Written in My Own Heart's Blood, Page 58

  Lord, keep him safe! I prayed in the silence of my heart.

  “Did you say something, ma’am?”

  JAMIE RUBBED a blood-wet sleeve across his face, the wool rasping his skin, sweat burning in his eyes. It was a church they’d chased the British into—or a churchyard. Men were dodging through the tombstones, vaulting them in hot pursuit.

  The British had turned at bay, though, an officer shouting them into a ragged line, and the drill began, the muskets grounded, ramrods drawn …

  “Fire!” Jamie bellowed, with all the power left in his cracked voice. “Fire on them! Now!”

  Only a few men had loaded weapons, but sometimes it took only one. A shot rang out from behind him, and the British officer who was shouting stopped shouting and staggered. He clutched himself, curling up and falling to his knees, and someone shot him again. He jerked backward, then fell over sideways.

  There was a roar from the British line, which dissolved at once into a rush, some men pausing long enough to fix their bayonets, others wielding their guns like clubs. The Americans met them, mindless and shrieking, with guns and fists. One militiaman reached the fallen officer, seized him by the legs, and began to drag him away toward the church, perhaps with the notion to take him prisoner, perhaps to get him help.…

  A British soldier threw himself upon the American, who stumbled backward and fell, loosing his hold on the officer. Jamie was running, shouting, trying to gather the men, but it was no use; they’d lost their wits altogether in the madness of fighting, and whatever their original intent in seizing the British officer, they’d lost that, too.

  Leaderless, so had the British soldiers, some of whom were now engaged in a grotesque tug-of-war with two Americans, each grasping the limbs of the dead—for surely he must be now, if he hadn’t been killed outright—British officer.

  Appalled, Jamie ran in among them, shouting, but his voice failed altogether under strain and breathlessness, and he realized he was making no more than faint cawing noises. He reached the fight, grasped one soldier by the shoulder, meaning to pull him back, but the man rounded on him and punched him in the face.

  It was a glancing blow off the side of his jaw but made him lose his grip, and he was knocked off-balance by someone shoving past him to grab some part of the hapless officer’s body.

  Drums. A drum. Someone in the distance was beating something urgent, a summons.

  “Retreat!” someone shouted in a hoarse voice. “Retreat!”

  Something happened; a momentary pause—and suddenly it was all different and the Americans were coming past him, hasty but no longer frantic, a few of them carrying the dead British officer. Yes, definitely dead; the man’s head lolled like a rag doll’s.

  Thank God they’re not dragging him through the dirt was all he had time to think. Lieutenant Bixby was at his shoulder, blood pouring down his face from an open flap of scalp.

  “There you are, sir!” he said, relieved. “Thought you was taken, we did.” He took Jamie respectfully by the arm, tugging him along. “Come away, sir, will you? I don’t trust those wicked buggers not to come back.”

  Jamie glanced in the direction Bixby was pointing. Sure enough, the British were retiring, under the direction of a couple of officers who had come forward out of a mass of redcoats forming up in the middle distance. They showed no disposition to come closer, but Bixby was right: there were still random shots being fired, from both sides. He nodded, fumbling in his pocket for his extra kerchief to give the man to stanch his wound.

  The thought of wounds made him think of Claire, and he recalled suddenly what Denzell Hunter had said: “Tennent Church, the hospital’s set up there.” Was this Tennent Church?

  He was already following Bixby toward the road but glanced back. Yes, the men who had the dead British officer were taking him into the church, and there were wounded men sitting near the door, more of them near a small white—God, that was Claire’s tent, was she—

  He saw her at once, as though his thought had conjured her, right there in the open. She was standing up, staring openmouthed, and no wonder—there was a Continental regular on a stool beside her, holding a bloodstained cloth, and more such cloths in a basin at her feet. But why was she out here? She—

  And then he saw her jerk upright, clap a hand to her side, and fall.

  A SLEDGEHAMMER hit me in the side, making me jerk, the needle dropping from my hands. I didn’t feel myself fall but was lying on the ground, black and white spots flashing round me, a sense of intense numbness radiating from my right side. I smelled damp earth and warm grass and sycamore leaves, pungent and comforting.

  Shock, I thought dimly, and opened my mouth, but nothing but a dry click came out of my throat. What … The numbness of the impact began to lessen, and I realized that I had curled into a ball, my forearm pressed by reflex over my abdomen. I smelled burning, and fresh blood, very fresh. I’ve been shot, then.

  “Sassenach!” I heard Jamie’s bellow over the roaring in my ears. He sounded far off, but I heard the terror in his voice clearly. I wasn’t disturbed by it. I felt very calm.

  “Sassenach!” The spots had coalesced. I was looking down a narrow tunnel of light and spinning shadow. At the end of it was the shocked face of Corporal Greenhow, the needle dangling by its thread from the half-sewn gash in his forehead.

  EVEN PEOPLE WHO WANT TO GO TO HEAVEN DON’T WANT TO DIE TO GET THERE

  I SWAM DIZZILY TO the surface of consciousness, thinking, What was it Ernest Hemingway had said, about how one is supposed to pass out from the pain but you don’t? I just had, but he was more or less right; the unconsciousness hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. I was curled into a tight ball, both hands pressed against my right side, and I could feel the blood welling between my fingers, hot and cold and sticky, and it was beginning to hurt … very much …

  “Sassenach! Claire!” I swam out of the fog again and managed to open one eye. Jamie was kneeling by me. He was touching me, had his hands on me, but I couldn’t feel it.…

  Sweat or blood or something ran burning into my eyes. I could hear someone gasping—short, shallow, panting breaths. Me, or Jamie? I was cold. I shouldn’t be cold, it was hot as blazes today.… I felt jellied, quivering. And it hurt. A lot.

  “Sassenach!”

  Hands turned me. I screamed. Tried to. I felt it wrench my throat but couldn’t hear it; there was a roaring in my ears. Shock, I thought. I couldn’t feel my limbs, my feet. I felt the blood leaving my body.

  It hurt.

  The shock’s wearing off, I thought. Or is it getting worse? I could see the pain now, going off in bursts like black lightning, jagged and searing.

  “Sassenach!”

  “What?” I said through clenched teeth. “Auh!”

  “Are ye dying?”

  “Probably.”

  Gutshot. The word formed unpleasantly in my mind, and I hoped vaguely that I hadn’t spoken it out loud. Even if I had, though … surely Jamie could see the wound …

  Someone was trying to pull my hands away, and I struggled to keep them in place, keep pressing, but my arms had no strength and I saw one hand hanging limp as they lifted it, the nails outlined black with blood, fingers coated scarlet, dripping. Someone rolled me onto my back and I thought I screamed again.

  It hurt unspeakably. Jellied. Impact shock. Cells blasted to shreds and goo. No function … organ failure.

  Tightness. Couldn’t breathe. Jerking, and someone cursing above me. My eyes were open, I saw color, but the air was thick with pulsing spots.

  Shouting. Talk.

  I couldn’t draw breath. Something tight around my middle. What’s gone? How much?

  God, it hurt. Oh, God.

  JAMIE COULDN’T take his eyes off Claire’s face, lest she die in the second when he looked away. He fumbled for a kerchief, but he’d given it to Bixby, and in desperation seized a fold of her skirt and pressed it hard to her side. She made a horrible sound and he nearly let go, but the ground under her
was already darkening with blood and he pressed harder, shouting, “Help! Help me, Rachel! Dottie!”

  But no one came, and when he risked a split second’s glance around, he saw nothing but clumps of wounded and dead under the trees some distance away and the flickering forms of soldiers, some running, some wandering dazed through the tombstones. If the girls had been nearby, they must have been forced to run when the skirmish rolled through the graveyard.

  He felt the slow tickle of Claire’s blood running over the back of his hand and shouted again, his dry throat tearing with the effort. Someone must hear.

  Someone did. He heard running footsteps on the gravel and saw a doctor named Leckie whom he knew racing toward him, white-faced, hurdling a tombstone as he came.

  “Shot?” Leckie asked, breathless, collapsing onto his knees beside Jamie. Jamie couldn’t speak, but nodded. Sweat was running down his face and the crease of his spine, but his hands seemed frozen to her body; he couldn’t pull them away, couldn’t let go until Leckie, pawing in one of Claire’s baskets, seized a wad of lint and jerked Jamie’s hand out of the way in order to clap it in place.

  The surgeon elbowed him ruthlessly aside and he scuttled crabwise a foot or two away, then rose to his feet, swaying helplessly. Jamie couldn’t look away but became slowly aware that a knot of soldiers had gathered, appalled, shuffling among themselves, not knowing what to do. Jamie gulped air, seized the nearest of these, and sent him running to the church in search of Dr. Hunter. She’d want Denny. If she survived long enough for him to come—

  “Sir! General Fraser!” Not even the shouting of his own name made him look away from the spectacle on the ground: the blood, so much of it, soaking her clothes, making a hideous dark red puddle that stained the knees of Leckie’s breeches as he knelt over her; her hair, untied and spilling wild, full of grass and bits of leaf from the ground she lay on, her face—oh, Christ, her face.

  “Sir!” Someone grabbed his arm to compel his attention. He drove his elbow hard into whoever it was, and the man grunted in surprise and let go.

  A gabble of whispers, agitation, people telling the newcomer that it was the general’s wife, hurt, shot, dead or dying …

  “She’s not dying!” he turned and bellowed at them. He thought dimly that he must look demented; their blackened faces were aghast. Bixby stepped out and touched his shoulder gingerly, as though he were a lighted grenade that might go off in the next second. He thought he might.

  “Can I help, sir?” Bixby said quietly.

  “No,” he managed to say. “I—he—” He gestured to Leckie, busy on the ground.

  “General,” said the newcomer, at his other elbow. He turned to find a blue-clad regular, a very young man in a baggy lieutenant’s uniform, face set in dogged earnestness. “I dislike to intrude, sir, but as your wife’s not dying—”

  “Go away!”

  The lieutenant flinched, but stood his ground.

  “Sir,” he said stubbornly. “General Lee has sent me urgently to find you. He requires that you attend him at once.”

  “Bugger Lee,” said Bixby, very rudely, saving Jamie the trouble, and advanced on the newcomer, fists clenched.

  The lieutenant was already flushed with heat, but at this grew redder. He ignored Bixby, though, attention focused on Jamie.

  “You must come, sir.”

  VOICES … I heard words, disjointed, coming out of the fog like bullets, striking randomly.

  “… find Denzell Hunter!”

  “General—”

  “No!”

  “—but you’re needed at—”

  “No!”

  “—orders—”

  “NO!”

  And another voice, this one stiff with fear.

  “… could be shot for treason and desertion, sir!”

  That focused my wandering attention and I heard the reply, clearly.

  “Then they’ll shoot me where I stand, sir, for I will not leave her side!”

  Good, I thought, and, comforted, lapsed into the spinning void again.

  “TAKE OFF YOUR coat and waistcoat, lad,” Jamie said abruptly. The boy looked completely bewildered, but—stimulated by a menacing movement from Bixby—did as he was told. Jamie took him by the shoulder, turned him round, and said, “Stand still, aye?”

  Stooping swiftly, he scooped a handful from the horrifying puddle of bloody mud and, standing, wrote carefully on the messenger’s white back with a finger:

  I resign my commission. J. Fraser.

  He made to fling the remnants of mud away but, after a moment’s hesitation, added a smeared and reluctant Sir at the top of the message, then clapped the boy on the shoulder.

  “Go and show that to General Lee,” he said. The lieutenant went pale.

  “The general’s in a horrid passion, sir,” he said. “I dassen’t!”

  Jamie looked at him. The boy swallowed, said, “Yes, sir,” shrugged on his garments, and went at a run, unbuttoned and flapping.

  Rubbing his hands heedlessly on his breeches, Jamie knelt again beside Dr. Leckie, who spared him a quick nod. The doctor was pressing a wad of lint and a handful of skirt hard against Claire’s side with both hands. The surgeon’s hands were red to the elbow, and sweat was running down his face, dripping from his chin.

  “Sassenach,” Jamie said softly, afraid to touch her. His own clothes were sodden with sweat, but he was cold to the core. “Can ye hear me, lass?”

  She’d regained consciousness, and his heart rose into his throat. Her eyes were closed, shut tight in a furious grimace of pain and concentration. She did hear him; the golden eyes opened and fixed on him. She didn’t speak; her breath hissed through clenched teeth. She did see him, though, he was sure of that—and her eyes weren’t clouded with shock, nor dim with imminent death. Not yet.

  Dr. Leckie was looking at her face, too, intent. He let out his own breath, and the tension in his shoulders eased a little, though he didn’t relax the pressure of his hands.

  “Can you get me more lint, a wad of bandage, anything?” he asked. “I think the bleeding is slowing.”

  Claire’s bag lay open a little way behind Leckie. Jamie lunged for it, upended it on the ground, and snatched up a double handful of rolled bandages from the litter. Leckie’s hand made a sucking sound as he pulled it away from the sopping wad of cloth and grabbed the fresh bandages.

  “You might cut her laces,” the doctor said calmly. “I need her stays off. And it will help her to breathe more easily.”

  Jamie fumbled his dirk free, hands shaking in his haste.

  “Un … tie … them!” Claire grunted, scowling ferociously.

  Jamie grinned absurdly at hearing her voice, and his hands steadied. So she thought she’d live to need her laces. He gulped air and set himself to undo the knot. Her stay laces were leather and as usual soaked with sweat—but she used a very simple granny knot, and he got it loose with the tip of his dirk.

  The knot fell free and he jerked the laces loose, wrenching the stays wide apart. Her bosom rose white as she gasped, and he felt an instant’s embarrassment as he saw her nipples stiffen through the sweat-soaked fabric of her shift. He wanted to cover her.

  There were flies everywhere, black and buzzing, drawn by the blood. Leckie shook his head to dislodge one that lighted on his eyebrow. They were swarming round Jamie’s own ears, but he didn’t bother about them, instead brushing them away as they crawled on Claire’s body, over her twitching, pallid face, her hands half curled and helpless.

  “Here,” Leckie said, and, seizing one of Jamie’s hands, pushed it down on the fresh compress. “Press hard on that.” He sat back on his heels, grabbed another bandage roll, and unfurled it. With some lifting and grunting and a terrible moan from Claire, together they contrived to pass the cingulum round her body, securing the dressing in place.

  “Right.” Leckie swayed for a moment, then got laboriously to his feet. “The bleeding’s mostly stopped—for now,” he said to Jamie. “I’ll come b
ack when I can.” He swallowed and looked directly at Claire’s face, wiping his chin on his sleeve. “Good luck to you, ma’am.”

  And with that, he simply strode off toward the open doors of the church, not looking back. Jamie felt such a rush of fury that he would have gone after the man and dragged him back, could he have left Claire’s side. He’d left—just left her, the bastard! Alone, helpless!

  “May the devil eat your soul and salt it well first, you whore!” he shouted in Gàidhlig after the vanished surgeon. Overcome by fright and the sheer rage of helplessness, he dropped to his knees beside his wife and pounded a fist blindly on the ground.

  “Did you just … call him a … whore?” The whispered words made him open his eyes.

  “Sassenach!” He was scrambling for his discarded canteen, lost in the rubble of stuff from her bag. “Here, let me get ye water.”

  “No. Not … yet.” She managed to raise one hand halfway, and he stopped dead, canteen in hand.

  “Why not?” She was the gray of rotted oats and slick with sweat, trembling like a leaf. He could see her lips beginning to crack in the heat, for God’s sake.

  “I don’t … know.” She worked her mouth a moment before finding the next words. “Don’t … know where it is.” The trembling hand touched the dressing—already showing a stain of blood seeping through. “If it’s perf … perf’rated the … bowel. Drink would … kill me. Fast. Intestin’l … sh-sh-shock.”

  He sat down by her slowly and, closing his eyes, breathed deliberately for a few seconds. For the moment, everything had disappeared: the church, the battle, the screams and shouts and the rumble of limber wheels along the rutted road through Freehold. There wasn’t anything but her and him, and he opened his eyes to look on her face, to fix it in his mind forever.

  “Aye,” he said, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “And if that’s the case … and if it didna kill ye quick … I’ve seen men die gutshot. Balnain died that way. It’s long and it’s foul, and I willna have ye die like that, Claire. I won’t!”

  He meant it, truly he did. But his hand squeezed the canteen hard enough to dent the tin. How could he give her the water that might kill her right before his eyes, right … now?

  Not now, he prayed. Please, don’t let it be now!

  “I’m not … keen … either way,” she whispered, after a long pause. She blinked away a green-bellied fly, shining like emerald, that had come to drink her tears. “I need … Denny.” A soft gasp. “Quick.”

  “He’s coming.” He could barely breathe, and his hands hovered over her, afraid to touch anything. “Denny’s coming. Hold on!”

  The answer to this was a tiny grunt—her eyes were squinched shut and her jaw set hard—but she’d heard him, at least. With the vague recollection that she always said you must cover folk suffering from shock and lift their feet, he took off his coat and put it over her, then took off his waistcoat, rolled it up, and shoved it under her feet. At least the coat covered the blood that had now soaked the whole side of her dress. It terrified him to see that.

  Her fists were clenched, both driven hard into her wounded side; he couldn’t hold her hand. He put a hand on her shoulder, so she’d know he was there, shut his eyes, and prayed with his whole being.

  SUNDOWN

  THE SUN WAS NEARLY down, and Denzell Hunter was laying out his knives. The air was thick with the sweetness of corn liquor; he’d dipped his instruments in it, and they lay gleaming wetly on the clean napkin Mrs. Macken had put down on the sideboard.

  Young Mrs. Macken herself was hovering in the doorway, a hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes big as a cow’s. Jamie tried to give her a reassuring smile, but whatever his expression was, it wasn’t a smile and appeared to alarm her further, for she retreated into the darkness of her pantry.

  She’d likely been alarmed all day, like everyone else in the village of Freehold; she was heavily pregnant and her husband was fighting with the Continentals. And still more alarmed for the last hour, ever since Jamie had pounded on her door. He’d battered six doors before hers. She was the first to answer, and, in poor return for her hospitality, now found a badly injured woman lying on her kitchen table, oozing blood like a fresh-killed deer.

  That image unnerved him still further—Mrs. Macken was not the only one in the house who was shaken by events—and he came close and took Claire’s hand, as much to reassure himself as her.