Her grandfather had left drains in the wounds, thick black horse hairs that stuck stiffly out between the stitches. She drew one now, and Mungo gasped but did not flinch. A weak little trickle of watery pus followed the hair Out. She stooped and sniffed it and grimaced. This was not the rich creamy pus that the ancients had called "pus bonum et laudabile". From the stink of it, gangrene was not far off. She felt a little icy splinter of dread, and immediately wondered at it, surely there were no feelings left in her for this man.
"Tell me how it happened?"
"That, doctor, is my business."
"Dirty business, I have no doubt," she snapped. "And I want no lurid account of it, but if I am to locate the ball I must know where you were in relationship to the weapon that was fired at you, the type of weapon, the weight and charge "Of course," he said quickly. "Your grandfather did not bother to enquire."
"Leave my grandfather out of it."
"The man used a pistol; it looked like a single-action Remington army model, in which case the ball would be.44, Of lead, cone-shaped, weight one fifty grains, and driven by black powder."
"Low penetration, break up of the ball if it hit bone," she muttered.
"The man was lying on the ground, about twenty-five paces distant, and I was in the act of dismounting from my horse, this leg raised "He was ahead of you."
"Slightly ahead and on my right hand."
Robyn nodded. "This will hurt." And ten minutes later she stood back and called, "missis Sint John." As soon as Louise entered, she said, "I shall operate as soon as the light is good enough tomorrow morning. I shall need your assistance. I warn you now that even if I am successful, your husband will not recover full use of the leg. He will always have a pronounced limp."
"And if you are unsuccessful?"
"The degeneration will accelerate, mortification and gangrene "You are frank, doctor," Louise whispered.
"Yes," Robyn agreed. "I always am., Robyn could not sleep, but she reminded herself that she seldom could on the eve of an operation under anaesthetic. Chloroform was such an unpredictable substance, the margins of safety were frighteningly narrow, overdosage, too high a concentration or inadequate oxygenation, would lead to primary collapse with fatal depression of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.
She lay beside Clinton in the darkness and ran through a mental list of her preparations for the morrow, and set her mind on the procedures she must adopt. Firstly she must re-open and find the source of the mortification.
She moved and Clinton stirred beside her and muttered in his sleep. She froze and waited for him to settle.
The distraction altered the direction of her thoughts, and she found she was thinking about the man and not the patient. For a while she tried to prevent it, and then gave in.
She remembered him on his quarter-deck, the white linen shirt open to the throat and his chest hair curling out of the V, his head thrown back to hail the masthead, the thick dark mane of his hair rippling in the wind.
Then suddenly she remembered that morning when she slipped out of her cabin and stepped out onto Huron's main-deck. He had been under the deck pump, while two seamen worked the handles, and clear sea water hissed over him as he stood naked under the jet.
She remembered his body and the way he smiled at her without attempting to cover it from her gaze. Then abruptly she remembered his eyes, those flecked yellow eyes above her in the gloom of the cabin, eyes like those of a leopard.
She moved again, and this time Clinton came half awake. He said her name and threw one arm across her at the level of her waist. For a while she lay quiescent under his arm and then slowly she reached down and drew up the hem of her nightdress. She took Clinton's wrist lightly and guided his hand downwards. She felt him come fully awake, heard his breathing change and his hand went on without her insistence.
Long ago she had learned, painfully, that there were limits to the restraint that she could exercise over her unruly sensuality. So now she closed her eyes, relaxed her limbs and let her imagination run unchecked.
She drank only a cup of the hot coffee substitute that she had concocted of roasted sorghum and wild honey and while she did so she composed her mind by glancing through her notes.
She always found comfort in Celsus'injunctions, somehow the fact that they were written around the time of Christ made them more poignant.
Now a surgeon, the chirugus, should be youthful or at any rate closer to youth than age, with a strong and steady hand that never trembles, ready to use left hand as well as right, with vision sharp and clear and spirit undaunted... Then there was Galen, the surgeon of the gladiators, the Roman who had stored all his experience in twenty-two volumes. Robyn had read them in the original Greek, and extracted the pearls of his genius, which she had used with great success in treating the gladiatorialtype wounds of Lobengula's young men. Though she had substituted alum for corn, iodine for pigeon dung, and carbolic acid for lamp black and oil in the fight against inflammation and mortification.
The kind of trauma that faced her now as she bowed over the long table in the church was much like those described by Galen, though caused by a different projectile. Mungo Sint John's hoarse, muffled breathing was the only sound in the quiet church. Robyn tested the depth of his coma by pricking his finger with a probe, and then immediately lifted the mask of plaited bamboo and lint from his nose and mouth.
Then she listened to his breathing as it eased, and found herself examining his face as she had not been able to while he was conscious. He was still a handsome man, despite the missing eye and marks of pain and of advancing age etched into his face. Louise Sint John had borrowed Clinton's straight razor the previous day.
Mungo Sint John was clean-shaven now, and suddenly she realized that the new lines in his face and the silver wings above his temples accentuated the power of the man, while at the same time the relaxation of his mouth gave him a childlike innocence which made the breath catch in her throat.
Clinton looked across at her, and she turned her face away quickly before he could see her expression.
"Are you ready, madam?" Robyn made her voice cold and businesslike, and Louise nodded. She was very pale, the fine freckles standing out in sharp contrast on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.
Still Robyn hesitated. She knew that she was squandering the moments during which the chloroform was having its blessed effect, but she was seized by a terrible dread. For the first time in her life she was afraid to wield the knife, and a thought transfixed her.
Iff you once love a man, can you ever cease entirely to do so?"
She dared not look again at Mungo Sint John's sleeping face; she felt she must turn and run from the church.
"Are you unwell, doctor?" Louise Sint John's concern steeled her. She would not let this woman suspect weakness in her.
The leg was painted dark yellow brown with tincture of iodine. It looked like a rotten banana. She snipped her grandfather's stitches and the wound fell open. She saw the depth of the ulceration, and knew from dreadful experience that a wound like this would never heal, even by second intention. Her main task was not to find the pistol ball but to repair this damage.
She went in deeper, down past the thick pulsing snake of the femoral artery, down to the bone, the bared femur, and again she felt her spirits quail. The bone was malformed, yellow and cheesy.
She guessed at the cause, this was where the pistol ball had struck and been deflected away. It had struck a long splinter of bone off the femur, and she picked something out of the dead stinking tissue with the forceps and held it up to the light from the window.
It was a flake of black lead. She dropped it into the bucket under the table and bent once more over the open chasm in mungo's flesh. There was hardly any blood, a few drops only from the stitches, and the rest of it was slimy yellow matter smelling like a corpse.