The North Water

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Black finds Sumner, he looks dead already. His body is wedged into the narrow crack between two ice floes; his head and shoulders are above the water, but everything else is below. His face is bone white apart from the lips, which are a dark, unnatural blue. Is he even breathing? Black leans down to check, but he can’t tell — the wind is too loud, and all around the ice is screeching and grating in the swell. Everything about the surgeon appears frozen up and solid. Black takes his sealing rope and secures it around Sumner’s chest. He doubts that he can pull him out on his own, but he tries anyway. He yanks him sideways first to dislodge him from the crevice, then, setting his heels in the snow, hauls upwards with all his might. Sumner’s stiff and motionless body rises with remarkable ease, as though the sea has decided it doesn’t want him after all. Black drops the rope and lunges forwards, grabbing the sodden epaulettes of Sumner’s greatcoat and pulling the rest of him onto the surface of the ice. He turns him over and slaps him twice across the face. Sumner doesn’t respond. Black hits him harder still. One eyelid flickers open.

“Dear God, you’re alive,” Black says.

He fires his rifle in the air twice. After ten minutes, Otto arrives with two other men from the search party. The four men take a limb each and carry him back to the ship as fast as they are able. His wet clothes have frozen solid in the arctic air, and it is more like carrying a heavy piece of furniture across the ice than a human being. When they get to the ship, Sumner is lifted aboard with a block and tackle and laid out on the deck. Brownlee looks down at him.

“Is the poor cunt even breathing?” he says.

Black nods. Brownlee shakes his head in wonderment.

They carry him down the hatchway into the wardroom and cut off his frozen clothes with shears. Black puts more coal in the stove and tells the cook to boil water. They rub his icy skin with goose fat and wrap him in scalding towels. He doesn’t move or speak; he is still alive but comatose. Black remains by his side; the others come in occasionally to stare or offer advice. Around midnight, his eyes flicker briefly open, and they give him brandy, which he coughs up along with a smear of dark brown blood. No one expects him to live through the night. At dawn, when they find he is still breathing, they move him out of the wardroom and into his own cabin.

When he comes to, Sumner assumes for a moment that he is back in India, that he is lying in his humid hill-tent on the ridge above Delhi and the sounds of ice blocks crashing against the keel of the Volunteer are actually the sounds of heavy ordnance being traded back and forth between the bastions and the pickets. It feels for a moment as if nothing terrible or irrevocable has yet happened to him, as if he has been given, incredibly, a second chance. He closes his eyes and falls asleep again. When he opens them an hour later, he sees Black standing by his bed looking down.

“Can you speak?” Black asks him.

Sumner looks back at him for a moment, then shakes his head. Black helps him up into a sitting position and commences to feed him bouillon from a teacup. The taste and heat of the bouillon are overpowering. After two spoonfuls of it, Sumner closes his mouth and lets the liquid dribble over his chin and down onto his chest.

“By rights you should be dead,” Black tells him. “You were in that water for three fucking hours. No normal man survives a dunk like that.”

The tip of Sumner’s nose and sections of both cheeks just below the eyes are black with frostbite. Sumner doesn’t remember the ice or the cold or the ghoulish green water, but he does remember looking up, before whatever happened to him happened, and seeing the sky above him crammed with a billion snowflakes.

“Laudanum,” he says.

He looks hopefully across at Black.

“Are you trying to say something?” Black asks, tipping his head closer in.

“Laudanum,” Sumner says again, “for the pain.”

Black nods and goes into the medicine chest. He mixes the laudanum with rum and helps him drink it. It burns Sumner’s throat, and he thinks for a moment he will vomit it up, but manages not to. He is exhausted by the effort of speaking and doesn’t know (since he is definitely not in India) where or who he is. He shudders violently and starts to weep. Black lowers him back down onto the bunk and covers him over with a coarse wool blanket.

In the wardroom that evening, over supper, Black reports that the surgeon is showing signs of improvement.

“Very good,” Brownlee says, “but there will be no more sixth boat from now on. I don’t wish another fucker’s death to trouble my conscience.”

“Just bad luck, that’s all,” Cavendish says offishly. “A man slides off the ice in a snowstorm, could happen to any of us.”

“Ask me, it worked out well for him,” Drax says. “The fucker should rightly have been crushed or drowned. After ten minutes in that kind of water, a man’s blood gets claggy and his heart gives out, but the surgeon’s still alive somehow. He’s fucking blessed.”

“Blessed?” Black says.

Brownlee holds up his hand.

“Blessed or not,” he says, “I say there will be no more sixth boat. And while we mariners are busy hunting fish, the surgeon will remain safe in his cabin reading his Homer or pulling on his pizzle, or whatever the fuck it is he does in there.”

Cavendish rolls his eyes.

“Easy enough for some bastards,” he says.

Brownlee glares at him.

“The surgeon has his job on this ship, Cavendish, and you have yours. And let that be the fucking end of it.”

Drax and Cavendish meet again at midnight, when the watch changes. Cavendish pulls the harpooner to one side and glances around before speaking.

“He may yet die, you know,” he says. “Have you seen the way he looks?”

“He looks to me like a cunt who’s difficult to finish off,” Drax says.

“He’s a leathery fucker, that’s for sure.”

“You should have popped a ball into him when you had the chance.”

Cavendish shakes his head and waits for one of the Shetlanders to pass them by.

“That would never have flown,” he says. “Brownlee’s fucking sweet on him, and so is Black.”

Drax looks away as he lights his pipe. The sky above them is alive with jiggling stars; a layer of blue-black ice clings to the rigging and coats the deck.

“How much do you think that ring is worth anyway?” Cavendish says. “I’m thinking twenty guineas, even twenty-five.”

Drax shakes his head and sniffs, as if the very question is beneath him.

“It’s not your ring,” he says.

“And it’s not Sumner’s either. I’d say it belongs to whichever cunt has his hands on it at the time.”

Drax turns back to Cavendish and nods.

“That’s about the way it is,” he says.

* * *

In the darkened cabin, swaddled beneath a thick pile of bear hides and blankets, Sumner, feverish and as weak as a newborn, sleeps, wakes, then sleeps again. As the ship sails north and west through fog and drizzle, under a heavy swell with two feet of ice cladding the hull, and the men chipping it off the deck and gunwales with marlin spikes and mallets, Sumner’s opiated mind slips its moorings and drifts backwards, sideways, through fluid dreamscapes as fearsome and as thick with unnameable life as the green arctic waters which press and crash only twelve wooden inches from his head. He could be anywhere at any time, but his thoughts, like iron rushing to a magnet, return to one place only:

A large yellow building beyond the racquet court, the astonishing noise and the slaughterhouse stench of meat and excrement, like a scene out of hell. Thirty or more doolies arriving every hour carrying in, three or four at a time, the dead and the wounded. Young men’s mangled and exploded corpses tossed into a miasmic outbuilding. The flailing of the wounded and the screams of the dying. Amputated limbs clattering into metal troughs. The incessant sound, as in a workshop or a sawmill, of steel gnawing through bone. The floor wet and sticky with spilled blood, the unstoppable heat, the thud and shake of artillery fire, and the clouds of black flies settling everywhere, on everything, without pause or discrimination — in eyes and ears and mouths, in open wounds. The incredible filth of it all, the howls and the pleading, the blood and shit, and the endless, endless pain.

Sumner works all morning, probing, sawing, suturing, until he is light-headed from the chloroform and nauseous from the generalized butchery. It is far worse than anything he has ever known or imagined. Men who, hours before, he saw boasting and laughing on the ridge are brought to him in pieces. He must do his duty, he tells himself, he must labor diligently. That is all that is possible now, all that any man could do. Like him, the other assistant surgeons — Wilkie and O’Dowd — are drenched with sweat and sunk in blood up to their elbows. As soon as one surgery is over, another one begins. Price, the orderly, checks the doolies as they arrive, discards the already dead, and moves the maimed to a place in the queue. Corbyn, the staff surgeon, decides which limbs must be amputated immediately and which might be saved. He was with the Coldstream Guards at Inkerman, a rifle in one hand, a scalpel in the other, two thousand dead in ten hours. He has specks of blood in his mustaches. He chews arrowroot against the stench. This is nothing, he tells the others; this is small fucking beer. They slice and saw and probe for musket balls. They sweat and curse and feel like vomiting from the heat. The wounded men scream constantly for water, but there is never enough to slake their thirst. Their thirst is obscene, their needs are intolerable, but Sumner must bear them anyway, he must continue doing what he does for as long as he is able. He has no time for anger or disgust or fear, no time or energy for anything but the work itself.

By late afternoon, three or four o’clock, the fighting slows and the flow of casualties diminishes at first, then stops completely. Rumor has it that the British troops have stumbled upon a great store of liquor near the Lahore Gate and have drunk themselves into a communal stupor. Whatever the reason, the advance is halted, at least for now, and for the first time in many hours Corbyn and his assistants are able to break from their labors. Baskets of food and carboys of water are brought in, and a number of the wounded are moved back to their regimental hospitals up on the ridge. Sumner, after washing the blood off himself and eating a plate of bread and cold meat, lies down on a charpoy and falls asleep. He is woken by the sounds of fierce argument. A turbaned man has appeared at the door of the field hospital carrying a wounded child; he is asking for assistance, and O’Dowd and Wilkie are loudly refusing.

“Get him out of here,” Wilkie says, “before I put a ball in him myself.”

O’Dowd picks up a saber from the corner of the room and makes a show of unsheathing it. The man doesn’t move. Corbyn comes over and tells O’Dowd to settle down. He examines the child briefly and shakes his head.

“The wound is too severe,” he says. “The bone is shattered. He can’t live long.”

“You can cut it off,” the man insists.

“You want a son with only one leg?” Wilkie asks.

The man doesn’t answer. Corbyn shakes his head again.

“We can’t help you,” he says. “This hospital is for soldiers.”

“British soldiers,” Wilkie says.

The man doesn’t move. Blood is dripping from the child’s shattered leg onto the newly mopped floor. Clouds of flies are still buzzing around their heads, and every now and then one of the wounded soldiers groans or calls out for help.

“You’re not busy,” the man says, looking around. “You have time now.”

“We can’t help you,” Corbyn says again. “You should go.”

“I am not a sepoy,” the man says. “My name is Hamid. I am a servant. I work for Farook the moneylender.”

“Why are you still in the city? Why didn’t you flee with all the others before the assault began?”

“I must protect my master’s house and its contents.”

O’Dowd shakes his head and laughs.

“He’s a shameless liar,” he says. “Any man left in this city is a traitor by definition and deserves only hanging.”

“What about the child?” Sumner asks.

The others turn to look at him.

“The child is a casualty of war,” Corbyn says. “And we are certainly not under orders to assist the offspring of the enemy.”

“I am not your enemy,” the man says.

“So you say.”

The man turns to Sumner hopefully. Sumner sits down again and lights his pipe. The child’s blood drips steadily onto the floor.

“I can show you treasure,” the man says. “If you help me now, I can show you treasure.”

“What treasure?” Wilkie asks. “How much?”

“Two lakhs,” he says. “Gold and jewels. See here.”

He lays the child down carefully on a trestle table and removes a small kidskin pouch from his tunic. He offers the pouch to Corbyn, and Corbyn takes and opens it. He tips the coins into his palm, looks at them for a moment, pushes them around with his forefinger, then passes them to Wilkie.

“Many more like that,” the man says. “Many more.”

“Where is this treasure?” Corbyn asks. “How far away?”

“Not far. Very close. I can show you now.”

Wilkie passes the coins to O’Dowd, and O’Dowd passes them to Sumner. The coins are warm and faintly greasy to the touch. The edges are unmilled and the surfaces are marked with elegant ribbons of Arabic script.

“You don’t really believe him?” Wilkie says.

“How many more like this?” Corbyn asks. “A hundred? Two hundred?”

“Two thousand,” the man says. “My master is a famous moneylender. I buried them myself before he fled.”

Corbyn walks over to the boy and peels the blood-soaked wrapping from his leg. He peers down and sniffs the gaping wound.

“We could remove it from the hip,” he says. “But he will probably die anyway.”

“Will you do it now?”

“Not now. When you get back here with all that treasure.”

The man looks unhappy, nods, then leans down and whispers something to the boy.

“You three go with him,” Corbyn says, “and take Price. Arm yourselves, and if you don’t like the way something looks, shoot this bastard and come straight back. I’ll stay here with the boy.”

For a moment no one moves. Corbyn looks at them steadily.

“Four equal shares and a tithe each for Price,” he says. “And what the prize agents don’t ever learn about can’t hurt them.”

* * *

They leave the field hospital and enter the city proper through the smoking wreckage of the Cashmere Gate. They clamber over hillocks of shattered masonry, past piles of smoldering corpses being sniffed at and nibbled by pariah dogs. Above them, tatter-winged vultures flap and complain, mortars fizzle and thump. There is a stench of cordite and scorched flesh, a distant sound of musketry. They wend their way through narrow, blasted streets clogged with broken furniture, eviscerated animals, and abandoned weaponry. Sumner imagines behind every barricade and loophole a crouching sepoy ready to shoot. He thinks that the risk they are taking is too great and that the treasure itself is probably a lie, but he knows it would be foolish to refuse a man like Corbyn. The British army is built on influence, and if a man wishes to rise he must be careful who he knows. Corbyn has friends on the Army Medical Board, and his brother-in-law is an inspector of hospitals. The man himself is boastful and dull, to be sure, but to be connected to him by this shared secret, this pile of illegal loot, would not be a bad thing for Sumner at all. It might even, he thinks, be his path out of the Sixty-First Foot and into a more respectable regiment. But only, of course, if the loot is real.

They turn a corner and come across a gun emplacement and a gaggle of drunken infantrymen. One of them is playing the squeeze-box, another has his britches down and is evacuating into a wooden bucket; empty brandy bottles are scattered around.

“Who goes there?” one of them shouts.

“Surgeons,” Wilkie says. “Does any man here require treatment?”

The soldiers look at one another and laugh.

“Cotteslow over there needs his fucking head examined,” one of them says.

“Where are your officers?”

The same man gets to his feet and, squinting, walks unsteadily towards them. He stops a foot or two away and spits. His uniform is ragged and stained with blood and gun smoke. He smells of vomit, piss, and beer.

“All dead,” he says. “Every single one.”

Wilkie nods slowly and looks off down the street past the gun emplacement.

“And where is the enemy?” he says. “Is he close by?”

“Oh, he’s close enough,” the man says. “If you look over yonder he may even blow you a wee kiss.”

The other men laugh again. Wilkie ignores them and turns back to confer with the others.

“This is a fucking disgrace,” he says. “These men should be hanged for dereliction of duty.”

“This is as far as we can get,” O’Dowd says. “This is the limit of the advance.”

“We are very close now,” Hamid says. “Two minutes more.”

“Too dangerous,” O’Dowd says.

Wilkie rubs his chin and spits.

“We’ll send Price,” he says. “He can go on ahead and report back. If it looks safe, the rest of us will follow.”

They all turn to Price.

“Not for a fucking tithe,” he says.

“What say we double it?” Wilkie suggests. He looks at the other two, and the other two nod in agreement.

Price, who has been squatting, stands up slowly, shoulders his rifle, and walks across to Hamid.

“Lead on,” he says.

The others sit down where they are and wait. The drunken soldiers ignore them. Sumner lights his pipe.

“He’s an avaricious little shit,” O’Dowd says, “that Price.”

“If he gets killed, we’ll have to make up some tale,” Wilkie says. “Corbyn won’t be happy.”

“Corbyn,” O’Dowd says. “Always fucking Corbyn.”

“Is it his brother or his brother-in-law?” Sumner asks. “I can never remember.”

O’Dowd shrugs and shakes his head.

“Brother-in-law,” Wilkie says. “Sir Barnabas Gordon. I saw him lecture in chemistry at Edinburgh.”

“You’ll get nothing out of Corbyn,” O’Dowd says to Sumner, “don’t think you will. He’s an ex-Guardsman and his wife’s a baroness.”

“After this he’ll feel obliged,” Sumner says.

“A man like Corbyn doesn’t care to feel obliged. We’ll get our share of the loot if the loot exists, but believe me, that will be it.”

Sumner nods at this and thinks for a minute.

“Have you tried him already?”

Wilkie smiles at this, but O’Dowd says nothing.

Ten minutes later, Price comes back and reports that they have found the house, and the route to it appears safe enough.

“Did you sight the treasure?” O’Dowd asks him.

“He says it is buried in the courtyard inside the house. He showed me where and I started him digging.”

They follow Price through a complication of narrow alleyways, then out onto a wider street where the shops have been ransacked and the houses are shuttered and silent. There is no one else about, but Sumner is sure these buildings must contain people nonetheless — terrified families crouching in the tepid darkness, jihadis and ghazis licking their wounds, making quiet preparation. They hear noises of carousing from nearby and, from farther off, the sound of cannon fire. The sun is beginning to set, but the heat is steady and unforgiving. They cross the road, picking their way amongst the smoking piles of bones, rags, and broken furniture, then walk another hundred yards until Price halts in front of an open doorway and nods.

The courtyard is small and square, the whitewashed walls are smeared and grubby, and there are patches of exposed mud brick where the plasterwork has failed. Each wall has two archways let into it, and above the archways runs a ragged wooden balcony. Hamid is squatting down at the center. He has moved one of the flagstones and is scraping away at the loose dirt beneath it.

“Help me please,” he says. “We must be quick now.”

Price kneels down next to him and begins to dig with his hands.

“I see a box,” he says, after a moment. “Look, there.”

The others gather round. Price and Hamid tug the box out of the earth, and O’Dowd smashes it open with his rifle butt. The box contains four or five gray canvas sacks.

Wilkie picks up one, looks inside it, and begins to laugh. “Jesus Christ,” he says.

“Is it treasure?” Price asks.

Wilkie shows the sack to O’Dowd and O’Dowd smiles, then laughs and slaps Wilkie on the back.

Price pulls the other three sacks out of the box and opens them. Two are filled with coins, and the third contains an assortment of bracelets, rings, and jewels.

“Oh, fuck me,” Price whispers softly to himself.

“Let me see those darlings,” Wilkie says. Price passes him the smallest bag and Wilkie tips its contents out onto the dusty flagstones. On their knees now, the three assistant surgeons gather round the glistering pile like schoolboys at a game of marbles.

“We prize out all the stones and melt down the gold,” O’Dowd says. “Keep it simple.”

“We must go back now,” Hamid says again. “For my son.”

Still gripped by the treasure, they ignore him completely. Sumner leans forwards and picks out one of the rings.

“What are these stones?” he says. “Are they diamonds?” He turns to Hamid. “Are these diamonds?” he asks, showing him the ring. “Is this real?”

Hamid doesn’t answer.

“He’s thinking of that boy,” O’Dowd says.

“The boy’s dead,” Wilkie says, not looking up. “The boy was always fucking dead.”

Sumner looks at Hamid, who still doesn’t speak. His eyes are wide with fear.

“What is it?” Sumner asks.

He shakes his head as if the answer is much too complicated, as if the time for explanations has gone and they are occupying, whether they realize it or not, a darker and more consequential phase.

“We go now,” he says. “Please.”

Hamid takes Price by the sleeve and tries to tug him streetwards. Price snatches his arm away and pulls back a fist.

“Watch yourself now,” he says.

Hamid stands back and raises both his arms above his head, palms facing forwards — it is a gesture of silent refusal but also, Sumner realizes, of surrender. But surrender to whom?

There is the crack of a musket from the balcony above them, and the back of Price’s head explodes in a brief carnation of blood and bone. Wilkie, swiveling on his heels, points his rifle and shoots wildly upwards but hits nothing, and is then shot twice himself — first through the neck and then high up on the chest. They are being ambushed; the place is alive with sepoys. O’Dowd grabs Sumner by the arm and drags him backwards into the safety and darkness of the house. Wilkie is writhing on the flagstones outside; blood is squirting in crimson pulses from his punctured neck. Sumner pushes open the street door with the toe of his boot and an answering bullet thumps into the door frame from outside. One of the ambushers vaults over the rickety balcony and dashes towards them screaming. O’Dowd shoots at him but misses. The sepoy’s saber meets O’Dowd’s abdomen and emerges, reddened and dripping, halfway up his back. O’Dowd coughs blood, gasps, looks amazed at what has been done to him. As he pushes the sword in still harder, the sepoy’s expression is urgent and passionate. His pitch-black eyes bulge wildly; his brown skin is slick with sweat. Sumner is standing two feet away from him, no more; he lifts his rifle to his shoulder and fires. The man’s face disappears instantly and is replaced by a shallow, bowl-like concavity filled with meat and gristle, and crazed and shattered fragments of teeth and tongue. Sumner drops his rifle and kicks open the front door. As he steps into the street, a bullet bites him in the calf and another smashes into the wall inches from his head. He staggers, grunts, topples backwards for a second, but then rights himself and commences a lopsided dash for safety. Another bullet whines above his head. He can feel a warm squelch as his left boot fills with blood. From behind him, there is screaming. The street is littered with shattered masonry, potsherds, sackcloth, bones, and dust. Shops and kiosks lie empty-shelved on either hand, their sagging shamianas holed and rotting. He abandons the road and plunges sideways into the crackpot labyrinth of lanes and alleyways.

The high stucco walls are fractured and grease-streaked. There is a smell of sewage, a roar of bluebottles. Sumner limps on, frantic and directionless, until the pain forces him to halt. He crouches in a doorway and prizes off his boot. The wound itself is clean enough but the shinbone is broken. He rips a strip of flannel from his shirttail and binds the wound as tightly as he can to stop the bleeding. As he does so, a hot wave of nausea and faintness passes over him. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees a black swirl of pigeons wheeling and gathering like airborne spores in the darkening sky. The moon is out already; from all sides there is the constant dreary boom of ordnance. He thinks of Wilkie and O’Dowd and starts to shudder. He takes a long breath in and tells himself to sharpen the fuck up or he will die just like they did. The city will fall tomorrow for sure, he tells himself; when the British troops sober up, they will press forwards. If he sits tight and remains alive, they will find him and bring him home.

He gets to his feet and looks about for a place to hide. The door opposite is ajar. He limps across to it, dripping blood as he goes. Behind the door is a room with dusty matting and a broken divan pushed up against one wall. There is an unglazed water jar in one corner, empty, and a teakettle and glasses scattered over the floor. The single high window looks onto the alleyway and gives little light. On the far wall, an archway concealed by a curtain opens onto another smaller room with a skylight and a cooking stove. There is a wooden cupboard, but the cupboard is empty. The room smells of old ghee, ashes, and wood smoke. In one corner of it, a small boy is lying curled on a filthy blanket.

Sumner watches him for a moment, wondering whether he is alive or dead. It is too dark to tell whether he is breathing or not. With difficulty, Sumner leans down and touches the boy’s cheek. The touch leaves a faint red fingerprint behind. The boy stirs, moves his hand across his face as though brushing away a fly, and then wakes. When he sees Sumner standing there, he is startled and cries out with alarm. Sumner hushes him. The boy stops shouting but still looks scared and suspicious. Sumner takes a slow step backwards, not taking his eyes off the boy, and lowers himself gradually onto the dirt floor.

“I need water,” he says. “Look. I am wounded.” He points at his oozing leg. “Here.”

He reaches into his coat pocket for a coin and realizes that he still has the ring. He doesn’t remember putting it in his pocket, but here it is. He shows it to the boy, then gestures for him to take it.

“I need water,” he says again. “Pani.”

The boy looks at the ring without moving. He is around ten or eleven years old — thin-faced, bare-chested, and shoeless, wearing a grubby dhoti and a canvas vest.

“Pani,” he echoes.

“Yes,” Sumner nods. “Pani, but tell no one I am here. Tomorrow when the British soldiers come I will help you. I will keep you safe.”

After a pause, the boy answers him in Hindustani: a long line of empty, clashing syllables like the bleating of a goat. What is a child doing sleeping in a place like this? Sumner wonders. In an empty room in a city that has become a battleground? Are his family all dead? Is there no one left to protect him? He remembers, twenty years before, lying in the dark in the abandoned cabin after his parents were removed to the typhus hospital in Castlebar. His mother had sworn to him they would come back soon, she had held his two hands tight in hers and solemnly sworn to it, but they never did. It was only William Harper the surgeon who happened to recall the missing child, who rode back the next day and found the boy still lying where they had left him. Harper was wearing his green tweed suit that day; his pigskin boots were muddy and wet from the road. He lifted the boy up off the soiled pallet and carried him outside. Sumner remembers, even now, the smells of wool and leather, the damp warmth of the surgeon’s steady breathing and his soft easeful curses, like a newfangled form of prayer.

“When the British soldiers get here I will keep you safe,” Sumner insists again. “I will protect you. Do you understand?”

The boy stares at him for a moment longer, then nods and leaves the room. Sumner returns the ring to his pocket, closes his eyes, leans his head against the wall, and waits. The flesh around his wound is hot and badly swollen. The leg is pulsing with pain, and his thirst is becoming unbearable. He wonders if the boy will betray him now, if the next person he sees will be his murderer. He would be easy enough to kill in his present condition: he has no weapon to defend himself with and little strength left for the struggle even if he had one.

The boy returns with a jug of water. Sumner drinks half of it and uses the remainder to rinse off his wound. Just above the ankle, the shinbone slants backwards at an angle. The foot lolls uselessly below. Compared to the abominations of the field hospital his case is mild, but the sight fills him with fear nonetheless. He shuffles across to the stove and selects two long sticks of firewood from the pile next to it. He takes his jackknife from his tunic pocket, unlocks the blade, and begins to trim and smooth the wood. The boy watches him impassively. Sumner places one piece of firewood on either side of his leg, then gestures for the blanket that the boy was sleeping on. The boy brings it over to him and he tears it into strips. The boy doesn’t move or speak. Sumner leans forwards and starts binding the splints with the pieces of dirty blanket. Just tight enough, he tells himself, but not too tight.

Soon he is drenched with sweat and panting. He can feel the sour taste of vomit rising up his throat. The sweat is stinging his eyes, and his fingers are trembling. He prods the second strip of blanket underneath his leg and then draws the ends together on top. He tries to tie them in a knot, but the pain is too severe. He gives up, pauses a moment, then tries and fails again. He opens his mouth in a silent scream, then grunts and falls backwards onto the floor. He closes his eyes and waits for his breath to return. His heartbeat is like a heavy door somewhere off in the distance being slammed hard again and again. He waits, and eventually the shrill pain resolves into a nauseating ache. He rolls over and looks across at the boy.

“You must help me,” he says.

The boy doesn’t respond. Small black flies agitate across his lips and eyebrows, but he makes no effort to brush them away. Sumner points down at his leg.

“Tie it for me,” he instructs. “Tight but not too tight.”

The boy stands up, looks at the wound, and says something in Hindustani.

“Tight but not too tight,” Sumner says again.

The boy kneels down, takes hold of the bandage, and begins to tie the knot. The bone ends grind together. Sumner cries out. The boy stops, but Sumner impatiently gestures for him to carry on. He finishes the knot and ties the next one and the next one. When the splinting is finished, the boy goes out to the well behind the house, refills the water jug, and brings it back. Sumner drinks the water, then falls asleep. When he wakes up the boy is lying next to him. He smells of wet sawdust and is no larger than a dog; his breaths are slow and shallow. In the nearly lightless room, his sprawled body seems like no more than a thickening of the general darkness. Without moving his damaged leg, Sumner reaches out and touches the child as gently as he can manage. He is not sure which part of his body he is touching. The shoulder blade, is it? The thigh? The boy doesn’t stir or wake.

“You’re a good little fellow,” Sumner whispers to him. “A good little fellow, that’s what you are.”

At first light, the barrage recommences. The explosions are distant to begin with, but then, as the gunners find their range and the British troops gradually advance through the city, street by street, they become closer and louder. The room shakes and a fresh crack jags across the ceiling. They hear the fierce buzz of cannonballs passing overhead, then the dull basso crumble of collapsing walls.

“We sit tight,” Sumner tells the boy. “We sit tight here and wait.”

The boy nods and scratches himself. He has found a piece of bark to chew on and what looks like the leaves of a turnip. Sumner lights his pipe and silently prays that Tommy Atkins arrives before the house is hit by an artillery shell or overrun by fleeing Pandys. After a while they hear the rattle of musketry, then voices. Someone outside is cursing and yelling commands. There are footsteps overhead and the sound of slamming doors. Sumner feels a sudden and terrifying sense of encroachment and exposure; he feels the urge to crouch down and hide. The boy looks at him expectantly. Sumner grabs onto the stove and pulls himself upright. The pain in his leg is sickening but tolerable. He leans against the boy and together they stumble over to the doorway. There is a boom of cannon fire and then screams. The boy presses himself against Sumner’s side. Sumner cracks open the door and peers out. He sees a dead Pandy propped against a wall and, from the gap at the end of the alleyway, the flash of a British uniform. The air is sharp with gun smoke, full of yellow dust, and loud with the panic and wildness of battle.

“Quick,” he says to the boy, “quick before they leave us behind.”

They hobble down the alleyway in the direction of the shouting and gunfire, but already the noises are becoming fainter. The battle is moving on. When they reach the thoroughfare, all they see are piles of smashed masonry and scattered, blood-smirched corpses. A British soldier appears from a doorway, carrying a pistol in one hand and a sack of loot in the other. Sumner calls out to him for help. The soldier turns sharply back to look at them. His eyes are wild, and his once-red uniform is befouled with sweat and dirt. Noticing the boy, the soldier stiffens momentarily, then raises his pistol and shoots. The ball hits the boy full in the chest and knocks him backwards. Sumner lowers himself and presses his hands hard against the pulsing wound. The pistol ball has shattered the sternum and passed directly through the heart. Bubbles of blood rise and break on the boy’s gray lips, his dark eyes roll back into his head, and in a minute he is dead.

The soldier spits, twitches, and begins to reload his pistol. He looks over at Sumner and smiles.

“I have a fucking good eye for the shooting,” he says. “I always have.”

“You are a fucking imbecile,” Sumner answers.

The soldier laughs and shakes his head.

“I am the one who saved your precious life,” he says. “Think on that.”

A dooly arrives, and Sumner is lifted onto it. They carry him back through the broken city to the field hospital behind the racquet court. He is not recognized at first amongst the hordes of wounded, but when Corbyn sees him, he is quickly moved upstairs and placed in a side room by himself.

He is given food, water, and a dose of laudanum, and an adjunct is sent to re-splint and dress his leg. He slips in and out of slumber. He can hear the constant noise of cannon and the intermittent howls of the wounded from the floor below. It is dark before Corbyn comes up to see him. He carries an oil lamp and smokes a cheroot. They shake hands and Corbyn stares down at him for a moment with an expression of sad puzzlement, as though Sumner is a carefully planned experiment that has unexpectedly misfired.

“So the others are all dead?” he asks.

Sumner nods.

“We were caught unawares,” he says.

“You were lucky to survive then.” He lifts the blanket and glances at Sumner’s leg.

“The wound is clean and the break isn’t so bad. I may need to use a cane for a while, but that’s all.”

Corbyn nods and smiles. Sumner watches him expectantly. Soon, he thinks, he will make me an offer, suggest an appropriate reward for my sufferings.

“You must have imagined I was dead also,” Sumner says, “when no one came back.”

“Indeed,” Corbyn says, “that was the general assumption.” Then he adds after a pause: “I am glad of course that we were wrong.”

“The treasure was real enough, but there were Pandys hiding in the house.”

“You walked into a trap then. You made a bad mistake.”

“Not a trap,” Sumner says, “an accident. No one could have guessed they were in there.”

“For a surgeon to leave his post is a serious thing.”

Corbyn’s gaze hardens and he watches Sumner carefully. Sumner opens his mouth to speak, then stops himself.

“I trust you understand my meaning,” Corbyn says. “I am glad you’re safe, of course, but nonetheless your present situation is not a happy one. There is likely to be a charge.”

“A charge?” Sumner wonders for a confusing moment if this could be part of some larger plan that Corbyn has cooked up in his absence. Some grander strategy for their mutual benefit.

“The circumstances make it unavoidable,” Corbyn goes on. “The assault was at a crucial stage. To lose three surgeons at such a time…” He raises his eyebrows and lazily exhales a tube of gray-brown smoke into the inky darkness.

Sumner feels a sharp tightening across his chest, and the beginnings of disorientation, as if the room has started unexpectedly, impossibly, to tilt around him.

“If there is to be any charge,” he says, “I trust I can rely on your assistance, Mr. Corbyn.”

Corbyn frowns and shakes his head dismissively.

“I don’t see what assistance I could possibly offer you,” he says lightly. “The facts of the matter are clear.”

“Your account of yesterday, I mean,” Sumner says. “The details of what occurred. The boy and so on.”

Corbyn has put the oil lamp down on a side table and is pacing slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed. Before answering, he goes over to the open window and pauses there awhile, as if looking out for a dinner guest who is late.

“The general is unlikely to concern himself with the minor details,” Corbyn says. “When you were needed here, you left the hospital in search of treasure. Three men have died, and you have come back severely wounded. In your absence, your injured comrades, several officers amongst them, lay untreated and oftentimes in severe agony. That, I fear, is as much as he wants, or is required, to understand.”

“You expect me to hold my tongue then? To take my punishment? I will very likely be dismissed.”

“I’d advise you not to make a bad situation even worse, that’s all. To bring my name into this will not serve you well. I can assure you of that.”

There is a pause in which the two men hold each other’s gaze. Corbyn’s expression is stern, but also calm and self-assured. Beneath the standard military-issue stiffness there lies a vast and heedless confidence born of wealth and leisure, a sense that the world is malleable, that it will bend to his desires.

Sumner’s head has begun to ache. He feels a sour inner swell of anger and self-reproach.

“So you offer me nothing at all for my trouble?”

“I offer you my advice, which is to accept the unfortunate consequences of your own actions. You were unlucky, I agree, but then again you are alive and the others are dead, so perhaps you have something to be grateful for.”

“I still have the treasure,” Sumner tells him.

Corbyn winces and shakes his head.

“No, you are lying about that. You were carrying nothing with you when they brought you in.”

“You checked then,” Sumner says flatly, “before deciding on this course of action.”

Corbyn’s jaw tightens and he looks, for the first time since the conversation began, discomfited.

“Do not provoke me. It will not help your case.”

“I have no case. You know that as well as I do. If I go before the general, my career is over.”

Corbyn shrugs.

“You will be moved up to the regimental hospital later on this evening, and you will receive the official charges in the next day or so. I will see you again at the hearing.”

“Why do you do this to me?” Sumner asks him. “What’s your purpose?”

“My purpose?”

“You are destroying me, and for what?”

Corbyn shakes his head and smiles thinly.

“There is a melancholic strain in the Celtic soul which finds martyrdom appealing, I understand. But in your case, Mr. Sumner, the cap hardly fits. I do my duty merely; you would have done much better to do yours.”

With that, he nods a brief good-bye and steps towards the door. Sumner watches him depart, hears the clatter of his boot heels as he descends the wooden stairs and the assonant gabble of his Englishness as he issues another command. As the surgeon lies there, as the truth of his situation settles slowly upon him, he feels the defining elements of his character — eagerness, belief, cussedness, a kind of desperate, unspeakable pride — beginning to slip away. When William Harper died and left him nothing — since everything the man owned had by then been sold or mortgaged or squandered on drink — even then he persisted; his determination didn’t flag. He could no longer afford his lectures or lodgings in Belfast, but he recognized the army as another way to rise. It would be much slower and much harder, he knew, but not impossible. He believed he could still do it, would still do it somehow. But now, those long-held reserves of resilience and tenacity are wiped out at a stroke. The years of effort, the years of doggedness and patience and guile. Is it possible? And if it is possible, what does it imply? He feels a hot jolt of rage at what Corbyn has done to him and then answering it, just as powerful but broader and more fierce, like a long, gray wave that has been gathering its force and finally reaches the shore, a chilling flood of shame.