by Jeane Westin
A meat knife!
She twisted her arm from under him. Pain shot through her. Still, she grabbed at the knife. Raising it as high as she could, she brought it down on his back, feeling the flesh give way and the knife scrape along bone, lodging there.
He grunted, his eyes wide with shock, and toppled to her side, his hands desperately clawing at his back.
Frances grabbed the pistol and waved it at the rest of the band as she scrambled to her feet. She rushed to Robert, menacing the man who had his foot planted on Robert’s back. The man moved away from her.
“Robert, you must get up,” she said, never taking her gaze from the men who moved to surround her. She waved the pistol in an arc.
Holding to her arm, Robert stood. Blood had pooled beneath him.
“Stay with me, sweet Robert,” she whispered, hoping he heard her.
She held the pistol on the footpads, but they advanced through the deep shadows until they heard the hammer click into place.
“Did Rowley load with new powder and ball?” one asked.
“I know not,” replied another. “He be fast, but…”
The man who had discovered her womanhood looked about, standing tall. “I be leader now,” he said, kicking at Rowley, who was fast becoming a corpse.
“Nay, we must draw lots, arse!” a man yelled. “Ye said it yersel’.” He raised his fists.
Frances and Robert backed away. “Climb up quickly,” Robert whispered hoarsely, his mouth scarce moving. “We must be off before they decide what to do.”
“The keg,” she said, and, reaching down with his good arm to where Rowley had dropped it, he tossed it back under the seat. Then, with her pushing, he climbed into the dray.
In doing so, he used his last energy. His face paled and his teeth began to chatter as if he’d been caught out in a winter storm. He slumped against her, managing a few words: “Frances, get you away. Leave me….” He slumped across her lap. She held him with one arm, grabbed the harness leads, wrapped them about her fist, and found the whip Robert had dropped. She grasped it, every part of her body bruised and aching.
Frances saw three men advancing stealthily on the dray. She lashed out at them and they jumped back, though from their curses she knew that her whip had found the flesh of one of them. At the crack of the whip, the horses, pawing the dirt nervously, lunged ahead down the dark road.
A scream followed her. The dray had crippled a footpad who’d fallen from its sideboard under the wheels. Frances felt no remorse. She did not slow the team to a walk for several furlongs.
Robert made no sound. She felt his face and found it warm. He was alive, but the rough shaking of the dray kept the blood flowing anew from his wound. “Don’t die,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.”
“Never…of my will,” he murmured.
The moon was high when she saw the lanterns of the Falcon and Dove yet lit, the innkeeper hoping for late business. She pulled into the inn yard, her strength at its end.
“Robert, you must sit up. If the innkeeper espies your wound, he will call the sheriff or local beadle.” She pulled his cloak up from the floorboards and wrapped it loosely about his shoulders. “Can you walk?”
“Aye. See to the horses; there’s good coin in my hat. They did not find that pocket.”
“Clever, Robert.”
“I know their ways,” he said, but produced no smile.
A sleepy-eyed innkeeper stepped from the door.
“Ho, innkeeper. I stopped here on my way to Burton.”
“A fast trip, sir, and a profitable one, I pray.”
Robert nodded, his mouth tight.
Frances spoke up in her croaking boy’s voice. “My master and I will have a room with clean bed linen.”
“Aye,” the innkeeper said, “my best linen sheets just come from the washerwomen in the village.” He looked at Robert, smiling. “And ale, too, lest yer master has a’ready had his fill.”
Frances realized that the innkeeper thought Robert was in his cups and seized on the idea. “A groat if your potboy helps my master to his bed. His head already aches.”
“’Tis done,” the man said, barking loudly for the stable boy. “Hay and water for these horses, Will, yet first help the brewer’s ’prentice with his master, who be his own best customer this night.”
Robert found strength enough to climb the steep stairs to the room above, leaning on Frances and the stable boy.
The room was small, the ceiling low and slanted under the eaves, with one small window to allow air and light, though not much of either. The room was stifling, yet Frances dared not open the pane to the noxious night air. Even in the country, physicians warned that night air must be avoided lest pestilence or evil spirits enter.
Robert staggered to the sagging rope bed and fell on the straw mattress, his cloak parting to reveal a bloody shirt.
The stable boy stared and backed to the door.
Frances, carrying Robert’s hat after it had fallen on the stairs, fished in a small inside pocket and pulled out a coin. “You earned your groat, but I’ve a silver shilling for you, Will, if you say nothing of what you see here to the innkeeper.”
The boy held out his hand.
“Nay,” said Frances, making her face stern, “no coin until we leave and you have kept your silence.”
The boy frowned.
“Yet, lad, if you tell me where I may find a doctor in the nearest village, you will have a silver penny this instant.”
“Now?”
“Aye, and the shilling later if you have kept the secret. Not a groat more, if you do not.”
“I be showing you where to find the doctor, but it be late and he may a’ready have taken to his bed.”
“I need him brought quickly.”
“My master’ll have my hide if I leave, so come silently.”
“A moment of time.”
Frances went quickly to Robert and opened his shirt to see the wound yet seeping blood. At least his life essence was not flowing so fast. She took a deep breath and tore some sheeting, which still smelled of lye soap, to pad the wound. Her trembling had ceased and a calm had o’ertaken her…an intelligencer’s calm. Robert had no one but her, and she would not let him die or spend his strength in worry for her. She bent to his ear. “I must go for a doctor to take out that ball.”
He groaned. “Go quickly, then.”
She turned to the stable boy. “Is there a back stairs?” He nodded, and she prodded him out the door, closing it softly. They moved along the short corridor to the stairs and quickly down.
“Which way to the village?” Frances asked, her hasty words just understandable.
“The cart trail there behind the stables.”
“Far?” she asked, eager to start, to run as she hadn’t since her girlhood.
“Nay, not long, two furlongs or so only.”
She clinked the coins transferred from Robert’s hat to her pocket. “Remember, a silver shilling is yours if you are faithful to your word.”
The boy looked at her, his eyes bright. “Ye must love yer master.”
She swallowed hard. “Aye,” she said. “I do love him well for the man he is and his goodness to me.” There, she had said the words that had hidden themselves so deep inside her for so long. They were free now and yet also captive in her heart.
Will sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Ye are fortunate. That is not my lot,” he said, and headed for the stables, his day’s work not yet done.
Though she was bruised and aching, she walked swiftly behind him, grabbed up a lantern with a goodly candle, and began to run for the cart trail. The lantern swayed wildly, light dancing up and down huge old trees, showing her feet a safe way down the rutted trail, scarce much wider than a footpath. A turned ankle was a danger even in full day, but she could not worry about that with Robert’s life ebbing into the sheets back at the inn.
Breathing rapidly, she soon saw the lights of village candles and lanterns ahead. A larg
er, two-story house loomed above her at the turn of a small green containing a horse trough. A sign bearing the mortar and pestle of an apothecary hung in front, and on the door was the chevron and three silver lancets identifying the owner as a member of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons.
Relieved, though yet near breathless from her swift passage, Frances pounded on the door. There was no light in the windows and no sound from inside. She pounded again, this time with both fists. “Awake!” she shouted, over and over.
Stepping back, she saw the faintest, flickering yellow light in an upstairs window, and to this she shouted again, “Doctor, come quickly! You are called to the inn! A wealthy merchant!”
The light disappeared to reappear at the door in front of her.
It opened.
An unshaven little man in his nightshirt and bare feet, wig askew, held a candle up to see her features. He swayed, catching himself on the door post. “It is late, young sir”—he hiccuped—“and I am abed. Your business…your business…must wait until…the morrow.”
Frances stared at him. The man was obviously far gone with wine, some of it spilled down his nightshirt. A walk down the cart track would sober him. “Doctor, you must come with me. My master and I were attacked on the road, and he has taken a pistol ball in his shoulder.”
The doctor weaved back and forth, the lantern light moving with him, his eyes unfocused, his mouth open in an idiot’s pose.
She was close to shrieking at him, striking him. He was drunk, too drunk to stand up, too drunk to be a surgeon. “Do you have a ’prentice, sir, anyone, who can come…now!”
Close to choking on her own fears, she grabbed the man, who was about to fall on her. She pushed him back into a chair, finding herself with more strength than she’d ever used before, not knowing she had so much.
“’Prentice left me for the armies on the continent. Rotten pisspot. Wife died. Alone now,” he mumbled, tears starting as his head lolled onto the back of the chair.
Frances swallowed hard, her heart aching from this news and pounding as if she were still running. “Tell me what I must do,” she said, shaking the doctor by his nightshirt.
“Get the ball out. Cauterize…stop…bleeding.” He was gulping the words.
Frances’s voice was now low and her words spaced far apart so that the man would hear her well. With each word, she shook him to keep him from sleeping. “How do I get the ball out?”
“You will kill him.”
“I have to try. Now, how do I remove the ball in his shoulder!” She kept shaking him.
“A probe…” He looked about, his head lolling back. He jerked a thumb toward a back room. “…surgery there. Take it and…leave me…peace.”
“Laudanum for the pain?” She had seen her father lanced for deep boils. Her strong father had screamed so loud as to be heard all over Barn Elms.
The doctor did not answer. He had fallen asleep from drink, and all her shaking would not wake him.
Frances ran back to the room the doctor had named his surgery. The barber-surgeon had but recently worked at his trade.
She saw a blood-spattered oaken table and floor, a bloody leg floating in a barrel of water. Her empty stomach roiling, she looked away quickly to the long table filled with beakers. On a nearby shelf stood jars of specimens that did not bear close scrutiny.
Rolled in a sealskin on the table, she found the barber-surgeon’s bloody instruments and examined them for probe, lancet, and knives. Small jars of yellow unguents and balms were in a folded section, and a modern surgery text by the famed French surgeon Ambroise Paré lay nearby. By the smell of it, a stoppered flask contained laudanum. She snatched up all and, taking off her doublet, rolled them securely inside and tied them with the sleeves.
Grabbing her lantern, still glowing though the candle was more than half-gone, she retreated back to the entrance. The doctor had fallen out of his chair and lay on the floor amidst his own vomit. The stench was unbearable. Yet she bent and retrieved a leathern wine flask by the door. Philip had once told her that soldiers carried wine with them into battle for the washing of wounds. Though the doctor could not hear her, she spoke a promise. “I will return all when you are better able to use them without killing your patients.”
Out the door and across the green she went, stopping at a rain barrel to splash water on her face and drink deep. Frances then ran for the cart path as the sliver of moon was setting, but before there was a glow in the eastern sky. She knew the ruts and trail this time, and her passage back to the inn was swifter than before, though with every breath she was whispering over and over, “Praise Jesu if Robert be allowed longer life.” She looked to heaven, praying that God would answer her prayer.
The inn was dark and quiet, but the stable boy was sitting, half-asleep, on the stairs. The lantern light woke him.
“Where be the doctor?” he asked, rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“On the floor by his door.”
The boy nodded. “The drink be killin’ him.”
“Why are you here?” she asked, hurrying past him.
“To help.”
“And to keep an eye on your shilling?”
He nodded. “And to keep an eye on me shilling. I been cheated before.”
“Not by me. Now get to your bed. I may have need of you later.”
She left him and went quickly to the room, opening the door and holding her breath against what she might see. What she did see was not what she expected.
“Should you be sitting upright, Robert? Look, you have lost more blood.”
“Where were you? Don’t you know I—”
She opened her doublet and spread the doctor’s instruments and unguents out for his inspection.
“Where is the doctor?”
“You see the doctor before you.”
His mouth twitched, either in pain or amusement. “Is there nothing you think you cannot do?”
“Many things, but standing by to see you die is not one of them.”
Going to the window, she removed the leather-wrapped stopper and cleaned the instruments in the wine from the leathern flask, a picture of the floating leg before her eyes.
Opening his shirt, she was gladdened that her belly was empty. Dried blood covered his left shoulder.
In an effort to sit straighter, he groaned between his teeth. “The ball…may have gone through clean. Look.” He breathed a shallow breath to keep from moving again.
Relief weakened her limbs and she sat down on the bed. “How do you know?”
“I feel blood on my back.”
“Can you bend forward?”
“Give me leather to chew on, lest I cry out and wake the whole shire.”
Frances pulled out the leather wine stopper and held it to his mouth, which opened enough for her to push the stopper between his teeth as they clamped down.
A small hole somewhat jagged and red revealed itself in his left shoulder. She bent to see his back and sighed with relief. This was the exit wound, smaller than the first.
“Christ’s nails,” she said softly, taking a deep breath, and, without thinking, kissed his cheek. “I will not have to probe.”
“Doctor,” he said, his mouth twisted in pain and pleasure, “I find your balms exceeding all other curatives.”
“Hush, Robert,” she said, kissing his other cheek, caring nothing that it was wrong to do such, thinking only of him and not of her married state.
“…all other curatives,” he repeated. “But your surgery is not done.”
“What say you?”
“If the ball carried some piece of my shirt in with it, the wound will suppurate and I will not last the fortnight.”
Frances sat down quickly and whispered softly again, “What say you?”
“You must probe, darling doctor. Frances, you must probe….”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“From so ungrateful fancy,
From such a female frenzy,
From them that
use men thus,
Good Lord, deliver us.”
—Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney
“Good Lord, Frances, a lady cannot do such work,” Robert said, his head lolling back on the cushion she had placed behind him, though his mouth turned up in grim humor. “Women are midwives, not surgeons.” He knew his words would never discourage her, but he wanted what she did to be done in defiance of custom, in disobedience of him. That was always Frances at her best.
“Hush!” she said, her tone impatient to cover her fright and uncertainty. “The wound must be probed. You said so yourself.” She was tired and hungry, troubled to her heart that she would fail in this, the most important task of her young life. Aye, even more important than becoming an intelligencer. Was her hand steady? Was her courage sufficient? She shivered, silently praying that God bless her hand so that she would not kill him, though hurt him she must.
Through the window she heard the near, sweet coo-coo of a woods dove calling for a mate. Robert’s gaze moved to the window and he smiled. He had heard the same call, and that shared moment steadied her.
Taking a deep breath, Frances realized that she could not show her fears—not to Robert, not to herself—for once shown, once acknowledged, they would have power.
“Think you that I would allow you to die, brewer?” Her tone was light but firm, steadying her hand, convincing even to herself.
“Would my death not solve…solve a problem?”
She looked into his eyes so that he would see that she knew exactly what problem he meant. “No, never solved for me.” She had not intended to respond with the whole truth, but she no longer followed her best intent. What came from her heart was more real than what she had been taught, or even what she had vowed.
He spoke the next words quickly. “Frances, wait…wait until the barber-surgeon is sober. This is no work for a lady of the presence chamber.”
She would not allow him to spare her at the cost of his life. “The surgeon I saw may never be sober.” She drew a sharp breath and held it. “Robert, you know that once the wound begins to suppurate, it will defy the best Oxford doctors.” She frowned, her face a handbreadth from his. “And what work is not for me? Have you forgotten so soon that I fought the footpads of the road?” She swallowed hard. “Mayhap killed one!” She filled her lungs again to steady her trembling hands. “It is my fault you are wounded. If I had not defiantly stowed myself on the dray—”