An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana - Страница 207

When I looked back at our own fire, the man was gone.

“Shall I tell ye something, Auntie?” Ian said, frowning thoughtfully at the empty shadows lengthening beneath the trees. “He’ll be back.”

JAMIE AND HAMISH did not return for supper, leading me to suppose that the loo must be going well for them. Things were going reasonably well for me, too; Mrs. Kebbits, the militia wife, did feed Ian and myself, and very hospitably, with fresh corn dodgers and rabbit stew with onions. Best of all, my sinister visitor didn’t return.

Ian had gone off about his own business, Rollo at heel, so I banked the fire and prepared to set off for the hospital tents for evening rounds. Most of the severely injured had died within the first two or three days after the battle; of the rest, those who had wives, friends, or relatives to care for them had been taken off to their own camps. There were three dozen or so left, men on their own, with lingering but not immediately life-threatening injuries or illnesses.

I put on a second pair of stockings, wrapped my thick wool cloak around myself, and thanked God for the cold weather. A chill had struck in late September, setting the woods afire with a glory of red and gold, but also helpfully killing off the insects. The relief of camp life without flies was marvelous in itself—no surprise to me that flies had been one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. The lice, alas, were still with us, but without flies, fleas, and mosquitoes, the threat of epidemic illness was tremendously decreased.

Still, every time I came near the hospital tent, I found myself sniffing the air, alert for the telltale fecal stench that might portend a sudden irruption of cholera, typhus, or the lesser evils of a salmonella outbreak. Tonight, though, I smelled nothing beyond the usual cesspit smell of the latrines, overlaid by the funk of unwashed bodies, filthy linens, and a lingering tang of old blood. Reassuringly familiar.

Three orderlies were playing cards under a canvas lean-to next to the biggest tent, their game lit by a rush dip whose flame rose and flickered in the evening wind. Their shadows swelled and shrank on the pale canvas, and I caught the sound of their laughter as I passed. That meant none of the regimental surgeons was about; just as well.

Most of them were simply grateful for whatever help was offered and thus left me to do what I would. There were always one or two who’d stand on their dignity and insist on their authority, though. Usually no more than a nuisance, but very dangerous in case of emergency.

No emergencies tonight, thank God. There were a number of tin candlesticks and stubs of varying lengths in a bowl outside the tent; I lit a candle from the fire and, ducking inside, made my way through the two large tents, checking vital signs, chatting with the men who were awake, and evaluating their condition.

Nothing very bad, but I had some concern for Corporal Jebediah Shoreditch, who had suffered three separate bayonet wounds during the storming of the great redoubt. By some miracle, none had hit any vital organs, and while the corporal was rather uncomfortable—one thrust having plowed upward through his left buttock—he wasn’t displaying any major signs of fever. There was some sign of infection in the buttock wound, though.

“I’m going to irrigate this,” I told him, eyeing my half-full bottle of tincture of gentian. This was nearly the last of it, but with luck, there shouldn’t be great need again until I was in a position to make more. “Wash it out, I mean, to rid you of the pus. How did it happen?” The irrigation wasn’t going to be comfortable; better if he could be distracted a little by telling me the details.

“Wasn’t retreatin’, ma’am, and don’t you think it,” he assured me, taking a good grip on the edge of his pallet as I turned back the blanket and peeled away the crusty bits of a tar-and-turpentine dressing. “One o’ them sneaky Hessian sons of bitches was a-playin’ dead, and when I went to step over him, he come to life and reared up like a copperhead, bay’net in hand.”

“Bayonet in your hand, you mean, Jeb,” joked a friend who lay nearby.

“Nah, that was another un.” Shoreditch shrugged off the joke with a casual glance at his right hand, wrapped in bandages. One of the Hessians had pinned his hand to the ground with a bayonet blade, he told me—whereupon Shoreditch had snatched up his fallen knife with his left hand and swiped it murderously across the Hessian’s calves, felling him, and then had cut the Hessian’s throat—disregarding a third attacker, whose thrust had removed the top part of his left ear.

“Somebody shot that un, Lord be praised, afore he could improve his aim. Speak of hands, Ma’am, is the colonel’s hand a-doing well?” His forehead shone with sweat in the lantern light, and the tendons stood out in his forearms, but he spoke courteously.

“I think it must be,” I said, pressing slowly on the plunger of my irrigating syringe. “He’s been at cards with Colonel Martin since this afternoon—and if his hand was poor, he’d have come back by now.”

Shoreditch and his friend both chuckled at this feeble pun, but he let go a long sigh when I took my hands away from the new dressing, and rested his forehead on the pallet for a moment before rolling painfully onto his good side.

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said. His eyes passed with apparent casualness over the figures that moved to and fro in the darkness. “If you was to see Friend Hunter or Doc Tolliver, might you ask ’em to stop a moment?”

I raised a brow at this, but nodded and poured him a cup of ale; there was plenty now that the supply lines from the south had caught up, and it would do him no harm.

I did the same for his friend, a man from Pennsylvania named Neph Brewster, who was suffering from dysentery, though I added a small handful of Dr. Rawling’s Bowel-Bind mixture before handing over the cup.

“Jeb ain’t meanin’ no disrespect to you, ma’am,” Neph whispered, leaning confidentially close as he took the drink. “It’s only as he can’t shit ’thout help, and that ain’t somethin’ he wants to ask a lady. Mr. Denzell or the Doc don’t come by soon, I’ll help him, though.”

“Shall I fetch one of the orderlies?” I asked, surprised. “They’re just outside.”

“Oh, no, ma’am. Once the sun goes down, they figure as how they’re off duty. Won’t come in, save there’s a fight or the tent catches fire.”

“Hmm,” I said. Plainly attitudes among medical orderlies weren’t that different from one time to another.

“I’ll find one of the surgeons,” I assured him; Mr. Brewster was thin and yellow, and his hand shook so badly that I had to put my own fingers round his to help him drink. I doubted he could stand long enough to manage his own necessities, let alone help Corporal Shoreditch with his. Mr. Brewster was game, though.

“Shittin’ is somethin’ I can claim to have some skill at by now,” he said, grinning at me. He wiped his face with a trembling hand and paused between swallows to breathe heavily. “Ah … might you have a bit o’ cooking grease to hand, ma’am? My arsehole’s raw as a fresh-skinned rabbit. I can put it on myself—unless you’d like to help, o’ course.”

“I’ll mention it to Dr. Hunter,” I replied dryly. “I’m sure he’d be delighted.”

I finished my rounds quickly—most of the men were asleep—and went in search of Denny Hunter, who I found outside his own tent, bundled up against the cold with a muffler round his neck, dreamily listening to a ballad being sung at a nearby campfire.

“Who?” He came out of his trance at my appearance, though it took him a moment to return fully to earth. “Oh, Friend Jebediah, to be sure. Of course—I’ll go at once.”

“Have you got any goose or bear grease?”

Denny settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose, giving me a quizzical look.

“Friend Jebediah is not constipated, is he? I understood his difficulty to be more one of engineering than of physiology.”