Sister Merrow’s washroom had been transformed into an emergency dressing station. The copper laundry tubs were bubbling with boiling well water. It filled the room with hot, healing steam that smelled of crushed elderberries, vinegar, and boiled linen. Six wooden cots had been dragged from the neighboring cottages and set along the whitewashed wall, occupied by elderly residents whose cellars were already knee-deep in yellow slow leak.
Eren and Miller Tom carried Orson through the door. Then, Merrow took charge without a word of panic. She cut away the last shreds of the boy’s soaked clothes, washed the river mud from his crushed thigh with warm vinegar water. Then she inspected the bone with her broad, skilled hands.
‘The bone is bruised and cracked along the shaft,’ Merrow declared, her voice firm and grounding. ‘But it hasn’t broken the skin. He will walk again by midsummer if we keep the inflammation down and keep him out of the damp. Tavi, bring the cedar splints and the animal fat-boiled linen bandages!’
Pella knelt beside Bram, wrapping the shivering fourteen-year-old in three dry woolen blankets and feeding him hot tea sweetened with beet syrup. The boy’s skin was gradually warming, the blue tint leaving his lips. Even so, his small frame still shook with the lingering shock of the dark pit.
