have happened, had Jamie not had a handkerchief and the knowledge and opportunity to use pressure on the wound.

Belatedly, I realized what he’d said: “The blood sprayed out like a fountain and soaked us both.” And when I’d asked Stebbings whether it was his own blood soaking his shirt, he’d leered and said, “Your husband’s.” I’d thought he was only being unpleasant, but—

“Was it Captain Stebbings who stabbed you?”

“Mmphm.” He made a brief affirmative noise as he shifted his weight, leaning back to let me get at the wound. He drained the cup again and set it down, looking resigned. “I was surprised he managed it. I thought I’d dropped him, but he hit the floor and came up wi’ a knife in his hand, the wee bugger.”

“You shot him?”

He blinked at my tone of voice.

“Aye, of course.”

I couldn’t think of any bad words sufficient as to encompass the situation and, muttering “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” under my breath, set about swabbing and suturing.

“Now, listen to me,” I said, in my best military surgeon’s voice. “So far as I can tell, it was a very small nick, and you managed to stop the bleeding long enough for a clot to form. But that clot is all that is keeping you from bleeding to death. Do you understand me?” This was not completely true—or it wouldn’t be, once I’d stitched the supporting flesh back into place—but this was no time to give him a loophole.

He looked at me for a long moment, quite expressionless.

“I do.”

“That means,” I emphasized, stabbing the needle into his flesh with sufficient force that he yelped, “you must not use your right arm for at least the next forty-eight hours. You must not haul on ropes, you must not climb rigging, you must not punch people, you must not so much as scratch your arse with your right hand, do you hear me?”

“I expect the whole ship hears ye,” he muttered, but glanced down his cheek, trying to see his collarbone. “I generally scratch my arse wi’ my left hand, anyway.”