Chapter Text
It wasn’t uncommon to hear gunshots when out in the parkland around Charlton Park, particularly not during the shooting season. What was uncommon about it was that Father’s Game-Keeper was currently standing directly in front of her and had been in her company for the past hour when, had there been a shoot happening, he’d very much have been superintending the whole affair. Mr McAllister blinked at her, then frowned as something warm and thickly wet spattered over Angelina’s cheek. He wavered on his feet, unbalanced as if he’d been drinking, and pressed a hand to his chest, just below his right pectoral. He pulled the hand back, staring hazily down at the violently red smear across his palm.
“Oh my god, you’ve been shot.” She caught him as he started to buckle, pressing her hand over the spreading stain seeping into the fabric of his jacket. “Quickly! Quickly, we have to get under cover. I can patch you up.”
The parkland was a perfect, Capability Brown-esque manufactured wilderness, the smattering of mature trees nowhere near dense enough to offer them any sort of protection if the gunman decided to take another shot. Mr McAllister’s chest was rising and falling in fitful jumps and the blood was starting to seep between their fingers as they both tried to apply pressure to the wound. Angelina clenched her jaw tight, the muscles bucking and twitching, and tried to swallow even as her throat morphed into chalk dust. He squinted up at her, his eyebrows drawn down low and the bridge of his nose creased,
“You can patch me up, uh- you wha- What?”
“Stay with me, what’s your name?” She stumbled into walking, her knees locking and jolting over every step
“Uh- ah,” he shuffled along with her as if she were a child dragging a doll around, “John McAllister”
“And what’s my name?”
“Heavenly angel.”
It jittered behind her ribs even as she cursed. Heavenly angel. He was clearly delirious, hardly a wonder given the circumstances. She’d been called a lot of things over the years; unfeminine, standoffish, difficult, a beautiful face wasted on a poor personality, all just mens’ ways of belittling a woman who was stronger and cleverer than they could ever hope to be. The idea of someone seeing her as anything even approaching angelic was laughable. Men like small, pretty, insipid women who did as they were told, kept house, and had babies. Men liked everything she wasn’t. Mr McAllister must have been losing blood at a more rapid rate than she’d realised if he was saying such things. Heavenly angel. Ludicrous. But the jittery warmth coiled around her ribs and spine was spreading nonetheless, easing into her knees and helping make her steps surer. Seeping away the ache in her arms from having to support the weight of a full-grown man. Quieting the fuzzy, rattling noise in her head enough that she could breath again.
A second shot clattered through the air. Angelina tensed, every muscle in her body taut enough to snap and crumble like perished rubber. Nothing. No impact. No pain. No change in Mr McAllister. She inhaled, praying the air would somehow keep all her bones from shivering into pieces, and dragged them both into a stumbling run. They just had to get to the house, that was it. Then they’d be safe, out of sight, and she’d be able to try and put what she’d learnt from those soldiers whilst she was researching for a retrospective on the Anglo-Afghan wars into practice.
It took an age, or maybe no time at all because the whole world was elastic and too bright and too loudly-quiet, but she hefted them both to the house. Their hands were slick and too warm and blood continued to ooze over them, the cotton of her chemise was sticking to her back as she sweated despite the humid October post-rainfall chill. Mr McAllister’s hair was sticking to his forehead and his clothes were still soaked through from being caught in the rain, the thick woollen tweed of his jacket turned darker by the water. A stark contrast to how pale his face was now, the faintly boyishly soft angle of his cheekbone pasty-white and clammy. She fumbled with the doorhandle, bracing him against herself to free up her hands. Popping bubbles of fizzy hysteria bounced around in her throat, bursting and scattering uselessly unimportant thoughts up the back of her skull. Her day dress was probably ruined at this point. Someone would have to come and scrub the door clean. When had she last had someone pressed up this close to her.
Her fingers slipped on the doorhandle, too tacky to get proper purchase and it took more than one attempt before she managed to open the door. They lurched inside and she half gasped, half yelled into the entrance hall,
“Mrs Daltry I need bandages, a muslin handkerchief, some vaseline, a porous plaster, scissors, warm water, and iodine.”
Angelina looked at the spiral staircase and, judging by how limp Mr McAllister was in her arms, wrote off the idea of trying to get him up them. Instead she carried him passed them and through a tucked away door that led into the servants area. The creeping tideline of blood had run far enough over her fingers and hand that it had started to soak into the cuff of her shirtwaist. Mr McAllister’s shirtfront was ruined, wet through and slick with blood and the only reason his hand was still pressed over the wound was because Angelina had hers firmly holding it there. His breathing was ragged, a slight sucking gasp marking every inhale and she could feel the bubble of blood under their hands as air escaped his chest with every exhale. She’d clamped her tongue crushingly hard between her teeth, layering the pain over the tumbling scramble cantering through her mind and down her spine to try and block it out. Light headed, cold shivers trickled across her back despite all her best efforts.
Mrs Daltry shuffled into view, inching along the corridor in her glacial attempt at haste. She stopped abruptly,
“My lady what happened?”
Angelina lurched herself and Mr McAllister passed and kept on down the hall towards the kitchen, “someone shot him.”
“What? Why? Who?”
“Heaven only knows, but the poor boy doesn’t deserve to die.”
The moment she clattered them both through the kitchen door the cook and all the kitchen maids stopped what they were doing and turned towards them to curtsey. Every single one of them stopped mid-bob, eyes wide, at the sight of the lumbering mess she and Mr McAllister made. Brittle quiet hung like cobwebs, only Mr McAllister’s rattling breaths cluttering the usually industriously noisy space. The silence pulled tighter and thinner, tighter and thinner, until a willowy scullery maid gulped out a sob and buried her face into her apron. With the suspension shattered Mrs Entwhistle, the cook, set down her ladle and started clipping out instructions,
“Sally, take Betsy somewhere else.” The crying scullery maid was whisked away by another girl, “Jane and Mary, clear the table, and Sarah, you put a pot of water on to boil.”
Angelina ushered Mr McAllister over to the sturdy, oak table in the middle of the room that Jane and Mary were rapidly making space on. As soon as the clear area was big enough cook helped her lift Mr McAllister onto it and they both fell to stripping him of his jacket, waistcoat, necktie, and shirt. Her brain hiccoughed at the sight of him. He was thin, but more wiry than scrawny, his muscles were well defined in a way that smacked of a man who’d done largely physical work, and his collarbones stuck out in a way that suggested he needed to be fed more. An ugly, spreading splash of arterial red smeared from just below his right pectoral down over his ribcage and abs. Mrs Entwhistle sucked in a low breath through her teeth,
“Is that where it went in or where it came out?”
The sentence she wanted so she could reply drifted faintly beyond Angelina’s reach as her brain stuttered over realising that Mr McAllister had a light smattering of pale blonde chest hair. The cook patted her gently on the arm,
“My lady, the bullet, is this where it went in or where it came out?”
“How. . . how did you know he’d been shot?”
Mrs Entwhistle took the cloth Jane handed her and started to brusquely wipe away the blood, “I’m a cook, it might have always been game animals up until now, but I’ve seen plenty of things that’ve been shot before. Although I’m afraid unless you want him ready for a Sunday roast I’ve not got much idea how to deal with him.”
“No that’s alright I-” she shook herself, “I know what to do. That’s the exit wound, he got shot in the back so we’ll need to turn him over and see to that as well.”
Mrs Daltry finally caught up to them, her arms full of the things Angelina had asked for. She set them on the table and Angelina pressed her nails hard into her palms before she reached out and picked up the muslin, all the air in her lungs rushing out in relief when her hands didn’t shake. Sarah and Mrs Entwhistle had more or less finished using cloths and warm water to wipe the blood off Mr McAllister’s torso, so she swabbed the wounds with iodine and then set to tearing the muslin in half and soaking one of the pieces in vaseline.
“Mrs Daltry, cut the plaster into strips please and warm them on the range until they’re sticky.”
As soon as the muslin was thoroughly coated she lay it over the hole in Mr McAllister’s chest and covered it with a small section of clean, dry bandage. Her hands were still steady, still moving with some semblance of precision and she kept her eyes firmly focussed on them. Narrowing her world down to just the small portion of Mr McAllister’s skin with that ragged-edged puncture in it and papering over any thoughts of the man as a whole. Not thinking about the shape of his ribcage, the cluster of moles on his shoulder, or how pale his face had gotten. Mrs Daltry handed her three warmed strips of the plaster and Angelina used them to adhere down the top, left, and right edges of the strip of bandage over the Vaseline-soaked muslin, leaving the bottom one open so any air trapped in Mr McAllister’s chest cavity could still escape and, hopefully, prevent his lung collapsing from the build up of pressure.
She breathed out, slowly and measured, forcing her jaw to unclench and stop juddering, “we need to turn him over now.”
Between the four of them they managed it, manoeuvring the limp collection of limbs that was usually her Father’s Game-Keeper as if he were made of brittle spun sugar. She did the same order of operations with the bullet wound on his back as she had with his front, and once both were covered by vented dressings Mrs Entwhistle and Sarah held Mr McAllister upright whilst Angelina and Mrs Daltry wrapped bandages around his torso. They manhandled him into a chair and Angelina crouched down in front of him, leaning in to press her ear to his chest. She closed her eyes, his skin was clammy, chilled, but not worryingly cold and she could hear both his lungs working, albeit his breathing was still raspy and uneven. She squeezed her nails into her palms again, then patted him gently on the cheek,
“Mr McAllister,” his eyelids fluttered weakly, “Mr McAllister I need you to stay awake.”
He blinked at her, “Angel?”
“Yes, hello,” she allowed herself to breathe again, then looked over her shoulder, “he needs something to drink, something a little salty like a broth, to replace the fluid he’s lost and can someone fetch the laudanum.” She laid a hand on Mrs Daltry’s arm to get her attention, then carried on quietly, “pack a bag for both me and Mr McAllister and have Banks bring my phaeton round, it’s evidently not safe for either he or I to stay here anymore.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’m. . . I’m not sure, I’ll suppose I’ll figure that out on the way.”