by Wilma Counts
“I’ll be right there,” she said. She donned her robe and slippers and made her way downstairs behind Stewart, both of them wary of waking her father. She found Mrs. Hutchins standing over the patient, patting his shoulder and murmuring softly to him.
“Oh, good. You’re here,” Mrs. Hutchins said to Hero. “He’s not conscious by any means, but he keeps talking—doesn’t make sense, mind you—an’ he’s also moving his arms an’ that good leg of his. Tryin’ to move the other one too. Tosses the cover off as fast I can put it back.”
Hero put a hand on his forehead. “Hmm. His temperature is up.” She checked the bandage on his head wound. “That bump seems a bit smaller than it was. Let’s look at the leg. Bring the lamp closer, please.”
Mrs. Hutchins gasped when Hero lifted the edge of the blanket and they saw an angry red splash of color on either side of the bandage. Hero removed the bandage and inspected her stitchery. She dipped a cloth in a basin of clean water that Stewart held close; she gently washed around the wound. Almost as if he were aware of what she was doing, the patient’s moans lessened to long, shuddering breaths and the leg was still as she worked.
“We’ll just leave this uncovered for a bit, shall we?” she said to herself more than to anyone else. She wet another cloth and wiped his face, neck, and shoulders; he seemed to calm even more. Mr. Stewart set the basin aside and she dipped the corner of yet another cloth in the bowl of water from which they had been keeping his mouth moistened. Again, she was glad to see him swallowing and even spontaneously licking his lips. “Like that, do you?” she asked softly, leaning closer. He turned his face toward the sound of her voice.
“Would you look at that?” Mrs. Hutchins murmured as she put the lamp on a nightstand near the bed. “That’s the first I’ve seen him really respond to anything.”
“It’s a hopeful sign,” Hero said. “I’ll sit with him now. You two go and rest. The sun will be up before we know it.”
With only token protests, the two did as she bade them. Hero placed a clean bandage on the leg wound, then dipped a cloth in the cool water and wiped his brow, his neck, his chest to the edge of the bandage on his ribs, his arms, and his uninjured leg. Tucking the blanket around him, she settled herself in the bedside chair. At least she had had sense enough to leave her knitting here earlier. She reached for the basket under the edge of the bed and inspected her work to pick up the pattern again.
About an hour later her patient began to mutter and thrash about, especially tossing his head from side to side. At first the sounds were soft grunts and moans, but they grew in both frequency and volume. And they became more distinguishable as words or names.
“On your right, Ollie!”
“Over there, Fitz!”
“Stand your ground, men!”
“Hold your fire!”
“Look out, Ollie! Ah, God, Ollie—No! Olliiiiie…” This cry ended on a sob, and an immediate, firm, “No time. Mourn later.”
“Fitz! Take over. There! That cannon!”
Hero quickly set aside her knitting and said to herself, Well, that confirms Papa’s theory about your being a soldier. She moved her chair nearer his head and grabbed the hand nearest her to keep him from flailing it about. “You are safe now,” she said softly, holding his hand in both of hers. “Everyone is safe. Shhh.”
He quieted. When the hand she held relaxed, she thought he had lapsed into real sleep again. Nevertheless, she gave him a bit of water and straightened the blanket covering him. She gazed at him, admiring the regular features of his face, taking in the fading scent of what she had assumed earlier to be his shaving soap, and listening with pleasure to the sound of his regular breathing. She was puzzled by her own sense of protectiveness about this particular patient, especially given the possibility that he might be a lord, as Mrs. Hutchins had suggested. At best, Miss Hero Whitby extended only passing indifference to male members of that element of society. She had long since got over her fear—indeed, her intense dislike—of such men. Still, there were residuals of those feelings that had once dominated her attitude to them.
Nevertheless, this man occupied her thoughts far more than she liked to acknowledge, even to herself. Had he been the first injured man she had ever treated, she could have understood this feeling better. But she knew if she lost him or if he lost his leg—gangrene was still a possibility—that it would be a personal loss for her, a personal failure. What was it about this man that moved her so?
The next day passed pretty much as the first one had, with one significant exception. In the early afternoon Dr. Whitby and his daughter received a visitor who was greeted with a degree of reservation and indifference rather than enthusiasm.
“Mr. Teague,” the doctor said politely, as the man was ushered into the library by Mrs. Hutchins, who had answered the door. The doctor gestured to a barrel-shaped chair for the visitor near the one he himself occupied, with his foot, as usual, propped on a footstool.
Hero rose from the couch where she had been sitting while she and her father discussed their concern over the fact that their patient was still unconscious. “May we offer you some tea or lemonade?” she asked.
“I would welcome a cup of tea.” Teague stood near the chair indicated as Hero stepped out to find Mrs. Hutchins waiting at the library door for the order of a tea tray.
Hero returned and seated herself as Teague too sat down. Teague was a man of medium height, and, approaching his late thirties, was still in reasonably good shape, though in a very few years he would be “portly” at best. He was known to be something of a dandy and was dressed as he probably thought a country squire should dress: in a tweed jacket, brown wool knee pants, and highly polished brown boots. He had a full head of blond hair, which he combed in an attempt to emulate a man of fashion. She knew that he fancied himself something of a ladies’ man and that, indeed, a number of local women found him attractive. He sat back in his chair with one leg crossed over the other and his fingers laced across his midriff.
He looked around the book-lined room as though he were evaluating its contents. “My Lettie would have loved this room,” he offered conversationally.
Hero merely raised an eyebrow, knowing full well that the late Letitia Teague had probably never read a book more challenging than a cheap gothic novel once she left the local dame school. But then the poor woman undoubtedly welcomed any diversion from the petty tyranny of such a husband. Mrs. Teague had died giving birth to her fourth child barely ten months after delivering her third. Four babies in six years had just worn the poor woman out. “I knew ’twas too soon,” she had said on visiting the Whitbys well into her last pregnancy, “but Willard is a hard man to say no to.” The Whitby father and daughter had then exchanged a look of disgust over a bruise on the woman’s face.
Mrs. Hutchins brought in the tea tray and set it on a low table in front of Hero. With her back to their visitor, the housekeeper gave Hero a knowing glance and then departed, according him only a nod in passing.
“Doesn’t say much, does she?” the visitor observed.
Hero busied herself pouring the tea. “Milk? Or lemon?” she asked him, adding milk as he requested, fixing cups for herself and her father, then serving the tea and a plate of biscuits.
“Was there a particular reason for this visit?” Dr. Whitby asked when they had all settled back in their seats.
Teague placed his cup and saucer on a small table near his elbow and sat more erect with his hands on his knees.
“Well, sir, there’s actually two reasons I’ve seen fit to call today.” He gave Hero an oblique look and turned his attention to her father. “My Lettie’s been gone for well over a year and I’ve come to ask your permission to call on Miss Whitby.”
Hero gasped, nearly choking on her tea.
Scarcely noting her reaction, Teague went on. “I know such a request would ordinarily be addressed to the father of a
young miss in private, but as Miss Whitby has been of age these several years, it seems only fair she should know my intentions right up front, so to speak.”
“Well, now,” Dr. Whitby said slowly, setting aside his own tea, “my daughter is of age, as you pointed out, and has a mind of her own, as I am sure you know very well.”
“Yes, sir. But I’m something of an old-fashioned man, and I thought to gain her father’s permission.” Teague’s ingratiating tone belied almost everything Hero knew of the man who was famous for demanding his own way and causing woe to those who crossed him on even the most insignificant matters. He went on, his tone more firm. “A man needs a woman, don’t you know—a helpmeet as the good book says. And there’s not a woman alive but what needs the guiding hand of a man.”
With the fingers of one hand on his forehead and his palm shading his expression from the visitor, Whitby gazed at his daughter, his eyes fairly dancing. Hero glanced away, afraid she would burst into laughter. She allowed a moment of silence, then innocently offered “More tea?” as a way of leaving a response to this preposterous statement to her father, who did, indeed, rise to the occasion.
“As I said, Mr. Teague, my daughter is her own person. I would not presume to tell her whom to befriend. Didn’t do that with her sister; won’t do so with her.”
“Her sister? That’d be Mrs. Tamblin, Milton Tamblin’s wife?” he asked just as though he, as steward of Weyburn Abbey, did not know very well all the Abbey’s farmers.
Neither Hero nor her father responded to this, so Teague blundered on. “The Tamblins have one of Weyburn Abbey’s tenant farms. Couple of miles from my cottage. I always think it’s nice to have family members close by.”
“Even better if said family members have a roof that does not leak,” Hero said before she could stop herself.
“Well, now, that’s a problem that could be remedied easy enough, Miss Whitby.”
Her father apparently decided to rescue her, for he said, “You said there were two reasons for your visit.”
“Ah, yes. The other is this matter of the man I hear you are doctoring. As I am sort of unofficially a deputy to the magistrate in this area, I thought I should check on any stranger, don’t you see?”
Hero snorted inwardly. You mean, she thought, that you have that poor old man bullied into letting you exert undue authority regardless of whether a matter is of any real concern to you. What she said was, “The man is still unconscious.”
Teague continued to address her father. “You got any idea who he is yet?”
“No, we have not,” Dr. Whitby said in what Hero recognized as his “professional” voice. “He came to us in rather bad shape, and he is likely to be incapacitated for some time. Broken bones take time to heal.”
“Maybe he has family that should be notified,” Teague said.
“My daughter and I will handle that issue as soon as he comes to.”
“I… uh…see. Well, let me have a look at him. Might be I know who he is as I get around so much in the county.”
“As you wish,” the doctor said. “Hero?”
She rose and led the way down to the entrance hall, where she picked up Teague’s hat from a side table and handed it to him. “This way, please. Please do not try to talk to him. He moans some, but nothing he says makes much sense at all. He is probably asleep.”
Teague followed her—too close, she thought, and, as they approached the medical rooms, he made an ostentatious show of opening the door for her and “accidentally” brushing her breast as he did so. She quickly stepped away from him and he chuckled. “Taming a woman like you could be a lot of fun.”
“I beg your pardon,” she said coldly. “The patient is in the next room.”
She crossed the surgery and opened the door to the other room, glad to see that the watcher of the moment was Stewart, who greeted the visitor politely but without enthusiasm. “Mr. Teague.”
Teague merely nodded.
“No change, Miss Hero,” Stewart said. “He called out them same names again, but don’t make no sense.”
“Names?” Teague said sharply. “What names?”
“Someone named Ollie an’ another’n named Fitz. We think they’s fellow soldiers,” Stewart explained.
“How d’you know he’s a soldier?” Teague asked.
“We do not know that he is, or was,” Hero said, “but he has some scars that would indicate that sort of life.”
“I see. Well, let me get a look at him.”
Hero pulled the blanket away from the patient’s chin so his face showed to better advantage, feeling as she did so that she was somehow allowing Teague to invade the man’s privacy.
Teague stared long and hard at the figure on the bed, then turned away. “I never saw him before,” he said brusquely. “Let me know if you find out who he is.” He slammed his hat on his head and left abruptly.
“I didn’t wanta say nothin’ in front of Teague,” Stewart said, “but seems to me he ain’t a-sleepin’ so deeply as he was afore.”
“Hmm. I’ll keep watch until suppertime. You need to get at that herb garden while it is still daylight. Get Davey to help you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
After supper that evening, as was their custom, Dr. Whitby and his daughter shared cups of tea and whatever had passed that day.
“You were right, Papa,” Hero said as she handed him his cup of tea prepared exactly as he liked it: milk and just a little sugar.
He reached for the cup. “Fathers are always right, my dear, but about what this time?”
“Our patient must have been a soldier.” She told him about the man’s unconscious ramblings.
“Hmm.” Her father’s expression turned serious. “When he becomes conscious, we should probably watch him quite closely. Maybe try to get him to talk about what happened.”
“Before the Jacobs men found him, you mean?”
“That too, if he remembers it. Sometimes the most recent memories are the hardest to retrieve.”
Hero shifted in her seat across from him. “You mean get him to talk about his experiences in the war?”
“Only so far as he wishes to share those. Sometimes a soldier’s worst wounds don’t show.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “How’d you come to know that, Papa?”
“My cousin James was a few years older than I. He served in America. He came back from his duties there pretty broken up. He’d seen action against both the natives and the colonists. I think it eventually killed him.”
“I thought he died in a riding accident.”
“He did. But it was probably deliberate. We all knew no horse could take that fence.”
She sucked in her breath, appalled. “It was suicide?”
“Mm-hm. Probably. As I say, some wounds just don’t show much.” He stood and placed his cup back on the tea tray. “It is something to consider.” He paused. “With Michael too, maybe—when he comes home.”
“Michael?” She set her own cup on the tray and looked up to hold her father’s worried gaze.
He nodded. “Michael was a battlefield surgeon. He has done and seen things you and I cannot even imagine.”
“You are really worried about him?”
“Maybe not worried precisely, but you are the one who noted the change in tone of his last letters. It’s something to think about.”
“I’m sure Michael will be all right,” she said, recalling her brother’s laughing eyes as he described some experience from his years in medical school in Edinburgh.
“No doubt he will be,” her father said. “And right now we have this fellow to concern ourselves with. I’ll go and check on him now, then I’m off to bed.” He paused at the door and Hero watched the twinkle return to his eyes. “Now. About this development with Teague. I feel I should tell you I would not welcome him as a so
n-in-law.”
Hero gave an unladylike snort. “There is little danger of that! Where on earth might he have come up with such a preposterous idea?”
“Hard to tell with a man like Teague. He sees things as he wants to—and the devil with anyone else. You be careful around him, Hero.”
“I will—and thank you, Papa.” She twisted in her seat to turn up the wick of a lamp on a side table and picked up the book she had laid aside earlier in the day.
Chapter 3
Having taken the last of the night shifts with the still unconscious patient, Hero slept late the next morning. She woke to a small hand patting her shoulder and a slobbery kiss on her cheek.
“C’mon, Auntie H’ro. Wake up. You promised…” a childish voice implored.
Hero opened one eye to gaze fondly at the small four-year-old girl badgering her. “Mm. What did I promise? I do not remember any promise.” She pretended to snuggle back into her bedcovers.
“Riding!” the child squealed. “ʼMember?”
“Ah, yes. But was it Annabelle or Tootie who was to ride with me?” Tootie, Annabelle’s imaginary friend, had joined the household a few months ago. Hero recognized Tootie’s existence as fulfilling a lonely child’s need for a companion in an environment dominated by adults.
“Bofe of us! And Bitsy too.” Annabelle pushed a black-and-white kitten into Hero’s line of vision.
The maid Clara Henson, charged with the care of the little girl, burst into the room. “Oh, Miss Hero, I am so sorry. I turned away for two seconds and she was gone just that quick!”
“Never mind, Clara. I did promise Annabelle we would go riding.”
“An’ Tootie. An’ Bitsy,” Annabelle insisted.
“Oh, but how can they ride?” Hero asked. “Sandy is but one small pony.”
“I’ll hold Bitsy, an’ Tootie can sit ahind me,” Annabelle said.
“That will work for Tootie, but perhaps we should leave Bitsy in the barn to visit with her brothers and sisters.”