Without hesitation Claudine stretched out her finger and pressed.
Hester was oblivious of time. It could have been a quarter of an hour, or three quarters, when she finally realized she had done all she could. With Claudine’s help she bound the last bandage on Martha’s neck and shoulder and the top of her arm. She looked only once at the purplish patch near the armpit. She did not know if it was a bruise or the beginning of a bubo. She did not want to know. They washed her the best they could, put a clean gown on her, then called for Squeaky to help them carry her to one of the downstairs rooms. They laid her on the bed and covered her over.
Claudine looked at Hester questioningly, but she did not ask if Martha would live or not. “I’ll go and clean up the kitchen,” she said ruefully. “It looks like a butcher’s shop.”
“Thank you,” Hester answered with profound sincerity. She did not add any praise. Claudine knew she had earned approval, and that was all that mattered to her. She went out, even smiling very slightly at Squeaky as she passed him on her way to the door.
Hester took the bloodstained clothes down to the laundry, where she found Sutton looking exhausted. His lean face was shadowed as if with bruising, his eyes hollow, the stubble on his chin patched with white.
“Was the Crimea like that?” he said with a twisted smile. “Gawd ’elp the army if it were.”
She thought of it with an effort. It seemed like another world now. She had been younger, had so much less that was precious to her to live for. One did not allow oneself to think about the violence and the pain in a rational way, or it became too much to bear. Then instead of helping, one was another needing to be helped.
“Pretty much,” she replied, dropping the clothes on the floor. The real answer was too long, and she was too tired, and perhaps Sutton did not really want to hear it anyway.
“Iggerant an’ mad, in’t we?” he said with startling gentleness. “Makes you wonder why we bother wi’ ourselves, don’t it? ’Ceptin’ we in’t got nob’dy else, an’ yer gotter care ’bout summink.” He shook his head and turned to walk away. “Snoot!” he called when he was outside in the passage. “Where are yer, yer useless little article?”
There was an enthusiastic scampering of feet. Hester smiled as the little dog shot out of the shadows and caught up with his master.
After putting the clothes into cold water she went back to Martha’s room. There was not much she could do for Martha except sit with her, make sure the bandages did not work loose, give her water if she woke, bathe her brow with a cool cloth, and try to keep the fever down.
Five minutes later Claudine came to the door with a hot cup of tea and passed it to her. “It’s ready to drink,” she said simply.
It was. It was just cool enough not to scald. It was also so powerfully laced with brandy that Hester felt she should be careful not to breathe near the candle flame.
“Oh!” she said as the inner fire of it hit her stomach. “Thank you.”
“Thought you needed it,” Claudine replied, turning to go, then she stopped. “Want me to watch her for a bit? I’ll call you if anything happens, I swear.”
Hester’s head was pounding and she was so tired her eyes felt gritty. If she closed them for longer than a second she might drift off to sleep. The thought of letting go and allowing herself to be carried away into unconsciousness, without fighting, was the best thing she could imagine, better than laughter, good food, warmth, even love—just to stop struggling for a while. “I can’t.” She heard the words and wondered how she could make herself say them.
“I’ll get another chair to sit here,” Claudine replied. “Then if she needs you I can wake you just by speaking. I wouldn’t have to leave her.”
Hester accepted. She was asleep even before Claudine sat down.
She sat up with a gasp an hour later when Claudine woke her to say that Martha was very restless and seemed to be in a lot of pain. One of the wounds was bleeding again.
They did what they could to help her, working with surprising ease together, but it was little enough. Hester was grateful not to be alone, and she told Claudine so as they sat down again to watch and wait.
Claudine was embarrassed. She was not used to being thanked; to be praised twice in one night was overwhelming, and she did not know how to answer. She looked away, her face pink.
Hester wondered what the other woman’s marriage was like that she apparently lived in such bitter loneliness, uncomplimented, without laughter or sharing. Was it filled with quarrels, or silence, two people within one house, one name, one legal entity, who never touched each other at heart? How could she reach out to Claudine without making it worse, or ask anything without prying and perhaps exposing a wound which could be endured only because no one else saw it? She remembered Ruth Clark’s cruel words and the mockery and contempt in them, as if she really had known something about Claudine, not just guessed at it. Perhaps she had, and perhaps it was bitter and wounding enough that Claudine had seen the chance to kill her and protect herself. But Hester refused even to allow that into her mind. One day she might have to, but not now.
“Would you like Sutton to have another message sent to your home?” Hester asked aloud. “You could let them know you are all right, but that with so many ill we can’t do without you. That would be more or less the truth, or at any rate it’s not a lie.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Claudine replied, her eyes fixed steadily on Martha. “I said that in the first message.” She was silent for a moment or two. “My husband will be annoyed because it is a break in his routine, and he was not consulted,” she went on. “There may be social events he would like me to have attended, but otherwise it will not matter.” Her voice caught for a moment. “I don’t wish to appear to be explaining myself. For the first time in my life I am doing something that matters, and I don’t intend to stop.”
She had said little, and yet beneath the surface it was an explanation of everything. Hester heard the emptiness behind the words, a whole bruised and aching lifetime of it. But there was no answer to give, nothing to make it different or better. The only decent response was silence.
She drifted back into sleep again, and Claudine woke her a little before four. Martha was slipping into deeper unconsciousness. Claudine stared at Hester, the question in her eyes, the answer already known. Martha was dying.
“Is it the plague or the dogs?” Claudine asked in a whisper.
