Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [78]
“He’ll be all right,” I tried to reassure him. “Very uncomfortable, but all right.”
“Thank you, madam,” he replied, so clearly unconvinced that I had to wonder if something further had happened on the trip here. I hurried off to see for myself.
I had no intention of getting caught up in the fray, and made along the front wall of the Great Hall in the direction of the western wing, but even that backwater was pulsing with full-throated conversation. I edged around a three-sided argument involving a woman wearing a sort of Roumanian peasant gown with a multitude of scarfs over it, a tall, cadaverous man with a handful of turquoise chips hanging from his right ear-lobe, and a short, plump individual in a man’s lounge suit who might have been male or female. This last person wore a small, ill-tempered spider monkey on the left shoulder of the suit; the creature was plucking irritably at the jewelled collar and gold chain that kept it from leaping to the heights. I gave the monkey wide berth, nearly knocked into a huge betasselled sombrero someone had perched on a marble bust of the third Duke, avoided the peculiar green drink thrust in my direction by a woman dressed predominantly in beads and fringe, and escaped.
Standing outside of the heavy door to Marsh’s rooms, I could hear voices. I knocked, then turned the knob to open the door a few inches.
“May I enter?” I asked.
“Come in,” Iris answered.
The tableau that greeted my eyes was like some dramatic canvas depicting the aftermath of battle: doctor in rolled-up shirt-sleeves with blood to his elbows, his assistant (Alistair) holding up a lamp to throw strong light on the victim, a worried nurse (played by Iris) clasping her hands. Except that none of them were dressed for the part, the victim was more furious than suffering, the surgical table was a vast high bed covered in velvet, and the worried nurse on closer examination seemed rather to be clasping her hands to keep back laughter as the grizzled Scots doctor mumbled on and on about the foolishness of walking out in front of bairns with guns. I shook my head to dispel the images of paint on canvas (Justice Hall was having a powerful influence on my imagination, I thought in irritation) and stepped forward to offer succour to the wounded. Or distraction, at the least.
With the blood cleaned away, the injury became a matter less of gore and carnage than of a myriad of oozing punctures gone angry with reaction. The doctor, working his way methodically from cheek to thigh, was currently prodding away at the upper arm. A small saucer of dug-out shot lay to one side, and Iris reached out with the sticking-plaster to cover one trickling but empty hole in her husband’s shoulder.
The doctor’s digging produced another tiny lump, which he dropped into the saucer with a wet clink.
“You’re certain you won’t have a wee bit of morphia, are ye?” he asked. “You’ll find it goes ever so much easier.”
“No morphia,” Marsh grunted.
“Very well,” the doctor said in an It’s-your-funeral sort of voice, and picked up his probe.
Sweat was running freely down Marsh’s taut face, the only indication of what had to have been agony.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked him. “Water? Whisky?”
His answer was a flicker of the eyes in the direction of the bedside jug near the doctor’s elbows. I took the glass to the lavatory and filled it with water from the tap. When the next piece of shot was in the saucer, he propped himself on his right elbow and drank thirstily.
A rat-a-tat of knuckles on wood interrupted us, and a sudden increase of noise indicated the door being opened.
“Yoo-hoo,” came Phillida’s voice. “Anyone here? There you are—Marsh, you poor boy, are you all right? How terribly awful for you—er.” Her cheerful air did not survive the sight of the doctor’s bloody hands or the small plate of gory lead pellets, but she did not flee. “Marsh, dear. You must hurt like the blazes. Do you want me to put