The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [29]
It was difficult to know how old he was. Even without all that disguising hair, he had the kind of skin that conceals a man’s age until he turns eighty overnight. He moved like a man of thirty but spoke like someone twice that; when his face was still, he had the ancient gaze of a trench soldier; when he grinned, his teeth were uneven and slightly oversized, like an adolescent who had yet to grow into his mouth.
“Thank you for coming to our rescue,” I told him. “I’m Mary Russell. That man you’ve been carrying is my pilot, Cash Javitz. He’s an American. The child is my husband’s granddaughter, Estelle.”
“Robert Goodman,” he said.
It was on the point of my tongue to say, Not Robin Goodfellow? but that was the concussion speaking.
Oddly, a twinkle in his emerald eyes suggested that he guessed the fanciful direction of my thoughts. I shook off the idea: stick to facts. “We started this morning in Orkney. I think Mr Javitz had hoped to make it to Manchester, but the machine rather came to pieces around us.”
“So I saw. Something to eat, then?”
“I think—”
But he had already snatched two large onions and a handful of carrots from a basket under the work-table, and set them beside a small knife and a heavy iron pan. “Chop these while I see to your pilot.”
I eyed the proceedings dubiously—I am no cook—and instead followed Goodfellow to the bedroom. There he gently removed the half-conscious man’s remaining boot before pulling a long, well-honed knife from somewhere about his person and, with one deft motion, slit the blood-soaked remnants of the trousers from cuff to belt.
He looked over the leg without touching it, then picked up a flowered bowl and bar of soap and pushed past me to spill water into it from the heating kettle. I was encouraged to see him scrub his hands. He even poured that water into the sink and refilled the bowl before bathing Javitz’s wound.
It was messy, a ten-inch furrow up the outside of his thigh. Because of the circumstances, it had bled a lot, but bar infection, I thought it would heal without permanent effect.
“Would stitches help?” I asked my host.
He shook his head. “They’d pull.”
I watched him work, cleaning the wound and examining the portions that were still bleeding, but those stubby hands knew what they were doing. “You’ve done this sort of thing before,” I remarked.
“He … A friend …” He stopped to concentrate on the wound. “I was an ambulance driver in the War. Lent a hand in the dressing stations when I was needed. One picks things up.”
It was a peculiar idea, Ariel strolling through the fourth act of Henry V—then I pushed the thought away, hard: Clearly, it would take a while for my brain to settle.
I left our unlikely medic to his repairs, and went to address the problem of the onions and carrots, about which I will say only that I succeeded in not giving my host another major wound to dress.
Chapter 18
The remainder of Saturday passed in snippets of memory, cut from whole cloth and rearranged by the blow my head had taken:
After we ate, I lay dozing on a surprisingly comfortable if much-repaired deck chair beneath the big oak tree. The late-afternoon sun had broken through; someone had put a warm wrap over me.
Estelle and Goodman were sitting on a pair of upended firewood rounds, a third round between them as a table. On it the child had arranged an impromptu tea-service. The participants were Estelle, Goodman, and a bedraggled once-purple stuffed rabbit lifted from his sitting room wall, with a fourth setting for the fawn he had told her might come by. The plates were mismatched saucers from Goodman’s kitchen, the cups were two acorns, a small tea-cup, and her treasured porcelain dollies’ cup. The tea-pot was a creamer lacking a handle, decorated with the Brighton Pier and a generous stripe of gilt. A silver salt bowl and spoon made for a scaled-down sugar bowl. A clean khaki-coloured handkerchief was the tablecloth.
Goodman solemnly stirred a spoonful of nonexistent sugar into the dollies’ cup, which was scarcely larger than the salt spoon. He raised