The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) (33 page)

The afternoon sun slanted across the river, obscuring details that might distinguish one dirty, worn wagon from another. Kit frowned as a wagon entered the water. “Whose wagon? Can you tell? Looks like it’s tipping.”

Sarah knitted her hands and held them under her chin. “That’s the Abbots. They might have a broken wheel?”

Kit stood and walked from under the tent. “They’re unhitching the team.” Her pulse quickened. “Looks like they’re going to float the wagon all the way across?”

Suddenly, men jumped out of other wagons and swarmed the disabled one.

Kit cupped her hands at her forehead to shade her eyes. “Somebody’s hurt.”

“Maybe they’re just afraid the wagon will tip and they’ll lose control.”

“Where’s Cullen?” Dread wrapped Kit’s chest in tight rubber bands.

“I don’t see John or the boys either.”

Minutes ticked by. Kit paced, gazing at the disabled wagon. “I can’t wait any longer. I’ve got to find out what’s happening.”

Sarah squeezed Kit’s arm. “Cullen wouldn’t want you back in the water.”

She considered her promise. But since she wouldn’t actually be jumping into the river she wasn’t technically breaking her word, right? “I won’t be long.” She mounted Stormy and raced into the water. The current was stronger now, but her horse was a confident swimmer and easily reached the middle island. Voices grew louder but words were unintelligible.

The men had pulled the wagon’s nose onto the first island. The left front wheel had fallen off, and the wagon sat lopsided. Where was Cullen? Where were the Barrett men? Cullen’s voice rose above the commotion. “Go back.”

She funneled her hands around her mouth. “Where are you?”

He poked his head from behind the wagon. “Adam’s hurt. Go back.”

Adam was hurt, but Cullen wanted her to go back. Why? Ignoring his command, she entered the water, then stopped, turned around, and headed back toward shore. In her century, she was a first responder, but in the nineteenth century, she was much more. She needed to hurry back and get ready.

Sarah ran to meet her. “Is anybody hurt?”

Kit dismounted and hobbled stormy. “It’s Adam.”

Sarah slapped her hand against her chest. “How bad?”

“Cullen didn’t say. They’re bringing him in now.”

Each minute carried the weight of an hour. Finally, Cullen and the wagon reached the north shore. He dismounted.

“What happened?” Kit’s throat held her heart.

“Axle broke. The boy fell.”

Tears rimmed Sarah’s eyes, and she wrung her hands. “Is John with him?”

“They’re both in the wagon.” Cullen’s face showed more concern than his voice reflected.

Sarah ran toward the wagon, calling for her husband.

“How bad is he hurt?” Kit asked, watching Sarah.

“A chunk of the wheel sheared off, rammed into his groin.”

Blood drain from her body. Visions of Scott swarmed inside her brain. She’d been unable to help him. What could she possibly do for Adam?

Cullen grabbed her, held her steady. “We need to get ready. I told John to bring him to our tent.”

She gazed into Cullen’s eyes and drew strength from him. Whatever else happened, he was with her. She didn’t have to face this or anything else alone, ever again.

“This way. Careful with the leg,” Henry said.

Adam moaned. The sound of his pain climbed into Kit’s heart, shocking her like a jolt of electricity. She ducked inside the tent. “Get my bag and the rubber sheet out of the trunk.” Cullen helped her cover the bed with the sheet, then Henry and John laid Adam down.

A six-inch sheared off piece of the spoke, half-inch in diameter, protruded from his body.

“Can’t we pull it out?” John asked.

A few beats of silence followed.

“No,” Kit said, finding her voice. “The femoral artery might be punctured.” She took a shaky breath.

“Tell me what to do,” Cullen said.

She rummaged in the bag, withdrew a bottle of Perocet. “This’ll cut the pain. Hand me a canteen.”

Adam jerked. His eyes were wide and wild. Kit shoved two pills into his mouth and placed the canteen against his trembling lips. “Swallow,” she ordered.

The men stood back while Kit cut away Adam’s pants leg. “His wet shirt and boots need to come off too.” She squatted beside the bed and studied the stake’s point of entry in the crease between the torso and right leg. It was impossible to tell how deeply it was embedded. Blood oozed from the wound, and his foot and ankle had turned pale and cold. She compared the pulses in his feet. The injured leg was much weaker. The stake probably hit a blood vessel. Which one and how extensive the damage she couldn’t tell until she extended the wound and removed the piece of wood.

She ushered Sarah and the three men out of the tent. “I think the stake is embedded in a blood vessel and is decreasing the blood flow to his foot. I can open him up and see what’s going on, but I’m not a surgeon. I can’t repair a vessel.”

“Will he lose the leg?” Cullen asked.

“It’s possible. But I couldn’t…” Her stomached roiled.

“Wait just a damned minute. Nobody’s cutting my boy’s leg off,” John said.

Sarah’s work-worn fingers curled into fists at her side. Tears streaked down her face. “Don’t let him die, Kit. You do whatever you have to do. I
won’t
lose another child. I won’t.”

“They’re not going to take his leg, Sarah.” John embraced his wife. “He’s going to be fine.”

“Let’s get the spoke out,” Kit said. “I’ll repair what I can, and then we’ll watch him. We might have to take the leg later, but not right now.”

How in the world did this happen? She wasn’t trained to open someone and tie off blood vessels. Sure, she’d seen vets do it at the equine center and had seen videos of vascular repair on people. But, actually performing the surgery… She hugged Sarah. “Why don’t you and John wait out here? I’ll call you if I need you.”

Sarah shook her head. “Adam needs his ma. I want to be with him.”

They all reentered the tent. Kit looked into the tensed faces of the people she had come to love. This was not how she wanted to reveal her identity to them. Not in a moment of crisis. Not like this. But she had no choice. Their lives would change now. They would treat her differently. They would know she wasn’t one of them. No matter how much she longed to be a member of the flock, they wouldn’t accept her. Even Cullen, coming from a Celtic, mystical background, had a difficult time accepting her identity. John, Sarah, and Henry were simple folk—not simple minded, but grounded in what they could see and feel and taste. Yet they had their faith and they believed in dreams. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be more than halfway to Oregon. What would she do if they wouldn’t let her teach Frances and Elizabeth? She swallowed, trying to conceal the ache and flutter of fear.

Was there any place she truly belonged? Now was not the time to worry about herself. She turned to the spectators. “I’m going to use instruments and procedures you haven’t seen before. Please be patient. I’ll explain everything later.” Her friends were probably too worried about Adam to care about instruments and procedures. She took a deep, steadying breath.

“John. Henry. You hold Adam’s legs. I don’t think he’ll move, but if he does, try to hold him still. Sarah, you stand on the other side and hold his hand.” They shuffled into position, wearing pinched expressions.

Cullen cleared the table, and Kit opened a suture set. “I’ll need you to hold the spoke while I cut around it.”

He nodded.

Adam attempted his usual cock-eyed grin. “Is it bad, Miss Kit?”

“I don’t know yet. How’s your pain?”

“Not bad.” His eyes told her the pain was less severe, but still palpable.

“No one will think less of you if you vocalize your discomfort.” She whispered in his ear. “Scream if you have to.”

“Do they scream in Mr. Shakespeare’s plays?”

“I’m sure if they had a sword stuck in their side, they’d let someone know.”

He squeezed his ma’s hand until her knuckles turned white.

“I’m going to put a needle in your arm. Don’t be alarmed.” Henry and John whispered to each other as Kit started an IV. “You’ll have to ask Cullen to tell you the story about when I did this to him.”

Cullen patted Adam’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, son.”

“I’m going to cut around the spoke. Cullen will hold it steady until I’m ready to take it out. How’s the pain?”

“Don’t feel much.” His face shone with nervous perspiration. As she’d discovered with Cullen, modern pain medication seemed to take effect more quickly in nineteenth-century patients.

“I’m going to put a tourniquet around your upper thigh to slow the bleeding so I can see what happened to you.”

Cullen donned gloves, and stood at her side to assist. “Will you hand me the surgical knife?” she asked.

He held up the scalpel. “This?”

Kit nodded, and he placed the instrument in her hand. She took a deep breath and checked the tourniquet. “Hold the tip of the spoke, easy.” She cut through Adam’s skin, extending the edges of the wound. “Sponge.” Cullen placed the gauze in Kit’s hand. “Now pull, slowly.” The spoke came out. It had embedded deeper than an inch into his groin and severed a vessel. Not the femoral artery. She breathed a sigh of relief. “Will you wipe my forehead, please?”

“With the gauze?”

“Yes.”

She needed to tie off both ends of the vessel. She tightened the tourniquet. “Catgut and needle.” Cullen’s hand shook as he handed Kit what she requested.

“Can you fix it?” he asked.

“No,” she said, with calm deliberateness. “But I can tie it off. He’ll lose the vessel but he’s got others to carry blood to his leg.”

“Adam, do you need anything?” Cullen asked.

Adam’s fingers tapped against the sheet to a cadence only he could hear.

“Do you want Cullen to read to you?” Kit asked.

“If’n he’ll read
Midsummer’s Night Dream.
” Adam’s voice was low, trembling.

In his sonorous voice, Cullen began to recite, “Act 1, Scene 1. Athens. The palace of Theseus.”

She glanced at her husband and a throb of affection raced through her.

An hour later, Kit finished stitching and dressing the wound. Color slowly returned to Adam’s foot and ankle, and the pulse grew stronger. Exhausted by the ordeal, he drifted off to sleep, his face no longer taut from fighting pain.

The inside of the tent resembled an operating room. Bloody sponges were tossed haphazardly on the table, along with the instruments Kit had used to put Adam back together.

Sarah’s soft sobs filled the air with a mother’s quiet relief. John and Henry lit their pipes.

“As long as his pulse stays strong,” Kit said, “we can hope for the best.”

Adam’s brothers, Ben and Case, slipped into the tent. “How is he?”

“We’ll know more in a few hours,” Kit said.

“We made coffee,” Ben said.

John turned to him. “Thanks, son. Bring in some chairs, too. We need to sit a spell.”

Five tense people sat on the edge of their chairs, drinking coffee, watching Adam breathe, and all waiting for something to happen. Henry leaned forward, elbows on his knees, wearing a no-nonsense expression. “I believe you owe us an explanation, missy.”

Cullen gave her a silent nod of encouragement. She cleared her throat and crossed her hands in her lap. He tented his hands, which she noticed shook slightly.

“What Kit is about to tell you may be more than you’re wanting to hear. Listen to her with your heart. If you try to listen with your mind, you won’t understand.” He paused, laid his hand over hers, warm and reassuring. “Go on, lass. Tell them who you are.”

She cleared her throat again, and laced her fingers with his. “I was raised believing my name was Kitherina Mary MacKlenna. I discovered that wasn’t my real name only weeks before I left my home in the twenty-first century—”

They gasped, then her friends fell silent and still. For the next thirty minutes, they listened. Occasionally, they asked questions. Cullen interjected his own disbelief and confusion, and he explained how he finally came to accept Kit’s identity.

“If Kit had told this story weeks ago, we would have set her on the side of the road,” John said. “I’m not sure we wouldn’t have done the same this morning, even with you speaking on her behalf, Cullen. But after watching her work on the boy, I have no doubt she is who she says she is.” John glanced at Henry then at his wife. There seemed to be silent agreement among them.

John continued. “It’s best if we put your other life behind us. Once we leave this tent, we’ll never mention the subject again. We’ll never ask you about your home. Not that we aren’t curious, but the future is not meant for us to know.”

“I respect that, John,” she said.

“You’ve been teaching the little ones about voting for women. I won’t object to you teaching subjects they need to learn. I will object if you teach subjects they don’t have a right to know.” He paused. “Do we have an understanding?”

She took a deep breath, nodded, then relaxed against Cullen.

John turned to the rest. “Do you have anything to say, Sarah—? Henry—?”

Henry tapped the bowl of his pipe against his palm. “I said all that needs saying the day I walked you down the aisle.

Sarah stood and laid hands on Kit. Heat seeped into her skin, her soul, her heart. “You were misplaced for some reason, but Frances called you home for just such a time as this.”

Kit buried her face in Cullen’s shirt and sobbed. How could they still love her and forgive her after all she’d done to deceive them?

He wrapped her in the warmth of his arms. “Shh. We’re your family now.”

She wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. In her lifetime, she’d already lost two.

WHILE CULLEN MADE rounds, Kit walked along the quiet shore reflecting on all that had happened. The memory of Cullen reciting
Midsummer’s Night Dream
would remain embedded in her heart for a lifetime. His powerful voice brought the poetry to life, but it also brought calmness to her spirit and enabled her to do abundantly more than she ever imagined she could.