The House at Mermaid's Cove(33)

“Who’s that?” George Retallack heard me come through the door before the others noticed. He turned his face toward me, his unseeing eyes flickering from side to side. I saw that he was holding Leo’s hand.

“I’m a nurse,” I said. “Alice McBride—cousin to His Lordship.” It felt strange referring to Jack in that way. But it had an immediate effect. George and the two elderly men standing on the opposite side of the table stepped back to let me through. A fourth man stayed where he was. I saw that he was pressing down on a bloodied rag just below Leo’s left knee.

“’E’s hurt bad, miss.” The man looked familiar. I realized fleetingly that I’d seen him at the birthday party. “’E were tryin’ to land the boat, and a big wave come and trapped ’im ’tween the gunwale and the quayside.”

“You’ve done the right thing, putting pressure on the wound. How long have you been doing that?”

“Since we got ’im in ’ere—about ’alf an ’our or so.”

“Okay. Let me look at him now.”

They’d cut away the fabric of his trousers around the injury. Blood had seeped from the rag into the frayed edges. As I watched, the dark stain began to spread. “I’m going to need someone’s shirt,” I said. “And something short and strong—a stick or a big spoon.”

George was the first to unfasten his shirt. He held it out to me. I wasn’t sure if it was my voice or the smell of the blood that enabled him to locate my hands so precisely.

“There’s a wooden spoon in the sink,” one of the other men called. “Will that do?”

“Yes. Can someone boil a kettle? And I’ll need more pillows—or anything soft to prop up his leg.”

A flower-patterned cushion and a woolen jersey appeared at the end of the table. I lifted Leo’s leg and tucked the shirt under his thigh. He cried out in pain and clapped his hand over his mouth.

“Hold on, Mr. Badger—I’m just going to stop the bleeding, then I can have a proper look at you.” I tied the arms of the shirt in a double knot, with the wooden spoon caught in the middle of it. Then I started to turn the spoon, tightening the makeshift tourniquet.

“Could you hold it there for me?” I asked the man from the birthday party. “I need to check his pulse.”

I moved down the table and put my thumbs on the leg, below the knee and above the wound. As gently as I could, I palpated the flesh at the back of the leg with my fingers. I could feel no pulse. That was good. It meant I’d stopped the flow of blood.

As I straightened up, I saw Jack coming through the door. Without a word he came to stand opposite me, passing me what I needed to clean up the wound. Then I asked him to thread a needle with cotton for me.

“Damn!” In his haste, he dropped it on the floor.

“Don’t worry,” I said, as he bent down to retrieve it. “It needs sterilizing anyway—just pour some water from the kettle over it.”

I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he darted across the room. He didn’t need to be told to put the thread through the eye of the needle before dangling it into the boiled water. Soon he was back, passing it to me. As I stitched the ragged edges of skin together, I felt the break in the fibula, at the back of the old man’s leg.

I glanced up at Jack. “Did you find something we could use as a splint?”

He gestured toward the door, where two lengths of wood were propped against the wall. They were thin and flat—the sort of thing that might be used for fence panels.

“Perfect.” I nodded.

He went to get them, watching me as I bound them to the shin and the calf.

“We’d better keep the tourniquet on for a while longer,” I said. “Would anyone in the village have any morphine?”

“I should have thought of that.” Jack shook his head. “The military people up at the house might have some—I’ll go and find out.”

Leo Badger let out a muffled grunt as I tied the ends of the bandage. But it wasn’t a cry of pain; he was trying to say something, waving his hand at the elderly man standing over by the sink. The man went to him, bending so that his ear was close to Leo’s mouth.

“He says he’s got morphine,” the man said. “It was for his wife, Gladys. She died last year—terrible bad, she was, at the end.”

“Could you find it for me? Then we can try getting him into bed.”

When the drug had taken effect Jack and I tried to work out how to get the sleeping man up the narrow, twisting staircase to the bedroom. Jack thought that, with the help of one of the men, he could carry him, but I thought it was too much of a risk. In the end we brought his mattress downstairs and made up a bed for him on the floor.

When he was settled, we stepped outside, sheltering from the rain in the doorway of the fish cellar.

“Is he going to be all right?” Jack asked.

“I hope so. The bleeding seems to have stopped now—but he needs to see a doctor. I’m worried about the risk of infection.”

“I’m going to drive the tractor up to the main road,” he said. “I’ll see if I can get through the floodwater.”

“Is that wise?” I bit the inside of my lip, imagining him lying trapped beneath the thing if it should overturn.