Chapter 26: And His Deadly Wound Was Healed

CHÂTEAU COUTHOVE, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

March 1918

Laura woke in the darkest part of the night and knew that something was wrong, even though she was high in an attic, out of earshot of the ward. Before she was properly awake, she was out of bed and hurrying into her clothes, laid ready on the trunk. In less than a minute, she was slipping softly down the stairs, straining for the sound of aeroplanes, of explosions. Nothing. But she heard the commotion clearly as she got closer to the ballroom, saw the play of electric lanterns as the night staff belatedly heard and came across. She was with them as they entered the ballroom, their lights sweeping the stained parquet. The staff looked disoriented, even sheepish. They’d been taking their ease in the warm sterilization room while things went to hell in the main ward. Laura had to bite back orders and reprimands both.

The room was in chaos. Mila—Christ, why had no one been with him?—was screaming.

“Where are you?” howled the dying man, with a volume and clarity he absolutely shouldn’t have had, not with his ruined face. “Please, please, please, you promised…”

He was the loudest. But the whole room howled. Patients’ voices fell on her ears as she made for the screaming man.

“God, did you hear?”

“It’s a sign, it is, we’ve lost.”

“He’ll come for us all.”

“God save us.”

Someone was sobbing.

Laura went to Mila, who’d actually got himself out of bed, bellowing like a calf, and pulled the bandage loose from his face. The blood was already starting to run. She caught his clawing hands, said, “Sir, you must go back to bed.” Laura could not stop him physically; her head hardly came to his shoulder.

“He knows me,” said Mila. “I don’t care what he wants, at least he knows me. That was him, calling…”

Laura said, “You must go back to bed.”

“I don’t care. He can have me. He doesn’t lie. Everyone else is a liar,” said Mila, voice choked with blood. “They lied when I joined up—they said we were all heroes.” Then he staggered, eyes rolling back, and she caught him, shouting. He’d have taken her down with him, but there was a familiar voice, a familiar smell of disinfectant, and then Jones was there, taking Mila’s weight, calling for orderlies.

More and more staff were coming in; Mary was there herself, with a wrapper thrown over her nightgown, and under their collected efforts, the ward quieted a little. The patients were tucked back under the blankets, given water, bedpans, morphine. Laura glanced out the window. She could hardly see out, with the lights in the ballroom. She thought she saw, briefly, movement in the dark just as a frail voice behind her said, “Is he gone?”

Who?she thought, before the rest of her brain caught up. That was Trovato’s voice. Something wrong in the timbre of it. She spun, saw the flow of black blood from his leg, the hemorrhage unnoticed in the confusion.

“Doctor!” Laura called, not looking up. Her hands flew.

“He’s not a liar,” whispered Trovato. He tried to catch at Laura’s wrist. “That’s the worst of it, that he’s not a liar. He doesn’t pretend virtue, you know. Take the little one home. Take her…”

He fell mercifully unconscious. The flow of blood eased; she’d got a tourniquet round. Now Laura cut away the soaked bandage round his calf. Saw that the gangrene had sloughed, as Jones predicted; the whole rotten piece sliding free to lie seeping on the bedclothes. But the slough was deep enough to have taken the artery with it. Trovato’s lips and nails were already bluish. Suddenly Jones was behind her, a strong light in his hand. He cast a professional eye over the situation. “It came off,” he said, looking with satisfaction at the hollow where the gangrene had been.

Trovato was unconscious and Laura was furious, which is why she permitted herself to retort, low and savage, “Yes, well, I’m sure that will be a great comfort to him, to be buried with two legs and no gangrene.” Even if he didn’t bleed to death in front of her, how was he going to heal with the artery severed?

Jones merely put his stethoscope to Trovato’s chest. “He needs blood,” he said. An orderly vanished. Laura’s stomach knotted. She’d seen attempts at transfusion before. It meant shredded veins, tubing everywhere, and the patient nearly always died.

“Objections, Iven?” said Jones.

“Doctor, he’s not a science experiment. Let me give him saline and—”

The orderly reappeared, carrying, of all things, a glass jar full of blood. Laura had never seen blood in a jar. Transfusions were between people, lying parallel. How could there be blood in a jar? It ought to be clotted black. It ought…

Jones began to set up tubing with quick, practiced movements. His voice was surprisingly mild. “We ghouls with our experiments sometimes have the last word.”

Laura said, “I’ve seen transfusions. They go into shock. They die.”

“A question of blood type,” said Jones. “Been begging the continentals for years to take account of blood type.”

Laura said, “You don’t know his type.”

“Don’t need to. We only store blood from the O’s—they can give to anyone.” He took up the bottle of blood. Laura stood silent now, holding the light for him. Jones’s transfusion setup was an ugly scrawl of tubing, a mess of blood and iodine. But if it worked—

Laura said, “How do you keep the blood from clotting?”

Absorbed in what he was doing, Jones had lost much of his supercilious manner. His eyes were bright as a boy’s when he said, “Paraffin on the inside of the bottles, citrate and dextrose in the blood. If it’s kept cold, it will last for days. Weeks, even.” He slipped a needle into the vein in Trovato’s arm.

The implication silenced her. If they could store blood…

“Christ,” she said.

“Yes.” Jones glanced up. Now the light in his eyes reminded her of Faland, in his ruined hotel, when he played his impossible music. Maybe it was just the act of wrenching something beautiful or useful out of the grime. “Imagine,” said Jones. “Shelves of blood. And then when an attack comes…”

He trailed off. Laura could see it. All the men who expired from shock and blood loss—they’d have a chance. She had never met anyone who had held the wreckage of the war between his hands, and could still imagine making the world better. But now she watched the color come—like magic—back into Trovato’s face, and she said, swallowing her pride, “Doctor, will you show me how to use the tubing?”

“Naturally,” said Jones. “I have to dazzle you somehow, Iven; I’ll never win a Croix de Guerre.”

She didn’t have an answer to that, but he didn’t seem to want one. “Look here,” he added, businesslike, and bent to show her the arrangement of tubes, the vial, the syringe. The blue had left the patient’s lips. Laura stood there in fragile wonder, until Jones said, “I know you’re lost in admiration, Iven, but enough for tonight. You ought to go back to bed.”

Laura shook her head. “After all this excitement? Not a chance. I’m going to have cocoa and have a word with the night sister. Such carelessness, leaving a roomful of wounded men all alone.”