The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [65]
“It was not to the point of my visit, sir. And I did not expect you to remember.”
“Your arm, you say. Let me see, then.”
Taken aback, Quire found himself quite motionless, and with no words offering themselves to his tongue.
“Come, man,” Knox said with a rather cold smile. “Allow the craftsman to inspect his former works. You say I saved the limb. Let me see it, then.”
Quire tried to pull back the sleeve of his jacket, but the material was too thick and tight.
“Take it off, take it off,” Knox muttered.
Quire did so, and draped the jacket over the back of a chair. He rolled up his shirt sleeve to expose his left forearm, and turned it—with an uneasy tightening of embarrassment in his chest—so that Knox could examine the scars on its inner face.
“Burns,” the doctor murmured as he took hold of Quire’s wrist and ungently lifted the limb closer to his eye.
The skin was thick and messy and hairless, with an unnatural shine to it like wax that had hardened and smoothed in mid-flow. Ridges and furrows knotted themselves over the surface. In the midst of that wound, another, more distinct, resided: ugly and slightly raised, like a corrupted boil.
“And this?” Knox asked.
“You extracted a ball fragment, sir.”
“Ah. Well, you were fortunate, then. To work amidst burns, digging around in there—nine times in ten I’d think to lose the limb. Or the entire patient.”
“They told me afterwards that you prevented them from amputating it. You thought it might be saved. Removed not just the bullet but several pieces of my uniform from the wound.”
“Yes, yes. Often overlooked. It is rarely the lead itself that carries rot into the flesh, but what it takes with it. Very well. Cover yourself up.”
Quire pulled down his sleeve with relief, his left hand making a fist of its own volition, tensing against shivers of pain in his arm.
“Not my best or neatest work,” Knox said, handing Quire his jacket. “But that is to be expected: I was learning my trade then, on the army’s coin, and there were a great many demands on my time over those few days. That Corsican dwarf made sure of that, eh?”
“He did.”
“Well, luck was with you. And an astute surgeon, dare I say? Or one filled with the hubris of untrammelled youth, in any case.”
Knox’s manner was greatly mellowed, perhaps by self-importance, perhaps by fond reminiscence. Quire shared neither, and had no memory of any luck worthy of the name attending upon him in those days. Quite the reverse, in fact.
“Come, then,” said Knox, opening the great panelled door and ushering Quire out to the head of the stairway. That his teaching practice was successful, as Christison had intimated, was beyond doubt. The oak staircase, the paintings upon the walls, the wide entrance hall below, all put Quire in mind of the house of some noble family; and this was not even Knox’s residence, merely his place of teaching.
“Paterson!” Knox shouted, leaning over the banister and peering down.
There was no response from his doorkeeper.
“Ach, that man,” muttered Knox. “Unreliable staff are a blight upon every enterprise, Sergeant, you mark my words.”
“I will make my own way out, Dr. Knox,” Quire said.
He glanced back as he descended the wide stairs, but Knox was already gone, retired to his desk and his gallery of silent specimens.
Robinson’s Last Day
Adam Quire’s dreams, when he remembered them at all, had once been of fire, darkness and little else. Never, in other words, conducive to a restful slumber. Now, they were fiercer still. Teeth and shadows and horrors unnamed. He would come roughly out of sleep, trembling or sometimes rigid with morbid fear, to find himself entangled in his sheets and blankets.
Quire awoke, unrested, in just such a state of disorientation. Only the intrusion of the mundane upon his senses finally shook him free of the nightmare’s grasp. He heard the haberdasher’s wife on the floor above