Chapter 14
Captain Ramsay’s right hand has turned black. An inch or two above the wrist, the skin awakens to an angry but living red that streaks to the shoulder. Fever consumes the rest of his flesh. From time to time, he shouts out nonsense.
Dr. Elliott nods his head. “It will have to come off.”
“The hand?”
“The arm itself, my dear. To the elbow, I think, if not above.” The doctor rises from the stool and gazes down at his captain’s chest, bandaged in scraps of linen from the rag basket.
“The rest of him is healing tolerably, however. Look how beautifully the scalp knits. It does you credit, my dear, much credit. But the arm must go, I’m afraid. There is nothing more to hope.”
“Shall I send Beulah to gather the candles?”
“Candles? Candles? Heavens, no. I shall want more light than that. I once carried out an amputation in the gloam of the gunroom, just after sunset, and the results were not at all as I hoped. No, no. We will operate in the morning, if he lives so far.”
On the other side of the wall, Beulah bangs at the soup pot. Before Ned Ramsay occupied the lean-to at the back of the house, it served mostly for the plucking and hanging of geese. The cold air stinks of game; damp stains the walls. Underneath the bed lies Dr. Elliott’s pallet, waiting the night.
Hephzibah smooths the hair that springs around the ridge of purple-red skin on Ramsay’s scalp. The doctor removed the stitches a week ago. “And it’s his right arm, too, poor soul,” she says. “At least there will be no more fighting, God willing.”
“What’s that? No more fighting, you say?”
“Unless he wields his sword from the left?”
Elliott laughs. “My dear, you could no more hold back Ned Ramsay from battle than you could pause the march of time. No, no. So long as he draws breath, he will fight. The loss of a mere arm is no consequence, except to make the contest fairer to his opponent.”
Hephzibah gazes down at the grim white scar-streaked face.
“You will know him better than I do,” she says.
“Indeed I do, pet. We have known each other these eight or nine years, since I was a surgeon on the old Reckless, the devil take her, and he was but a scrawny midshipman, voice scarcely broken. Even then, he was never shy of a good brawl.”
“Why—the navy, then? You fought for the king?”
“The queen, for she was then still alive.”
“But I understood you to—”
“Hush, now. I have said too much.” Elliott lays his finger against the side of his nose. “Don’t you let on when he wakes up, for he won’t thank me for it, the brute.”
Another crash of metal from the direction of the hearth.
“Beulah wants my help laying supper.” Hephzibah tucks the blankets under the mattress. “You will not let him die, Doctor.”
“Why, not while supper is laying, I assure you. Dear, dear. Poor fellow. Ribs laid open for the crows to peck, scalp peeled back like a Seville orange, and yet he takes mortal ill from a trifling nick to the hand.”
With Silas abed, guts griping, Hephzibah must see to the livestock.
Both cow and heifer lumber to the gate when Hephzibah calls.
First the thump of cloven hooves, then the white faces appear from the black night.
The cow doesn’t have a name, but Hephzibah calls her Sally because it seems more good-natured than saying Move along, then, Cow, or Give over, Cow.
When they weaned the calf last summer, Sally lowed so plaintively that Hephzibah used to steal out and feed her handfuls of dried corn.
Now Sally whuffles her warm breath into Hephzibah’s palm, hoping against hope.
“None today, sweetheart. Scarce enough corn for ourselves, I fear, with so many mouths to feed.” Hephzibah kisses the swirl of hair in the center of Sally’s forehead. “Now be a kind good girl and give us a nice pail of milk, hmm?”
Patiently Sally chews her cud while the milk sings against the wood.
The heifer rubs her muzzle against the small of Hephzibah’s back.
The air is cold and dry, the moon a sliver, the stars a spill of diamonds.
Once the snow falls and covers the grass, she will bring Sally and the heifer into the stable and feed them what hay Silas bestirred himself to mow from the south meadow at the end of August.
If they’re lucky, the snow will hold off another month and the hay might last until spring.
Hephzibah hangs the stool from the gate post and carries the steaming milk into the coop, where the hens squawk an indignant welcome.
There are seven of them, besides the young cockerel.
Hephzibah bats away the stabbing beaks and discovers three eggs in the straw—no, four.
It will do. Hephzibah lays each one tenderly in the hollow of her apron and knots up the ends.
Outside, she pauses to listen for the sheep. Silas has eighty-six sheep in his flock—his entire fortune, his treasure, his dream of wealth—and they spend their days and nights among the meadows, growing wool. A faint baa floats down the slope—the flock must not be far away.
She clutches the handle of the bucket, clutches the knot of her apron with the eggs tucked safely inside, and hurries toward the house where the fire cracks in the hearth.
A voice stops her. “And how many eggs have our ladies given us tonight?”
“Doctor! You startled me.” Hephzibah sets down the bucket. She smells whiskey and desolation. “Four. Nice large ones. Are you well, Doctor?”
“Perfectly well, my pet. Perfectly well. Only ruminating on the task at hand.”
“You mean the amputation? A grave trial, I’m sure.”
“I never dreamed, in the course of my medical studies, that I should be called upon to saw limbs and extract musket balls. There are barber-surgeons to perform such acts of mere butchery.”
“I’m sorry it troubles you.”
“No more than it should, my dear. No more than it should,” he says. “The wind grows cold, does it not? Give me your bucket and we will return to the house.”
Their footsteps whisper on the bitten grass. “But you do have some experience with amputations, don’t you?”
“Heavens, child. I have hacked off more limbs than I can count. Fingers, toes, legs, arms. A hopeless ear, once. Oh, it’s a hazardous business, my pet, a life at sea, aboard a frail wooden bark subject to constant motion, constant peril of wind and wave, men hourly obliged to rattle up and down prodigious heights while half-drunk on their devil’s ration of rum.
To say nothing of battle itself. No, no.
I do assure you, I can whip off a man’s leg as fast as he can draw his next breath. ”
He stops at the door and turns to her. Light leaks from the cracks of the shutters—enough to suggest a face heavy with worry and with drink.
“Poor lad,” he says. “The shame of it. He was but a smooth-cheeked boy when I first saw him, a promising lad. Such parts, such shining parts. Now this. Oh, I knew the day must come that this cursed trade would mangle the rarest human specimen that God ever molded from base clay. I expected the fatal hour long before this, to tell the truth. Still, it stings. It stings. You will assist me, won’t you, my dear?
You stitch such a neat snug tidy seam, a marvel. ”
From between the shutters comes Silas’s shrill roar, Beulah’s soothing murmur.
“What about him?” asks Hephzibah. “Is there anything you can do for him?”
“Him?” Elliott jerks his head toward the window. “Oh, there’s no hope for him. A malignant tumor in the bowels, as clear a case as I have encountered. He won’t live to see another summer.”
Morning, chill and wet. The rattle of rain on the eaves. “And such a clear perfect evening it was, too,” mourns the doctor. “I should have had off the wretched limb yesterday.”
With Beulah’s help, they move Ramsay into the front room and open the shutters to admit all possible light. The rain splatters on the floor. “Silas said we might glaze the windows next year, if we can get a good price for the wool,” Beulah says wistfully.
Ramsay’s dazed with fever, but awake—divining, possibly, the dangerous new currents in the air.
He stares hard at Hephzibah and asks after her feathers.
He has extremely blue eyes. She hasn’t noticed how blue until this moment, this exact angle where the daylight finds them.
She wipes the perspiration from his face with the corner of her apron while the doctor arranges his tools.
“You are an orange bird indeed,” he tells her. “How I wish the stones were less round. Tacitus tells us…Tacitus…”
Elliott hands her a cup. “Give him this.”
“What is it?”
“Tincture of opium, my dear. A blessed release from all pain, easing the subject into a state of remarkable euphoria.”
With her finger, Hephzibah parts the cracked lips and nudges the rim of the cup between them. Ramsay closes his eyes as he swallows. When she draws the empty cup away, he fixes his eyes on her face and whispers, This is but indifferent rum.
“The opium is dissolved in alcoholic spirits,” explains the doctor.
“Now take up that rag. Twist it nice and tight, my dear. Slip it right between the teeth, there we are. What a ferocious beast he looks. Fangs all bared. And that scalp! He will require a wig the rest of his days, alas, if he is not to frighten his own children.”
Hephzibah looks up. “Has he children?”
“None that own him, so far as I know. Nor will he, with this barbarous appearance. I believe we are ready. Shall we call in that brute of yours? Of your sister’s, I mean, though in truth he’s a plague to the both of you.”
“Silas? What use is Silas?”
“To restrain the patient, pet. The captain is an exceptionally strong fellow, even in his present unfortunate condition.”
This is not Silas’s first amputation. “I once did the same for my cousin Caleb,” he says, leaning his meager weight on Ramsay’s left shoulder. “Only it were his leg. Never woke again, Caleb. Ball in the thigh, near bled to death. Then it went putrid, like this arm, here.”
“Musket balls are the devil. Inevitably the lead carries in some scrap of shirt or breeches, impossible to dig out, fatal to the humors. How I regret my tools. Had only a moment to fill the chest. Hurry, hurry—always this infernal hurry. Number three saw, forsooth. I had wanted better for him. Where is your sister, pray?”
“Betook herself out of doors.”
“Well, I won’t blame her, in her delicate state. No matter. We’ll swab our own deck. Now, child. Ready yourself. When the saw bites, he will jump.”
“Doesn’t he know?” she asks.
“I have explained the operation, of course. Whether he comprehended me, I can’t say.”
Hephzibah places her hands on Ramsay’s right shoulder and leans close.
Smell of sweat and rot and tang of blood. Sour warm breath. Skin the color of curdled milk. Fair hair that springs from his jaw.
And the blue eyes still fixed on her as if Silas does not exist at his other shoulder.
“God have mercy,” murmurs the doctor.
Ramsay doesn’t so much jump as twist at the waist, back arched. A noise breaks from his throat and through the rag between his teeth, like the bellow of a bull.
Silas swears and tugs the left shoulder, leans the weight of his own body in the hollow between Ramsay’s sternum and clavicle, but he might as well struggle with a bear.
The bellow breaks off, lungs emptied, leaving the gentle patter of rain and the rasp, rasp as the saw grinds its way through the humerus, a rhythmic burr of metal and bone, the doctor’s muscular grunts, a muttered God damn my soul, fucking arm like fucking iron, Jesus Christ, and another bellow, less conviction than the first, though the spine remains twisted in that graceful helix of agony and the blue eyes remain locked with Hephzibah’s as if she is the source of all his pain, of his very existence.
Again the bellow breaks off for want of air. Rasp rasp, grinds the saw.
Breathe, sir, says Hephzibah.
The sound of her voice drowns out the scrape of blade on bone, the grist mill behind her. So she keeps talking.
Nice and slow, sir, a great deep breath.
The doctor will make you better, oh, he will fix everything, just a minute more and it is all over, you must believe me, you must breathe nice and slow, nice and slow, bite down on that rag, as hard as ever you can, look in my eyes, sir, a moment more, just a moment more, sir, that’s it—
“Aha!” cries the doctor. Relief and triumph. A soft heavy thump on the floor behind her.
Ramsay falls back. His eyes lose focus but remain on Hephzibah. His lip curls up to expose his teeth, to bare his fangs digging deep into the rag.
“Mr. Winthrop,” says Elliott, “pray be so kind as to dispose of the limb and swab the floor.”
Silas lifts himself away from the pirate’s left shoulder and looks back at the right side, the carnage. “Jesus Christ,” he whispers.
He slumps to the floor.
Elliott clucks. “Has he hurt himself?”
“I don’t believe so,” says Hephzibah.
“Watch your step, then, my pet. One can so readily slip in the effluvium. I have myself witnessed a depressed cranial fracture result from an unfortunate fall on just such a greasy floor as this, after a most bloody engagement, oh most bloody, brutal, endless—off the coast of the Spanish Main, as I recall. A fierce little brigantine loaded with heartwood. Ramsay would remember it. A fat prize she was, in the end, and every penny hard-earned. One moment, now, while I tie off the arterial vessels. Such a nice clean cut it is, too, when one considers the qualities of the saw. One moment and the stump is yours, my dear, as pretty a stump as I ever saw.”
Hephzibah loosens her grip on the patient’s chest. His left hand, perfectly whole, finds its way to her arm and forms a solid cuff just above her elbow. His eyes are wide and beseeching. Words rumble in his throat; his mouth works at the rag. She takes one end and pries it free.
“Snow—on your—feathers,” he tells her.