Fire Along the Sky
Page 136

“Did he?” Hannah bit back a smile. “He sounds like a good friend to have, this priest of yours.”
“It does seem that way. To tell you true, I had the sense that the priest could talk the colonel into sending us all home, if he got that in his head.”
A flush of color moved over her neck, and she dropped her head to study her shoes.
“And what did all of that cost?” Hannah crossed her arms at her waist. “What did you have to give him?”
“Och, no so verra much,” Jennet said.
“Let me guess. You said he could come preach, here. Among the prisoners.”
Jennet's mouth twitched. “As if he needed my leave, or yours. He'll come, no doubt. And we canna stop him, even if we cared to.”
“What then? I know you well enough, Jennet. There's something you're up to.”
Her cousin was smiling now. This was Jennet with a hand of cards she liked: whether to bluff with, or to take the pot, Hannah was not sure.
“I think he wants to win me over for the church, and I intend to let him.”
For once Hannah felt herself completely at a loss. “Win you over . . . baptize you into the Catholic church?”
“Aye.”
“Jennet. You are Catholic.”
Her cousin smiled up at her prettily. “Aye, I am. But there are so few of us in Scotland these days—and Father O'Neill doesn't need to know I'm one of them, does he? He wants to tell me about his sister the nun.”
For a moment Hannah studied her cousin. There were faint lines at the corners of her eyes that told not so much her age as her temperament. For all her laughing ways, Jennet was sharp-witted and keen-eyed, and there was something about this priest she was not saying, and did not want to say. Out of fear, or the idea that she must protect others before she thought of her own welfare.
I cannot manage her on my own, Hannah thought. I should send her to Luke. As soon as Daniel is well enough to travel, I must send her to Luke.
Instead she said, “You mustn't take unreasonable risks, Jennet. Promise me.”
Jennet closed her eyes and opened them again. “I promise. But it's no so bad as you imagine. Caudebec wants to please the priest. Why, I canna say. There's something afoot there. But so long as the priest is here, Caudebec is far more likely to be generous. And if it makes yon bloody great Irish priest happy to poach a soul for Rome, why then he shall have his convert. Who will it hurt, I ask you?”
Hannah could not help herself: she burst into laughter.
The men turned from their pallets to look at her, pleased at her laughter and a little wistful, that there should be something to laugh about that excluded them, hungry for diversion as they were.
When Hannah had calmed herself Jennet said, all business now: “Shouldn't we start with Daniel while we still have the light?”
Hannah said, “Yes, I suppose we should.”
And then she followed her cousin to her brother's bedside, and set about making him ready.
It was not hard to assemble the things she would need: the single brown bottle of laudanum, dressings newly washed and folded, the herbs she had ground into a salve this morning, tincture of winterbloom, willow bark, and meadowsweet. Jennet went to the guard to request Hannah's surgeon's kit, kept under lock and key in the sergeant's office. She would come back with the box and two armed guards, who would not leave again until the operation was done and they could take the instruments away with them. As if sick men armed with scalpels might overpower the garrison. Mr. Whistler ranted at the idea, but it pleased him, too, that the redcoats should fear such a motley collection of underfed farmers and trappers.
There was a moment, while Jennet was out of sight and Daniel lay on the table before her, pale and sweating, that Hannah imagined the worst: Sergeant Jones had taken her surgeon's kit with him. She was wishing that she had thought of this possibility before Jennet went to see Caudebec, when her cousin appeared with the box in her arms and two great guards behind her, their scarlet coats like beacons in the dim barracks.
And that, of course, was what had taken so long: Jennet had needed the time to convince them that they wanted nothing more in the world than to bring every candle they could find.
Mr. Whistler said, “She was born with the touch, was our Miz Jennet.”
From deep inside his laudanum haze, Daniel laughed.
“A swallow more?” Mr. Whistler asked her, and then lifted up Daniel's head to slip the spoon between slackened lips.
Hannah, convinced not so long ago that she would never again pick up a probe or scalpel, had found that she hadn't forgotten anything at all. The instruments came to her hand as easily as a quill came to her stepmother's, and obeyed her in the same way. In her first day she amputated four frostbitten fingers and six toes, sutured and cauterized and abraided wounds, moving from one man to the next.
She was reminded, to her surprise, that there was a pleasure to be had in the work. When things went well she brought relief. Some of the men had lived with severe pain for so long that its sudden absence rendered them as helpless as infants, who must weep themselves to sleep. Even if she had to take a foot or an arm to save a life there was some satisfaction in doing it well and cleanly. A farmer without a leg might still tend his crops and raise his children and give a wife comfort.
The first thing was to forget who the man tied to the table was. He was not her brother or anyone she had ever met or hoped to know. What she had before her was simply a body, a long plane of abdomen, winter pale. There was so little fat on him that she could see each of the muscle groups clearly defined, and the beat of his pulse, too, between breaths.