Percy’s handsome face lighted.
“À votre service . . . seigneur,” he said, and bowed again.
AN ALTERNATE USE FOR A PENIS SYRINGE
GERMAIN HAD, IN FACT, found some honey, and now that the excitement of recovering Clarence was over, he produced a large chunk of sticky honeycomb, wrapped in a dirty black kerchief, from the recesses of his shirt.
“What are you going to do wi’ that, Grannie?” he asked, curious. I’d set the oozing chunk of comb in a clean pottery dish and was again employing the useful penis syringe—carefully sterilized with alcohol—to suck up honey, being careful to avoid bits of wax and noticeable pollen grains. Having been designed for irrigation rather than puncture, the syringe had a blunt, smoothly tapered tip: just the thing for dribbling honey into someone’s eye.
“I’m going to lubricate his lordship’s bad eye,” I said. “Fergus, will you come and steady his lordship’s head, please? Put your hand on his forehead. And, Germain, you’ll hold his eyelids open.”
“I can keep still,” John said irritably.
“Be quiet,” I said briefly, and sat down on the stool beside him. “No one can keep still while having things poked into their eye.”
“You were poking your bloody fingers into my eye not an hour since! And I didn’t move!”
“You squirmed,” I said. “It’s not your fault, you couldn’t help it. Now, be quiet; I don’t want to accidentally stab you in the eyeball with this.”
Breathing audibly through his nose, he clamped his mouth shut and suffered Fergus and Germain to immobilize him. I’d debated whether to dilute the honey with boiled water, but the heat of the day had made it sufficiently thin that I thought it better to use it at full strength.
“It’s antibacterial,” I explained to the three of them, using my cautery iron again to lift the eyeball and squirting a slow dribble of honey under it. “That means it kills germs.”
Fergus and Germain, to whom I had explained germs more than once, nodded intelligently and tried to look as though they believed in the existence of such things, which they didn’t. John opened his mouth as though to speak, but then shut it again and exhaled strongly through his nose.
“But the chief virtue of honey in the present instance,” I went on, anointing the eyeball generously, “is that it’s viscous. Let go now, Germain. Blink, John. Oh, very good!” The handling had of course made the eye water, but even dilute honey retains its viscosity; I could see the altered gleam of the light across the sclera, indicating the presence of a thin, soothing—I hoped—layer of honey. Some had overflowed, of course, and amber beads were sliding down his temple toward his ear; I stanched the flow with a handkerchief.
“How does it feel?”
John opened and closed his eye a couple of times, very slowly.
“Everything looks blurry.”
“Doesn’t matter; you aren’t going to be looking out of that eye for a day or two anyway. Does it feel any better?”
“Yes,” he said, in a distinctly grudging manner, and the other three of us made approving noises that made him look embarrassed.
“Right, then. Sit up—carefully! Yes, that’s it. Close your eye and hold this to catch the drips.” And, handing him a clean handkerchief, I unrolled a length of gauze bandage, thumbed a pad of lint carefully into the eye socket, and rolled the bandage round his head a few times, tucking in the ends. He strongly resembled a figure in an old painting titled The Spirit of ’76, but I didn’t mention it.
“All right,” I said, exhaling and feeling rather pleased with myself. “Fergus, why don’t you and Germain go and find some food? Something for his lordship, and something for the road tomorrow. I rather think it will be a long day.”
“This one’s been quite long enough already,” John said. He was swaying a little, and I pushed him gently back down with little resistance. He stretched his neck to ease it, then settled on the pillow with a sigh. “Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure,” I assured him. I hesitated, but, with Fergus’s departure, I didn’t think I’d have a better chance to ask what was in my mind. “I don’t suppose you know what Percival Beauchamp wants with Fergus, do you?”
The good eye opened and looked at me.
“You mean you don’t think he believes Fergus to be the lost heir to a great fortune? No, I don’t, either. But if Mr. Fraser will take a bit of unsolicited advice, I’d strongly suggest having as little as possible to do with Monsieur Beauchamp.” The eye closed again.
Percy Beauchamp had taken his leave—very gracefully—after Clarence’s rescue, explaining that he must attend le marquis but adding that he would seek out Fergus on the morrow.
“When things are quieter,” he’d added, with a genteel bow.
I regarded John thoughtfully.
“What did he do to you?” I asked. He didn’t open his eye, but his lips tightened.
“To me? Nothing. Nothing at all,” he repeated, and turned over on his side with his back to me.
THREE HUNDRED AND ONE
THREE HUNDRED MEN. Jamie stepped into the darkness beyond the 16th New Jersey’s campfire and paused for a moment to let his eyes adjust. Three hundred bloody men. He’d never led a band of more than fifty. And never had much in the way of subalterns, no more than one or two men under him.
Now he had ten militia companies, each with its own captain and a few informally appointed lieutenants, and Lee had given him a staff of his own: two aides-de-camp, a secretary—now, that he could get used to, he thought, flexing the fingers of his maimed right hand—three captains, one of whom was striding along at his shoulder, trying not to look worrit, ten of his own lieutenants, who would serve as liaison between him and the companies under his command, a cook, an assistant cook—and, of course, he had a surgeon already.