A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  The oval disc depicted a heart crowned with flames and encircled by thorns—Jamie’s Sacred Heart medal, the one her mother had presented to him on her deathbed. “He gave it to you?”

  “Right after my ma lit into him and stormed off. He said it was the only nice thing he had, and he wanted to thank me for bringing him all that food and being so good to him. He said I come along just when he needed a friend. I told him I couldn’t take it, but he said he wanted me to have it. I was afraid if I told you about it, you’d want it back. And it’s... it’s all I’ve got left of him. But that was selfish and wrong, cause you’re his sister, and it belonged to your ma, and you should have it.”

  “Claire reached behind her neck to unhook the chain, but Nell stilled her hand. “Keep it.”

  “On no, miss, I couldn’t.”

  “You were there when he needed someone,” Nell said. “I wasn’t. Please keep it. My mother would have wanted you to have it.”

  Chapter 8

  That night, when Nell came downstairs after tucking Gracie into bed, Cyril Greaves was standing at the foot of the stairs holding a Barnstable Patriot extra with a headline in two-inch letters.

  DAVID QUINN CAPTURED.

  Second Bloodthirsty Burglar Under Arrest.

  Evaded Justice for 34 Days.

  A Wave of Relief Washes over Cape Cod.

  “They caught him this afternoon,” said Cyril as Nell skimmed the extra, which described how Quinn had grown a beard to disguise himself before seeking work as a deckhand on a codfish trawler. Nevertheless, the captain had recognized him from his pictures in the newspaper articles and summoned the Falmouth constabulary. He said it was Quinn’s “lunatic bug-eyes” that gave him away.

  “I want to talk to him,” Nell said.

  “To find out whether it was he or your brother who shot Mrs. Cunningham?”

  “That, and whether he knew that Jamie was hiding out in that cranberry shed.” Nell told Cyril what she and Will had found out during their visit to the Gilmartins’ farm that morning—Claire’s having known that Jamie was there all along, her mother’s ensuing rage, the shattered camphene lamp—and what they hadn’t found, namely any sign of blood or a knife blade.

  Cyril said, “If you must talk to Quinn, you’ll have to do it in the morning. They’ve got him in a holding cell at the Falmouth Police Station, but they’ll be transporting him to the Plymouth House of Corrections tomorrow afternoon. I don’t want you going alone, though, not to talk to a character like that. I can’t go with you, because I have appointments all morning.”

  “I’m sure Will won’t mind coming with me.”

  “Where is he?” asked Cyril, glancing around.

  “In the boathouse, I assume. I haven’t seen him since before supper. He won’t eat with us when Mr. Hewitt is here.”

  “Let’s go talk to him.”

  “Now?” Nell thought about the morphine and hypodermic apparatus on the dressing table of Will’s bedroom. If Cyril were to see that, there would be no way to convince him that Will was anything other than a confirmed degenerate.

  “Humor me,” he said, offering his arm. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of that boathouse.”

  * * *

  “He must not be in there,” said Nell with relief as Cyril knocked on the door of the guest suite for the third time. “He’s probably out on the dock.”

  “Aren’t there stairs to the dock from the veranda?” Cyril asked as he opened the door, gesturing Nell and ahead of him. “Let’s take those.”

  Nell’s suspicion that this was just a ruse to get a peek inside the famous Hewitt boathouse was confirmed when Cyril lingered in the sitting room to look around. She took advantage of his preoccupation to make a beeline for the bedroom with the intention of hiding the tray before he could see it, but all she found on the dressing table were the most recent issues of The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. She conducted a swift survey of the bedroom, then checked the adjacent bathroom; nothing.

  Cyril called out, “Nell look at this.”

  Oh, no. She returned to the sitting room with a sense of dread, only to find Cyril standing over the desk in the corner holding a sheet of writing paper inked in a neat, sharply angled hand.

  “Before you revile me for reading someone else’s correspondence,” he said, “ask yourself if you could have resisted doing so if you’d noticed this.” He pointed to the words engraved in the upper righthand corner of the writing paper in Gothic lettering: Executive Mansion

  Nell snatched the letter out of his hand and read it.

  Washington, August 12th, 1870.—

  My dear Will,

  I write this in the fervent hope that it will find you well on the way to recovery from the bayonet wound you suffered during the Battle of Wissembourg. From Marshal MacMahon’s account to Ambassador Washburne, which the ambassador was kind enough to share with me, it is clear that you exhibited courage much beyond the call of duty in risking your life to save those two wounded French soldiers. This came as little surprise to me, given the extraordinary valor you exhibited at the battle of Olustee during the War Between the States, as attested to by your commanding officers.

  In grateful, if belated, acknowledgment of that fearless service in defense of the Union, it is my privilege to grant you this nation’s highest award for bravery, the Medal of Honor. Were it not for the mistaken inclusion of your name on the Andersonville death rolls back in ‘64, the process of selecting you as a recipient would have concluded long ere this. My secretary will contact you with the particulars as to the ceremony, which can take place either here in Washington, or when I visit Boston in October.

  I look forward to reminiscing with you over a bottle of whiskey—and to saluting you with the most heartfelt respect and admiration when I present you with the Medal of Honor.

  Yours very truly,

  U.S. Grant

  “This is incredible,” Nell said.

  “He’s turning it down.”

  “What?”

  Cyril lifted from the desk a sheet of heavy vellum embossed FALCONWOOD, on which Will had begun penning his reply, and handed it to her.

  August 22, 1870

  President Ulysses S. Grant, Washington D.C.

  Dear Mr. President,

  Humbled though I am to be considered for such an honor, it is one I feel unworthy to accept. My actions on the field of battle were no more remarkable than those of many other men, soldiers and surgeons alike, some of whom paid for their valor with their lives. It is with regret but deep gratitude that I must

  Nell reread the half-finished letter, shaking her head. “This is so like Will.” She looked up to find that Cyril had wandered off. Turning, she saw him standing in the kitchen doorway holding the tray of morphine paraphernalia.

  “This was on the kitchen table,” he said.

  Nell closed her eyes.

  “You knew about this.” It wasn’t a question.

  Before Nell could summon a response, there came footsteps rising from the stairs that led to the boat slips beneath them.

  Will appeared in the entrance to the stairwell, stark naked and dripping. His gaze shifted from Nell, with the letter in her hand, to Cyril holding the tray. “Find everything all right?” he drawled.

  Nell gaped, as did Cyril, not because of Will’s state of undress, but because of his right forearm, which was slashed open from elbow to wrist. The gash was deep, ragged, and purulent, the surrounding flesh hotly inflamed. In comparison, the puckered, long-healed bullet wound on his right thigh, which had shocked Nell the first time she saw it, seemed a mere scratch.

  “Will—my God,” Nell said.

  Cyril set the morphine tray on the desk and crossed to Will, scrutinizing the wound with his trenchant physician’s gaze. “How long has it been exhibiting sepsis?”

  “I’ve got it under control.” Will grabbed a towel off the back of a chair and scrubbed it over his chest.

  “You’ve got the pain under
control,” said Cyril, nodding toward the cluster of needle marks and bruises on the upper part of his right arm. “But the injury itself... well, quite apart from its severity, it’s badly putrefactive. Are you running a fever?”

  Will averted his gaze from Cyril’s as he dried off. His hesitation was telling. No wonder he was so pale and glassy-eyed. It wasn’t just morphine intoxication. His body was struggling—with limited success, it would seem—to fend off the infection ravaging his arm.

  “I’m getting my medical kit.” Cyril turned to leave.

  “I’m dealing with it—I told you,” Will said, but Cyril ignored him as he left the suite and sprinted down the stone staircase. “Greaves. Greaves!” Will muttered something under his breath as he wrapped the towel around his hips.

  “Nell crossed to him and stroked his damp forehead, which was hot to the touch. “For God’s sake, Will. Why on earth did you tell us it was just a minor wound?”

  He took her hand, pressed it to his cheek and leaned into it. “I didn’t want you to fret over me, but now that you are, I rather like it.”

  “The morphine—I knew you were taking it again, but I didn’t realize it was for pain. I thought...”

  “You thought I was slipping back into old habits. Can’t say as I blame you. I haven’t exactly proven myself a model of sobriety.”

  Will kissed her palm and retreated into the bedroom, leaving the door open. “Best to put something on before the good doctor returns,” he said, pulling a pair of linen drawers out of a clothespress and stepping into them. “It’s no easy task to project an air of authority when one is stark naked. Curious that Greaves didn’t raise any objection to it, considering your presence.”

  “He was focused on your arm.”

  Will smiled as if at a prevaricating child. “He knows you’ve seen me naked. You told him about us.”

  She sighed and nodded.

  He attached a pair of narrow black suspenders onto trousers of the same color, shook them out, and pulled them on. “Do you think that was wise?”

  “I trust him absolutely,” she said, feeling the pinch of guilt that Cyril knew even more about them than did Will; he knew she was going to have his baby.

  Shrugging into a starched white shirt, Will said, without looking at her, “Seems a rather intimate subject for a conversation with a man you haven’t seen in what—six years?”

  “We’re old friends, Will.”

  “You’re old lovers.”

  Nell’s face stung with heat right up to her hairline. “It’s not... W-we’re not...”

  “Oh, Nell.” He came to her, took her face in his hands, and kissed her. “Of course you’re not. But you were at one time, and... well, it’s always been something of an abstraction to me, you and he having been together that way. But now that I’ve met him, it all seems just a bit too real. Don’t misunderstand,” he added, holding her at arm’s length so that he could look her in the eye. “I don’t judge. God, how could I, considering my own past? This isn’t about condemnation, it’s about the knot in my chest every time he says something intelligent or does something thoughtful or displays one of his many other estimable qualities, which seems to be every bloody second of every bloody day.”

  “Wait,” she said through a chuckle. “You’re put out because he’s a good, decent man?”

  “If only he were a braggart,” Will said as he buttoned his shirt, “or a prig, or had a lisp, or a perhaps a hump. Yes, that would do nicely. I’d settle for a hump.”

  Hearing Cyril’s footsteps on the stairs outside, Nell said, “Why won’t you let him treat your arm?”

  “Because I don’t need him. I’m a doctor, remember? I treated thousands of limbs injured just as badly as this one during the War.”

  By cutting them off, one after another, to the screams and sobs of the other wounded men waiting for their turn under the bonesaw, because it was the only way to deal with such grievous wounds in the field. Nine minutes per leg, he’d once told her. That’s all it took me.

  “Let’s do this in the kitchen,” Cyril said as he strode through the room with his medical bag—the same cracked old leather satchel he’d used when she’d assisted him in his rounds. “The light’s better in there.”

  “I told you,” Will said. “I’ve got it under—”

  “What you’ve got,” Cyril said, turning in the kitchen doorway to face Will, “is an arm that will have to be amputated above the elbow if you ignore it much longer.”

  “That’s what he’s afraid of,” Nell said. “That’s why he doesn’t want you to treat him, because he’s thinks you’ll want to cut it off.”

  Will glowered at her. She glowered back.

  “You do realize it’s a vicious circle,” Cyril told him as he disappeared into the kitchen. “In an effort to stave off amputation, you avoid medical care, which only worsens your condition, increasing the likelihood that you’ll lose the arm.”

  Will looked as if he were trying to summon a refutation, but having no luck. He raised his right arm to rake the wet hair out of his eyes, winced, and used the left. The hair fell right back down again.

  “That’s the first time I’ve seen you exhibit any pain,” Nell said.

  “I’m due for more of that.” He cocked his head toward the morphine. Nell was familiar enough with the drug, from her nursing experience and Will’s use of it, to know that doses low enough to keep one alert and functioning could dull the pain but not eliminate it. She realized Will’s arm must hurt constantly, especially when he used it in a normal fashion, but he’d been stiffening his backbone and carrying on as if nothing were amiss. Nell didn’t know whether to find that admirable or idiotic.

  “What I want to know,” Cyril said, raising his voice to be heard from the kitchen, “is how you could have allowed the infection to progress to the point of necrosis. You’re a physician. You must have known what was happening.”

  Approaching only as far as the kitchen doorway, Will said, with a disgusted sigh, “It was that bloody mail packet. It was a floating cesspool. I’d brought along a bottle of carbolic for cleaning and dressing the wound, but it fell and broke during rough seas our second day out. I was left with nothing but morphine for the pain and seawater as an antiseptic. It does help a little—that’s why I go out in the bay every evening to soak the arm, that and because it’s soothing—but it’s a poor substitute for carbolic. The arm was a curséd mess by the time I disembarked in Boston.”

  “Nell, do you think you could put a pot of water on to boil?” Cyril asked as he washed his hands at the sink. “The biggest one you can find. And see if there are any Epsom salts in the cupboard. Oh, and we could use some clean napkins or towels or the like.”

  Will stepped aside for Nell, who started pulling out drawers, amused that Cyril had reverted so automatically to their old doctor-nurse relationship.

  Producing a roll of gauzy bandaging from his medical bag, Cyril said to Will, “I assume you have been using carbolic since you got back.”

  “Of course, full strength. But—”

  “Full strength? That stuff is corrosive at full strength. It can even be toxic.”

  “It did cause some burning of the surrounding tissues, but I felt that was better than losing the arm altogether. I’m beginning to think it’s not quite the magic wand Lister claims, though, because it doesn’t seem to have much good.”

  “The infection must be so deep-seated at this point that the carbolic just isn’t reaching all of it. And, too, pure carbolic can actually impede the healing process. Ah, just the thing,” Cyril said as Nell handed him the box of Epsom salts she’d found under the sink.

  “Surely you’re not proposing that I use that in place of the carbolic.”

  “You’re to use it in place of the seawater. Make a strong, hot solution of it three times a day and soak your arm for an hour at a time. This,” he said, holding up a little jar of crystalline powder, “is your substitute for the carbolic.”

  Coming closer so
that he could read the label, Will said dubiously, “Lunar caustic? You’re going to cure me with silver?”

  “Silver nitrate, “ Cyril said. “About a year ago, I came across an article about the inability of aspergillus niger to grow in silver vessels. I recalled our cook, when I was young, dropping silver coins into a jug of milk to keep it fresh when it couldn’t be kept in the icebox. So I started using a solution of silver nitrate on open wounds, and so far I haven’t seen a single one go bad.”

  “Will these do?” asked Nell, setting a stack of tea towels on the table.

  “Quite nicely. If you wouldn’t mind washing your hands, I could use your assistance.” To Will he said, “Our first priority is gaining access to the deeper infection, and to do that, I’m going to have to lance the wound where necessary, clean it out, and cut away the necrotic tissue. After that, we’ll soak it in the Epsom solution, then pack it with gauze soaked in silver nitrate. The silver will leave an indelible black stain on the wound and surrounding flesh, but over time, as new skin grows in to replace the old, it will disappear.”

  He untied a leather roll and whipped it open on the table with a steely clatter, revealing a gleaming array of scalpels, bistouries, lancets, forceps, and scissors.

  Will regarded the instruments in silence for a weighty moment. He looked oddly young and vulnerable in that untucked shirt and dangling suspenders, his hair drying in wavy tendrils over his forehead.

  Cyril pulled a chair out from the table and gestured to it.

  With a capitulatory sigh, Will took a seat and rolled up his right sleeve.

  Cyril retrieved a little brown vial and a hypodermic kit. Screwing a needle onto the brass syringe, he asked Will how much morphine he could tolerate without diminished respiration. “You’ll want your maximum safe dose for this.”