Found: One Husband

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Meredith Webber

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18,1K

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Meredith Webber

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18,1K

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🏰 Historical

CHAPTER ONE

HE DIDN’T exactly drop from the sky. It was more a slithering, bumping descent, but the effect was much the same.

One minute Sam was rock-hopping quietly up the stream, revelling in the solitude, the splash and gurgle of the crystal-clear water as it scurried around the rocks, the occasional cries of birds in the thick rainforest which crowded the right-hand side of the creek.

Then suddenly there was this body, landing half in and half out of the water, right in front of her.

‘Damn the man!’ she muttered to herself, protesting the interruption to her blissful escape while shrugging off her backpack and hurrying forward to tend to him anyway.

There was an awful lot of him, she realised when she reached the small ledge that had prevented the top half of his torso landing in the creek. Too much for her to move on her own.

She peered upwards where snapped-off bushes and a scrape of loose stones marked the path he’d taken, and tried to visualise the map of this section of the park.

‘Anyone up there? Hello?’

But even as she called, she knew the hope was futile. The man’s companion, had he had one, would have been doing his own calling out. Yelling down the cliff, anxious for the reassurance of a reply from his friend.

Or her friend.

A stray sunbeam picked out the gold band on the man’s left hand.

Her husband?

The thoughts jostled in Sam’s head while her eyes did an initial survey of the inert victim. He’d landed on his side and she left him that way, reluctant to move him before she’d checked his injuries. It was close enough to the recovery position anyway.

He was definitely alive, as he was breathing, his chest rising and falling with a steady, reassuring rhythm beneath a faded khaki shirt which had seen better days. There was no blood spurting from open wounds—no open wounds that she could see if she discounted a multitude of abrasions. A hairy growth of curly brown beard had probably protected the lower half of his face, while the thick, overlong and slightly darker brown hair might have provided padding for his head.

She ran her fingers through her own short crop of rusty blonde curls and wondered if the curling of his beard bothered him as much as her wayward hair had always aggravated her. Not that hair was of the slightest importance at the moment! Was she thinking about it to put off the moment when she had to bring another sense into play in assessing his injuries? That of touch?

Come on! You touch patients every day of your working life. Touch the man! Feel his pulse.

She knelt on the ledge and wondered whether she’d feel a pulse beneath his chin. Find a chin beneath the beard? Went for the wrist instead, not moving his arm but feeling beneath the frayed, buttonless cuff of his shirt.

It was slow. Very slow, considering hers was racing and she would imagine most people, on falling down a cliff, would have reacted with some slight elevation in their heartbeat.

She lifted one eyelid and then the other. No obvious difference in pupil size but she had a torch in her backpack—she’d check reaction when she’d finished her physical examination.

Skull first. Setting aside her own lingering annoyance that her all-too-brief holiday had been disrupted, she thrust her fingers gingerly into the dark locks, pressing lightly against his scalp, feeling for contusions, for a movement in the bone that would suggest a fracture.

As far as she could tell, it was all intact, but if medical people had been able to diagnose cracked bones by feel, X-rays would never have been invented.

Sam moved on, running her hands down his body, lean and sinewy, and in one piece, if touch could judge. Then, listening for crepitus, that awful sound of bone scraping on bone, she gently moved his arms.

From his waist down he was in the water and the instinctive urge to somehow haul him out was countered by a fear he could have sustained spinal injury and any movement might exacerbate the damage.

She should go for help, but she was a day’s walk from the nearest habitation and in the meantime the man might regain consciousness—or worse, part-consciousness—and wander off. Fall down another cliff. There were any number to choose from in the area, including the one she’d scrambled up a hundred yards farther along the creek.

Her immediate dilemma was solved by the man himself. He groaned and shifted, moving his legs, then moaning as if the movement caused him pain. But his legs had definitely moved. In fact, his pelvis had also moved for there was dampness spreading across the dry stones on the edge of the creek where he’d lifted his hips out of the stream.

‘Hello! Can you hear me? Wake up. Talk to me.’

It wasn’t standard recovery-room procedure for unconscious patients but Sam’s anxiety level was rising as the deepening shadows over the creek reminded her that the sun was sinking. Night fell swiftly in the rainforest and moving anywhere in the darkness would be suicidal.

She looked around her, wondering where she could pitch her tent if they had to stay right here until morning. On this side, the cliff down which the unwelcome intruder had fallen rose steeply, while on the other, the growth was so thick, its tangled vines kissed the water.

‘Talk to me!’ she repeated, almost yelling the words in her despair.

‘What about?’

She looked around, certain the man couldn’t possibly have said the words. Whoever had been with him must have somehow scrambled down the cliff.

As far as she could see, they were still alone, so she turned her attention back to her patient.

‘What did you say?’ she demanded, watching lips she could barely discern in the hairy growth, hoping for movement.

‘Jocelyn.’

The lips did move but only minimally, so the word sounded distorted.

‘Jocelyn! Is that your name?’

Sam knew it more as a woman’s name, but she had a vague feeling it could also be a man’s. And who was she to argue with unisex names?

‘Jocelyn?’ she repeated, bending closer so she could see more of his face.

Which was when his eyes opened, and although she’d seen them earlier her attention had been on pupil size, not blueness. Bright blueness like the wedge of sky she could see above the creek.

‘I’m Sam,’ she said, as the eyes tried hard to focus on her face. ‘What’s your name?’

It was stupid conversation to be having, but Sam knew she needed him conscious if she was to have any hope of getting him out of the wilderness area.

Or getting a rescue team in.

He was frowning at her, the blue eyes shadowed by lowered eyelids and a curtain of lashes a darker shade than his hair. Almost black, in fact.

‘Is it Jocelyn?’ she prompted, and the creases between his equally dark eyebrows deepened.

‘Jocelyn’s a sissy name!’ he muttered crossly at her.

‘Well, forgive me for breathing!’ Sam shot back. ‘I’m only trying to help!’

He looked at her then, really looked at her, and if anything the frown grew fiercer.

Arguing with him wasn’t going to help, Sam reminded herself. Calm down—be professional.

‘Perhaps Jocelyn’s your wife,’ she suggested, then watched as the frown developed into a black scowl.

‘Pigs!’ he said.

‘And pigs to you, too!’ Sam snapped, then she weakened. ‘Look here, mate! I’m trying to help you. You’ve tumbled down a cliff in the middle of nowhere and I’m your only visible means of support. Somehow I’ve got to get the two of us out of here. Could you, please, at least try to get with it?’

His lips moved again, but this time it was to reveal strong white teeth. And the blue eyes were twinkling in a most beguiling manner. The man was smiling at her.

‘No wife,’ he said forcefully. ‘Even though I was offered two pigs.’

He was either so satisfied with this response, or so worn out by the effort of talking, that his eyes closed and Sam felt him slipping away from her.

‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ she told him, seizing his arm and dragging his wrist around so he could see his own left hand. ‘You stay awake. And look at this. It’s a wedding ring. You must have a wife.’

He opened his eyes and gave her a pained look, then mumbled again about pigs.

‘That might be one reference too many to pigs in conjunction with wives!’ Sam told him, as the eyelids drooped again. ‘I’ve a good mind to leave you here on your own. You can take your chances with the cliffs!’

As if in response to her threat, the hand she’d waved in front of his face moved and she felt his fingers grasping hers, holding on tightly, like a child who didn’t want to get lost in a crowd. It was cool, that hand, and slightly calloused, yet she felt, had their situations been reversed, she’d have found it comforting.

The thought made her feel more kindly towards him and she tried again for a verbal response. Nothing. Perhaps she should put her time to better use by getting the rest of him out of the water. Now his hips were resting on the edge, it should be easy to tackle the legs. If she moved the lower one, the right one, first, then eased the other up on top of it so he was lying curled on his side…

First detach his hand.

This proved difficult as the long, thin fingers tightened when she tried to disengage hers, and she had to pry them back, one by one.

‘I’ll hold it again soon,’ she promised him, as this unspoken dependence on her touched her heart.

Before moving either limb, she ran her hands down each one, feeling through the thick wet material of his dirty, patched camouflage trousers for any obvious misalignment of bone.

No obvious breaks.

The plan worked well with his right leg, although with all the paddling around in the creek she was forced to do to get a good hold she was now as wet as he was. But when she lifted his left leg, gripping the damp trousers where she thought his calf would be, he stirred and groaned deeply as if the movement was causing him pain.

Sam lowered it gently and knelt in the shallow water, pushing the trouser leg up so she could see what was what.

His lower leg was intact, the femur forming a nice straight ridge, but his foot hung at a crazy angle, a clear indication all was not well with his ankle. Further examination showed it had already swollen inside his tough, scuffed hiking boot.

‘If I leave your boot on for support and things swell more, it could constrict the blood supply to the rest of your foot,’ she told her unconscious patient. ‘And if I take the boot off and strap the ankle, you won’t get it back on again, and without its support you’ll have less chance of walking out of here!’

He was no help, although she sensed he might have heard her voice for he stirred and she thought she heard him murmur Jocelyn yet again.

‘She must be your wife!’ Sam told him, while her fingers probed the swollen tissue above the boot. ‘Poor thing! Your wife, not you!’

Though why, apart from the pig’s remark, she should be feeling empathy for his wife, she didn’t know.

‘Because you’re a nuisance to me, I guess,’ she admitted honestly. ‘Which is most unfair of me!’

Deciding it was better to tackle his injury while he was still unconscious, she crossed to where she’d dropped her pack and dug around in it until she found her first-aid kit. Then, armed with sharp scissors and an elastic bandage, she returned to her patient.

Getting the boot off was the hardest part, and in the end she had to resort to the kit again and use a scalpel and new blade on the tough leather before she could ease it off.

‘Not a bad idea anyway,’ she told her comatose patient. ‘Maybe after a bit more surgery on the leather I’ll be able to put it back on and give the joint some support.’

His ankle was very swollen, the bruise already coming out, turning patches of pale skin a purplish blue. She bound it carefully, then rested his left leg on top of the right so that he was now lying, curled like a sleeping child, on the narrow ledge.

Only he wasn’t sleeping. He was unconscious.

A major concern!

She moved back to the head end of her unexpected company and noticed a redness in the curling beard she hadn’t seen earlier. Not russet red, but blood red. Blood-soaked red, in fact.

An oath she rarely used echoed around the pristine wilderness and, first-aid kit still gripped in one hand, she knelt to investigate. Damping her handkerchief in the creek, she mopped up the worst of the blood, but couldn’t pinpoint the injury.

‘Here’s hoping this face fuzz isn’t something you’ve taken a lifetime to grow,’ she muttered as she snipped at the damp hair, seeking the source of the bleeding.

The injury was on his jawline, a gash about an inch and a half long, deep enough to be showing the white of bone beneath it.

‘Scars are manly things for men to have,’ she told him, her mind racing as she considered and discarded options.

No razor to shave the area around the cut. She’d have to scrape away what she could with a scalpel and then suture the skin together.

Or try to hold it together with plastic strips?

If she left it open he’d have a wider scar—which the beard would hide. Or would it? Perhaps the hair wouldn’t grow where the scar was and there’d be an unsightly gap.

‘I don’t even like beards so why the hell am I worrying about your face fungus?’ Sam muttered at him, searching through the compact pack for an antiseptic solution and the sutures and needles she knew she had stowed into it.

Shaving even such a small portion of his skin with a scalpel was difficult, but fortunately he lay still.

He stirred as she splashed antiseptic liberally around the area, but as she neatly stitched and tied off sutures he remained immobile.

‘Not much point trying to put something over that,’ she decided, speaking her thoughts aloud automatically.

‘Over what?’ the man mumbled, his head turning towards her as he asked the question.

Perhaps it was the beard, the mass of brown, that made his eyes look so blue.

‘Over the gash on your chin,’ she told him, smiling to hide the strange twinge the eyes were causing her. ‘Are you properly awake this time? Can you tell me who you are? What you’re doing here?’

He looked beyond her to the trees, the sky, then back to her, and frowned.

‘Where’s here?’ he asked, then must have decided he was at a disadvantage for he sat up suddenly, almost knocking Sam back into the creek.

‘Hey! Steady on! I’m wet enough, thanks to you,’ she grouched at him, grabbing at his shoulder as he swayed precariously towards the creek.

The bits of skin she could see on his face, beneath beard, blood and scratches, were a greenish white and for a moment she thought he’d pass out again. She propped him against the rock face down which he’d tumbled and held him steady while he took in great gulps of air through his mouth.

Then his breathing steadied and the mesmeric eyes snagged her attention once again.

‘Did you hit me?’ he demanded, shaking off her supporting hand and feeling at what must have been a tender patch on his scalp.

‘No, but I’ve been tempted!’ Sam told him. ‘You fell from up there.’

He turned to gaze upward, then groaned and gripped his knee as he moved his legs to get a better view.

‘Is your knee sore, too?’

‘No, it’s my ankle.’

He peered at the offending joint then looked back at Sam.

‘You’ve bandaged it!’

The accusatory tone riled Sam, though she knew head-injured patients were often argumentative.

‘Ten out of ten for observation,’ she sniped at him, anxiety prickling beneath her skin like a rash turned inside out. ‘Now, let’s try the questions again. Who are you? And what were you doing before you tumbled down the cliff to ruin my holiday?’

‘Why do you want to know what I was doing?’ he demanded, a frown pulling his eyebrows almost together. ‘Why should that matter?’

He’s concussed, Sam reminded herself. Be patient with him.

‘If you were walking with someone and fell behind, or perhaps walked on ahead, then eventually that someone might just report you missing, which means people would come looking for you and we will both be found.’

‘Are you lost?’ he asked, the frown deepening slightly.

Mad as well as concussed?

‘No! Of course I’m not lost!’

‘Then why would you want to be found?’

Sam sighed.

‘If this is how you normally behave, then it’s very doubtful anyone would ever report you missing. In fact, they’d probably take themselves to the nearest church to give thanks on bended knee that they’ve finally got rid of you.’

Then, having vented herself of a little spleen, she added, ‘We’ll both be found because I’ll be with you. I can hardly go off and leave an injured man lying here in the bush.’

‘But don’t tempt you?’ he said, accompanying the words with a slightly rueful smile.

Sam was so surprised she chuckled.

‘I’m sorry. I have been grumpy, but I hardly ever get away from people and I’ve been looking forward to having these two days alone. So to have you tumbling down into my little bit of solitude kind of threw me.’

He looked around and the frown returned.

‘You’re out here in the jungle all alone? Couldn’t you have found your solitude somewhere safer than this? Isn’t it stupid to be clambering around here on your own?’

The condemnation in his voice killed the moment of empathy his little joke had produced.

‘Only if I fall down a cliff,’ she told him, standing up and stepping over his legs to get to her pack. ‘Now, do you think we could stop discussing my presence here and get back to yours? Does anyone know where you are? Are people likely to raise an alarm if you don’t return home tonight?’

She considered how far she’d walked today and amended the question.

‘Or tomorrow night?’

He stared at her, his eyes wide—as if startled—then he shook his head and the frown became positively ferocious.

He lifted both hands and ran them through his hair, wincing as fingers must have pressed against the tender part.

‘I don’t know!’ he said crossly. ‘Actually, I have no idea. I can’t remember if I was with someone or alone, or whether someone knows where I am. In fact, I don’t know that either. Where am I?’

He did the fingers in the hair thing again, and glared at Sam as if she might be responsible for stealing his memory.

‘You’re in the Border Ranges National Park, but in a fairly remote area of it. I don’t know the marked trails very well, but as far as I know there’s no regular walking track at the top of the cliff. Could you have rock-hopped down the creek?’

The man looked around again, peering into the rainforest as if he expected it to tell him something.

‘What border?’ he asked, his voice lower now. Husky. Almost as if he was afraid.

‘Queensland and New South Wales. The mountains are known as the Border Ranges although they have their own names. This is—’

‘Queensland and New South Wales in Australia?’ he demanded.

‘Of course,’ Sam told him, although now she was feeling the coolness of fear. Was he more badly injured than she’d thought? ‘Where did you think you were?’

But he was looking around again, and didn’t answer, instead turning back suspiciously.

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘Quite sure.’ She opened one of the side pockets of her pack and pulled out her plastic-coated map. ‘See. Here’s the border, and the mountains. I left my car down there where that dotted mark ends, and followed the creek up. I think we’re at about this point. This narrow swirl of lines indicate the cliff.’

He all but snatched the map from her hand and pored over it, running his finger over the names he found.

‘Are these towns? I’ve never heard of them.’

The suspicion she’d heard earlier had deepened.

‘They’re more like villages,’ she said. ‘Little settlements down in the valley. Did you want a town?’

He must have heard the tartness in her voice for he glanced up.

‘A name,’ he said lamely. ‘The name of a town I might recognise.’

Sam closed her eyes as the realisation that she was stuck in the bush with an injured amnesiac dawned.

‘Do you know who you are?’ she asked, more gently now she considered the awful confusion he must be feeling.

She saw the answer in his eyes, in the desperate gaze he fixed on her.

‘You don’t know me?’

Sam shook her head, then reached out to touch his shoulder.

‘Don’t try to remember right now. You’ve taken a bad tumble and knocked yourself unconscious on the way down. Give yourself time. It will all come back to you if you don’t start worrying about it.’

‘You’re guaranteeing that?’ he demanded, and as she turned and looked at him, and saw the same question reflected in his eyes, she knew she couldn’t lie.

‘No, I can’t,’ she said quietly, ‘but right now there’s nothing we can do about your memory, so let’s think about what we can do, which is getting out of here.’

He was silent for a moment, then he nodded and again she saw the hint of a smile.

‘So, how do we go about that, Girl Scout?’

Sam decided it was her turn to frown. She peered up at the cliff down which the stranger had fallen, and confirmed her earlier opinion. There was no way she’d get up it without pitons, and preferably someone at the top belaying rope to her.

‘If you’ve told someone where you’d be, then they’ll come looking for you eventually. Were you carrying a pack? Do you remember that much?’

The frustration in his eyes answered her, and she realised she should be saving him angst, not causing more by asking questions he couldn’t possibly answer.

With a final twinge of regret for the loss of her peaceful idyll in the bush, and for the time she needed to think seriously about Henry, she turned her thoughts to practical matters.

‘I think we should head back towards my car. I’ll leave a note here in case someone does come looking. We’ve already lost the sun and will only have about an hour’s light. Hopefully, by then we’ll have found a slightly better place than this to camp for the night.’

The man greeted these sensible pronouncements with a look of undisguised horror.

‘What’s the matter now?’ Sam demanded.

‘What do you mean by “camp for the night”? Isn’t there a track? Couldn’t we keep walking? How far away can your car be?’

‘Too far for you to make it tonight,’ Sam told him. ‘That’s assuming you can actually walk. Sit there while I hunt around for a stout stick. You can lean on me when we can walk abreast but there are a lot of places where you’ll have to manage on your own. A stick will help.’

She knelt down beside her pack again, fumbling through the folds of rain slicker and clothing until she found a plastic container and the shape of a plastic mug.

Reaching out to the creek, she filled the mug with water and passed it to the man, handed him two paracetamol tablets from her first-aid kit, then opened the lid on her ‘energy food’.

‘Here.’ She put the container down by his side. ‘Dried fruit and nuts. Eat some of these, take the tablets and drink plenty of water before we get going.’

She turned her attention to writing a note and sealing it in a plastic bag which she held down with a rock at the base of the cliff, but when he didn’t acknowledge the snack she looked up, to find him peering at the water in the cup, the expression on his face holding equal parts of horror and distaste.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Sam asked him.

‘You can’t drink water straight from a stream,’ he told her. ‘I might have lost my memory, but I haven’t lost my mind. Not drinking the water is a basic rule of survival in the bush. You need sterilising tablets, or should boil it for at least ten minutes to get rid of any deadly micro-organisms lurking in it.’

‘In this water?’ Sam teased, scooping up a handful and drinking noisily. ‘This water?’ She splashed it over his face and watched the droplets sparkle where they landed in his beard. ‘This is pure, clean, fresh water, totally uncontaminated by any…’

Another aspect of what he’d said struck her forcibly enough to stop her mockery.

‘You don’t remember your name but you know about deadly micro-organisms in water?’

‘My brother’s a brain surgeon.’

The reply came out so pat that Sam chuckled, then laughed, and had to hold her sides as an uncontrollable mirth gripped her.

‘Oh, I’m s-sorry,’ she stuttered, wiping tears from her eyes and trying to control the final fits of giggles. ‘But you have no idea how funny that sounded. “My brother’s a brain surgeon!” It’s like little kids using “My Daddy’s a policeman” as the final unarguable, unanswerable threat.’

But her companion, now that her eyes were free of tears and she could see him clearly, seemed more puzzled than offended.

‘Now, why would I know that if I don’t know who I am?’

‘I don’t know enough about amnesia to explain,’ Sam said, ‘but I do know there’s not much of a link between micro-organisms in drinking water and brain surgery, so I wouldn’t take the brain surgeon as gospel. Unless by chance you can remember this brother’s name?’

She was teasing him again, but gently, hoping a little light-hearted joking might ease some of the inner turmoil he must be feeling.

‘Take my word for it, the water is clean so drink plenty of it—eat some fruit. I’ll be right back.’

He didn’t reply, but he did lift the cup slowly towards his lips and, as Sam smiled and nodded her encouragement, took a few tentative sips.

Confident she could leave him on his own for a few minutes, she stepped nimbly from rock to rock across the creek, trying not to think of the places along the banks where it was impossible to walk.

How the man would manage rock-hopping with his injured ankle…