Will Starling by Ian Weir Page B

minutes, that’s all. Two minutes out of a lifetime.”
    So it was. He sliced through to the bone, clean as carving the Sunday joint, and barked for the largest bonesaw. Two minutes later was calling for needle and thread. And Your Wery Umble, who had spewed all the way from Southampton, held his stomach down quite remarkable, handing over each instrument as it was barked for, and watching with fascination and something very close to awe. Truth told, I was a bit appalled with myself. You’d like to think you’d be more distressed by the suffering. But I was mainly exhilarated instead — by Mr Comrie’s dreadful skill, and the notion that I had acquitted myself admirably. Afterwards, I groped for some words of reassurance to offer to poor Sidewhiskers, who groaned horribly as they carried him off.
    â€œWell done,” was the best I could come up with. “You’ll see — right as rain. Back on your feet before you know it.” I winced. “That is, back on your foot . . .”
    Mr Comrie was wiping blood from his hands with a rag. It had soaked his shirt as well, though he didn’t seem to notice. I cleared my throat, and waited for him to offer some gruff compliment.
    â€œYou can clean the instruments,” he muttered. Forgetting, apparently, that I was not his servant.
    â€œAnd what if he dies anyway?” I asked after a moment. “Holding him down like that, while he’s screaming for you to stop.”
    â€œThen I’ll have given him a chance. That’s all a man can ask for, up against Old Bones.”
    Old Bones?
    â€œThe rattling fellow. With the scythe. When they’re clean, you wrap them in cloth,” he added, “before putting them back in the box.”
    I hesitated, and couldn’t resist asking the question: “So what are these worth?”
    A wintry look. “The skin right off your back.”
    â€œRight you are,” I said, and commenced wiping the blood from the tools.
    Mr Comrie continued to eye me. “I saw you on the ship,” he said. “Running away from home? Or just haven’t got one?”
    â€œI expect that would be my business.”
    I said it with a careless shrug, the sort that marks out a London lad, tough as nails — and not at all the other sort of lad. The sort who’d find himself sobbing on the road to Southampton, with a sense that the world was much too large, with no one in it who’d care if he expired in the nearest ditch.
    â€œI’m here for a sodger,” I said to him.
    He honked one abrupt syllable. Apparently this was a laugh. “Sodger, eh? You’d do better to tag after me.”
    â€œNot likely,” I snorted, deciding to take against him strongly.
    â€œHow old are you?”
    â€œEighteen.”
    â€œAnd I’m the King of Portugal.”
    â€œSixteen, then.”
    â€œFourteen. At the outside.”
    He reached for his jacket, which he’d draped over a chair. Two wide-eyed Spanish pot-boys had arrived with sawdust, to sop up the blood on the floor. They were going to need more sawdust.
    â€œI was fourteen when my father died,” he said then, unexpectedly. “My mother died years airlier.”
    He said it like that: airlier . I shrugged.
    â€œBring the leg,” he said.
    â€œThe what?”
    He pointed. Sidewhiskers’s severed trotter was lying on a bench nearby, attracting flies.
    â€œWe bury those.”
    â€œI don’t take orders from you.”
    But it seems I did — and it turns out a leg is heavier than you might expect. I picked it up and followed him out the door.
    And I followed Alec Comrie for the next five years, through the field hospitals of the Peninsula. Just a dogsbody at first, but by and by I was helping during procedures, even learning to tie off the arteries after an amputation, since it turned out I have a knack for this sort of thing — keen eyes and nimble fingers. Then I followed