The Moon by Night (24 page)

Shiloh had, of course, closely observed the other ships around his berth. The shipping agent for Winslow Brothers Shipping, Levy & Levy, were also agents for Tourneau Shipping, and Mr. Levy had told Shiloh practically everything about them, along with almost everyone and everything else that went in and out of the South Street Seaport. Mr. Levy—Shiloh had only seen one Levy—was ancient and still as sharp as could be. Shiloh was grateful to have him, for he kept
Locke's Day Dream
going back and forth to the West Indies as often as they could make a turnaround, and always with the holds full. It was difficult, in a way, for Shiloh, because Mr. Levy was so efficient and had the shipping business so well in hand that Shiloh was practically like an extra appendage. But Shiloh still came down to the shipping office at least three times a week, mostly to sign forms and authorizations and look over the ledgers, which were always very favorable for Winslow Brothers Shipping. Old Mr. Levy was very polite, of course, but Shiloh knew he was actually more in the way than anything else. So he tried to fill up his time with his clubs and visiting Behring Orphanage and helping out with the children and taking French lessons from Allan Blue. In particular, it seemed that those lessons might be of use to him right now.

Shiloh had never talked with any of the seamen from the four French brigantines, though he saw them often. The officers had always seemed arrogant and disdainful to Americans, and the seamen seemed to be perpetually drunk. Mr. Levy said Frenchmen would wither and die if they didn't drink wine all day and night every day and night. It had been Shiloh's experience that drunks either cried or fought. So now as he rounded the prow of the brig to investigate, he got ready for a fight.

Sure enough, a man in a double-breasted blue coat with epaulets and a captain's insignia loomed over a small boy, shouting and cursing down at him. The boy knelt on the pier, his arms encircling two dogs.

Shiloh's French was still very sketchy, but now that he could see the tableau, his mind clicked and he could understand much of what the man was shouting about.

“I told you, you little fool, that you couldn't keep the three dogs! Not three! I told you not to bring these two back on board! And now, here, look at you! Right now, Jaime, come back on board, or I swear I will throw those two into the sea and carry you on board myself!”

The little boy clung to the dogs and cried pitifully.

The captain, a short, round, red-faced pudding of a man, took a step toward the child and the woebegone dogs. He did not raise his hand, but he looked as if he were about to yank the child up.

Shiloh moved as fast as he ever had, grabbed the man's arm, and gritted out,
“Capitaine, ne faites pas ça.”
He wasn't even conscious that he spoke in French until the man looked up at him, startled, and then began a stream of rapid liquid French of which Shiloh could not understand one word except the oft-repeated
s'il vous plaît, monsieur
.

Shiloh grimaced, then deliberately lowered the man's arm, which he was holding up in a death-grip. “Slow down, slow down…uh…
lent. Lentement. Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?”

Both the man and the little boy, who was about six or seven years old, started talking in such a passionate torrent of French that Shiloh gave up and concentrated on piecing the story together from the occasional word that he caught. It seemed that the boy, Jaime, was the captain's wife's sister's husband's cousin—Shiloh's mind reeled as he tried to hasten his translation—and the captain, only by the goodness and charity of his heart, had agreed to take the boy on as his cabin boy. But the boy had smuggled on board not one, not two, but three dogs! The outraged captain held up three pudgy fingers in front of Shiloh's eyes in case he didn't understand—
trois chiens! Un, deux, trois!
Up popped his fat thumb, forefinger, and middle finger.

Shiloh frowned. “
C'est ça? Mais où est le troisième chien?”
This was delivered in a distinctly unfriendly tone, and to emphasize it Shiloh reached out and grabbed the man's thumb and yanked it down so that he felt it pop.

Both the boy and the man started wailing. They seemed to be saying that the big dog was on board the ship—yes, yes, the sweet, loving captain let the boy keep the big dog—but the two little dogs must go. This made no sense to Shiloh—the two dogs were obviously full grown mutts. They looked alike, one slightly larger than the other, with big heads and floppy ears and short colorless coats and long stringy tails. As he frowned down at them, listening to the captain swear over and over how he loved the boy, he loved the big dog, but he could not take three dogs on his ship, and so on, the boy looked up at Shiloh with great tragic dark eyes.

One of the dogs lifted his drooping head and looked up at Shiloh too. One long listless ear had flopped over onto the top of his head, and he looked tragic and comical at the same time. Then he seemed to sigh, stood, and took two steps right up to Shiloh. He lowered his head and gently butted Shiloh's knees.

The rest of Shiloh's heart melted.

“Zut alors!”
he muttered as he got down on one knee, threw an arm about the dog's neck, and then reached over to lift the boy's chin. Ignoring the torrid flow still erupting from the captain, he said softly, in halting French, “Jaime, I'll take care of your dogs. Now tell me, do you want to go with this man? Do you want to sail with him? Because if you don't, I might be able to help you find a place to live here in New York.”

The boy, whose eyes lit up at Shiloh's words, swiped his sleeve across his wet nose. Shiloh took out his handkerchief and offered it to him. The captain had fallen silent and was carefully doing a toe-heel-toe-heel backward slide to put a little distance between himself and the tall dangerous American.

Jaime honked into Shiloh's handkerchief and then answered, “No, sir, if you please, I want to go home, and Captain Lille, he will take me and my big dog, Nina. So you will take care of these, the little dogs?”

“Sure, I know a place with lots of children, where they'll have a very good home,” Shiloh said kindly. “I own that clipper that berths right over there. So when you sail back here, you come find me if my ship is in, and I'll take you and show you where the—er—little dogs live. All right?”

The boy recovered quickly, hopping up and offering Shiloh back his handkerchief, then bowing with a surprising grace. Shiloh stood and noticed that the other dog now came and leaned against his legs, as if it were a ship heeling in a strong wind. Captain Lille was already at the gangplank, and the boy was holding his hand. They seemed to be affectionate toward each other, and now Shiloh doubted very seriously that the man would have tossed the dogs into the sea or beaten the boy.

“You never can tell about Frogs,” he grumbled down at the dogs, who were still leaning, head-down, on him. “Hope you two aren't Frog dogs. I've never seen any except those little ugly ones with the smashed-in noses in the old paintings of the guys with the funny wigs. You look more like American mutts to me.”

The two dogs didn't look up. Shiloh noticed with pity that the smaller one was shivering. It sank in that it was very cold—Shiloh was fairly immune to such discomforts—and that Balaam, too, looked forlorn and chilled, standing with his head down, occasionally stamping his feet.

There was much screaming and shouting in French as the ship prepared to cast off. Shiloh looked up at the bow, and Jaime stood there, waving. Shiloh saluted him, then turned and led Balaam away. The dogs trotted alongside, pressing close against his legs. Shiloh knew it was for what warmth they could get, for their coats were short and he thought their paws, which were huge, must be freezing.

It struck Shiloh that he was more than a hundred blocks from Behring Orphanage, where he had thought he would take the dogs.

It was only about thirty blocks to Gramercy Park.

It started to sleet.

He led Balaam and his two new friends over to Dover Street. He saw three hansom cabs, those small open buggies with the passengers in a hooded seat in front and the driver up behind. He had hoped to get a hackney, the larger coaches with facing seat benches that could comfortably accommodate four persons, or perhaps one person and two big mutts. But there was not a single hackney coach to be found.

Finally he hailed a hansom, and then, as the driver watched incredulously, Shiloh lifted up the two dogs and set them in the seat.

“You'm wanting me to drive two mutts over to Gramercy Park?” the driver repeated cautiously.

“That's right,” Shiloh grumbled, remounting Balaam. “I'll follow.”

“No, sor,” he said smartly. “You stays up in front wheres I can see you. And it'll be forty cents. Up front.”

Shiloh paid him and rode out.

“For dogs,” Shiloh muttered darkly to himself. “I'm out in a blinding freezing storm, renting a hansom for two mutts. Huh? Sorry, Balaam, but I don't know of any cabs big enough for you to ride in. Let me assure you that if there were such a thing, I would certainly be hiring it for your comfort and convenience.”

Balaam snorted derisively.

“Hey, I gotta stay out in it too, to ride you, don't I?” Shiloh growled.

Balaam blubbered a loud raspberry.

“Lemme tell you something, Horse,” Shiloh said. “We gotta quit hanging around these docks.”

Cheney lifted Cornelius Melbourne's left hand and placed her forefinger on the pulse point of his wrist. She smiled to herself, recalling that she had used her thumb to take her first pulse as a first-year medical student. Her teacher, a gentle Quaker professor named Dr. Henry Vallingham, had said in a kindly manner, “Miss Duvall, are you feeling quite well?”

“Why yes, Dr. Vallingham, I'm very well, thank you,” she had replied, mystified.

“That is good. I was concerned because you appear to be taking your own pulse, even though you are holding a patient's hand. The thumb, you see. It has its own pulse.” Cheney had jerked her hand away, startled, and then she, the patient, and Dr. Vallingham had all laughed.

Sixty-one per minute. A little slow but strong
. She noted it, along with the time, in Melbourne's file.

Next she held her watch out again, marked the minute, then carefully watched his respiration. She didn't just count the number of breaths; she noted the look of his nostrils to see if he was straining, the sound as the air went in and out of his throat and lungs, how deeply his chest rose and fell.

Fourteen,
she noted with satisfaction.
Also slow but rhythmic and deep
.

She hesitated, for she really needed an accurate temperature.

Tomorrow would be one week since the catastrophic accident, and the young man was doing very well, under the circumstances. When a person is subjected to a traumatic injury, regardless of his general health or age or gender, all parts of the body are weakened. Cornelius Melbourne was still very weak while his system was recovering from the shock of the injury. He had been in a deep sleep, a state close to unconsciousness, for the first three days after the accident. This was not unusual, as it was the body's way of beginning a recovery process. After this initial posttraumatic reaction, Cheney had kept him heavily sedated on heroic dosages of laudanum. Now she was considering reducing the drug dosages, but she must think this through carefully. Not only was laudanum a very effective pain-killer, it was also an extremely good sedative. In cases such as Cornelius Melbourne's, it was important that the patient be tranquil and free from anxiety while the body began to heal.

Now he was resting so quietly and soundly that Cheney hated to awaken him to take his temperature. Mr. McBean, a rather melancholy ex-soldier who was the morning shift attendant in the men's ward, had told Cheney that the patient's parents had visited that morning, and his mother had seemed to agitate the patient. Mrs. Melbourne still wept every time she visited and showed so much fear that even after she had left this morning, Melbourne was very restless, sleeping fitfully and often jerking awake and calling out for the doctor. Mr. McBean had said sourly, “He called for you so often, Doctor, and was so upset that Dr. Pettijohn said I was to give him another full sixty drops of laudanum two hours before your orders specified.”

“That's fine, Mr. McBean,” Cheney had responded. “As long as it was duly noted in his file.” It had been, in McBean's cramped and awkward left-handed script.

Making a decision, she gently laid her hand on the man's brow, barely resting it on his skin. It felt warm but not hot and was dry to the touch. Just to be sure, Cheney felt the back of his neck and his lower abdomen.
Temp normal by touch only; patient in deep sleep,
she noted in his file.

Now she hesitated and looked at the door of the cubicle tentatively. She had left the curtains open, as was her habit on routine bed checks. All of the doctors did that unless a procedure required privacy for the patient. That way, if anyone in the hospital had to find the doctor, they didn't have to stand on a ward and yell for them, they could just walk the hallway and check the cubicles with open curtains.

But Cheney was going to do something that was at best unusual and could at worst be disturbing to a chance observer. Furtively she pulled the curtains closed and went back to Cornelius Melbourne's bedside. Pulling the covers down, she lifted the light dressing on his incision, then bent down until her face almost touched his chest. Closing her eyes with concentration, she breathed in very deeply.

That is, she smelled the incision.

Shiloh had taught her that. “I found out in the war that you can smell gangrene before you can see it, Doc,” he had said as they worked the emergency room together at the hospital in San Francisco. They had been checking a dressing on a small boy's thumb. It had been cut deeply a few days earlier, but his mother had brought him to the emergency room at St. Francis because he had started coughing and running a fever. Cheney had diagnosed influenza, but Shiloh had stripped the homemade bandage—a clean strip of cotton—off the boy's finger and then had lifted it to his nose.