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Jack did not faint from blood loss until the Polychrest was sunk entirely and the Fanciulla had exchanged its French colors for the English. The wheel was heavily christened with his blood when he fell against it, dripping red as St. George's cross. Stephen and his assistant Bonden carried Jack on their shoulders into the Fanciulla's sick-berth - an actual sick-berth, not an upturned table and sheets for walls. The French doctor was dead, leaving Stephen to inherit a fine set of hardware. Let it never be said that the French did not extend hospitality even in their defeat.
Hauling Jack onto the table, Stephen stripped his ruined shirt. "How long ago? What all has he done since?"
"Hours and hours, sir," said Bonden. "He's done all a man can do. In the sea, out of it, toiled in the powder, plugged holes below deck."
The stab wound was from a bayonet: small, asymmetrical, burrowed deep into the shoulder. Closest to veins, but closer than one would prefer to the subclavian artery. Cutting in to assess could do more harm than good, especially with so much blood spilled already. "Did the blood pour steadily, or come in great gouts?"
"Send me to the devil if I know, sir."
"Ask anyone who boarded."
Bonden hesitated. He wanted to tell Stephen that none of the boarding crew would have been watching the captain, that they'd been busy looking after their own skins. Stephen didn't want to hear it.
"Ask the French, if you must," said Stephen.
Alone with his patient, Stephen removed a sodden clump of packing lint from Jack's shoulder. The wound burbled weakly. That was very good, or very bad; either the bleeding wasn't much, or Jack's body didn't have much blood to give. A circular cut, a saw through the bone, and Stephen could neatly ligate the broken vessels, be they sluggish veins or thunderous arteries. He could sew the wound shut, like a package at Christmas, and that would be that.
It was only Jack's left arm. He would be impaired, no doubt, and melancholic. Yet perhaps he would recover his humor and cut a one-armed figure like Nelson's, given enough time.
But Jack could not lose the arm. It was a simple, penetrating thought. Jack could not be broken into pieces. Morevoer, Stephen could not make himself do the breaking. His fingers were numb as he stuffed more cotton into the wound. Yes. He would cauterize. That was all there was to it.
He pretended Jack was awake and saying, You've told me many times that amputation and ligatures are the enlightenment of cautery, that the circulation doesn't recover well from a hot iron.
"Yes," Stephen replied, pressing the wound with his measly weight, "but consider. You have been in filth, in water, containing God knows what refuse, what malignant animalcules. Cautery reliably burns away impurities. And if the injury is only a lesser vein, I think you will recover quite well."
But Stephen, Jack would say, what if it isn't only a lesser vein?
"Necrosis, I should think," says Stephen. "Sepsis."
Speak plain.
"Your flesh would die, and so would you."
You'd let me die?
"I won't let you lose the arm."
It's only an arm, Stephen.
Stephen realized, with startling clarity, that he was a horrible physician. "No, Jack. It's your arm."
Bonden returned with mangled French: "Ce n'était pas, eh, une… it started with an r. Something like rattle, or raffle, or-"
"Râle?"
"That sounds right," said Bonden, scratching under his cap. "Yes, I think it was."
For all his love of the French language, Stephen would throttle the speaker who invented the word.
"It was not yet a death rattle," Stephen translated. "He was arch, no doubt?"
"No, sir," said Bonden, "quite serious. I could bring him to you, sir, if you give me a moment."
Damn the man, Stephen thought. Damn his scorched pride, damn the war for igniting it, damn the French and the English and the Spanish. Damn Jack for his daring capers. Damn that complexifying force, as Lamarck called it, which eroded the vital force until a utopian algae bed became a biped with the mark of Cain: a creature which murdered rather than killed.
Stephen thrust his cautery iron into the orange furnace embers. "Water. Rinse him quickly."
Bonden turned away when Jack's flesh sizzled under the iron, but Stephen didn't mind. This was merely staunching a wound, nothing grotesque. The smell of burning blood hardened and gave way to the smell of burning meat. The arm was whole again. Inside, the circulation would simply have to adapt to fewer channels.
Jack did not stir as he burned. He wasn't whole, so couldn't be resurrected yet.
"Help me turn him over, Bonden. Now we address his head."
His hair, his hair. It was a sponge of blood, golden seaweed bloated with dark mud. No matter which way Stephen separated the strands with his foreceps, more sprouted up to hinder him. Jack had his shoals, his sandbars, his dangerous waters: Stephen had his own.
"Scissors," he said, and Bonden supplied them with the sorrow Stephen felt. Taking a hank from the crown, Stephen chewed through Jack's hair in wet centimeters. When Bonden took the scissors, he poured water on the blades, blood and loose blond hairs falling away in the flow.
The scalp was torn back and away, a red flag of surrender the size of a child's palm. The skull, however, remained whole. "Simple stitchery," said Stephen, "nothing alarming. Rinse the wound, Bonden, while I prepare."
"Shall I, sir?" asked Bonden. He made two regretful snips with the scissors.
Baffled for a moment, Stephen held his tongue. It often took him a few seconds longer than he liked to understand someone's secret meaning. Two more sad snips of the blades, a hair dangling from the handle. Yes, of course, the hair. He could not clearly see the wound. Best to shear Jack completely, down to the scalp. Stephen had done it many times, on man and sheep alike.
"No need for that, I think," he said. "The wound is sizable, but not enormous, and the bleeding has slowed. I have time."
"Indeed, sir," said Bonden. "He will look quite gruesome in the morning. At least you can leave him his crowning glory."
As Stephen waxed the last of his fine silk thread, Bonden poured basin after basin of cool water over the back of Jack's head. The water spilled onto the blood-soaked sand on the floor, washed it down cracks, deep into the bilge below. Jack's hair was clean, a sober shade of itself, and even the wound looked milder, embarrassed to be ruining the landscape.
Stephen used interrupted stitches rather than a continuous thread. He was down to a scrap of silk when he made the last knot, but it was worth the eye strain, because he could rest assured that one break wouldn't ruin the entire set. He'd done well, better than usual. He anticipated minimal scarring. It would be covered up by Jack's excessive hair, but it pleased him, thinking that the skin would sit flat against Jack's skull.
Jack was carried to his new quarters while Stephen took his final round for the night. He'd seen to the necessary injuries while waiting for the crisis to pass, for Jack to have time for treatment. It was not a bad lot, truth be told. Babbington's arm was left to God's will, and he worried as usual for the gut wounds and bullet holes. He descended to the French with some trepidation. They huddled ungallantly, but then again, they had been taken by surprise, with no time to prepare their composure. The most gruesome injury on their side was a man who had lost both eyes to a Polychrest whose will to live expressed itself through a bloodthirsty awl. As Stephen changed bandages, an eager face emerged from the press of captives, saying in French, "Venerable doctor! I spoke to your assistant, Mr. Bonden. How is the captain?"
Stephen was fortunate to be caring for one man, or he would be beating another. "He still has not sounded a death rattle." He spat the word: râle.
The man frowned. "Death rattle? Oh- sir! Your man did me wrong!" And he said: "Ce n'était pas une rafale."
Rafale; burst. Stephen had only heard it used in regards to gunfire, bullets. A navyman didn't discriminate between bullets and bodies. Ce n'était pas une rafale: it was not a burst.
"That is very good to hear," said Stephen, pressing down his shame, telling it that he would address it later. "Yes, there was a misunderstanding."
"He lives?" asks the man.
"Yes, and I think he'll recover well, if the blood did not flow in bursts."
"I am relieved," said the man, "because I'm the one who stabbed him. God save Napoleon, but I would bitterly regret it, killing Lucky Aubrey."
The man ran Jack's name together with "veinard," a begrudging word for luck only used by the loser to admit the winner's success: the lucky dog, the lucky devil. An expression of your appreciation for the very same victory which wounded you.
Lucky Aubrey. Le Veinard Aubrey. Le Veinaubrey.
Stephen was rolling the single word in his mind when Jack finally roused himself. The Fanciulla's cabin was spacious, the cot stuffed with goose down, the windows spitshone enough to see a night bird soar past the moon, miles away. Jack, a cadaver in the clear blue light, was half-hidden by Stephen's shadow falling over his blankets.
"Stephen," said Jack.
"Here." Stephen felt for his pulse. Weak and steady as an hour earlier.
"I have a dreadful fear."
"There's no need for fear."
"Yes, there is," said Jack. "The only time I see you lately is when you come to bleed me on Wednesdays."
Angry at Jack for saying it, angry at himself for finding it funny, Stephen laughed. "I think we can skip this week's session. You've had enough."
"No. I still haven't bled out this damned temper, I can feel it still." Jack opened his eyes. Stephen knew it to be a serious, concentrated effort for someone in this state. "I cannot retract that you are a liar and a coward, because you've lied to me and avoided me for months. You're welcome to bleed me more, Stephen, until you're satisfied."
Stephen was a horrible physician, a horrible friend, a horrible citizen of the earth. He was selfish in every way a man could hoard himself: worse than Jack with his sanguine enthusiasms, far worse. Stephen couldn't kill, couldn't save, couldn't give, couldn't take. He waited like a solitary ant lion, refusing everything until he dragged a victim into his pit for shameful devouring.
He was disturbed, not just that he once thought to kill Jack out of malice and spite, and not just that he risked it again out of affection and pride, and not just that Jack's death naturally associated itself with a kind of endless dusk over the world. He was disturbed that all of these things existed, emerged, and submerged in him so rapidly. Every animal had a range of behaviors and moods, but Stephen was at a loss when he observed himself. Derangement, perhaps, as it so often happened in captivity. Taken from the wild, trapped in an enclosure, the mind reeled. Fish swam in endless circles. Rodents clawed for dominance and wailed at separation. A wild dog, taken in, pined away to mere bones while its domesticated cousin watched sadly from an embroidered bed.
There was no wild for Stephen to return himself to, though. He was brought up in a cage like anyone else. He was merely mad in conditions which made other men happy. Jack was far tamer, but showed flashes of derangement, too. They were an awful pair, captive on land and captive on sea.
Stephen would kill Jack in an effort to maintain him, rather than save him and see him changed. But he had, against all moral logic in the universe, gambled and won. Jack would live, and would probably keep his arm, all because Stephen was too selfish to cut it off. And now, Jack was willing to give Stephen the final satisfaction. A dead friend, but a whole one; a sad conclusion, but a duel won without a single bullet. No rival for Diana Villiers's heart. A clean bill of honor and honesty. A coup de grâce beyond imagination.
"I've had enough, too," said Stephen.
"Then you won't come on Wednesday?"
"You are a patient in my custody. You have no notion of the powers of a doctor over a captain."
Stephen knew what he was saying, but not why he said it. He remembered the vitality he'd felt when Jack had issued that clunky threat to keep Stephen aboard the ship: You have no notion of the powers of a captain over a man-of-war.
If Jack remembered his own words, he didn't show it. He simply stared.
"There is no escaping me, my dear," said Stephen.
Jack shut his eyes instantly, as though he felt he could finally stop exerting himself.