“My God. I’ve kept him here. And he’s wounded. Edward. Edward. Is he dead?”
“Help me, captain,” said Perrin’s voice. “You’ve kept him on the rack, Olivia.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Lay him on my bed. That’ll be quieter. I must nurse him. Let me have some bark and limes, Captain Cammock. Lay him down there. Now some cold water.”
He was half conscious of being lifted out of the light, while a multitude of Spaniards charged him. He saw the faces, he saw the horses’ heads flung back, and the foam spatting their bit-cups. He was slashing at spear-heads, which pressed in a crown of points about his skull. After that, he fell into the wildness of fever, seeing that endless vision in his brain, the endless, disordered procession of soldiers, and guns, and ships, which shouted crabbed poetry, poetry of Donne, difficult to scan, exasperating:—
“Men of France,”
the procession shouted,
“changeable chameleons,
Spitals of diseases, shops of fashions.”
So he lay, for many hours, feverish and sick, rambling and incoherent.
He was ill for some days, during which Olivia nursed him tenderly. She found in the vigil a balm for her own sorrow, a respite from the anxieties which ate her heart. The uncertainty made it worse for her. She would fall asleep, sitting uneasily in the chair by the bed, to dream of her husband lying in the earth, among the roots of the creepers, the mould in his eyes. Or she would see him chained to a log, working in the gang, carrying mud bricks to the walls, or singing, like the man in Cammock’s tale, with whip-cuts on his body. Sometimes, in the worst dreams, she saw him with the veiled figure of a woman, and woke crying to him to come back to her, knowing herself deserted. She had at first prayed that the men would attack Tolu at once, to bring him back to her. The point had been debated among the captains. But Perrin, at his best now, with his quiet, clumsy sympathy, had shown her that this was not possible.
“And see, Olivia,” he said, “they must expect us. And we must run no risk of failure. You see, don’t you, what a danger it would be to him if we tried and failed? And the town will be full of troops for the next week or two, expecting an attack.”