Carla Kelly Page 17

“My dear, through the years I have become a great observer. If I cannot explain human nature without exposing my own hypocrisy, I can at least watch it. I have been observing your husband. Are you aware of how often he looks at you?”

  “Well…no…I…Oh, monsieur, he is concerned for all of us!”

  “Or how often you look at him?”

  She could think of nothing to say. Leger released her hand and stood up to stretch. “I am finally too old to sit on cold church steps, even with a charming lady. Good night, my dear. Do think about what I said concerning the redoubtable Captain Randall. And the rest? Take this lesson: We know not what burdens others bear, do we?”

  No, we do not, she thought. She was still sitting on the step when her husband returned with the priest. He sank down onto the step beside her. The priest touched his shoulder, and went inside. “I had an interesting experience,” he said finally.

  You did? she wanted to ask. I am beginning to wonder lately if Spain has anything but interesting experiences. “What happened?” she asked instead.

  “We saw the old man. He has numerous bed sores. I only had water and soap, but I cleaned them and showed the priest what to do.” He made a face. “He had been applying a local remedy containing sheep dung. Imagine! I couldn’t help but wish for a little permanganate of potassium, but soap and water still trump sheep dung.” He looked across the plaza. “I wonder what could drag Spain into the nineteenth century.”

  “A miracle?”

  He laughed, and tucked her arm through his. “At least! Elinore, while I was cleaning the sores, the priest cooked a little parched corn for him. You won’t believe this, but when it was cool enough, the priest chewed a bite, then put it in the old fellow’s mouth! He’s quite toothless, and relies on the priest to chew his food for him.” He patted her hand. “At first it disgusted me, and then I began to wonder if I could ever be as kind as that priest, or as humble as his parishioner. Forgive the pun, but it’s food for thought.”

  How is it that such kindness and such cruelty exist side by side in this world? Elinore asked herself. She leaned against her husband, and closed her eyes when she felt his lips on her hair. I shouldn’t be feeling as good as I do, considering everything. “Let me tell you what I learned tonight from Monsieur Leger,” she began.

  She told Jesse everything except what the Frenchman had said about him. “We’ll have to do all we can to get him to the border, won’t we?” he said when she finished. She could tell by the way his arm had tightened around her that he was affected by the story.

  “I’m not so certain that is what he really needs.”

  “He probably needs absolution worse than most of us,” Jesse said frankly. He shook his head. “But who am I to say what will make a man’s heart right? I try to heal bodies, don’t I?”

  “You do it well.”

  “It’s just puny medicine, Elinore. Up you get.” He pulled her to her feet, and kept his hold on her hand as they went inside the church. He stopped, and she held her breath as he dipped his fingers in the holy water at the door and crossed himself, something she had never seen him do. “You know, I hope that someday there is room in medicine for physicians of the mind and heart.” He laughed, and it sounded self-conscious to her ears. “A lunatic idea, eh? No one ever said you were married to a rational man, Elinore Randall.”

  She thought he would come to bed, but he didn’t. When she finally closed her eyes, he was standing by the altar, then kneeling by the row of candles, which gleamed a little brighter.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next day was like the one that preceded it, and so on through a week of rain. Each day had its differences, and they stuck out like little jewels against the dark wool of long hours of walking, and hunger. At every sick call in every scabby village, Jesse knew the gratitude that comes to a surgeon who does so little that seems so much to those who have even less. The only pay they could ask for was food, but it was in scarce supply.

  None of them took much when it was offered, but it broke his heart to watch Elinore scarcely able to chew a slice of bread because of young ones who watched her every swallow. More than once she had given up, and handed out the bread to one of them, protesting that she was full. When he tried to remonstrate with her in private, she only cried. What could he say? They were all doing the same thing, even Wilkie, who found excuses for handing out the sausage he carried. “Captain, it’s just too heavy,” he said at one stop, and gave him such a look that Jesse knew better than to comment, even if he was the officer, and according to a piece of paper, the gentleman among them.

  He was able to take his consolation in the little good he did. He knew it was his skill that kept them moving, and it gave him huge satisfaction to provide, even in such puny measure, for those he was coming to love. He already knew he loved Elinore, but the others began to work their way into his heart in ways he had not expected. He knew he was a man of compassion, but like others of his class and station, he knew the chasm that separated officers from soldiers. As the days passed, he began to see them as men.

  One thing troubled him. He continued to hear riders at night, not every night, but now and then, as though someone watched, but did not appear too concerned that they would suddenly disappear. No one else seemed to be aware of them, which made him wonder if his hearing was more acute than anyone else’s or if his mind was starting to wander. He wanted to saying something to Elinore again, but decided against it. They had enough to worry about without tackling his overworked imagination.

  Wilkie was his greatest surprise on the retreat. One night they came to a village so poor there was no church. He found the alcalde and Elinore made the usual offer of medical help in the morning in exchange for food and lodging. He could tell it pained the alcalde to say there was no food, and unlike in other villages used to hoarding and hiding, Jesse believed him. Lodging then, Elinore had asked. Again the alcalde shook his head. Jesse winced at his embarrassment and what years of war had done to the village. There was no food, no lodging, no hope, only the wish that enemy and ally alike would vanish.

  After smiling at the alcalde to indicate no harm done and no offense taken, Jesse took Elinore’s hand and turned toward the road again. Wilkie began to sing a tune full of home and longing. Jesse had heard the tune before, and he knew it was from Devon, something about watching the water for sailors overdue. He gathered his wife close to him and let the wistfulness and power cover them both like a warm blanket. He could only thank the saint who protected wanderers—whoever that was—for this glimpse into another man’s heart that was as sound as his own.

  Harper’s worth he already knew, and finally admitted it to himself the afternoon when Elinore, exhausted by struggling through mud and confined by skirts that made the effort so difficult, simply fell to her knees and stayed there. It killed his heart to see her, but he was already carrying his medical satchel, and David Sheffield’s. He hurried to her side to raise her up, but Harper beat him there. In one motion he picked her up and kept walking. Elinore cried and protested, but Harper only turned to look at him and grinned. “I didn’t think she weighed very much, sir,” he said and kept walking.

  He knew he would not understand Armand Leger. The Frenchman continued to watch them all, saying little, but carrying his share of the load, and then Elinore’s, when she faltered. He did not join in their chat, but at least he no longer regarded them with that irritating superior air that had characterized the early days of their acquaintance.

  A few days later, he had his first argument with Elinore. Upon the greater reflection that time and travel by foot allowed him, he did debate whether it was an argument. All he knew for sure was that he lost, to his ultimate relief.

  They had come to a more prosperous village, and the rain stopped long enough to allow them to wash the mud from their clothes, and even set up a small clinic in an empty house. They had spent a comfortable night. The two-room house had no windows, but the roof was sound, and that was an almost undreamed-of lux
ury. He had the satisfaction of setting a fracture for a butcher’s apprentice that earned them a sausage.

  An old woman came into the house lugging a wooden case that he recognized the moment she came through the door. He hurried to her side, and he lifted the box onto the table. He knew what was inside. “Elinore, would you look,” he said, touching the bottles with their Latin labels and familiar contents. “Persulphate of iron, quinine sulphatis, iodide of potassium, oh, and tincture of opium. My goodness.”

  He understood most of what the woman was telling him, but Elinore filled in the gaps. “Her husband was the town’s physician. He died last year. She wonders if you wanted to buy these medicines.”

  With what? he thought, his delight turning to despair. He took a last look at the bottles and closed the box. “Ask her if she will take brass uniform buttons,” he told Elinore. “Tell her I am singularly lacking in funds.” He tried to make a joke when he saw the sadness on Elinore’s face. “Ask her if she will take a draft on the Bank of England.”

  “You’re not so far gone,” Elinore said. She tugged at her collar and pulled out her mother’s gold necklace that he had saved from Captain Mason. In a moment she opened the clasp and held out the necklace to the old woman.

  “I won’t let you do that,” he said, and took it from her.

  Elinore turned on him with a fury he didn’t know she possessed. “Isn’t what is mine yours now? Aren’t we married? Weren’t you listening?”

  “Elinore, this is all you have left from your mother!” he said, raising his voice.

  “It’s a necklace, Jesse,” she replied, her voice steely calm. “Think what good you can do with it.” She faltered a moment, then met his gaze with one as determined as his own. “And didn’t you promise the chaplain you would do what I said?”

  “You know he was quizzing us!” he replied in exasperation.

  “I don’t know any such thing,” she told him, her voice kinder now, more subdued, as though she knew she had overstepped some boundary, but did not wish to back down. She took the necklace, and he made no more protest when she handed it to the woman.

  In tight-lipped silence—he didn’t know who he was angry at, but he didn’t think it was Elinore—Jesse replaced the empty bottles in his medical case with the partly filled remnants from the Spanish physician’s box. He wanted to take them all, but he took the most useful, because he didn’t think he was strong enough to carry all the bottles now.

  They walked in silence for a mile or two, shoulders touching now and then, but separated by what he knew was a combination of pride and shyness. Medicine is easier than this, Hippocrates, he thought, then redefined his statement when Elinore glanced at him sideways with a little smile in her beautiful eyes.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” Elinore said, breaking the silence.

  “I’m not,” he told her. “I’m just frustrated that I have a little fortune sitting in a bank in England, and cannot do a thing with it.”

  She could have said all kinds of things then, but she chose to tease him. “Oh, does this mean I have married a wealthy man?”

  Something about what she said, maybe it was her oddly merry rejection of his money, humbled him. Here was someone who had spent her young life with less than nothing so long that it didn’t seem to bother her. I doubt she even believes me, he thought. What fun it will be someday—if we live to the border—to prove her so wrong.

  He could see no regret on her expressive face. I wonder what you will do, my darling, when I dig a diamond necklace out of the family vault in Dundee? he thought. He could hardly wait to find out.

  Elinore remained vaguely out of charity with him for that day’s march, still miffed that he would think to question her exchange of a necklace for medicine. He didn’t mind, because he knew there was time to make amends. And that, beyond his epiphany about friendship forged by hardship, was his greatest gift on the retreat: time.

  As hungry as he was, as wretched, and as worried about Number Eight, he realized that Major Bones—damn him to perdition, yes—had unwittingly provided him with time. Yes, winter was fast approaching; yes, they feared every day to meet with the French; and yes, he knew they were hurrying as fast as they could to the Portuguese border—all this paled under the reality that he had no patients to tend in the night, and no major cases to fret over and relive again and again, once they left each village in the morning. He could march along with his wife and comrades, no longer tyrannized by medicine. How odd it was that the thing he enjoyed the most could so dictate his life until his life was not his own. Was this something he had allowed to happen, or was it part of his medical calling? He knew he wanted to talk with Elinore about this curious phenomenon, but he watched her struggle and grow weary, and knew this was not the time to crow about his own independence. He decided finally that only another surgeon could fully appreciate the contradictory situation, and kept his own counsel.

  They came to Tordesillas, having skirted Valladolid on Leger’s advice, who reminded them that the French had many allies in that fickle city. He could tell that Harper wanted to argue with him, but Jesse decided to believe the Frenchman. He could tell from Elinore’s approving glance that she seconded his decision. Leger seldom spoke to anyone except Elinore, and her approval told him that he had not erred.

  They avoided Valladolid and came to Tordesillas, famous for its arrogant treaty between the Peninsular rulers in 1494 that divided the little-known hemispheres beyond the horizon into fiefs of Spain and Portugal. The rain, which had held off for a few days, thundered down again, but he could see the royal tower—the property years ago of Isabel of Castile—where the treaty was signed. From the march to Burgos in the summer, he remembered other castles—some ruined, some not—in the vicinity.

  For Elinore’s sake he wanted shelter more than usual. She had come to him red-faced and head down earlier in the afternoon to tell him that she had begun her monthly flow and could hardly walk from the cramps. She also asked if she could dig into their precious store of bandages. He gave his immediate consent, and sent her into the bushes to make the best effort she could, all the while wishing she could take care of the detail of her woman’s life and then lie down with a warm bottle of water at her feet.

  Naturally she said nothing to the others, but when she came out of the bushes, Harper had already attached her satchel and medical bag to his own load. Jesse held his breath, but Elinore was too weary to argue, and too uncomfortable. He took her hand, and they walked into Tordesillas in the rain.

  Number Eight had a stroke of luck at the church, a massive structure shabby-grand in that way of buildings constructed during Spain’s Golden Age of conquistadors and wealth from the Indies, and then ignored for a few centuries as Spain declined.

  There were no benches in the sanctuary, but Elinore sank gratefully to the floor and drew her knees up tight against her chest. He touched her head. “I hate to ask it, but I need you to translate,” he reminded her. He helped her to her feet.

  The priest stood close to the altar, arguing with a well-dressed man who leaned on a cane. They came closer, uncertain. Even though his Spanish was still limited, Jesse could not detect much animosity between the men. Rather, the words had a rehearsed quality to them, as though this was not the first exchange on the same subject. He glanced at Elinore, whose puzzled expression mirrored his.

  The man with the cane broke off the discussion first, turning in their direction, then executing a most elegant bow. “Dama elegante,” he began.

  To Jesse’s amusement, Elinore looked behind her in surprise. “What, my dear, aren’t you elegant enough in your mud?” he interrupted, teasing her in a low voice.

  “Silence, you!” the man ordered in English. “Obviously you do not appreciate the beauty beside you.” He addressed himself to Elinore. “Please tell me that this wretched man is not your husband.”

  Elinore laughed. “Oh, I wish I could,” she said, her eyes merry, despite her exhaustion. “Senor, your English is i
mpeccable.”

  The man bowed again while the priest growled something low in his throat that Jesse strained to hear. “Dama, I am el Conde de Almanzor y Talavera, at your service.” He put his fingers to his lips, shut his eyes in something close to ecstasy, and kissed them. “I have never seen a more beautiful lady.”

  “Thank you,” Elinore said, and looked at Jesse for help. He shrugged. She collected herself and remembered her purpose. “Father, we were left behind in General Sir Arthur Wellesley’s retreat from Burgos and are on our way to Portugal. My husband here is a surgeon. If you will find us food and lodging tonight, he will be happy to hold a clinic for your town in the morning.”

  “We have a physician here in Tordesillas,” the priest said in a tone that while not unkind, dismissed them.

  “May we at least stay here for the night, out of the rain? Ask him that, Elinore.”

  Before she could reply, the count swung his cane at the priest, who stepped back nimbly, as though expecting the assault. “I believe you are demented!” the priest exclaimed. He jabbed his finger in the air in frustration, then left his own sanctuary.

  We must have landed in the lunatic asylum, Jesse thought. “Let’s go, Elinore, before el conde here decides to take a swing at us.” He took her hand.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” the count exclaimed. “I would never do such a thing.” He glared at the departing priest’s back. “Never was a town blessed with such a bundle of debris in a black sack! No wonder no one has faith anymore.” He came closer to Jesse. “I think he is an afrancesado, as well. You cannot trust him.”

  “Then we should be on our way at once. Elinore, we dare not stay here.”

  “Senor, I would offer you the hospitality of Almanzor y Talavera,” the count said, before she could speak. “I cannot have you thinking that Tordesillas is inhospitable.”

  “We have no money,” Jesse said.

  The count clapped his hands in exasperation, and looked at Elinore. “Is your husband the most stubborn man in the British army?”