by Anne Groß
“Get him off me!” Elise struggled to get out from under the skirmisher’s weight. Her arm was pinned. She couldn’t breathe. Thomas lifted the body and tossed it aside with no more effort than he would give to sweeping a cat off the kitchen table.
“Get the hell back to camp.” Thomas pushed her roughly as she struggled to get to her feet and she fell back to the ground. “Go on with you!”
“I couldn’t let him kill you!”
“So you thought you’d save me? I can take care of myself!”
Her knife. She needed her knife back. She crawled over to the body and saw the skirmisher’s face for the first time. His eyes were open in death, clear brown orbs in the middle of a dimpled face. “He’s just a kid.” She touched his cheek, barely old enough for stubble.
Thomas kicked the body out from under her hand, making her recoil in shock. “Never look in their faces when you kill them,” he said, pulling Elise’s knife from the boy’s neck. The squelching noise made her feel sick. “They’ll haunt your dreams if you do.”
“Jesus,” she breathed. “How many people have you killed?”
“I’ve no regrets for any of them. I made London a better place.”
He wiped the knife off in the grass and offered it back to Elise. She reached to take it and saw her hand was caked in blood; the blood of the men she’d patched was now mingled with the blood of the boy she just killed. Her stomach clenched violently, her shoulders heaved.
“I don’t have time for this,” Thomas snapped. “Don’t go soft on me now. Take the knife.” He shook it impatiently at her. “Take it!” Suddenly he grabbed her arm and dragged her behind a boulder as shots rang out again from the trees. A ball ricocheted off the rock just as they huddled down together to wait for the smattering of musket fire to pass.
“How ’bout a smoke?” Elise squeaked, a weak joke. She touched his breast pocket, feeling for the clay pipe she knew was there.
Thomas ignored her question. He lifted her skirt and sheathed her knife against her leg.
“He was going to kill you. I couldn’t let you die,” Elise said again.
“Because you really wanted a nice, long smoke.”
“That’s right.” Elise attempted a smile but was distracted by the blood on her hands. She tried to wipe them off on the grass. “He was just a boy,” she whispered, looking at the body. It jerked as rounds sunk into it.
“It was a boy’s foolishness to think he could sneak up on me, but he still would have cut me down like a man if he’d caught me. There’s not a thing to feel badly about. If you hadn’t killed him, I would have.”
“Where are you going?” Elise clutched his coat when he stood, alarmed that he would leave the shelter of the boulder.
He peeled off her hand and quickly stepped to the body to pull off the boy’s boots. “These should fit you,” he said, returning. “You should check his pack. There might be something you could use.”
Reluctantly, Elise reached for the boots but ended up heaving a second time. The emerald seared painfully against her sternum as her bile rose.
“Don’t do that; don’t lose your iron,” Thomas urged gently. “You’re always going on about needing shoes. Now you’ve got them. What did you expect, Elise? That we’d all be murdering each other with warm smiles? Stay steady, do you hear me? It’s not over yet. The French have withdrawn to a better position and it’s going to be harder to roust them out. If the officers don’t get it right, we’ll be cut down.”
Elise looked at him, alarmed. His words weren’t helping to reassure her.
“Go back to that farmhouse. That’s where you belong. I need to know you’ll be safe so I can rejoin the company.”
“I can’t go back.”
“You’ll do as I say.”
“I can’t let you die, Thomas.”
He pushed his hair back. A smile played under the scar on his cheek. “So, now you’re the one looking out for me?” he asked gently. “Go back and wait until the fighting’s done, then come find me.”
“That’s not—”
“A dead healer’s no good to anyone. That fool Letchfeld shouldn’t have sent the surgeon to march with the colors. It’s damned shortsighted. If the lads can’t make it to the farmhouse, they’re needing the sweet arms of their maker, not a healer.” He stopped Elise with a fierce look as she took a breath to argue. “I mean what I say. Wait until the fighting’s done, then come find me. You can help me pull the wounded back down the hill.”
Thomas touched her open palm, then lifted her hand into his own to squeeze just for a second before dropping it and bashfully shoving his fist into his trouser pocket. “You’ll come looking for me?” His voice was pleading. His blue eyes pierced her.
“I’ll find you,” she whispered.
He nodded and sucked in a deep breath. Then rolled his shoulders under the weight of his pack and readjusted the straps. “They’ll think me a bloody coward if I don’t get to the front,” he mumbled. Elise felt a wrenching ache as Thomas fell in with the other soldiers.
HIDING IN THE BUSHES
The second Thomas left Elise’s side, the world came crashing back. She was almost surprised to see soldiers rushing past the boulder where she sheltered, on their way to make a second stand. The enemy fire had let off as the French rear guard had fallen back. She rose into a half crouch to look over her boulder and scanned the field for Jenkins and Russell, her promise to return to the farmhouse already forgotten.
“Where in the hell have you been?” Russell demanded when she jogged up to where she’d set up her medical station. “Jenkins has already started advancing with the color guard. Let’s go.”
Elise couldn’t wait for everyone to stop yelling at her and start thanking her. She shoved ribbons of bandages back into her pack and shrugged it on.
As the army advanced, wounded men dropped and were stepped around and left behind. Trotting from fallen man to fallen man, Elise stayed well behind the front line while Jenkins followed the flag and Russell split the difference between them.
To Elise, the men didn’t look like “England’s finest” in their boiled red wool, despite their pride of uniform. They just looked hot and haggard. The late morning sun shone brutally down on black felted shakos, boiling everyone’s brains which might have explained why the soldiers still carried their packs, despite being actively engaged in combat. As a matter of principle, Elise pulled the red coats off every man who could walk to her for help, and cut the coats off those who were carried and dropped at her feet, no matter where their wound was located. Every single one of the them begged for her to leave their jackets alone, but only after they first begged for a drink. She closed her ears to their pleas. The two canteens she’d filled that morning were empty, and wearing wool in the summer was just plain stupid.
Despite the conditions, the English were winning. The French retreated not once, but twice, both times reaching better positions on hilltops. By late afternoon, the enemy was outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and full-on running, leaving behind their cannons and anything else they couldn’t drag along quickly.
But for the small medical team, the job continued. Elise looked up into the ascending trees as she finished wrapping a bandage around the large forehead of a short man who was explaining the advantages of accepting his marriage proposal—mostly the enticing promise of a hovel full of children. “I’m already married,” she muttered, too preoccupied to give her patient much attention. Thomas was somewhere in the thick woods above her. Her stomach was clenched with anxiety. She would have left immediately to go find him, but was too busy bandaging the head of a man already brainless.
“If you find your husband has not survived the day, please think of me,” requested the soldier.
Elise’s head whipped back around to look into his earnest face. The guy had balls. “You’re all set. You can rejoin your company now.”
He squeezed her thigh meaningfully. “I’ll not forget your kindness this day. Was your husband in Colone
l Lake’s division? If so, there’s very little likelihood that he has survived. If you’ve not heard, the fool charged his men up the hill prematurely, nearly costing Wellesley the entire battle. They were all killed or taken prisoner. Lake himself, God rest his soul, didn’t make it through the day.”
Elise felt her stomach twist more tightly. It was one thing to see the wounded and work actively to patch them up. It was entirely different to hear a story and be left wondering the truth of it. The hand on her thigh tightened like a shackle. “I can see you’re concerned. There’s no need for worry. You’ll be a good wife to me, I can tell.”
“Do you want to keep your hand?” Elise asked with a smile.
He blinked at her in confusion, then let go of her thigh when he noticed she was brandishing a scalpel over his wrist. When it finally registered he’d been rejected, his mouth twisted in anger. “You’ve made a big mistake. I was taking pity on you, nothing more. You’re hideous—nothing but sinew and bones. And your nose is much too big. Pity your poor husband. I’m sure he wishes he were dead, even if he weren’t.”
Elise watched him stalk away, the end of his bandage trailing from his head like a white flag. Much of what he’d said, with the exception of the insult about her nose, was true. She was nothing but skin and bones, especially after all the marching they’d done. Richard was definitely pitiable, given the loss of his business and pride. What’s more, Richard could be dead. Her entire company could be dead, for all she knew. She looked back up into the trees. She had to go find Thomas.
“Where are you going, Mrs. Ferrington?” Russell called from fifteen feet away. It was now impossible to tell the freckles that dotted his nose from the splattered blood across his face.
“I’m. . . MacEwan. . .” she pointed up the hill, too tired to form a sentence.
“Private MacEwan just passed by not two minutes ago. He looked straight at you. Didn’t you see him? He was headed to the hospital with wounded. You might as well go there yourself. I’ll be along shortly.”
Thomas looked right at her and didn’t stop. Elise sighed. She rummaged in her pack and found, buried under rolls of bandages and rattling spools of thread, a small vial of her rainy-day rum. It was, officially, a rainy day.
It had taken seven hours for the army to advance to the base of the third hill, but only fifteen minutes to return to the hospital where Elise had started the day. Even so, she was confronted with the results of the war before she even reached the converted farmhouse. There were so many wounded being carried off the battlefield that the hospital couldn’t take them all inside. Instead, they were placed under the shade of trees to wait their turn. Piles of them huddled together, many dying slowly.
Elise stood on the edge of the farmyard, trying to steady her breathing as she surveyed the carnage. No one was separating the wounded by those who most urgently needed help. Soldiers who’d been assigned the job of aiding the surgeons would appear in the open doorway, toss a leg or an arm onto the pile that was growing near the front steps, and haul inside another wounded man to take the place of whoever just lost a limb. Whichever man was closest to the door won the prize of a second chance at life. It was as simple as that.
A heavy hand squeezed her shoulder, making her jump. “Steady-on, Mrs. Ferrington.” George Russel looked at her in concern. It hadn’t taken long for him to catch up to her. Despite the grueling day, his jaw was set for the next stage of tending to the troops. “You should take a rest. No one will fault you if you don’t go inside. It’s no place for a woman.”
“Have you heard of triage?”
He shook his head.
“It’s where someone separates the wounded so that those closest to death are served first to save their life, whereas those without life-threatening issues, a broken finger or a twisted ankle or whatever, get served last.”
“That seems reasonable. Did Bill Stanton make it through? You go rest and send Bill along to do triage.”
“It takes someone with medical knowledge to triage. Otherwise mistakes get made. Some things you have to know to look for, blood pressure, heart rate, that kind of thing. If you miss a sign, people can die. Let me stay out here and sort the wounded, but tell everyone inside they have to take whoever I tell them to take.”
“I merely ask that you allow us to rest by occasionally sending in a man with insignificant ailments after every third mortal wound.” He threw up his hand as Elise drew a breath to argue. “If you queue up all the difficult cases, you’ll exhaust the surgeons.”
Elise reluctantly agreed to throw in something straightforward after every five hard cases.
“Good. Then I’ll tell the others. ‘Triage’ did you say? Sounds French. I wonder if Napoleon knows of this.”
“I think he does,” Elise said with a slow smile, suddenly remembering a bit of nursing trivia she learned in school.
As soon as Russell disappeared through the farmhouse door, Elise began the heartbreaking work of organizing the wounded into categories. She started calling the lawn the “waiting room,” and pulled other able-bodied men into helping her move those who couldn’t move themselves. It renewed her spirit to do something she was trained to do without being second-guessed by the stifling culture or hindered by inconveniences. By the time the sun was setting, most of the men had been pulled off the battlefield and placed into three categories of gore: those likely to live no matter what, those unlikely to live no matter what, and those who straddled the middle and needed immediate care.
No one noticed as she stepped through the door to the makeshift hospital, which was as it should be. The medical staff was too preoccupied with saving lives to see that a ragged woman in French skirmisher’s boots was taking in the scene. From the doorway, Elise could see that the first floor had just two large rooms. One of the rooms had a few scattered chairs. The other held a kitchen table, solid and wide, reminding her of the deeply scored table in the kitchen of the Quiet Woman. Spread out on the table was a soldier, pinned to the wooden slats by Thomas’s powerful hands. Thomas was listening, along with two other gentlemen, to a senior surgeon who was gesturing with a hacksaw while delivering a lecture. Scattered in all the corners of the room, other surgeons made repairs to bleeding men while keeping one ear open to the man pontificating at the table. Blood stood in puddles everywhere.
“There you are,” Russell smiled, tying the last knot for a patient who grimaced behind a leather strap held between his teeth. “What do you say? Four hundred? Five hundred wounded?”
“About that,” replied Elise.
“Did you hear that?” he called to the other medical personnel. “Only four or five hundred wounded!” A loud cheer went up.
“Damn that Colonel Lake,” grumbled an older man as he splinted a broken arm. “It’d be half that if it hadn’t been for his stupidity.”
They worked deep into the night, and when the last man’s wound was dressed, they worked longer to bed them all down comfortably. Elise tried to maintain a semblance of cleanliness, pulling water from the well outside and mopping the floor with a rag tied to a broom, organizing supplies, and helping wherever she was called to help. Later, she made herself available as the patients tried to sleep, giving water to the thirsty, checking bandages, calling over doctors when wounds that had been missed were discovered.
As morning light started to creep in through the windows, visitors arrived. Men wanted to see that their fallen companions had survived the night. Usually, they didn’t stay long, leaving broken-hearted even when finding their friends alive—if the men had spent the night in the hospital, prospects weren’t great. Just as the morning started to clang with noise from the camp, Richard came in, dragging a feverish Collins. Elise immediately removed him from Richard’s supporting arms and bedded him down outside, behind the house and well away from the other soldiers.
Soon after Richard had left, Lady Letchfeld stepped inside with a large basket artfully hung over her arm. Elise’s head jerked up to see the elegant woman, clear-ey
ed and well rested, lift her silk skirts over the mess of bloody gauze that kept accumulating on the floor. She passed out salted beef and sips of water to a few of the men, tucked them into their blankets, then swept out again, leaving behind a sweet scent of rosewater and a haughty grimace directed towards Elise. For the surgeons, she left wineskins and fresh loaves of bread.
“What an angel,” called a soldier breathlessly from the corner. “A beautiful angel of mercy. An angel of light, she is.”
Tears pricked Elise’s eyes. She didn’t do her job for the praise, but to have it directed towards the undeserving felt like a slap in the face. Her dress was stiff with men’s blood; her hair was crusted with the salt of sweat; her mind was shadowed by images she’d never be able to erase. But Betsy Letchfeld, fresh as a lily, was the one the men gushed over. It was too much. Elise threw down her mop, causing heads to swing around to look at her. “I’ve been slaving away for twenty hours straight,” she shouted, pointing at the hapless soldier. “What did she do for you? Nothing! She comes in here and breezes around a little, and suddenly she’s the one you call an ‘angel of light?’ She’s your Florence Nightingale? I fucking saved your life!”
“Mrs. Ferrington,” George Russell shouted. “Apologize at once.”
“Who’s Florence?” asked the soldier.
Elise laughed in disbelief. “Apologize for what? For pointing out injustice? If you’re going to be doling out praise all willy-nilly, how about sending some over here. I mean, look at me. Look at this,” she waved her arms in a wild gesture to encompass the entire world. “This is going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. And it’s Lady Letchfeld who—”
“She’s the major’s wife!” croaked the indignant soldier in the corner. “A right gentlewoman, unlike you.”
“Well then, fiiiiineee. I apologize for besmirching the name of a woman who was lucky enough to be born wealthy.” She bent over in an exaggerated curtsy. Movement in her peripheral vision caused her to whirl around. Thomas was approaching her with the same kind of care she’d seen him take countless other times at the bar when a patron had had too much to drink. “I’m warning you: do not check me.” He froze. Was he trying not to smile?