Dragonfly in Amber, Page 75

  “Madame,” he said, plucking at my sleeve as I ripped linens into strips and threw them into a pile for sterilization. “Madame!”

  “What is it this time, Fergus?” I was mildly irritated at the intrusion; I had been in the middle of a lecture to a group of housewives on the importance of washing the hands frequently while treating the wounded.

  “A man, Madame. He is wanting to speak with the commander of His Highness’s army. He has important information, he says.”

  “Well, I’m not stopping him, am I?” I tugged at a recalcitrant shirt seam, then used my teeth to wrench loose the end, and yanked. It tore cleanly, with a satisfying ripping sound.

  I spit out a thread or two. He was still there, waiting patiently.

  “All right,” I said, resigned. “What do you—or he—think I can do about it?”

  “If you will give me permission, Madame,” he said eagerly, “I could guide him to my master. He could arrange for the man to speak to the commander.”

  “He,” of course, could do anything, so far as Fergus was concerned; including, no doubt, walking on water, turning water into wine, and inducing Lord George to talk to mysterious strangers who materialized out of the darkness with important information.

  I brushed the hair out of my eyes; I had tied it back under a kertch, but curly strands kept escaping.

  “Is this man somewhere nearby?”

  That was all the encouragement he needed; he disappeared through the open door, returning momentarily with a thin young man whose eager gaze fastened at once on my face.

  “Mrs. Fraser?” He bowed awkwardly at my nod, wiping his hands on his breeches as though he didn’t know quite what to do with them, but wanted to be ready if something suggested itself.

  “I—I’m Richard Anderson, of Whitburgh.”

  “Oh? Well, good for you,” I said politely. “My servant says you have some valuable information for Lord George Murray.”

  He nodded, bobbing his head like a water ouzel. “Ye see, Mrs. Fraser, I’ve lived in these parts all my life. I—I know all of that ground where the armies are, know it like the back o’ my hand. And there’s a way down from the ridge where the Highland troops are camped—a trail that will lead them past the ditch at the bottom.”

  “I see.” I felt a hollowing of the stomach at these words. If the Highlanders were to charge out of the rising sun next morning, they would have to leave the high ground of the ridge during the night watches. And if a charge was to be successful, plainly that ditch must be crossed or bypassed.

  While I thought I knew what was to come, I had no certainty at all about it. I had been married to an historian—and the usual faint stab came at the thought of Frank—and knew just how unreliable historical sources often were. For that matter, I had no surety that my own presence couldn’t or wouldn’t change anything.

  For the space of a moment, I wondered wildly what might happen if I tried to keep Richard Anderson from speaking to Lord George. Would the outcome of tomorrow’s battle be changed? Would the Highland army—including Jamie and his men—be slaughtered as they ran downhill over boggy ground and into a ditch? Would Lord George come up with another plan that would work? Or would Richard Anderson merely go off on his own and find a way of speaking to Lord George himself, regardless of what I did?

  It wasn’t a risk I cared to take for experiment’s sake. I looked down at Fergus, fidgeting with impatience to be gone.

  “Do you think you can find your master? It’s black as the inside of a coal hole up on that ridge. I wouldn’t like either of you to be shot by mistake, traipsing around up there.”

  “I can find him, Madame,” Fergus said confidently. He probably could, I thought. He seemed to have a sort of radar where Jamie was concerned.

  “All right, then,” I conceded. “But for God’s sake, be careful.”

  “Oui, Madame!” In a flash, he was at the door, vibrating with eagerness to be gone.

  It was half an hour after they had left that I noticed the knife I had left on the table was gone as well. And only then did I remember, with a sickening lurch of my stomach, that while I had told Fergus to be careful, I had forgotten altogether to tell him to come back.

  * * *

  The sound of the first cannon came in the lightening predawn, a dull, booming noise that seemed to echo through the plank boards on which I slept. My buttocks tightened, the involuntary flattening of a tail I didn’t possess, and my fingers clasped those of the woman lying under the blanket next to me. The knowledge that something is going to happen should be some defense, but somehow it never is.

  There was a faint moan from one corner of the cottage, and the woman next to me muttered, “Mary, Michael, and Bride preserve us,” under her breath. There was a stirring over the floor as the women began to rise. There was little talk, as though all ears were pricked to catch the sounds of battle from the plain below.

  I caught sight of one of the Highlanders’ wives, a Mrs. MacPherson, as she folded her blanket next to the graying window. Her face was blank with fear, and she closed her eyes with a small shudder as another muffled boom came from below.

  I revised my opinion as to the uselessness of knowledge. These women had no knowledge of secret trails, sunrise charges, and surprise routs. All these women knew was that their husbands and sons were now facing the cannon and musket fire of an English army four times their number.

  Prediction is a risky business at the best of times, and I knew they would pay me no mind. The best thing I could do for them was to keep them busy. A fleeting image crossed my mind, of the rising sun shining bright off blazing hair, making a perfect target of its owner. A second image followed hard on its heels; a squirrel-toothed boy, armed with a stolen butcher knife and a bright-eyed belief in the glories of war. I closed my own eyes and swallowed hard. Keeping busy was the best thing I could do for myself.

  “Ladies!” I said. “We’ve done a lot, but there’s a lot more to do. We shall be needing boiling water. Cauldrons for boiling, cream pans for soaking. Parritch for those who can eat; milk for those who can’t. Tallow and garlic for dressings. Wood laths for splints. Bottles and jugs, cups and spoons. Sewing needles and stout thread. Mrs. MacPherson, if you would be so kind…”

  * * *

  I knew little of the battle, except which side was supposed to win, and that the casualties of the Jacobite army were to be “light.” From the far-off, blurry page of the textbook, I again retrieved that tiny bit of information: “…while the Jacobites triumphed, with only thirty casualties.”

  Casualties. Fatalities, I corrected. Any injury is a casualty, in nursing terms, and there were a good many more than thirty in my cottage as the sun burned its way upward through the sea mist toward noon. Slowly, the victors of the battle were making their way in triumph back toward Tranent, the sound of body helping their wounded comrades.

  Oddly enough, His Highness had ordered that the English wounded be retrieved first from the field of battle and carefully tended. “They are my Father’s subjects,” he said firmly, making the capital “F” thoroughly audible, “and I will have them well cared for.” The fact that the Highlanders who had just won the battle for him were also presumably his Father’s subjects seemed to have escaped his notice for the moment.

  “Given the behavior of the Father and the Son,” I muttered to Jenny Cameron on hearing this, “the Highland army had better hope that the Holy Ghost doesn’t choose to descend today.”

  A look of shock at this blasphemous observation crossed the face of Mrs. MacPherson, but Jenny laughed.

  The whoops and shrieks of Gaelic celebration overwhelmed the faint groans of the wounded, borne in on makeshift stretchers made of planks or bound-together muskets, or more often, leaning on the arms of friends for support. Some of the casualties staggered in under their own power, beaming and drunk on their own exuberance, the pain of their wounds seeming a minor inconvenience in the face of glorious vindication of their faith. Despite the injuries that bro
ught them here to be tended, the intoxicating knowledge of victory filled the house with a mood of hilarious exhilaration.

  “Christ, did ye see ’em scutter like wee mousies wi’ a cat on their tails?” said one patient to another, seemingly oblivious of the nasty powder burn that had singed his left arm from knuckles to shoulder.

  “And a rare good many of ’em missin’ their tails,” answered his friend, with a chortle.

  Joy was not quite universal; here and there, small parties of subdued Highlanders could be seen making their way across the hills, carrying the still form of a friend, plaid’s end covering a face gone blank and empty with heaven’s seeing.

  It was the first test of my chosen assistants, and they rose to the challenge as well as had the warriors of the field. That is, they balked and complained and made nuisances of themselves, and then, when necessity struck, threw themselves into battle with unparalleled fierceness.

  Not that they stopped complaining while they did it.

  Mrs. McMurdo returned with yet another full bottle, which she hung in the assigned place on the cottage wall, before stooping to rummage in the tub that held the bottles of honey water. The elderly wife of a Tranent fisherman pressed into army service, she was the waterer on this shift; in charge of going from man to man, urging each to sip as much of the sweetened fluid as could be tolerated—and then making a second round to deal with the results, equipped with two or three empty bottles.

  “If ye didna gie them so much to drink, they’d no piss sae much,” she complained—not for the first time.

  “They need the water,” I explained patiently—not for the first time. “It keeps their blood pressure up, and replaces some of the fluids they’ve lost, and helps avoid shock—well, look, woman, do you see many of them dying?” I demanded, suddenly losing a good deal of my patience in the face of Mrs. McMurdo’s continuing dubiousness and complaints; her nearly toothless mouth lent a note of mournfulness to an already dour expression—all is lost, it seemed to say; why trouble further?

  “Mphm,” she said. Since she took the water and returned to her rounds without further remonstrance, I took this sound for at least temporary assent.

  I stepped outside to escape both Mrs. McMurdo and the atmosphere in the cottage. It was thick with smoke, heat, and the fug of unwashed bodies, and I felt a bit dizzy.

  The streets were filled with men, drunk, celebrating, laden with plunder from the battlefield. One group of men in the reddish tartan of the MacGillivrays pulled an English cannon, tethered with ropes like a dangerous wild beast. The resemblance was enhanced by the fanciful carvings of crouching wolves that decorated the touch-hole and muzzle. One of General Cope’s showpieces, I supposed.

  Then I recognized the small black figure riding astride the cannon’s muzzle, hair sticking up like a bottle brush. I closed my eyes in momentary thankfulness, then opened them and hastened down the street to drag him off the cannon.

  “Wretch!” I said, giving him a shake and then a hug. “What do you mean sneaking off like that? If I weren’t so busy, I’d box your ears ’til your head rattled!”

  “Madame,” he said, blinking stupidly in the afternoon sun. “Madame.”

  I realized he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “Are you all right?” I asked, more gently.

  A look of puzzlement crossed his face, smeared with mud and powder-stains. He nodded, and a sort of dazed smile appeared through the grime.

  “I killed an English soldier, Madame.”

  “Oh?” I was unsure whether he wanted congratulation, or needed comfort. He was ten.

  His brow wrinkled, and his face screwed up as though trying very hard to remember something.

  “I think I killed him. He fell down, and I stuck him with my knife.” He looked at me in bewilderment, as though I could supply the answer.

  “Come along, Fergus,” I said. “We’ll find you some food and a place to sleep. Don’t think about it anymore.”

  “Oui, Madame.” He stumbled obediently along beside me, but within moments, I could see that he was about to fall flat on his face. I picked him up, with some difficulty, and lugged him toward the cottages near the church where I had centered our hospital operation. I had intended to feed him first, but he was sound asleep by the time I reached the spot where O’Sullivan was attempting—with little success—to organize his commissary wagons.

  Instead, I left him curled in the box bed in one of the cottages, where a woman was looking after assorted children while their mothers tended wounded men. It seemed the best place for him.

  * * *

  The cottage had filled up with twenty or thirty men by midafternoon, and my two-woman staff was hopping. The house normally held a family of five or six, and the men able to stand were standing on the plaids of those lying down. In the distance across the small flat, I could see officers coming and going to the manse, the minister’s residence commandeered by the High Command. I kept an eye on the battered door, which hung constantly ajar, but didn’t see Jamie among those arriving to report casualties and receive congratulations.

  I batted away the recurrent small gnat of worry, telling myself that I didn’t see him among the wounded, either. I had not had time since early on to visit the small tent up the slope, where the dead of the battle were being laid out in orderly rows, as though awaiting a last inspection. But surely he could not be there.

  Surely not, I told myself.

  The door swung open and Jamie walked in.

  I felt my knees give slightly at sight of him, and put out a hand to steady myself on the cottage’s wooden chimney. He had been looking for me; his eyes darted around the room before they lighted on me, and a heart-stopping smile lit his face.

  He was filthy, grimed with black-powder smoke, splattered with blood, and barefoot, legs and feet caked with mud. But he was whole, and standing. I wasn’t inclined to quibble with the details.

  Cries of greeting from some of the wounded men on the floor dragged his gaze away from me. He glanced down, smiled at George McClure, grinning up at his commander despite an ear that hung from his head by a sliver of flesh, then looked quickly back at me.

  Thank God, his dark-blue eyes said, and Thank God, my own echoed back.

  There was no time for more; wounded men were still coming in, and every able-bodied nonmilitary person in the village had been pressed into service to care for them. Archie Cameron, Lochiel’s doctor brother, bustled back and forth among the cottages, nominally in charge, and actually doing some good here and there.

  I had arranged that any Fraser men from Lallybroch should be brought to the cottage where I was conducting my own triage, quickly evaluating the severity of wounds, sending the still-mobile down the street to be dealt with by Jenny Cameron, the dying across to Archie Cameron’s headquarters in the church—I did think him competent to dispense laudanum, and the surroundings might provide some consolation.

  Serious wounds I dealt with as I could. Broken bones next door, where two surgeons from the Macintosh regiment could apply splints and bandages. Nonfatal chest wounds propped as comfortably as possible against one wall in a half-sitting position to assist breathing; lacking oxygen or facilities for surgical repair, there was little else I could do for them. Serious head wounds were dispatched to the church with the obviously dying; I had nothing to offer them, and they were better off in the hands of God, if not Archie Cameron.

  Shattered and missing limbs and abdominal wounds were the worst. There was no possibility of sterility; all I could do was to cleanse my own hands between patients, browbeat my assistants into doing the same—so long as they were under my direct scrutiny, anyway—and try to ensure that the dressings we applied had all been boiled before application. I knew, beyond doubt, that similar precautions were being ignored as a waste of time in the other cottages, despite my lectures. If I couldn’t convince the sisters and physicians of L’Hôpital des Anges of the existence of germs, I was unlikely to succeed with a mixed bag of Scottish housewives and
army surgeons who doubled as farriers.

  I blocked my mind to the thought of the men with treatable injuries who would die from infection. I could give the men of Lallybroch, and a few more, the benefit of clean hands and bandages; I couldn’t worry about the rest. One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.

  Jamie stood a moment in the doorway, assessing the situation, then moved to help with the heavy work, shifting patients, lifting cauldrons of hot water, fetching buckets of clean water from the well in Tranent square. Relieved of fear for him, and caught up in the whirlwind of work and detail, I forgot about him for the most part.

  The triage station of any field hospital always bears a strong resemblance to an abattoir, and this was no exception. The floor was pounded dirt, not a bad surface, insofar as it absorbed blood and other liquids. On the other hand, saturated spots did become muddy, making the footing hazardous.