Pushing the bottom of the coverlet aside, Declan found her legs at the base of the bed and locked his hands onto her ankles. Ness’s eye had remained shut, her mouth silent, her body limp as the laudanum had already taken a hold of her.
Or not.
The second Mrs. Jenkins pulled Ness’s upper left arm away from her torso, Ness went rabid—screaming, legs kicking, her body thrashing.
The pain brutal or a hallucination taking a hold of her, Talen wasn’t sure.
Her right leg kicked, jutting up and out of Declan’s hold and her knee cracked Declan in the right eye as he tried to retrieve it. It was enough to send him flailing back a step. “Bloody hell—”
“Ness—calm,” Talen ordered into her ear. “We’re fixing your arm so be still.”
She froze, her body tense against him. But she stopped whipping about. Her head turned, her right ear pressing against his chest as she looked away from what was happening to her left arm.
Mrs. Jenkins was quick, wrenching and manipulating Ness’s arm into position as she realigned the bone.
But with every twist, every yank Mrs. Jenkins made upon her arm, Ness’s body flinched. He felt it in her muscles. But she didn’t scream. Didn’t kick. Didn’t fight the pain.
Her chin merely curled down, taking every stitch of torture the grinding of marrow against marrow caused.
Talen had seen plenty of bones set in his day, some in the strongest of men. Men he’d had to punch out so they wouldn’t hurt the bonesetter. None of them had ever taken this sort of pain with the stoic silence that this woman did.
Whereas he didn’t truly believe her before—that she had ridden the entire way from Edinburgh to London in the mail coach with her arm like this—he believed her now.
She and pain were well acquainted.
That didn’t stop her body from shaking, the agony overwhelming.
Of all of it, that struck him. How her body shook uncontrollably against him. A life in overt turbulence.
One last wedge of Ness’s arm and Mrs. Jenkins looked up to him, satisfied. “I’ll wrap it with a splint.” She leaned over to dig through the satchel she’d dropped on the floor and pulled free a plank of wood and long strips of linen. “Ye need to have her leave it in place for weeks, a month, more if it still pains her. It cannot slip out of place.”
Talen nodded. “We will keep it wrapped.”
Mrs. Jenkins was quick to set the wooden splint along Ness’s forearm and then wrap it with the linen to lock it into place.
She stood straight, her gaze resting on Ness’s face that was turned away, quivering against his chest. Mrs. Jenkins pointed to Ness’s head. “And have the apothecary get an ointment for her face to relieve the swelling, the poor pup.”
“Thank you for the prompt work.” Talen motioned his head toward Declan. “Declan will take care of you.”
Mrs. Jenkins picked up her bag and followed Declan out of the room.
This was the moment when he needed to extract himself from Ness’s body, but her shaking had yet to cease.
There was something inherently wrong about it, the thought of abandoning the tiny waif while she was still quivering.
One would think he was going soft, for how long he sat there, his arms wrapped around her body, trying to soothe the residual shocks of pain rolling through her.
But sit he did.
Until the trembling eased and her body relaxed against him, a deep laudanum-induced sleep taking her over.
Thank the saints.
He’d never stood for a woman sleeping against him, but in this case, he’d take it. Anything to ease the torture in her body.
He finally allowed himself to take a deep breath and he realized how uncharacteristic of him it was, caring at all if her pain eased. When had he started to care about the wretched souls?
Never.