Chapter 6
There was no kindly reception waiting for him on the curb opposite the clinic tent this afternoon. He did not even feel tempted to wait and see if fortune would provide him a clear invitation into the tent, so concerned was he that he would lose his nerve if he allowed his momentum to slow.
He did not bring flowers this time. Nor a thick envelope of donations. Perhaps he ought to have, but again, stopping to think would have only given him exactly the wrong sort of pause.
He ducked into the low-hanging flap before he could talk himself out of it and came to an immediate, freezing halt at the scene (and the stench) that greeted him on the other side.
Children were playing knucklebones in the dirt at his feet, seemingly unconcerned with their parents doubled over or otherwise dead to the world in the cots above them.
In the corner, a circular curtain that looked to have been taken straight from a condemned window was emitting a great deal of noise as a man wailed and roared in pain.
The other girl, the one he’d seen with Hannah the first time he’d come here, burst out from the faded floral of that second curtain, rubbing her hands together and shedding talc powder on the floor as she went, calling questions to a narrow, red-faced woman who was standing over an empty cot.
“Why did he go back?” she demanded. “What could have possibly been so important? It’s so much worse now than it was.”
“I know, miss,” said the woman, dragging her hands over her blotchy, red face. “I’m sorry, miss.”
“I can’t hold him down!” the girl was telling the woman. “I can’t help him because he won’t hold still.”
“He’s awful sore, miss,” the presumed spouse of the injured party whimpered. “Some of the men could …”
“Which men?! They’re all hurt too!”
“What about him?” the woman said, turning so suddenly to point at Beck that he startled. “He looks hale.”
The rabbi he’d spoken to the last time emerged from the curtain as she said it, his eyes falling on Beck standing at the entryway with surprise and open delight.
“My young friend!” he exclaimed, crossing the room with a series of weaves and hops that should not have been possible for a man of his age.
“You’ve come back! And just when we need your help most dearly. ”
The young woman with the talc-covered hands gave him a once-over and nodded in approval. “Come on,” she said, as though it did not broker argument. “We’ll need your strength, sir.”
“You’ll want to shed your jacket,” the rabbi told him quietly. “Miss Casper will attend to the skilled work, but we are needed to assist her. I hope you are not disturbed by blood.”
“I’m not,” said Beck, a bit queasy with the familiar strains of his upbringing that this place was stoking within him. He left his jacket on a cot and pocketed his cuff links, rolling his sleeves up quickly in anticipation of what horror he was about to find behind the curtain.
He stepped in just as another figure stepped out, just the flash of fabric as she moved. It might not even have been her, but of course, it likely was.
Anywhere else, he likely would have faltered or frozen with the leap his stomach gave. This place had no time for it.
The man on the table was flat on his back, his teeth clenched around a dirty towel, and his trousers cut away up to his thigh. His knee and quite a bit of his shin, it appeared, had recently been stitched up after sustaining a large gash, but the black threads were popped away, torn and dangling.
It looked like he had stepped through a rotted plank. There were fresh scrapes and bruises dancing up his calf, and a large piece of splintered wood was wedged into his wound.
“I don’t have ether,” the girl, Miss Casper, was saying, scattering more talc around the man’s leg to soak up the blood. “I don’t even have whiskey. He can’t stay still long enough for us to fish the splinters out.”
Beck nodded, meeting the wild eyes of the wounded man with a kind of resigned pity. Calling that shard of wood a splinter was poetic at best. “Shoulders or legs?” he asked the woman, who was clearly the authority in this place.
“Shoulders,” she said, relief making her own narrow set of shoulders sag a little. “Bless you. Rabbi, take his good ankle. Where is Hannah?”
“I am …” came her voice, sweet and songlike, from his back, until it fell away at the sight that awaited her.
He could feel her eyes against his back. Could feel the thrill and the caress of them as he anchored his palms into the patient’s shoulders. He turned his head slightly, the only greeting he could rightly give her in this situation.
“I am here,” she said, after a breath. “Where am I needed, Mae?”
“The other ankle, please,” Mae replied, already unspooling another towel as she walked toward the mangled shin. “He won’t kick you. He can’t.”
Beck glanced down at the face of the man between his arms and pressed his lips together. He had better not kick her, delirious or no.
She passed around him, close enough that she could have touched his arm, and turned into view as she rounded the table, her pale hands going immediately to the dirty ankle of the man lying on it.
She anchored her grip, her knuckles going white as she pressed the flat of his foot down against the sheet, and then she looked up. She met his eye.
And she held it. She held those crystalline blue eyes right on his black ones.
The least Beck could do was return the gesture. Through the grunt he released as the man began to fight against the healer’s grip on the wood in his leg, through the ache in his arms as he worked to keep the man safe and still, he held her eye.
Nothing short of the ground opening up and swallowing him whole could have stopped him.
Neither of them watched the plank come loose or the mopping up of blood. Neither marveled at the clean, meticulous stitches that followed. Neither even much registered when the man finally stopped fighting and went limp, his repaired leg dangling over the side of the bed.
“Fainted,” said Mae Casper. “Fainted after it all.”
“It is well,” said the rabbi, whose brow had gone damp with the effort of securing the man’s good leg. “He can rest now, and perhaps heal a little in the doing.”
“Yes, well,” said Mae, pushing a bunch of damp, tiny little curls back into her hairline, which had also gone damp in the effort. “He can sleep right here. I’m not moving him back to that bed tonight. Not that I could, even if I wanted to.”
“I could—” Beck began to offer, but she just met his gaze and shook her head.
“Moving him might disturb the stitches before he can clot,” she explained, sliding the dirty, chewed towel from the man’s chest, balling it up, and propping it under his head. “Best to leave him right where he is. Hopefully he sleeps through the night.”
“Are there any more?” the rabbi asked, sagging with visible relief when the woman shook her head.
“No, and I’ve nothing left to give them even if there were,” she said. “Better to rest now and come back fresh tomorrow than treat someone with numb fingers and flagging focus.”
“Indeed,” said Hannah quietly. Her focus had slid from direct eye contact in the wake of the fainting, but she flicked her gaze up at him once as she said it, and then away again.
He could see her now. He could see her fully, beyond just the endless well of her eyes. She was dressed simply, in starched powder blue linen that was speckled with filth. Her hair was braided around her head like a tiara, and she had streaks of talc on her cheek and her fingers.
She looked beautiful. Bridal, almost. Somehow still a beacon in the grime, so far removed from the glittering opulence of Blackcove, and yet still right in the thick of it, as ever.
He felt himself almost smile, a fondness tugging at the corner of one side of his mouth, a breath escaping him that he hadn’t meant to hold.
“I did not get your name, sir,” Mae Casper said, stepping into his line of sight and extending her hand. “You have my thanks. And my hope that this is not the only visit you intend to pay to our little tent of hard-won healing.”
“Thaddeus Beck,” he said, taking her hand and shaking it. “It is an honor, Miss Casper. I would be happy to return, should you require me.”
“We require you,” the rabbi said immediately. “Badly.”
“Thaddeus,” the healer said, her lips curving. “Like the saint?”
He could only blink at her, baffled by the question. “What saint would that be?” he asked, as politely as he could manage in a room full of gore.
He glanced at the rabbi, who shrugged. “Not my domain,” he said with a wry little smile.
“Judas Thaddeus,” Mae answered, tilting her head and glancing from the patient back up to Beck. “Patron saint of lost causes.”