The Black Hawk

Two

SHE DID NOT DIE ON THE DOORSTEP. SHE HAD NOT died more times than she could count. Perhaps this would be another.

She opened her eyes. After a while she knew where she was. She was lying on the dining room table at Meeks Street, looking up at silver loops and flowered sconces holding half-burned candles. The ceiling was white, molded plasterwork with garlands of leaves.

She heard Hawker say, “Will she live?” and the long, rude, impatient man who was a surgeon replied, “How the hell would I know? Now get out of my light.” She could not tell if this reassured Hawker, but it gave her considerable comfort. Surgeons were honest butchers. She did not trust polite doctors with their slimy patter of Latin and their soft hands.

The table was flat and hard under her. She hadn’t noticed them cutting her clothes away, but she was naked. Several people held her down. It was Hawker who took her left shoulder and looked into her face.

Dark closed down upon her. She was in the heart of the pain. Had to get away. Had to. She fought.

The surgeon said, “Keep her still, damn it.”

Hawker said, “Chère. Ne me quitte pas. Look. Look at me. Ici.”

Light came back. He was above her, his clever, handsome face grave. Hair fell in his eyes. Hard eyes. They had been old and cynical when he was a boy. “Look at me. That’s right.” His fingers dug into her shoulder. “Be still. You’re here with me.”

“I didn’t want to come here,” she said.

“I know. Quiet, now. Chouette, look at me.”

“I don’t hate you.” Did she even say that? It was too much effort.

“She’s fainted,” someone said. “Good.”

She had not fainted. She saw shadow and darkness, heard their voices, felt—oh yes, she felt—the pain. But it was as if it happened to someone else, several feet away.

A man said something. Hawker answered, “. . . before the blood washes away. Find out where this happened. Pax, I want you to . . .”

The surgeon did not pause in hurting her. “See if there’s anybody left out in the rain who needs me. Every time you people—” and he said, “Hold that,” to someone.

She said, “I was not fast enough. I must tell you. The papers . . .”

“Later,” Hawker said. “Talk later.”

She was not going to die, then. Not possibly. Hawker, of all people upon the earth, would awaken her and force her to speak if her life were ending and she had only minutes left. He would be brutally efficient, wringing the last morsel of words out of her, if she were dying. One could depend on him.

Another voice. “The house is secure.” A man’s face, grim and scarred, looked down at her and went away. William Doyle.

Then Hawker was telling someone to knock on the doors on Meeks Street. Did anybody see anything?

Under it all, the mutter of the surgeon. “Don’t you slip away on me, you bastard . . . And here’s the bugger causing all the problems. Little bleeder going at it like hell for no reason. I need to—Will you people hold the damn woman still!”

There was a pattern of greater pain and lesser pain. The surgeon set stitches, talking to himself as he worked on her arm. It was predictable in its dreadful bite and pull. She counted. Put a number on each second. Stepped from one second to the next. She could get through ten seconds. Start again. Ten more.

“Nice musculature. Healthy and no fat on her. I suppose she’s one of yours.” It was the surgeon’s voice.

“Yes. Keep her alive,” Hawker said.

Someone said, “Doyle is . . .” and a murmur after that. Someone said, “It’s coming down in buckets,” and then, “. . . found it under . . .”

“I’ll look at it later.” Hawker’s voice.

More voices. She did not listen. Soft darkness, most perfectly solid, crowded in from all sides like so many insistent black pillows. She had slept in a bed with black velvet pillows in Vienna.

A clangor of pain struck and she was being lifted. Corners of the room spun by, confusing and dizzying.

The surgeon said, “You know what to do. Watch her. Make sure it doesn’t start bleeding again. Put her to bed and keep her there.”

“I shall devote myself to that goal,” from Hawker.

“You are barbarians.” She did not say they were crétins and clumsy idiots because she was a marvel of tact and endurance. “I am naked. Deal with this.”

She was being carried upstairs past the large mirror in the hall. Past the line of maps in frames. After so many years, Hawker’s arms were still as comforting as bread and milk. Familiar as the rumble of thunder.

I have never forgotten.

He was not tall or massive. Not a walking mountain of threat like William Doyle. Hawker was the menace of a thin, sharp blade. He was strong in the deep fibers of his body. Tough as steel in the sinew and bone and straps of lean muscle.

Behind them, at the bottom of the stairs, she heard William Doyle say to someone, “She’s too old for you, lad. She was too old for the likes of you when she was twelve.”

One of the young men of this household had looked upon her nakedness and become interested. Her last, thin thread of consciousness found this amusing.