Right this moment, he was busy regretting that he’d ever disapproved of her making ether. He would have given anything he possessed to spare her awareness of the next half hour.
The setting sun washed the room in gold, and the blood seeping through her bandages showed dark.
“ALWAYS CONCENTRATE when you’re using a sharp knife,” I said weakly. “You might lose a finger, else. My granny used to say that, and my mother, too.”
My mother had died when I was five, my granny a few years later—but I hadn’t seen her often, as Uncle Lamb spent at least half his time on archaeological expeditions round the world, with me as part of his baggage.
“Did you frequently play with sharp knives as a child?” Denny asked. He smiled, though his eyes stayed fixed on the scalpel he was carefully sharpening on a small oilstone. I could smell the oil, a soft murky scent under the tang of blood and the resinous smell of the unfinished rafters baking overhead.
“Constantly,” I breathed, and shifted my position as slowly as I could. I bit my lip hard and managed to ease my back without groaning aloud. It made Jamie’s knuckles go white when I did.
He was standing by the window at the moment, clutching the sill as he looked out.
Seeing him there, broad shoulders outlined by the sinking sun, brought back a sudden memory, surprising in its sharpness. Or rather, memories, for the layers of experience came back altogether, in a wodge, and I was seeing Jamie rigid with his fear and grief, the slight black figure of Malva Christie leaning toward him—and remembered feeling both a vague affront and a tremendous sense of peace as I began to leave my body, carried on the wings of fever.
I shook the memory off at once, frightened even to think of that beckoning peace. The fear was reassuring; I wasn’t yet so close to death as to find it appealing.
“I’m sure it went through the liver,” I said to Denny, gritting my teeth. “That much blood . . .”
“I’m sure thee is right,” he said, pressing gently on my side. “The liver is a great mass of densely vascularized tissue,” he added, turning to Jamie, who didn’t turn from the window but hunched his shoulders against the possibility of being told anything else of a horrifying nature.
“But the excellent thing about a wound to the liver,” Denny added cheerfully, “is that the liver, unlike the other organs of the body, will regenerate itself—or so thy wife tells me.”
Jamie cast me a brief, haunted look, and went back to staring out the window. I breathed as shallowly as I could, trying to ignore the pain, and trying even harder not to think about what Denny was about to do.
That little exercise in self-discipline lasted about three seconds. If we were all lucky, it would be simple, and quick. He had to widen the bullet’s entrance wound enough to see the direction of its track and to insert a probe along it, in hopes of finding the bullet before he had to dig for it. Then a quick—I could only hope—insertion of whichever one of his jawed forceps looked most appropriate. He had three, of different lengths, plus a davier: good for grasping a rounded object, but the jaws were much bigger than the tips of a forceps and would cause more bleeding.
If it wasn’t simple or quick, I’d very likely be dead within the next half hour. Denny was entirely correct in what he’d told Jamie: the liver is hugely vascularized, an enormous sponge of tiny blood vessels crossed by very large ones like the hepatic portal vein. That’s why the wound, superficially tiny, had bled so alarmingly. None of the major vessels had been damaged—yet—because I would have bled to death in minutes if they had been.
I was trying to breathe shallowly, because of the pain, but had an overwhelming need to draw deep, gasping breaths; I needed oxygen, because of the blood loss.
Sally flitted through my mind, and I seized on thought of her as distraction. She’d survived the amputation, screaming through a leather gag, Gabriel—yes, Gabriel, that was the name of the young man with her—white-eyed as a panicked horse, fighting to hold her steady and not to faint himself. She had fainted, luckily, toward the end—So sucks to you, Ernest, I thought blearily—and I’d left them both in Rachel’s care.
“Where’s Rachel, Denny?” I asked, suddenly thinking to wonder. I thought I’d glimpsed her briefly in the churchyard after I’d been shot, but couldn’t be sure of anything that had happened in that blur of black and white.
Denny’s hand stopped for an instant, the cautery iron he was holding suspended over a tiny brazier he’d set fuming at the end of the sideboard.
“She is searching for Ian, I believe,” he said quietly, and laid the iron very gently in the fire. “Is thee ready, Claire?”
Ian, I thought. Oh, God. He hasn’t come back.
“As I’ll ever be,” I managed, already imagining the stench of burning flesh. Mine.
If the bullet was resting near one of the large vessels, Denny’s probing and grasping could rupture it and I’d hemorrhage internally. The cauterization might cause shock suddenly to set in and assassinate me without warning. Most likely, I’d survive the surgery but die of lingering infection. Consoling thought . . . At least in that case I’d have time to write a brief note to Brianna—and perhaps warn Jamie to be more careful about who he married next time. . . .
“Wait,” Jamie said. He didn’t raise his voice, but there was enough urgency in it to freeze Denny.
I closed my eyes, rested a hand gingerly on the dressing, and tried to envision just where the damned bullet might be. Was it only in the liver, or had it gone all the way through? There was so much trauma and swelling, though, that the pain was generalized over the whole right side of my abdomen; I couldn’t pick out a single, vivid line of bright pain leading to the ball.