Carey coughed, looked at the ground. Somehow he felt the boy should know, that imagination would be worse than the facts.
‘The first cry is when the surgeon begins to cut. Then you can’t get your breath for a bit, but just as he finishes you can get out another yell, and then the final one is when they put pitch on the end.’
‘Oh,’ said the boy, inspecting him for missing limbs. ‘Ye’ve watched before then?’
‘Yes,’ said Carey.
‘Who was it? Did he live?’
‘Oh yes. He’s got a hook instead of a hand now.’
‘Will it no’ grow back?’ asked the smallest boy anxiously. ‘Will it no’ get better again?’
‘Ye’re soft,’ sneered the middle boy. ‘It’s no’ like a cut.’
‘It will get better, but it won’t grow again,’ Carey explained. The little girl had taken one finger out of her ear and was blinking at him with the tears still wet on her cheeks. ‘He should be well enough by harvest time, there’s no need to cry.’
‘If he doesnae die of the rot,’ said Cuddy brutally.
The girl nodded. ‘Ay, that’s what me mam said.’
‘Anyway,’ Cuddy added, ‘she’s only crying because mam wouldna let her watch.’
‘Me mam said it’s your fault, if ye’re the Deputy,’ accused the middle boy.
‘Call him sir,’ snarled Dodd.
‘Is it yer fault, sir?’
Carey took a deep breath and began to stride to the house.
‘Nay, ye soft bairns,’ Dodd said. ‘It were the Elliots, that’s who we were fighting.’
Cuddy nodded fiercely. ‘When I’m big enough I’ll find the man that did it and cut his hand off.’
‘That’s the spirit lad,’ said Dodd approvingly.
***
Long George’s farmhouse was one of those built quickly after a raid, out of wattle and daub, with turves for a roof and pounded dirt bound with oxblood and eggwhite for a floor. George was lying in a corner on a straw pallet covered over with bracken, gasping for breath and moaning. One man who looked like his brother and another older one who seemed to be his father, were standing next to him talking in low voices, while Long George’s wife tended the fire on the hearth in the middle of the floor to keep the broth boiling. Smoke shimmered upwards into the hooded hole in the roof. She stood up and wiped her hands on her apron and blinked at Carey as he stood hesitating in the doorway, his morion making a monster out of him.
The father stepped forward protectively, while Long George’s brother moved unobtrusively for an axe hanging on the wall.
‘Who’re ye?’
‘I’m the Deputy Warden.’
There was a sequence of grunts from the men and a sniff from the wife. Carey saw that the barber-surgeon was squatting beside his patient, tending the stump. Finally he wrapped the remains of George’s hand in a bloody cloth and rinsed his arms in water from one of the three buckets. George’s tightly bandaged stump was partly hidden by a cage of withies that the surgeon had bound around it. It lay stiffly inert beside George, not seeming to be part of him.
‘Did ye kill the man that did it?’ demanded George’s father with his eyes narrowed. ‘What family was he, sir?’
‘I killed one Elliot myself, I don’t know who killed the other.’
‘Did ye not hang the rest?’
‘They escaped.’
George’s brother spat eloquently into the bucket of blood by the bed. The surgeon stood up, nodded to Carey, handed the gory package to George’s wife.
‘Bury that with a live rat tied to it to draw out any morbidus,’ he prescribed reassuringly. ‘Give him as much to drink of small beer as he’ll take but no food till tomorrow and I’ll come the day after to see to him. My fee...’
Carey caught the man’s eye and shook his head. The man looked puzzled, then caught on, and nodded happily, no doubt tripling his fee on the instant. He began wiping, oiling and packing his tools away in his leather satchel, whistling between his teeth.
Long George’s family stared at him and Carey went over to the bed, squatted down beside it. Carey had visited wounded men of his before; he knew there was not much he could say that would make anything better, but he was very curious about the cause of Long George’s maiming.
‘Long George,’ he said softly. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Ay, Courtier.’ The voice was down to a croak and Long George’s face had the grey inward-turned look of someone in too much pain to think of anything else. He was panting softly like an overheated hound. It was a pity he had been too tough to faint while the surgeon did his work.
‘I’m sorry to see you like this, Long George,’ Carey said inadequately.
‘Ay.’ Long George tried to lick his grey lips. ‘What about ma place?’
For a moment, Carey was nonplussed.
‘Ah canna fight now, see ye.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t worry about it. I’ll look into a pension for you.’
