Scuff found himself blinking. His eyes stung, as if there were dust in them. He turned over to be a bit more comfortable, and the next moment he was asleep.

  —

  HE WOKE UP WITH a start to find it daylight already. He could see faintly blue sky beyond the window. Fitz was half propped up on the other bed. His eyes were closed, but his body was tensed and tears were running down his face, gray-white in the early light.

  Scuff had no idea what to do. He could see the man’s distress as clearly as if he had been sobbing openly, and yet it appeared that he was still asleep and this was the result of some appalling dream. Scuff was a bystander, observing what was acutely private. Yet he was also the passerby who should stop and help. Which was worse, to intrude or to pretend not to have seen, because you had no idea what to do?

  Was it a present agony that caused such grief? Or was it something haunting him from the past, even the past as many years ago as the war, and a thousand miles away in that peninsula that stretched off Russia down into the Black Sea? Hester had shown it to Scuff on the map, and traced the route she had gone, by sea, to reach the port of Sebastopol.

  Fitz groaned as though a physical pain racked him, and Scuff saw that his hand, lying beside him, was clenched until the knuckles were pale.

  Scuff got up and reached for his trousers. He was just pulling them on when Fitz let out a gasp, and then a long moan of despair. It was so filled with pain that Scuff could not let it be. He went over and put his hand on Fitz’s. It was as hard as bone, as if his fingers had no flesh at all.

  “Dr. Fitz!” he said very clearly.

  Fitz opened his eyes. For a moment he could not seem to focus, then slowly he looked at Scuff and the life returned. He blinked several times.

  Scuff scrambled for something to say.

  “Would you like a cup of tea, sir? I’m just going to see if Crow’s all right, an’ how poor Tibor is doing. I daresay he’ll need more of that wine heating up, if he has to…”

  Fitz blinked. “Yes…Yes, of course. Tibor…the dressings. Yes, I’d like a cup of tea. Make it strong, if you please.” He looked up and down at Scuff, as if trying to place him. Was he looking for a soldier’s uniform? Had his nightmare taken him back to the war?

  “I’ll get it for you, sir,” Scuff said. “And I’ll tell you how Tibor is doing. I expect Crow will need a bit of a break.”

  “Yes…” Fitz blinked. “Yes, of course he will.” He pushed the fair hair off his brow and seemed to be collecting his wits.

  “There’s water over there.” Scuff pointed to the big ewer and the basin in the corner. Then he went out of the room and into the big clinic space, where Crow sat looking haggard. His hair had fallen over his brow, black as the bird for which he was named.

  “Cup o’ tea, sir?” Scuff offered.

  Crow nodded. “And pull the cheap wine over onto the heat. We’ll need to change the dressings.” He straightened up a bit, moving stiffly. “How’s Fitz?”

  Scuff kept his back to Crow and walked over to the stove. “All right, I think. I’ll get us all a pot of tea.”

  “Good.”

  Ten minutes later Fitz came into the main room. He was very pale, but composed. He had not shaved, because he had no razor with him, but he was washed and dressed, his hair combed. He spoke calmly and accepted a cup of hot tea from Scuff, then consulted with Crow as to what to do next for the patient.

  They began by taking off the dressings, carefully unwinding the bandages and lifting them away. Scuff could see that they were stained with a yellowish serum, but there was little leakage of blood, and the flesh had not the odor of death. Tibor himself had his face turned away. He was not ready yet to look at the wound and see that his arm was no longer there. That time would come.

  Fitz talked to him gently all the time Crow was working.

  “Scuff!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I need a potion for Tibor,” Crow directed. “Get out for me the best claret again, cinchona bark, and Hoffman’s Anodyne Liquor. I’ll come and mix it in the right proportions. But you make a note, for future use. When it’s ready, I’ll go and catch a little sleep.” He blinked as he said it, as though he had grit in his eyes. “Give him a small spoonful every fifteen minutes. You can see the clock. Watch it. If there is any change in him, other than slightly for the better, then you must come and waken me immediately.”

  “Yes, sir. What do I do if he won’t take it?”

  “I’ll wait with you for the first one—”

  “I’ll stay,” Fitz interrupted. “We’ll manage. You must go and sleep.” He gave a very slight smile. “We may need you later…”

  Crow was too exhausted to do anything but agree.

  —

  IT WAS A LONG day. Crow slept quite a lot of it. Scuff did exactly as he had been told, and all the time Tibor was awake, Fitz talked to him in Hungarian. It seemed to encourage him greatly. He accepted a spoonful of the liquor every fifteen minutes, except once when he was sleeping so deeply that, after checking his pulse and his breathing, Fitz told Scuff not to bother.

  Early in the afternoon Crow came back, washed and shaved and wearing a clean shirt. It was pretty thoroughly worn and patched in places, but he looked much better.

  Before he did anything for himself, he looked carefully at Tibor and told Scuff to prepare more camphorated wine, mixed with bark.

  Scuff knew the proportions because he had done it before, for other deep wounds. Next he made a good broth and seasoned it with cinnamon and cloves. When Tibor had taken that, he gave him a glass of the better claret.

  “Now we must wash him,” Crow went on. “Make him more comfortable. I’ll prepare etherized vinegar. You get the flannel we have and put it in the lower oven to be thoroughly warmed. We will need it so that at no time is he chilled. You know how to do that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the afternoon moved into evening, Crow gave the patient an enema made with a decoction of cinchona, strongly camphorated, while Scuff changed the bed to make him clean and comfortable for the night.

  By dark, Tibor seemed to be resting quite well. Fitz went out and bought food for the night and the following day. When he returned Crow told Scuff that he should go home to Paradise Place for the night, and return by nine o’clock the next morning.

  “Thank you, sir,” Scuff said, accepting with profound gratitude. He would have stayed if Crow had asked him, but right now he wanted to escape the confines of these rooms, the sight of pain he could not help, the shock of seeing the dead flesh of a limb cut off a living man, and knowing what Tibor’s distress would be when he realized fully what had happened to him.

  CHAPTER

  4

  HESTER WAS WORKING QUIETLY in the kitchen in their home at Paradise Place. She had spent some of the day at the clinic in Portpool Lane, which she had started several years ago. The huge, rambling building had been a profitable brothel, which Monk and Sir Oliver Rathbone, their lawyer friend, had acquired almost by chance. Of course there had been a good deal of skill on Rathbone’s part as well. They had turned the place into a free clinic for women in trouble, homeless and ill. It was run on charitable donations, and Hester had enlisted the aid of a number of women well placed in Society, and of generous disposition, to elicit the funds. Others actually worked there in person.

  The bookkeeping was done by a highly talented, scruffy, eccentric and disreputable man named Squeaky Robinson. It was he who had owned and run the place as a brothel before. Rathbone had allowed him to stay there because his skills were superb and his knowledge of every nefarious art of the street comprehensive. Their trust in him had proved well-placed. Hester had to admit, ruefully, that she had even become fond of him. He was outwardly uncertain of temper, but actually he was extraordinarily loyal. He spoke of respectability as if it were some unmentionable disease, and torture would not have forced him to admit that he treasured it more than any other benefit that running the affairs of the clinic would have brought him. It was even more important to him than the original reward of a home, food and legitimate employment.

  Hester herself was not as necessary there as she had been in earlier days. She seldom had to spend nights there now, and some days wasn’t needed at all.

  She missed Scuff, but it gave her great pleasure that he wanted to practice medicine so intensely that he was prepared to sacrifice even the pretense of independence. She stood at the stove preparing a dinner of lightly cooked vegetables to have with sausages. She had no idea when Monk would be home. This brutal murder in Shadwell was drawing him out early in the morning and keeping him out after dusk, which was a long day in summer. He was exhausted, but any strong leads were eluding him.

  Portpool Lane was nearer to the center of London, a long way from Shadwell, or any of the docks. Hester had little idea of the Hungarian community. But she knew prejudice. It was universal. It might be based on race, religion, social class or education, or a dozen other things. It seemed always to stem from a fear of the different, the belief that somehow it threatened one’s own safety. The cause could be anything from speech you did not understand—the thought that people were talking about you, laughing at you, planning your downfall somehow—to threats to your job or changes to your familiar neighborhood. Men seemed to fear that the strangers would take their women.

  The worst fear of all was that people of another faith would make you question your own belief in your place and value in the world, the old certainties you had grown up with that kept the darkness inside imprisoned where it could not spread and consume you with doubt, until you no longer knew who you were.

  Hester was thinking on this while she chopped mint and parsley to put in the potatoes. They were old ones to be mashed; it was a little too early for the small, sweet-tasting new ones. She heard a light footstep outside the back door and the next moment Scuff came in.

  She was delighted to see him, but she could not miss the pallor of his face, or the deep smudges of weariness around his eyes. She knew better than to comment on it. He hated fussing. It made him feel as if she thought he was still a child, unable to look after himself. He had let her know that, more than once. He was approximately eighteen, a young man. She had known many soldiers no older than that.

  “Hungry?” she asked as casually as she could.

  “Yes. I…I think so,” he replied.

  She noticed that he smelled faintly of carbolic and there was a small stain of blood on one of his shirtsleeves. She looked at him more closely.

  “It was an operation,” he said, taking one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs and sitting astride it, looking at her over the back, his arms folded. “Crow took off a man’s arm at the shoulder. It was gangrened. I think he might live.”

  “And you helped?” She wanted to keep calm, but she remembered with a sudden shock of horror the first time she had encountered gangrene. It was the smell of carbolic that brought it back, strong enough to mask the sharp, sour-sweet odor of dead flesh attached to a living person.

  “Yes.” He was watching her.

  “How did he get so bad?”

  “I don’t know. He was too ill to say much. And he’s Hungarian.” He waited to see her reaction to that.

  “From the community at Shadwell?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. The thing is…he hardly speaks any English at all.” His face was very pale. She noticed how blue his eyes were.

  She waited.

  “Crow said to me that we had, at the very least, to tell him that we had to take his arm off, if he had any chance to live. And it would be better for him if there was someone who could speak to him properly while we did it…”

  “So you found someone from the Hungarian community?”

  “Yes. But he is actually English. He speaks like you…” He stopped, waiting to see her reaction. It seemed the natural thing to do.

  “What is it?” she asked. “There’s something else. Has it to do with the murder in Shadwell?”

  “Not that I know of. But the man I found is a doctor too, a real military doctor, from the Crimea. He knows you.”

  “Knows me?” The room seemed to fade to a small, bright spot where the lowering sun came in through the window, onto Scuff’s head. How young his cheek was, barely showing soft, fine hairs where his fair beard was hardly worth shaving, and the tiredness of his eyes, hollowed around with pity and exhaustion. “Are you sure?” she asked, then immediately knew how pointless that was. She had known most of the many doctors in the Crimea, those who survived and those who were lost.

  “Yes.” Scuff was still watching her. “He said his name was Herbert Fitzherbert. That’s not just any kind of a name…You do know him!”

  He must have seen the shock in her face, flooding around her like an incoming wave that knocks you off balance and sucks you under.

  “Yes, I did…but he was lost at Inkerman. I saw him myself. There were so many dead, but some were beyond recognition.” She stopped. She did not want the memories of overwhelming death, broken bodies of men and horses, blood and flies everywhere. Friends and strangers. A line of Byron came to her, very much unbidden, of Waterloo: “in one red burial blent.” She certainly did not want Scuff ever to imagine what it had been like.

  “He said to call him Fitz. He talks like you. He’s a bit taller than I am, fair hair and a face that’s…full of thought. He doesn’t smile much, but I think he sees a kind of amusement in things that other people don’t. I can’t really describe him…”

  She had a flash of memory of Fitz in uniform, looking out of place among the dashing red-coated soldiers with sabers at their sides, early in the war, before the battle at Balaclava and the slaughter there. Before the killing winters when men froze to death. He looked like a man playing at soldiers, to please his friends. He could see the joke of it that they could not. But it was wistful, even then. The joke was not funny, only dismal, and eventually tragic.

  “Yes, that’s Fitz,” she answered, refocusing her vision to the present. “We thought he’d been killed.”

  “Well, he wasn’t,” Scuff said. “He said he’d come back across Europe. Spent some time in Hungary; that’s how he spoke their language. He seemed to speak it easily. As if he could think in Hungarian.”

  The memory almost overwhelmed her: even in the exhaustion of that day, her grief at Fitz’s death had been sharper than all the rest. She did not want Scuff to know that.

  “You have to, if you’re going to speak it well,” she agreed. She wanted to know what had happened to Fitz, how he was, if he was safe—well, all kinds of things. But the recollection of that day returned to her as if it had been only weeks ago. It was all clear again.

  She had been helping the stretcher-bearers find anyone still living, and perhaps savable. She had turned the men over, gently, trying not to tear open wounds already terrible. She had not even recognized him when she removed the body half covering him and seen his face. He was motionless, eyes closed, drenched in blood. She touched him, and he was cold. It was only when she wiped his face that she knew him, and a wave of grief came over her, so intense that for moments she could not move.

  It was the orderly who broke the nightmare, and made it real. She could hear his voice now. “You can’t ’elp that one, miss. ’E’s gone. God rest ’im. But there’s one more ’ere we can mebbe save.”

  And she had gone, rising to her feet and staggering after the orderly, hardly knowing what she was doing. Somewhere there was a man they might save. They must be quick. Concentrate on the moment. There would be time for grieving afterward.

  And she had grieved, along with everyone else. She recalled the long nights on duty out in the open when she had been so cold that her hands were numb and her bones ached. They had made ridiculous jokes and laughed too hard, because their world was all touched with absurdity and desperation. In her mind she relived one evening after a battle, sharing the last of the water out of a leather flask and a couple of stale army biscuits. Fitz had raised the flask and given some elaborate toast, as if it were the best brandy, and smiled at her. She had amused him with something that sounded funny at the time. They had laughed, until he had turned away, tears in his eyes. She had said nothing. It was a friendship that defied words. All the things that could not be said were understood anyway.

  None of it could be shared with anyone else. She had buried it in her mind, along with most of the other things about the Crimean War that had to be left behind. She had a new life, with gifts beyond price.

  She looked up at Scuff, searched his face and saw that he was struggling to say something also, or perhaps uncertain whether to say it or not.

  “Is he all right?” she asked. “I really thought he was…dead.” Bland words, but what else was there to say?

  “I don’t think so,” he answered almost under his breath. “I don’t know. He helped us, and he was good. His hands were…good hands, delicate…if you know what I mean. I think he could take forceps and pick up a single hair. Or stitch so beautifully it wouldn’t matter if it showed…” He stopped, unsatisfied with what he had said.

  “That’s Fitz,” she agreed. “Did he sew up the wound?”

  “No…Crow did that. He did it all. Fitz said he doesn’t do much medicine anymore. Hester…”

  She waited. She could feel the beating of her heart as if it were a dull knocking inside her, impatient.

  “When I saw him this morning, when I woke up…Crow had sat up with Tibor all night…until five. Then Fitz and I took over.”

  “When you woke up, what?”

  “I don’t know if Fitz was awake or asleep, and dreaming. But there were tears on his face. I think something hurt him too much.”

  “I think you’re right,” she replied. “It happens…” She had seen it in the Crimea, and since. There are things you can’t share, except with those others who were part of it. The people at home don’t want to know. They can’t take it away from you; they can only feel useless. There are not words created to describe the horror of some things. And why would you want to burden them with it anyway? They cannot help, and they cannot carry it for you. The only ones who need to know are the authorities who by their ignorance create it. And they refuse to believe. Emotionally, they cannot afford to. Their guilt would disable them.