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Thomas Doughty, 1791 - 1856 Fanciful Landscape 1834: oil on canvas

@kaelci

inspired me with An Unfortunate Adventure! #freewritemadness: Day One and Day Two --and holy squid, how does @kaelci know how to do book covers so well? I need to find the tools!

My NaNo book is Lady Graves.

The novel has been gestating in my mind ever since I saw the historical movie "A Royal Affair" and, feeling inspired by Regency Romance novelist Amy Corwin, I felt brave enough to attempt a story set in England and Germany, early 1800s, shortly after Dr. Stangler got his hands on a copy of the Lewis and Clark journals and got inspired by America's ideals of freedom and equality and no caste system. Romance is a genre I normally avoide reading, but enough people accuse my fiction of having Romance elements, or Women's Fiction, I decided to give it a shallow embrace (no full frontal hug, not those genres; I prefer science fiction, adventure, and literary).

Last year I tried to super-condense several chapters into one short story, One-Eyed Emil and the Shallow Grave, and meant to come back to it but never did--until NaNo gave me an incentive.

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1-Nov-2018

CHAPTER ONE

The one-eyed dog had earned his keep,

with extra credits to last nine lifetimes, but Emil was using them all up in one night. That infernal barking. Not just loud, but shrill, as if the beast’s other eye were being ripped out.

“Halt,” Stangler shouted, pulling a pillow over his head.

Boing! Boing! Emil leaped straight up, swatting the door latch. That crazy, crafty, stubborn little villain got the door open himself.

“Emil! I am no longer shocked that someone tried to kill you!”

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The dog catapulted into the night

while Stangler hurried into his pants, boots and cloak. The moon was full and bright and probably the source of Emil’s Angst, and he had to hurry after the beast, so he did not take time to light a lantern.

On a moonlit path through the trees, Stangler broke into a run along Emil’s well-worn course to the stream. He followed Emil’s yipping, past the usual rabbit warren, past the old oak with the squirrel, and on, until a gyrating tail gave him away like a white flag waving. Dirt and leaves went flying from paws that moved unbelievably fast.

“Enough, Emil.”

Emil, so quick to learn new commands, obeyed only when it suited him. He pawed the earth until something pale and fleshy came to light. Stangler bent down.

This was no animal.

Not since his first day as a battlefield medic, sawing off arms and legs of young men who'd been perfectly healthy minutes before, had Herr Doktor Niklaus Stangler felt so queasy. He pushed away branches that had been heaped over a human body. There wasn’t much for Emil to dig. A grave this shallow suggested someone in a big hurry to move on.
He stood back, grasped what felt like two ankles, and stepped back, pulling, dragging. Emil sniffed around and started barking at a fresh pile of horse manure.

“Ah, Emil. If you could talk, I’d have you follow that trail, find out who did this, and report back to me.”

He laid out the body. A maid or a serving wench, bodice unlaced and skirts hiked up. He wished for someone he could send in search of the gravediggers, but exiles like him had no neighbors.

On her arms, dark liquid beads formed along fresh scratches.

Dead people didn’t bleed.

He checked for a pulse. It was faint but steady.

She had been buried alive, and if not for Emil, she would have expired before anyone ventured far enough from the road to find her. The dog looked up at him with an eager expectation of attention and praise.

“Well done, Emil.” He couldn’t share the tail-wagging joy, knowing how little life remained in this cold, cold body. “Ach, Emil! This one may be harder to resurrect than you were.”

The dog listened, one ear cocked, his one eye full of concern. Surely, animals had souls.

Stangler scooped the dirty young wench into his arms, enfolded her in his cloak, and hiked back to the cottage.

She was so cold. Desperate to warm her, he allowed the dog to snuggle under a blanket with his find on Herr Doktor’s own bed. He assembled tools and implements, hot water and clean linens, then tended to her wounds. Her bleeding scalp indicated she had been dragged by her hair, which was tangled with dirt and leaves. A gash in the back of her head required sutures. Her pulse was stronger now, but she was far from conscious.

Like a mother hovering over her sick child, Emil watched over the wretched girl. Not long ago it had been the dog as his patient. Stangler wondered how he could saw off a soldier’s limbs but wince at having to snip off the eyeball that dangled from a dog’s head, clean the empty socket and sew it shut, and keep the dog from waking and biting off the hands that healed him. Perhaps he would have been wiser to let mother nature take her course, but it was the physician’s nature to intervene, to fix, to heal.

He plied the needle and thread, then dabbed a tincture of walnut leaves on her open wounds. His busy hands were well accustomed to this work, allowing him to examine his conscience and lament his plight. Why couldn’t he have left a mostly dead wench to complete her task of dying? If not for Emil, she’d be no concern of his. There was no telling what she might have done. He might be harboring a thief or a worse. Women, too, were capable of murder.

Clearly, someone had tried to kill her, and probably not in self-defense. He could go off in search of her assailant but she might die in his absence. If Emil could talk, he’d send him on the trail of the assassin. That dog loved to run off and come home barking incoherently of his finds.

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He saved a dog who saved a girl, but who was saving him?

He had to check his patient for deeper injuries. Preferably before she awoke. Pray God she would not awaken to find a stranger groping between her legs!

The cottage walls danced with shadows from the flickering lantern, and Stangler wished for a healthy dose of bright sunlight to illuminate his job. If the girl came to now, she’d think him a mad man and scream for help but there was none at hand, nought but a dog and a stranger.

She had not been raped. One consolation.

In fact, he could be sure this was no wench from a brothel. Nothing had penetrated her and broken her maidenhood.

The sun rose as always no matter happened in the night, filling his cottage with light, but Stangler felt himself still in the dark. He took up his journal and noted the latest events, the nature of the maiden’s injuries, the medical interventions he ministered.

Keeping his new patient warm and hydrated would occupy him for hours. He had to implement a feeding tube to get something warm and nourishing inside her. Ancient Egyptians used reeds to give rectal feedings of chicken broth, wine, and eggs, but in the more enlightened early 1800s, physicians learned to fashion a flexible, hollow tube of leather to deliver blended food to the stomach. Stangler concocted a mix of mashed potatoes, chamomile tea for its antiseptic, anti-inflammatory action, and cream--which reminded him, he must get out and milk the goat, if Nana hadn’t leaped the fence again. Emil had been preoccupied all night with his new charge. He let the little watchdog out to do his morning duty, sniff about, then return to the girl while Stangler milked the goat.

The day wore on. Sometimes the girl moaned but didn’t awaken. Better for her to sleep through the pain. Stangler added capsicum and more chamomile to the feeding tube and got her to swallow without choking.

A second night passed. The girl would live, he decided, but only if he kept tending to her.

Time was wasting. He had work to do, gathering more roots and herbs from the woods, drying and storing, labeling and collecting. Fritz Lanza, the local boy, should pay Herr Doktor a visit soon to earn some chore money. Why had he told the boy not to come every day? If only he would come now, and the cleaning lady too, but once a week was all he’d asked of her. Now he’d squander more time hand-washing and mending the girl’s garments himself.

He fed Emil, fed himself, fed the fire, then sank into the wooden rocking chair facing the bed. The mantel clock ticked the afternoon away.
Up! Up! Bark! Bark! Emil summoned him from a dreamless sleep, springing up and down like no other dog Stangler had seen. The dying flames were the only source of illumination now; daylight had fled.

A voice, soft and weak, murmured in English: “My head is on fire.”

Stangler bolted to his patient’s side. Her bruised eyes, partly open, focused not on him but on Emil, who immediately sprang up and down again with unstoppable joy.

“Am I in hell?” she whispered. “What is that?”

Stangler laughed. “That little demon is your guardian angel, mein Schatz. His name is Emil.”

She didn’t laugh with him. Indeed, she gripped the blanket and held it like a shield. Did she know German? “My treasure” might translate into an unwelcome endearment.

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“Who are you, and why am I here?”

Her voice was rather imperious, for a maid or serving wench. And accusing. As if he had brought here to this sorry state--he who had lost a good night’s sleep and used no ordinary skill to keep her from her grave!

“Fräulein,” he said, gentling his voice, “I would love to know the answer to those questions. I have been looking forward to your waking and telling me.”

Her head rose slightly from the pillow; dark eyes fixed on him; her lips parted, she began a reply, only to sink back as if exhausted by the prospect of making a proper introduction. At this point, propriety was as far away as the brute who’d failed to kill her. Stangler had undressed her, bathed her, and inspected her wounds, with no such nicety as having been employed by her to secure his services.

“Fräulein--”

But she had fallen under once more.

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This will undergo many revisions, but for now, here is my rambling output for Day Two: CHAPTER TWO