She fed him more of the mixture until it seemed to her he scowled and she put the spoon back in her pocket. She spent a few minutes working with the fire, then went back to the kitchen to fill a basin with warm water. She would have to wash him. He stank. Sickroom smells, yet it seemed more than that, as if he had brought with him a gust from the workhouse. He would have lice on him, that was certain. She would need a good razor because a sharp blade was the surest way to be rid of lice. She wondered if he might have his own razor in the knapsack but it had seemed to contain so little. She would look for one of his father’s. There would be one in a drawer somewhere, in the old room. Can an unused razor lose its edge? She did not think so.

She unwrapped his feet. Much of the skin from the soles seemed to have gone. She had to peel away the cloth with infinite care to keep herself from removing what was left. She washed them, patted them dry, then fetched her sewing scissors and cut up the legs of his trousers. She smoothed and sopped, cleaned the very white skin of his thighs, cleaned between his legs, dabbed the slightly darker skin of his cock (thought how it had, poor piece, a stunned look to it, like something—a glove—flung down and forgotten).

The shirt, she decided, was his, the only thing of all. She imagined she recognised the stitching—her own—but it was stained beyond any scrubbing and she cut it off too, dropping strips of material by her feet, a pile of rags she would burn on the kitchen fire until they were ashes and then nothing.

She washed his chest. He had lost a stone in weight or more than that, but it was still a soldier’s chest and when she flattened her palm over his heart she could feel the heat of it and for the first time since he was carried into the house she did not fear for his life.