Page 13 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)
A week had passed since the babe’s first cry, and Ivy was well on the mend.
Mother and daughter thrived, the little one drawing dozens of smiles from Alaric when he visited, which was often.
Too often, Claire sometimes thought. She was glad for Ivy’s happiness, of course, but the chamber grew crowded when he was there, and Claire often felt like an intruder at those times.
She’d taken to slipping out when Alaric visited, wandering the keep or the bailey to give them privacy.
Today was such a day. It was gray but dry, the air sharp and crisp, a typical autumn day.
She meandered across the expansive courtyard, past the smithy with its glowing forge, past the granary where hens pecked for stray grain, until she noticed a low stone outbuilding tucked beneath the curtain wall at the firth-side of the keep.
Its wide door stood ajar, and from within came sounds that caught her ear, low groans amid a rustle of voices.
She paused, curiosity risen, and followed the noise. Cautiously, she pushed the door open, her jaw gaping by what she discovered inside. The smell hit her first, sweat, blood, and unwashed bodies.
Inside, pallets of straw lined the walls and were laid in messy rows across the middle of the long room.
Men were stretched upon them, some swathed in bandages that were stained with seeping blood.
Others were pale and unmoving except for the rise and fall of their chests.
A silent gasp fell from her lips—these were the injured and wounded of the Kerr and Mackinlay armies, and this a makeshift infirmary.
Never had she felt so immersed in the medieval world.
Castles and people she could almost convince herself to romanticize—those she had seen in books, films, and glossy tourism brochures.
But this—this dim, airless room where men fought not only their wounds but the rot and filth creeping into them—reeked of ancient times in the truest, rawest sense.
Toward the middle of the room, a boy no older than twenty clutched his side, teeth gritted against the pain, while an older man bent over him with a rag that looked anything but clean.
Claire’s nurse’s instincts made her surge forward. “You can’t use that,” she cried out as she crossed the room. “You’ll infect him.”
The man looked up, brows bristling beneath a furrowed forehead.
He had a leathery face and a gray beard, and his sleeves were rolled up, and stiff with dried blood.
Claire gasped when her eyes dropped to his hands.
They were broad and work-worn but caked with filth, and it looked as if it had been weeks or months since he’d cleaned under his fingernails.
She thought of everything those hands had touched, every wound they had pressed and probed, carrying sickness from one man to the next.
Iron instruments lay scattered at the man’s side—clamps and blades dulled with use, none of them clean.
Her stomach lurched. She remembered lectures from nursing school, professors grimly recounting how, before antiseptic practice, infection had killed more soldiers than their wounds ever did.
The man, who might be the army’s doctor, fixed a dark-eyed glare on her for her interference. A string of guttural Scots poured from his mouth as he rose from his haunches, getting bigger and bigger until he loomed over her in a menacing fashion.
Claire’s pulse jumped, but she didn’t back away. His method of practice was very dangerous, would kill more than he saved. “You’ll cause an infection,” she said, her voice stringent with urgency.
The doctor paused only briefly in his tirade, just long enough to reveal shock and contempt at the sound of her voice, possibly further angered to be reprimanded in English.
But Claire pressed on, desperate to make him see.
“Hot water. Clean linen. That’s what you should be using—you have to sterilize everything, all the time. ”
She pointed to the dirty rag in his hand, but the doctor yanked it away, as if he thought she meant to steal it. He barked again at her, louder this time, motioning her away with a bloodstained hand.
“He says for ye to go. Nae yer place.”
Claire turned to find a very young kid, not more than ten years old, his skinny arms weighted down with buckets of water, staring at her, having translated the tirade for her—unnecessarily, since she had no doubt the doctor wanted her gone.
She pivoted a bit more away from the shouting man and pleaded with the child. “Can you please tell him I’m only trying to help, that he’s actually doing more harm than good—”
Before Claire could finish her plea to the boy, a rough hand clamped around her arm. She gasped at the sudden pressure of his iron-hard grip. With a sharp tug, the nasty doctor wrenched her away from the pallet and spun her toward the door.
“Hey—stop!” Claire stumbled, catching herself, twisting against his hold. She turned back to the kid with the buckets. “Please! Just tell him I’m trying to help,” she called out over the doctor’s shouting. “He has to understand, he’s making things worse—”
Again she was startled so much that the words ground to a halt.
She was jerked hard, then suddenly released.
Claire was flung sideways, landing hard on her hip, her palms meeting with hard-packed earth.
Before she’d even thrust her hair out of her face, her arm was seized again, this time with some degree of gentleness, and she was hauled to her feet.
Breathless, Claire moved her hair off her face and discovered Ciaran Kerr now held her arm.
The doctor was sprawled on the ground as she had been seconds ago, his hand cupping his cheek, his eyes glowing furiously—and Ciaran’s free hand was fisted and cocked, ready to strike again, it seemed. His chest heaved a bit, and his lips were curled as he stared down at the doctor.
Mouth wide open yet again, Claire turned her attention back to Ciaran, cowering a bit as she regarded him. His eyes, pale and burning, pinned the man to the ground with a ferocity that made her breath falter.
The room had gone silent, every wounded man and hovering attendant staring, the air charged with shock.
Ciaran’s voice cracked across the room like the snap of a monitor alarm in a quiet ward, sharp and commanding. “Touch her once more, and I’ll make certain ye never lift that hand again.”
Claire’s her heart hammered at the suddenness of it all—at the trouble she’d caused.
“No, no, no,” she cried, turning to Ciaran, her arm still held by his strong hand. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He wasn’t... he didn’t—please don’t blame him.”
“There is nae reason—nae ever—to manhandle a lass,” Ciaran seethed, his voice dangerous for how low and controlled it was, his derision directed at the hapless doctor.
Claire conceded mechanically, “Okay, yes, that was not good, but I’m sure he didn’t mean to—"
Ciaran turned his magnificent rage onto Claire, the force of his glare withering. “Ye defend him?” He growled.
“Yes. No! That is”—she paused to draw breath, holding up both her hands, a silent request for calm, in herself and others.
“Okay, here’s what happened. He was about to use a rag on that kid that had already been used on other men,” she said, turning and pointing to the young man on the straw pallet, one of many.
“I tried to stop him, to tell him he has to use hot water and clean cloths. He has to sterilize everything. If he doesn’t, he’s going to spread infection.
More will die from that than from the sword and arrow wounds themselves. ”
Her explanation did not appease, she was quick to realize. Ciaran Kerr’s gaze burned into her still. The muscles in his jaw flexed, and his fist was still half-clenched at his side.
“And who are ye ,” he demanded, “to stand in this place and tell Diarmad his craft? Ye ken nothing of these men, nothing of their wounds. Ye’d walk in here, a stranger, and imagine yerself wiser than the man who’s tended them his whole life?”
His words cracked like whips across the silence, becoming progressively louder. He looked at her not just with anger, but with suspicion, as though she’d unmasked herself in some dangerous way.
“You have to understand,” Claire stated firmly, meaning to make her point no matter how much he or they or anyone resisted, “what he’s doing is well-intentioned, but it’s causing more harm than good. I’m simply saying there’s a better, safer way.”
“By what right,” he growled, stepping closer, the heat of him rolling off in waves, “do ye come to Caeravorn, into my sick house, in my men’s time of need, and tell us how they’ll be saved or lost?”
Claire held her ground, tilting her face up at him, too busy trying not to roll her eyes to start quaking in her twenty-first century sneakers.
“Christ, you’re as bad as he is,” she accused, flicking her thumb at the doctor, who’d since gotten to his feet.
“Could you stop with the men-know-better medieval bullshit? What I’m stating are basic principles of hygiene and health.
” Annoyed now, since his storm of irritation only seemed to grow, she turned and yanked the dirty rag—the cause of all this trouble—from the scowling doctor’s hand.
She whipped about, thrusting it in front of Ciaran’s face.
“See this? See how filthy it is? This is probably caked with blood from half these men. And do you know what that means? It means every cut it touches will carry what the others already have. Tiny things you can’t see—smaller than dust—live in this.
They grow, they spread, and they rot the flesh until the wound festers.
” Her voice rose, sharp with frustration.
“That’s why men spike fevers, why their skin turns red and swollen, why they die days after the battle—not from the hole an arrow or sword made, but from the fever that follows.
” She waved the rag again, her knuckles white.
“And it starts with this. However,” she said, with great emphasis, holding up the forefinger of her free hand, “if you clean everything with boiling water, if you use cloths that are clean to begin with—exactly the very simple thing I was trying to say to him—men will live who otherwise might not.”
A murmur rippled through the room, uncertain and uneasy. The barber-surgeon scoffed, shaking his head violently, muttering under his breath.
Claire sucked in a breath, lowering the rag but not her gaze.
Ciaran’s eyes stayed fixed on her, scrutinizing her hard, as though he couldn’t decide whether to sneer or demand more.
Perhaps because she sounded so certain—because she was—some part of him was intrigued, as if she knew truths he’d never thought to consider.
Yet suspicion shadowed his expression too, the wary look of a man who had spent his life measuring people and their motives.
Claire sighed, understanding that it was unlikely she would change minds in this century, certainly not a lone, strange-sounding woman in the midst of a group of medieval men.
She slapped the rag into the doctor’s hand and said to Ciaran, “You don’t have to believe me. But if he keeps using rags like that and filthy instruments as well, you’ll watch men who should be walking tomorrow burn up with fever instead. That’s the truth.”
And with that, she turned and left the building.