Marion Lennox - Stepping Into The Prince's World

‘You’ve paid the price.

‘It could have been a whole lot higher.’

He was watching her arm while they talked. She was supporting it with her good hand, holding it slightly away from her body. Her shoulder looked odd. Squared off.

‘Idiot or not, you might need to trust me with your arm,’ he suggested. ‘Can I touch it?’

‘If you don’t mind me screaming.’

‘I’ll be gentle,’ he told her, and lightly ran his fingers down the front of her shoulder joint, thinking back to his first-aid courses. Thinking of anatomy.

‘It feels dislocated,’ he told her.

‘It feels broken.’

‘It probably feels worse than if it was broken.’

He put his fingers on her wrist and checked her pulse, then did it again at the elbow.

‘You look like you know what you’re doing,’ she managed.

‘I’ve been in the army for years. I’m a first-aider for my unit.

‘You put on sticking plasters?’

‘Sometimes it’s more than that. When we’re out of range of medical help this is what I do.’

‘Like now?’

‘I hope we’re not out of range. You said you have a radio. Two-way? We must be within an hour’s journey for a chopper coming from the mainland. Tell me where it is and I’ll radio now.’

‘Or not,’ she said.

‘Not?’

‘No.’ She winced. ‘I know this sounds appalling... We have a radio—a big one. We also have back-up—a decent hand-held thing that’s capable of sending signals to Hobart. But last time he was here Don—the owner—was messing around with it and dropped his beer into its workings. And the main radio seems to have been wiped out in the storm.’

‘He dropped his beer...?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘If it had been Marigold it would have been a martini.’ She closed her eyes. ‘There’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen,’ she told him. ‘I think I need it.’

‘I doubt aspirin will help.’

‘Marigold is allergic to pain. Very allergic. She’s been known to demand morphine and a helicopter transfer to the mainland for a torn toenail. I’m thinking there’ll be something decent in there.’

There was. He found enough painkillers to knock out an elephant. Also muscle relaxant, and a dosage list that seemed to be made out for the Flying Doctor—Australia’s remote medical service. The list didn’t actually say This much for a dislocated shoulder, but he had enough experience to figure the dose. He made her hot, sweet tea—plus one for himself—then watched her take the pills he gave her.

‘Stay still until that works,’ he told her.

He found a blanket and covered her, and watched her curl into an almost foetal position on the settee. Rocky nestled on the floor by her side.

He tried to think of a plan.

Plans were thin on the ground and he was still having trouble thinking straight.

The drugs would ease her pain, he thought, but he also knew that the longer the shoulder stayed dislocated, the higher the chance of long-term damage.

In the Middle East he’d had a mate who had...

Um, no. He wasn’t going there.

He did a further tour and found the radio in a truly impressive study. Claire had been right: there was no transmission. He headed outside and saw a wooden building blasted to splinters. A huge radio antenna lay smashed among the timber.

No joy there.

‘You’re on your own,’ he muttered, and pushed away the waves of exhaustion and headed back to the living room.

She was still lying where he’d left her, but her rigidity seemed to have lessened.

He knelt beside her. ‘Better?’

‘Better,’ she whispered. ‘Just leave me be.’

‘I can’t do that. Claire, we’re going to have to get that arm back into position.’

‘My arm wants to stay really still.’

‘And I’m going to have to hurt you,’ he told her. ‘But if I don’t hurt you now you may have long-term damage.’

‘How do I know it’s not broken?’

‘You don’t. I don’t. So I’m using basic first aid, and the first rule is Do no harm. We were taught a method which only sometimes works, but its huge advantage is that it won’t hurt a fracture. If there’s a fracture the arm will scream at you and you’ll scream at me and we’ll stop.’ He hoped. ‘Claire, I need you to lie on your front and let your arm hang down. We’ll put a few cushions under you so your arm is high enough to hang freely. Then I’m going to gradually weight your arm, using sticking plaster to attach things like cans of beans...’

‘Beans?’

‘Anything I can find.’ He smiled. ‘In an emergency, anything goes. My first-aid trainer said if I ask you to grip the cans then your arm will tense, so I just need to stick them on you as dead weights. Then we’ll let the nice drugs do their work. You’ll lie back and think of England, and the tins of beans will tug your arm down, and if you relax completely then I’m hoping it’ll pop back in.’

‘Think of England?’

‘Or sunbeams,’ he told her. ‘Anything to take your mind off your arm.’

She appeared to think about that for a moment, maybe choosing from a list of options. And then she opened her eyes and glanced up at him, taking in his appearance. From head to toe.

‘Nice,’ she whispered. ‘I think I’ll think about you. If you knew how different you look to Don... Don fills his T-shirt up with beer belly. You fill it up with...you.’

‘Me?’

‘Muscles.’

Right. It was the drugs talking, he thought. He needed to stop looking into her eyes and quit smiling at her like an idiot and think of her as a patient. As one of the guys in his unit, injured in the field. Work.

Nothing personal at all.

But he needed to get her relaxed. He knelt beside her and pushed a damp curl from her eyes. She was little and dark and feisty, and her freckles were very, very cute. Her hair was still damp from her soaking. He would have liked to get her completely dry, but he was working through a list of imperatives. Arm first.

‘H... How does this work?’ she muttered.

‘The socket’s like a cup,’ he told her. ‘I think your arm’s slipped out of the cup, but it still has muscles that want it to go back in. If we weight it, and you’re relaxed, then your muscles have a chance to pull it back into place.’

That was the theory, anyway. If it worked. If the arm wasn’t broken. But the weighting method was the only safe course of action. To pull on a broken arm could mean disaster. Gradual weighting was the only way, but she had to trust him.

And it seemed she did.

‘Do it,’ she said, and smiled up at him. ‘Only we don’t have baked beans. How about tins of caviar?’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘No. But there are tinned tomatoes as well.’ Then she appeared to brighten. ‘And we have tins of truly appalling instant coffee. It’d be great if they could be useful for something.’

She smiled up at him and he thought of the pain she was suffering, and the sheer courage she was showing, and the fact that she was smiling to make him smile...

And he smiled back at her and backed away—because a man had to back away fast from a smile like that—and went to find some truly useful cans of coffee.

* * *

Somehow he stayed businesslike. Professional. Somehow he followed the instructions in his head from first-aid training in the field. He taped on the weights. He watched for her to react from too much pain, but although she winced as he weighted her arm she didn’t make a murmur.

He put on as much weight as he thought she could tolerate and then he sat beside her and waited.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

‘Relax. Forget the arm. Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you a story.’

‘What sort of story?’