Claiming the Forbidden Bride. Gayle Wilson
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of the tribe, she was still shocked by the extent of the scarring. Was it possible he still had the use of his arm after such damage?
She pushed his sleeve upward, revealing that the muscle in both the lower and upper arm appeared almost normal. Despite whatever had happened to him, the limb hadn’t atrophied. Manipulating his shoulder more carefully now, she managed to remove the shirt without provoking any other outcry.
As she tucked a dry blanket around her patient, she bent to take another look at the cut on his head. There was still no swelling, and the clot seemed to be holding.
Other than that, she had found no evidence of new injuries. In an older person, she might suspect an inflammation of the lungs. In someone his age, who seemed to be in relatively good physical condition, that seemed unlikely.
All she could do tonight was watch over him. If his fever increased, there were remedies for that, even if she was unsure of its cause.
In her very limited experience with prolonged unconsciousness, there were only two possible outcomes. He would wake up on his own, his faculties intact. If he didn’t, eventually he would die. And despite all her grandmother’s careful teaching, Nadya knew of nothing that could tip the scales toward the more favourable outcome.
As she had expected, due to the rapid onset of symptoms, her patient’s fever began to climb during the night. She knew that her English colleagues, with the advantage of their medical degrees, would at this point begin a very rigidly proscribed course of treatment. The patient would be bled and then blistered. If the fever did not abate, both remedies would be repeated until it did. Or until he died.
Nadya instituted instead a regimen she had learned from her grandmother. She’d had the men remove the rest of his clothing, and then, despite the night chill, she pulled the blankets they had put over the Englishman down to his waist. Using a cloth dipped into a basin of water drawn from the barrel that served as the camp’s cistern, she bathed his face, neck and torso.
At first, his shivering had increased, so strongly that at one point his teeth rattled with the strength of the tremors. He tossed and turned, as if trying to escape the discomfort of what she was doing, but she persisted.
On the morning of the third day, when the congestion of the lungs she feared had not materialized, she added another of her grandmother’s remedies to the treatment. With endless patience she dribbled tea brewed from her small supply of a dried bark, supposedly acquired from some medicinal tree in Peru, between his parched lips.
At some point during her vigil, the Englishman’s inarticulate noises had become words. Uttered in the throes of delirium, they made no sense to Nadya, but she listened as he called names and issued directives to the phantoms he seemed to believe had gathered around his bed.
Finally, near dawn on the sixth day, her efforts were rewarded by the formation of a dew of perspiration along his upper lip. Exhausted, unable to remember the last time she had eaten a complete meal or slept for more than a few restless hours, Nadya discarded her basin and cloth as the rays of the sun crept steadily into the caravan.
She sat down on the low stool beside her patient’s bed and laid the back of her hand against the gaujo’sbrow, which was as cool as her own. Now that the fever was broken, his body would attempt to heal itself through sleep. Not the restless, fever-induced unconsciousness of the last few days, but a restorative rest that would almost certainly last for several hours.
Since it was safe to leave him, she would ask Magda or one of the other women to sit with him. She needed something to eat. And after she’d seen Angel, a few blessed hours of uninterrupted sleep for herself.
Rhys opened his eyes and then quickly closed them against the light that had seemed to stab through them, like a knife thrust into his brain. On some level, he realized that he had been aware of the agony in his head for a long time. Finally, its persistence had dragged him from sleep.
He had a vague memory of being carried from the field, but he couldn’t think what battle they’d been engaged in. As adjutant, he should certainly know, but in spite of his struggle to remember, there was nothing about any of that left in his consciousness.
Perhaps that was because there was room there for nothing but pain. And a thirst so profound it was almost worse than the other.
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was too dry. Even in the makeshift field hospitals set up near the lines, someone always brought water to those awaiting treatment. If he could only make them aware of his need.
He dragged leaden eyelids upward again, but more cautiously this time. Through the slits he allowed, he saw that what he had avoided before was a single candle. And that its light was not bright at all.
He turned his head, trying to locate one of the orderlies or even a surgeon. A shard of the previous agony sliced through his skull.
He clenched his lips against the resultant wave of nausea, one so severe it threatened his determination never to move again. Hardly daring to breathe, he willed himself not to be sick.
He tried to think of something—anything—other than the overwhelming urge to vomit. And finally, in his travail, realized that in the split second his eyes had been open, some still-functioning part of his brain had recognized that, wherever he was, it was like no hospital he’d ever seen.
And like nowhere else he’d ever been.
Curiosity engendered by that realization was almost enough to quell his roiling stomach. His eyelids again opened a slit, and for the third time, he peered out between his lashes.
The light was definitely a candle. It had been pushed into a twisted holder made of some unidentifiable metal, blackened with age or use.
Beyond was a blur of colour, reds and golds predominating. He turned his head another fraction of an inch in an attempt to bring his surroundings into better focus.
The wall opposite where he lay was so close that, if he had had the strength, he could probably have stretched out his arm and touched it. And every inch of it, from floor to ceiling, was crowded with objects.
He allowed his gaze to follow their upward climb, trying to identify what was there. Baskets, woven of vine and stacked full of what appeared to be dried roots. Earthenware crocks, their tops sealed with wax. Glass jars whose contents were indistinguishable, dark and strangely shaped. And sitting incongruously in the middle of what he had now realized were a series of shelves was a rag doll, exactly like those sold in every penny shop in England.
England.
He was no longer in Spain, he knew with a flash of clarity. He hadn’t been for months.
If that were true.
He raised his right hand to touch his face. Clean-shaven. Which must mean he’d been here—wherever here was—only a short time.
His gaze came back to the table. A measuring cup and a small medicine bottle stood near its edge.
A memory swam to the surface of his consciousness. A pair of long, slender fingers had poured out a measure of the liquid the bottle contained. Then a hand had slipped behind his head, raising it enough to allow him to swallow the dose. He tried desperately to retrieve the image of the face of the person who had administered the medication, butthe only thing he could remember after that was the same searing pain he had experienced a few minutes ago.
He closed his eyes, releasing the breath he’d been holding in a long, slow sigh. Something moved against his leg. He opened his eyes to see what and realized gratefully that the pain in his head was less than before.
A little girl, perhaps four or five, stood beside his bed. Her eyes, the exact colour of the hyacinths that bloomed in his sister-in-law’s garden, were surrounded by long, nearly colourless lashes. In contrast, the unbound hair that framed her face seemed almost golden in the candlelight.
When she saw that his eyes were open, the child’s mouth rounded into an O of surprise. Clearly his visitor hadn’t expected him to be awake. Which made him wonder how many times she’d stood at his bedside as he slept.