“As I recall, you boasted about it for ten minutes straight.”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Francisco. It’s very unbecoming. Okay, back to business. Fifth—”
Chapter 39
Sharon almost stumbled when she came into the salon of the embassy which, by dint of feverish work throughout the night, had been turned into an impromptu operating room. Fortunately, she caught herself in time to turn the stumble into what she hoped would pass for a dignified pause.
“Jesus, Stoner,” she hissed, “you didn’t say anything about a mob.” She forced herself to scan the room slowly, instead of doing what she felt like doing, which would have resembled a small girl frantically looking everywhere at once, trying to find a bolt hole.
“It’s hardly a ‘mob,’ ” Tom Stone murmured. “Okay, yeah, it’s a lot of people. But—trust me on this one—they’re about as hoity-toity as it comes. No rabble here.”
He glanced into one corner of the huge salon, where, atop one of the many heavy tables that had been positioned around three sides of the room to serve as an jury-rigged observers’ gallery, Lieutenant Ursinus and two men from the Arsenal were standing. “Well, leaving Conrad and his people aside—but I think both of those guys are guildmasters anyway.”
Stoner scanned the room also. The gaze, in his case, was genuinely serene—perhaps even smug—rather than Sharon’s desperate attempt to fake it. “You’ve got just about every doctor in Venice worth calling by the name in this room. They’re all good ones, too, I know them. They even scrupulously followed my instructions about being freshly bathed and wearing clean clothes, so far as I can tell. The rest of the people—the ones I made stand in the back because I’m not sure about how closely they followed my sanitation instructions—are political bigshots of one kind or another. According to Taggart, they include one of the doge’s aides and at least four senators. He thinks one of them might be on the Council of Ten. Hard to know, of course. There’s even a cardinal of the Church—Bedmar, the Spanish guy. I sent somebody to invite him, too, seeing as how it’s his main man going under the knife. I didn’t think he’d show up, actually.”
Sharon’s eyes went to the great bank of windows along one wall. The windows faced almost directly to the east, which was the reason she’d picked this salon for her operating room. She had agonized over that decision. Given the nature of Ruy’s wound, she’d wanted to operate as soon as possible. Waiting twelve hours was a terrible risk—an unconscionable one, had she still been in the world she’d come from. But that world had electric lighting and this one didn’t. Sharon had finally decided that the risk of trying abdominal surgery by lamplight was worse than the risk of waiting till sunrise—and would have been, even if she were an experienced surgeon instead of a nurse trying to pass herself off as one.
“It’s not even six o’clock in the morning,” she protested.
Stoner smiled. “Yeah, but the light’s pretty terrific, you gotta admit. The sun’s been up for almost an hour, shining right in now, and—” He bestowed a lingering and very approving look upon the eclectic collection of lighting aids that surrounded the operating table. “Billy did one hell of a job. And he was right about those tailor’s globes. Filled with water, they make a lot of difference. Especially with the mirrors.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Sharon hissed again. “How the hell did you get all these people here this early? Especially when you just got back yesterday yourself?”
By way of an answer, Stoner simply gave her an ironic little cock of the eyebrow. Sharon understood it, of course. She’d known the answer before she even finished the question. A world which, outside of Grantville and parts of Magdeburg, still had only oil lamps and candles to illuminate the night was a world where early to bed, early to rise was taken for granted. Even for political bigshots.
“I’m nervous enough already, damn you, Tom. The last thing I need is to try to pull this stunt off in front of a crowd.”