While we were waiting he dug into the bag again and laid out more equipment in a precise line on a piece of sterile cloth. A pack of forceps, stainless steel kidney-shaped dishes, black suture, and thin curved needles, like the unsheathed claws of a small but lethal cat.
“The adrenaline with the anaesthetic should help to stop the bleeding when I’ve completed the extraction,” my father said to Jacob, nodding to his array of tools, “but you’ll need to be ready with that swab anyway, just in case.”
He seemed to be ignoring me. I doubt I would have been much use as a scrub nurse, anyway. I didn’t want to watch as he pulled back the skin round the entry site and slid the tips of the forceps into the wound, but I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away. It seemed so barbaric.
Even Sean turned his head, preferring to stare into Clare’s fearful face as she sat on the other side of the table, still clutching his fingers. The knuckles of both their entwined hands had turned white.
The look of concentration on my father’s face as he probed the wound was profound. The time ticked by, but he refused to be hurried, making absolutely sure he had a firm grip on the bullet before he attempted to withdraw it along the same track it had followed on the way in.
When the squat, misshapen round finally emerged in a fresh welter of blood, he dropped it with a clang into the waiting dish that Jacob held out for him. The five of us let out our breath in a collective gush at its successful delivery.
My father dealt with the cleaning out and closing up process with an efficiency born of long practise, leaving a neat line of stitches as the only evidence of his invasion. Then he stood back and nodded once, as if pleased with his own handiwork.
While he taped a dressing in place over the stitches I picked the bloodied bullet out of the dish and turned it round in my fingers. The copper outer jacket of the slug had compressed to less than half its original length, mushrooming slightly. It was deformed from the initial contact with whatever had deflected its path, sent it spinning into Sean’s body.
I glanced up, found him watching me, and held the bullet up so he could see it. “It’s a nine millimetre,” I said, and the significance of that wasn’t lost on him.
It rang no bells with my father, though. He unhooked the now-empty bag of saline and withdrew the cannula. “Perhaps there’s somewhere a little more comfortable where we can move the patient to rest?” he asked Jacob.
Jacob suggested the living room, where there was a fire burning and the sofa was large enough to sleep on. Clare jumped up again and went in search of spare pillows and bedding. Between the rest of us we managed to get Sean on his feet and half-walk, half-carry him the short distance to the living room.
“He’s had enough morphine to keep him quiet tonight,” my father said, “but you’ll need to watch him fairly carefully. I’d like to think I’ve cleaned the wound out completely, but there’s always the chance that any clothing debris pulled into it will lead to infection. I’ll leave you a course of antibiotics, but if he starts showing any signs, you’re going to have to get him to a hospital, whatever the consequences. Do you understand me?”
It was my turn to say, stiffly, “Yes sir.”
Clare offered to sit with Sean for a while and Jacob, recognising that there were things that needed to be said, went to keep her company, quietly closing the door behind him.
My father moved back through to the kitchen, peeling off his gloves as he went. When I followed he was scrubbing his hands thoroughly at the butler’s sink. I watched him without speaking until he was done.
“So, Charlotte, are you going to tell me what happened?” he said carefully then, wiping his hands on a towel with vigorous efficiency.
“It’s a long story,” I said wearily.
There was a pause as he waited for me to continue. I didn’t.
He turned. “Did you shoot him?”
I couldn’t work out if I should be flattered or affronted by the question. “If I had done, he’d be dead,” I said, matter of fact, without bravado. “No, I didn’t shoot him.”
He raised a dubious eyebrow at that. “Really? I would have thought Sean Meyer was a prime candidate for it.”
“Why?”
He made an impatient gesture. “He ruined you, Charlotte, in more ways than one,” he said. It should have sounded ridiculously old-fashioned, but from him somehow it didn’t. What did surprise me was the vehemence in his tone.
“I never knew you cared,” I said lightly.
His face tightened at that, the only outward display. “Of course we cared – and still care – about you. Your mother and I had to stand by and watch you go through the torments of hell twice over because of that man.”
“I knew having a fling with Sean when he was my instructor was against the rules, and it was stupid, with hindsight, but it was my choice,” I argued. “But it wasn’t his fault that I was attacked. He wasn’t even on camp when it happened.”
“Has it never occurred to you that perhaps the very reason you were singled out as a victim by the men who raped you,” my father demanded now, “was because they found out about your relationship with Meyer?”
I tried not to flinch. He may have seen it anyway, because his voice softened slightly. “I know you weren’t allowed to say much about it, but you were doing well at your course, weren’t you? Better than most of the men you were training alongside, as I recall.”
“The marks I scored were on my own merits,” I said, suddenly defensive. Sean had been famously tough as an instructor, and not just on me. They said that if he didn’t lose a few trainees from every intake on medical grounds, he was a disappointed man.
He had seemed to know instinctively where everyone’s own personal breaking point lay, just so he could drive you up to and beyond it.
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that you received any sort of preferential treatment,” my father commented. He folded the towel neatly, put it on the draining board. “But what better salve to their wounded egos than to imagine that it wasn’t talent drawing you ahead, but good old-fashioned sex? And what better way for them to reassert their male superiority than the somewhat violent method they chose?”
I shook my head. “Sean didn’t betray me,” I said, “but then, you already knew that, didn’t you?”
He’d been gathering the soiled equipment he’d used, stowing it into his bag, and his momentary stillness told me what I needed to know. The last vital piece of the jigsaw dropped into place, and the picture suddenly became painfully, blindingly clear.
“After I was – after it happened,” I said, annoyed at the way I faltered, “it was my mother who rang camp asking for Sean, wasn’t it? Who else would have wanted to accuse him of letting harm come to me, of not standing up for me at the court martial? But he’d been posted before any of it happened and he didn’t know.”
I met his eyes steadily, and pressed on. “Whoever she spoke to put two and two together. It was only afterwards that she must have realised what she’d done, when they paraded the information at the civil trial. That’s why she didn’t support my appeal, isn’t it? In case it all came out that she’d been disloyal to her own daughter.”
It was a long speech, and it was greeted by a wary silence. My father sank down onto the kitchen chair next to him, suddenly looking every year of his age, defeated.
He sighed, heavily, before he went on. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know. She went through hell wanting to confess, but your relationship was so bad by that time that she didn’t see it would help. I persuaded her not to tell you.” He looked up at me, as though resigned to accusations, and bitter rhetoric. “What do you propose to do now, Charlotte?”