“How is he hurt?” Now Patience was moving, too. She opened a little cupboard and began to take out prepared salves and tinctures.
“His leg. The same one. I don’t know exactly, I haven’t looked at it yet. But it won’t take his weight; he can’t walk by himself. And he has a fever.”
Patience took down a basket and began loading the medicines into it. “Well, what are you standing about for?” she snapped at me as I waited. “Go back to your room and see what you can do for him. We’ll be up in a moment with these.”
I spoke bluntly. “I don’t think he’ll let you help.”
“We’ll see,” Patience said calmly. “Now go see that there is hot water.”
The buckets of water I had asked for were outside my door. By the time the water in my kettle was boiling, people had begun to converge on my room. Cook sent up two trays of food, and warmed milk as well as hot tea. Patience arrived and began to set out her herbs on my clothing chest. She quickly sent Lacey to fetch a table for her, and two more chairs. Burrich slept on in my chair, deeply asleep despite occasional bouts of shivering.
With a familiarity that astounded me, Patience felt his forehead, then searched under the angle of his jaw for swelling. She crouched slightly to look into his sleeping face. “Burr?” she queried quietly. He did not even twitch. Very gently, she stroked his face. “You are so thin, so worn,” she grieved softly. She damped a cloth in warm water and gently wiped his face and hands as if he were a child. Then she swept a blanket off my bed and tucked it carefully about his shoulders. She caught me staring at her, and glared at me. “I need a basin of warmed water,” she snapped. As I went to fill one she crouched before him and calmly took out her silver shears and snipped up the side of the bandaging wrapping his leg. The stained wrappings did not look as if they had been changed since his dunk in the river. It went up past his knee. As Lacey took the basin of warmed water and knelt next to her, Patience opened the soiled bandaging as if it were a shell.