Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

111

Morning Has Broken

IT WAS STILL RAINING, but the day was near. I made my way slowly toward the dim glow of the kitchen, not quite leaning on the walls as I passed, but letting my fingertips touch them now and then, to make sure that I was where I thought I was. The house was still and smelled of blood and burnt things, but the air was cool and gray with coming dawn, the desk and chairs in Jamie’s study a monochrome still life painted on the wall—and yet my fingertips passed through empty air as I walked past the doorway, my footsteps inaudible to my own ears, as though I were the ghost who haunted this house.

Most of the men had left for their own homes, but there were a few bodies on the floor of the parlor. I had left Charles Cunningham sleeping on the table, under the influence of a lot of laudanum, and Elspeth dozing in my surgery chair, head nodding on her neck like a dandelion. I wasn’t going to wake her; the Loyalist wounded would have to see to themselves—or their wives would.

In the kitchen, Fanny was sound asleep, sprawled facedown on one of the wide benches, one leg dangling comically to the side. Bluebell was curled up below her, also sound asleep, and Jamie was on his back on the hearth rug, looking like a desecrated tomb effigy in the dying light of the fire. It was smoking and nearly out; no one had smoored it properly. He opened his eyes at the sound of my footsteps and looked up at me, heavy-lidded but alert.

“Come and sit down, Sassenach,” he murmured, and lifted a finger vaguely at a nearby stool. “Ye look worse than I do.”

“Not possible,” I said. But I did sit down. Tiredness flooded up from the aching soles of my feet, closing my eyes as it rose through my body like a spring tide—filled with churning sand and fragments of sharp shell and seaweed. A warm hand curled around my ankle and rested there.

“How do you feel?” I murmured. I did want to know, but was having trouble opening my eyes to look.

“I’ll do. Hand me the wee jar, Sassenach.” The hand left my ankle and rose up to my lap, where I was holding the small jar of alcohol and sutures. “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do what?” I opened my eyes and stared at him. “Stitch your own chest back together?”

“I thought that might wake ye up.” He dropped his arm. “Help me get up, a nighean. I’m stiff as parritch on the third day and I dinna want ye crouchin’ on the floor to stitch me. Besides, I might wake the wee lassie if ye make me howl.”

“Howl, forsooth,” I said, rather cross. “Serve you right if I did. Let me see it, at least, before I try to get you on your feet.” The floor around him was littered with wadded cloths, rusty with drying blood, and there were smears of it across a wide swath of floorboards. I slid gingerly down onto my knees beside him.

“It smells like an abattoir in here.” He smelled of blood and mud and smoke, but most strongly of the curdled sweat of violence.

He put his head back, sighed, and closed his eyes, letting me look at his chest. The girls had put his wet plaid over him for warmth, and underneath was a folded linen towel soaked in water. A faint scent of lavender and meadowsweet drifted up, along with the sharp copper tang of fresh blood. I was surprised and wondered which one of them had thought to use a wet compress to keep the edges of the wound moist. Whoever it was had also thought to take his shoes off and put the bundle of his rolled-up jacket and shirt under his feet to raise them. Or maybe Jamie had told them, I thought vaguely.

Fanny’s description of the wound had been completely accurate; it was a deep slash that ran downward from the middle of his right clavicle, across the center of his chest—I could see a faint shadow of white bone under the raw red scrape where the cutlass had almost touched his sternum—and ended two inches below his left nipple—which demonstrated its resiliency by hardening into a tiny dark-pink nub when I brushed it. By reflex, I touched the other one.

“They both work,” he assured me, squinting down his chest. “So does my cock, if ye’re reckoning such things.”

“Glad to hear it.”

I picked up his wrist to check his pulse, though I could see it plainly in his neck, banging steadily along at a tranquil rate. The feel of him, warm and solid, was restoring my sense of my own body. I yawned suddenly, without warning, and the rush of oxygen spiked my blood. I began to feel somewhat more alert.

“That’s going to hurt like the devil if you try to get up by yourself,” I observed. Putting any pressure on his arms would tighten the severed muscles and skin.

“I know,” he said, and immediately started trying to do it anyway.

“And you’ll make it bleed more,” I added, putting a hand on his throat to stop him. “And you haven’t an ounce of blood to spare, my lad. Stay,” I said sternly, as though to a dog, and he laughed—or started to. He went white—well, whiter—and stopped breathing for a moment.