Fiske shook his head unhappily. “I don’t think so. He’s been thrashing about most of the time. I hope it’s a good sign now that he’s sleeping.”
Christa’s voice was somber. “This is not a normal sleep.” She glanced at the valet and said, “You look almost as bad as he does, Jamie. Could you make us some tea from the supplies I brought? Then get some rest. You must be exhausted.”
He didn’t deny it. Moving slowly, he entered the kitchen where a kettle simmered on the hob, and set the tea to steeping. Christa noticed a small room with a trundle bed off the bedchamber, so she appropriated it for her own use and changed to clothes that were blessedly dry and warm. When Willson came in, the three shared a meal of bread and cheese, with mugs of hot, sweet tea to warm the new arrivals.
After they finished, Christa suggested, “I’ll sit with Lord Kingsley while you two get some rest. You both look ready to fall asleep on the table.”
Willson said conscientiously, “You must be just as tired.”
“I wouldn’t mind being relieved in a few hours,” she admitted. “But you traveled twice as far as I did, and Jamie had a blow on the head and a long watch alone.” The two men accepted her offer and retired to a bedchamber in the other wing of the house while Christa returned to Alex’s room.
She put more coal on the bedroom fire, then went to sit next to Alex, taking his hand in hers. She had sat like this when she was thirteen and her maternal grandmother was dying. They had been close, and Christa had prayed desperately for the old woman’s survival. Her grandmother had been drifting in and out of consciousness, very near death. At three in the morning, she opened her eyes and said very clearly, “Let me go, child. Your prayers are holding me back.”
Christa had cried, then prayed for her grandmother’s best interests rather than for her continued existence. The old woman was over eighty years old and had lived a full life, and she had been suffering these last weeks. Half an hour later she was gone, a smile of peace on her face.
From that Christa had learned that death in its proper time was a healing, not a loss, and if Alex’s time had truly come, she would try not to hold him back. But he was a young man in his prime, with a contagious enjoyment of life. It was hard to believe he had done all his living. She leaned over and kissed his lips very gently, feeling the fever heat. With tears in her eyes she whispered, “If you are not ready, I promise anything in my power to help you stay.” She thought perhaps his fingers tightened faintly on hers, but it might have been imagination.
Looking at his handsome face, wracked by fever and pain, Christa knew that her vow included existence itself; if she could have exchanged her life for his, she would have done so. Many people loved and depended on Lord Kingsley, while her passing would make a very small ripple indeed. True, she also enjoyed life, but when she left this body, she would be reunited with those she had lost. And who here would miss her more than briefly? She smiled faintly at her melodramatic imaginings. Just as well no devil appeared to offer a Faustian bargain.
Alex’s breathing was ragged, but he was quiet. Periodically she sponged him with cool water to reduce his temperature. In the small hours, Bob Willson relieved her, and she staggered to her pallet, collapsing into a sleep of utter exhaustion. She didn’t even stir when the groom laid a blanket over her.
The next morning dawned late and dark as the storm continued to rage. Alex was worse, tossing back and forth and sometimes rambling incoherently. Christa took charge of the kitchen. While cooking was not her forte, she managed some beef broth that Alex was induced to sip in small doses.
The day stretched endlessly, and it was obvious that Alex’s condition was deteriorating, the fever rising in spite of their efforts to lower it with sponge baths and the doctor’s powders. Late in the afternoon Christa managed to get her patient to take some willow-bark tea, hoping it would reduce some of the pain and fever.
She thought the crisis would come in the early hours of the morning, and she went to bed early so she could take the late shift. It was well past midnight when Fiske shook her awake. “Christa, come quickly, he’s much worse!”
She pulled her wrapper over her shift and darted into the bedroom. Willson was holding their patient onto the bed and Alex was shouting. Some words seemed to be ship’s commands, others were unintelligible. Once he gasped, “He’s got no head, it’s gone, he’s gone . . .”
His eyes were open but unseeing, and with a powerful twist of his body he wrenched away from Willson and fell onto the floor. When they got him back onto the bed, he was quiet again, but the bandage was colored with fresh blood.
Christa unwrapped the bandage. A long thin scar that ran halfway around his body near the bottom of the ribs had a sharp-edged slit in the middle, and blood oozed slowly out. She studied the wound. From the nature of this and other scars, he must have been torn up by metal fragments. She knew that shards not removed at the time of injury could migrate in the body. Might a fragment have been shaken loose when he smashed into the rocks and it was now cutting its way out?
She glanced up unhappily. “I think there’s a shell fragment in the wound and it’s making him feverish. If it becomes inflamed . . .” She couldn’t continue the sentence.
Willson’s gaze was steady on her. “Do you think you could get it out?”
Christa shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t know. The wound does not seem deep, and I have some metal instruments here that could be used, but this issurgery. I have never done anything more complicated than remove splinters and sew up gashes. What if I make it worse?”
The groom said quietly, “Do what you can, lass. He’s in a bad way. Better to do something than watch him get worse and worse until…the end.”
With a sigh, she went for her instrument case. Besides scissors and tweezers, there was a thin metal pick that could be used as a probe. She also had a sharp, narrow knife that could be used as a probe. Much as she hated subjecting Alex to amateur surgery, he needed to have that vicious piece of metal removed and she was the best person to do it.
A French surgeon she’d known as a girl had told her that he always purified his instruments in fire in the hope of reducing the chances of inflammation, so she did the same. Then she set to work.
Besides scissors and tweezers, she had a sharp, narrow knife that could be used as a probe. Much as she hated subjecting Alex to amateur surgery, he needed to have that vicious piece of metal removed and she was the best person to do it.
A French surgeon she’d known as a girl had told her that he always purified his instruments in fire in the hope of reducing the chances of inflammation, so she did the same. Then she set to work.
The next few minutes of leaning over Alex and exploring the bloody gash were some of the most testing of her life, and she was barely capable of doing what was necessary. If Bob and Jamie hadn’t held Alex down, she could never have managed. Christa was about to give up when the probe contacted a hard object below the ribs where only soft tissue should have been. She used the probe and the point of the knife to stretch the edges of the wound, then reached in with the tweezers. If Alex were at all conscious, the pain must have been beastly, but she thought his convulsive thrashing was from fever and delirium rather than her crude operation.
The fragment was embedded in flesh and slippery with blood, and it took an endless, anxious time to remove because it was almost impossible to grip. She came near giving up, fearful that her efforts would injure more than help. Then suddenly, using a combination of knife and tweezers, the fragment popped loose. It was deceptively small for the damage it was causing, a bloody inch-long fragment that seemed to be brass.
Gasping for breath as if she’d been running, Christa slumped against the bed for a long moment until she was somewhat recovered, then dusted the wound with basilicum powder and closed it with several neat stitches. She hoped fervently that this would be her only experience of surgery on a human.
Willson put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder while a white-faced Fiske left the room for a few moments. Alex was calmer now, but his face was pale with shock and each rasping breath was an effort. Willson looked at his master helplessly, his normally impassive face a study in anguish. “I should go for the doctor again. The lying-in must be over. Maybe he can do something more.”
Christa glanced at him from where she knelt as she tied a fresh bandage around Alex’s chest. “The tide is high now. You’ll never make it over the causeway.”
