ONE JUST MAN
The sun rose invisible, to the sound of drums. Drums on both sides; we could hear the British reveille, and by the same token they must hear ours. The riflemen had had a brief skirmish with British troops two days before, and owing to the work of Ian and the other scouts, General Gates knew very well the size and disposition of Burgoyne’s army. Kościuszko had chosen Bemis Heights for a defensive position; it was a high river bluff, with numerous small ravines down to the river, and his crews had labored like madmen for the last week with shovels and axes. The Americans were ready. More or less.
The women were not, of course, admitted to the councils of the generals. Jamie was, though, and thus I heard all about the argument between General Gates, who was in command, and General Arnold, who thought he should be. General Gates, who wanted to sit tight on Bemis Heights and wait for the British attack, versus General Arnold, who argued vehemently that the Americans must make the first move, forcing the British regulars to fight through the thickly wooded ravines, ruining their formations and making them vulnerable to the riflemen’s sniper fire, falling back—if necessary—to the breastworks and entrenchments on the Heights.
“Arnold’s won,” Ian reported, popping briefly up out of the fog to snag a piece of toasted bread. “Uncle Jamie’s away wi’ the riflemen already. He says he’ll see ye this evening, and in the meantime …” He bent and gently kissed my cheek, then grinned impudently and vanished.
My own stomach was knotted, though with the pervasive excitement as much as with fear. The Americans were a ragged, motley lot, but they had had time to prepare, they knew what was coming, and they knew what was at stake. This battle would decide the campaign in the north. Either Burgoyne would overcome and march on, trapping George Washington’s army near Philadelphia between his forces and General Howe’s—or his army of invasion would be brought to a halt and knocked out of the war, in which case Gates’s army could move south to reinforce Washington. The men all knew it, and the fog seemed electric with their anticipation.
By the sun, it was near ten o’clock when the fog lifted. The shots had begun some time earlier, brief, distant pings of rifle fire. Daniel Morgan’s men were taking out the pickets, I thought—and knew from what Jamie had said the night before that they were meant to aim for the officers, to kill those soldiers wearing silver gorgets. I hadn’t slept the night before, envisioning Lieutenant Ransom and the silver gorget at his throat. In fog, in the dust of battle, at a distance … I swallowed, but my throat stayed stubbornly closed; I couldn’t even drink water.
Jamie had slept, with the stubborn concentration of a soldier, but had waked in the deep hours of the night, his shirt soaked with sweat in spite of the chill, trembling. I didn’t ask what he had been dreaming about; I knew. I had got him a dry shirt and made him lie down again with his head in my lap, then stroked his head until he closed his eyes—but I thought he hadn’t slept again.
It wasn’t chilly now; the fog had burned away, and we heard sustained rattles of gunfire, patchy, but repeated volleys. Faint, distant shouting, but impossible to make out who was shouting what at whom. Then the sudden crash of a British fieldpiece, a resounding boom that struck the camp silent. A lull, and then full-scale battle broke out, shooting and screaming and the intermittent thud of cannon. Women huddled together or set about grimly packing up their belongings, in case we should have to flee.
About midday, a relative silence fell. Was it over? We waited. After a little, children began whining to be fed and a sort of tense normality descended—but nothing happened. We could hear moaning and calls for help from men wounded—but no wounded were brought in.
I was ready. I had a small mule-drawn wagon, equipped with bandages and medical equipment, and a small tent as well, which I could set up in case I needed to perform surgery in the rain. The mule was staked nearby, grazing placidly and ignoring both the tension and the occasional burst of musketry.
In the middle of the afternoon, hostilities broke out again, and this time the camp followers and cook wagons actually began to retreat. There was artillery on both sides, enough of it that the continuous cannonading rolled like thunder, and I saw a huge cloud of black powder smoke rise up from the bluff. It was not quite mushroom-shaped, but made me think nonetheless of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. I sharpened my knife and scalpels for the dozenth time.
It was near evening; the sun sank invisibly, staining the fog with a dull and sullen orange. The evening wind off the river was rising, lifting the fog from the ground and sending it scudding in billows and swirls.
Clouds of black powder smoke lay heavy in the hollows, lifting more slowly than the lighter shreds of mist and lending a suitable stink of brimstone to a scene that was—if not hellish—at least bloody eerie.
Here and there a space would suddenly be cleared, like a curtain pulled back to show the aftermath of battle. Small dark figures moved in the distance, darting and stooping, stopping suddenly, heads uplifted like baboons keeping watch for a leopard. Camp followers; the wives and whores of the soldiers, come like crows to scavenge the dead.
Children, too. Under a bush, a boy of nine or ten straddled the body of a red-coated soldier, smashing at the face with a heavy rock. I stopped, paralyzed at the sight, and saw the boy reach into the gaping, bloodied mouth and wrench out a tooth. He slipped the bloody prize into a bag that hung by his side, groped farther, tugging, and, finding no more teeth loose, picked up his rock in a businesslike way and went back to work.
I felt bile rise in my throat and hurried on, swallowing. I was no stranger to war, to death and wounds. But I had never been so near a battle before; I had never before come on a battlefield where the dead and wounded still lay, before the ministrations of medics and burial details.
There were calls for help and occasional moans or screams, ringing disembodied out of the mist, reminding me uncomfortably of Highland stories of the urisge, the doomed spirits of the glen. Like the heroes of such stories, I didn’t stop to heed their call but pressed on, stumbling over small rises, slipping on damp grass.
I had seen photographs of the great battlefields, from the American Civil War to the beaches of Normandy. This was nothing like that—no churned earth, no heaps of tangled limbs. It was still, save for the noises of the scattered wounded and the voices of those calling, like me, for a missing friend or husband.
Shattered trees lay toppled by artillery; in this light, I might have thought the bodies turned into logs themselves, dark shapes lying long in the grass—save for the fact that some of them still moved. Here and there, a form stirred feebly, victim of war’s sorcery, struggling against the enchantment of death.
I paused and shouted into the mist, calling his name. I heard answering calls, but none in his voice. Ahead of me lay a young man, arms outflung, a look of blank astonishment on his face, blood pooled round his upper body like a great halo. His lower half lay six feet away. I walked between the pieces, keeping my skirts close, nostrils pinched tight against the thick iron smell of blood.
The light was fading now, but I saw Jamie as soon as I came over the edge of the next rise. He was lying on his face in the hollow, one arm flung out, the other curled beneath him. The shoulders of his dark blue coat were nearly black with damp, and his legs thrown wide, booted heels askew.
The breath caught in my throat, and I ran down the slope toward him, heedless of grass clumps, mud, and brambles. As I got close, though, I saw a scuttling figure dart out from behind a nearby bush and dash toward him. It fell to its knees beside him and, without hesitation, grasped his hair and yanked his head to one side. Something glinted in the figure’s hand, bright even in the dull light.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Drop it, you bastard!”
Startled, the figure looked up as I flung myself over the last yards of space. Narrow red-rimmed eyes glared up at me out of a round face streaked with soot and grime.
“Get off!” she snarled. “I found ’im first!” It was a knife in her hand; she made little jabbing motions at me, in an effort to drive me away.
I was too furious—and too afraid for Jamie—to be scared for myself.
“Let go of him! Touch him and I’ll kill you!” I said. My fists were clenched, and I must have looked as though I meant it, for the woman flinched back, loosing her hold on Jamie’s hair.
“He’s mine,” she said, thrusting her chin pugnaciously at me. “Go find yourself another.”
Another form slipped out of the mist and materialized by her side. It was the boy I had seen earlier, filthy and scruffy as the woman herself. He had no knife but clutched a crude metal strip, cut from a canteen. The edge of it was dark, with rust or blood.
He glared at me. “He’s ours, Mum said! Get on wi’ yer! Scat!”
Not waiting to see whether I would or not, he flung a leg over Jamie’s back, sat on him, and began to grope in the side pockets of his coat.
“ ’E’s still alive, Mum,” he advised. “I can feel ’is ’eart beatin’. Best slit his throat quick; I don’t think ’e’s bad hurt.”
I grabbed the boy by the collar and jerked him off Jamie’s body, making him drop his weapon. He squealed and flailed at me with arms and elbows, but I kneed him in the rump, hard enough to jar his backbone, then got my elbow locked about his neck in a stranglehold, his skinny wrist vised in my other hand.
“Leave him go!” The woman’s eyes narrowed like a weasel’s, and her eye-teeth shone in a snarl.
I didn’t dare take my eyes away from the woman’s long enough to look at Jamie. I could see him, though, at the edge of my vision, head turned to the side, his neck gleaming white, exposed and vulnerable.
“Stand up and step back,” I said, “or I’ll choke him to death, I swear I will!”
She crouched over Jamie’s body, knife in hand, as she measured me, trying to make up her mind whether I meant it. I did.
The boy struggled and twisted in my grasp, his feet hammering against my shins. He was small for his age, and thin as a stick, but strong nonetheless; it was like wrestling an eel. I tightened my hold on his neck; he gurgled and quit struggling. His hair was thick with rancid grease and dirt, the smell of it rank in my nostrils.
Slowly, the woman stood up. She was much smaller than I, and scrawny with it—bony wrists stuck out of the ragged sleeves. I couldn’t guess her age—under the filth and the puffiness of malnutrition, she might have been anything from twenty to fifty.
“My man lies yonder, dead on the ground,” she said, jerking her head at the fog behind her. “ ’E hadn’t nothing but his musket, and the sergeant’ll take that back.”
Her eyes slid toward the distant wood, where the British troops had retreated. “I’ll find a man soon, but I’ve children to feed in the meantime—two besides the boy.” She licked her lips, and a coaxing note entered her voice. “You’re alone; you can manage better than we can. Let me have this one—there’s more over there.” She pointed with her chin toward the slope behind me, where the rebel dead and wounded lay.
My grasp must have loosened slightly as I listened, for the boy, who had hung quiescent in my grasp, made a sudden lunge and burst free, diving over Jamie’s body to roll at his mother’s feet.
He got up beside her, watching me with rat’s eyes, beady-bright and watchful. He bent and groped about in the grass, coming up with the makeshift dagger.
“Hold ’er off, Mum,” he said, his voice raspy from the choking. “I’ll take ’im.”
From the corner of my eye, I had caught the gleam of metal, half buried in the grass.
“Wait!” I said, and took a step back. “Don’t kill him. Don’t.” A step to the side, another back. “I’ll go, I’ll let you have him, but …” I lunged to the side and got my hand on the cold metal hilt.
I had picked up Jamie’s sword before. It was a cavalry sword, larger and heavier than the usual, but I didn’t notice now.
I snatched it up and swung it in a two-handed arc that ripped the air and left the metal ringing in my hands.
Mother and son jumped back, identical looks of ludicrous surprise on their round, grimy faces.
“Get away!” I said.
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry for your man,” I said. “But my man lies here. Get away, I said!” I raised the sword, and the woman stepped back hastily, dragging the boy by the arm.
She turned and went, muttering curses at me over her shoulder, but I paid no attention to what she said. The boy’s eyes stayed fixed on me as he went, dark coals in the dim light. He would know me again—and I him.
They vanished in the mist, and I lowered the sword, which suddenly weighed too much to hold. I dropped it on the grass and fell to my knees beside Jamie.
My own heart was pounding in my ears and my hands were shaking with reaction, as I groped for the pulse in his neck. I turned his head and could see it, throbbing steadily just below his jaw.
“Thank God!” I whispered to myself. “Oh, thank God!”
I ran my hands over him quickly, searching for injury before I moved him. I didn’t think the scavengers would come back; I could hear the voices of a group of men, distant on the ridge behind me—a rebel detail coming to fetch the wounded.
There was a large knot on his brow, already turning purple. Nothing else that I could see. The boy had been right, I thought, with gratitude; he wasn’t badly hurt. Then I rolled him onto his back and saw his hand.
Highlanders were accustomed to fight with sword in one hand, targe in the other, the small leather shield used to deflect an opponent’s blow. He hadn’t had a targe.
The blade had struck him between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand and sliced through the hand itself, a deep, ugly wound that split his palm and the body of his hand, halfway to the wrist.
Despite the horrid look of the wound, there wasn’t much blood; the hand had been curled under him, his weight acting as a pressure bandage. The front of his shirt was smeared with red, deeply stained over his heart. I ripped open his shirt and felt inside, to be sure that the blood was from his hand, but it was. His chest was cool and damp from the grass but unscathed, his nipples shrunken and stiff with chill.
“That … tickles,” he said in a drowsy voice. He pawed awkwardly at his chest with his left hand, trying to brush my hand away.
“Sorry,” I said, repressing the urge to laugh with the joy of seeing him alive and conscious. I got an arm behind his shoulders and helped him to sit up. He looked drunk, with one eye swollen half shut and grass in his hair. He acted drunk, too, swaying alarmingly from side to side.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“Sick,” he said succinctly. He leaned to the side and threw up.
I eased him back on the grass and wiped his mouth, then set about bandaging his hand.
“Someone will be here soon,” I assured him. “We’ll get you back to the wagon, and I can take care of this.”
“Mmphm.” He grunted slightly as I pulled the bandage tight. “What happened?”
“What happened?” I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. “You’re asking me?”
“What happened in the battle, I mean,” he said patiently, regarding me with his one good eye. “I know what happened to me—roughly,” he added, wincing as he touched his forehead.
“Yes, roughly,” I said rudely. “You got yourself chopped like a butchered hog, and your head half caved in. Being a sodding bloody hero again, that’s what happened to you!”
“I wasna—” he began, but I interrupted, my relief over seeing him alive being rapidly succeeded by rage.
“You didn’t have to go to Ticonderoga! You shouldn’t have gone! Stick to the writing and the printing, you said. You weren’t going to fight unless you had to, you said. Well, you didn’t have to, but you did it anyway, you vain glorious, pigheaded, grandstanding Scot!”
“Grandstanding?” he inquired.
“You know just what I mean, because it’s just what you did! You might have been killed!”
“Aye,” he agreed ruefully. “I thought I was, when the dragoon came down on me. I screeched and scairt his horse, though,” he added more cheerfully. “It reared up and got me in the face with its knee.”
“Don’t change the subject!” I snapped.
“Is the subject not that I’m not killed?” he asked, trying to raise one brow and failing, with another wince.
“No! The subject is your stupidity, your bloody selfish stubbornness!”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that! You—you—oaf! How dare you do that to me? You think I haven’t got anything better to do with my life than trot round after you, sticking pieces back on?” I was frankly shrieking at him by this time.
To my increased fury, he grinned at me, his expression made the more rakish by the half-closed eye.
“Ye’d have been a good fishwife, Sassenach,” he observed. “Ye’ve the tongue for it.”
“You shut up, you fucking bloody—”
“They’ll hear you,” he said mildly, with a wave toward the party of Continental soldiers making their way down the slope toward us.
“I don’t care who hears me! If you weren’t already hurt, I’d—I’d—”
“Be careful, Sassenach,” he said, still grinning. “Ye dinna want to knock off any more pieces; ye’ll only have to stick them back on, aye?”
“Don’t bloody tempt me,” I said through my teeth, with a glance at the sword I had dropped.
He saw it and reached for it, but couldn’t quite manage. With an explosive snort, I leaned across his body and grabbed the hilt, putting it in his hand. I heard a shout from the men coming down the hill and turned to wave at them.
“Anyone hearing ye just now would likely think ye didna care for me owermuch, Sassenach,” he said, behind me.
I turned to look down at him. The impudent grin was gone, but he was still smiling.
“Ye’ve the tongue of a venemous shrew,” he said, “but you’re a bonnie wee swordsman, Sassenach.”
My mouth opened, but the words that had been so abundant a moment before had all evaporated like the rising mist.
He laid his good hand on my arm. “For now, a nighean donn—thank ye for my life.”
I closed my mouth. The men had nearly reached us, rustling through the grass, their exclamations and chatter drowning out the ever-fainter moans of the wounded.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“Hamburger,” I said under my breath, but not far enough under. He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Chopped meat,” I elaborated, and the eyebrow fell.
“Oh, aye, it is. Stopped a sword stroke wi’ my hand. Too bad I didna have a targe; I could have turned the stroke, easy.”
“Right.” I swallowed. It wasn’t the worst injury I’d seen, by a long shot, but it still made me slightly sick. The tip of his fourth finger had been sheared off cleanly, at an angle just below the nail. The stroke had sliced a strip of flesh from the inside of the finger and ripped down between the third and fourth fingers.
“You must have caught it near the hilt,” I said, trying for calm. “Or it would have taken off the outside half of your hand.”
“Mmphm.” The hand didn’t move as I prodded and poked, but there was sweat on his upper lip, and he couldn’t keep back a brief grunt of pain.
“Sorry,” I murmured automatically.
“It’s all right,” he said, just as automatically. He closed his eyes, then opened them.
“Take it off,” he said suddenly.
“What?” I drew back and looked at him, startled.
“The finger. Take it off, Sassenach.”
“I can’t do that!” Even as I spoke, though, I knew that he was right. Aside from the injuries to the finger itself, the tendon was badly damaged; the chances of his ever being able to move the finger, let alone move it without pain, were infinitesimal.
“It’s done me little good in the last twenty years,” he said, looking at the mangled stump dispassionately, “and likely to do no better now. I’ve broken the damned thing half a dozen times, from its sticking out like it does. If ye take it off, it willna trouble me anymore, at least.”
I wanted to argue, but there was no time; wounded men were beginning to drift up the slope toward the wagon. The men were militia, not regular army; if there was a regiment near, there might be a surgeon with them, but I was closer.
“Once a frigging hero, always a frigging hero,” I muttered under my breath. I thrust a wad of lint into Jamie’s bloody palm and wrapped a linen bandage swiftly around the hand. “Yes, I’ll have to take it off, but later. Hold still.”
“Ouch,” he said mildly. “I did say I wasna a hero.”
“If you aren’t, it isn’t for lack of trying,” I said, yanking the linen knot tight with my teeth. “There, that will have to do for now; I’ll see to it when I have time.” I grabbed the wrapped hand and plunged it into the small basin of alcohol and water.
He went white as the alcohol seeped through the cloth and struck raw flesh. He inhaled sharply through his teeth, but didn’t say anything more. I pointed peremptorily at the blanket I had spread on the ground, and he lay back obediently, curling up under the shelter of the wagon, bandaged fist cradled against his breast.
I rose from my knees, but hesitated for a moment. Then I knelt again and hastily kissed the back of his neck, brushing aside the queue of his hair, matted with half-dried mud and dead leaves. I could just see the curve of his cheek; it tightened briefly as he smiled and then relaxed.
Word had spread that the hospital wagon was there; there was already a straggling group of walking wounded awaiting attention, and I could see men carrying or half-dragging their injured companions toward the light of my lantern. It was going to be a busy evening.
Colonel Everett had promised me two assistants, but God knew where the colonel was at the moment. I took a moment to survey the gathering crowd and picked out a young man who had just deposited a wounded friend beneath a tree.
“You,” I said, tugging on his sleeve. “Are you afraid of blood?”
He looked momentarily startled, then grinned at me through a mask of mud and powder smoke. He was about my height, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a face that might have been called cherubic had it been less filthy.
“Only if it’s mine, ma’am, and so far it ain’t, Lord be praised.”
“Then come with me,” I said, smiling back. “You’re now a triage aide.”
“Say what? Hey, Harry!” he yelled to his friend. “I been promoted. Tell your mama next time you write, Lester done amounted to something, after all!” He swaggered after me, still grinning.
The grin rapidly faded into a look of frowning absorption as I led him quickly among the wounded, pointing out degrees of severity.
“Men pouring blood are the first priority,” I told him. I thrust an armful of linen bandages and a sack of lint into his hands. “Give them these—tell their friends to press the lint hard on the wounds or put a tourniquet round the limb above the wound. You know what a tourniquet is?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he assured me. “Put one on, too, when a panther clawed up my cousin Jess, down to Caroline County.”
“Good. Don’t spend time doing it yourself here unless you have to, though—let their friends do it. Now, broken bones can wait a bit—put them over there under that big beech tree. Head injuries and internal injuries that aren’t bleeding, back there, by the chestnut tree, if they can be moved. If not, I’ll go to them.” I pointed behind me, then turned in a half circle, surveying the ground.
“If you see a couple of whole men, send them up to put up the hospital tent; it’s to go in that flattish spot, there. And then a couple more, to dig a latrine trench … over there, I think.”
“Yes, sir! Ma’am, I mean!” Lester bobbed his head and took a firm grip on his sack of lint. “I be right after it, ma’am. Though I wouldn’t worry none about the latrines for a while,” he added. “Most of these boys already done had the shit scairt out of ’em.” He grinned and bobbed once more, then set out on his rounds.
He was right; the faint stink of feces hung in the air as it always did on battlefields, a low note amid the pungencies of blood and smoke.
With Lester sorting the wounded, I settled down to the work of repair, with my medicine box, suture bag, and bowl of alcohol set on the wagon’s tailboard and a keg of alcohol for the patients to sit on—provided they could sit.
The worst of the casualties were bayonet wounds; luckily there had been no grapeshot, and the men hit by cannonballs were long past the point where I could help them. As I worked, I listened with half an ear to the conversation of the men awaiting attention.
“Wasn’t that the damnedest thing ye ever saw? How many o’ the buggers were there?” one man was asking his neighbor.
“Damned if I know,” his friend replied, shaking his head. “For a space there, ever’thing I saw was red, and nothin’ but. Then a cannon went off right close, and I didn’t see nothin’ but smoke for a good long time.” He rubbed at his face; tears from watering eyes had made long streaks in the black soot that covered him from chest to forehead.
I glanced back at the wagon but couldn’t see under it. I hoped shock and fatigue had enabled Jamie to sleep, in spite of his hand, but I doubted it.
Despite the fact that nearly everyone near me was wounded in some fashion, their spirits were high and the general mood was one of exuberant relief and exultation. Farther down the hill, in the mists near the river, I could hear whoops and shouts of victory and the undisciplined racket of fifes and drums, rattling and screeching in random exhilaration.
Among the noise, a nearer voice called out: a uniformed officer, on a bay horse.
“Anybody seen that big redheaded bastard who broke the charge?”
There was a murmur and a general looking around, but no one answered. The horseman dismounted and, wrapping his reins over a branch, made his way through the throng of wounded toward me.
“Whoever he is, I tell you, he’s got balls the size of ten-pound shot,” remarked the man whose cheek I was stitching.
“And a head of the same consistency,” I murmured.
“Eh?” He glanced sideways at me in bewilderment.
“Nothing,” I said. “Hold still just a moment longer; I’m nearly done.”
It was a hellish night. Some of the wounded still lay in the ravines and hollows, as did all the dead. The wolves that came silently out of the wood did not distinguish between them, judging from the distant screams.
It was nearly dawn before I came back to the tent where Jamie lay. I lifted the flap quietly, so as not to disturb him, but he was already awake, lying curled on his side facing the flap, head resting on a folded blanket.
He smiled faintly when he saw me.
“A hard night, Sassenach?” he asked, his voice slightly hoarse from cold air and disuse. Mist seeped under the edge of the flap, tinted yellow by the lantern light.
“I’ve had worse.” I smoothed the hair off his face, looking him over carefully. He was pale but not clammy. His face was drawn with pain, but his skin was cool to the touch—no trace of fever. “You haven’t slept, have you? How do you feel?”
“A bit scairt,” he said. “And a bit sick. But better now you’re here.” He gave me a one-sided grimace that was almost a smile.
I put a hand under his jaw, fingers pressed against the pulse in his neck. His heart bumped steadily under my fingertips, and I shivered briefly, remembering the woman in the field.
“You’re chilled, Sassenach,” he said, feeling it. “And tired, too. Go and sleep, aye? I’ll do a bit longer.”
I was tired. The adrenaline of the battle and the night’s work was fading fast; fatigue was creeping down my spine and loosening my joints. But I had a good idea of what the hours of waiting had cost him already.
“It won’t take long,” I reassured him. “And it will be better to have it over. Then you can sleep easy.”
He nodded, though he didn’t look noticeably reassured. I unfolded the small worktable I had carried in from the operating tent and set it up in easy reach. Then I took out the precious bottle of laudanum and poured an inch of the dark, odorous liquid into a cup.
“Sip it slowly,” I said, putting it into his left hand. I began to lay out the instruments I would need, making sure that everything lay orderly and to hand. I had thought of asking Lester to come and assist me, but he had been asleep on his feet, swaying drunkenly under the dim lanterns in the operating tent, and I had sent him off to find a blanket and a spot by the fire.
A small scalpel, freshly sharpened. The jar of alcohol, with the wet ligatures coiled inside like a nest of tiny vipers, each toothed with a small, curved needle. Another with the waxed dry ligatures for arterial compression. A bouquet of probes, their ends soaking in alcohol. Forceps. Long-handled retractors. The hooked tenaculum, for catching the ends of severed arteries.
The surgical scissors with their short, curved blades and the handles shaped to fit my grasp, made to my order by the silversmith Stephen Moray. Or almost to my order. I had insisted that the scissors be as plain as possible, to make them easy to clean and disinfect. Stephen had obliged with a chaste and elegant design, but had not been able to resist one small flourish—one handle boasted a hooklike extension against which I could brace my little finger in order to exert more force, and this extrusion formed a smooth, lithe curve, flowering at the tip into a slender rosebud against a spray of leaves. The contrast between the heavy, vicious blades at one end and this delicate conceit at the other always made me smile when I lifted the scissors from their case.
Strips of cotton gauze and heavy linen, pads of lint, adhesive plasters stained red with the dragon’s-blood juice that made them sticky. An open bowl of alcohol for disinfection as I worked, and the jars of cinchona bark, mashed garlic paste, and yarrow for dressing.
“There we are,” I said with satisfaction, checking the array one last time. Everything must be ready, since I was working by myself; if I forgot something, no one would be at hand to fetch it for me.
“It seems a great deal o’ preparation, for one measly finger,” Jamie observed behind me.
I swung around to find him leaning on one elbow, watching, the cup of laudanum undrunk in his hand.
“Could ye not just whack it off wi’ a wee knife and seal the wound with hot iron, like the regimental surgeons do?”
“I could, yes,” I said dryly. “But fortunately I don’t have to; we have enough time to do the job properly. That’s why I made you wait.”
“Mmphm.” He surveyed the row of gleaming instruments without enthusiasm, and it was clear that he would much rather have had the business over and done with as quickly as possible. I realized that to him this looked like slow and ritualized torture, rather than sophisticated surgery.
“I mean to leave you with a working hand,” I told him firmly. “No infection, no suppurating stump, no clumsy mutilation, and—God willing—no pain, once it heals.”
His eyebrows went up at that. He had never mentioned it, but I was well aware that his right hand and its troublesome fourth finger had caused him intermittent pain for years, ever since it had been crushed at Wentworth Prison, when he was held prisoner there in the days before the Stuart Rising.
“A bargain’s a bargain,” I said, with a nod at the cup in his hand. “Drink it.”
He lifted the cup and poked a long nose reluctantly over the rim, nostrils twitching at the sickly-sweet scent. He let the dark liquid touch the end of his tongue and made a face.
“It will make you sleep.”
“It gives me terrible dreams.”
“As long as you don’t chase rabbits in your sleep, it won’t matter,” I assured him. He laughed despite himself, but had one final try.
“It tastes like the stuff ye scrape out of horses’ hooves.”
“And when was the last time you licked a horse’s hoof?” I demanded, hands on my hips. I gave him a medium-intensity glare, suitable for the intimidation of petty bureaucrats and low-level army officials.
He sighed.
“Ye mean it, aye?”
“I do.”
“All right, then.” With a reproachful look of long-suffering resignation, he threw back his head and tossed the contents of the cup down in one gulp.
A convulsive shudder racked him, and he made small choking noises.
“I did say to sip it,” I observed mildly. “Vomit, and I’ll make you lick it up off the floor.”
Given the scuffled dirt and trampled grass underfoot, this was plainly an idle threat, but he pressed his lips and eyes tight shut and lay back on the pillow, breathing heavily and swallowing convulsively every few seconds. I brought up a low stool and sat down by the camp bed to wait.
“How do you feel?” I asked, a few minutes later.
“Dizzy,” he replied. He cracked one eye open and viewed me through the narrow blue slit, then groaned and closed it. “As if I’m falling off a cliff. It’s a verra unpleasant sensation, Sassenach.”
“Try to think of something else for a minute,” I suggested. “Something pleasant, to take your mind off it.”
His brow furrowed for a moment, then relaxed.
“Stand up a moment, will ye?” he said. I obligingly stood, wondering what he wanted. He opened his eyes, reached out with his good hand, and took a firm grip of my buttock.
“There,” he said. “That’s the best thing I can think of. Having a good hold on your arse always makes me feel steady.”
I laughed and moved a few inches closer to him, so his forehead pressed against my thighs.
“Well, it’s a portable remedy, at least.”
He closed his eyes then and held on tight, breathing slowly and deeply. The harsh lines of pain and exhaustion in his face began to soften as the drug took effect.
“Jamie,” I said softly, after a minute. “I’m sorry about it.”
He opened his eyes, looked upward, and smiled, giving me a slight squeeze.
“Aye, well,” he said. His pupils had begun to shrink; his eyes were sea-deep and fathomless, as though he looked into a great distance.
“Tell me, Sassenach,” he said, a moment later. “If someone stood a man before ye and told ye that if ye were to cut off your finger, the man would live, and if ye did not, he would die—would ye do it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, slightly startled. “If that was the choice, and no doubt about it, and he was a good man … yes, I suppose I would. I wouldn’t like it a bit, though,” I added practically, and his mouth curved in a smile.
“No,” he said. His expression was growing soft and dreamy. “Did ye know,” he said after a moment, “a colonel came to see me, whilst ye were at work wi’ the wounded? Colonel Johnson; Micah Johnson, his name was.”
“No; what did he say?”
His grip on my bottom was beginning to slacken; I put my own hand over his, to hold it in place.
“It was his company—in the fight. Part of Morgan’s, and the rest of the regiment just over the hill, in the path of the British. If the charge had gone through, they’d ha’ lost the company surely, he said, and God knows what might have become o’ the rest.” His soft Highland burr was growing broader, his eyes fixed on my skirt.
“So you saved them,” I said gently. “How many men are there in a company?”
“Fifty,” he said. “Though they wouldna all have been killed, I dinna suppose.” His hand slipped; he caught it and took a fresh grip, chuckling slightly. I could feel his breath through my skirt, warm on my thighs.
“I was thinking it was like the Bible, aye?”
“Yes?” I pressed his hand against the curve of my hip, keeping it in place.
“That bit where Abraham is bargaining wi’ the Lord for the Cities of the Plain. ‘Wilt thou not destroy the city,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘for the sake of fifty just men?’ And then Abraham does Him down, a bit at a time, from fifty to forty, and then to thirty, and twenty and ten.”
His eyes were half closed, and his voice peaceful and unconcerned.
“I didna have time to inquire into the moral state of any o’ the men in that company. But ye’d think there might be ten just men among them—good men?”
“I’m sure there are.” His hand was heavy, his arm gone nearly limp.
“Or five. Or even one. One would be enough.”
“I’m sure there’s one.”
“The apple-faced laddie that helped ye wi’ the wounded—he’s one?”
“Yes, he’s one.”
He sighed deeply, his eyes nearly shut.
“Tell him I dinna grudge him the finger, then,” he said.
I held his good hand tightly for a minute. He was breathing slowly and deeply, his mouth gone slack in utter relaxation. I rolled him gently onto his back and laid the hand across his chest.
“Bloody man,” I whispered. “I knew you’d make me cry.”
The camp outside lay quiet, in the last moments of slumber before the rising sun should stir the men to movement. I could hear the occasional call of a picket and the murmur of conversation as two foragers passed close by my tent, bound for the woods to hunt. The campfires outside had burned to embers, but I had three lanterns, arranged to cast light without shadow.
I laid a thin square of soft pine across my lap as a working surface. Jamie lay facedown on the camp bed, head turned toward me so I could keep an eye on his color. He was solidly asleep; his breath came slow and he didn’t flinch when I pressed the sharp tip of a probe against the back of his hand. All ready.
The hand was swollen, puffy, and discolored, the sword wound a thick black line against the sun-gold skin. I closed my eyes for a moment, holding his wrist, counting his pulse. One-and-two-and-three-and-four …
I seldom prayed consciously when preparing for surgery, but I did look for something—something I could not describe but always recognized: a certain quietness of soul, the detachment of mind in which I could balance on that knife-edge between ruthlessness and compassion, at once engaged in utmost intimacy with the body under my hands and capable of destroying what I touched in the name of healing.
One-and-two-and-three-and-four …
I realized with a start that my own heartbeat had slowed; the pulse in my fingertip matched that in Jamie’s wrist, beat for beat, slow and strong. If I was waiting for a sign, I supposed that would do. Ready, steady, go, I thought, and picked up the scalpel.
A short horizontal incision over the fourth and fifth knuckles, then down, cutting the skin nearly to the wrist. I undermined the skin carefully with the scissors’ tips, then pinned back the loose flap of skin with one of the long steel probes, digging it into the soft wood of the board.
I had a small bulb atomizer filled with a solution of distilled water and alcohol; sterility being impossible, I used this to lay a fine mist over the operating field and wash away the first welling of blood. Not too much; the vasoconstrictor I had given him was working, but the effect wouldn’t last long.
I gently nudged apart the muscle fibers—those that were still whole—to expose the bone and its overlying tendon, gleaming silver among the vivid colors of the body. The sword had cut the tendon nearly through, an inch above the carpal bones. I severed the few remaining fibers, and the hand twitched disconcertingly in reflex.
I bit my lip, but it was all right; aside from the hand, he hadn’t moved. He felt different; his flesh had more life than that of a man under ether or Pentothal. He was not anesthetized but only drugged into stupor; the feel of his flesh was resilient, not the pliant flaccidity I had been accustomed to in my days at the hospital in my own time. Still, it was a far cry—and an immeasurable relief—from the live and panicked convulsions that I had felt under my hands in the surgeon’s tent.
I brushed the cut tendon aside with the forceps. There was the deep branch of the ulnar nerve, a delicate thread of white myelin, with its tiny branches spreading into invisibility, deep in the tissues. Good, it was far enough toward the fifth finger that I could work without damage to the main nerve trunk.
You never knew; textbook illustrations were one thing, but the first thing any surgeon learned was that bodies were unnervingly unique. A stomach would be roughly where you expected it to be, but the nerves and blood vessels that supplied it might be anywhere in the general vicinity, and quite possibly varying in shape and number, as well.
But now I knew the secrets of this hand. I could see the engineering of it, the structures that gave it form and movement. There was the beautiful strong arch of the third metacarpal, and the delicacy of the web of blood vessels that supplied it. Blood welled, slow and vivid: deep red in the tiny pool of the open field; brilliant scarlet where it stained the chopped bone; a dark and royal blue in the tiny vein that pulsed below the joint; a crusty black at the edge of the original wound, where it had clotted.
I had known, without asking myself how, that the fourth metacarpal was shattered. It was; the blade had struck near the proximal end of the bone, splintering its tiny head near the center of the hand.
I would take that, too, then; the free chunks of bone would have to be removed in any case, to prevent them irritating the adjoining tissues. Removing the metacarpal would let the third and fifth fingers lie close together, in effect narrowing the hand and eliminating the awkward gap that would be left by the missing finger.
I pulled hard on the mangled finger, to open the articular space between the joints, then used the tip of the scalpel to sever the ligament. The cartilages separated with a tiny but audible pop! and Jamie jerked and groaned, his hand twisting in my grasp.
“Hush,” I whispered to him, holding tight. “Hush, it’s all right. I’m here, it’s all right.”
I could do nothing for the boys dying on the field, but here, for him, I could offer magic and know the spell would hold. He heard me, deep in troubled opium dreams; he frowned and muttered something unintelligible, then sighed deeply and relaxed, his wrist going once more limp under my hand.
Somewhere near at hand, a rooster crowed, and I glanced at the wall of the tent. It was noticeably lighter, and a faint dawn wind drifted through the slit behind me, cool on the back of my neck.
Detach the underlying muscle with as little damage as could be managed. Tie off the small digital artery and two other vessels that seemed large enough to bother with, sever the last few fibers and shreds of skin that held the finger, then lift it free, the dangling metacarpal surprisingly white and naked, like a rat’s tail.
It was a clean, neat job, but I felt a brief sense of sadness as I set the mangled piece of flesh aside. I had a fleeting vision of him holding newly born Jemmy, counting the tiny fingers and toes, delight and wonder on his face. His father had counted his fingers, too.
“It’s all right,” I whispered, as much to myself as to him. “It’s all right. It will heal.”
The rest was quick. Forceps to pluck out the tiny pieces of shattered bone. I debrided the wound as best I could, removing bits of grass and dirt, even a tiny swatch of fabric that had been driven into the flesh. Then no more than a matter of cleaning the ragged edge of the wound, snipping a small excess of skin, and suturing the incisions. A paste of garlic and white-oak leaves, mixed with alcohol and spread thickly over the hand, a padding of lint and gauze, and a tight bandage of linen and adhesive plasters, to reduce the swelling and encourage the third and fifth fingers to draw close together.
The sun was nearly up; the lantern overhead seemed dim and feeble. My eyes were burning from the close work and the smoke of fires. There were voices outside, the voices of officers moving among the men, rousing them to face the day—and the enemy?
I laid Jamie’s hand on the cot, near his face. He was pale, but not excessively so, and his lips were a light rosy color, not blue. I dropped the instruments into a bucket of alcohol and water, suddenly too tired to clean them properly. I wrapped the discarded finger in a linen bandage, not quite sure what to do with it, and left it on the table.
“Rise and shine! Rise and shine!” came the sergeants’ rhythmic cry from outside, punctuated by witty variations and crude responses from reluctant risers.
I didn’t bother to undress; if there was fighting today, I would be roused soon enough. Not Jamie, though. I had nothing to worry about; no matter what happened, he wouldn’t fight today.
I unpinned my hair and shook it down over my shoulders, sighing with relief at its looseness. Then I lay down on the cot beside him, close against him. He lay on his stomach; I could see the small, muscular swell of his buttocks, smooth under the blanket that covered him. On impulse, I laid my hand on his rump and squeezed.
“Sweet dreams,” I said, and let the tiredness take me.