I did the same for his friend, a man from Pennsylvania named Neph Brewster, who was suffering from dysentery, though I added a small handful of Dr. Rawling’s Bowel-Bind mixture before handing over the cup.
“Jeb ain’t meanin’ no disrespect to you, ma’am,” Neph whispered, leaning confidentially close as he took the drink. “It’s only as he can’t shit ’thout help, and that ain’t somethin’ he wants to ask a lady. Mr. Denzell or the Doc don’t come by soon, I’ll help him, though.”
“Shall I fetch one of the orderlies?” I asked, surprised. “They’re just outside.”
“Oh, no, ma’am. Once the sun goes down, they figure as how they’re off duty. Won’t come in, save there’s a fight or the tent catches fire.”
“Hmm,” I said. Plainly attitudes among medical orderlies weren’t that different from one time to another.
“I’ll find one of the surgeons,” I assured him; Mr. Brewster was thin and yellow, and his hand shook so badly that I had to put my own fingers round his to help him drink. I doubted he could stand long enough to manage his own necessities, let alone help Corporal Shoreditch with his. Mr. Brewster was game, though.
“Shittin’ is somethin’ I can claim to have some skill at by now,” he said, grinning at me. He wiped his face with a trembling hand and paused between swallows to breathe heavily. “Ah … might you have a bit o’ cooking grease to hand, ma’am? My arsehole’s raw as a fresh-skinned rabbit. I can put it on myself—unless you’d like to help, o’ course.”
“I’ll mention it to Dr. Hunter,” I replied dryly. “I’m sure he’d be delighted.”
I finished my rounds quickly—most of the men were asleep—and went in search of Denny Hunter, who I found outside his own tent, bundled up against the cold with a muffler round his neck, dreamily listening to a ballad being sung at a nearby campfire.
“Who?” He came out of his trance at my appearance, though it took him a moment to return fully to earth. “Oh, Friend Jebediah, to be sure. Of course—I’ll go at once.”
“Have you got any goose or bear grease?”
Denny settled his spectacles more firmly on his nose, giving me a quizzical look.
“Friend Jebediah is not constipated, is he? I understood his difficulty to be more one of engineering than of physiology.”
I laughed, and explained.
“Oh. Well. I do have some ointment,” he said doubtfully. “But it is mentholated—for the treatment of grippe and pleurisy, thee knows. I fear that will do Friend Brewster’s arse no favors.”
“I fear not,” I agreed. “Why don’t you go and help Mr. Shoreditch, and I’ll find a bit of plain grease and bring it along?”
Grease—any kind of grease—was a staple of cooking, and it took only two inquiries at campfires to procure a cup of it. It was, the donor informed me, rendered possum fat. “Greasier than grease,” the lady assured me. “Tasty, too.” This last characteristic was unlikely to be of much interest to Mr. Brewster—or at least I hoped not—but I thanked her effusively and set off through the darkness, back toward the small hospital tent.
At least I intended to head in that direction. The moon had not yet risen, though, and within a few minutes I found myself on a thickly wooded hillside that I didn’t remember, stumbling over roots and fallen branches.
Muttering to myself, I turned left—surely that was… No, it wasn’t. I stopped, cursing silently. I couldn’t be lost; I was in the middle of a campground containing at least half the Continental army, to say nothing of dozens of militia companies. Exactly where I was on said campground, though… I could see the glimmer of several fires through the trees, but the configuration of them seemed unfamiliar. Disoriented, I turned the other way, straining my eyes in search of the patched roof of Colonel Martin’s large tent, that being the biggest landmark likely to be visible in the darkness.
Something ran over my foot, and I jerked in reflex, slopping liquefied possum fat over my hand. I gritted my teeth and wiped it gingerly on my apron. Possum fat is extremely greasy, its major drawback as a general-purpose lubricant being that it smells like dead possum.
My heart was beating fast from the shock and gave a convulsive leap when an owl came out of the copse to my right, a piece of the night taking sudden silent flight a few feet from my face. Then a branch cracked suddenly, and I heard the movements of several men, murmuring together as they pushed through the undergrowth nearby.
I stood quite still, teeth set in my lower lip, and felt a wave of sudden, irrational terror.
It’s all right! I told myself, furious. It’s only soldiers looking for a shortcut. No threat, no threat at all!
Tell that to the Marines, my nervous system replied, at the sound of a muffled curse, the scuffle and crunch of dry leaves and breaking branches, and the sudden kicked-melon thump of a solid object meeting someone’s head. A cry, the crash of a falling body, and hurried rustling as the thieves rifled their victim’s pockets.
I couldn’t move. I wanted desperately to run but was rooted to the spot; my legs simply wouldn’t respond. It was exactly like a nightmare, with something terrible coming my way but no ability to move.
My mouth was open, and I was exerting all my strength to keep from screaming, while at the same time terrified that I couldn’t scream. My own breathing was loud, echoing inside my head, and all of a sudden I felt my throat harsh with swallowed blood, my breath labored, nostrils blocked. And the weight on me, heavy, amorphous, crushing me into ground rough with stones and fallen pinecones. I felt hot breath in my ear.
There, now. I’m sorry, Martha, but you got to take it. I got to give it to you. Yeah, there… oh, Christ, there… there…
I didn’t remember falling to the ground. I was curled into a ball, face pressed to my knees, shaking with rage and terror. Crashing in the brush nearby, several men passed within a few feet of me, laughing and joking.
And then some small fragment of my sanity spoke up in the recesses of my brain, cool as dammit, dispassionately remarking, Oh, so that’s a flashback. How interesting.
“I’ll show you interesting,” I whispered—or thought I did. I don’t believe I made a sound. I was fully dressed—swaddled against the cold—I could feel the cold on my face, but it made no difference. I was naked, felt cool air on my br**sts, my thighs—between my thighs …
I clamped my legs together as tightly as I could and bit my lip as hard as I could. Now I really did taste blood. But the next thing didn’t happen. I remembered it vividly. But it was a memory. It didn’t happen again.
Very slowly, I came back. My lip hurt, and I was drooling blood; I could feel the gouge, a loose flap of flesh in my inner lip, and taste silver and copper, as though my mouth was filled with pennies.
I was breathing as though I’d run a mile, but I could breathe; my nose was clear, my throat soft and open, not bruised, not abraded. I was drenched in sweat, and my muscles hurt from being clenched so hard.
I could hear moaning in the brush to my left. They didn’t kill him, then, I thought dimly. I supposed I should go and see, help him. I didn’t want to, didn’t want to touch a man, see a man, be anywhere near one. It didn’t matter, though; I couldn’t move.
I was no longer frozen in the grip of terror; I knew where I was, that I was safe—safe enough. But I couldn’t move. I stayed crouched, sweating and trembling, and listened.
The man groaned a few times, then rolled slowly over, branches rustling.
“Oh, shit,” he mumbled. He lay still, breathing heavily, then sat up abruptly, exclaiming, “Oh, shit!”—whether at the pain of the movement or the memory of the robbery, I didn’t know. There was mumbled cursing, a sigh, silence… then a shriek of pure terror that hit my spinal cord like a jolt of electricity.
Mad scrambling sounds as the man scuffled to his feet—why, why, what was going on? Crashing and rattling of flight. Terror was infectious; I wanted to run, too, was on my feet, my heart in my mouth, but didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t hear anything above that idiot’s crashing. What was bloody out there?
A faint rustle of dry leaves made me jerk my head round—and saved me by a split second from having a heart attack when Rollo thrust his wet nose into my hand.
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I exclaimed, relieved at the sound of my own voice. The sound of rustling footsteps came toward me through the leaves.
“Oh, there ye are, Auntie.” A tall presence loomed up, no more than a shadow in the dark, and Young Ian touched my arm. “Are ye all right, Auntie?” There was an anxious tone in his voice, bless him.
“Yes,” I said rather faintly, then with more conviction, “Yes. I am. I got turned about, in the dark.”
“Oh.” The tall figure relaxed. “I thought ye must have lost your way. Denny Hunter came and said ye’d gone off to find some grease but ye’d no come back, and he was worrit for ye. So Rollo and I came to find ye. Who was yon fellow that Rollo scared the bejesus out of?”
“I don’t know.” The mention of grease made me look for the cup of possum grease. It was on the ground, empty and clean. From the lapping noises, I deduced that Rollo, having finished off what was in the cup, was now tidily licking the dead leaves on which grease had spilled when I dropped it. Under the circumstances, I didn’t feel I could really complain.
Ian bent and scooped up the cup.
“Come back to the fire, Auntie. I’ll find some more grease.”
I made no demur at this and followed him down off the hillside, paying no real attention to my surroundings. I was too occupied in rearranging my mental state, settling my feelings, and trying to regain some kind of equilibrium.
I’d heard the word “flashback” only briefly, in Boston in the sixties. We didn’t call it flashback earlier, but I’d heard about it. And I’d seen it. Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second. It’s what happens when you live through things you shouldn’t have been able to live through and can’t reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.
Well, I did, I said defiantly to myself. So you can just get used to it. I wondered for an instant who I was talking to and—quite seriously—whether I was losing my mind.
I certainly remembered what had happened to me during my abduction years before. I’d have strongly preferred not to but knew enough about psychology not to try to suppress the memories. When they showed up, I looked carefully at them, doing deep-breathing exercises, then stuffed them back where they’d come from and went to find Jamie. After a time, I found that only certain details showed up vividly: the cup of a dead ear, purple in the dawn light, looking like an exotic fungus; the brilliant burst of light I’d seen when Harley Boble had broken my nose; the smell of corn on the breath of the teenaged idiot who’d tried to rape me. The soft, heavy weight of the man who did. The rest was a merciful blur.