‘Believe in yourself, Sophy. You must believe in yourself. None of this, Toby and what’s happened, was your fault. It was his. You don’t know your own worth, you never have. You’re an amazing woman.’
She didn’t feel like an amazing woman. Someone like Emmeline Pankhurst or Florence Nightingale was an amazing woman. They had no doubts, no uncertainty about what they were doing, whereas she was racked with them. They had probably never woken in the middle of the night feeling they weren’t worth loving.
The sound of her name being called lifted her out of the maelstrom of her thoughts. There, on the other side of the road, waving with all his might, was Kane. It had been over six months since she had seen him and she didn’t think beyond that in the surprise of the moment. Her lips forming his name, she stepped out towards him, oblivious of the carriage and pair bearing down on her. She
saw him shout, turned to see the horses almost upon her, and then she was flying backwards out of the path of the hooves to land at the side of the kerb. The lunge Kane had made to push her out of harm’s way was not enough to carry him clear. As she raised her head she saw him bowled underneath the horses and then the carriage went over him, to the accompaniment of screams and shrieks from onlookers. As the carriage came to a halt a little way down the road, Sophy struggled on to her hands and knees. She was looking straight at the crumpled body lying ominously still, a rivulet of red running into the dust of the road. It had all happened in a moment of time.
‘I blame myself.’ Sadie repeated the words she had said umpteen times. ‘I should never have told him where to find you. He could have sat and waited for you to come back and this would never have happened.’
Sophy shut her eyes for an infinitesimal moment. The small hospital waiting room was painted a sickly green and smelled strongly of antiseptic, its immaculate walls and floor as clinically clean as only plenty of disinfectant and elbow grease – and a healthy fear of Matron – could achieve. She wanted to scream at Sadie that if she said the same thing one more time, she would go mad. Yet when she looked at Sadie’s quivering lips her innate kindness overcame her own guilt and fear, and, putting out her hand, she patted Sadie’s. ‘It’s not your fault. I was the one who stepped out into the road without thinking.’
They had been sitting huddled together for what seemed like an eternity but in reality was only a matter of hours. A young nurse had brought them cups of tea at regular intervals, which they had drunk without tasting, and twice a middle-aged Sister had put her head round the door and tried to persuade them to go home and rest. Kane had not regained consciousness before they had taken him down to theatre to attempt to save his crushed legs, and
there was talk of other serious injuries too. The surgeon had held out little hope when he had spoken to them earlier.
Sophy was always to look back on those hours and the ones that followed as the worst of her life. They eclipsed anything that had happened in her childhood, the revelations about her mother which had driven her from the north-east, the misery she’d endured in her marriage with its terrible conclusion when Toby had sold her to be violated, even the horror of Cat’s death at the hands of a madman. Those things she had been unable to prevent, they had been out of her control. But Kane . . .
When she had crawled over to him in the road and seen what the carriage had done to him she had begun to whimper his name over and over but he hadn’t heard her. He’d lain deathly still, bloodied and broken in the dirt. One of the women who had been on the march had come running over and, after explaining that she was a nurse, had torn pieces of cloth from her dress and applied tourniquets on Kane’s legs where the blood was pumping freely. The doctor had told her Kane wouldn’t have reached the hospital alive but for this lady’s action, but the woman had disappeared when the ambulance had arrived and Sophy had never thanked her.
Dazed, and her white dress stained red with Kane’s blood, she had travelled with him to the hospital, willing him to open his eyes so she could tell him she loved him. Why hadn’t she realised it before? she’d asked herself, only to have the answer in all its starkness: she had realised it, deep down in the depths of her. For months now she had known she loved him in a way she had never loved Toby, and because of that, Kane could hurt her more. If she had admitted to herself that she loved him, it would have given him a power over her that she found terrifying, and so she had substituted affection and fondness in all her deliberations, weak versions of the real thing.
Ralph had joined them at one point for an hour or so and, in an effort to comfort her, had added to her silent screams of protest and self-denigration when he’d told her he knew Kane had loved her for years. ‘He’s never said, mind,’ Ralph elaborated quickly as
though his knowing might cause offence, ‘but it tore him in two the day you got wed. He went out and got blind drunk – paralytic, he was, and that’s not like him. He’s a man of few words, is Mr Gregory, but he feels things more deeply than most and that’s a fact. He’s a fine gentleman—’ Ralph, great hulking Ralph, had broken down at this point and it had been she who had comforted him, all the time wishing she could cry too. But the agony inside was too acute for the relief of tears.
Giving Sadie’s hand a last pat, Sophy straightened in the uncomfortable hardbacked chair. ‘I think you should go home and get some sleep for a few hours,’ she said quietly. She had sent a messenger boy to the house to inform Sadie and Harriet what had happened, saying she didn’t know when she would be home; she hadn’t expected Sadie to drop everything and rush to her side, but maybe she should have.
‘No, I’m staying with you.’
‘What good is it going to do if you make yourself ill? I don’t want to have to worry about you as well as Kane. Please, Sadie, go home.’
It took a little more persuasion but eventually she saw Sadie off in a cab and returned to the waiting room. She saw several people looking at her askance and realised her bloodstained dress must appear disconcerting, but she wasn’t about to go home and change. However long it took, she had to stay until she knew he was going to be all right. He had to be all right. But his legs, if they amputated his legs, how would that affect him? But she wouldn’t think like that.
Please, God, please save his legs, but if he has to lose them to live, then please grant him life. I can’t bear it if he dies, God. I’ll do anything, anything, but don’t let him die.
She sat on, praying and beseeching and, when the desperate pain within got too much, pacing the waiting room for an hour or more, only sitting down when she felt too weak and faint to continue. She was frightened, so very frightened.
At midnight, the surgeon came. Sophy had been surprised when she had seen him before Kane had been taken to the theatre earlier in the day. He looked to be about thirty-five, maybe forty years
of age, which she thought young for such an important post. She wasn’t to know that any of the other surgeons whom Kane might have had wouldn’t have hesitated before amputating both legs, so severe were his injuries. But Edgar Grant was not only a brilliant young surgeon, he had the advantage of a formidably intelligent and empirical mind and was bang up to date with the most advanced thoughts and techniques. Kane’s injuries had presented him with the perfect opportunity to try out some experimental surgical procedures at which a lesser man would have baulked. Added to this, Grant was an avid disciple of Joseph Lister, a British surgeon who’d pioneered antiseptic techniques in surgery to prevent the infection of wounds following an operation, and who’d introduced carbolic acid to dress wounds and clean equipment. Through observing various patients, Grant insisted his serious cases be isolated in side rooms within a ward, and that any nurse or doctor attending to the wounds of such patients must wash their hands in a solution of diluted carbolic acid before touching their charge. Grant was not a popular man among his peers and subordinates, having a cold, analytical mind which suffered fools badly, but he was a respected one.
Sophy rose to her feet as the door opened. The surgeon looked tired and he wasn’t smiling. Again, she wasn’t to know that Edgar Grant almost never smiled. Her heart filled with dread, as she stared at him.
‘Please sit down, Mrs Shawe.’ Grant waved at the seat she’d just vacated and Sophy automatically sat. He pulled up a chair and sat down himself, stretching his neck out of the collar of his shirt as he did so. Sophy found she still couldn’t speak.
‘Mr Gregory is a fighter,’ he said quietly. ‘He has just survived a very long operation which in itself would have finished most men, but he is a very sick man.’
‘His – his legs?’
‘I have done the best I can but, should he survive this trauma which I have to tell you is by no means certain, whether he’ll walk again, I don’t know. Apart from the damage to his legs, he also has several broken ribs which I think are due to the horses’
hooves rather than the carriage. He also has some concussion which is not unusual in the circumstances.’
‘Can I see him?’
Grant shook his head. ‘Maybe tomorrow if he’ – he had been about to say ‘lasts the night’ but something in the extraordinary amber eyes holding his made him change it to – ‘is well enough. He’s asleep now and I don’t expect the effects of the anaesthetic to wear off for at least twenty-four hours.’
The relief which had flooded her at the surgeon’s first words had quickly abated as he’d gone on. He didn’t expect Kane to live. She could tell.
Grant stared at the lovely young woman in front of him. He knew who she was. One of the doctors who had been to see her in a play had said she was a fine actress, but he had no interest in anything besides his work. She was certainly beautiful, but she had the saddest eyes of anyone he had ever seen. He briefly wondered what had happened in her life to put such a depth of grief in such a relatively young woman. It had to be more than her concern for this fellow Gregory.
His thoughts caused him to say, in a voice that would have amazed the junior doctors on his team who were terrified of him to a man, ‘The will to live is a powerful force, Mrs Shawe, and one that we doctors cannot always understand. I have seen men and women who should have died make a good recovery, and others who should have lived simply fade away. Mr Gregory is fighting back. It’s a good sign.’
‘Thank you.’
His reward for the uncharacteristic thoughtfulness was her smile. As he found himself smiling back, he thought to himself that in Gregory’s position he would do battle to come back to the land of the living too.
After a few hours’ sleep and a wash and change of clothes, Sophy was back at the hospital at ten o’clock in the morning. She was allowed into Kane’s room with a nurse at her side at twelve o’clock for five minutes, after being warned that he was still unconscious.
His face was deathly white on the pillow and the huge contraption to keep the covers from his damaged legs was alarming. She sat down, taking his limp hand which was resting on the counterpane and told him, over and over again, how much she loved him, even though she knew he couldn’t hear her. She still hadn’t cried.
Taking her seat in the waiting room again, once the nurse had gently told her she had to leave Kane, she sat on. She knew Edgar Grant had relaxed the strict visiting hours in her case and she was grateful, but she didn’t want to leave the hospital again until she had to. He might wake up, and if he did, she wanted to be near.
She was allowed in Kane’s room for another five minutes before she went home that evening, and the same pattern was repeated the next day. Kane remained absolutely still, so still she had to lean forwards to check if he was still breathing.
It was a full forty-eight hours before Edgar Grant was sure Kane was winning the fight he’d talked about. Until then his patient had remained in that other world but his temperature had gone up and down with alarming suddenness and his blood pressure had been all over the place. A man who prided himself on remaining detached from his patients, Grant found himself taking a particular interest in this case. Not only because of the difficult and gruelling hours he’d spent putting Kane’s legs together again, but because of his patient’s heroic battle to live against all the odds, and the beautiful woman waiting for him.
Sophy was in her usual place in the waiting room when Grant walked in just before midday on the third day after Kane had been admitted to the hospital. She was alone, although over the last two days Sadie had joined her on occasion, along with Ralph who had proved a tower of strength. Ralph was so sure Kane would pull through it was difficult to think otherwise when he was present. It was when she was by herself that the demons came. If she had faced it once, she had faced a hundred times the thought of a life without Kane in it, and she knew if he died it would be the end of her. Oh, she might continue to exist, to function on a day-to-day basis and go through the motions of life, but she knew the core of her, the place from whence came all joy and happiness, would shrivel away.
Now everything had become so crystal clear, she wondered how she could have got it so wrong before. Kane had showed her in a million different ways over the years the sort of man he was. Who he was had been there, in front of her eyes, the whole time. And his last act, and she prayed with all her heart it wouldn’t be that in reality, of saving her at the cost of himself, wouldn’t even have entered Toby’s mind.
She was sitting in a shaft of sunlight from the small window in the waiting room when the surgeon walked in. She had been half-dozing, so tired her limbs felt like lead and her mind fuzzy, but even so she had kept up the steady begging and pleading and wild promises to God she’d engaged in since the accident. She had got to know the routine of the hospital a little during the last days, and she knew that this consultant – this
god
as the medical staff seemed to regard him – did the rounds of his patients every morning between eleven and twelve o’clock. She jumped up, with an alertness she would have thought herself incapable of a second before.