Page 61 of Two Wars and a Wedding

Paul turned big, wounded eyes on her. “I couldn’t do that. He saved my life.”

He wasn’t just wounded; he was burning up with fever. His head was so hot it practically sizzled when the cloth touched it. It was too soon for wound fever, even if Paul had practically dredged the man’s head through the mud. Unless . . . Betsy peeled back an eyelid. Bloodshot but not jaundiced. Not yellow fever, thank goodness.

Betsy rounded on Paul. “Has he been coughing? Did he complain of stomach upset?”

“N-no? No coughing. Not that I remember.”

“What about the stomach? Does he have the runs, Paul?” she demanded impatiently. Not typhoid, please, not typhoid. “Think, Paul.”

Paul’s sunburned face went red and he shifted uncomfortably. “Er. We all have the runs, Betsy. It’s the mangoes. Or maybe the bully beef. But no more than anyone else. I don’t think. He’s been limping for a while,” Paul added hopefully, grabbing at straws to distract attention away from his digestive system. “He took a bullet in the leg at Las Guasimas. But that was over a week ago. So it’s probably not anything to do with anything. Betsy? What are you doing?”

“Cutting away these trousers.” Stony-faced, Betsy clipped the fabric away, and, sure enough, there it was.

Not anything to do with anything, he said.

In the interest of not killing Paul, Betsy made herself focus on the task at hand. Under Holt’s uniform trousers, a dressing the consistency of cement had glued itself to a wound that had started small but was now red, distended, and bulging with pus.

“When was the last time he changed this dressing?”

“We’ve been in battle, you know,” said Paul indignantly.

“When. Was. The. Last. Time. He. Changed. This. Dressing,” demanded Betsy, biting out each word like a bullet.

“I don’t know. What am I, his nursemaid?” Paul looked as shifty as he was capable of looking, which wasn’t much. He hadn’t been made for dissembling. “If you must know, we had a bit of a falling-out.”

“I don’t care whether you quibbled about who won a game of marbles. I care about whether this was cleaned or not.”

“This wasn’t the Ritz Paris, Betsy. None of us had much chance to bathe. We weren’t allowed to go in the river, you know. One fellow made himself a makeshift bathtub by digging a hole in the ground and lining it with some oilcloth, but it didn’t work so well.” Betsy fixed him with a hard look. Paul hastily summed up, “Um, yes. I don’t think he’s done anything with it since, well, Las Guasimas.”

“It’s infected.” Betsy forbore to add “you idiot,” although she didn’t do much to hide the fact she was thinking it.

“Will he lose it?”

“Possibly.” Instead of beginning to close, the wound gaped stubbornly open, distended by a large abscess. The area around it was visibly swollen and red streaks marred the skin above and below. How had the man been walking on this for a week? Cussedness, she assumed. Pure cussedness. But there were, thank goodness, no signs of the blackened flesh that signaled gangrene. It stank, but not of putrefaction. Not yet, at any rate. “Possibly not. But if he keeps it, it won’t be through any fault of his own. What idiot doesn’t change a dressing for a whole week?”

“I told him you’d scold him,” said Paul complacently.

“You.” Betsy glared at Paul, overcome by a combination of affection and exasperation. “If you get yourself shot, I’ll kill you. Now stop clogging up my tent. You’re so filthy you’re probably infecting my patients just by being near them.”

“You tell ’im, sister!” called one of her wounded. The men adored it when she yelled at people. They kept score and cheered her on. Men were very strange sometimes, but it seemed to work, so she wasn’t going to question it.

Paul beamed at her. “I knew I could count on you.” He started to go and then stopped, dragging a very muddy booted foot through her nice, clean straw. “Um, Bets. About Holt. Look. He’s not what he seems. But he’s a decent sort. Just—don’t be alarmed if he starts spouting French poetry. Some of it’s pretty risqué stuff.”

Paul was worried about poetry? She was surrounded by men maimed in all the ways men could possibly be maimed. Over the past two days, she’d picked shrapnel out of hairy backsides, dealt with punctured private parts, and helped clear an impacted bowel—and a little French poetry was supposed to offend her sensibilities?

“He can quote poetry in Swahili for all I care as long as we get that leg cleaned.” There was no point in arguing with Paul. Paul was, and would eternally be, Paul. Betsy sighed. “Go find Nurse Carson. She’ll give you a cup of coffee and pump you for your recollections of the battle. Make sure to spell your name for her so she can quote you.”

Right now she needed to deal with that leg. Dr. Stringfellow was passing by on his way back to the surgery tent, so tired he was swaying as he walked. Betsy grabbed his arm and dragged him into her tent.

“Can I save this leg?” she demanded.

She had to give Dr. Stringfellow credit. He didn’t take her to task for waylaying him or not waiting properly as some of the other doctors might.

Of course, it might just have been that he was too exhausted to argue with her.

Dr. Stringfellow squinted at Holt. “Oh, him. I remember him. Have him come to me a week ago to have it cleaned the way I told him to. That should do the trick.”

Given that she didn’t live in a novel by H. G. Wells . . . “Do you have any other suggestions?”