Queen of Swords
Page 78

“It is very unsettling, even for the most sanguine of temperaments,” Jennet agreed.
Around them, the sound of glass breaking as dishes and mirrors and paintings fell with every percussion that shook the house. The worst so far, Jennet thought. Maybe not the worst to come.
Mrs. Livingston pressed a half-gloved hand to her mouth. From down the hall came the sound of her mother weeping piteously.
“She won’t calm unless I take her to the nuns,” Mrs. Livingston said. “We are all going. Won’t you come, too? You and your little ones? With the men away—”
Jennet knew what she was thinking, where her imagination went. If the British won this battle and took the city, she expected the same kind of rape and pillage she had seen as a young woman during a different revolution. It was unlikely, but Jennet could not promise Mrs. Livingston anything. Neither could she go cower in the Ursuline convent and pray the rosary while there was work to do at the clinic.
“At least let me take the babies.” Mrs. Livingston grasped Jennet’s hands so firmly that she winced. “The nurses will be with us, they will lack for nothing. You can come see them there, when your work is done. And if the worst should happen, I believe that even the English will respect the sanctity of the convent.”
Jennet, the daughter of a Scots earl well versed in the history of Englishmen and their way of making war, managed a brief smile.
“Thank you,” she said. “It will be a relief to know them well looked after.”
Later, making up cots in the main clinic with Hannah, Jennet found that she was angry at herself for letting the boys go.
“Luke won’t like it,” she told Hannah. “No more do I.”
“Luke wasn’t there,” Hannah told her. “For my part, I would have done the same thing.”
Jennet didn’t know if that was a lie meant to calm her, but she was thankful nonetheless.
For the next hour they worked without trying to talk over the noise of the battle, and Jennet studied Hannah’s face. She looked far more healthy and rested than she had in many months, which most certainly had something to do with the fact that her father and uncle had come. At least in large part.
Three hours after the first shots were fired, something changed. The timing or rhythm of the battle had shifted. Hannah straightened and turned toward the windows, her head tilted to one side as she listened.
Finally she said, “One side or the other has stopped firing.”
“The Americans?” Jennet could barely say the word.
“Most probably the British,” Hannah said calmly. “Apparently they are very low on powder and ammunition.”
Jennet heard herself squeak. “How do you know such things?” And then: “I hope you do more than talk of war all night.”
At that Hannah flushed so completely that Jennet was reminded of her as a young girl, before she had known anything of men. When they had played together at Carryck, and climbed trees, and shared secrets.
She said, “He is a good man, is he no?”
Hannah nodded. “Yes, he is that.” Her gaze flickered toward Jennet and then away again.
“Do you regret Wyndham?”
The question took Hannah by surprise. She paused, a pillow in her hands, and seemed to be trying to recall something specific. She leaned against the wall with one shoulder, her head lowered, and when she raised it again there was a distance in her expression, the look that came over her when she was contemplating a patient, and the nature of whatever illness had brought that person to her.
She said, “When I think of Kit, I can see him in my mind doing simple things—looking at a chart, talking to the sailors, eating an apple—but I can’t recall his face, or the sound of his voice. But I do remember the things he told me, his own stories. He had a need to hear them told, I think. I don’t think he heard himself, it was more in the way of praying that some folks have, repeating words for the sound. Kit was always reminding himself what others expected of him, and why those things were good and necessary. So when I think of him, I wonder if he’ll ever find his way and I wish him well, but he feels far away from me. As he always did, even when he slept beside me. A man away from himself.”
She stood straight and flexed her shoulders as if her muscles were cramped. “I was glad to know him, but I have no regrets. And now if you have any love for me at all, Jennet, you’ll stop there and ask me no questions about Ben Savard.”
Jennet opened her mouth, but Hannah stopped her words with a severe look. “I mean what I say, cousin. Every word.”
If she had stopped to think about it, Hannah would have known that this conversation with Jennet would be shared with Luke, and from there would make its way to Nathaniel Bonner and Runs-from-Bears. What did surprise her, though, was the speed with which it all happened. Less than twenty-four hours after she had forbade Jennet questions about Ben Savard, her father and uncle sought her out.
She had already retired for the evening, taking with her one of Paul Savard’s books on anatomy and a brace of good candles. Ben was likely to be out on patrol all night, and she worried she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The greater implications of that worry only made things worse, and the solution, she decided, was to focus on facts and medical histories and diagrams.
So lost was she in a drawing of the nerves of the arm and shoulder that she didn’t hear the steps on the stair until the last moment. And then her father’s voice.
A wave of panic flooded up from her gut, spread over her breast and throat and down her arms until her fingers jerked with it. As though she were a little girl who had misbehaved and must now face the consequences.