Страница 264 из 285
“No,” William admitted. “But I think so. He had a staff with him, and so did this man. And there’s something about the way he stands—a little stooped. The man I met in New Jersey was very old, and this one walks the same way.” He didn’t mention the missing fingers; no need to remind Dottie of violence and mutilation just this minute, and he couldn’t see the man’s hand at this distance anyway.
Rollo had left off growling and settled himself with a brief grunt, but his yellow eyes were still watchful.
“When do you mean to be married, Dottie?” William asked, wishing to keep her mind occupied. A strange smell was coming from the window above them; the dog was wrinkling his nose, shaking his head in a confused sort of way, and William didn’t blame him. It was a nasty, sickly kind of thing—but he could distinctly smell blood, as well, and the faint stink of shit. It was a battlefield smell, and it made his insides shift uneasily.
“I want to be married before the fighting starts again in earnest,” his cousin answered seriously, turning to face him, “so that I can go with De
Rachel returned the smile, but briefly.
“What a strange thing,” she said to both of them, but her hazel eyes were fixed on William, soft and troubled. “In only a little while we shall be enemies again.”
“I have never felt myself your enemy, Miss Hunter,” he replied, just as softly. “And I shall always be your friend.”
A smile touched her lips, but the trouble stayed in her eyes.
“Thee knows what I mean.” Her eyes slid from William to Dottie, on her other side, and it occurred to William with a jolt that his cousin was about to wed a rebel—to become one herself, in fact. That he must in fact soon be directly at war with a part of his own family. The fact that De
“I know what you mean,” he said quietly. But he took Rachel’s hand, and she gave it him, and the three of them sat in silence, linked, awaiting the verdict of the future.
INK-STAINED WRETCH
I MADE MY WAY TO the printshop, dead tired and in that state of mind in which one feels drunk—euphoric and uncoordinated. I was in truth somewhat physically drunk, too; Lord John had insisted upon plying both Denzell Hunter and myself with his best brandy, seeing how done up we both were in the wake of the surgery. I hadn’t said no.
It was one of the most hair-raising pieces of surgery I’d done in the eighteenth century. I’d done only two other abdominal surgeries: the successful removal of Aidan McCallum’s appendix, under the influence of ether—and the very unsuccessful cesarean I’d performed with a garden knife upon the murdered body of Malva Christie. The thought of that gave me the usual pang of sadness and regret, but it was oddly tempered. What I remembered now, walking home in the cool evening, was the feeling of the life I’d held in my hands—so brief, so fleeting—but there, unmistakable and intoxicant, a brief blue flame.
I’d held Henry Grey’s life in my hands two hours before and felt that blaze again. Once more I’d willed all my strength into the burning of that flame—but this time had felt it steady and rise in my palms, like a candle taking hold.
The bullet had entered his intestine but had not encysted. Instead, it remained embedded but mobile, not able to leave the body but moving enough to irritate the lining of the intestine, which was badly ulcerated. After a quick discussion with Denzell Hunter—who was so fascinated with the novelty of examining a person’s working insides while they lay unconscious that he could barely keep his mind on the business at hand, exclaiming in awe at the vivid colors and pulsating throb of live organs—I had decided that the ulceration was too extensive. To excise it would narrow the small intestine dramatically and risk scarring—constricting it further and perhaps obstructing it altogether.
We’d done a modest resection instead, and I felt a twinge of something between laughter and dismay at the recollection of Lord John’s face when I severed the ulcerated segment of intestine and dropped it with a splat on the floor at his feet. I hadn’t done it on purpose; I’d simply needed both my hands and Denzell’s to control the bleeding, and we’d lacked a nurse to help.
The boy wasn’t out of the woods, not by a long chalk. I didn’t know whether my penicillin would be effective, or whether he might develop some hideous infection despite it. But he was awake, and his vital signs were surprisingly strong—perhaps, I thought, because of Mrs. Woodcock, who had gripped his hand and stroked his face, urging him to wake with a fierce tenderness that left her feelings for him in no doubt whatever.
I did wonder briefly what the future held for her. Struck by her unusual name, I’d inquired cautiously about her husband and was sure that it was he whose amputated leg I’d tended on the retreat from Ticonderoga. I thought it very likely he was dead; if so, what might happen between Mercy Woodcock and Henry Grey? She was a free woman, not a slave. Marriage wasn’t unthinkable—not even as unthinkable as such a relationship would be in the United States two hundred years in the future: marriages involving black and mulatto women of good family to white men were, if not common in the Indies, not a matter of public scandal, either. Philadelphia was not the Indies, though, and from what Dottie had told me of her father…
I was simply too tired to think about it, and I needn’t—De
I should walk faster; there was a curfew. Still, who would arrest me? I was too old for patrolling soldiers to molest me, as they would a young girl, and of the wrong sex to be suspicious. Should I meet a patrol, they wouldn’t do more than abuse me and tell me to go home—which I was doing, in any case.
It struck me quite suddenly that I could move the things Marsali described circumspectly as “Mr. Smith’s job”: the written letters circulated by the Sons of Liberty that passed between villages, between towns, that whirled through the colonies like leaves driven by a spring storm, were copied and sent on, sometimes printed and distributed within the towns, if a bold printer could be found to do the work.
There was a loose network through which these things moved, but it was always prone to discovery, with people arrested and imprisoned frequently. Germain carried such papers often, and my heart was in my throat when I thought of it. An agile boy was less noticeable than a young man or a tradesman going about his business—but the British were not fools and would certainly stop him if he looked at all suspicious. Whereas I…
Turning the possibilities over in my mind, I reached the shop and went in, to the smell of a savory supper, the greetings of excited children, and something that drove all thought of my potential new career as a spy from my mind: two letters from Jamie.
20 March, A.D. 1778
LallybrochMy dearest Claire;
Ian is dead. It has been ten days since the Event, and I thought I should now be able to write calmly. Yet to see those Words written on thePage just now smote me with the most unexpected Grief; Tears are ru