Fire Along the Sky (44 page)

She remembered then why she was making this visit, and the men in the stockade, whose well-being depended on what she could accomplish here.

Jennet withdrew her hand. “I am a widow woman, aye. My husband was a vicar, ye see. We were on our way here as missionaries when he took ill. He wanted me to carry on without him, and so I try, poor woman that I am.”

The priest's blue eyes considered her, calculating openly, adding things together and taking others away. Jennet had the strangest sense that she had met the man before, and realized then that he reminded her of her own father: someone with the gift of seeing the truth no matter how well hidden it might be, and using it to his own advantage.

She must rise to that challenge, for her own sake and for the sake of the men who were counting on her.

He said, “Would you object, then, to my visiting the Catholic prisoners?”

She didn't like the idea at all, of course, but Jennet could do nothing but smile and assure him that his company would be welcome.

“I would like to have the chance to talk to you a bit about my mission,” said the priest. “I think my work will interest you. I have a sister who took orders with Grey Nuns in Montreal. You remind me of her.”

Jennet pressed her hands together in her lap. “But of course, Father O'Neill. I would be pleased. In the meantime there are a few matters I must discuss with the colonel.”

The priest's gaze never left her face. “Ah, yes. You've come to ask for favors for the prisoners, have I guessed it? I'm sure that Colonel Caudebec would be happy to see that your needs are met, is that not so, Colonel?”

Jennet thought of Sergeant Jones, and wondered if trading that problem for the one in front of her was such a very good idea. But the colonel was looking at her, his expression all eagerness. She took a deep breath, and presented her case.

“I'll tell you aye true,” Jennet told Hannah much later. “I came close to wetting my drawers when I saw him sitting there. As big as a house, and hawk-eyed, forbye.”

“You know this priest?” Hannah whispered, pulling Jennet farther into the corner where they had gone to talk. Next to them the boy slept on with his eyes open and fixed on nothing in particular. The regular slow hiss of his breath was the only sign that he still lived.

“I know of Adam O'Neill, aye,” Jennet whispered. “And so do you. The priest wha thumped Uz Brodie on the head with his crucifix. You recall, he told us the tale when we were here no two days, when he was on guard duty.”

Hannah said, “You're speaking Scots. You must be worried.”

“A wee bit, aye.” Jennet pursed her mouth. “I've known many priests in my time, but none like this Father O'Neill.”

“You knew that before,” Hannah said. “From the stories.”

“Och, I don't mean the fighting. There are stories enough about soldier-priests. I canna tell ye what it is exactly that bothers me. Nor can I tell ye what the man's doing here, beyond the fact that he's got some connection to Caudebec. It's no like I could ask, you'll agree.”

“All right,” Hannah said, forcing herself to breathe deeply. “Could he be some kind of spy?”

“I thought of that,” Jennet said. “I suppose it's possible, but what could he want to learn from this poor lot?”

She cast a quick look over their patients. Mr. Whistler, watching them closely while he tended to the brazier, nodded at her and she raised a hand in greeting. Then she sent Hannah a sharp look.

“I've been thinking, perhaps it would be best if I let the colonel know whose daughter I am.”

Hannah saw a particular look in her cousin's eye that made her nervous indeed. She pitched her voice a tone lower. “Jennet. We've discussed all this. If they know
that,
then they know that you're connected to Luke. And there's good reason to keep Luke out of all this, you'll remember that much.”

She pushed out a breath and the curls that fell over her forehead stirred irritably.

“Out of what? I'm here against Luke's wishes, am I no? You read the letter.” She flushed a little, remembering the single closely written page delivered by Simon Ballentyne. The only thing that had made it bearable was the fact that along with the letter came all the things she had asked him for: food and blankets and medicines. The gift of a good friend, an anonymous donor. The man she was supposed to marry. If she did not drive him away, first.

“Jennet,” Hannah said sharply. “Don't forget why we're here. As soon as Daniel is well enough to travel we'll be away. Runs-from-Bears and Sawatis will find a way. And how would it look, once we're gone? Then Luke would be connected to the escape, and maybe to worse.”

She didn't say the word, the one word that could bring disaster down on all of them. The Tories made short work of anyone they suspected of spying. It was one of the reasons that both of them were careful never to talk to any of the guards or soldiers about things even vaguely military.

The small red mouth contorted. “Aye. Aye, aye, aye. I see that, I do. But I just thought—”

Hannah waited.

“Had ye thought,” Jennet began again, “how much I could do for these prisoners, were the officers to know who I am? Jennet Huntar brings them a handful of eggs. But there's verra little they could refuse Lady Jennet of Carryck. And aye, it's far too great a risk. I'll bide my time, you have my promise.”

There was a small silence. Hannah smoothed her cousin's hair away from her face and managed a smile.

“What about the rest of it? Were you able to present our case to Caudebec? You do remember? Braziers, firewood, rations,
Jones.
”

“Och, aye. Of course I remembered.” Jennet was looking over Hannah's shoulder.

“And?”

Jennet pointed with her chin. “Yon's your answer on one point, at least.”

Sergeant Jones had appeared at the doors. His face was contorted with anger, white and red and trembling. Jennet and Hannah stood just as they were, unflinching.

For a moment Hannah thought the sergeant would speak, but then he turned on his heel and left. The doors closed behind him.

“That's the end of Jones,” said Jennet. “He's been reassigned to Halifax, I think the colonel said.”

It took a moment for Hannah to understand. “Caudebec has sent him away?”

“Aye. Father O'Neill said Caudebec should, and so he did. And then he promised braziers and wood and better food, forbye—and all in front of the priest. What Father O'Neill said was, to tell it all, that if the British army was living off American pork smuggled over the border, American prisoners should get no less.”

“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.

The wound itself, a dark red dimple in the plane of the oblique muscle, had made a bed for itself as angry and threatening as a wasp's nest. One she must disturb.

In the light of the candles Hannah traced the bed of infection first with her eyes and then, gently probing, with her fingers.

Sleepily Daniel said, “Don't you be a coward, sister, and neither will I.”

Across from Hannah Jennet said nothing, but she was pale and sweat had broken out on her forehead.

With a quick, neat movement, she made a curved incision. A thick river of pus and blood welled up in the track of the scalpel. There was a tensing in the muscles, and Daniel made a small sound: relief more than pain.

All through the room men had gone very quiet. Cards and dominoes and dice were forgotten, arguments faded away as Hannah worked.

“Christ, what a stench,” said one of the redcoats. Then he turned away and vomited onto his boots. The smell of porridge and ale joined the miasma that hung around the table: laudanum, sweat, blood, infection.

“Just a little put-ri-fi-cation,” sang Mr. Whistler, rolling each syllable. “Just a spot of corruption to be washed away.”

Hannah heard her own voice clear and sharp and far away, asking for the things she needed. When it came time to dig into the muscle, Jennet handed her the probe with a hand that shook only a little.

“Shall I give him more laudanum?” asked Mr. Whistler, and got a negative grunt from Daniel in reply. In the minute it took Hannah to find the bullet and extract it, that was the only sound he made.

“Well, look there,” Mr. Whistler said in a conversational tone. “There it is, the devil. I suppose that was a bullet once, but it don't look like much now at all.”

Hannah was pulling something from the wound: thin and ragged and bloody, it unwound itself endlessly from its cave, and then fell with a wet plop to the table.