Startled, Ren looks up. Ah Long has the uncanny ability to materialize in all corners of the house, which has made it difficult for Ren to search for the finger. He’s like a suspicious old cat, squinting in the sunlight.
“There are houseboys older than you who don’t do such a good job,” Ah Long says. “We had one a few months ago. Twenty-three years old and couldn’t iron a shirt. Wanted to wear a uniform and serve drinks at parties.”
Dr. MacFarlane seldom formally entertained. The old doctor had a reputation for collecting specimens, though, and it wasn’t uncommon to find a row of local hunters patiently awaiting his return, their prizes bulging out of sacks or snarling at the end of a rope.
“Is the master married?” Ren asks. He knows that many foreigners leave their wives and children behind in England or Scotland or wherever they come from. The tropical climate here is considered unhealthy for European children.
Ah Long sniffs. “No. Better if he was.”
“Why’s that?” Ren is eager to take advantage of Ah Long’s good mood. Normally it’s hard to get more than a few words out of him.
“Then he’d stop playing around. Aiya, as if we all didn’t realize what he’s been doing!”
Ren has a vague understanding that this touches upon adult matters. Things like marriage or not-marriage, and relationships between men and women that are too difficult to puzzle out. But if William has no interfering wife or family, it increases the chance that Ren can retrieve the finger. The fact that he hasn’t found it yet despite two days of quiet searching worries him.
* * *
They bring the injured woman in just before noon. Ren hears shouts, anxious wailing, and then Ah Long’s determined refusal.
“Tak boleh! Tuan tak ada di sini!”
Ren runs out. There’s a wheelbarrow propped on the drive and in it lies a young Sinhalese woman. There’s a deep gash in the back of her left calf. Dark splotches of blood soak her sari.
Ah Long is trying to persuade her relatives to take her to the hospital in Batu Gajah, for Tuan Acton is not at home, but they insist that it’s too far. Ren knows that the deeply superstitious Ah Long is afraid the woman will die in this house. He pushes his way forward.
“Bring her in!”
“Are you mad?” cries Ah Long.
Ignoring him, Ren tells the men to bring her up onto the veranda while he races into the study. The doctor keeps an emergency bag behind his desk as well as a drawer full of first-aid equipment.
“I need a basin of boiled water,” he says to Ah Long.
“What if she dies here?”
Ren ignores him as he washes his hands thoroughly with soap, forcing himself to count slowly to fifteen. Next, he examines the makeshift tourniquet, a narrow band of cloth twisted tightly around the leg. The woman has fainted, and he’s grateful for that. He washes the leg as best he can with the boiled water, then ties another tourniquet above the original. His head swims; there’s a sick feeling in his throat. In his mind’s eye, he sees Dr. MacFarlane’s square hands again, repeating the steps. A stick through the knot, functioning as a windlass to tighten it if necessary. Ren cuts off the original rough tourniquet.
“What are you doing? If you take that off she’ll bleed to death!”
“It’s too tight and too close to the wound. She’ll lose the leg.”
Ren grits his teeth, willing the new tourniquet to hold. Around him people are muttering, but no one else appears to take charge. Ren checks the pulse in her ankle. Still some slow bleeding. Twisting the knotted stick, he slowly increases the pressure until it stops.
The woman is beginning to stir again, moaning as they hold her down and he syringes the wound with hydrogen peroxide. It’s all he has on hand, but as the raw flesh bubbles and foams, he feels the onlookers turn away. The blood makes him dizzy. Breathe, he tells himself. If you don’t breathe you’ll faint.
At last it’s over. The dressing he puts on top soon becomes soaked, but it’s better than the glimpse of bone.
“You should take her to the hospital now,” he says over the relieved chatter. “She needs stitches.”
They put her into the wheelbarrow again, and he worries how she’ll endure the journey. If he had some morphine, he’d give her a quarter grain. He isn’t supposed to do that. The old doctor always warned him away, locking the medicine cabinet, but he’s