The Woman at the Front

by Lecia Cornwall

  Her tears were pouring down her face now. She could barely breathe, let alone reach out and take the pen. She shrank away from him. A fraud. “But I am a doctor!” she said fiercely.

  He shrugged. “Apparently not. Not really.”

  He took a step toward her, but there was another knock on the door. “What is it?” Edward snapped.

  Private Gibbons entered with a shy smile. He saluted Edward, then turned to Eleanor. If he noticed her tears, he didn’t say anything. “Sergeant MacLeod is here, miss. He’s wounded, and the colonel is busy. Will you see him?”

  “He’s— Oh, no. Not . . .” She pictured Captain Duncan’s pale face, his terrible wounds, and in her mind it became Fraser’s face, Fraser’s broken body. “How bad?”

  “His tag says he’s WW, walking wounded, and FW, flesh wound, and G for gunshot,” he said, listing the wound ticket abbreviations. “T for tetanus, too. Captain Blair signed it. They brought him from the aid post with another patient, a private with his hand amputated. The matron is seeing to him.”

  “I’ll come,” she said, grabbing her cardigan.

  “Eleanor.” She heard the warning in her brother’s voice, the low growl, but she couldn’t look at him now. She wanted to be away from him. She left him standing behind her, the pen still in his hand. She was relieved when he didn’t follow her. She wiped away her tears with the heel of her hand as she walked, and Gibbons followed. “Is that your brother, miss?”

  “Yes,” she said through tight lips.

  E. Atherton.

  Gibbons didn’t comment further or ask what had happened. Her whole life had changed in an instant, that’s what had happened, and what did it mean, exactly? Was she even still a doctor, still anything? Her head buzzed, her stomach ached, and she was aware of the wind on her face, knew it was cold, but she was numb, didn’t feel it.

  You must have known. Had she? She’d wanted to be a doctor all her life, wanted it so badly that it felt as if nothing could stand in the way of it, as if it was destined, fated, what she’d been born to do, to be. And now?

  She kept on walking with Private Gibbons along the duckboards. Someone needed her. Fraser MacLeod needed her. What would he say, do, if he knew the truth? She was a fraud.

  Sergeant MacLeod was seated on a bench outside the triage tent. His eyes were closed, and his face was turned up to the long fingers of pallid sun that struggled to part the clouds. His right arm was in a sling, loosely bandaged and protruding from the blood-soaked sleeve of his greatcoat. Her chest contracted. Little things could turn septic quickly here, her medical brain said. Fraser’s left hand was curled against his knee, the wound tag clutched in his fingers.

  He didn’t move as she approached, and she realized he was asleep. He looked younger, like a lad who’d wandered in off the battlefield to rest, utterly peaceful for once. And yet he was wounded, and the colonel was busy.

  There are wounded men out there who need help, Fraser had said the day of the attack. I don’t give a damn about the rules, nor do those poor bastards waiting out there for help, dying. Ye told me ye were a doctor.

  She’d graduated seventh in her class, and she knew what to do.

  Fraud, liar, cheat.

  There was blood on his greatcoat.

  He needed help.

  She carefully pulled the wound tag from his hand and took a moment to decipher David Blair’s appalling scrawl. Gunshot, splinter, both right side. Light duty for seven days, reassess. A more personal note said, See that he gets some sleep and eats well.

  She touched Fraser’s shoulder. “Sergeant?”

  His eyes opened at once and he sat up, instantly on alert. He looked around for a moment, searching for danger, then focused on her.

  He stared at her, his gray eyes heavy with the scant sleep he’d had and the need for more. “If Blair hadn’t insisted I come, I’d think I was dreaming. ’Tis a good dream,” he murmured. He looked away. “Och, I’m babbling.” He lifted his hand to rub his face and frowned at the sling. “Blair sent me back. There’s a wee splinter in my arm. A lot of fuss about nothing. I just need it cleaned up and bandaged properly.”

  “I believe I’ll wait and determine what’s required once I’ve examined your wounds, Sergeant,” she said, more sharply than she had intended. “The tag says you were shot.”

  “Just a graze. Don’t take on. I only meant to save ye time, let ye get on with your patient.” He meant Louis, and she ignored the comment.

  “Would you prefer to see Colonel Bellford? He’s busy, but I’m sure—”

  His brow furrowed. “Nay—I didn’t mean that. Do ye think I don’t trust ye?”

  “No. It’s just . . .” She swallowed. “It’s one of the rules the colonel has insisted I follow. He fears some men will be uncomfortable with a female doctor, so I must ask their permission before I treat them.”

  “Not me. I saw ye in action. I know well enough you’re a good doctor.”

  “I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”

  “Aye, but I suspect ye get few enough of those—where your medical skills are concerned, I mean, not about yourself. No doubt ye get plenty of—” His eyes flicked over her, and he blushed. “There I go, babbling like a green lad again. I must be hurt worse than I thought.”

  “We’d best check that,” she said.

  He rose to his feet, towering over her, a foot taller than she, a quintessential Highlander. Her belly tightened. What would he look like at home, in plaid?

  “You don’t wear a kilt,” she said, speaking the stray thought aloud. Now she was the one babbling. She turned to lead the way inside to the treatment area.

  “Nay. If the wool gets muddy, it turns the pleats to razors when it dries, and they slice into a man’s legs, and the cuts get infected. And gas attacks the damp areas of the body first.”

  The throat, then, or the inside of the nose, or . . . Oh. Oh. It was another lesson she’d learned in Edinburgh, precisely what Highlanders wore—or didn’t wear—under their kilts. She felt her cheeks grow hot again thinking of what Fraser MacLeod had under his uniform.

  Inside, she led him to one of the tables set up for simple procedures. The tent was nearly empty, and the linens on each examination bench were fresh and crisp as new snow, ready for the next influx of wounded.

  He sat on a small stool next to the table and gingerly slid his arm out of the sling. He frowned at the torn and bloody sleeve of his greatcoat. “I suppose you’ll have to cut it off. The splinter is in the way. I hate to lose this coat.”

  “Surely they’ll give you another.”

  His eyes were bright as he looked at her, silver instead of gray in the muted glow of soft daylight inside the tent’s canvas roof and walls. “It’s not that. I’ve sewn extra pockets inside this one for supplies and things I might need to tend a wounded man—cigarettes, a bit of rum, extra bandages, and such.”

  “Comforts,” she said.

  “Aye.”

  She used the heavy shears to cut the sleeve enough to expose the splinter, long and black and deeply embedded. “Are you in pain?” she asked, touching his flesh, looking for signs of shock or deeper damage, warning signs.

  The muscles in his jaw were tense. “Nay. Well, not very much.”

  She cut through the thick wool of the coat’s shoulder and helped him remove it. It weighed nearly as much as she did, or so it seemed as the thick garment fell into her hands. There was more blood on his tunic, high up under his arm. She could see the dark eye of the bullet hole in the fabric.

  “Your tunic will have to come off as well,” she said. “And your shirt—”

  “Nay!” The word was as sharp as a knife. She looked up at him in surprise at the ferocity in his eyes—or perhaps it was modesty. “Do what ye want to the tunic, but I’ll be keeping my shirt.” He kept his left arm clamped across his chest.

  “We
’ll see to the splinter first,” she said. He nodded crisply and laid his arm down.

  The splinter was black and jagged against the sterile whiteness of the linen that draped the table. It had missed arteries and tendons or bone, thank heaven. His head was bent close to hers, and she knew he was making his own assessment. “You’ll have a scar,” she said.

  “Aye.” His voice was low and husky, male. “I’ve already got plenty of those. What’s one more?” She looked at the old scars and half-healed cuts and blisters that marked his hands and wrists and forearms. So many . . . She thought of what he’d endured, and she looked up at him.

  His face was inches from her own, his eyes on her, not on his wounds. She felt a blush rise in her cheeks, and she turned away and busied herself gathering the supplies she needed, taking antiseptic, clean towels, forceps, tweezers, sutures, salve, and bandages from the shelves.

  “How did it happen?”

  He grunted. “A house fell on me, or what was left of it. I was scouting for a new aid post. I lost my footing when the bullet hit me.”

  He stuck his left thumb through the holes in his tunic. “It went straight through. The damage can’t be too bad.” He tried to sound unconcerned, but there was an edge to his voice.

  “But if it had been an inch to the right, or the left—” she said, but he shook his head.

  “I ken. An inch to the right, the bullet would have shattered the bone, and I probably would have lost my arm. An inch to the left, and—” He stopped, his mouth tightening. She knew what followed. Shattered ribs, a punctured lung, or even death. Another casualty, killed instantly, or left to bleed out in agony. “But didn’t happen, so there’s no point in brooding over it.”

  “Lucky,” she murmured, and he frowned.

  She scrubbed her hands, then poured clean water into the bowl and cleaned the skin around the splinter with disinfectant. He bore the sting silently, without flinching, the tension in his body the only sign it hurt.

  She looked at the shard of wood, and her clinical brain considered the veins and nerves and tendons under the skin. She’d memorized every one of them for the exam. She knew how the injury might affect them, if hemorrhage or infection or damage to nerves might occur. She’d known all of it. She felt Fraser’s pulse beating under her fingertips. She traced the lines of the blood vessels, noted his raw knuckles, the older cuts and bruises on his arm, the long, scarred length of his fingers.

  “Ye have such wee hands,” he murmured, watching her. So close to her ear, the comment felt intimate, as if he were assessing her as well.

  “And you have fine hands as well,” she said. “Artistic hands.”

  “I was a musician before the war, played the pipes. I carved things and tied fishing flies. I don’t draw or paint.” His voice was a low, pleasant burr, and her stomach slid sideways, and she felt breathless for an instant, but when she looked up, he was staring down at his hand.

  She reached for the forceps.

  He looked up then, and she met his gaze, ready to warn him that there’d be pain, but his eyes were as gray and deep and unfathomable as the North Sea. There was no fear there, only trust. His fingers closed over her own for a moment, his skin rough on hers.

  “You should wear gloves,” she murmured. “In the field, I mean.”

  He chuckled at that. “Gloves? I’ve lost more pairs than I can count. Ye have to take them off to apply a dressing or give morphine. Ye set them down, and they sink into the mud, or get left behind. Scissors, too, if ye drop them.” He was still looking into her eyes as he spoke.

  “So what do you do?” she asked, not just to distract him but out of genuine interest.

  He reached inside his tunic and pulled on a long string and dangled a small pair of surgical scissors.

  “A good solution. Are you ready?” For an instant he curled his fingers around hers and squeezed gently.

  “Aye,” he said. He met her eyes, his gaze flat. “Do it.”

  She gripped the end of the splinter and pulled it free. She dropped it onto the towel. She heard him exhale the breath he’d been holding. The wound bled freely, cleansing itself, and she washed it with saline, then an antiseptic solution. She examined the ragged hole for debris. He watched her without moving and without comment. She leaned over his arm and began to suture, feeling his breath on her hair, smelling the salt heat of his body, the tang of wool and winter wind.

  “Ye sew like a seamstress,” he murmured. “I’ll hardly have a scar at all.”

  “My mother wanted me to learn to knit. I took up embroidery instead.”

  “Now was that just to be contrary or because ye knew ye’d be a doctor?”

  She glanced at him, surprised he understood that. Her mother didn’t. “A bit of both, I suppose.”

  “You’re a good doctor,” he said.

  “For a woman?” she added automatically. She smeared a thick antiseptic paste carefully over the stitches and wrapped his arm in bandages.

  “For anyone. You were brave the other day, with triage. It can’t have been easy for ye, but ye didn’t give up.”

  “Is that why you stayed close? In case I fell into hysterics?” Or panicked, froze, couldn’t think . . .

  “One reason,” he said honestly. “I’ve seen a number of VADs and even a few seasoned male doctors lose their nerve. They can’t take the terrible things they see day after day.”

  “How do you manage?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Training. That and knowing that if I don’t get the wounded off the field, they’ll die, add to the number already dead, and that’s high enough.”

  She asked him what she’d asked Louis. “Are you afraid?”

  He quirked one eyebrow. He had a dimple in one cheek when he smiled, even if it was a grim smile. “Only fools aren’t afraid.”

  “Then you just . . . just get used to it, the wounded and the dead, the blood, the fear?”

  He sobered. “Never.” He hesitated. “A week ago I helped the chaplain bury another bearer. He was new, here only a month. He took a bullet in the sleeve of his coat on his second day. It passed straight through, didn’t touch him.” He glanced at his own tunic again. “He showed it off, talked about how lucky he was.” He shut his eyes. “He told everyone he was as lucky as me. The bullet that got him went through his helmet the very next day.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now we’re short another bearer,” he said gruffly, but she read grief in the tight line of his jaw, in the bitter set of his mouth, in the tension of his hand gripping hers like a lifeline.

  “Let’s see to your bullet wound,” she said softly. “Then you can rest.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He’d gladly endure the extraction of the splinter all over again, Fraser thought, and the sting of the antiseptic, and the pinch and tug of the stitches, just to stay near her a few minutes more, to smell the sweet, feminine scent of her hair, to watch the way her lips tightened with determination, pursing, when she was considering how best to treat a patient. He’d noticed that the other day, too, during triage. She was easy to read, probably because of her youth and inexperience of the world, though she tried to hide it by being bold and brave. She blushed easily, too, her cheeks turning as rosy as sunrise, and her eyes were the exact color of the Highlands at this time of year, gold and bronze and fragile green. She looked up at him again, her eyes like a touch, a balm, a caress, and his breath caught in his throat. Pretty was his only thought now. Nay, beautiful.

  “I need to look at that bullet wound,” she said again, like a mother coaxing a stubborn bairn.

  The soft, muzzy warmth of attraction turned to horror in Fraser’s gut as she reached for the buttons of his shirt and began to undo them. He clapped his hand over hers and pushed her away, shrinking back. The stitches in his arm objected, and the untended bullet wound stung, leavi
ng him panting.

  She’ll see . . .

  “Careful, Sergeant, or you’ll tear those stitches. Let me help,” she said brightly. She reached for him again.

  “No! I’d like an orderly,” he said. “Get Bellford.”

  She looked surprised and hurt.

  “I’m—dirty.”

  “Oh.” Her brow cleared. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you clean once we’ve seen to the wound.” She said it with gentle insistence. She gave him a “be-a-big-boy” smile, and it was his turn to blush. He felt the hot blood rise in his ruddy Scottish complexion. The wound ached like the devil was gnawing on it now, but his dignity was at stake.

  “I’ll tend to it myself.”

  She regarded him sternly. “That won’t do. You need a doctor to see to it—”

  “I won’t take my shirt off,” he insisted again.

  “Come now, Sergeant,” she said as she picked up the shears, and he waited, his heart pounding. “We’ll start at the bottom, cut it open only as much as we need to.” No doubt she thought him prudish or shy, or she was imagining he didn’t trust her after all. So be it.

  She slipped under his arm to take the first snip. The wool of the frayed hem parted easily, and he nearly cried out. She paused to examine a scar on his lowest rib.

  “That’s old. A sheep bit me,” he said. “I stitched it up myself.”

  “With your left hand? Did you not have a doctor look at it?” She continued cutting, was approaching his armpit now. She’d see the wound and stop. He relaxed. His secret was safe.

  “Highlanders are used to tending our own ills. We do have a doctor in the glen, though. When my mother saw what I’d done, she dragged me all the way to his surgery by the ear and made him lecture me.”

  “I can imagine what he said,” she murmured. “He told you that it might have become infected, you might have died, you should have come to him, and—”