“He will,” Jamie whispered, folding his arms briefly round her. “So will I.”



I WAS STANDING in the wrong place. The fact that I understood what was happening to me didn’t help at all.

A trained surgeon is also a potential killer, and an important bit of the training lies in accepting the fact. Your intent is entirely benign—or at least you hope so—but you are laying violent hands on someone, and you must be ruthless in order to do it effectively. And sometimes the person under your hands will die, and knowing that … you do it anyway.

I had had them bring more candles, though the air in the room was already suffocating. The miasma of humidity and slowly evaporating sweat made the light of the candelabra fill the chamber with a gentle, romantic glow; just the thing for a dinner party filled with wine, flirtations, and dancing.

The wine could wait, and any surgeon dances with death routinely. The problem was that I’d forgotten the steps and was flirting with panic.

I bent to check Tench’s heart rate and respiration. He was breathing shallowly but fast. Lack of oxygen, severe blood loss … and I felt my own chest tighten, heaving for air, and stood up, giddy, heart hammering.

“Sassenach.” I turned, hand on the bedpost, to see Jamie watching me, eyebrows drawn together. “Are ye all right?”

“Yes,” I said, but my voice sounded queer even to my own ears. I shook my head hard, trying to clear it. Jamie came close to me and put his hand on mine, where it rested on the bedpost. It was big and steady, and it helped.

“Ye willna help him, lass, if ye faint in the midst of it,” he said, low-voiced.

“I’m not going to faint,” I said, made a bit testy by anxiety. “I just—I—I’m fine.”

His hand fell away, and after a long, searching look into my face, he nodded soberly and stepped back.

I wasn’t going to faint. Or at least I hoped not. But I was trapped there in that close, hot room, smelling blood and tar and the scent of myrrh in the laudanum, feeling Tench’s agony. And I could not do that. I couldn’t, I mustn’t.

Peggy hurried in, a maidservant behind her, several large knives clutched to her bosom.

“Will one of these do?” She laid them in a clinking heap at the foot of the bed, then stood back, gazing anxiously at her cousin’s pale, slack face.

“I’m sure one will.” I stirred the heap gingerly, extracting a couple of possibilities: a carving knife that looked sharp, and a big, heavy knife of the sort used for chopping vegetables. And, with a vivid recollection of what it felt like to sever tendons, I picked up a paring knife with a freshly sharpened, silvered edge.

“Do you butcher your own meat? If you have something like a bone saw …”

The servant went as pale as a black man reasonably can, and went out, presumably to acquire one.

“Boiling water?” I asked, brows raised.

“Chrissy is bringing it,” Peggy assured me. She licked her lips, uneasy. “Do you—mmm.” She broke off, narrowly avoiding saying what she so plainly thought: “Do you know what you’re doing?”

I did. That was the trouble. I knew much too much about what I was doing—from both sides.

“Everything will be fine,” I assured her, with a decent appearance of calm and confidence. “I see we have needles and thread. Would you take the biggest needle—a carpet needle, perhaps—and thread it for me, please? And then a couple of smaller ones, just in case.” Just in case I had time and opportunity to actually capture and ligate blood vessels. It was much more likely that the only choice I would have was cautery—a brutal searing of the fresh stump to stanch the bleeding, for Tench didn’t have enough blood left to be able to spare any of it.

I needed to be alone in my head, in a calm, clear place. The place from which I could see everything, sense the body under my hand in all its particularities—but not be that body.

I was about to disjoint Tench Bledsoe’s leg like a chicken’s. Throw away his bones and flesh. Sear the stump. And I felt his fear in the pit of my stomach.

Benedict Arnold had come in with an armload of firewood and a silver table knife in one hand—my cautery iron, if there wasn’t time to stitch. He set them down on the hearth, and the butler began to poke up the fire.

I closed my eyes for an instant, trying not to breathe through my nose, shutting out the candle glow. Denny Hunter had operated on me by candlelight; I remembered watching through a haze of eyelashes, unable to open my eyes more than a crack, as each of the six big candles was lit, the flames rising up pure and hot—and smelling the small iron heating in the brazier beside them.

A hand touched my waist, and, gulping air, I leaned blindly into Jamie.

“What’s wrong, a nighean?” he whispered to me.

“Laudanum,” I said, almost at random. “You don’t—you don’t lose consciousness altogether. It makes the pain go away—not stop, just seem not connected to you—but it’s there. And you … you know what’s happening to you.” I swallowed, forcing down bile.

I felt it. The hard probe jabbing its way into my side, startling. The remarkable sense of cold intrusion, mingled with incongruous faint warm echoes of internal movement, the forceful jabs of a child in the womb.

“You know what’s happening,” I repeated, opening my eyes. I found his, looking down at me with gentleness.

“I ken that, aye?” he whispered, and cupped my cheek with his four-fingered hand. “Come and tell me what ye need me to do, mo ghràidh.”



THE MOMENTARY PANIC was subsiding; I forced it aside, knowing that even to think about it was to slide headfirst back into it. I laid a hand on Tench’s injured leg, willing myself to feel it, find the truth of it.

The truth was all too obvious. The lower leg was a complete wreck, mechanically, and so compromised by septicemia that there was no chance of saving it. I was searching desperately for a way to save the knee; having a knee made a tremendous difference in the ability to walk, to manage. But I couldn’t do it.

He was far gone from injury, blood loss, and shock; he was a stubborn man, but I could feel his life flickering in his flesh, dying away in the midst of infection, disruption, and pain. I could not ask his body to withstand the longer, painstaking surgery that would be necessary to amputate below the knee—even if I felt sure that such an amputation would be sufficient to forestall the advancing septicemia, and I didn’t.

“I’m going to take his leg off above the knee,” I said to Jamie. I thought I spoke calmly, but my voice sounded odd. “I need you to hold the leg for me and move it as I tell you. Governor”—I turned to Arnold, who stood with a reassuring arm about Peggy’s Shippen’s waist—“come and hold him down.” Laudanum alone wasn’t going to be enough.

To his credit, Arnold came instantly and laid a hand against Tench’s slack cheek for a moment in reassurance before taking firm hold of his shoulders. His own face was calm, and I remembered the stories I’d heard of his campaigns into Canada: frostbite, injury, starvation … No, not a squeamish man, and I felt a small sense of reassurance from the presence of my two helpers.

No, three: Peggy Shippen came up beside me, pale to the lips and with her throat bobbing every few seconds as she swallowed—but jaw set with determination.

“Tell me what to do,” she whispered, and clamped her mouth shut hard as she caught sight of the mangled leg.

“Try not to vomit, but if you must, turn away from the bed,” I said. “Otherwise—stand there and hand me things as I ask.”

There was no further time for thought or preparation. I tightened the tourniquet, grasped the sharpest knife, nodded to my helpers, and began.

A deep incision, fast, around and across the top of the leg, cutting hard down to expose the bone. An army surgeon could lop off a leg in less than two minutes. So could I, but it would be better if I could manage to cut flaps to cover the stump, could seal the major vessels… .