The last time Harper had to help someone through a fever, it was his mother. He was only eleven years old, and it started, he remembered, when one of his younger siblings had gotten a cough one chilly autumn morning.
It had quickly spread throughout the rest of his younger siblings, and then his mother caught it. Although the difference between his mother and his siblings, the day after she started coughing, she got a very hot fever and could barely sit up to get out of bed. She could also barely keep any food or water down as well.
It had scared him back then, none of them knew what to do, and they certainly couldn't afford a doctor. All he could do was look after her, try to help her eat and drink. A neighbor had given them some herbs and said to put them in some tea. It did a little to help, but not much.
His sister had even asked if they should go get the Priest from town. He had half been tempted to say yes.
Thankfully it hadn't gotten that dire.
After about a week his mother had recovered. It had taken a couple more weeks for her to get back to full strength, but eventually she did so.
Seeing Sharpe here now, suffering under the same thing, it sends a pain through Harper's chest.
Harper wasn't a doctor or surgeon or anything, so he couldn't be sure that what he could do would work, but between his experience nursing his mother back to health and Hagman's old remedies, he figured something would work out.
It would have to.
The second day into the fever, after they had carried Sharpe out of that claggy dungeon, Sharpe didn't look to be getting better. Harper had prayed all night that Sharpe would recover, or at least be on the road to healing, Harper had only found Sharpe to be, unbelievingly, even hotter to the touch.
The one priest they had around, the one who had been trying to convince Harper to marry Ramona, had given him a sachet of herbs, ones that looked remarkably similar to the ones he was given when he was eleven.
He brewed them into a cup of tea. Sharpe had always said that Harper had a skill with brewing tea. Hopefully he could wake Sharpe up enough to drink this one.
"Drink up, sir," Harper said as he tried to coax the man to take a sip of the tea. Sharpe himself was barely awake, barely even had his eyes open. He let out a moan as Harper raised his head and shoulders off the bed.
Harper didn't want to cause the man pain, but this was the only way he knew how to do this. And the man had to drink something. With the number of sheets and bedding having been soaked in sweat, Harper didn't know where any more sweat could be coming from.
And he knew that it would be a bad thing if Sharpe had stopped sweating while he was still hot to the touch like this.
He was able to get Sharpe to swallow down about half the cup. He would have liked it to be the entire cup, but this was better than an hour ago.
Harper was worried he would have to get a Priest again. He knew Sharpe wasn't Catholic, and certainly didn't believe in any religion, but old habits die hard sometimes.
Harper could only stand around waiting for so long, he had to do something. Something that could be productive, something that would require enough thinking to distract him from his slowly dying superior officer.
The sword provided an answer to both of those requirements.
Harper was not a blacksmith or swordsmith by any means. But he had spent a summer as an apprentice to his uncle who was one when he was thirteen. He figured he knew the basics, or at least he hoped he did.
It had to have been a sign of something that the same day Harper had finished the sword, was the day Harper was given the suggestion of putting Sharpe in the bath and to douse him in cold water.
He had been told there were certain risks with that option. It could shock his heart and cause it to fail. But Harper knew Sharpe was strong, and so was the man's heart.
If he could survive who knows how many battle wounds, he could survive this, even in his current state. And it didn't seem like leaving it to time was doing anything either way.
It did worry harper though. It worried him senselessly.
But the next morning, when the man woke up and got out of bed, looking damn near fully recovered, Harper knew he shouldn't have.
He had his Captain back, his fool of a Captain who was already asking to go back into battle.