Carla Kelly

by The Wedding Journey

  She shook her head.

  “The Chief had me stay there an extra week while the army moved ahead to Burgos last August. The sisters had an orphanage, and some of the children had the croup. Ring a bell with you now?”

  “Why, yes, it does. It’s a little west of Salamanca, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Let’s go.”

  They arrived after dark, picking their way along a stony path lit only by the moon, which appeared to be in danger of disappearing behind a bank of clouds coming up quickly from the north and east. Only one lamp gleamed outside the convent walls, but Jesse knew enough of Spanish poverty to feel no alarm. Elinore gasped when he jangled the bell outside the massive gate and the sound seemed to bounce off the walls. He reached out and touched her leg. “Don’t worry, my dear, I know this place.”

  He smiled in the dark, already relishing the opportunity to show the others something of his own skill. Two of the nuns were from Italy, and it was going to be his turn to demonstrate his linguistic prowess. Hippocrates, the sin of pride is the stumbling block of physicians, eh? he told himself as he heard footsteps and waited for the smaller gate cut in the larger one to be opened.

  Lorenzo the slow boy was there at the gate, peering around it at first, tugging it open when he saw how few they were, then running to call for the nuns. Sister Maria Josefina came first, tall and handsome and so Italian. She smiled to recognize him, taking his hand in hers, her beautiful Tuscan-flavored Italian tumbling out as though she had been waiting just for his arrival.

  “Captain Randall, you are an answer to my prayers. How did you know we needed you?”

  “It is not the children again, is it?” he replied in Italian.

  “No, we have sent them south to a safer place. Oh, sir, there are others. Do follow me, and bring your men.” She peered closer. “Captain, do you have a wife now.”

  “I do, sister.”

  “High time. Bellissima.”

  He indicated the others to follow, and left Lorenzo with the horses. He had to hurry to keep up with the nun because she was taller than he was, and had a longer stride. He almost ran with her down one corridor, the others trailing behind. She stopped and pushed open the smaller portion of another large door, this one of iron.

  When she spoke next, it was in French. “I have brought you help,” she said in a louder voice. He felt the familiar tingle down his spine as he stared at two rows of French soldiers, some on cots, others lying on pallets. “My God, sister,” he whispered. “My God.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The shock in his voice rooted Elinore to the spot. The anguished look he gave her—one that cried “please help” without a word spoken—next set her in motion. Despite his obvious need for her, when she reached the doorway he extended both arms to prevent her from crossing the threshold. She could only look over his arm and gasp.

  “They’re French!” she exclaimed, then pinched her nostrils shut. The odor of putrefaction was almost overwhelming, even though the room was large—it must have been the convent’s refectory—and the air cool. The men lay in two rows facing each other. These are the enemy, she thought, and then, God help them.

  She recognized them immediately for what they were, men whose injuries were too severe for the retreating French to take with them after the battle of Salamanca in July. Only now in cold November were some of them recuperating, while others faded. She looked at them, thought of the three men left behind with Daniel O’Leary in Santos, and wondered all over again why nations fight.

  She made no move to follow Jesse when he and the nun began to walk slowly by the wounded men. She was speaking to him in Italian. Hands behind his back, eyes lowered as though he wanted to look everywhere but at the men, Jesse listened, nodding now and then. They turned when they reached the end of the row, and this time he looked at the men. A few more feet, and then he stopped.

  Elinore took her fingers from her nose, breathing slowly and evenly, concentrating on the act of breathing, rather than the ferocious stench of the body when it turns on itself. In another moment she felt her heart resume its normal pace. Her hand when she lowered it was steady. She looked at her husband again, not surprised that he had found a stool from somewhere and seated himself beside a man who had propped himself up on one elbow and who gestured as he spoke.

  The man appeared near death, his cheeks sunken, but red with fever, his dark eyes so bright they almost glittered. She thought it odd that he should have the energy to gesture until she noticed the satchel with the cross on it at the foot of his cot.

  “Monsieur Leger, I think Jesse has found another surgeon,” she said.

  “He has found the enemy!” Leger hissed.

  She stared at him, shocked. “I…I don’t think he sees it that way,” she said when she found her voice.

  “He is a fool then.”

  “Elinore, please bring me my shoulder bag. I left it by the door,” Jesse called, raising his voice, and yet still speaking softly, in the way that surgeons did when there were patients they did not wish to disturb.

  She nodded and found the bag. Leger grabbed her arm. “If he treats these French soldiers, he is a traitor!”

  “Monsieur, he is a surgeon,” she said quietly. “It is not in his power to be anything else. Let go of me.”

  She was not sure what she would do if he did not release her, but Harper solved the problem by placing both meaty hands on the Frenchman’s shoulders and giving him a shake. He put his face close to Leger’s. “Let ’er go. ’Twouldn’t bother me much to land you in one of them cots.”

  Jesse was on his feet now, his face pale. “Elinore, are you all right?”

  In the middle of hell, he is worried about me, she thought. She knew then that if she lived to be old, she would never forget the peculiar grace of the moment. “Stay there, my dear,” she called. “It’s nothing.” She took in her surroundings, the nuns who had gathered by now, the French patients, and the look on her husband’s face when she called him “my dear.” She knew beyond doubt there was no other place in the universe for her.

  Leger turned on his heel and left the hall. In another moment she heard the massive door slam. Harper and Wilkie exchanged glances. “D’ye know, Wilkie, there are times I get distressed with me fellows, but I’ve never seen the profit in hating them all.”

  “Private ’arper, it does seem a bit uncouth, eh?” Wilkie agreed. “Mrs. Randall, do you understand the workings of the aristocratic mind?”

  “I only know there is more sorrow in his life than any of us know,” she said quietly. “Where I might have judged earlier, I would not presume so now.”

  The men were silent then, and she shouldered her husband’s medical bag. I do hope I live long enough to appreciate what I have learned on this retreat, she thought. Didn’t Jesse promise me some Randall luck? Something tells me I am not the first woman led astray by a husband’s promise. The notion made her want to smile.

  “Here you are, Jesse,” she said. There wasn’t any point in calling him Captain, or even Chief anymore, not after calling him my dear. “Monsieur Leger seems to think you are a traitor for setting foot in this room.”

  “What a relief that I am not too concerned about his opinion,” he replied. He nodded to the man on the cot. “This is Captain Philippe Barzun.” He smiled. “What do I learn in a few moments but he is also a graduate of the University of Milan, although a few years before I matriculated. This is my wife,” he concluded in Italian.

  She smiled at the surgeon, who put a hand to his chest and managed a bow from his cot that someone contrived to be elegant. He spoke to Jesse in Italian, and she could not overlook the blush that rose to her husband’s face. She raised her eyebrows at him. “He said he did not know that British woman were so beautiful, and what does she see in a surgeon?” he related.

  It was her turn to blush. She tried not to look as Jesse raised the blanket off the basket frame at the end of the cot to reveal a leg swollen to grotesque proportions bound in a
stained bandage far too constricting. He reached in his bag for his surgical scissors, and listened to Barzun.

  “My dear, he wants you to take that basin down the row and toward the end. You will see several soldiers there with fever. They could use a cool cloth.”

  “He’s sending me away, isn’t he?” she asked, her voice calm. The odor from the wound was overpowering, now that the blanket had been turned back.

  “Yes, and if he didn’t, I would. Go now.”

  She did as he said, walking to the end of the row, and sitting down between two soldiers. One of them must have been a cuirassier, because his chest armor had been upended on the table and doubled as a washbasin. The younger soldier had been burned. She looked closer at his arm. The burn had obviously been cleaned at one time, but not recently. Jaws clenched, she concentrated on wiping his face and neck. In the light of his injury, her act so puny, he still opened his eyes and smiled. “Merci,” he whispered.

  The other soldier was grizzled, older, and bore the look of someone who has marched many miles in the service of the emperor. His injury was not obvious until she glanced down his blanketed form and noticed that one leg ended abruptly at the knee. He had obviously followed her glance. When she looked at his face again, he shrugged.

  She wiped his face as well, wishing she could carry on an inconsequential chat in French, or do something, anything, that would cut off the sounds of anguish spilling out of the French surgeon now. The surgeon shrieked, and she leaped to her feet, only to see Jesse on his feet as well, trying to stand back from the pus that foamed from the infection. “Jesse?” she called, and hated how her voice quavered.

  “Stay where you are, my dear,” he ordered.

  “We have tried to do our best.”

  Elinore looked up from the contemplation of her own trembling hands to see a nun before her, speaking in Spanish. “You have done well,” she replied. “The men are well-tended.” It was true. Their injuries may have been appalling, but the men were clean, and cots tidy.

  The nun stood before her, hands folds in front of her. “There are but two of us here now,” she said. “Most of the sisters went with the older children to another convent in Portugal.” Her voice hardened. “Others were killed by stragglers from both armies after suffering…indignities.” She looked down at her own hands. “I fear that despite our vows, this has led to a certain reluctance to help either side.”

  “I can understand that,” Elinore said. “But…what happened to the surgeon? Was he wounded at Salamanca like the others?”

  The nun shook her head. “No. Three weeks ago he was helping us shift a pile of rubble left from an artillery shelling last summer. Part of the outer wall fell on him, and his leg broke in two places with the bone protruding.” She reached inside her long sleeve, pulled out her rosary and fingered the beads. “We helped as best we could, but he had to set his own fracture. I fear it did not go well.”

  “And you have been trying to tend all the soldiers, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.” She looked at the black beads. “We are an order dedicated to teaching the young and educating the privileged daughters of Salamanca. I wish we were a nursing order. I wish…” She stopped, then rose in one graceful motion and left the hall, glancing neither right nor left.

  Elinore looked at her husband again. He had called Harper to help him, and she felt a momentary pang. Doesn’t he think I am useful anymore, she asked herself. Have I ever fainted in Number Eight? Complained? Whined? Nagged? Or is that dear man trying to protect me?

  It was really no decision for her. She had squeezed the rag in her hand into a knot. Carefully she straightened the cloth, dipped it in the cuirassier’s armor again, and made her way on steady feet back to her husband. The French surgeon lay quiet now on his back, his shoulders relaxed with relief from the draining wound. She could see it would be no better, and she knew the task ahead for her husband. She had no doubt that he would fight for the French surgeon’s life, but she knew he would lose.

  Her glance did not waver as she looked deep into his eyes, then wiped his face. His eyes flickered when she did that, and she put her hands on his neck, holding them there, trying to communicate in a wordless way that he was not alone in this ordeal. She knew she should say something, but she knew her own shyness. Well, what of it? she asked herself, in the room that had gone so quiet. I will not let my chances pass me by anymore. That would be a shameful waste of time, especially when we do not know from day to day how much time we have.

  “Jesse Randall, I love you,” she whispered. “I will never go so far as to say that marrying me was the wisest thing you ever did, but it was the best thing that has ever happened to me. Thank you.”

  She wanted to kiss him then, but she knew she was too shy for that. To her gratification, he leaned forward then and rested his cheek against hers until his lips were by her ear. “Elinore, it would astound you if I told you how long I have loved you. You might even call me a liar,” he whispered.

  “You have never lied to me,” she murmured.

  “I never will. I want you to take my shoulder bag, get out the bone saws when you are in another room, and wash them. Give them to Harper in a clean towel and ask Sister Maria Josefina to find me a room with thick walls. Wilkie can help Harper move Philippe’s cot.”

  She closed her eyes against what he was saying, but did not flinch. She nodded, and picked up his bag. There was plenty of hot water in the kitchen, and she scrubbed the three bone saws. The wooden handles were smooth from constant use, oiled by Jesse’s hands for ten years. Ten years of this! She looked down into the soapy water and remembered how her father and some of the other officers had chuckled over poor, shy Captain Randall. You have no idea, she thought. If it is true that our guardian angel, or St. Peter, or someone beyond my paltry theology writes our deeds in a book of life, I only hope I am standing close to you, Jesse Randall, when the deeds are read out loud. I want to watch you blush, and stammer, and say it was nothing, while the rest of us plead for second chances.

  Harper, his face deadly serious, was waiting for her in the main hall when she came up the stairs from the kitchen. She took the bag from her shoulder and handed him the saws. “Here you are, Private.”

  He shouldered the bag. “Mrs. Randall, doesn’t he know that I am a lazy sneak thief who never thought of anyone but himself?”

  It was the same question she had been asking about herself for the entire retreat. “You know,” she replied, after a moment’s thought, “I don’t think Captain Randall sees what we see in ourselves.”

  He shifted his feet, and she could tell he was uncomfortable with the idea. “Well, well…which of us is right?” he asked finally.

  “He is, without a doubt. Go on, now. It won’t be as bad as you think.”

  Harper nodded. “Because he thinks I can handle this?”

  “He knows you can. I believe that is part of his secret in dealing with us.”

  She touched his arm and gave him a little push. In another minute Jesse came from the refectory, wiping his hands on a towel, followed by the privates carrying Philippe Barzun on his cot. She blew him a kiss, and was rewarded with a smile. Sister Maria Josefina and another nun brought dinner for the soldiers, nothing more than barley broth and dark bread to sop it with. There was a bowl for her and Wilkie, who had returned to the refectory and stood against the wall, his eyes stark. When she ate finally, he did, too. She sat on the stool in the space empty now of the French surgeon, willing the time to pass. Although she had never witnessed an amputation, she knew how fast Number Eight’s surgeons could operate. Why is this taking so long? she thought.

  She wondered where Leger was, and toyed briefly with the idea of looking for him. The urge passed; all she wanted to do was lie down and sleep until the war was over. She dared herself to think of what life must be like in Dundee as the wife of the local surgeon, and found that she had neither the wit nor the energy to conjure up even the slightest image. Dismayed, she tried to imagine a
lending library, her favorite daydream, one told her in Lisbon by a major recuperating from Vimiero. Nothing. I am just tired, she thought, just tired.

  As she sat staring at the wall, Wilkie began to sing. She closed her eyes in gratitude for the beautiful sound of his voice. The heavy masonry walls of the refectory were the perfect sounding board for his clear tenor as he sang a lullaby she remembered from her own childhood. Funny how that is, she told herself as she opened her eyes and watched him, smiling at the way his brows came together when he sang, skinny, scrawny, undernourished Wilkie. When this retreat began, I wouldn’t have thought Wilkie had ever even possessed such a thing as a mother. I am in better company right now than at any time in my life. I suppose Major Bones thought to punish me—punish us all. He is the fool.

  When Wilkie finished, she noticed Harper standing in the doorway. She hurried to him, taking in the seriousness of his expression. Poor, dear Harper, she thought. She took his hand. He clung to it, and her heart went out to him.

  “How can a man do what he does?”

  “I’m not sure.” Her other arm was around him now.

  She felt Harper relax a little, but she did not release him from her embrace. “What happened, Private?” she asked, when she thought he could talk. “What took so long?”

  “He wanted a priest, so we waited for one to come from Salamanca.” He tightened his grip on her. “He confessed and received—what’s that called?”

  “Absolution?”

  “Yes, that. And do you know, Captain Randall did the same thing, only he asked for the priest to make his hands steady-like.” He sighed. “I don’t want to talk about the operation.”

  “Then don’t. Is the Frenchman still alive?”

  Harper nodded and released her, her words obviously reminding him why he had come to the hall. When Wilkie finished singing, he tapped his shoulder. “You’re to help me move the surgeon back in here now.” He turned to Elinore. “The Chief wants him in here, and he wants another cot so he can lie down beside him. He said you’re to ask Sister Josefina if she has another cot.”