Page 109 of The King's Man
Jem looked at Nan and nodded.
‘Rouse that lazy stable lad and send him for the chirrurgeon on the Strand.’
Nan nodded and kilting up her skirts ran from the room.
‘What did you do to Morton and that bitch?’ Kit looked up at Jem.
‘Not as much as I would have liked to,’ Jem said, grimly. ‘I got halfway down High Holborn afore I realised you wasn’t behindus, so May told me to go back to fetch you. Luckily for both of us, it looks like you’d put a pistol ball through Morton’s left arm. He was bleeding like a stuck pig. Didn’t put up much of a fight … one blow and he went over like a rotten tree in a high wind. I flung him down the cellar stairs and sent the Talbot woman and that ugly maid of hers after him. I just hope he broke his neck.’
Kit’s face creased in pain. ‘You should’ve killed him.’
‘After what he did to May, it was all I could do not to,’ Jem agreed. ‘But I didn’t want to end up at the end of a rope for murder. You’re all done in, Lovell.’ He looked at Thamsine. ‘Come on, lass. Let’s get him upstairs to a bed while we wait for help.’
With difficulty, Thamsine and Jem manoeuvred the Kit up the narrow stairs to the large, airy bedchamber that Kit and Thamsine now occupied. He hung between them, barely conscious and a dead weight. As they laid him on the bed, Nan brought a bowl of water and a cloth and began to wash the blood from his face.
Jem rested Kit’s damaged hand down across his chest and shook his head.
‘That looks bad, Lovell.’
Thamsine forced herself to look down at her husband’s battered face and then moved her gaze to his hand. His fingers, those wonderful, magical fingers, were bloodied and broken like splintered wood. Thamsine backed away. She felt the bile rising in her throat.
‘I … I think I’m going to faint.’
Jem put a hand on her arm and guided her to a stool. He forced her head down between her knees.
‘Just what we need,’ he muttered, ‘a fainting female.’
***
As the grey dawn light began to creep in through the grimy windows, Thamsine raised her head. She had fallen asleep in the chair beside Kit’s bed, her head resting on the covers. She stood up and stretched her cold, stiff limbs and looked down at Kit.
He had been unconscious or asleep for hours following a torrid session with the chirrurgeon and the bonesetter, both of whom seemed to think the only solution for Kit’s broken fingers was to amputate his hand, a proposal Kit, with the last vestige of consciousness, had resisted vigorously. As a result his hand, splinted awkwardly and heavily bandaged, lay intact on the bed covers.
She touched his face, her fingers rasping against the rough stubble of his unshaven chin. She picked up his good hand and pressed the fingers to her lips. Kit groaned and moved and his face contorted with pain. His eyes opened and a string of voluble French curses accompanied his return to consciousness.
‘Kit?’
He turned his head slightly to look at her. He opened his eye and looked up at her.
She gently stroked his forehead. ‘Is the pain bad?’
‘Stop beating me on the head, it hurts. Everything hurts,’ Kit mumbled, shutting his eyes again.
Thamsine withdrew her hand.
Kit lifted his good hand to his face, probing the bruises. ‘Am I going to live?’
‘We think so. You have several cracked ribs, a black eye, your right knee is badly bruised and swollen and your hand…’ Thamsine trailed off on the inventory of Kit’s injuries. ‘I just hope that Ambrose is in a similar sorry state.’
Memory flooded back into his face and she had a fleeting glimpse of the terror of the previous night.
‘I thought he would kill me,’ he said. ‘Very slowly and very painfully. Thank God Jem came back for me.’
He turned his head to look down at his heavily bandaged right hand. Thamsine saw the muscles of his right arm flex experimentally as he tried to raise his hand. The effort produced another string of blasphemous oaths and he turned back to look at her, his face sheened with sweat. She answered the question in his eyes.
‘The bonesetter has splinted it as well as he can. You have three broken fingers and broken bones in your hand. It will take months to heal and even then he is doubtful you will have the full use of it again. He wanted to amputate it.’ She smiled. ‘But you were adamant that you wouldn’t let him.’
Kit’s eyes widened. ‘They wanted to take my leg after Worcester, but I survived quite well with it intact. I can do so again.’
