First he employs a leather strap as a tourniquet. Then, on the inside of the physic chest’s lid, he lays out the silk twine for tying off blood vessels. He pulls out two small saws and puts them beside the twine. With his head turned away, he reaches back several times until he knows he can grasp a replacement saw without having to think where it is, should the first blade break. Finally he pours the contents of a flask of arak spirit over the wound to wash away as much of the dirt and blood as he can.
Now there is only the action – and for that he does not need to prepare. It is lodged by practice in his memory. Taking up a long-bladed knife, which he knows to be sharp because he hones it as the last task of his working day, he kneels, placing one knee on Norris’s left shin, close to the ankle. The knife slides into the flesh as if by itself, down to the bone in one fast orbit, angled so as to leave a flap of skin to cover the stump. Dropping the knife – no time for tidiness, he can clean it later – Nicholas’s right hand moves back and finds the handle of one saw. He begins to murmur a familiar song:
He sets the saw’s teeth against the bloody bone.
Swift, hard movements, the elbow locked to counter the resistance.
It is not the fastest job he’s ever done, but speedy enough. By the end of the third verse the limb is lying in the bloodied grass, like the cast-offs after a butchery session at the Mutton Lane shambles. Norris’s men seem unwilling to approach it, as though it’s an evil talisman. Nicholas picks it up by the ankle and throws it away into the fog. ‘Well, he won’t need it now, will he?’ he says with a grim laugh in answer to their stares. ‘We’re not at Whitehall. There’ll be no dancing the volta for a while for any of us.’
His words bring him up with a start. He realizes how easily he has fallen back into the black humour that had been the lingua franca of his days in the Low Countries – the soldier’s antidote to the pain of cruel experience.
‘I suppose he won’t be needing both of these now,’ says the man who carried Norris, holding up one of the bloodied leg greaves, before letting it drop back onto the grass with a clatter.
‘That was a fine piece of carvery, Doctor,’ says another in admiration.
They’ve accepted me, thinks Nicholas. At least now they won’t seek revenge if Norris dies. I’ve seen that happen before.
‘Will you stay with him, sir?’ another asks.
‘I take it that Sir Henry is not the only man hurt today. There must be others for me to attend.’
‘We’ll go together,’ says Henshawe. ‘But we’ll need this damnable fog to lift if we’re to recover those who cannot walk back. If any are lying out there, I fear the rebels will not have shown them much mercy.’
A blood-red sun has lifted above the fog, thinning it into misty tendrils by the time Nicholas and his barber-surgeons have accounted for the wounded – some dozen men. None is as badly hurt as Norris, though almost all of them stare in terror at the indistinct figures approaching until the English voices reassure them. They have good reason. Several of the dead Nicholas encounters look as though their throats have been slit whilst lying immobilized from their wounds. Walking beside Oliver Henshawe, he cannot help but remember the bodies he had seen at the wreck site. What is it about this island, he wonders, that makes men forget the principle of mercy? Does hatred grow with the roots of the grass, the bracken, the heather, the trees themselves?
He is still wondering when he hears the cry go up, ‘The baggage train! They’ve fallen upon the baggage train!’
Nicholas stands in the shadows and stares in disbelief at the devastation. Now he understands the source of the noises he had heard in the forest on his way to treat Sir Henry Norris. A fleeing band of rebels have stumbled upon the encampment of the supply column. Too few – and too pressed for time to commit wholesale massacre – they have launched a spiteful little attack. Several tents have been pulled down and trampled. The cooking cauldrons have been overturned and their contents spilled. Grain sacks have been slashed open, a few of the smaller wagons looted. The oxen for the artillery have been set loose and chased off. And five camp-followers – all women – lie dead in the mud.
The tent Nicholas shared with Bianca is still standing. But she is nowhere to be seen. With mounting dread, he goes from body to body.
Later, he will confess to himself his shame for the surge of relief when each one turned out not to be her. But at this moment he is faced with one last place to search for her. He almost dares not look inside the tent, for fear of what he might find there.
The air inside the tent is sultry, heated by the morning sun. It feels like a physical barrier, resisting him as he enters, preventing the breath from leaving his lungs. A vision of blood and white skin reels before his eyes – and then is gone.
All the balms, pastes and medicines have vanished, as valuable as food to a fleeing rebel who lives off the land and has no recourse to an apothecary, a physician or a hospital. A few other useful items have been taken. Everything else is left untouched.
And of Bianca there is no trace.
30
How can the leader of a rebellion have time to spare for a cantankerous young woman of the Spanish nobility, even an ailing one? Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, might be forgiven for having more pressing claims on his attention. Yet he has come to sit by her bedside more times than Cachorra can count. She knows the answer to her own question well enough. He thinks Constanza Calva de Sagrada is the daughter of an emissary sent by Spain to aid him in his battle against the heretic English queen.
‘My physicians have done their best,’ Tyrone says sadly as he takes his leave after his latest visit. ‘I wish they could do more. Let me know if your mistress sickens further. I will call a priest to perform the Viaticum.’
‘In Spain we have wise women skilled in ancient cures,’ she tells him. ‘Do you not have such people in Ireland?’
Tyrone laughs, his craggy face showing a benevolence that surprises her. ‘Aye, we have as many wise women as we have poets and storytellers. Sadly, their arts are just as ephemeral. Some people will swear they can raise Lazarus from the dead, if you promise them enough gold half-crowns.’ He pauses at the chamber door. ‘Then there is the lack of roads, and the marauding English to consider.’
Constanza burbles in the deep fathoms of her unconsciousness, her skin shiny and wet to the touch. To Cachorra, she has become a child to be pitied rather than a trial to be borne, a tyrant to be despised. The change has as much to do with Cachorra’s understanding of what it is to be defenceless as with the silent vow she made to Don Rodriquez to serve and protect his daughter. ‘There must be something you can do,’ she says, almost pleadingly.
‘I have caused the word to be spread amongst the chieftains: that the O’Neill has urgent need of a skilful healer. Let us pray – for the sakes of both your mistress and my cause – that they find one before it’s too late.’
Today, having no tasks that cannot be delayed for a few hours, Ned Monkton walks the three miles to Camberwell. The summer sunshine lifts his spirits better than a bottle of aqua vitae. The meadows beside the lane hum their approval into the languorous air. The larks trill at him, urging him forward, congratulating him. He grins with pleasure, not just at the brightness of the day, but for the man he has become.