Band of Angel (57 page)

But she was also living on reserves of energy she did not have, and one freezing night she went to the wards, put her head, briefly, on the pillow beside his and fell asleep. She woke suddenly in the early hours, looked up and saw Cavendish looking down at both of them.

“What a pretty scene,” he said.

She jumped up quickly, braced for his anger, but he was smiling in a gentle and understanding way, swaying slightly.

“I know him,” she said. She forced herself to stand tall, to look him in the eye. “He’s my friend.”

“I can see that.” He looked yellowish with fatigue in the morning light. “Heavens, you
are
nice to your friends.”

“A friend from home I—” something in his expression stopped her.

“Don’t.” He held up his hand. “I am very, very tired and have no interest whatsoever in your . . . in your . . .” He swayed on his feet as though about to propose a toast.

“You’ve kitted him out nicely I see.” Cavendish touched the red hat and the muffler that Betsy had given him. “Where do you find such things? Oh don’t bother to tell me, I actually don’t give a rat’s arse. What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, we can soon find out.” He was starting to sound impatient.

With a ripping sound, he drew the calico curtain around the three of them, stared down at the bed and then began to unwrap Deio’s nightshirt, ignoring his weak protests. She helped him fold the woolen blanket down, saw him feel inside the wound with as much emotion as Betsy would stuff a chicken. His hand was covered in pus and blood and Deio was groaning and trying to push him away.

“Be careful!” she wanted to shout. “Don’t hurt him.”

“What kind of friend, I ask again, Carreg?” he said, feeling
around. “Oh don’t answer, I’ve never met a nurse yet who wasn’t a . . . wasn’t a . . .”

“Please don’t.” She looked him straight in the eye. “Not now. He was a drover. I knew him in Wales; I think he was given a commission out here, but I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for months.”

She was trying with every ounce of her strength not to give in to the terror she felt at how much worse his wound was looking. Deio had fallen asleep again; it seemed to her that his face on the pillow grew more and more serene.

“Is he going?” She couldn’t hide her panic.

“Probably. I don’t know. I can feel something inside the wound, maybe shot, maybe some metal.”

“Can you help him? Please help him.”

He seemed to go off in a dream, focusing on a point above her head and then rocking himself backwards and forwards on his feet.

“No, I’m sorry but I can’t,” he said at last. “Too tired. I’ve been up since four this morning, and quite honestly, why should I, there are a hundred other men in this hospital I won’t get around to seeing for days.”

“No?”

“No. Sorry.” He didn’t sound a bit sorry. “Don’t take this personally. I must lie down before I drop.”

“In the morning then? Please. Can I at least come and ask you again?”

“You are very keen to see
me
suddenly,” he grumbled. “Well, perhaps.” He pushed out his lips. “Maybe.”

“Thank you.”

“
Thank you
,” he mimicked her. He was looking at her very strangely. “The odd thing is, Catherine, I really did want to help you.”

“You can.”

He shook his head. “No. Not like this”—he yawned showing all his teeth—“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said.

When she went on the ward the next day, she could hardly believe her eyes. Though Deio could barely walk, they’d made him line up
against the wall with the ambulatory patients; he was waiting for a teaspoon of the chalk, honey, and peppermint water, routinely dispensed for diarrhea. She watched him from a distance, furious with the orderlies who should never have got him up. The miserable nightshirt they’d given him only just covered his knees and was already a map of watery bloodstains. And he looked cold—cold and shriveled; he held his hands around his ribs as though to stop them bursting.

My poor love.
She knew how much he’d hate to be seen like this.

She watched him make his agonizing way back to bed, and although she wanted to box the ears of the silly old pensioner who had led him there and who was now collecting the spoons, she went to him and, instead, tried to sweet-talk him into emptying the tubs in the room; the stink was so strong she guessed they’d been standing for several days. The old man, stooped and bleary with tiredness himself, said he was too busy, but if she would shave some of the men that afternoon, they could swap jobs. While she was agreeing to this, she could see, out of the corner of her eye, Deio’s fingers feebly plucking at his blankets, trying unsuccessfully to pull them up. She went to him.

“Deio,” she said, “did you sleep at all?”

“No.” He glanced at her and carried on staring at the ceiling. His beard and hair were wet with sweat. His pillow was jumping with lice.

“Deio.” She touched the tips of his fingers. “Do you know how this happened?” she asked him.

“Don’t.” He closed his eyes. “I can’t.”

The black skin around his eyes creased.

“Did you know I got a commission?” he said suddenly. “Did you know that? What a fool.”

“I’d heard, Deio, and I felt proud of you. Lewis and Meg will have been, too.”

“Ugh, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Can’t take this in, Catrin. Don’t ask me questions or I’ll act the girl.”

“Then I won’t.” She would have liked to hold his hand, but felt him go away from her to some place where she wasn’t wanted.
While he muttered and explained things to himself, one of the cuts on his lip cracked open and began to ooze.

She sat beside him. Nothing in her training had prepared her for the shock of seeing someone she knew in this much distress. Now she knew how quickly—a cough, a blink, a sigh, a sweet, sudden smile—it could all be over.

She glanced up to see if the orderly could see them.

“Look!” she whispered. She took the lark’s wing he’d carved for her out of her bodice. She’d hung it on a piece of leather. “I wear it all the time.”

“Don’t.” He closed his eyes again, tight.

“Your lip’s bleeding,” she told him. “Use this.” She handed him a clean rag from her apron pocket

“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

“What about?”

“I wish I’d understood . . . Now I can’t.”

“Can’t what?” She watched him swipe away at his chin. “Oh for God’s sake, Deio, please let me do that, I’ve brought you some food. Try and eat some.”

He ignored her.

“Catherine.” His hand was burning in hers. “I’ve never felt so strange.” He gave her a sudden smile of inspiration. “I saw the Water Horse.”

“Listen, you silly bugger.” Her lips were at his ear, and she was whispering, fiercely. “Hold on! Please hold on!”

There was a rattle of wind across the roof and the entire flimsy hut shook like a piece of paper. The man in the next bed sat up like a ghost, looked at them, and lay down again.

“Deio, I’ve brought you some food; if you don’t eat it I’m going to wallop you one.”

“Too tired. I’m too tired.”

She poked a tiny morsel of ham between his lips, wincing at the pain it evidently caused him. The cast in his eye was wandering wildly. She talked to keep the thread of life from snapping.

“What was the name of your first pony, Deio? Come on, remember! Come on.”

“Gray Dawn, twelve hand, fast.”

“How did you first learn to ride a horse, Deio?”

“Always, always . . .” he murmured.

“Not true. You had to gallop for the first time, jump for the first time.”

“Why are you here? You should never have come,” he said.

“Damn you, Deio.” For a moment she was a furious little girl again, about to brain him with her whip. “Don’t you dare go to sleep. I’m here because I damn well want to be. I wanted to try things for myself, to see if I could do this.”

The man in the next bed was calling for her. She rested his head in a more comfortable position and tucked his blankets around him.

The wind rattled the doors again, moving the stench of the latrine tubs around the ward. She went back to Deio’s bed and, while he was asleep, did what she’d dreaded doing all morning and pulled up his nightshirt. She listened to his chest, she looked at his belly. She could smell the coppery odor of his blood; feel the heat coming off his chest wound. The skin around the wound was a dark red and angrily inflamed, and it was so deep she could see the faint pulsations of his lungs breathing. She thought of her mother; of herself, standing by the window in her white dress watching her bleed.
Tell me what to do.
And she still didn’t know. The dark wave was coming again; waiting to fall.

She went back to the kitchen where Betsy was standing by a new wooden crate. “Idiots!” she said. “They sent a cartload of wooden legs this morning and more winter boots than we’ll ever need. If we’d had those boots three months ago we could’ve had a bonfire of these.” She was waving the wooden leg around her head, when she saw Catherine’s face.

“What’s happened?” she said. She pulled out a chair and pushed her in it.

“He’s dying,” she said. “He has a fever. He’s stopped talking. I think his lungs will give out.”

“Oh God,” said Betsy, “poor love, you go back to him and cooch him, we can manage; just stack them boots for me in the scullery before you go.”

“Betsy. There’s something inside his wound. He needs an
operation to get it out. If you were in my shoes, who would you get to do it?”

Davis moved her lips around with her tongue while she thought.

“Last month I would have said Meredith, he was the best, but Stead is good and so is Carter, but he’s at the front. I think I’d have to say your friend Dr. Cavendish for the simple reason that he’s here and you know him.”

“He knows about me and Deio, will that make a difference?”

“I don’t think so . . . I don’t know . . .” It was the first time she’d ever heard Betsy sound unsure about anything. “I mean, we’re all of us a bit peculiar at the moment, so maybe he’s not such a bad man.”

Catherine gave a low moan. “Do you think he’s the best doctor? Tell me the truth now.”

“I do.” Betsy turned away, shook her head and sighed. “You’d better let them men in,” she said, “before we have a mutiny on our hands.”

She had nothing more to say about an impossible situation.

Lunch was a thin onion and goat stew; its dispatching and clearing up seemed endless, but Betsy had told her to wait, because if Catherine thought it would help for her to talk to Cavendish, she would. She said he would listen to her, and if he didn’t, she would threaten to starve or poison him, simple as that.

Catherine tried to smile but she couldn’t. She sensed there would only be one chance to ask him the question and that the way they asked it would be of paramount importance. She made a conscious effort to check her usual impulsive nature and think of him objectively: to read him without emotion as one might try and read an unpredictable animal. His bad temper must always be reckoned with, those moments when his rocklike face darkened and his eyes blanked, but then she remembered the almost old-womanish care with which he had wrapped her in her cloak in Constantinople.

She tried to think dispassionately of his better qualities: the deftness of his hands, the single-minded care with which he carried out even the most mundane of his medical duties. Cruel, controlling, professional, fastidious, which part could you rely on? He was
definitely a fight animal, dominant and resourceful, determined to stamp himself on any situation, but did that make him a bad surgeon?

She thought about it off and on all morning and decided there was nothing constant about his nature except his vanity. The glances he’d given her over his patients—
Aren’t I the clever one;
his self-conscious habit of smoothing his whiskers; she’d even seen him checking his own reflection in a knife in that hotel in Constantinople. He was a man who at all times preferred an audience, even if it was only himself.

At the end of the afternoon, Betsy returned with the news that he was on duty that night. “They’ve been told to put no more patients on his list. He’s full up to the eyeballs.”

“Betsy.” She had decided. “Thank you for offering to see him, but I must do this myself. Then if he says no, I will only have myself to blame.”

Betsy, who was as unshockable as Barnsie when it came to men and their ways, put her hands on Catherine’s shoulders, and then pushed her away, considering.

“If you go, you must make the most of it. Go away and wash your face and brush your hair, and when you get there, be nice, be sweet—look, put a dab of this on.” She got out the bottle of rosewater a Turkish man had given her to flavor her junkets. She put it behind Catherine’s ears and on her pale wrists.

“Good luck, love.”

Half an hour later, she was outside his hut. He opened the door in his shirtsleeves and slippers. Behind him, she caught a glimpse of a cluttered table; the bones of a fish on a dirty plate.

“Nurse Carreg. Come in. What a charming surprise—no, don’t worry about your boots.”

He took off his slippers and put a jacket on. “I’m afraid I have no servant at the moment,” he said. “It’s a bit of a shambles.”

As he swept a chairful of books and clothes aside, a case of medical implements clattered onto the floor.

“Ooops,” he said looking at her. “I should be more careful.”

She’d expected arrogance, anger even, but it was clear from the
jerky speed with which he buttoned his jacket that he was nervous, also, from the hopeful gleam in his eye, that he wanted her still. Deio’s early training had made her sensitive to human and animal signals. If he’d been a horse, you might say he had stopped his posturing, was confused to see her here, but was bending an ear toward her and was ready to be caught.

How awful, but how helpful, too. She took a deep breath.

“Are you well, Dr. Cavendish?”

“No, exhausted since you ask, and you?” He gave one of his bright, insincere smiles.

“Moderately so.”

“Moderately well or moderately exhausted?”

“Moderately well, or as well as anybody can be here at the moment,” she said.