Ian ignored little Lara and hurried back to the sofa. Taking the unconscious woman in his arms, he looked down at her, wondering fleetingly what she looked like beneath the broken, battered skin.
He eased the kelp away from her throat and let the slimy strand fall to the floor.
"Fight with me, princess."
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She didn't move, barely breathed, but she was still alive, and there was a chance he could save her.
A chance.
He felt a rush of adrenaline. Just like the old days.
Chapter Two
Ian rammed a dusty bottle of carbolic acid underneath his arm and raced to his bookcase, pulling out one long-unused volume after another. He scanned the texts quickly for any help, but there was precious little written about head injuries. When he had all that he could find, he ran downstairs to the woman's bedchamber.
Maeve, Queen Victoria, and Andrew were all there, breathing heavily, their arms heaped with supplies. Weak light from a bedside lantern splashed the trio, cast their elongated shadows on the white plaster walls.
Queen Victoria sighed. "This ice is deuced heavy. I say?"
"Drop it and get more, Your Highness. You, too, Mother. We're going to need a lot of ice and more clean sheets. More!"
Andrew moved forward, his scrawny arms piled with pale, grayish white linen and a single knife that glinted silver in the weak light. "I-I got the sheets from the laundry room. I didn't see any bandages specifically?"
"Good. Start ripping them in two-inch strips. But first, wash your hands in soap and water and then rinse in this carbolic acid. Don't let the sheets hit the floor. Put them on the bed." Ian surged to the door and stuck his head out, hollering into the dark hallway. "Soap! I need soap, damn it, and hurry."
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Within seconds, Lara appeared in the open doorway, holding a rough bar of ash soap.
Ian snagged it from her pudgy fingers and started washing his hands, rinsing them in the stinging carbolic acid before he returned to the woman's bedside. Kneeling, he looked down at her. He heard the rapid, uneven tenor of his own breathing in the quiet of the room; it lent this moment a strange, almost surreal feeling, as if he were somehow detached from the drama, watching it. Behind him, he heard Andrew thrust the knife into taut linen, heard the methodic rip-hiss of the fabric being rent in strips. The bedside lamp flickered, the yellow-red flame spitting and writhing inside the smoky globe.
The woman lay as still as death.
He pressed forward on his knees and slipped his hand beneath her head. He tensed instinctively, waiting for the onslaught of images. But again there was nothing.
The touch was so damned normal that he wanted to cry.
His fingers moved gently along her scraped flesh, through her blood-and-seaweed-matted hair, to the hairline crack at the base of her skull. He tested, probed, cataloged her injuries the way he'd done so often at New York Hospital, talking quietly to himself. "Left occipital cerebral contusion. Enlarged right front cerebral contusion. Basilar skull fracture, just above spinal column." He drew back, shaking his head. "Jesus, she was lucky.. .."
Footsteps thundered up the staircase and burst into the bedchamber. Ian turned slightly as Edith slid into the room, her arms loaded with sheets and fabric and bottles. "I'm here, Doctor," she wheezed. "What c'n I do?"
"Get Maeve and Victoria up here with the ice. We're going to have to pack her in it. We've got to keep her head cold."
"But the poor wee thing'll catch pneumonia?"
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"Don't question me, Edith."
"Sorry, Doctor." Edith swallowed hard and raced from the room.
Ian turned back to his patient, blotting the blood from her nostrils. He was so engrossed in the task that he barely heard Andrew come up behind him. "The bandages are done, Doctor. Are you going to operate?"
He wanted to. Sweet Jesus, he wanted to hold a scalpel as he'd done so many times, wanted to feel the energy pulse through him, the confidence, the unbelievable arrogance that came from his skill. He wanted?once more?to be God. But he couldn't, not this time.
"I can't, Andrew. The surgery is too advanced; besides, she'd die of infection. This damned carbolic acid isn't perfect. All I can do is try to relieve the pressure on her brain?hopefully she'll keep bleeding from her nose and ears. That, and keep her cold. She's going to have to win this battle on her own."
For the next hour, Ian worked like a demon to save her life. He shaved, cut, bandaged, and wrapped until his fingers were shaking from fatigue and slick with her blood.
Finally, he'd done all that he could do. Throwing everyone but Maeve out of the room, he slumped forward on the stool beside her bed, cradling his face in bloody hands. The woman lay stretched out before him, her arms pressed close to her body, her head layered in bandages. Blood was everywhere; on his hands, his clothes, the floor, the bed.
A three-inch layer of crushed ice covered her whole body, caught the lamplight and gave her the shimmering look of an illusion. More ice was her pillow, the clear peaks stained pink with her blood. Half of her face was covered in bloody bandages; the other half was a bloated, indistinguishable mound of purple bruising, her one eye stretched beyond recognition.
He'd shaved a triangular section at the back of her
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head and brought the rest of her hair forward, tying it in two twisted, matted tails that trailed along her arms. He should have shaved her whole head, but he hadn't had the time, and it probably wouldn't matter anyway. She was so damned weak. Her pulse was sporadic and shallow, her breathing almost nonexistent. Her teeth weren't even chattering, for God's sake, though she lay in a bed of broken ice.
"Don't die," he whispered, hearing the scratchy desperation of his plea and not caring at all. He knew he was being selfish in his wish to save her?he'd always been selfish in his need to perform miracles. But he needed her, this broken patient whom he could touch and heal, needed her as he'd never imagined needing anyone. She could save him, give him back his profession, his reason for living. She could be his first true patient in years.
"Will she live?"
Maeve's quietly spoken question invaded his thoughts. With a tired sigh, he looked at his patient through his objective clinician's eyes. The horrible swelling on her brain had abated a little, helped by the stream of blood that even now trickled from her left nostril. He'd bathed her head in carbolic acid and covered it in a layer of waterproof silk, then added precisely eight layers of carbo-lized linen bandages and finished with two layers of soaked gutta-percha. The whole stinking mass had been coated in liquid resin and paraffin and encased in two more layers of waxed taffeta. Her swollen, bruised head looked like a cracked gray croquet ball shoved atop a rag doll's body.
He'd followed Joseph Lister's technique to the letter, but still there was precious little hope that she would recover.
"I've done all I can, Mother."
Maeve kneeled beside him, her hands coiled in her lap, her red hair tied in a loose cluster of curls at the base of her neck. Her body moved in a ceaseless back-
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and-forth motion, her fingers gripping a small, tattered scrap of old satin. The ribbon she hadn't released in fifteen years. A tawdry scrap of her wedding veil. Her eyes lacked the clarity they'd held earlier. He recognized the signs; his mother was slipping back into her delusional state of mania.
He sighed again, ran a hand through his hair. "Go get Edith, Mother. Tell her to bring up the man."
Maeve stopped rocking for a second and stared blankly at him. "What man?"
"The lobsterman who brought the woman here." "Oh, him. I gave the poor old man a cup of coffee and sent him on his way."
Ian was so stunned, it took him a moment to respond. Slowly, steeling himself not to explode, he pushed the words out. "You got his name, I assume?"
She heard the anger in his voice and started rocking again, faster, not looking at him. "Of course I did." "What is it?" "What's what?"
/>
"His name, Mother. What's the man's name?" "Who?"
Ian controlled an explosion by sheer force of will. "The man who brought her here."
"Oh, that. I can't remember now."
"Jesus .. ."
She frowned in concentration. "No, I would remember if he'd been called Jesus.... I believe it started with a B. Or perhaps an I?."
"Oh, Mother." He leaned forward and closed his eyes, rubbing his temples.
"Why?" She didn't look at him, stared at the ribbon she worked so madly in her hands.
"Who the hell is she? And where did she come from? And how did she get injured?"
She stopped suddenly, looked at him. "Oh." Her voice was a whisper, throaty with the same shame he
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saw in her hazel eyes. "He said something about a boating accident."
Disgusted, he turned away, stared dully at his patient. Jesus, they might never know who this woman is. Or was.
"How will she live?" Maeve asked in a timid
voice.
He didn't even try to understand the question. "What
do you mean?"
"Will she be ... normal?"
There was a holy reverence in his mother's voice when she said the word normal. It was so important to her, being normal, and he supposed he understood why. She'd never been normal a day in her life. He sighed, feeling suddenly drained. "I don't know. It's unlikely."
Maeve squeezed her eyes shut, rocking faster, turning the ribbon through her fingers. "I hope she's normal... in the head. She would want to be normal."
He turned away, unable to look at her, unable to see her pain and know it mirrored his own, and know that neither one of them could change it. "Yes, Mother. Wouldn't we all?"
Ian studied the woman's maimed face, searching for some hint of the person beneath the bandages and the bruises. She smelled of wax and acid and blood; it was a smell he knew well, one that lingered in the halls of New York Hospital, clung stubbornly to the operating rooms. No amount of soap and water could remove it? and not nearly enough was spent in the effort.
The smell of death. He dumped another bucketful of ice beside her head, tucking the freezing chunks close to her bandaged skull.
Then he set the empty bucket on the floor. It hit the hardwood with a tinny clank that he barely heard. Backing away from the bed, he turned to the open window and stared out.
The storm had long since passed. Fog had rolled in,
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impenetrable and moody; the thick haze lay huddled along the shoreline. Somewhere the sun was rising, casting uncertain light through the gray-white shroud, but from this window, there was nothing but the stifling gloom.
Will she be normal?
He couldn't forget the question. Once, he might have cared only that she survived. But if nothing else, the past few years had taught him that there was life? breathing, heart-pumping animation?and there was life. He understood the pain of abnormality now, the agony of isolation. Of being wrenchingly different from your fellow man. No longer could he tell himself that life at any cost was a triumph.
He squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head against the cold, damp glass of the window. Don't give her half a life, God. Make it all or nothing.
"All or nothing," he whispered aloud, a small, bitter smile curving his lips. His breath clouded the clear pane.
It was the prayer he should have offered six years ago. Instead, all he'd said was let me live.
When he turned back around, he saw the faces peering at him through the open doorway.
"Come on in," he said wearily, too tired to fight them any longer. They wanted to see the woman, and he couldn't blame them. She was the most interesting thing to happen at Lethe House in years.
The inmates shuffled in slowly, silently. One by one, they pulled up chairs and formed a ring around the bed, scooting in like some macabre quilting bee for damned souls. The hushed murmur of their voices filled the quiet room, and suddenly he was glad for their arrival. Maybe they would somehow reach the woman beneath the bandages, maybe the sound of their voices would draw her from the coma. It wasn't much of a hope, but it was all they had.
ik * ?**
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Pain. Immeasurable, inexpressible, it wrapped around her, invaded her bones and ate at her flesh with tiny, piercing teeth. Slicing, burning, aching, freezing ...
She wanted desperately to cry out, but all she could manage was a bleating whimper, a hesitant sound like that animal?puffy, white, four legs. Mackinaw . .. rubber. Words came at her, drifted by in a hazy kaleidoscope that had no meaning whatsoever. She thought of the animal again, pictured it, saw it moving in a herd, but no name came to her.
She moved restlessly, felt the stinging cold wrapped like an icy blanket around her body. Her teeth chattered, her fingers trembled.
"SweetLord . . . shemadea sound. .. ." It was a voice. Out there, beyond the freezing darkness . . .
She tried to speak, say something, shriek for help, but nothing made it past her chapped lips, her aching chest. Another shiver wrenched through her. She gasped at the intensity of it, clawing the wet fabric beneath her fingertips.
Lamb. The word for the animal burst into her mind. She pushed it aside, not caring anymore. The pounding in her head was excruciating. Blinding blows, a thrumming torment. Her heart pumped hard, drowned out every sound except the evidence of her own life. Where am I?
She had the one coherent thought before another volcanic blast of pain slammed through her head. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing hard. Oh, God, it hurts it hurts it hurts. She couldn't take it anymore. She screamed?or thought she did, wished she did?and then it was over.
She was drifting again, moving back into the comforting black waters of oblivion.
Back to the place where there was no pain.
Chapter Three
Ian glanced at the bottle of scotch on the green bedside table. He ached for a comforting drink, but it was a pleasure he'd forcibly denied himself for the last four days. He wanted to be sober when she awoke. If she awoke.
"Please wake up." He said the words softly, hearing the throaty catch in his voice and not caring. He was tired, so tired. He'd been sitting by her bed for days. One hour blurred into the next and the next and the next. He stared at her in morbid fascination, watching every struggling breath she took, wishing with everything in his soul that he could breathe for her.
In the past days, she'd become more than his patient. She'd become his world. He'd tried at first to remain detached and professional, but such distance was beyond him now. The coldness he'd once worn like a frock coat was now impossible to find. He wanted her to live so badly that sometimes he couldn't breathe. Every time he looked at her, he got an aching pain in his chest, and he knew what caused it.
She would probably die without ever once waking up. "Just open your eyes," he whispered. "Please .. ." He sat perched on the small, straw-seated mahogany chair, his long legs folded tightly against the painted green bed frame. Moonlight fell through the open windows, puddling on the pale woman in the bed. Diamond
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chips of ice lay melting all around her. Yet, even so, her fever climbed higher and higher, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do to stop it.
Her bruising was so much worse now; there was no hint whatsoever of her face. But not all of the news was bad, and Ian clung to the good news like a lifeline. She'd accepted the feeding tube well, and the third set of bandages around her head was finally beginning to stay white. The bleeding had eased off and the swelling on her brain had abated. She might actually have a chance ... if the pneumonia didn't kill her.
She wanted to live as much as he wanted her to. He could see it in every laboring breath she took.
He leaned forward and took one of her hands in his. It lay limp and unresponsive in his grasp. He stroked her hot, damp fingers, noticing the soft pliancy of her flesh, the whispery hairs at her wrist, the hard calluses at each finge
rtip.
She was making him a little mad, and even though he knew it, he couldn't stop it. Didn't really even care, because for the first time in years, he felt truly alive.
Sometimes, when it was late at night and he was alone with her, he could close his eyes and imagine her waking up, smiling, laughing, beckoning to him.
Madness ...
Madness to care about her, to even pray for a complete recovery, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. He needed her to awaken, needed to save just one more person in his sorry life. Needed to be a doctor again.
He smiled down at her, his patient. He couldn't see her face at all because of the bruising, but it didn't matter. She was beautiful to him, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. His goddess, his mystery, his chance to practice medicine again.
That's what he would call her. A name that reflected the magic and mystery of the moon.
"Selena ..." He brushed a matted, bloodied streak of hair from her cheek. "Fight the fever, Selena...."
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In the next instant, a Gatling-gun burst of whispers shot through the silence.
Ian spun in his seat and glared at the people huddled along the wall. Lord, he should have thrown the crazy lot of them out yesterday. They had no business here. "Shut up or leave."
Johann strolled forward. Flinging his angular hip to one side, he planted a thin hand on it and sighed with his usual drama. "Apparently, Herr Doctor, there's some dissension about your right to name the human sausage."
Ian's brows pulled together in a low, forbidding frown intended to silence the fool. He stood and strode toward the group. "Now, look here?"
"Where?" Maeve interrupted.
Ian glanced at his mother. Her eyes were clouded and vague, and she clutched one of his father's old hunting trophies against her chest. Today it was a badger, frozen forever in a defensive snarl, its padded body stiff and rock-hard. She was certain that Herbert's soul resided in one of the animals?she simply wasn't sure which one.
He looked away, disgusted, sweeping the rest of the misfits with cold eyes. Before he could speak, they started talking again, arguing among themselves like magpies.
"I found her?" someone said.
"I opened the door?" Edith argued.
"I believe I carried her to the sofa," Johann drawled. "Without me, she'd still be a bloody spot on the carpet."
"I'm the queen; I shall bestow a name on my poor, unknown subject."
"I-I believe we should vote," Andrew said softly, looking to Ian for confidence. The boy raised a cautious, shaking hand. "I vote for Selena."
"Weakling," Johann hissed. "I vote for Violet ... in deference to her skin color. What's your vote, Maeve?"
Maeve whispered to the stuffed badger in her arms,
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then gave Johann a serious look. "Ian's father votes for Colleen."
"Aagh! Guard! Off to the Tower with all of them," Queen Victoria said, puffing her mammoth chest out, rapping the floor with her pinewood scepter. "My subject shall be called Alberta."