to his ankles, shins, calves … Her white hands stood out against his darker skin.
‘He is an out-of-doors man,’ a gravel-digger noted.
She palpated bone, ligament, muscle, her eyes all the while diverted from his nakedness, as though her fingertips saw better than her eyes. She worked swiftly, knowing rapidly that here, at least, all was well.
At the man’s right hip Rita’s fingers inched around the white handkerchief, and paused.
‘Light here, please.’
The patient was badly grazed all along one flank. Rita tilted liquor from the green bottle on to a cloth and applied it to the wound. The men around the table twisted their lips in little expressions of sympathy, but the patient himself did not stir.
The man’s hand lay alongside his hip. It was swollen to twice the size it ought to be, bloodied and discoloured. Rita applied the liquor here too, but certain marks did not come away, though she wiped once and again. Ink-dark blots, but not the darkness of bruising, and not dried blood. Interested, she raised the hand and peered closely at them.
‘He is a photographer,’ she said.
‘Blow me down! How do you know that?’
‘His fingers. See these marks? Silver nitrate stains. It’s what they use to develop the photographs.’
She took advantage of the surprise generated by this news to work around the white handkerchief. She pressed gently into his abdomen, found no evidence of internal injury, and worked up, up, the light following her, until the white handkerchief receded into the darkness and the men could be reassured that Rita was safely back in the realm of decorum again.
With his thick beard half gone, the man looked no less ghastly. The misshapen nose was all the more prominent, the gash that split the lip and ran up towards his cheek looked ten times worse for being visible. The eyes that usually endow a face with humanity were so swollen they were tight shut. On his forehead the skin had swollen into a bloodied lump; Rita drew splinters of what looked like dark wood from it, cleaned it, then turned her attention to the lip injury.
Margot handed her a needle and thread, both sterilized in the liquor. Rita put the point to the split and drove the needle into the skin, and as she did, the candlelight flickered.
‘Anyone who needs to, sit down now,’ she instructed. ‘One patient is enough.’
But nobody was willing to admit to the need to sit.
She made three neat stitches, drawing the thread through, and the men either looked away or watched, fascinated by the spectacle of a human face being mended as if it were a torn collar.
When it was done, there was audible relief.
Rita looked at her handiwork.
‘He do look a bit better now,’ one of the bargemen admitted. ‘Unless it’s just that we’re used to looking at him.’
‘Hmm,’ said Rita, as if she half agreed.
She reached to the middle of his face, gripped his nose between thumb and index finger and gave it a firm twist. There was a distinct sound of gristle and bone moving – a crunch that was also a squelch – and the candlelight quivered violently.
‘Catch him, quick!’ Rita exclaimed, and for the second time that night the farmhands took the weight of a fellow man collapsing in their arms as the gravel-digger’s knees gave way. In doing so, all three men’s candles fell to the floor, extinguishing themselves as they dropped – and the entire scene was snuffed out with them.
‘Well,’ said Margot, when the candles had been relit. ‘What a night. We had best put this poor man in the pilgrims’ room.’ In the days when Radcot Bridge was the only river crossing for miles, many travellers had broken their journey at the inn, and though it was rarely used these days there was a room at the end of the corridor that was still called the pilgrims’ room. Rita oversaw the removal of her patient and they laid him on the bed and put a blanket over him.
‘I should like to see the child before I go,’ she said.
‘You will want to say a prayer over the poor mite. Of course.’ In the minds of the locals, not only was Rita as good as a doctor, but given her time in the convent she could stand in for the parson at a push. ‘Here’s the key. Take a lantern.’
Back in her hat and coat and with a muffler wrapped around her face, Rita left the Swan and went to the outbuilding.