Galore - Michael Crummey [110]
He took out the confession and affidavit and he set them side by side on the lungers where Judah could see them, then looked up at the long lines of fragments on the wall. To bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron Deliver me out of great waters from the hand of strange children Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones. It made Newman think there might be a case for madness after all, for the author of the Psalms if not for Judah. —Do you recognize the signature on this confession, Jude? God’s Nephew? He pointed to the paper but Judah didn’t glance down. —Barnaby Shambler accuses you of threatening the King and claiming the English throne. Is there any truth to that?
Jude pushed himself to his feet and shuffled by the doctor to piss through the grated hole in the floor. Which may have been a comment on Shambler’s claims, Newman thought, or simply the call of nature.
The first patients of the day were waiting for him at the clinic—an ingrown toenail black with infection, a broken finger, a strained back. Bride had already prepped the toenail, the infected digit washed and stained with iodine, the scalpel and retractor and scissors in a porcelain bowl. Newman went to the office to change and he was helping himself to a quick cocktail of ethyl alcohol and juniper berries when Tryphie barreled into the room, the door swinging against the wall. Newman set his glass under the desk. —Let’s have a look at you, he said, turning the boy and pushing up his shirt.
He’d performed half a dozen rudimentary skin grafts across the shoulders and along the left side but he was reaching the limit of what he could do in Paradise Deep. And Tryphie was still bent nearly double by the scar tissue on his back. He traveled in a loping primate fashion, his hands swinging near the floor as he wandered through rooms to talk to patients, observing simple operations. He passed the hours of imposed bedrest by taking apart any gadget the doctor was willing to risk, a pocket watch, a gyroscope, a barometer, sketching each individual spring and screw before reassembling it. The youngster had the hands of a surgeon, the same distilled concentration and dexterity. He never failed to reconstruct any contraption and often in better working order than when he began. Newman’s natural discomfort around children was swallowed up by his admiration for Tryphie’s precociousness.
Bride knocked at the door. —Do you want me to do the toe, Doctor?
He glanced up at her. —I’ll be right there, he said.
All the while he rooted after the rogue toenail, Newman tried to decide what to do about Judah. There was something in the whole affair that pricked at him, a sliver of some larger thing that he couldn’t quite guess the shape of. Bride’s hip grazed his shoulder as she reached for additional gauze and he lost his train of thought altogether. She wrapped the toe when he was done, offering the patient instructions on disinfecting and bandaging while Newman washed up under the window. He turned from the basin and the sight of her stole the wind from his chest. He went to his office, mixing another clandestine cocktail and sipping at it as he waited for the surge to pass. The innocent weight of her breasts against her blouse, the attention she lavished on the naked foot. Jesus loves the little children.
In the year since Henley Devine was carried home in his coffin Bride had insinuated herself into every facet of the clinic’s operation. She managed the daily administration, organized fundraising teas, oversaw the volunteers who laundered and chopped firewood and set the hospital’s vegetable garden. They spent most of their time in each other’s company and she didn’t give the slightest indication she felt anything for Newman but collegial admiration