The Companion (10 page)

She had done what she could. She ran for the open deck, pushing her way among the seamen to the forward stairway and so down to the orlop where the surgeon held sway.

She found that gentleman, red-eyed but seemingly sober, awash in wounded. They packed every cranny of the triangular space open to the deck above and into the companion-way. There were some grievous belly wounds, slashes, obvious broken bones. Some men might not see daylight. The loblolly boy was hauling a man up onto two lockers covered with bloody canvas. “We’ll have that leg off,” the doctor muttered, looking around distractedly.

“Dr. Granger, if you please!” she called over the groans and panting breath.

He looked up in surprise. “Are you wounded, miss?” He gave directions for tying his patient down with leather padded chains.

“No, but Mr. Rufford is badly hurt. He needs you.” The request seemed lame even to her.

“Get some men to bring him down.” Granger selected a saw from instruments laid out across a locker. “Gag that man!” he barked.

The surgeon was right. He could not be spared in the midst of such waves of agony. She had to get Mr. Rufford to the surgery. She dashed back up the stairs.

The deck was a mass of confusion as every able-bodied man pumped, spliced rigging, heaved at spars, or scurried up the masts. She clutched at several arms and begged for help to carry Mr. Rufford, but though they might touch their forelocks deferentially, all swore the bo’sun would flog them were they to leave their present task. “Not a moment to be lost,” was their common refrain. The Captain on the quarterdeck
finally yelled, “Passengers below!” at her and she knew she would have no help from the deck.

Panic surged. She hurried back to the cabin, dreading that she would find him already dead. The door opened easily. To her surprise, she found Mr. Rufford had dragged himself up to lie more securely in his cot. His stare roamed across the ceiling, swimming and insensible. Then his eyes closed.

What could she do? Well, she could bind up the sundry cuts at least, if she could come at them. She was certain she was unequal to removing the bullet. It had looked as though it was lodged perilously close to his spine. Perhaps the first step was to clean him up enough to survey the secondary damage. She soaked the towel hanging by his washstand and began to mop his chest and arms. She could not but be sensible of his massive shoulders and the muscle across his chest. He must weigh fifteen or sixteen stone, distributed most agreeably across a frame of more than six feet. His skin was tanned evenly across his body, even his loins, as though he had spent a long time naked in the sun. She glanced away from his private parts, though she could not help but note that he was well endowed.
Concentrate, you silly goose!

Some part of her noted the scars, white against tanned skin. As she wrung out the towel, now soaked with blood, her gaze moved over the fine, massive body. He had been whipped. The lace of scars on shoulders, ribs, and hips said as much. A necklace of scars matched his bracelets, and calluses and scars across his collarbone and under his arms made her think he had carried some kind of pack at one time with straps that galled him most grievously. There were jagged scars across his breast, others across biceps and thighs, even at his groin. Most curious of all, there were many pairs of small circular scars. What could have made those?

She jerked her attention to his gashes. They were her business now.

What? What was this? Her glance ranged over his body, even as her heart beat faster. God’s breath! These wounds could not have bled so! A pike thrust that gouged his side
looked days old, its edges puckering. The wound in his shoulder closed perceptibly as she watched. He was healing before her eyes! Panic surged inside her. What was happening here?

She brought a hand to her mouth and swallowed convulsively. What was this man that he could heal horrible wounds at such a rate? She sat, transfixed by fear, afraid to rise and turn her back on something so outside human experience but yet afraid to stay. The wounds closed together. The half-crushed chest wall swelled and rounded; the shattered shoulder straightened.

“My God,” she whispered.

“I’m afraid God has nothing to do with it.”

The hoarse whisper made her jump half out of her skin. Her gaze rose to his face. He was haggard, sure. There was a strange almost reddish cast to his pupils. But he wasn’t dead, and color was coming back into his cheeks. How could . . . how could this
be
?

Suddenly his red eyes widened and he lurched up from his pillow and jerked her hand away from her mouth, where she still clasped it, perhaps to keep from screaming. “Don’t touch your mouth! You are covered with my blood.”

She shrank and backed away from him.

He held out a hand; whether to touch her or in supplication she couldn’t tell. “I mean you no harm.” He swallowed once, as though deciding. “One of the few things I know about my . . . condition is that it is spread through blood.”

She looked at her hand, the blood on it half-congealed. Her glance darted back to him. Several of his wounds had healed to the extent that they were only jagged, seeping marks upon his body. If anything, she now looked more like the one wounded in battle. His life’s fluid smeared her hands, her dress, and probably her cheeks as well.

“Go wash at my basin,” he said softly, in that rumbling voice.

She had no intention of staying a moment more in that room. She resolved to lurch out onto the deck amid the press of humanity and the racket of sailors shouting. But somehow,
looking into those eyes, the red in them now fading, she did not. She turned and went slowly to the basin. “There is a fresh cloth, just under it,” she heard him say. Mechanically she watched herself take the towel, pour the water from the pitcher into the basin, take up the soap. “Wash carefully now, your mouth first. Get every bit from beneath your nails. . . .” The murmured instructions were comforting, human, real. Was that why she obeyed? For obey she did.

Her mind, a comforting blank, began to engage as she dried her face. Here was a mystery, lying on the cot not three feet away. She stole a glance at him. He was still naked, the proof of his manhood lying in a nest of hair a shade darker than his sandy curls. He was a particularly fine physical specimen, and he looked strong and healthy. Now that the fear that he might be dying had subsided—oh, God . . . why was he not dying?—the awareness of his nakedness doubled and trebled within her. She felt her face grow warm. That was not the only place that felt the heat. It seemed to streak downward from her pounding heart. He saw her discomfiture and realized his state. He grabbed a bloodied quilt and clutched it to his chest. The wounds she could still see ceased their seeping and drew together into red angry weals, the skin shining pink. She had no doubt they would leave no scars. If he could heal thus, why did he bear any scars at all?

Fear cycled in her belly. Yet why? Was it because if he could heal himself he represented the unknown? Was he evil? What would the poor wretches in Dr. Granger’s surgery not give to heal as this man had? Her thoughts danced about the battle tonight. Healing was not his only strangeness. She had seen him fight with incredible strength, cleaving multiple enemies, lifting a great spar it might take half a dozen men to wield. Who
was
this man, or what?

She cleared her throat and gathered her courage, her curiosity now piqued. “You said you have a condition. . . . What is it, sir?”

“That I cannot explain, since I do not know myself,” he said, pushing himself up. The quilt covered his thighs and loins but left his torso bare. She was only too aware of the
soft nipples, the brush of light hair across his chest, the throbbing of a pulse under the damp skin of his throat. He was wary of her. “I hope a good English physician will be able to tell me. But seamen are a superstitious lot. If they were to find out I am not like them . . . well, at the least it would make for a most unhappy ship. Or the results might be more violent.”

It seemed doubtful that any confrontation would end in his death. Was he really concerned for theirs? “I have no intention of telling anyone what I saw, if that is what you mean,” Beth said stiffly. “No one would believe me, in any case.”

“They will already be uneasy. They saw me lift the spar.”

“Men can sometimes perform extraordinary feats of strength in times of great stress. And you were very anxious not to be taken as a slave. Again.” That was the explanation for the whip scars, of course, and the fact that he had gone naked in the desert. Why was she giving him a way out of his dilemma? Should she not be shouting his alien nature from the mizzenmast?

“As you say.” He inclined his head, wary. “You have overcome your initial abhorrence.”

Beth was about to protest but could not. It was true. She was intensely curious, but whether it was his prosaic speech in this most seamanlike cabin, or the simple human action of washing herself, she was not quite so frightened of him. “I regret my tactless reaction, sir. It was the natural human response to the unfamiliar,” she said, hesitating. “We all fear the unknown. But I know that someone built the Sphinx before men knew how to put two blocks together. I have seen men walk on coals with no burns or scars.” She drew herself up. “In short, I have seen the mysteries of the world, and know enough to realize that not everything can be explained.”

He nodded, still speculating. His sandy curls had escaped their ribbon in the heat of battle, and his hair waved about his scarred shoulders. He might have been a warrior on the steppes of Russia or a hunter on the plains of Catalonia a thousand years ago.

“What do you know of your . . . condition, even if you
cannot name it?” she stuttered, looking for some conversational ground that did not move beneath her feet.

His eyes, so intensely blue now that all trace of red was gone, blinked once and a veil descended upon them. “I heal when none should heal, and fast. I have great strength at my command. It was a careless drop of blood on my lips that started it all. I know no more.”

“But would it not be something great to convey these powers to others? I wonder how long a man could heal himself. Would life itself be extended?” The possibilities lit up inside her.

“You run too fast, Miss Rochewell. It would be a sin to pass the malady to others without full knowledge of the effect.” His tone was damping.

“And you do not like the sun, do you?” she mused. “Is that a part of it?”

“My eyes and skin are particularly sensitive.” He looked alarmed at her surmises.

“So to choose the ability to heal would be to deny the daylight forever.” A heavy price.

“In Tripoli I found if I used colored lenses and covered myself from head to toe I could survive, but it is inconvenient.” His expression was dark. “Enough about this foolish condition.” He looked at her pointedly. “I wish merely to live as much like everyone else as I can.”

“But surely you want to study the ramifications, that we might know as much as possible about it? That is the way of science, and the progress of mankind.”

“The way of science will have to plod along without me, Miss Rochewell. All I ask is to be left alone.” He looked so drained after his ordeal she could not in conscience press him now. Who knew what resources a body claimed in order to affect that miraculous recovery?

“Very well, Mr. Rufford. I shall leave you to your rest. We can talk another time.”

He looked far from resigned to that event. But as she turned to go, he called out, “Miss Rochewell . . . I am indebted to you for your efforts on my behalf.”

She felt herself blushing again. “They were nothing and not needed, in any case.”

She closed the door softly behind her. But she could not close the door on her thoughts. How had he been infected by a drop of blood? What were the full effects of his condition? What was he hiding? He knew something he was not telling her.

She peeked in on Mrs. Pargutter. Jenny had resorted to laudanum to calm her. The older woman was now sleeping heavily. Beth retired to her own cabin, knowing sleep was far away in spite of the quite pronounced letdown after so much excitement. There was a full-fledged mystery aboard the
Beltrane
. And she wanted to know more about it—about him.

Six

Exhausted as he was, sleep did not overtake Ian easily. For the first time, a human being had mastered the natural abhorrence for his state, and she was only a woman. Even a man who had been a soldier and a diplomat like Ware had not done as much. She would not be so sanguine if she knew he sucked blood, and he was glad she didn’t realize he had compelled her to wash.

Her acceptance was most strange. Perhaps it was rooted in her experience divining rational explanations for things others could not explain, gotten from her father’s archaeology. She might be the one woman capable of accepting as much of him as he would allow her to see. Not that she was much of a woman. She was far from those flowers of white heaving bosoms and sensibility he had known in London or . . . or the other female who so dominated his body and his soul. But all women were driven to control a man, if not straightforwardly, then with caressing ways meant to assert superiority. They must make up for their weaker physical being by using a man, directly or indirectly. The females of the species were all the same, even this one.

Still, her blunt straightforwardness was unlike the coy manipulation he had known or the direct cruelty he’d experienced
in the desert. Her impulse had been to help him. That spoke of underlying goodness and competence. She was almost more like a man. Her father had certainly treated her like a son, traipsing about Africa. He already knew she was intelligent. Tonight she’d guessed that he’d been a slave, though she could not know the depth of his servitude. No one could imagine that. He would not think of it. He would think of England and the normal life that lay ahead of him, if he could only reach it. . . .

An oasis. The caravan stopped. The slaves were allowed to put down the litter. Her tent was erected as the sun rose. She stepped out of the litter and into the dark reaches of her tent. The chosen slaves, the sturdy males just around her litter, were given wooden cups of water. One of the rabble of slaves from the back of the caravan was sent into her tent, a woman. She would be dragged out again shortly, Ian knew, dead and deathly pale, her flesh collapsed against her bones. The beautiful owner had been going through the horde of slaves at the rate of one a week, or even two
.