The Flesh and the Devil (74 page)

         
and go; it was only as they issued out again, empty-handed,
that she realized they were at Luis‘s house, and that the door was closing.

         
She was through them in an instant, pushing her way clear
unheeding of their startled voices, too desperate to reach the closing door to
hear what they said to her. Somehow it seemed that if that door were once shut
upon her she could never induce it to be opened again. Someone caught at her
arm.; she shook off the hand and fought her way forward, her fingers closing on
the jamb just as Luis was about to swing the door shut.

         
'What the -' The heavy door paused, and Luis‘s furrowed
face peered round it.

         
'Luis, let me in, please! I must -' Juana was almost bent
double with breathlessness, her tangled hair trailing in the dust before the
door.

         
Luis stared, aghast, at her bowed figure and did not move.
'Juana?' he enquired uncertainly.

         
'Please.' She had turned her hand to grip the door itself,
and was leaning her slight weight against it. 'Please let me come in. I shall
no – trouble you long if you do not want me, but I must – speak to you.'

         
Luis cast a haunted look behind him. 'You do not
understand, Juana. You cannot -'

         
'Luis, I beg you! For Felipe‘s sake!'

         
'You know, then?' He took s step back from the doorway.
'But how did you hear of it so quickly?'

         
She was not listening t him, and her words came in an
incontrollable rush. 'I have been told of – a plot to kill him. The man who
planned it boasted of it to me. I managed to – to get from him, and came straight
here – to warn Felipe. Luis, will you -'

         
She broke off as the door swung wide open, showing her the
room beyond.

         
Every light in the house must have been burning there, she
thought in that first moment. The long table that Elisabeta used for preparing
food had been dragged hastily into the middle of the room and everything else
pushed back. Elisabeta was building up the embers of the fire to heat water,
not bothering to look up; and across the tabletop a long, lean figure, almost
unrecognizably plastered with filth and refuse, was sprawled face downwards,
its right thigh disintegrated into a wet crimson blur.

         
Luis said, 'You are too late.'

         
Juana gave a cry that had no words at all and ran to the
table, stooping over Tristán protectively, and Luis, with as faintly guilty
glance and shrug at his wife, shut the door.

         
'Eugenio said he must be dead.' Juana stroked the filthy
red hair with tender hands, speaking as though to herself. 'He said he had
hired someone to kill him in a duel…'

         
'He may still die. Is that why you came, to be sure?'
Elisabeta spoke without a trace of her usual friendliness as she turned from
suspending the iron cauldron over the fire, and her tone made Juana look up
quickly. 'I suppose you were ashamed of marrying him when you saw how we live –
was that why you ran away to
la viuda
and her fine friends?'

         
Hot denials died in Juana‘s lips as she looked from
Elisabeta‘s unforgiving face to Luis‘s doubtful one. 'It does not matter why I
left him – if that is what you believe, think so still. We waste time in
debating when we should be tending him

         
– how badly is he hurt?'

         
She heard the roughening of her own voice and curbed
herself, biting her lips as she saw the odd way Elisabeta was staring at her.

         
'We need warm water to wash the blood,' she said curtly,
and turned away.

         
Luis chimed in, giving Juana a disjointed account of how
and where Tristán had been found.

         
'In the Calle Talavera, almost the other side of town! The
men who found him said he left a trail of bloodstains all the way from the town
refuse-heap – the Lord knows how long it took him to go so far. He must have
thought he was going in the other direction, for they said he had been trying to
come to us.'

         
Juans shivered, but Luis went on, oblivious, 'They think he
must have been shot and then taken there to die, but instead he got up and
walked – on that.' He contemplated the wound grimly for a moment, then said, 'I
must fetch my instruments,' and went out quickly.

         
Juana turned to Elisabeta, her eyes wide and dark with
urgency. 'We must send for a surgeon quickly.'

         
'There is no time.' Elisabeta did not lift her eyes from
the hot cauldron that she was carrying towards the table, gripped in the folds
of her apron. 'Even if we could afford to pay the charges for one, that ball
would have to be dug out straight away, before the fever starts to make Felipe
restless.'

         
'I have held still – for Luis before.' The blurred whisper
from the table made Juana‘s heart bound suffocatingly into her throat.
Tristán‘s head had turned slightly, straining, and she saw the tension in his
broad shoulders as he tried to raise himself.

         
Elisabeta put down the cauldron hastily. 'Lie still, Felipe!
Someone shoot you from behind, and we cannot turn you over until Luis has dealt
with the wound.'

         
'Frontenera.' The whisper slurred into silence, and the
lifted head lolled again.

         
With a catch of breath that sounded perilously like a sob,
Juana fell to her knees and caught one long hand between both of hers. He lay
still with the clumsy inertness of a dead thing, totally unlike the graceful
repose of his waking stillness; his half-averted face was etched with lines of
pain even while he was unconscious, the exaggeratedly heavy lids motionless,
his lashes dark gold against his pallor. Her fingers fumbled to find his pulse,
but as she sought for it her own heartbeats were so loud in her ears that she
was almost deafened. Then, with a gasp of thankfulness, she realizes that the
tremors shaking his hand were those of fever, not her own fear. She rose
stiffly, still holding his hand as though she feared to let it go in case he
should slip away from her.

         
'He is alive.' She said inadequately, as though the sound
of the words would strengthen their truth.

         
Elisabeta stood for a moment watching her stroke the
tangled hair back from Tristán‘s face, and then said shortly, 'We must wash the
wound before Luis can probe it. You move the candles as close you can while I
cut away his breeches.'

         
Feeling curiously numb, Juana obeyed. Every candle in the
house could not give more than a wavering, yellowish light, and she began to
understand how difficult Luis‘s task would be. Even the most skilled surgeon
needed light for his work, and for a novice to offer to dig into living flesh
by the light of six or seven tallow candles seemed to her like braving death
needlessly. And what did he mean to use for instruments? Surely a surgeon would
be less dangerous, even if to fetch one meant delay.

         
But the time she had positioned the last candle, Elisabeta
had cut away the charred and bloodstained velvet and exposed the wound. It did
not look like human flesh, Juana thought; it looked indescribable, caked with
black powder and glistening with wet blood, the flesh driven in upon itself by
the leaden ball so that it lost shape and substance in a crimson pulp. She must
have made some sound, because the elder woman looked up at her and then away.

         
In a impersonal voice Elisabeta said, 'Wash the blood away
while I fetch some fresh water and more rags. It will hurt him, but the quicker
and more firmly you work the better it will be for him; dabbing at it feebly is
no good.'

         
She had used the same tone when she had told her how to
churn butter and wring chickens‘s necks, Juana remembered, and as Elisabeta
left the room she dipped what looked like the remains of her hostess‘s best
shift into the warm water and hesitated in agony. Even the sight of the wound
made her susceptible stomach move, but in hesitating to touch it it was of
Tristán‘s pain that she thought, not her own distaste. Then her lips tightened.
That was what Elisabeta had been telling her; that it was better to hurt Felipe
to keep him alive than give way to sentimental softness and have him dead for
the sake of her squeamishness. He had taught her to fight him when she was a
sheltered child who knew nothing but pampering and indulgence, and now she
would use the spirit that he had roused to fight on his side against death.

         
Much of the blood was caked on uninjured flesh and sponged
away cleanly, but it stained the water until she seemed to be bathing blood
with blood. As she approached the wound itself gunpowder smears stained the red
black, and the blood too was black, thick and clotted, slippery to the touch.
Juana worked on steadily, her face white and pinched, trying to ignore the
instinctive flinching of the raw flesh when she touched it; it was only when wound
was clean that she realized she had been holding her breath.

         
When Juana looked up Luis was watching her, but he said
nothing, only nodded and unrolled a bundle of dark cloth in which metal
clinked. His normal, faintly lugubrious expression had altered indefinably, and
there was purpose in the set of his swarthy, heavily-lined face.

         
Elisabeta said, not addressing Juana but looking somewhere
over her head,

         
'Luis used to be a field-surgeon in the army once. He was
never a man of science, but he could cure people – the men came to him for help
more often than they went to the trained doctors. He doctored Felipe‘s poor
face when that girl had it cut open, all those years ago – It was why Felipe
came to us then. Luis had told him stories about the old days and he remembered
them, even half blind and as shocked as he was -'