“Oh, well. I don’t know, but he has a good heart, even if he is simple.” She took Simon’s hand and formed it into an open palm and held it out for Cale to shake. Once Simon realized what he was to do, it took Cale some time to stop the energetic pumping of his hand. All the while the blood was soaking the temporary bandage Cale had placed on Simon’s wound. He gestured for the boy to sit and, anxiously watched by Arbell, peeled it back. It was a nasty gash nearly two inches long.
“The little bastards could have had his eye out. It’ll need stitching.”
Arbell Swan-Neck looked at him in astonishment. “What do you mean?”
“It’ll need stitching, just like you mend a shirt or a sock.” Cale laughed at what he’d said. “Obviously, not like you do.”
“I’ll get one of our doctors.”
Cale snorted with derision. “The last Materazzi doctor to treat me would have killed me given the chance. It’s not just that he’ll have a huge scar-a jagged wound like this won’t heal. Ten to one it will get infected, and then, God knows. Three or four stitches will close it up and you’ll barely know it’s there.”
Arbell Swan-Neck looked at him, completely at a loss.
“Let me get a doctor to look at him first. Please try to understand.”
Cale shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
An hour later two doctors had been called and after loudly arguing with one another had failed to staunch the bleeding and, if anything, had made it worse by their poking and prodding. By now Simon was so confused and in such pain that he’d had enough and refused to let the doctors near him, all the while bleeding profusely from his head wound.
After a few minutes of this, Cale had left, returning half an hour later to find Simon standing in the corner and refusing to let anyone touch him, not even his sister.
Cale pulled the distraught Arbell to one side, “Look,” he said. “I’ve got some yarrow from the market to stop the bleeding.” He nodded at the drama going on in the corner. “This isn’t doing any good. Why don’t you ask your father what he thinks?”
Arbell Swan-Neck sighed.
“My father refuses to have anything to do with him. You have to understand-it’s a terrible shame to have a child like this. I can make the decision.”
“Then decide.”
Within a few moments the doctors had been dismissed and the room cleared but for Cale and Arbell. Simon stopped yelling but eyed the two of them suspiciously from his corner. Cale made sure Simon could see as he undid the curled paper of yarrow powder and poured a little into the palm of his hand. Cale pointed at the powder and then at Simon’s wound and then at his own forehead. He paused for a second and then carefully approached Simon and knelt down, showing him his open hand with the yarrow powder as he did so. Simon looked at him, suspicion changing to wariness. Cale took a pinch of the yarrow and slowly brought it up to Simon’s head. He then leaned his own head back and gestured to Simon to do the same.
As leery as you like, the boy did so, and Cale sprinkled the powder on the still-bleeding wound, repeating this six times. Then he stood back and let Simon relax.
Within ten minutes the bleeding had stopped. Now calmer, Simon let Cale approach him again so that Cale could clean the yarrow powder out of the wound. While this was clearly painful, Simon was patient as Cale delicately did his work, all the while watched by Arbell Swan-Neck. When he’d finished, he coaxed Simon back into the middle of the room and onto the table. Then, watched still leerily by Simon, he took out a small fold of silk material from an inside pocket and opened it on the table. It contained several needles, some of them variously curved, with short lengths of silk already through the eyes. The suspicion returned to Simon’s eyes as Cale took one of the needles with its thread and held it up to show him. He tried various pantomime shows of what he wanted to do, but all that showed on Simon’s face was a deepening alarm. Every time he tried to begin stitching the wound, the uncomprehending Simon shouted and screamed in terror.
“He won’t let you. Try something else,” said the distraught Arbell.
“Look,” said an exasperated and increasingly irritated Cale, “the wound’s too deep. I told you it’s going to get infected-then he’ll really have something to scream about-or it’ll just shut him up permanently.”
“It’s not his fault-he doesn’t understand.”
It was impossible to disagree and Cale simply stood back and sighed. Then he stepped back again, took out a small knife from his inside pocket and, before either Simon or Arbell Swan-Neck could react, cut a deep gash into the palm of his left hand, just at the fleshy point leading to the thumb.
For the first time for many minutes there was silence. Both Simon and his sister stared in shock and awe at what they had just seen. Cale put the knife away, and as the blood poured from the wound, he took a bandage from the table and pressed it hard into the cut. For the next five minutes he said nothing and the other two just stared at him. Then carefully he pulled away the bandage and saw that the wound had stopped bleeding freely. He moved slowly to the table, picked up the needle and thread and showed it to Simon, as if he were about to perform a magic trick. Then he placed the needle carefully next to the wound and began pushing it through from one side of the cut to the next. He pulled it taut with an expression of concentration on his face as if he were darning a sock. Then he tied it off in a knot, reached for another threaded needle in his pack and repeated the action three more times until the wound was tightly closed. Then he held the stitched wound up to Simon’s face so that he could examine it carefully. When he had finished, Cale looked him in the eyes, nodded and waited. Simon, now pale with apprehension, took a deep breath and then nodded back. Cale took another needle from his pack, held it to the boy’s wound (he thought of him as a boy, even though they were the same age) and pushed.
The five stitches were duly done but not, understandably, without a good deal of yowling and screaming from Simon. When he finished, Cale smiled and shook Simon’s hand, and while Simon had gone as white as Melksham milk, he had endured the pain of hell. Cale turned to Arbell Swan-Neck, now almost as white and shaking as her brother.
“He’s got the right stuff,” he said to her. “There’s more to your brother than people think.”
Cale’s shameless showing off was having the effect he had hoped for. As she stared at the extraordinary creature in front of her, Arbell Materazzi, dazzled, shocked, afraid and astonished, was now very nearly half in love.
The Guelphs-a people of notoriously ungenerous disposition-have a saying: no good deed goes unpunished. Cale was soon to discover the occasional truth of this miserable proverb. Unfortunately for him, he had not been brought up to police the behavior of nasty little boys with their childishly cruel ways-he had been brought up to kill. Moderation in violence was a deeply unfamiliar notion, and sadly the kick he had delivered to one of Simon’s tormentors had been harder than he had intended and had broken two of the boy’s ribs. By unfortunate coincidence the boy’s father was Solomon Solomon, who already wanted his revenge on Cale for having thrashed five of his best students and who now was beside himself with rage at his son’s injury. As is often the case with murderous brutes, Solomon Solomon was a kind and indulgent parent. Nevertheless his anger, which was incandescent, had to be contained. It was not possible to challenge Cale to a duel when the reason for doing so was that the injury to his boy had been caused while the little monster was attacking Marshal Materazzi’s son. Mortified and ashamed as the Marshal might be at having a half-wit for a male heir, he would be furious at the attack on his family honor, and for all his importance and martial skill, Solomon Solomon would find himself shipped off to some dump in the Middle East to supervise burials in a leper colony. To an already festering anger against Cale was added a murderous hatred just waiting for an opportunity. The opportunity would not be long in coming.