by Keegan, Mel
“Look, if you don’t want me to stay, I can move on this morning,” Toby said with a faint but audible sigh.
“Did I say that?” Jim demanded.
“No.” Toby slopped tea into two cups and spooned in a lot of sugar in lieu of milk, of which there was none. “But you look…”
“Do I?” Jim forced his mind back to reality and summoned a smile. “Don’t take any notice to me. I think I got up on the wrong side of the bed.” Which was my usual side, since there was nobody in it to make me get up on the other bloody side! He took a large mouthful of kipper and sopped up the salt-sweet juice. “Fix the roof if you feel compelled to, but you don’t have to.”
“I like to be busy.” Toby gestured vaguely. “There’s any number of jobs I can do around the place.”
“You saying you want to stay on?” Jim took a long slurp of the tea, found it too hot and far too sweet. “I can’t pay you much.”
“I’d like to stay for a while,” Toby said cautiously, “and you don’t have to pay me at all.”
“You’re going to fix the thatch, and not hand me the bill?” Jim almost scoffed at the idea. “It’d cost me at least three shillings to get it fixed by the man who comes over from Exeter, and he’d drink a dozen pints of my best ale while he was at it.”
“So the job ought to buy me dinner for a week or three,” Toby said easily. “And then we’ll see if your customers have had enough of me and my stories.”
“They’re good stories,” Jim said almost reluctantly. “Good songs. It’s always a pleasure to hear something new.”
“It is.” Toby sat back and studied him over the rim of his mug. “You, uh, you don’t have a wife who’s due back any moment? That is, I was listening to your customers. I couldn’t help overhearing some of the things they were saying, and…”
Jim pushed away his plate with a sigh. “And they were muttering on about how I’m an odd fellow, all alone, and no use to a lass. About how I’m a eunuch,” he said sourly.
“Well, not in those exact words,” Toby said with astonishing gentleness, “but I suppose it’s what they were saying. And I couldn’t help noticing how you, uh, that is…”
“Have a gimpy leg.” Jim frowned into his cup.
“You walk with a very slight limp,” Toby amended. “I thought it made you a little mysterious. Interesting. I’d have thought the local lasses would be all over you, wanting to mother you.”
“Smother me, maybe,” Jim grumbled.
“Smother?” Toby’s brows arched. “You’re not really a – a eunuch?”
“No, I’m bloody not! But they like to think I am.” Jim regarded him with a defiant glare, challenging him to make something of it.
“No offense intended,” Toby assured him. “I was just curious, because you’re alone. And it’s so unusual to find a handsome young man alone.”
“Is it?” Jim was about to tell him it was far from unusual, when the handsome young fellow was like that. When he was one of those. When his heart lay in places seldom mentioned in genteel company, and then only for a ribald joke. He wanted to snap the words at Toby, and only bit them off at the last moment because the confession could have been a close second cousin to suicide, if Toby were altogether the wrong man to hear any such admission.
Before he could speak, the balladsinger shushed him. “It’s all right, Jim. It’s nothing to do with me, if you don’t want to run the gauntlet of women with a leg that won’t serve you when you need it to. If you’re not a eunuch, though … well, there’s still a lot to be grateful for, I should say.”
And he pushed away from the table, taking the empty plates to the big brass bowl where Mrs. Clitheroe washed dishes. Jim watched him there, seeing the long lines of his back and legs, the strength in the sinewy forearms, the honey brown skin which looked soft as any girl’s. He ached to just come right out and speak the truth, and he could not remember another time when reading a man’s signs had been so damned difficult.
In the end he said nothing at all, but drifted out into the tavern yard and sat on a barrel there, stoking the long-stemmed pipe he rarely smoked. It was midmorning when he could be bothered to stir. He heard Toby up on the roof, singing softly to himself in French and Spanish, and he hopped down off the barrel when Mrs. Clitheroe appeared at the corner.
She wore a tight, worried face, and at once Jim knew something was badly wrong. He had been knocking out the pipe, and now set it aside and took the old woman’s basket, which was heavy with vegetables.
“Edith, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”
“Nay, Master Jim – not me. But … I’s sorry, mebbe I should’ve asked, but I put ’er in yon coach house, cuz it looks like rain.”
“Who?” Jim wondered. The stable and coach house stood opposite the tavern yard, like the crossbar on a letter T. From the barrel by the kitchen door, he could not see the coach house’s wide double doors.
“Just a gypsy lass,” Mrs. Clitheroe said, flustered. “She come to me door afore first light, tryin’ to sell me kerchiefs … needin’ a few pennies fer medicine. I could see what she wanted, sick as she is, poor bairn, an’ I brung ’er ’ere. I couldn’t send ’er away, could I?”
“A gypsy girl?” Jim echoed. “She’s in the coach house now?”
“An’ sick as a dog,” Mrs. Clitheroe said distractedly. “Such a pretty little thing. I thought I’d give ’er a mug o’ somethin’ hot, an’ see if I can find one of Joe Flynn’s kids, send ’im to run into Exmouth fer the doctor.”
“Do that.” Jim gestured into the kitchen. “You get the kettle on the hob and I’ll go and find one of Joe’s kids. I know where they’ll be at this time of the morning – and if they’re not checking their snares in the hedgeback, I’ll walk on up to the farmhouse.”
He was moving as he spoke, and only turned back when a voice called down from above. “Something wrong, Jim? You and old Edith need a hand?” Toby shouted a moment before his face appeared over the line of the thatch.
“We might,” Jim called up. “There’s a young girl, sick, in the coach house. See what you can do to help the old lady while I find a lad to run for Doctor Hardesty. He’s a good man – if he’s at home, he’ll come out.”
He gave Toby a wave and swung away toward the stables. One of the coach house’s doors was open, chocked with a brick to keep it from swinging shut, but he did not venture inside. If the girl was laid low with something catching, he had no desire to be one step closer, though he would hurry for Harry or Danny Flynn, whose young legs would make short work of the run to Exmouth.
The girl lay on a lap rug, curled on her side, and she was not moving. She looked like a bundle of old clothing dumped at the roadside, and Jim felt a pang of pity. He might have wondered if she had swooned, even expired, but he heard a low moaning.
“You hang on, love,” he called quietly to her. “Mrs. Clitheroe’s fetching you a mug of tea, and you’ll have the doctor, soon as we can manage.”
Did she hear him? Jim was not sure, and tarrying to repeat himself was the wrong thing to do. Instead, he pushed the lame leg as hard as he knew how on the path toward the hamlets of Budleigh and Salterton. And not for the first time he cursed himself, because running was entirely beyond him. What kind of useless leg of mutton was he, if a girl could die for want of a doctor because Jim Fairley could not run?
A very slight limp, Toby called it. He was being generous. Jim walked with one hell of a limp, and he knew it. He cursed himself mercilessly, all the way to the end of the lane leading up to the Flynn farm. If Toby Trelane had no interest in him on account of the gimpy leg, Jim was not about to blame him for the preference. Even if a colt like Toby liked bedding with men – and the signs were so confused, even now Jim was unsure – he was hardly likely to want damaged goods. This morning Jim accorded himself no skerrick of mercy.
The hedgeback where the Flynn kids trapped for rabbits was empty, and he turned into the lane. The sun was high and warm, and the air was sweet with flowers, light w
ith scores of skylarks, as he left behind the coastal path. On another morning he would have called it a pleasant walk, but today he had no such charitable thoughts.
Twenty yards up the lane, he caught a glimpse of yellow and called ahead. “Mary, is that you? Little Mary Flynn, is your brother around?”
The girl was eight or nine, still at the tomboy stage where she would rather be trapping rabbits with her brothers than brushing her hair and learning to darn socks. She was on hands and knees under the hedge, dressed in gray skirts and a yellow apron, and she waved as she saw him coming. But it was her brother Danny, two years older, with bright orange hair and a face full of freckles, who answered.
His britches were patched at the knees, his shirt was ripped and his hands were dirty. Boys, Jim thought ruefully, would always be boys, no matter where they were. He had been a little ruffian himself at the same age, in London. He dug through his pocket for a bright penny and tossed it, spinning in the air, to Danny. The lad caught it deftly and viewed it with astonished eyes.
“A copper for you, lad, if you’ll run an errand. You know where Doctor Hardesty lives?”
“So I should,” Danny Flynn scoffed. “I run to fetch him for me Ma often enough. You sick, then?”
And, damnit, he was looking at Jim’s left leg as he asked, which made Jim’s hand itch to cuff him. “Not me, rascal. Tell the doctor there’s a girl at The Raven and she looks so sick, if she was a dog, they’d have shot her already. Run, now, earn that copper, so you can spend it on any toffee you like, and rot your teeth without a qualm of guilt!”
The boy’s cheeks pinked as if Jim had read his thoughts, and he took off fast. The little girl bobbed up to watch him go before she plopped back into the rank grasses, where she was chaining daisies and eating clover flowers. Jim watched her for some moments and then his eyes narrowed against the sun as he looked away into the distance, where the Flynn farmhouse was no more than a hundred yards up the lane. Her father would be selling vegetables at the market in Salterton.
“Will I walk you home?” he offered the child.
Her dark head shook indignantly. “If I goes home, I’ll only ’ave to learn ’ow to read.”
“Reading is a very good thing,” he informed her. She made a face as if the idea stunk like fish stranded on the beach and three days rotten, and Jim laughed. “A dozen years from now, young lady, you’ll probably change your mind, and then what will you do?”
A dozen years from now she would be a fishwife, he thought, with a babe in arms, a toddler at her feet and another on the way. She might look back longingly on the days when she could have learned to read and do sums, and become a pupil teacher instead. Or would she be wed to a lad she loved, body and soul, and be so happy, any human heart could only be envious?
With a sigh, Jim turned back toward the coastal path and headed for home at a slower pace, better suited to the leg. It ached when he overworked it, and he was rubbing it hard, pushing a clenched fist into the big muscles, when he limped back into the tavern yard.
In the same amount of time, Danny Flynn would probably have bolted into Hardesty’s cottage, which was well to the east side of Exmouth, standing in a great garden of weedy herbs, where he grew a lot of the medicinals of his trade.
Coffee was on Jim’s mind, and a slab of apple pie, and perhaps another shot at making heads or tails of Toby. He was headed for the kitchen, but voices from the coach house pulled him up short. It took him a moment to recognize Toby Trelane’s voice, for the words were so strange, and then he was drawn to the door there like nails to a magnet.
Inside, Mrs. Clitheroe was standing by the lap rug with clenched hands while Toby knelt beside an odd little bundle of blankets, and the balladsinger’s voice was soft, gentle, almost singsong. “Réquiem æternam dona ei, Dómine. Et lux perpétua lúceat ei. Requiéscat in pace. Anima ejus, et ánimæ ómnium fidélium defunctórum, per misericórdiam Dei requiéscant in pace. Amen.”
Surprise rendered Jim mute as he watched Toby fold the girl’s small hands on her breast, close her eyes and kiss her forehead. She was dead? His throat caught, though he had never known her. “There was nothing you could do?” he asked quietly.
“Nothin’,” Mrs. Clitheroe said sadly, “’cept say the right words, and it’s just lucky young Master Trelane ’ere knows ’em, and sez ’em the right way.”
“Lucky?” Toby echoed as he stood up. “Now, I’m not sure luck has anything to do with it.” He angled a long, dark glance at Jim. “It’s not a doctor she wants. Not any longer.”
“It’ll be Marcus Stiles, the undertaker, and a pauper’s grave on the other side of the churchyard from my father and your mate Charlie, and Charlie’s ma,” Jim said soberly. “Damn, what a shame. Do you know who she was, Edith?”
But the old woman only shrugged, and dabbed her eyes with a kerchief. “She just come to me door, needin’ pennies fer medicine. I don’t even know ’er name.” She rubbed her eyes, crossed herself, hugged herself. “I’ll go fer Mr. Stiles, will I?”
“I think you’d better,” Toby said thoughtfully. “And as for you, Jim Fairley, you’d best come inside, sit down and let me have a look at that leg of yours. You’ve given yourself all kinds of grief, haven’t you?”
“It’s fine,” Jim lied.
“Tommyrot,” Toby said tartly. “When Doctor Hardesty gets here, it’s you he’ll be looking at, I think.”
“He’s already looked – and there’s nothing to be done,” Jim said moodily, though he let Toby herd him out of the coach house and through the yard. “It aches if I punish it, and I just did – and all for what?”
“In a noble effort to save a young girl’s life.” Toby held open the door till Jim went ahead of him, with Bess on his heels. “Pull a stool up by the fire and let me see to you.”
“I told you, there’s nothing to be done,” Jim argued, through he pulled the kitchen’s three-legged stool into the warmth of the big cooking hearth and turned his leg so the heat could get to it.
As he settled, Toby was hunting through the many jars and canisters which lined the kitchen shelves, and he found what he wanted a moment later. It was lamp oil – whale oil, the finest thing for making clear, white light or treating rheumatics. It was best used hot. Jim had heard of men who were afflicted with the ill of the bones, and who immersed themselves in the bodies of freshly dead whales, the innards still hot with the life force of the leviathan, and they swore by the treatment. Jim could never have brought himself to do such a thing, but when Toby fetched the brown glass bottle of oil and stood waiting with an immovable look on his face, he hitched up his buttocks, dropped his britches around his knees and turned a little to let him get to the leg.
The scars were the size of the palm of his hand, old and white now. The pain came from inside, in the front and side of his thigh. When it afflicted him only rest and heat and a drop of the best Dutch laudanum, if he could get it, did him any good. Not that he was about to refuse Toby Trelane’s hands on him, slick and shining with the whale oil which rapidly grew warm, and then hot, in front of the fire.
Toby threw down the kitchen rags and knelt on them, the better to work on the leg, and almost reluctantly Jim began to sigh. He closed his eyes, reveling in sheer relief, and his mind was floating when Toby said quietly,
“These are nasty scars, Jim, but they’re only skin deep and they’re old. There’s nothing here to hurt you after all these years. What happened to your leg? Was it properly treated at the time? You said Doctor Hardesty’s looked at it for you, more recently?”
With an enormous effort, Jim stirred and forced open his eyes. Toby’s face was lit peach and cream by the fire, and his hair was like spun gold. In a moment of self-indulgent whimsy, Jim thought it might have been an angel kneeling there at his feet, and then he mocked himself for the foolish notion. He hunted for his voice, and for words.
“John Hardesty looked at it when me and my father took over The Raven. He used to come by three times a week to look at o
ld Charlie Chegwidden, and he couldn’t help but notice how I limp like the very devil. Lord knows, a blind man could see it. So I let him take a look, even though I knew there was nothing he could do for me.”
“You knew?” Toby echoed, still massaging, fingers kneading carefully, gently.
“There’s only one thing to be done about this,” Jim began, and then stopped. “Actually, there’s two, but the second one means cutting it off, and there’s no cause for that.”
“And the first thing?” Toby looked up at him, eyes deep and dark in the firelight.
Jim took a long breath. “It has to be cut wide open and probed, and about forty splinters of bone have to be plucked out of it, like pulling the spines out of a hedgehog skin.” He shrugged. “I know how it would be done, and I’m not game for it. Not yet – not when all I have to do is respect the old injury and not overtax it. Cut it wide open, Toby, and I wouldn’t walk for a month, even if the wound didn’t turn green and stinking. Johnny Hardesty could be back in a week and cutting the bloody thing right off, if I was really out of luck!” He shook his head emphatically. “No. Not unless I get so crippled that it ends up being worth the risk, and then … maybe.”
“I see.” Toby’s hands had always been gentle, and now they were more so. “How did it happen? You’ve been here at The Raven for several years?”
“Over six,” Jim affirmed. “And I’ve limped since I was fifteen. I was run down by a coach in the street.” He shrugged. “It’ll happen, if you’re stupid enough to run right out in front of a coachman when he has no chance of stopping four big horses.”
“And one of the horses stepped on you,” Toby guessed.
“I was lucky it was only one of them, and he only trod once on me!” Jim mocked himself with a humorless smile. “Oh, there was blood. They picked me up and took me to the nearest quack, who was a Welsh pox doctor, as luck would have it –”
“Luck?” Toby actually chuckled. And then, “Well, I suppose there’s one thing a pox doctor knows a great deal about, and that’s suppurating sores! I imagine he cleaned you up and bound the leg, cauterized it?”