Will Starling Read Online Free PDF Page B

particular story with a grain of salt, since I was the one who’d made it up. Still, Mr Comrie’s prowess had been the stuff of legend — after the Battle of Salamanca he had performed nearly two hundred amputations in twenty-four hours. That is the truth; I speak upon my davy. One hundred and eighty seven it was, to be exact, and I know this cos I counted. He could have your leg off in two minutes flat, and your arm in half that time, speed being the only mercy with no way to dull the pain. Orderlies would stack the limbs on either side: trotters on one pile, flappers on another. When Mr Comrie needed both hands free he’d clamp the knife bechuxt his teeth.
    I recollect a young Lieutenant on the morning after Badajoz, propped against the wall of a barn that was serving as a field hospital, staring in bleak bemusement at his right leg. It started out well enough, the trotter, before veering off at an extravagant angle. The break was above the knee, which would mean a disarticulation at the hip; Mr Comrie told him so, blunt as a slaughterman knocking mutton on the head.
    â€œWill I die?” asked the young Lieutenant.
    â€œUnless I operate directly.”
    There was no other way, with a break as bad as this one. With any break at all, really. You had to take the limb.
    â€œI am at the Gate,” said the Lieutenant. It seemed he had a poetic cast. “I lie at the Black Gate of Death itself.”
    â€œBut I am on my way,” said Mr Comrie.
    He had gone to university in Edinburgh, although he had been brought up somewhere farther north — I’ve a notion it was Dunfermline, not that I could tell you much about it, having never been north of Lichfield myself. In moments of urgency he grew especially Scotch.
    â€œOilskin,” he said to the Orderlies.
    We were outside, and a foul grey rain was pissing down. In such conditions they’d hold an oilskin over the surgeon’s head, and rain would drum paradiddles as he cut.
    â€œKnife,” he said to Your Wery Umble.
    The young Lieutenant had begun to weep.
    â€œHere I come,” said Mr Comrie. “I come wi’ steel and shrieking. But I’ll bring you back.”
    He did it, too. Five minutes to take the leg, cos a disarticulation was always more difficult. The Lieutenant swooned halfway through, but woke up afterwards. Two weeks later he was sitting up on a bed of straw, losing money to Wm Starling. Last I heard he was back in London, reciting ballads on street-corners.
    That is the truth. So — in case you wondered — is what I said about the size of Wellington’s tackle. But as it doesn’t concern the story I’m telling you now, you’re free to forget I mentioned it.
    After Waterloo, Mr Comrie resolved to build a civilian practice in London. “A matter of time,” he was saying, on this particular day in April of 1816. “That’s all it is.”
    He wasn’t normally a man for the syllables. But he had a way of repeating things to himself, as if saying them doggedly enough would make them come about.
    â€œPatients will come.”
    â€œâ€™Course they will,” I agreed, gamely.
    â€œJust a question of time.”
    â€œIt is.”
    â€œAnd they’ll be walking up those stairs.”
    He was in his surgery, with Your Wery Umble on the landing, looking in. The surgery was Spartan, and clean — he was a stickler for cleanliness, believing that patients did better in such conditions. It was just a notion of his, unsupported by Science, but when Mr Comrie took a conviction it set like mortar. There were two wooden chairs and a wooden examining bench, with a box of sawdust kept underneath to soak up blood, which might otherwise seep through the floorboards and drip onto the head of Missus Maggs in the gin-shop below. Against one wall was a table with surgical instruments, laid out on a green baize cloth. Your Wery Umble would clean these at the end of every