She left the window down, for the day was fine and there seemed little point in shutting herself inside the car where it would soon be too warm to sit comfortably. Most of the soldiers posted to Northern Ireland were painfully young. Eighteen-year-olds who often would not see nineteen, and were woefully unaware of the politics that had brought them here. One should have the privilege of naiveté at eighteen she supposed, though it was a costly vice when one was a soldier.
“How old are your children?” the soldier asked.
She hesitated before answering. Every bit of information could be used against a person in this country, and she found it was merely habit now to pause and consider before responding to even the simplest of questions. She didn’t see how her children’s ages could be used against her because she had no doubt that information was already on file.
“My son is three years old and my daughter is ten months.”
“I have a baby girl; she was born right after I was sent over here.” There was a distinctive longing in his voice. “She’s just the one month old.”
Damn him anyway, he had gone and made himself a human being when she had been hoping to just keep him as a uniform.
“It must be hard being away from her,” she said.
He nodded. “It is. I’d love to go home. As much as you would like us out of the country here, we’d like to go.”
“I’m sure you would. I fear we’re stuck with each other for the time being.”
“That we are.” He smiled, a careful smile. He had clearly been here long enough to understand it wasn’t wise to trust the natives. Of which she supposed she was one, though she didn’t often feel it. She smiled back, finding that she liked the young soldier instinctively. He had lovely deep grey eyes, fringed in sooty lashes and dark hair cut very short in the military fashion. He was tall and thin, but was one of those men who conveyed an impression of quiet strength. In short, he wasn’t someone to mess with.
The other soldier came up then, short and solidly built and with an electric air about him, as if he were just waiting for something to happen—Mutt to his colleague’s Jeff.
“Everything all right here, corporal?”
“It’s fine, private, I’m just passing the time of day with the lady here. There’s a P-check on her vehicle she wasn’t aware of. I’m waiting on the radio call to release her.”
The young private looked at her goggle-eyed. She smiled, slightly nervous under his unblinking gaze. The corporal cleared his throat. “Jock, I think you’re making the lady uncomfortable.”
The short soldier turned brick red as he realized that he was staring. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to stare.”
“Women are all he thinks about.” The corporal laughed. “I can’t say I blame him, mind you. It’s boring as hell here when the locals aren’t using us for target practice.”
She raised a brow at him, trying not to laugh.
“Did I just insult you? You don’t sound like a local.”
“Well, I’m American by birth, but Irish by marriage,” she said.
The two soldiers were Gordon Highlanders, from the northeast corner of Scotland. The corporal was from Dundee, the private from a tiny fishing village on the coast, the name of which was so long and filled with Scottish consonants and growls that Pamela couldn’t remember it a minute after the private sounded it out for her.
“We were about to have a bit of tea, would you like some?” The private asked when it became clear it wasn’t going to be a short wait. Between the remote location, boredom and the hostility of most of the people they encountered, it was likely a very welcome anomaly to find someone willing to be civil.
“Oh, no, but thank you for offering,” she said.
“Are you certain? My mum sent over one of her famous lemon loaves. It’s very good, are you certain you won’t have a slice?”
With impeccable timing her stomach growled, reminding her no food had been sent its way since the early hours of the morning, and that only a cup of tea and a hastily toasted piece of bread. It was ludicrous that even a slice of lemon loaf should become such a political quandary. A person could write a book on all the various ways to get yourself killed in this country—Life, Death and Lemon Loaf: A Practical Guide to Survival in the Six Counties. She bit her lip to keep from laughing. It wasn’t funny, though it was at times ridiculous, in the way things were ridiculous on the steps up to the gallows. It frightened her, because some days she felt she couldn’t recognize or acknowledge basic human decency anymore. A small curl of rebellion unfurled in her blood. These were just young men trying to be decent and make a tense situation somewhat less so. They hadn’t asked to be here, and were as much at the mercy of fate and authority as she was.
“Yes, I think I will—have a bit of the cake that is.”
The private smiled, and it was one of those smiles that lit the space around like a brace of fireworks.
“That’s better, and you’d best have some tea to wash it down too.” He went to their tiny shelter at the side of the road, and came back with a tin mug of tea and the lemon loaf.
She accepted the tea gratefully, and spent the next half hour engaged in chat with the two young men. They kept an eye on the road in both directions but managed to have an amiable conversation as well. At the end of the thirty minutes she knew both their names, their family histories and their romantic status. The corporal—Callum—was married and the private—Jock—was currently unattached and eager to change that condition, to the extent that he actually asked her if she knew of any eligible young ladies who might be willing to date a soldier.
“Alas,” she said, laughing at his hopeful expression, “I do not.” The private was a nice young man, and she wished that they both lived in a world where she could introduce him to an equally nice young woman, with whom he could fall in love and build a life. She didn’t actually know any eligible ladies, but she wouldn’t have introduced a soldier to any of them if she had. It was too risky for both sides.
The radio crackled to life with the permission for her to proceed through the roadblock, just as she as she swallowed the last of her tea. Real life flooded back then and she brushed the crumbs from her skirt and gave the corporal the tin mug with regret. She saw the realization in the deep grey eyes—what was normal here was not in other places, and so it stood to reason that what was normal elsewhere could not ever be so here.
“It’s all right,” he said, quietly. “It was only tea, and no one saw.”
She had become so wary of soldiers these last few years, that these two young men had taken her off guard. She hoped to God the corporal was right and that they hadn’t been spotted by anyone.
She realized she was trembling as she drove through the road block and ignored the private’s cheery wave. The lemon cake had turned into a cold lump in her stomach. Because while it might have only been tea and pleasant conversation for most, it was punishable by death in the world in which she lived.
Chapter Twenty-two
The Weight of Blood
THE KNOCK UPON THE DOOR came right at the witching hour, just as Pamela was readying herself for bed. She had put Conor and Isabelle to bed hours before and then had spent the intervening time setting the house to rights, getting wood in for the night, checking on Phouka and Paudeen—her lone sheep—in the byre and then returning to the house to make a cup of lavender tea in the vain hope it might send her off to sleep. She’d added three rows to the little pink sweater she was knitting for Isabelle while the tea steeped and then given it up to prowl restlessly around the house. There was something in the wind that pricked her nerves so that her skin felt like an open coursework with icy needles of water trickling through it. A visitor at this hour of the night turned that trickle into a churning flood.
“Who is it?” she called from her side of the door, Finbar growling at her heels, and a stout length of blackthorn in her hand that Casey had long ago carved into a shillelagh to hang upon the wall. She wished she had retri
eved the pistol from the tea tin.
“It’s Noah,” came the answer, quiet but terse.
She took a breath of relief and undid the bolt and opened the door. Noah stood on the step, face grim and rain plastering his dark hair to his head. “I’ve got a man in bad shape here, I need yer help,” he said, turning back toward the night even as he spoke. “Meet me by the byre,” he added and strode off into the dark streaming night. She stood for a moment, certain that whatever lay out there was not something she was eager to face. Then she took a breath, grabbed her coat and headed out to the byre.
She smelled blood, even through the rain, and knew the man’s injuries must be very bad. She caught up with Noah halfway across the yard where he was trying to hold up a boy who kept sinking to his knees. For it was a boy, not a man, bleeding in the glare of the one outside light. She came up on the other side of him. He was slim and looked to be no more than seventeen or eighteen. She propped the boy’s other shoulder up with her own and helped Noah get him across the yard. She could feel a spreading warmth on her side and knew it was blood. She let him go as they neared the byre and Noah took his full weight so that she could go ahead and open the door.
Inside she lit the lantern. Phouka was chuntering in his stall, wondering why his mistress was out in his domain at this time of night. She touched his muzzle, trying to reassure him. He was a high strung horse at the best of times. Paudeen merely stuck his woolly face through the slats of his pen in curiosity.
“He’s been shot, has at least five bullets in him as far as I can figure,” Noah said, coming in on her heels. The boy sank to the floor, as if his bones had dissolved, his clothes sticky and red. Phouka whinnied a little, stepping sideways in his stall. Like most horses he did not like the scent of blood. Noah shot a look sideways at the horse and then, stripping off his coat, knelt down by the young man, ripping his shirt down the front.
“I wish to God I didn’t need to move him, but we couldn’t stay where we were.”
She didn’t ask him just where that had been, she would know by tomorrow when the news of it spread like wildfire along the community branches—it was never more than whispers and hints; enough whispers and hints though, and any story could be pieced together to make something that was near to whole in the telling.
Pamela knelt down on the other side of the boy, thinking rather frantically that she felt somewhat like Phouka about blood—panicked and certain it held ill portents. She placed a medical kit beside Noah having stowed it in the byre after the last wounded man had passed through. Then she watched as he brutally and efficiently set about assessing the wounds. There was so much blood that she didn’t see how he could possibly know where most of it was coming from.
“Here,” Noah tossed her a couple of packages from inside the kit. “Put these over the worst of the bleeding. There and there.” He indicated just below the man’s ribs on one side and a wound in his groin. The packages contained thick wads of gauze. She stripped the covering off and took the pads out and then put them over the wounds Noah had pointed out.
“Put yer hand here and press down,” he said and placed her hand over the major artery in the groin. It would reduce the flow of blood from his thigh, there was little they could do about the chest wound, it was difficult to apply pressure with the rib cage in the way. Even now she could hear the whistle of his wound as the air moved in and out, less regular than it had been even a minute before. One finger was blocking a hole just below his abdomen, her elbow on that same arm desperately trying to keep pressure on the gauze pad. She felt like she was playing a very serious and rather gory version of Twister.
The boy’s pulse was stuttering, like a record that skipped so a song was only half heard, until it stopped entirely and there was only silence left. She saw the knowledge of it in Noah’s face as he started chest compressions, a grim concentration laying over his face, like he could will the boy to stay alive and force his survival, even though the slick floor of the byre told her that the blood loss was too great.
Time stretched out as if she could hear every tick of it on a clock, and she could feel the corresponding inertia in the body on the floor. Phouka was still grumbling, and she looked up at him when she could, making eye contact so that he wouldn’t panic and take the back wall out of the byre in his fear. She would never forgive herself if he was hurt because of this.
Her senses were heightened, the wash of panic having made her hearing and sight that much sharper. Out in the night somewhere, she heard a barn owl call on the wind, warning prey of its approach. Inside she was aware of the pool of light they were bounded by and the heavy breath of the horse outside it, the rustle of hay, the play of light on Noah’s hands as he raced against time to save this boy’s life.
The gauze was slick and heavy with blood, and it had breached the pads and was sliding along her fingers now and dripping from her wrist, turning cold as it moved. The flesh beneath her hands was not as warm any more either; it was flaccid and inert. Despite the chill of the night, she was sweating, her heart pounding in her chest so that she felt the slam of it in her throat with every beat. Her arms were tingling and the bones in her hands ached. Beads of perspiration had popped out on her forehead and around her hairline. A line of it trickled down her backbone, cold as ice.
“I feel like the little Dutch boy, trying to plug a dam with his fingers,” she said, wiping her forehead against her shoulder so that the sweat wouldn’t drip into her eyes and blind her.
“There aren’t enough fingers between the two of us to plug all the holes he’s got in him,” Noah said and she could hear the frustration in his words. He kept on for a few more minutes and then, “Ye can stop,” he said, and blew out a breath that he had clearly been holding on to for the last several minutes. He looked exhausted, red-eyed and disheveled. “He’s been gone twenty minutes by my count, even if I could bring him back he’d be brain damaged.”
Her hands came away with a sucking pop, sticky with drying blood and still slick where the last of the boy’s life had poured over them. Her knees were stuck to the byre floor and Noah looked like he had been butchering pigs for the last hour.
She staggered to her feet, and made her way outside to the rain barrel. The night air was raw and rain sluiced over her as soon as she stepped outside. The water in the rain barrel was cold but she plunged her hands in. It was a relief to wash away some of the blood. Phouka was still whickering, but he hadn’t panicked and for that she was grateful. Noah covered the body with a blanket and for the horse it was out of sight and at least partially out of mind.
Noah came out behind her, taking a deep breath of the night air.
“I’ll get the body moved before dawn,” he said, his tone somber and weary. She nodded; feeling like her very marrow was weighted with lead.
“Come in for some tea,” she said, “I’m sure you could use the warmth.”
“All right,” he said and followed her to the house, shedding his boots in the small porch, his clothing wet with rain.
Inside, she went directly to the sink, turned the water as hot as she could bear it and scrubbed her hands. There was still blood under her nails, embedded in the lines of her hands and traces of crimson on the edges of her cuffs. Noah stepped outside briefly and she suspected it was to radio for his men to come and help him remove the body.
Noah washed while she checked on the children. Both were still deeply asleep. Isabelle had kicked off all her covers, so Pamela gently replaced them, putting her hand to the baby’s soft halo of curls. Isabelle snorted slightly in her sleep, something that Casey had sometimes done. She bit her lip and drew in her breath. Conor looked like his father, but his mannerisms were more like his uncle and Pat said, his grandfather as well. Isabelle, in nature, was entirely her father’s daughter.
Downstairs she found Noah sitting at the table, having put the kettle on already. She made the tea in silence, for small talk seemed entirely beyond her scope at present. She had left the shirt he had loaned her
out on the table and he’d changed into it so that he was clean and free of blood on his top half.
When the tea was done steeping she put the pot on the table, steaming, and then took day old scones out of the bread box, put them on a plate and placed them on the table along with butter and jam. Scones were one of the few things she had mastered the baking of and so wasn’t afraid to serve them to the man.
He took two scones and then poured out the tea for her and himself. It felt odd to be sharing a cuppa in the wee hours with any man who wasn’t Casey, but it wasn’t uncomfortable or awkward.
“Ye have a beautiful wee home here,” he said, looking about the room. “Yer man did the work himself, no?”
“He did. He’s a natural craftsman.”
“Ye always talk about him in the present tense.”
It was a blunt statement, but somehow she didn’t mind bluntness from Noah.
“I know I do. Likely I seem crazy to you. You know what a disappearance like my husband’s means in this country, and so do I. Only I just don’t feel that he’s gone. I know how that sounds, but it’s just the reality of the situation for me.”
Noah nodded and addressed himself to the tea and scones. What he said next surprised her.
“Ye were brave tonight. Not many women have the sort of steel in them that ye showed out there. Wherever he is, yer man must miss ye, ye seem a rare woman to me.”
“Thank you,” she said, though she wasn’t sure how complimentary it was to be called a rare woman by the likes of Noah Murray. “Where did you learn your medical skills?” she asked.
“Well, ye’ll hardly countenance this, but I learned from a British Army medic.”
“What?”
He laughed. “Have I finally managed to surprise ye, Pamela?”
“Yes, you have. It’s not the most obvious of answers, you have to admit.”
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 22
