The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

scurried back and forth from the bar with glasses of beer and chunks of buttered bread and lumps of cheese. When the men had been fed and watered Sam would give them their dues. Tonight, he doubted there would be a single guinea of profit.

The last of the men—those who had been injured—staggered or, in the worst two cases, were dragged inside by their arms; their cries of agony made all the worse by the stillness of the bar.

‘God be damned,’ Ransley snarled, striding into the pub and drawing the attention of everyone. He snatched a pint from the landlord’s hand and thrust it with a violent jerk to his mouth, slopping the beer down his front, as he gulped and gulped until the glass was empty. He too was quiet for a moment, then shouted at Sam, ‘Where be that tarnal surgeon?’

‘He be sent for,’ Sam replied, unable to stop his gaze falling onto the worst of the injured men, John Brockman, biting down on a lump of wood, his thigh bone proudly protruding through his crimson galligaskins.

The door opened, and Sam smiled as Ann walked in breathlessly. She nodded at him briefly, then hurried to the wounded to put into practice that growing knowledge gained from working alongside Dr Papworth-Hougham on so many occasions. Sam observed her from behind as she crouched down, a lust rising inside him. He watched her with a yearning desire, wanting her more than ever. In the process of helping John Brockman, she turned, and the sight of her blood-soaked hands instantly curtailed his want.

The street door was pushed open with the gust of authority that preceded Doctor Papworth-Hougham. Wearing his customary blue coat and long black boots and carrying his red leather case, he bounded over to Ann, trusting her assessment of the priority of assistance for the injured men.

‘Amputation,’ Ann said, almost as an instruction.

Sam could see that she had already removed John’s trousers and placed a tourniquet around his upper thigh. The wound continued to bleed and give the man great distress.

The doctor pulled open the case and withdrew a shiny blade, causing John to resist the shackling grip of the two brawny tubmen who were holding him down. His eyes widened in terror and his head flicked ferociously from side to side as the doctor began to slice into his meaty thigh, which he pulled around the leg in a neat circle.

John issued a stifled scream, then passed out. At that same moment, a great geyser of blood spurted out into Ann’s face; she baulked but kept her position.

The doctor placed the bloodied knife to one side and Ann passed him a steel saw from his case. She parted the carved thigh flesh with two fingers, then he pushed the saw blade down into the gap until it met with the bone. Then, in a quick thrusting motion, he ran the saw back and forth until the leg detached and dropped to the floor. The whole procedure had taken no more than a minute, but to Sam, always morbidly fascinated by an amputation, it seemed to have taken much longer.

Sam turned from the macabre spectacle and moved over to talk to Ransley, who, in a quiet corner, seemed to have calmed somewhat. ‘There barely be enough money,’ he whispered. ‘Whatsay we be paying the men less?’

Ransley spoke through a glower. ‘Be paying what we owe,’ he said.

‘But what about money?’ Sam asked.

‘Happen the next few runs we be a-taking less men,’ Ransley suggested.

Sam nodded and obediently began to go around the room, offering the men their wages. Some stayed on and drank more, others left directly for the walk back home.

Within an hour, the injured men had been loaded onto carts and taken to their homes, their fate likely to be decided by dawn. Doctor Papworth-Hougham had taken a large brandy and then left on horseback for his home in Brookland.

‘G’night,’ Ransley mumbled, staggering out of the pub.

‘Night,’ Sam answered, taking a look at who was left. Only a pair of smugglers from the village—having drunk themselves to sleep—and Ann, slouched at the bar beside her third empty glass, remained.

Sam walked towards her, carefully stepping over the severed leg, ignored by everyone as though it might get up and walk out of its own will and placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘You be wanting another?’ he asked her.

Ann sat up and nodded. Her face was disgustingly comical. Her blue eyes, showing the effects of the drink, stared out from a face smeared almost entirely in John Brockman’s blood. It had matted her hair and stained her clothes, yet she seemed somehow oblivious to the gruesome fact.

‘Two pints of rum and water,’ Sam called across the bar. ‘And run a hot bath for this girl.’

The landlord nodded and disappeared momentarily out the back. Sam heard him talking, before he returned to the bar and served the two pints.

‘You be looking like the devil painted your face,’ Sam quipped.

‘Thank you, kind sir,’ Ann said with a drunken laugh. ‘It be meaning a great deal.’ She took a great mouthful of the rum and water and sighed with pleasure. ‘It be getting harder, don’t it?’ she said, a playful sparkle in her eyes.

‘What be?’

Ann raised one eyebrow and took a lingering swallow of the drink. ‘Smuggling,’ she finally answered.

Sam nodded. ‘I bain’t certain how much life there be in it.’ He heard himself saying the words that he had feared for some time but had not spoken. He worried for himself and for providing for his family. As he stared at Ann, though, he knew that part of his fear stemmed from the tacit question of what would happen to her. For a reason he could not explain to himself, he knew that she would not return to her previous life of criminal vagrancy.