Kit (22 page)

Kit woke to see a silver creature crouching like a spider on a table by her bed. The silver creature had a snubbed silver snout with one nostril, a long broad back, and leathery, spindly limbs like a daddy-long-legs. It was a creature from a nightmare, its silver skin tarnished, its smell acrid like urine. As her dreams fled and she began to wake, she realised what was on the table at her bedside. It was her silver prick.

She tried to sit, could not, her heart racing, her thoughts spinning in horror. She did not know where she was, or how much time had passed, knew only that she was on a bed, alone, in a stone room. There were no plaster saints floating above her head, so she was not in the church-turned-field-hospital at Arco. She looked down at her body, bandaged from chest to thigh, and grew cold. Atticus Lambe had stripped her and treated her and found out her secret.

All of the safeguards, all the deceit she’d practised for months, training her speech and her manner and her deportment, and it was her own body which had given her away.

Her truckle bed was right in the centre of the room, with a little table by her head. Her uniform was folded neatly over a nearby chair like a shed skin; she was wearing the linen shift and ragged red cross of the field hospital. She remembered then; the battle, the euphoria – then Richard, and the explosion. She’d been injured, for there was a pain in her hip acute enough to make her want to vomit when she moved. She forced herself to think. So she had been unmasked, and by Atticus Lambe, a man who had proved himself her enemy.

Her father’s sword was propped tidily by her uniform, her sheathed dagger placed neatly on the top of her pile of small clothes. Her musket – which had been in her hand when she’d fallen – was gone; and with it, all notion of time passed. She’d fallen off the calendar into this stone well – presumably, somewhere above her head, there were sunlit lands where time carried on.

There were no other patients with her – if Lambe had told no one, she could dispatch him. Battle was one thing, but cold-blooded murder? Could she do it? Her own body answered the question – when she tried to rise again she could not, for her bandaged right leg would not move at all – responding to her efforts only with a searing pain from hip to foot. She lay back, exhausted by even this tiny exertion. She was trapped.

She heard feet moving around overhead, and for what seemed like hours she waited. At last he came, first an arm appearing in the doorway, holding a firebrand high; then the doctor himself, pale and malign under the hissing torch.

‘Where am I?’

Atticus Lambe set the torch in an empty bracket. ‘You are in the fortress of Riva del Garda. My Lord Marlborough has commandeered the upstairs chambers for his war rooms, and I have been given the cellars for my hospital.’

‘Where are the others?’

‘What others?’

‘It was a mighty battle. I cannot be the only injured man.’

He looked at her. ‘But you are the only injured woman.’ He rolled his sleeves up beyond his long white wrists. ‘The wounded soldiers are in the wine cellars. Because of your particular … needs … I reserved this dungeon especially for you.’

He drew up a stool next to her, his eyes lit by the torchlight as she had never seen them. He laid the back of his cold hand on her forehead, and she shrank from his touch. ‘No fever,’ he said. ‘That is good.’ His hand moved to her cheek, and he pushed a cold thumb through her lips. It tasted sour. ‘Of course, one sees it now. Plump lips. Those eyes, shaped and coloured like a cat’s. Snub nose, freckles, white skin that has never seen a razor. Red curls. Such a pretty boy. Pity.’

She wished he would go. She wanted to think, to plan, and she could do neither under his gaze. His eyes travelled down her body. ‘It was very interesting, operating upon a woman again. I have not opened up a dame since I was at Saint Bart’s. And they were corpses, of course.’ He sniffed. ‘Mostly whores. I once opened one up with a child inside.’ He broke off and smiled pleasantly. ‘But why am I taxing your patience? You will never need to know this. Childbearing is not in your stars.’

She shuffled on to her elbows with an effort and studied his face. Was he mad? Did he
not
know she was a woman?

‘I mean, of course, that although you are female, you will
never bear a child.
’

He sat back, as if he had played an ace at the card table. She watched him, numb with shock, her dry lips working.
Never bear a child
. The surgeon gave a merry laugh. ‘Forgive me. Let me begin at the beginning.’ He folded back the coverlet and raised her gown. ‘The musket ball entered your body here at the hip.’ He pressed on the place where blood had seeped through the bandage, and a fiery pain shot through Kit. ‘It chipped the ball joint and travelled into the womb, rupturing the lining. I removed the bone fragments from your hip and staunched the bleeding in the uterus wall. I sewed the womb as, you will remember, I once sutured your finger; no mean task, I assure you, for it is as thick as cow’s liver.’ Kit shook her head, dazed – was he actually expecting her to congratulate him on his tailoring? ‘I did an admirable job, but the rupture will never allow the implantation of a viable foetus.’ He replaced the covers, stood and brushed his coat, as if she had infected him somehow. ‘Well; I imagine you wish to be alone with your thoughts.’ He extinguished the ring of torches, one by one, and left her in total blackness.

She cried then. She cried from loss; not the loss of Ross or Richard or even Kit the soldier, but the loss of her future children, children she had never known she’d wanted until now.

After that Atticus Lambe would come to her each day, draw up a chair as if he were to begin a cosy fireside chat, and then torture her with his words. At these times his eyes were black, his pupils huge, the pale grey of his eyes diminished to the tiniest halo about the darkness. She thought to herself –
he is mad
. He would talk, constantly, of Captain Ross – never by name, but always as ‘him’.

‘I thought about letting you die.’ He spoke matter-of-factly. ‘You were bleeding profusely. It would have been so easy to let you bleed out. And then you would never see have seen him again.’

Kit swallowed. She tried to adopt his dispassionate tone. ‘Why didn’t you?’

He did not quite look at her, but changed the subject. ‘He had a wife, you know.’

Kit was startled. ‘Ross?’

‘Yes. He met her at Oxford. She was his tutor’s daughter. Our tutor, of the Greek language. We sat in his room, Ross and I, and what times we had!’ His wistful face looked almost pleasant. ‘Our tutor would tell us of Jason, and Hercules, and Achilles the great hero of Troy. He would tell us of the love the Greeks held for each other – a higher love between men, of the mind as well as the body – not the grubby rutting of men and women.’ His lip curled. ‘But he was stolen from me, by that chit of a don’s daughter. His family was against it; second son, destined for the Church or the army, but still the apple of their eye. But he married her anyway. Diana, she was called. A delicate thing. He settled her on his estate in Renfrewshire with his mother. By the time he bought his commission Diana was with child. The bull had got a calf on his heifer. Then he went to Flanders and the child came early. Diana’s doctor was a village quack, and mother and babe died on the childbed.’ Again, the passionless delivery, with just a hint of professional scorn. ‘He blamed himself for being absent, for moving her from Oxford, where she would have had access to the best medical minds.’ He sniffed. ‘And since then he has fought every campaign they would give him. Trying to get himself killed. So of course, because he courted death, Fate turned every blade from him and he dodged every bullet.’

Kit thought of Ross at the walls of Cremona, taking a case knife from a French body, cutting his own hand with the blade so it might never harm him again. She said, in the same spirit of candour, ‘I think, now, he cares to live.’

‘I think so too. But only since you came along.’ There was real pain in his voice. The surgeon looked down on her. ‘Do you think you saved him that day?’

She did not need to ask which day. The retreat from Cremona. The aqueduct. Arthur McBride.

‘You
do
,’ Lambe said accusingly. ‘You think you saved him. But you didn’t.
I
saved him, not you. You pulled him from the mud, which is an office that a mule could render him, but it takes a man of science to save a life. Did you know he’d stopped to wait for you? I heard as much as he raved. “Kit,” he’d say, “catch up.” Patients say all manner of things. I could tell you more than a priest.’ His eyes bored into her, and she wondered what
she
had said in her delirium. ‘He turned back for you and got himself shot. You weakened him. You are the heel of Achilles. His weak spot. I understand. You think you’re in love with him.’

‘By God,’ she said, suddenly understanding. ‘If I am not, I know who is.’

He flinched, as if slapped; stood, and stalked from the room.

She lay back, her heart thudding.
The heel of Achilles
, he’d called her. This she did not understand, but she understood ‘weak spot’ all right. Had she compromised Ross at Cremona? Had the same thing happened to him at Cremona as happened to her at Luzzara? Both of them had run to the aid of a loved one. Did Ross, then, have feelings for her? She did not know – but she knew one thing for certain. Atticus Lambe loved Captain Ross. And Atticus Lambe was jealous of Kit Walsh.

Kit considered the nature of such a love. Lambe was convinced that the love between men was a higher thing, prescribed by the Greeks. What if he was right? What if it was not a low thing – a cooper’s beefy hand on the thigh, the ‘coney-catchers’ of Dublin docks sniffing the air for young untried boys – but a thing of nobility, as lofty as the sacrament between man and wife?

If Ross had feelings for her, they must have been of the nature of the Greeks – for he believed her to be a boy. Had he changed, after the death of his wife, to find himself unable to love a woman again? It seemed a long stride from marriage and consummation with a woman to the love that Atticus Lambe desired, the love that had once been so graphically described to her by Maria van Lommen. Or had Ross developed feelings for her because he knew, on some level, that she was female? It was all so confusing, but her last waking notion was one even more discomfiting. Was she, as Lambe maintained, in love with Ross?

In the first days in her hospital-prison Kit had no way of knowing which hours were passing, but in time she began to distinguish day from night by the faint noises of the outside world. When carts went rumbling over the drawbridge and children played about the moat, it was day. Then, too, she heard footsteps overhead and the groans akin to those she’d heard in the sanctuary at Arco, and knew that Lambe was dealing with his patients in the cellars. When jug-bitten soldiers sang in the street, or an owl hooted in the keeps, it was night. She began to think of the outside world as a place she would never go again. She did not know whether the regiment missed her, whether Lambe had told them of the woman who’d been masquerading in their midst, or even whether the Grand Alliance had won the battle of Luzzara.

Outside in that world people were divided into petticoats and uniforms, and were identified by which one they wore. But she learned in her dungeon that character had nothing to do with a person’s sex. The self inside was clean and white like the core of an apple, and it mattered not whether the apple’s skin was red or green. She was still herself, still Kit. She wondered whether love too was not a matter of sex, but was attached to a person. Was Kit the woman as lovable as Kit the boy?

She realised too, over the next many days and weeks, how much she needed Atticus Lambe; and that he needed her as much as she needed him. Now she knew his secret love he sought her out. He was her saviour; but she was also his. Many times she thought about telling him about Richard – that she just wanted to find her husband, then she would leave and never trouble him again. Might he let her go, might he even help her, in order to be free of her? But something stopped her. She did not want him to bend his malign gaze on Richard. So she held her tongue, as Lambe loosened his.

In many ways, he did right by her. He changed her dressings assiduously and fed her gruel with his own hand. But although he gave her nothing but food and water, he medicated himself constantly from the ranks of little green bottles he kept in a cabinet in the corner of the dungeon.

The first time she caught him at this, he’d held a little green bottle aloft, as if drinking her health. ‘The Greeks again, you see,’ he said, drily. ‘They gave us all the greatest elements of our civilisation. Socrates gave us philosophy. Hippocrates medicine. And Paracelsus gave us laudanum.’

Reality dawned. All those men he’d treated, he’d cut open with only a leather strap to wring in their hands and a stick to bite in their teeth. The limbs he’d taken with his saw, the musket balls he’d dug from sinewed flesh, the incisions he’d made; all with no relief from the pain, because Lambe was feeding his terrible addiction. ‘You have been keeping it for yourself,’ she breathed.

Lambe turned his head, very slowly, and focused his eyes on her. The pupils were huge again. ‘No,’ he said, forming the words carefully, hissing like the torches. ‘Not all of it. I gave some to
him
. My love cannot suffer pain.’

She had to ask. ‘You really think Ross is of your … persuasion? That he loves like the Greeks?’

Here Lambe blinked and frowned. ‘I think he would. I think I could make him love me – but you have been turning his head. But soon you will be gone,’ he said. And she knew then, he would never let her leave his dungeon.

Getting dressed was the most painful process she had ever had to endure. She could barely lift her right leg into her breeches, for the hip joint seemed to have no power, and her wound began to bleed again, an ugly dark stain soaking through the bandage. She could not face strapping on the silver prick, so tucked it in her saddlebag. She leaned on her sword as a crutch. This time she would not skulk out of his hospital – oh no. She must see Lambe’s face. For she had a deal to make.