Page 18 of Feathers in the Wind
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Perdita, I’m sorry but I can’t help you. I think I’m going to be sick.’
Perdita retrieved the basket before Bess dropped it.
‘You don’t have to, Bess. Bring some food and drink, blankets and more bandages. Indeed, the contents of the stillroom.’
Bess turned and fled. Perdita walked the lines of injured making a rough assessment of who was in most urgent need of care. The injuries ranged from sword slashes to the horrific and there were some, such as the man with the stomach wound, for whom a speedy death was all that could be prayed for. It was indeed no sight for the fainthearted and her own stomach churned. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for this. The bloody, broken, stinking bodies were far removed from the day-to-day hurts of the farm workers or kitchen hands she was more used to tending.
She knelt beside a young man with a musket ball in his leg, helpless to know how to tackle such an injury.
‘Let me, mistress.’
Ludovic appeared at her elbow. He laid a satchel down and took out a leather roll. He undid the lace and laid it out, revealing a set of bright, freshly honed knives and surgical instruments. Perdita picked up one of the knives, turning it over in her hand, and looked up at the man’s broad impassive face.
‘Ludovic these are surgeon’s knives. How did you come by them?’
Ludovic shrugged. ‘I was a surgeon's mate. The surgeon died of fever so I became the surgeon. The knives are mine. I feared this day would come so I have prepared.’
He set to work on the boy, with speed and appreciably more skill than any surgeon Perdita knew.
She passed him instruments as he asked for them with what seemed to Perdita no more than a flick of the wrist, he held up the musket ball. The patient gave a groan and fainted.
‘Where are you from, Ludovic?’ she asked as he stitched the wound
He did not look up from his work. ‘My mother was Polish and my father Hungarian,’ he said at last.
‘You’ve not always been a servant, have you?’
‘I’ve been a soldier and a sailor,’ he answered. ‘Your kinsman bought my freedom.’
Perdita knew that Geoffrey Clifford had travelled extensively in his youth and had returned to England with Ludovic as his manservant. There were stories that Clifford had purchased Ludovic in a slave market in Constantinople, but he had been part of the Clifford household for so long that no one thought to ask him about his origins.
‘So, it was not just my uncle’s story? You really were a slave?’
He paused and looked up at her, his expression bland. ‘A galley slave, yes. The Turks took me in battle. I spent six years in the galleys until your uncle came across me in a slave market and gave me my freedom.’
‘You were free and yet you chose to remain with him?’
His eyes never wavered but the hand holding the knife momentarily stilled.
‘When you’ve been a slave, you know the value of choice.’ He looked up at her. ‘I think perhaps you of all people understand that, Mistress Gray.’
Perdita sat back on her heels.
When you’ve been a slave…
She’d never thought of it in those terms. Yet that is what she had been, bound to a man forty years her senior. When she had woken one morning and found him dead in the bed beside her, she had rejoiced.
* * *
As evening fell,Perdita sat with a dying man, his hand in hers. They had done what they could to repair the fatal slash to his belly, but he would be dead by midnight and his death would be a relief.
‘Pray with me, mistress,’ he whispered.
Perdita prayed and read to him from the Bible, straining her eyes in the poor light of the lantern.
‘You are my hope and my salvation…’ The familiar words mouthed by the dying man were surprisingly comforting.
She read until her voice cracked and the hand she held no longer sustained life. The man’s eyes were wide open, staring with a look of peace as if he had indeed seen his hope and his salvation.
