by Jenny Brown
She didn’t look forward to riding through the night with her wound paining her so much, but to her relief, when she came down to dinner, Ramsay told her they would have to spend the night in the tiny village where they were stopped. One of the large wheels of the chaise was not properly seated on its axle. A wheelwright would have to attend to it. She hid her relief, knowing how important it was to him to reach their destination swiftly, but it was substantial. At last she’d be able to get some rest, away from the infernal rocking of the carriage.
When the maid came to help her prepare for sleep, Zoe called for hot water and made a poultice to suck the bad humors from her wound. But the next day it was, if anything, more painful. She grimaced as she walked into the private parlor where the innkeeper had laid out an unappealing breakfast of warmed-over rabbit and bacon for her and her companion.
“Surely your ankle isn’t still paining you?” Ramsay looked up from his plate.
“Not my ankle, but the wound in my leg. It’s opened up again.”
His brow furrowed. “How long has it been bothering you?”
“It’s always ached, ever since I injured it, but since it started bleeding again, it’s become much worse.”
“Bleeding? When did that start?”
“From the way the bandage looks, I should think yesterday or the day before.”
“Your wound’s been bleeding for two whole days and you didn’t tell me?” His voice rose. “Why didn’t you say something? Had I known, I’d have examined it.”
“After all you’ve said on the subject of how little you wish to be reminded that I have a body, I was hardly going to ask you to inspect my thigh.”
“But if mortification sets in you might lose the leg.” He looked horrified.
“I applied a poultice last night in the inn.”
“But today the leg is worse?”
“Yes. I’m afraid it is.”
Adam set down his knife and fork, fighting the feeling of doom that swept over him. He should have known better than to let some dirty inn wife dress her wound.
“Come here.” He beckoned her toward him.
Zoe began to rise, then winced and plumped down again on the plain wooden chair. When he met her eyes he saw fear in them—a fear that, uncharacteristically, she was making no effort to suppress.
His heart began to pound. “I must examine your leg,” he said. “There’s no time to waste.”
Zoe gave him a withering look. “What, and expose your purity to more of my corruption? You could hardly bear the sight of my ankle, and this injury is most certainly not to my ankle.”
“I know very well where the injury is,” he said gruffly. “But I’m not so lost to my duty as a physician that I can’t overcome my own weakness when a patient’s health is at stake.”
“Well,” she said slowly, “if you’ll promise that you won’t accuse me of trying to seduce you, I’ll let you examine the wound. The pain is almost unbearable, and I’ve become rather attached to this leg. I’d be very unhappy to lose it.” She smiled weakly at these last words as if to make a joke of them, but when she saw no humor reflected back from his eyes, her smile faded, and a tinge of fear colored her pale cheek.
He fought against the stabbing fear that gripped him. Fear had no place in a surgeon’s heart—and he must find the surgeon within him now and set aside all else. Zoe’s life might depend on it. He motioned to her to stretch out on the long, stiff-backed, old-fashioned wooden bench that stood against one wall of the private parlor where they’d broken their fast. When she had arranged herself as comfortably on it as she could, he lifted her skirt until the bandage was revealed. Then he began unwrapping it. As the cloth tore away from her wound, she gasped. An echoing pain shot through his body.
What had happened to his professional objectivity? It always hurt when a dressing was removed, and he had seen worse wounds. Yet he couldn’t bear that Zoe should feel any pain. Irritated with his descent into sentimentality, he gave the bandage a quick tug. She stifled a shriek, but the rest of the bandage came off, and he could finally see what lay under it.
It was worse than he’d feared. He need no longer worry that the sight of her naked thigh would fill him with lust, not with the stench of putrefaction that wafted up from the festering wound the bandage had hidden. Though it had scabbed over, the scab had broken, and an ugly mixture of blood and pus oozed out around its edges. But it wasn’t just the stench and the angry green pus that showed him just how badly his neglect had harmed her. The thin red streaks that radiated out along the flesh just above the wound were what every doctor feared: the first sign of blood poisoning.
Zoe might lose her leg. He wasn’t at all sure he could save it. If she had weakened his healing powers with her ill-advised attempt to seduce him, she would be the one to pay the price. He might have appreciated the irony had he still been bent on revenge, but he could feel nothing now but horror at what his neglect had done to her.
“Is it bad?” She sounded worried.
He nodded, barely able to speak. “The humors have turned putrid.”
A look of fear flashed across her face. “Will you have to take off my leg?”
“It hasn’t come to that,” he said, trying to reassure himself as much as her. In truth he probably would, and even then, she might not live. Once wound poison had reached the heart, the patient would often die. Every surgeon knew that. Still, he must give her hope. Hope was often the strongest medicine the physician could offer.
But as he had that thought, he was struck with another dreadful realization. Hope might be the only medicine he could offer her. He’d left London in such haste that he hadn’t thought to bring with him his collection of materia medica. He had no laudanum to dull her pain, no calomel to raise the fiery humor. And out here in the wilds of Galloway, they might be many hours away from an apothecary. Yet his only hope of saving her leg and perhaps her life lay in immediate surgery. Without laudanum.
He gritted his teeth. The pain she’d felt when he’d removed the bandage from her wound would be nothing compared to what she’d feel at the touch of his scalpel. The alcohol the inn could supply was a poor soporific, and besides, it was so prone to depress the vital functions that it would be dangerous to give it to a woman as slender as Zoe. But what was his alternative? He must operate.
He addressed his patient in what he hoped was a calming tone. “If we’re to save your leg, I’ll have to open the wound and drain the evil humors.”
Though he’d expected her to protest, she only bit her lower lip and nodded.
“Good, then. I’ll have to go fetch my instruments. Go to your chamber and do what you must to prepare yourself. I’ll meet you there in a few moments.”
He turned away from her, not trusting that he could control his features any longer. He mustn’t frighten her by betraying his own dismay. She’d need all her courage to fight off the poison that threatened her life. And she had courage aplenty, though it hurt to remember how many opportunities he’d given her to display it. She deserved better than the fate he’d condemned her to.
How wrong he’d been to even think of making her pay for her mother’s crime. For he could no longer think of her as the harlot’s daughter, but only as herself—brave, compassionate, intuitive Zoe, the strongest woman he’d ever known, and one he’d have been proud to claim as a friend had circumstances been different.
But they hadn’t been different, and with what he had done to her, she’d be justified in taking revenge on him, though the thought of her hating him sent another surge of pain shooting through his heart.
He struggled to regain the composure he would need to save her. You must put aside all human emotions if you are to prevail over the powers of death. Hadn’t that been the first thing the Dark Lord had taught him? He must remember it.
Taking a deep breath, he strode into his own chamber and rummaged through his things looking for the instrument case he always kept with him. It held the scalpel he’d need to cut the
poisoned flesh out from her wound. It was only as he was unfolding the leather case that he remembered that his scalpel was steel. Cold iron. It had been weeks now since he had touched anything of iron, ever since he’d received the Dark Lord’s letter announcing that he’d chosen Adam as his heir and giving him the long list of the things he must do to prepare for the Final Teaching. To touch the iron-bearing scalpel now would drain away all the power he’d built up through his abstention. It might even make him unfit to receive the Final Teaching.
He pushed the instrument case away. He’d use the bronze knife.
But then he remembered what the instructor at the medical school in Vienna had taught him—that the touch of bronze could itself cause a festering wound. Steel cut cleanly, as bronze did not.
But, of course, the ancients had used bronze, hadn’t they? And most of the patients he’d seen the Dark Lord operate on had survived—a much larger proportion of them, as he’d often recalled uneasily in Vienna, than those who yielded themselves up to Von Faschling’s speedy steel blade. Surely Adam didn’t need to pollute himself in order to heal Zoe? He must stay pure so he could assume the Dark Lord’s powers, and once he did, he’d be able to save so many more lives and atone, at last, for what he’d done to Charlotte. How could he give all that up—to save Isabelle’s child?
Pick up the bronze blade, he told himself, and have done with it. He’d hone the edge carefully. Surely that would be good enough to avoid contagion.
He grasped the handle of his bronze knife. The old familiar feelings flowed through him at its touch. He felt his teacher’s strength, and the strength of all the unknown Dark Lords who had come before him. They beckoned him to join them. After all these years of sacrifice he was so close to becoming what he’d always dreamed of being.
But he wouldn’t be what he dreamed of, if he let his greed for power harm Zoe.
He’d already harmed her enough by trying to husband his paltry powers. Had he not feared his own lust he would have cleaned out her wound himself and prevented it from turning septic. He couldn’t make the damage worse by operating on her with a knife that could worsen the poison. If that was the price the Ancient Ones demanded for the Final Teaching, it was too high.
He shoved the bronze knife back into its hilt. He wouldn’t use it.
Giving himself no time to change his mind, he reached into his instrument case and pulled out his scalpel. Cold flowed into his fingers from the prime German steel. He tried to sense whether at its touch, some of his power had fled from him, but if it had, he couldn’t feel it. The scalpel felt good in his hand, familiar. Memories of all the times he’d used it successfully flooded over him. He was an excellent surgeon. Even Von Faschling had admitted it this past fall in Vienna, and everyone knew how miserly he was with his praise.
So he said a silent prayer that this operation, too, would be added to the number of his successes, and that despite the advanced state of her wound, he would cure Zoe.
It would be a struggle. He’d have to find four strong men to hold her down while he did the operation. For surgery was a brutal art. He was one of very few gentlemen able to tolerate what the discipline required. It had taken him years to fight down the natural emotions that the surgeon must put aside so he could work serenely despite the agonized shrieks of his patients. And it would be even harder to operate on Zoe because of the sympathy that had joined the two of them since that fatal night at the inn. It would take all his fortitude—and more—to get through it, knowing as he did that, when he cut into her flesh, he would feel her agony as if it were his own.
He walked over to the washstand and carefully rinsed his hands to symbolize their purity, as the Dark Lord had taught him to do when he’d first begun to teach him the magic of healing. Von Faschling had laughed at him for following such a superstitious practice, but all surgeons had their little rituals, and the great surgeon himself wouldn’t operate if a black cat crossed his path. When Adam’s patients had done well after their surgeries, Von Faschling had forgiven him his idiosyncrasy.
Then Adam closed his eyes and invoked the help of the Unseen, asking that his hand be guided. He’d need all the help he could get, both seen and unseen, operating with nothing to dull her pain.
When he’d finished his prayer and opened his eyes, the first thing that caught his attention was his leather instrument case lying spread out on the table. The dog-eared corner of an old folded piece of paper peeked out of the pocket at one end. He hadn’t noticed it before, so caught up had he been in his struggle to pick up the scalpel. But he knew what it was. And as he grasped the edge of the yellowed paper and pulled it out of the instrument case, his heart surged.
His prayer had been heard. For the Dark Lord had given him that paper long ago in Morlaix. It held a sacred spell he’d entrusted to Adam—one he’d claimed was more powerful than even the newfangled magnetic discoveries of Mesmer. The Dark Lord had said that this spell could send a patient into a slumber so deep that once it was invoked, you could stab the patient with a knife and he wouldn’t awaken.
And it wasn’t just hearsay. Adam had seen the Dark Lord use this spell to remove a gangrenous toe without eliciting even a single scream from his sleeping patient. Had Adam not seen it, he wouldn’t have believed it possible. But he’d been given no chance to try it out himself, as the demonstration had taken place only a few days before the catastrophe that had destroyed Charlotte. And after that, the Dark Lord had been forced to send him away for his own safety.
It shamed him now to remember how, after leaving his master, he’d ignored that spell, even though he’d seen how effective it could be. But the Dark Lord had warned him to keep the secret teachings to himself so as not to earn the contempt of other physicians. Magic was out of fashion among the great minds of the Continent.
Now, as he read over the words his teacher had scribbled on the yellowed paper in his spindly script, and carefully fixed them in his mind, Adam remembered once more why he’d sacrificed so much to earn the Dark Lord’s wisdom. For though they had taught him much that would be useful, no man of science had tools that could do what this spell could do.
As the Dark Lord had taught him, he waved the steel scalpel through a candle flame thrice, to give it strength. He would combine what they’d taught him in the operating theaters of Vienna with the Dark Lord’s magic, and hope that with that potent mixture, Zoe might yet be saved.
Zoe couldn’t take her eyes off Ramsay’s scalpel. Its blade glittered, razor-sharp. She was lying on her bed with her hands folded primly on her abdomen as she had been doing ever since he’d sent her here to wait for him, and now he was here, with that thing in his hand, ready to cut into her flesh. She clenched her fist, struggling to remain calm, daring only to ask, “Aren’t you going to give me any laudanum?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have any. But even so, you won’t feel the pain. I’ve got something much better to still it.”
“Brandy?” She saw no sign that he’d brought any with the other paraphernalia he had carried into the chamber when he’d returned. Her muscles tightened. She hoped she wouldn’t disgrace herself when it was time to submit to the knife.
“No, something else. Some healing magic the Dark Lord taught me many years ago in France.” Her heart sank. He might believe in magic, but she was too practical to do so.
“It works,” he assured her, “whether or not you believe in it.” Once again, he’d responded to her unspoken thought, but strangely, this time instead of disturbing her, his ability to hear what she left unsaid gave her comfort.
“Is it a potion?” She saw no signs of one: no powders ground out of noxious substances, no small vial filled with healing foulness.
“No. It’s a spell—a really good one. All you need do is listen to me now and do just as I tell you. Nothing else.” He reached toward her. “Here, take my hand.”
She did, thinking it strange that he would allow her to touch him now, when he needed his magical powers to be at their str
ongest. Yet as she clasped his hand a burst of warmth filled her, despite her terror. The look of concern that filled his features made her feel cared for, yet at the same time, it made him look curiously vulnerable. Indeed, something about the way the faint haze of stubble on his cheek glowed golden in the morning light made her long to stroke his cheek and comfort him.
It was the virgin’s sickness, again. She looked away for a moment, unable to bear the sight of his sparkling eyes so full of some emotion she wouldn’t give a name to. With a sharp intake of breath he grasped her hand more tightly, then dropped it almost as quickly, as if her touch had burnt him.
When she’d found the courage to look at him again, she found him facing away from her with his head bowed. Time stretched out as he gave himself up in prayer to the powers that he served. Then he withdrew his watch from its pocket. But rather than consult the time, he let it dangle from its chain with its gleaming golden back facing toward her. With a swift motion, he set it to swinging in a broad arc, back and forth, in front of her eyes.
“Observe my watch,” he commanded.
She wondered why he should ask such a strange thing of her. But she did what he’d told her to do. She had no choice left now but to obey him.
Adam watched intently as her eyes tracked the arc his timepiece made as it swung like a pendulum, back and forth and back and forth again. As he did, he called upon the Ancient Ones, silently entreating them to come to his aid, despite his lapses, and his sins, and the curse he had been born with.
If he could save her, he would ask them for nothing more.
As her eyes continued to follow the rhythmic motion, her fingers uncurled and her lips parted. Her breathing became slower and beat in time with the swinging of the watch. Gaining courage, he lifted the chain and led her gaze upward, very slowly, until the subtle quivering of her lids told him the spell was beginning to work.