#DailyLines #MOBY #WRITTENInMYOwnHEARTSBlood #Book8 #neverknowwhenyoumightneedrepair Three hundred men. Jamie stepped into the darkness beyond the 16th New Jersey’s campfire and paused for a moment to let his eyes adjust. Three _hundred_ bloody men. He’d never led a band of more than fifty. And never had much in the way of subalterns, no more than one or two men under him. Now he had ten militia companies, each with its own captain and a few informally-appointed lieutenants, and Lee had given him a staff of his own: two aides-de-camp, a secretary--now, _that_ he could get used to, he thought, flexing the fingers of his maimed right hand—three captains, one of whom was striding along at his shoulder, trying not to look worrit, ten of his own lieutenants, who would serve as liaison between him and the companies under his command, a cook, an assistant cook—and of course, he had a surgeon already. Despite the preoccupations of the moment, the memory of Lee’s face when Jamie’d told him exactly why he didn’t need an army surgeon assigned to him made him smile. “Indeed,” Lee had said, his long-nosed face going blank. Then he’d gathered his wits and gone red in the face, thinking himself practiced upon. But Jamie had pushed back his cuff and shown Lee his right hand, the old white scars on his fingers like tiny starbursts where the bones had come through, and the broad one, still red, but neat, straight, and beautifully knit, running down between the middle finger and the little one, showing where the missing finger had been amputated with such skill that one had to look twice to see why the hand seemed strange. “Well, Colonel, your wife seems a most accomplished needlewoman,” Lee said, now amused. “Aye, sir, she is,” he’d said politely. “And a verra bonny hand with a blade, too.”
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 08:29:49 +0000
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