Only one thing puzzled him and that was why Mungo St. johnos shot had been so wide. At twenty paces he would surely have taken the head shot, aiming between the eyes with an expectation of the ball deviating less than an inch from the point of aim, yet the shot had taken Clinton low in the chest.
While Robyn pressed a dressing over the wicked little blue mouth of the wound, Zouga picked the pistol out of the sand. The barrel was still warm and there was the peppery whiff of burned powder as he examined it and saw instantly why Mungo's shot had struck wide.
There was a bluish smear of bright new lead on the steel trigger guard.
Mungo St. John had indeed aimed at the head, but Clinton had lifted the pistol to his eye at the same instant directly in the line of sight. St. John's ball had struck the metal guard and been deflected downwards.
That would account for the fact that Clinton's own ball had been high, for as a less expert marksman he would surely have aimed at St. John's chest. The strike of the ball had thrown his weapon upwards at the moment of discharge.
Zouga looked up and handed the pistol to Tippoo who waited impassively close at hand. Without a word, Tippoo took the weapon, turned away and followed his master over the dunes.
By the time four seamen from the gunboat could carry Clinton Codrington down the beach using his boat cloak as a hammock, St. John was climbing up from the Huron's whaler on to his maindeck, and before they could rig a block and tackle to lift the prostrate form of her captain into Black joke, Huron had broken out her anchor and was spreading sail before the south-westerly breeze and bearing away with the sunrise transformin her into a vessel etched in golden fire.
For twenty-four hours Clinton Codrington surprised Robyn with the strength of his recovery. She looked to see blood on his lips, and she expected him to experience the agony of breathing as the damaged lung collapsed.
Every few hours she listened with her sounding trumpet to his chest, stooping over the bunk in his cabin to catch the hiss and saw of his breathing, listening for the bubbling sound of blood, or for the dry rubbing of the lung against the rib cage, and was pleased when none of these symptoms occurred.
Indeed Clinton was unaccountably resilient for a patient with ball through the chest cavity. He complained only of stiffness reaching up into his left armpit and semi-paralysis of that arm, and he was vociferous in his advice to his surgeon.
You will bleed me, of course! he asked. I will not, Robyn told him shortly as she cleaned the area around the wound and then lifted him into a sitting position to bandage his chest.
You should take at least a pint, Clinton insisted. Have you not bled enough? ' Robyn asked witheringly, but he was undaunted. There is black rotten blood that must be taken off Clinton indicated the massive bruise that was spreading around his chest like some dark parasitic plant around the smooth pale trunk. You must bleed me, Clinton insisted, for all his adult life he had been exposed to the ministrations of naval surgeons. 'If you don't, fever is sure to follow.'
He offered Robyn the inner curve of his elbow where the thin white scars over the blue blood vessels marked where he had been bled before. We no longer live in the dark ages, Robyn told him tartly. 'This is 1860, and she pushed him down on the bolster and covered him with a grey ship's blanket against the shivering and chilling nausea which she knew must soon accompany such a wound. It did not come, and for the next twenty hours he continued to manage the ship from his bunk, and he chafed at the restraint she placed on him. However, Robyn knew the pistol ball was still in there and that there must be drastic consequences. She wished that there was some technique that could enable a surgeon to locate the whereabouts of a foreign body accurately, and then allow him to enter the rib cage and remove it.
That evening she fell asleep in the rope chair beside his bunk, awakening once to hold the enamel cup of water to his lips when he complained of thirst and noting the dryness and heat of his skin, and in the morning all her fears were confirmed.
He was only semi-conscious, and the pain was fierce.
He moaned and cried out at the smallest movement. His eyes were sunken into plum-coloured cavities, his tongue was thickly coated with white and his lips were dried and cracked. He pleaded for drink and his skin was hot, the heat increasing every hour until it seemed to be burning out the core of his being, and he was restless and flushed, tossing in the narrow bunk, fighting off the blankets with which she tried to keep him covered, and whimpering in his delirium at the agony of movement.
His breath was sawing painfully in his swollen and bruised chest, his eyes were glittering bright, and when Robyn unwound the bandage to sponge his body with cool water there was only a little pale fluid staining the dressing, but her nostrils flared as she smelled it. It was so horribly familiar, she always thought of that stench as the fetid breath of death itself.
The wound had shrunk, but the crust that had formed over it was so thin that it cracked at one of Clinton's restless movements and through it rose a thick droplet of custard-coloured matter. Immediately the smell was stronger. This was not the benign pus of healing, but the malignant pus that she so dreaded to see in a wound.
She swabbed it away carefully, and then with cold seawater sponged his chest and the hard hot swollen flesh below his armpit. The bruising was extensive and it had changed colour, dark blue as storm clouds, tinged with the yellow of sulphur and the virulent rose of some flower from the gardens of Hell itself.
There was one area just below the point of his shoulder blade particularly sensitive for he screamed when she touched it, and a sparse prickle of sweat broke out across his forehead and amongst the fine golden bristles of his unshaven cheeks.
She replaced the bandage with a fresh dressing and then forced between his dry lips four grams of laudanum mixed with a warm draught of calomel. She watched while he fell into a restless drug-induced sleep. Another twenty-four hours, she whispered aloud, watching him toss and mutter. She had seen it so often.
Soon the pus would suffuse his whole body, building up steadily around the ball deep in his chest. She was helpless. No surgeon could enter the rib cage, it had never been done before.
She looked up as Zouga stooped into the cabin. He was grave and quiet, standing beside her chair for a moment and placing a hand on her shoulder comfortingly.
He improves? ' he asked softly.
She shook her head, and he nodded as though he had expected the answer. You must eat. ' He offered her the
