Chapter 7 #2
"I have done this before. A great many times. On men in worse condition than your son, with far less than what stands in this street right now." Benjamin held the man's eyes. "I am not asking you to trust me. I am telling you what will happen if you do not decide quickly."
The silence held a beat too long.
"Look at his hands," Amelia said.
She did not lift her eyes from the boy's arm, and she did not raise her voice, and the crowd went quiet enough to hear her anyway.
"Mine are shaking. Yours are shaking — every hand in this street is shaking, and that is nothing to be ashamed of.
His are not. He has been looking at that wound the better part of a minute now and he has not once looked away from it, and a man does not learn to do that from reading.
" She pressed the cloth down harder. "That is not something a person can pretend at.
I would know. I have watched enough people go white at the sight of a great deal less than this. "
The boy's father did not answer. His jaw was working and his hands had gone into fists at his sides.
"I know what I told you," Amelia went on.
"Send to London. I have said it in this street before and I would say it again tomorrow, and my offer stands — the cart, the road, whatever it costs, all of it.
But I only ever said it because there was nobody here who could do anything else.
That was the whole of the reason. It was never a good plan. It was the only one."
She looked up at him then.
"It is not the only one this morning."
"He is a stranger to me," the man said.
"He is a stranger to all of us." She held his eyes.
"And he came round that corner at a run before he knew whose child it was, and he has not asked one question since that was not about the arm.
Whatever else he may be — I do not believe that is a man who is content to stand in a street and watch a boy suffer for the sake of being careful. "
She turned back to the wound.
"Eight hours," she said. "Or now. I have told you everything I know. It is your decision, and it must be made now, not in an hour."
The father's jaw worked once.
"Do it," he said. "God help us both if you are wrong."
They carried the boy inside, onto the kitchen table, and the next quarter hour had no room in it for anything but work.
Amelia set water to boil without being told and had a needle and thread scalded and ready before Benjamin had finished cleaning the wound properly, and when he glanced up to ask for it she was already holding it out to him.
"You have done this," he said.
"No." She did not look away from the boy's arm, her hand steady on his wrist to hold it still.
"I have read how it is done. Twice, in two different books, and the two accounts disagreed with each other on one point, and I have been hoping for a year that I would never need to find out which of them was right. "
"Which point?"
"Whether to clean it before or after."
"Before." He took the needle. "Always before. Whoever wrote the other book never watched a wound go bad."
She reached into the basket at her feet without being asked and came up with a small stoppered jar.
"This was meant for Mrs. Cobb," she said, working the lid free with her thumb. "She will forgive me. It slows infection more than anything a surgeon in London would trouble to use, whatever they think of where it comes from."
Benjamin worked while she talked the boy through it, her voice never once losing its evenness, and it took less time than either of them expected and considerably more concentration, and when it was finished the boy was pale and shaking and entirely, unmistakably, going to be well.
Benjamin washed the blood from his hands at the basin by the window while Amelia settled the boy against a folded blanket and gave his mother instructions for the dressing, twice over, until the woman could repeat them back without faltering.
Only then did she come and stand beside him at the basin, and take up a cloth for her own hands, and let out a breath that had clearly been waiting a while to be let out.
"Where did you learn to do that?" she asked.
Benjamin worked at a stain along one knuckle and did not look up.
"Somewhere a long way from here," he said.
"That is not an answer."
"No." He set the cloth down. "It is not."
Amelia studied him a moment, and did not press it — though something in her face made it plain she had noted the refusal and filed it away rather than let it go.
"You are very good at that," she said instead. "Answering a question in a way that leaves a person with nothing further to ask, and somehow no cause to be offended by it either."
"It is a skill I have had a great deal of practice at."
"I begin to suspect," she said, "that you have had a great deal of practice at a number of things you have no intention of telling me about."
"That would be a fair suspicion."
"You make secrecy sound almost ordinary."
"It was, where I was." He set the cloth down.
"A place with a few thousand men in it, and no road out that any of us were permitted to take, and every man depending on the one beside him for whether he ate that week, or lived past it.
You would not call it a town. But we respected everyone's privacy. We only cared about competency."
"Then you have lived somewhere small before Ashcombe."
"Something of that kind."
"From what you told me, if you exclude the privacy," she said, with the ghost of a smile finally coming back into her face, "that is rather like Ashcombe."
"In a sense." He looked at her properly for the first time since the street. "Though I will tell you plainly, Lady Amelia — Ashcombe feels a very great deal like paradise, by comparison."
She almost laughed at the flatness of it.
"Well." She dried her hands. "Whatever it is, and wherever you learned it — that boy is alive because of it, and I do not think I am inclined to interrogate a man for the crime of knowing how to save a child's arm."
"That is generous of you."
"It is practical of me." A faint, dry smile. "I find generosity and practicality agree more often than people expect."
The father came through from the front room before either of them could say more, hat already off, turning it in both hands.
"I do not have the words," he said, and stopped, and tried again. "My boy would not have lasted the ride, would he. Not truly."
"I do not know," Benjamin said honestly. "He might have. I did not want to find out."
"No." The man's throat worked. "No, nor did I, once you said it plainly.
" He looked between the two of them. "I did not trust you an hour ago, sir.
I will say that to your face, since I said the rest of it to your face as well.
I do not know what to do with the fact that I am standing here thanking you for my son's life. "
"You owe me nothing," Benjamin said.
''God bless you. If you ever need anything do not hesitate. You know where we live,'' the boy’s father said.
Benjamin smiled and nodded to the man.
Then he went back to his son, and Amelia gathered her basket, and stood a moment in the doorway with the afternoon light behind her.
"I have to get back," she said. "My father will wonder."
"Of course."
She did not move at once.
"It is a pleasure to see you again," Benjamin said, quietly. "Despite the circumstance."
Something in her face eased, all the way this time.
"Likewise," she said. "Despite the circumstance."
And she went, and Benjamin stood a moment longer in the doorway of a stranger's kitchen with a dead man's rope still over his shoulder and blood dried along one cuff, watching her go, before he remembered what he had actually come to the village for.