Satisfied, Sharon looked at the other Venetian doctor. “And this is Dottor d’Amati,” Stoner completed the introductions. “He has agreed to serve as the gofer.”
D’Amati’s chest swelled and he beamed at her. It was all Sharon could do not to burst into laughter. She should have known! Leave it to Tom Stone to call a gofer a gofer. There were times Sharon really liked that old hippie. She had no doubt at all that by the time Stoner finished with his lectures in Venice and Padua, Italian medical practitioners would have gofer firmly planted in their prestigious lexicon. He’d probably even manage, somehow, to get them clawing for the honor of being called a nurse. Which, as far as Sharon was concerned—she really looked at the world from a nurse’s perspective, not a doctor’s—would be just dandy.
She felt good. Really good. She’d been almost petrified in the hours leading up to this, knowing that for the first time in her life she’d have to be the one in charge of a critical operation. Now . . .
Flesh and blood. She could almost feel James Nichols’ big, capable hands settling over her shoulders, as if from half a continent away his spirit was calming her and guiding her.
The sensation was powerful enough that by the time Sharon finished sterilizing with alcohol the area where she’d be operating—she’d have preferred iodine but they hadn’t been able to turn up enough in the short time they’d had—she decided she would explain what she was doing while she worked. She’d seen her father do that, before students. He’d told her afterward that he found it a steadying influence on himself.
“I’m going to begin with what we call an exploratory laparotomy.” She gave Dottors Fermelli and d’Amati a smile, hoping they could detect it under her own mask. “That’s just a fancy phrase that means I’m going to cut the patient open and go exploring to see what’s happening in there.”
They seemed to be smiling back. Judging from his eyes, Fermelli’s smile was even cheerful.
Splendid. She made sure of her grip on the scalpel. “The initial incision needs to be made in one firm stroke. It must be firm enough to cut through the skin and part of the initial subcutaneous layer. That’s just another fancy word for ‘fat.’ Judging from appearance, I don’t think we’ll find a very thick layer of that with this patient. For a man of his age, he appears—make that any age, actually—to have a very low percentage of body fat.”
She slid the scalpel in. “I’ll open him from an inch or so below the breast bone to about four inches above the pubic bone. Like—”
It was a good cut. Really good.
“So.”
* * *
Cardinal Bedmar was not the only spectator who looked away, at that point. But he suspected he was the only one who did so for spiritual reasons.
Like—
So.
The cardinal from Spain understood many things now which had been murky to him before.
Some, which had been murky for a short time, he understood very well. Ruy Sanchez’s obsession with the woman had become a mystery to Bedmar, as the weeks had gone by since the doge’s levee. The cardinal had assumed, at first, that the Catalan’s fascination was nothing more complicated than a taste for exotic flesh.
And indeed, so it might have been, at the beginning. In the costumes they favored for their wealthy women, as in so many things, the Venetians enjoyed thumbing their noses at the Spain that controlled half of Italy. Where the Spanish style that still dominated much of the continent encased the female form in rigid, stiff—above all, high-necked—apparel, the Venetians preferred to see their women. Decadent and lascivious, in this as in all things.
And, see them they did. The first time Bedmar had ever attended a Venetian levee, as a man in his mid-thirties born and raised in Spain, he had thought himself somewhere at sea—with surging half-bare breasts making up the waves. He’d been quite shocked at the time, though he’d diplomatically kept it from showing.
He had not been shocked, of course, when he saw the Nichols woman so attired at the levee in February. By then, the man of thirty-five was a man of sixty-two, the marquis had become a cardinal, and Bedmar was as well traveled, cosmopolitan and sophisticated as any man in Europe. Yet even he had been arrested, for a moment, by the sight of such a magnificent and well-displayed bosom. All the more so when the flesh was as darkly colored as undiluted coffee.