Everything smelled of fishes, for some reason, as well as old blood. She did not even want to set her hands upon these tools when they were so dirty. She sent Doyle to the running stream with soap, to clean them for her. She was feeling Rom at this moment. She would not wash them in a basin. The Rom do not wash in stagnant water.
Then she turned to touch Adrian, to know what was what with him. He had stripped to the waist. He sat on the ground while Grey cut away the bandage.
“Chère Annique, if I’d known you were going to cut into me, I’d have let you finish your coffee this morning.” He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips to kiss. It was hard to believe he was not a Gascon. “How did Grey talk you into this?”
“It was entirely the other way around. Grey fought tooth and nail for the privilege of seeking bullets in you. But I was insistent.” He would laugh on the gallows, this one. “If you have not taken the opium, you should do that. We must wait a time, you understand, after you take it. I would not have you discussing with me the price of green beans or the weather when I am working. I am easily distracted.”
Grey said, “He won’t take it.”
Adrian’s arm moved. He was shaking his head, she thought. “If I took enough to do any good, I’d be stupid for days. Leblanc’s looking for somebody wounded. Make me groggy, and I’m dead.”
“I bloody well hate it when he’s right, don’t you?” Doyle said.
“I’m always right. Annique…Fox Cub…I won’t take opium. If I drank enough brandy to knock me out, it’d probably kill me. So it’s nothing at all. Can you do this?”
“Oh yes,” she said at once. “I have hunted out bullets, often and often. I am fast as lightning, me.” Mon Dieu, could they know what it would be like? It is the stuff of nightmares to operate with no opium at all. Truly, Adrian was like her in this—the good fairies had not attended his cradle to scatter blessings upon him. “Always they run out of opium before they run out of men with holes in them. One copes.”
“Nothing like practice. Here’s this lot, clean.” Doyle started laying instruments into her hand, one at a time so she did not slice herself.
“I am in the medical tents of the losing side, generally, so we have many wounded.” She dried the scissors with a strip of bandage and clipped through the cloth, testing. They were sharp. “I have been diligently spying upon the Milanese and Austrians who lose battles with some regularity. It has been most odd, all these years, dodging so many completely French bullets.”
There was a good supply of bandages. If she needed more than this, she would have killed Adrian anyway. “If you will lie down, Monsieur Adrian, I will be able to reach you. I am not a giantess.”
She hitched herself close to Adrian, to a position where she could work. Her tools made a neat row on the blanket. She picked them up and put them down till she could find everything without thought. Then she laid a cloth across. It was better Adrian did not spend his time looking at this. Sharp, shiny metal is wearing to the soul. She lifted a stack of bandages into her lap where they would be handy. She must concentrate now and think only of what must be done.
Adrian’s upper chest was nearly hairless, with hard muscles, set rigid in pain. He flinched when she first laid hands upon him, then took a deep breath and did not react again while she examined. The skin around the site of entry was noticeably hot. The mouth of the wound was damp and smelled of infection—the ordinary kind, not the rotting, sweet sort that means death.
Doyle settled on the boy’s right, large and comforting. Grey moved to take the other side. They were not holding him down yet. Soon they would have to. She had operated without opium before.
“Monsieur Doyle, I will show you where I want your hands.”
“There’s one thing we’ll do first,” Grey said. “I’m going to talk to Adrian. It’ll take a few minutes. You get comfortable.”
Almost, she hissed in exasperation. “You have had a whole morning to talk.” Every moment they delayed made it worse. Did they think their Adrian was constructed of imperturbable courage? Did they think she was?
“We’re going to try something I saw in Vienna. It may help.” He leaned close, talking to the boy. “The way you do this, Adrian, is you just relax and listen to me. That’s how we start, remember. You listen to what I’m saying.”
It seemed she must wait until this was done. She called to her mind a picture of the blood vessels in the chest. They ran so…and so. With luck, she would avoid them.
This was her great gift, this memory of hers. Any page she had read, any street she had crossed, any face in a crowd—they all came back to her perfect and exact when she called. Other people forgot things. She did not. That was why Vauban had given her the Albion plans in the small inn in Bruges when Leblanc came to extort and threaten. She had put the plans into her memory and burned each page, one by one, as she read. Her memory was why Maman had taken her everywhere, even when she was a child. Her head was stuffed with the secrets of many nations.
Fortunately, her memory also contained anatomical charts. The upper chest is far from the worst spot to be hit in, if the bullet is not deep, which must be so, because Adrian still lived.
Grey plodded on and on with his so-necessary conversation. She did not pay attention, since it did not concern her and was very dull. He was saying, “We’ll try this for a while, the first parts, anyway, and see how it goes. It’s easy to get started. You’re going to breathe slow and listen to what I’m saying.”
“It feels stupid,” Adrian said. “I’ll try. But the gods know I feel like an idiot.”
“You’re not going to do anything stupid, Hawker. Only what you want to do. You’re the one in charge. I’m just here to help you with what you’re doing to yourself. You lie there and feel the breathing. That’s how you do it. In and out. Now in. Now out. You feel the breathing. That’s all you feel.”
Grey repeated himself in an exceedingly boring way, which gave her no very high opinion of his powers of conversation. She finished thinking about the blood vessels in the chest and sat quietly, with her hands resting in her lap, letting her thoughts drift.
“Your eyes get tired in all this sunlight. You can close them.” Having found another subject of stultifying monotony, Grey droned on and on.
The next thing she knew, somebody was shaking her. Grey.
“Yes. You. Wake up, Annique. That’s it. Wide awake. You feel fine, Annique, and you are fully awake.”
She seemed to have fallen asleep sitting up.
“Of course I am awake.” Her legs had gone numb beneath her. “I am resting while you chatter so endlessly.” She did not keep sarcasm out of her voice. “I had a difficult night.”
“You are what is called an excellent subject,” he said, incomprehensibly. “Adrian, on the other hand, is not. I saw this done a couple times in Vienna, but I’ve never tried it. There’s a man there, uses it in surgery. Let’s hope it works.”
“You are through talking to him?”
“I’ll keep talking. You ignore what I say and do what you have to. Very definitely ignore me. I don’t want you nodding off again.”
“Then hold him.”
She showed them how she wanted him pinned. Doyle held his arm down and the shoulder. Grey took the other side, leaning his full weight on top, all the time talking and talking to Adrian—something about the pain being far away on the other side of a wall. Such bizarre stuff. She would ignore it.
“Do not let him move.” Then she trusted them to do their work and did not think about it again. There were many thoughts to dismiss from her mind. Most of all she must not think of Adrian. Beneath her hands was muscle and bone and skin. Not Adrian.
She took a minute to explore the site from outside, testing the surface of the skin with her fingers. Good. That was the bullet. That lump. They had been incredibly lucky. It lay high in the chest, superficial, just below the collarbone, at the second rib, lodged against bone. The entry path was oddly slanted, as if he’d been shot by someone below him. The lead had not torn into the lung beneath.