Jed hadn't noticed it was any hotter than any other day that week. He'd grown up with springs that were short and a long sweltering summer stretched from early May until October's end some years; the shore was always cooler but on the plantation, the air would swaddle him in its speckled wool. The sun was strong just after dawn and by noon, pressed down on his eyes with its brightness until all he could see was white. He wasn't much bothered by it nor was his sister Clara; they still ran and played, rode horses, ate heartily of whatever was put before them. Ezra couldn't manage it as well and either retreated to a shadowy corner of the house or made his way to the water's edge, though he never brought back anything, not even a shell or an unusual stone. The string of days this July in Alexandria was a little worse than what Jed had experienced at his childhood home but not much harder to tolerate than Baltimore's brick oven; he still drank his coffee hot at every meal and wore his full uniform to the Sunday church service without any particular distress.
He'd operated in his shirtsleeves, as they all did; it would not have done in Baltimore or New York and the physicians in Paris would have rightly jeered at their American compatriots' louche ways, but it was practical when every laundress was busy boiling bandages free of blood or wringing the lye soap from the soldiers' uniforms and blankets to try and regain dominance over the fleas and lice the men carried with them. It was a Sisyphean task but Matron and Mary did not relent and he and Summers and Hale, now McBurney too, all realized they had a better chance of staying clean and free of vermin themselves if they left off the uniform's jacket or the civilian's plain, dark coat and drab vest beneath their aprons. Mary and Nurse Hastings had grown accustomed to the level of informality that would have been otherwise shocking among gentlemen and the parade of prostitutes at Mary's weekly clinic showed their admiration with much fluttering of lashes and tossing of curls dampened with sweat and oily perfume.
Hale had been in the yellow room with them for the first surgery, working on a private with a fractured leg so mangled all were relieved when the limb was off. Even the young man had looked down at it and said, "Get that off me, I don't want it!" The past three hours, Jed had been alone with Mary and a corporal from western New York; the bright sun of the eastern-facing windows had been a great help to the delicate work Jed had undertaken with the man's thyroid still spread like a monarch butterfly across his throat, the capsule unbroken, the parathyroids snugly tucked away. The orderlies had just taken the man back to the general ward a few minutes ago and Jed had stretched from the crouch required to attend to the man's neck, enjoying the pull of his own muscles against long bones. Mary was at his side, sorting the instruments into basins, her long, full skirt the largest darkness in the room.
If he were doing the work, surely there would be a great clattering as he let each of the tools smack and bang against the other, but Mary was careful. There was only the sound of the scalpel touching the tenaculum lightly and sometimes there was no sound at all as she laid one instrument in its shallow tray, aligned with its neighbor. He didn't notice a difference at first as it was her way to be thoughtful about her work, neatly efficient and easy around others; sometimes he could not believe she was the same woman who had thrown herself upon him when she arrived, had shouted "Coward!" at the soldier who had threatened him with a gun, who had challenged him so smartly and firmly in a darkening hallway. He wasn't sure he liked the change but it was not something he had any say over, was not even something he could ask her about.
He had started to think that she seemed to be working slowly, a little more clumsily than usual, when she dropped a retractor into an enameled dish. The clang of the metal against the bowl's curved side was loud in the hot, still room and he almost missed her voice, low, a little slurred, unexpectedly direct.
"Jedediah, I don't, I feel…odd," she said and he was glad he had turned to her instinctively, because she fainted then and he was able to catch her with an arm around her waist, one on her upper arm. He held her close so she couldn't twist and fall in a huddle on the dusty floor.
He cried out her name, "Mary!" but she was silent except for her shallow breath. He felt the collapse, the sudden withdrawal of her animating spirit; he held her and it was not provocative or romantic as the feigned swooning of the young Maryland ladies he'd once known, Eliza's elegantly balletic lowering to a conveniently placed silk chaise. In Paris, every woman could faint like an odalisque and it seemed jasmine and myrrh scented the air they drifted through. They'd all suspended their disbelief, he and the other gentlemen, the gentlewomen deploying this manuever with ulterior motives never very concealed, usually generally approved. And if a hand glanced, grasped, if a hip slid against another before it met a settee, none complained, not even a chaperone in the corner.
There was nothing remotely erotic about holding Mary in his arms thus, seeing the way her throat curved up under her jaw, her parted lips—all he felt was the sickening surge of fear, like bile iced in his own chest. He'd never liked the expression "a dead faint" but now it was terrifying, to feel Mary loose and absent, not opening her dark eyes and blushing with dismay but still, white, her chestnut hair black with sweat. At least there was that, she was not only burning, her skin taut and dry, so stricken with the heat that she could not even perspire anymore. He smelled the acrid musk of her mixed with the rosewater she preferred, and it was reassurance that she would recover, like the pulse of her carotid in relief against her sternocleidomastoid, the muscle defined by the pull of her head drooping against his chest. He tried again to wake her, to call her back with his voice as his touch had not.
"Mary, come now, open your eyes, Mary! You must try, Mary, please," he urged but she only lay within his arms in a state completely unlike sleep with its lively dreams or pleasant, refreshing repose; she was like an expensive doll Clara had had, its limbs skillfully articulated but lifeless without her playful hand to guide her.
Jed gently picked Mary up to carry her to the empty operating table furthest from the window; he pretended to himself it was cooler away from the midday glare and she must lie down. He felt her slender form against his, heavier in her faint, lighter than he might have guessed, and it was nothing like what he had imagined at night, alone in his bed. He wondered a little at how frightened he felt, the insistent push to call, scream for help, for Hastings or McBurney, to drag even Hale into the room in some effort to revive her when he had certainly treated hundreds of men more grievously wounded; arteries had disgorged a man's life into his hands within minutes and he had not been as distressed. It was a little like when he operated on his brother, but then the morphine had blunted the fear, let him notice the beads of sweat on the bridge of his nose or the frustration at how the letters in the book refused to resolve themselves into words. Now he was entirely alert and aware. He had never before had to watch a woman he loved, loved desperately he admitted, lie before him ill and motionless. Eliza had never been this unwell before him and he had never loved her so well as Mary, to whom he could say hardly anything he truly meant.
Jed unbuttoned her limp lace collar, thankful there was no ribbon or brooch to pocket and rediscover. He thought he might need to loosen her stays, an inexcusable, tempting intimacy, if she did not awaken in a moment. Or he must call for Hastings to get a cold bath ready, as cold a bath as they could manage, and carry her there through the public halls. He could not be present for any more and retain decorum but how hard it would be to walk away! He must wait for Hastings to report, to parse out the truth of Mary's condition from Anne's scatter of smirks and sarcasm, to know how ill Mary must be if Anne refrained. There was a spare basin and pitcher of water within reach and he dampened his handkerchief, then stroked her cheeks, her forehead with the wet cloth. He began talking, again, more seriously, more emphatically.
"Mary, you must wake up now, open your eyes for me," he began and he thought she began to stir. "That's right, open your eyes, beautiful. Come now, wake up for me, let me see your eyes. Let me see you, Mary."
She blinked then, not the way a sleepy woman wakes in the morning or even from a stolen afternoon nap, but with the struggle of a sick person, to throw off the fever, the pain weighing them down. Her eyes were hazy, confused; he hastened to reassure her before she could feel afraid or embarrassed.
"You fainted, Mary. I think with the heat, you mustn't be used to it, you have been working too hard, I think, not sleeping enough."
"It's too hot, I can't catch my breath… why is it so hot?" she asked fretfully. She sounded so much younger and he had to make an effort to keep from brushing back her hair the way he might with a child.
"It's only a Southern summer, Mary. It must be very different from what you're accustomed to in New Hampshire," Jed replied.
"I hate it, it's so hot at night, the windows are painted shut in my room," she said.
The faint had made her forget herself; she was speaking to him without pretense, without formality or any discreet caution. What else might she say now? He thought of her room at the end of the hall, the one Matron had rid of boxes and broken furniture to give Mary the least bit of privacy. It had a southwest exposure, it must be an oven at night and without even the evening air to give any respite—he thought she could hardly have slept this week in the little hell that was hers alone. He should have thought, should have considered what might be making her look so pale and drawn, what made her tread so linger upon the stair, reluctance battling exhaustion. He'd found her in the front hall at dawn two days earlier but hadn't imagined that she had spent the night on the hard bench as she must have done.
"I'll see to it, I'll make sure we get the windows open for you. You need to be able to rest, it's far cooler at night. The room will stay more comfortable if you close the curtains against the sun during the day," he said.
"There aren't any curtains to draw," Mary said as if it were entirely expected that she sleep in the poorest accommodations Mansion House had to offer. Given that he knew Summers had only let her sleep on the floor of the wards the first few weeks, why would she think otherwise? Jed felt a sharp pain then, to think of what she accepted and how much she must miss the cool, green summer of New England, the lighter heat a thunderstorm might drive away, the depth of shadows beneath even the elms of the big cities—and how little he, who thought he cared so much for her, had considered her truly.
"Oh! It's still so hot, how can you bear it?" she cried. One hand gestured, almost independent of her will it seemed, pushed at the loosening hair in her chignon, the tight cuffs of her bodice. Jed might have smiled except she still looked weak and ill and he and Mansion House could offer hardly any of the accommodations to the weather and season that his wife or mother, even his uncomplaining sister, would have assumed their due.
"Let's get something cool for you to drink and I'll talk with Matron about your room. We cannot have the Head Nurse treated so. You need to rest now, somewhere dim," he said soothingly, an attempt at soothing in any case, his voice lowered, cajoling.
She was speaking a little more quickly now and there was a limit to how he could help her in this room. He held out a hand to assist her rising from the bare table he'd laid her down on, a far cry from the silk velvet chaise, the downy bed with crisp linen that Eliza would have demanded. Mary made an obvious effort to sit upright and he stepped closer as she slid down off the table and swayed where she stood. He reached out to steady her, not noticing that his hands went to her slender waist, drew her to him.
"Mary, we really must settle you somewhere cooler, we can't risk," he began and she interrupted him, her voice bare of any artifice, inconsiderate of the future, any moment but now, the purest desire of her heart.
"I want to go home."
He thought he could see it in her abstracted gaze, the silver rush of a New England brook in its banks or the brisk salt breeze over the bay, leaf's lush shadow, the familiar petrichor of a cloudy early evening.
"I know, Mary, I know, let's just…"
"Won't you, won't you take me home, Jedediah? Please?" she asked, startling him with the shift in the image it evoked: her arm held in his, her face upturned, content in the soft Northern sunlight, the scent of late lilacs blooming as he kissed her sweet mouth. Now, they must both be dizzy- the alteration her fainting created was persistent, enveloping them, letting them say such things…
"Oh, Mary, if I could," he tried. He saw Nurse Mary come back into her face, her posture, even as she trembled a little.
"I'm sorry, I've said… I've been wrong, I've said what I shouldn't, my duty is here," Mary said and began to draw back from him. He wanted to hold her closer but he would not, not when she didn't want him, when he couldn't give her any reason to find comfort with him alone. He couldn't resist speaking.
"Not wrong, Mary, it's not, you're not wrong to want to go home."
"Home with you," she said, then stopped. He saw in her dark eyes she knew what she'd revealed and that it was true.
He could feel every edge of himself touched by air like voile now, not smothering wool, the scent of her woman's body beneath her sturdy calico dress intoxicating; the few words made real for a moment his most ardent wish—Mary in a fine parlor, at the dinner table, Mary welcoming him to their bed while the summer air ruffled the muslin curtains in a Boston midnight. How he would steady her trembling with his hands, his mouth, his arms around her, how well he would care for her… He could do none of that, not now. He couldn't see how it ever could be so he must give her something else—recognition with propriety, her honor and his, if not his love.
"'Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself.' To long for your home, it isn't so untoward and the rest… you've been unwell, we'll pay it no mind."
"But it was the truth," she said, finality in the words and the motion she made separating herself from him; the only heat left was Alexandria's July.
Mary let him walk beside her as they left the room, until he settled her in the darkest corner of the former library with the promise to wait for an orderly with a tray. He could not help the hand he laid upon her cheek, his touch no pretense at a physician's exam, only a lover's, and he could not help saying,
"'Mercy and truth are met together,' Mary. Rest now or I'll be forced to send Dr. Summers round to bore you to sleep." The library was cooler, the air mild, but his hand was cold when he took it back from her face; he could bear the heat, but not the gentle warmth of her gaze without any shadow in it.