Written in My Own Heart's Blood (115 page)

“Mr. Bledsoe?” I said quietly, setting down my basket on a small table. There was a candlestick on the table, and by the light of the single flame, I could make out his face—or half of it. The other half was obscured by tar, as was a good bit of his head and neck. The clean half was that of a somewhat plain young man with a large, beaky nose, his features contorted in agony, but not at all fish-looking.

“Yes,” he gasped, and pressed his lips tight together, as though even the escape of a single word jeopardized the tenuous grip he had on himself.

“I’m Mrs. Fraser,” I said, and laid a hand on his shoulder. A fine shudder was running through him like current through a wire. “I’ve come to help.”

He heard me and nodded jerkily. They’d given him brandy; I could smell it under the aromatic reek of pine tar, and a half-full decanter stood on the table.

“Have you any laudanum in the house?” I asked, turning to Peggy. It wouldn’t help that much in the long run, but a large dose might get us through the worst of the preliminaries.

She was quite young—no more than eighteen, I thought—but alert and self-possessed, as well as very pretty. She nodded and disappeared, with a murmured word to the servant.
Of course
, I thought, seeing her skirts whisk out of sight.
She couldn’t send him for it
. The laudanum would be with the other household simples, in a closet under lock and key.

“What can I do, Sassenach?” Jamie said softly, as though afraid to break the injured man’s concentration on his pain.

“Help me undress him.” Whoever had attacked him hadn’t stripped him; that was lucky. And most of the tar probably hadn’t been boiling hot when it was applied; I smelled burnt hair, but not the sickening stench of cooked flesh. Pine tar wasn’t like the asphalt road tar of later centuries; it was a by-product of turpentine distillation, and might be soft enough to be daubed without needing to be boiled first.

What
wasn’t
fortunate was his leg, as I saw at once when Jamie peeled back the sheet covering him. That was where the smell of blood had come from; it spread in a soggy smear on the bedclothes, black in the candlelight, but copper and scarlet to the nose.

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ,” I said under my breath. Tench’s face was dead white and streaked with sweat and tears, his eyes closed, but he grimaced, hearing that.

Jamie set his jaw and drew his case knife, which was sharp enough to shave the hairs on a man’s arm. Sharp enough to slice through shredded stocking and damp breeches, spreading the stiffened fabric aside to show me the damage.

“Who did that to ye, man?” he asked Tench, gripping him by the wrist as the injured man reached a tentative hand downward, seeking the extent of the damage.

“No one,” Tench whispered, and coughed. “I—I jumped off the dock when he set my head afire, and landed on one foot in the mud. It stuck well in, and when I fell over . . .”

It was a very nasty compound fracture. Both bones of the lower leg had snapped clean through, and the shattered ends were poking through the skin in different directions. I was surprised that he had survived the shock of it, together with the trauma of the attack—to say nothing of a night and part of a day spent lying in the filthy river shallows afterward. The macerated flesh was swollen, raw, red, and ugly, the wounds deeply infected. I breathed in gently, half-expecting the reek of gangrene, but no. Not yet.

“He set your head afire?” Jamie was saying incredulously. He leaned forward, touching the darkened mass on the left side of the young man’s head. “Who?”

“Don’t know.” Tench’s hand floated up, touched Jamie’s, but Tench didn’t try to pull it away. It rested on Jamie’s, as though his touch would tell Tench what he needed to know but couldn’t bear to find out for himself.

“Think he . . . Way he spoke. Maybe England, maybe Ireland. He . . . poured pitch over my head and sprinkled feathers on. Others would have left me then, I think. But all of a sudden, he turned back and seized a torch . . .” He coughed, wincing against the spasm, and ended breathlessly, “ . . . like he . . . hated me.” He sounded astonished.

Jamie was carefully breaking off small chunks of singed hair and matted clumps of mud and tar, revealing the blistered skin underneath.

“It’s none sae bad, man,” he said, encouraging. “Your ear’s still there, no but a wee bit black and crusty round the edges.”

That actually made Tench laugh—no more than a breathy gasp—though this was extinguished abruptly when I touched his leg.

“I’ll need more light,” I said, turning to the servant. “And a lot of bandages.” He nodded, avoiding looking at the man on the bed, and left.

We worked for some minutes, murmuring occasional encouragement to Tench. At one point, Jamie pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed, excused himself with a brief word, and took it into the hall; I heard him retching. He came back a few moments later, pale and smelling of vomit, and resumed the delicate work of uncovering what might remain of Tench’s face.

“Can ye open this eye, man?” he asked, gently touching the left side. I peered up from my station over his leg, to see that the lid was evidently whole but badly blistered and swollen, the lashes singed off.

“No.” Tench’s voice had changed, and I moved abruptly up to his head.
He sounded almost sleepy, his voice unconcerned. I laid the back of my hand against his cheek; it was cool and clammy. I said something very bad out loud, and his working eye sprang open, staring up at me.

“Oh, there you are,” I said, much relieved. “I thought you were going into shock.”

“If he hasna been shocked by what’s already happened to him, I shouldna think anything would do it, Sassenach,” Jamie said, but bent closer to look. “I think he’s only worn out from the pain, aye? Sometimes ye canna be bothered to put up with it anymore, but ye’re no ready to die, so ye just drift away for a bit.”

Tench sighed deeply and gave a small, jerky nod.

“If you could . . . stop for a little while?” he whispered. “Please.”

“Aye,” Jamie said softly, and, patting his chest, drew the stained sheet up over him. “Rest a bit,
mo charaid
.”

I wasn’t at all sure that he wasn’t trying to die, but there was a limit to what I could do to prevent him, if that were the case. And there was a much more serious limit to what I could do if he
didn’t
die.

On the other hand, I had a vivid understanding of exactly what Jamie meant by “drifting away” and of the symptoms of severe blood loss. There was no telling how much blood Tench
had
lost, lying in the river. The fracture had by some miracle not ruptured either of the main tibial arteries—if it had, he’d have been dead long since—but it had certainly made hash of a number of smaller vessels.

On the other hand . . . the Delaware was a fairly cold river, even in summer. The chill of the water might well have constricted the smaller blood vessels, as well as slowed his metabolism and even perhaps minimized the damage due to burns, both by extinguishing the fire and by cooling the burnt skin. I’d whipped a pro forma tourniquet bandage round the leg above the knee but hadn’t tightened it; blood loss at the moment was no more than a slow oozing.

And, in fact, the burns
were
minimal. His shirt had been torn open, but the tar on his chest, hands, and clothes hadn’t been hot enough to blister his skin—and while there was certainly visible damage to one side of his face and head, I didn’t
think
more than a few square inches of scalp had third-degree burns; the rest was redness and blistering. Painful, of course, but not life-threatening. Whoever had attacked him had likely not meant to kill him—but they stood a good chance of doing so, anyway.

“Pitch-capping, they call it,” Jamie said, low-voiced. We had moved away to the window, but he nodded back toward the bed. “I havena seen it before, but I’ve heard of it.” He shook his head, lips tight, then picked up the ewer and offered it to me. “D’ye want water, Sassenach?”

“No—oh, wait. Yes, I do, thank you.” The window was firmly closed, in accordance with the custom of the times, and the small room was sweltering. I took the pitcher and nodded to the window. “Can you get that open, do you think?”

He turned to wrestle with the window; it was stuck fast in its frame, the wood swollen with humidity and disuse.

“What about the leg?” he said, back turned to me. “Ye’ll have to take it off, no?”

I lowered the pitcher—the water was flat and tasted of earth—and sighed.

“Yes,” I said. I’d been fighting that conclusion almost from the moment I’d seen Tench’s leg, but hearing Jamie’s matter-of-factness made it easier to accept.

“I doubt I could save it in a modern hospital, with blood transfusions and anesthetic—and,
God
, I wish I had ether right now!” I bit my lip, looking at the bed, and watching closely to see whether Tench’s chest was still rising and falling. A tiny, treacherous part of me rather hoped it wasn’t—but it was.

Feet on the stairs, and both Peggy and the manservant were with us again, armed respectively with a stable lantern and an enormous candelabra, Peggy with a square glass bottle clasped to her chest. Both turned anxious faces toward the bed, then toward me, standing apart by the window. Was he dead?

“No,” I said, shaking my head, and saw the same half-regretful relief flit across their faces that I had just experienced. I wasn’t without sympathy; no matter what their feelings for the injured man, having him on the premises was a danger to the Shippens.

I came forward and explained in a low voice what had to be done, watching Peggy go the color of a bad oyster in the flickering light. She swayed a little, but swallowed hard and drew herself up.

“Here?” she said. “I don’t suppose you could take him to . . . Well, no, I suppose not.” She took a deep breath. “All right. What can we do to help?”

The manservant coughed behind her in a meaningful manner, and she stiffened.

“My father would say the same,” she informed him coldly.

“Just so, miss,” he said, with a deference that wasn’t all that deferential. “But he might like to have the chance to say it himself, don’t you think?”

She shot him an angry glance, but before she could say anything, there was a grinding screech of wood as the window gave way to Jamie’s will, and everyone’s eye jerked to him.

“I dinna mean to interrupt,” he said mildly, turning round. “But I do believe the governor has come to call.”

JAMIE PUSHED PAST
Miss Shippen and her servant before either could react. He ran lightly down the back stair and came through the house, startling a kitchen maid. Clearly the governor wasn’t going to be admitted by the kitchen door.

He reached the front door just as a firm knock sounded, and pulled it open.

“Miss Margaret!” Arnold pushed past Jamie as though he wasn’t there—no small feat—and seized Peggy Shippen’s hands in his. “I thought I must come—your cousin? How does he do?”

“He is alive.” Peggy swallowed, her face the color of the beeswax candle
she was holding. “Mrs. Fraser is—she says—” She swallowed again, and Jamie swallowed with her, out of sympathy, knowing all too well what she was thinking of. Tench Bledsoe’s shattered leg bones, red and slimy as an ineptly butchered pig’s. The back of his throat was still bitter with the taste of vomit.

“I thank you
so
much for sending Mrs. Fraser to us, sir—I couldn’t think what on earth we were to do. My father’s in Maryland and my mother with her sister in New Jersey. My brothers . . .” She trailed off, looking distraught.

“No, no, my dear—may I call you so? It is my most fervent concern, to help you—your family, to . . . protect you.” He hadn’t let go her hands, Jamie noted, and she wasn’t pulling them away.

Jamie glanced covertly from Arnold to Peggy Shippen, then turned away a little, drawing back. It wasn’t hard for them to ignore him; they were focused on each other.

That made matters plain—or at least plainer. Arnold wanted the girl, and wanted her so nakedly that Jamie was slightly ashamed for the man. You couldn’t help lust, but surely a man should have enough control to hide it.
And no just for the sake of decency, either
, he thought, seeing a certain look of cautious calculation come into Peggy’s face. It was, he thought, the look of a fisherman who has just seen a fat trout swim right under the lure.

He cleared his throat in a pointed manner, and both of them jerked as though he’d run a drawing pin into them.

“My wife says it will be necessary to amputate the injured leg,” he said. “Quickly. She requires a few things—instruments and the like.”

“I need both the large saw and the small lunar one, the set of tenaculae—the long things that look like fishing hooks—and quite a lot of sutures . . .”

He was trying to keep the list in his head, though it made him ill to envision most of the items, thinking of the use they were about to be put to. Beneath the sense of revulsion and pity, though, was wariness—the same wariness he saw at the back of Benedict Arnold’s eyes.

“Does she,” Arnold said, not quite a question. His eyes flicked back to Peggy Shippen, who bit her lip in a becoming manner.