And for the first time, he smiled. “Few do.”
She was so glad to see even this spark of life in him.
“It’s Alphonse.” He coughed, dryly, then added, “Now you know why.”
She perched on the side of his bed, careful not to touch his damaged legs, and flattened the paper on her lap. “Is this letter to your family?”
He nodded, and recited an address in West Sussex. She took it down and waited.
“Chers Père et Mère, Je vous écris depuis l’h?pital en Turquie. Je dois vous dire que j’ai eu un accident—une chute de cheval—qui m’a blessé plut?t gravement.”
Eleanor’s pencil hung in the air. It had never crossed her mind that Le Maitre’s family might actually speak in French. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I cannot write in French.” She looked up and saw that he had closed his eyes to focus his thoughts better. “Can you say it in English?”
There was a rattling of wheels at the door of the ward, and several voices engaged in discussion. The hospital was waking up.
“Of course.” His voice was barely a croak. “How silly of me. It’s just that, at home…” He stopped talking, then started again. “My dear mother and father, I am sending you these words from the hospital in Turkey. A friend is writing them down.”
The rattling got louder.
“I’m afraid I was injured…in a fall from my horse.”
Eleanor, scrawling the words down, looked up to see the jug-eared orderly pushing the surgery cart like a flower wagon toward their corner. The other one was carrying a white screen, furled like a sail, under his arm. There was no mistaking their intentions.
“Oh, can’t you wait just a little while?” Eleanor said, rising to her feet.
“Doctor’s orders,” the first one said, as the second dropped the base of the screen onto the floor and quickly spread it out to shield the bed from view. Until Miss Nightingale’s arrival, all amputations had been done in clear view of the other patients. But Miss Nightingale, not only to ensure some measure of privacy for the amputee but to spare the others the full grisly spectacle of what might await them next, had insisted upon the use of these screens.
“The lieutenant has just begun dictating a letter to his family—surely you can attend to someone else first?”
“Eleanor?” Frenchie said, clutching at her sleeve. “Eleanor!”
She turned back to him, and saw that he had drawn a silver cigarette case out from under his mattress.
“Take this!”
It was the same case she had once seen at the Longchamps Club, after the day at the races. It bore the regiment’s grim insignia—a Death’s Head—and its motto, “Or Glory.”
“See that my family gets it—please!”
“But one day you’ll be able to give it to them yourself,” she said, as he pressed it into her hand.
“Missus, we have our work to do,” the burly orderly said.
She let the cigarette case fall into the pocket of her smock, as the white-haired surgeon strode toward the cot. “What’s the obstruction here?” he bellowed, throwing a murderous glance at Eleanor. “We haven’t got all day.” He whipped the sheet away from Frenchie’s mangled leg, inspected the damage for no more than a few seconds, then said, “Taylor, place the block.”
The jug-eared orderly took a wooden chopping block, encrusted with dried blood, and began to wedge it under the leg to be amputated. Frenchie howled in agony.
“Smith, bind his arms.”
“As for you,” the surgeon said to Eleanor, “I do not recall giving permission for Miss Nightingale’s protégées to interfere on my wards.”
“But doctor, I was only—”
“You’ll address me as the Reverend Dr. Gaines, if you must address me at all.”
A cleric and a physician? Even in the short time Eleanor had served at the Barrack Hospital, she had come to dread the devoutly Christian doctors more than any others. While chloroform was, undeniably, in short supply, there was usually some to be found for the amputations, but the more pious surgeons were often opposed to its use. For them, anesthesia of any kind was a novelty, a recent invention that only served to lessen the noble and purifying pain that the Lord had ordained. She turned to look at Frenchie, whose face, now that his leg had been raised, was flushed with blood. His arms had been bound to his sides by ropes passed under the iron bedstead. Taylor was holding a glass of whiskey to his lips, but most of it was dribbling down Frenchie’s quivering chin.
“Give him the mouth guard,” the doctor ordered, as he tied the strings of his white apron behind him, and Taylor took a worn chunk of leather and stuck it between Frenchie’s teeth. “Mind you bite down on that,” Taylor advised, “or you could lose your tongue.” He patted him on the shoulder in an amiable way, then left his hands there, one on each side, as he stood at the head of the bed.