Pay the Devil - Jack Higgins [56]
“But you’re wounded,” Kevin said. “At least let me bind it for you.”
“Get home, man!” Clay cried in a voice of iron. He slapped Rogan’s mare across the rump, sending her forward into the night, and turned Pegeen away across the moor.
After a while, he stopped and, removing the black scarf, knotted it about his wound and then rode on, alone with the heavy rain and the night.
It was a nightmare ride and he urged Pegeen forward, his knees desperately gripping her sides. He must have been riding for an hour when she tripped over a tussock and threw him from the saddle.
He was never very clear afterwards as to how long he had lain there. He remembered the mare standing over him, her tongue rough on his face, and then he was up and heaving himself back into the saddle.
It was Pegeen who brought him home a good hour later. She crossed the cobbled yard, hooves soundless in the rush of the rain, and halted in the stables. For a little while, Clay sat there and then he slid from the saddle and lurched across the yard to the door, sick and faint with pain.
The kitchen was in darkness and he wondered vaguely whether Joshua was asleep. As the storm raged outside, the very air seemed electric and humming with energy, as if there was nothing sleeping, as if in the surrounding darkness, there was a presence that waited for something to happen. And then the lightning flared outside and in the split second of its illumination, he saw Joshua, Kevin Rogan and Joanna facing him across the table.
What happened after that was confused and disjointed. Joanna was beside him, her face surprisingly calm, and Kevin stripped the wet clothes from Clay’s body while Joshua heated water. They wrapped Clay in a blanket by the fire and Joanna held a brandy bottle to his lips and told him to swallow.
He coughed as the fierce warmth of the raw spirit surged through him and then Joshua placed a bowl of water on the table and opened Clay’s instrument case. “We’ve got to get that bullet out, Colonel.”
Clay took a deep breath and fought to control himself. “I don’t think the arm is broken. It was a small bore pistol. You’ll have to probe, though. Just above the elbow. You’ve done it before.”
Kevin held his arm and Clay took some more brandy and watched with a detached, professional interest as Joshua started.
Joshua gently cleansed the area of the wound and felt for the bullet with no success. He then reached for a probe and inserted it carefully into the opening, pushing it in various directions until the porcelain tip grated on the bullet. After a while, he looked up at Clay. “Sorry, Colonel. I’m going to have to cut.”
Clay nodded weakly. “You’re the doctor. Remember your lessons.”
He drank some more brandy as Joshua reached for a scalpel. Joshua paused for a moment, sweat glistening on his brow in the firelight, and then he cut down through the flesh onto the end of the probe.
The pain which coursed through Clay was so exquisite that he gave an involuntary gasp of agony, and Joanna tightened her hand on his shoulder. As he opened his eyes again, Joshua lifted out the bullet with his fingers and dropped it into the fireplace. He washed his hands in the basin and forced a smile. “Got to stitch it now, Colonel.”
“Stitch away, by all means,” Clay told him and braced himself, but nature pushes no man too far, and at the first touch of the needle, he lapsed into a merciful darkness.
10
Clay awakened to firelight writhing and twisting in fantastic shapes across his bedroom ceiling. For a moment, he lay there, his mind a blank, and then he remembered and pain flooded through him as he tried to move his left arm.
He groaned, and immediately a cool hand was laid across his brow. He turned his head and found Joanna sitting by the bed, her face half-hidden by the shadows.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“Not too good at the moment. What time is it?”
She told him it was almost two o’clock and he lay there in silence, trying to focus his mind upon the events of the previous hours. After a while, he said, “They released Burke, I hope?”
She