Love's Betrayals (The Extraordinary Life of Amy Winston Book 2)

by Liza O'Connor

  Mrs. Halloway seemed disappointed. “Well, we will correct that shortfall in your education. Now as to triage: first, assess the injuries. If they are serious but with little likelihood of survival, set them aside. The objective is to address all wounds in the order of severity that you believe are survivable. You only give priority to your own men in the same category. If a soldier has both serious and lesser wounds, you should attend all life-threatening wounds and leave the others for your assistants. Do you have any questions?”

  Amy forced a ‘no ma’am’ from her frightened lips. Dear God, what had happened as they played and laughed upstairs?

  “Servants are considered soldiers for tonight. We will address the handling of innocent civilians tomorrow during your lesson.”

  Domnika and Catherine must have sensed the panic rising in Amy, for they each took a hand and squeezed it tight. Instantly, her fear disappeared. Whatever awaited them, she did not face it alone.

  Still the sight of white shirts stained with blood startled her.

  “Do a walkthrough first. Assess the injuries in categories of one through five: one requiring first aid to five for those bearing the most severe, survivable injuries. Catherine and Domnika can sort them out and group the categories together. The prisoners are in the music room. Never mix the two if you have the room, unless you don’t trust the doctor to treat the prisoners fairly. If that is the case, removing their jackets and mixing them up may be the only way to get a prisoner proper care.”

  Amy glanced at Domnika and Catherine. She could see they felt overwhelmed as well. “We can do this. No one looks seriously injured here,” she whispered and walked through. She almost called Gunter a one, the lowest class of injury, but her senses indicated something worse. She had thought he had his hand to his back because he had pulled a muscle, but when she looked closer, she could see he was holding a blood-stained rag hard against his back.

  “Oh Gunter!” she exclaimed.

  “Doctor, did you complete your assessments?” Mrs. Halloway demanded.

  “But Gunter is seriously injured!”

  “Then complete your assessments so he can be tended. Time is critical, Amy. Men’s lives depend upon the speed of your actions.”

  Amy quickly checked the other two men and declared them fives. By the time she returned to Gunter, Mrs. Halloway had him lying on his stomach and held the rag hard against his back. “Domnika, go to the kitchen and ask for boiling water and clean rags.

  “Whiskey would be nice,” Gunter admitted.

  “No whiskey,” Amy countermanded.

  “Lil Bit…” Gunter complained.

  “Sorry, Gunter, but the whiskey will thin your blood and make it harder to clot.” She asked Mrs. Halloway to continue holding pressure to the wound.

  Her King’s Men did not remain in their category groups but huddled about Gunter to give him moral support.

  She couldn’t see the wound in her mind, and if she couldn’t clearly see the problem, she couldn’t help him.

  “Should we cauterize the cut to stop the bleeding?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amy replied. “I can’t see—I don’t know what’s wrong yet.”

  Antonio approached her, his hand caressing her back in soothing strokes. “Breathe. Gunter’s not going any place. Just relax.” He spoke in a wonderful, soothing voice that felt like balm to her worn nerves.

  She took a deep breath and now she could see the wound in her mind. It looked bad. The knife had not only sliced through a small blood vessel, but it had sliced through the kidney wall. She focused and tried to heal the cut on the kidney, but she needed to close the wound before the body could seal itself. “I need something small and long, so I can insert them in the cut and push a piece back into place.”

  “Maybe we should just cauterize,” Sam suggested.

  “No! He’ll bleed out inside. His kidney has been cut.”

  That news sent Gunter into a long string of curses.

  “If you can’t save him, there are men in the other room that need your help,” Mrs. Halloway said, but her voice betrayed the pain those words gave her.

  “I can save him, I just need—”

  Antonio thrust her picks into her hand. “Yes, this is perfect. We need to sterilize them. I need the whiskey.”

  “No, Lil Bit, I need the whiskey,” Gunter insisted.

  Catherine returned with the whiskey and a rag and she sterilized the entire kit of picks while Amy inserted the long tool into the cut.

  Gunter jerked and screamed a long string of curses. Amy apologized and asked the men to keep him still, lest she injure him more. Then delicately as the image of his wound held in her mind, she used the pick to nudge the flap back into place. Realizing one pick was insufficient to hold the cut together, she added two more. Then she focused her will on helping the cut section to reattach to the adjacent wall.

  Once satisfied it would hold, she extracted the picks. “The kidney is fixed, let’s take care of this little artery now,” she muttered more to calm herself rather than to let everyone know how she progressed. She soon determined that the ends no longer met. “This will have to be cauterized.”

  Sam handed her his knife, fiery hot from the blaze in the fireplace.

  She smiled at him with appreciation and pulled the sides of the wound open as far as she could, causing Gunter to scream more curses.

  “Gunter enough,” Mrs. Halloway scolded. “If a woman can have their bodies torn apart bearing a child with the head of a grapefruit, you can surely bear a hole the size of an egg.”

  “If you’d give me whiskey, I’ll bear anything,” he assured her through gritted teeth.

  “One second longer, Gunter and you can have all the whiskey you want,” Amy promised and plunged the tip of the knife into the hole.

  Locating the vein with her mind’s view, Amy cauterized the vein shut.

  The stench of burning flesh almost brought her to a faint. “My, that is an unpleasant odor.”

  She advised the men to hold Gunter tight while she poured whiskey into his wound. Gunter jerked and arched in pain and fell limp onto the table.

  “I think he just went,” Brick said.

  “He’s fine,” Amy assured them, as she concentrated on healing the external wound. When it was reasonably closed, she stepped back and asked Catherine and Domnika to wash the skin clean using a rag dipped in whiskey and bandage him up.

  “Is he going to make it, Lil Bit?” Sam asked.

  “If he stays still, he should be good by morning.” She stretched her back and pulled at her neck. Antonio’s hand took over and massaged her neck for her. “Let’s get you to the other room,” he suggested.

  Once alone in the hallway, he stopped her. “Be careful that no one guesses your ability to heal. They don’t need to heal in a day. It would be dangerous to you if they did.”

  Amy hoped there was nothing half so serious for she doubted she had the stamina to do that again. When she entered the room, the men stared at her as if she had come to kill them rather than help them. She discovered their injuries were quite severe. One was a gut wound as bad as Gunter’s.

  When she knelt beside him and tried to touch his wound, his foot lashed out at her. “Let me die in peace, you son of a bitch,” he snarled.

  She looked up at him in surprise, for no one had ever called her a ‘son’ of a bitch before. She finally realized he spoke to Antonio.

  Ignoring his request, she opened his shirt and touched the sides of the ugly wound. She shuddered at the damage. This wasn’t a clean slice. Someone had twisted the knife while it was inside.

  She looked up at Antonio and shook her head. Antonio lifted her back to her feet. “What’s your favorite poison, soldier?”

  “Bourbon,” he answered.

  Antonio told Catherine to find the best bourbon they had and help him drink it. “Do not untie his hands. Hold the bottle for him. And watch him. He’s the type that stabs men in the back.”

  Amy no
w understood why his wound was so ugly. It had been payback for stabbing Gunter. She knelt beside a man who bled hard, but thankfully his wound was clean and straight. “This just needs cauterized.”

  Sam who had followed them in, placed his knife in the fire. She moved on to the next man while the knife heated. The cauterization he needed was only to one small vessel. Let’s try cauterizing this with one of the picks,” she suggested. “It will reduce the healing time.”

  Sam placed the pick of her choice in the fire and she returned to the first man. Now that the man realized she intended to do the cauterization, he demanded a real doctor.

  “She’s all you get, so don’t piss her off,” Antonio warned.

  “I don’t want no woman…”

  Amy opened the wound and pressed the knife to each side of the wound. She then called for whiskey as she ensured there was no further bleeding.

  “Looks good,” she said.

  “How the hell would you know, you had your eyes closed the whole time,” he complained.

  “That’s because he bet me I couldn’t do it with my eyes closed,” she replied as she poured the whiskey in his wound, causing a litany of curses.

  She shook her head. “That’s the saddest string of curses I’ve ever heard,” she complained, and focused on the last fellow.

  He remained completely silent as she pried open his wound and cauterized the one cut blood vessel. She kept her eyes open until the exact minute she needed to see the wound, and once done she quickly opened her eyes. With her hand on his wound, she turned her head away as she reached for the whiskey and closed her eyes again. Unfortunately, the vessel was not completely closed. She opened it back up and stared at the wound. “Sam put my largest pick in the fire. I didn’t quite get it all.”

  “Why don’t you just use the blade?” the man asked.

  “Because I want to use a pick,” she replied, and then smiled at him. “It’s not often I get a captive audience to try new techniques upon.”

  He frowned and glanced at Antonio. “If any of my men die because of this nonsense—”

  “The only man of yours that is going to die is the one she couldn’t treat,” Antonio replied. “And trust me, I made damn sure that no doctor could treat him.”

  His declaration shocked her. She had figured Sam had done that nasty piece of work. The idea of sweet joyous Antonio twisting the blade deep into the man’s gut, turning it over and over until it was impossible to fix was hard to imagine.

  “Relax.” he advised, his hand stroking her back, bringing a soothing warmth that calmed her.

  “I’m just tired. And I prefer grateful patients.”

  “Well, they aren’t very grateful prisoners either,” Antonio complained. “It seems they had the misconception they were the best King’s men in the army.”

  The silent man’s eyes narrowed. “We were led into an ambush. Fight us fair and see who’s best.”

  Antonio laughed. “I don’t even know where to start with that line of bullshit. First of all, you weren’t led anywhere. You came to this house all on your own. Your mistake was assuming there were only innocent civilians inside. You weren’t prepared to fight real soldiers.”

  “Damn right, I wasn’t. Who the hell has a butler that can throw a knife twenty-feet? I’m just lucky his aim was off.”

  “I’d say that softer or he might just come in here and show you how accurate his throw can be,” Antonio warned him. “I’ll grant you that the general gave you bad information and led you into a losing battle. But don’t even talk about fair fights. You came here expecting to slaughter innocent civilians. What the hell is fair about that?”

  “We weren’t going to kill them,” the man said and then grimaced as Amy re-cauterized the wound. “Would you just tell her to use a damn knife!”

  “You aren’t in a position to demand anything. If our positions were the opposite, you would have slit our throats and left us for dead.”

  “And you’ll have us arrested and thrown into jail. With these wounds to fester, we’ll die anyway, just slower and with more pain.”

  “We aren’t turning you over to the police. Once your wounds are tended, we are putting you on a ship, where you will learn the honest work of a sailor. If you become adept at your new job, when the ship docks at the first port you will have the choice of debarking and making your own way home or staying on with the ship for a sailor’s wage.”

  “And if we don’t learn our new job?”

  “Depends on how much you annoy the captain. He’ll either toss you overboard, because feeding you is a waste of food or keep you in the hull entertaining the rats until the first port. Having gone through the ritual myself, I recommend becoming skilled and making the entire journey. It is a life-altering experience.”

  The man tensed again as Amy poured the whiskey in the wound. “Aren’t you done yet?”

  She stood up and told Domnika to put honey on the bandage. “It’s a very good seal against water and disease cannot grow in honey.” She returned her attention to the angry man. “You’ll appreciate my efforts later. Your wound is going to heal much faster than his. On the sea, that could mean the difference between life and death.”

  She moved on to the last of the serious injuries and using picks cauterized it as well. “I wish you would have told me they were going sailing. I would have taken time to cauterize the individual vessels of the first man.”

  “He’s lucky I let you tend him at all,” Antonio growled. “These are some of the sorriest excuses for King’s men I’ve ever seen. Street thugs have more honor.”

  “Hey, don’t throw us all in the same basket here,” the man Amy tended whispered, his voice low enough the others wouldn’t hear. “The only reason I’m hurt is because I wouldn’t fight a civilian, or what I thought was a civilian.”

  Antonio smiled. “Now that you mention it, you did conduct yourself well. Take all the time you want on this one.”

  The man looked nervously at Amy. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  Amy smiled and nodded.

  “You have a nice smile,” he said.

  “Don’t distract the doctor,” Antonio growled. To keep the man’s attention away from Amy, Antonio decided to interrogate the man. “How’d you become involved with the general?”

  Before the man could answer the leader warned him to keep his mouth shut. The man refused to say another word after that.

  By the time Amy placed the bandage on his wound it was mostly healed. There was no chance he’d die from infection.

  Instead of returning now to tend to her soldiers, Antonio told her to finish tending the prisoners, so they could move them from the house at dusk. “Unless you think there was a wound that needed tending in our men,” he added.

  “Not unless they hid it from me as Gunter tried to do,” she muttered. “Why did he do that? If I hadn’t seen his injury, he would have died.”

  “He didn’t think you could save him. He intended to hide the wound until you came over here. Then he would have released the cloth and bled out.”

  Amy was stunned at how close she had come to losing Gunter. “Well, in the future, I would appreciate it if my soldiers allow me to decide who I can and cannot save.”

  “There’s no question of that after your performance tonight. Now, let’s get these whining babies dressed up and out of here.”

  When one of the men asked if they could drink their portion of whiskey instead of having their wound washed out, Amy told him there was medicine mixed in with the whiskey that would improve the healing process but tasted like hell. “Believe me you’ll be much happier with it on your wounds than in your mouth.”

  Antonio smiled at her cleverness. They’d attribute any rapid healing to her special whiskey.

  When she finished the last man, she stood up and grimaced from the pain in her back. “Next time I want a surgeon’s table,” she grumbled, rubbing the small of her back.

  Antonio’s hand pressed against her back. “
Finish with the servants and when we get back I’ll give you a well-deserved massage.”

  His words made her knees weaken and only his quick reflexes saved her from stumbling. Leading her to the other room, he sat her in a chair and suggested the injured come to her.

  Most of the injuries were minor wounds. She would cleanse them with her special whiskey/medicine mix and then place a small bandage on them to cover their miraculous healing. In less than an hour, she had tended all fourteen servants, some of them looking no more like a servant than Antonio did a valet. What an interesting life Mrs. Halloway must lead to have such a collection of soldiers.

  She looked at the dear woman sitting on the floor beside Gunter, watching him sleep. She noticed her hand rested on his neck where the pulse could be easily felt.

  Amy approached and sat down on the other side of Gunter. She placed her hand upon his back. Everything felt right beneath the skin. She moved her hand up to his heart and felt a touch of wrongness. She focused on the clogged vessel and with gentle tugging on the white rubbery balls that blocked the passage the blood soon flowed again. Having nothing better to do with her time, she laid her head down upon his back and tugged at additional little rubbery balls, so they could not form another clog.

  She didn’t realize she had fallen asleep until she felt herself floating up the stairs in arms so comfortable and warm.

  Antonio.

  She curled her arms around his neck and held on tightly, enjoying the sensations of pleasure his closeness created. When her body sank into the soft bed, which was delightful, she was not ready to give up the even more wonderful sensation of his body, so she held tightly, resisting his gentle tugging on her arms. His soft curses in her ear were delicious and she relaxed her arms, so her lips could find his. Unfortunately, that was all he needed to escape her.

  She murmured a protest and soothing hands removed her clothes, but she knew they were not Antonio’s, for they did not burn.

  Chapter 27

  Amy woke to darkness and it took her a moment to catch her bearings. The soft breathing of Domnika and Catherine in the other bed provided her a sense of well-being as she thought about her trial by fire. She hoped Mrs. Halloway was pleased with her first time as a triage doctor. Although she had broken many of the triage rules, she had done so under the order of Antonio. She hoped her general would understand.