"All right," she says, blushing faintly with pride at being thought trustworthy. "I'm going to start by unbuttoning your jacket and then untucking your shirt."

She carefully moves her hands over each brass button and pushes it back through its button hole, peeling the fabric back as she does. The cook returns with a bowl of warm water and a cloth, which Christine instructs her to set on the floor. When she reaches the area of the wound, she can't pull the jacket away from the drying blood, so she saturates the fabric with a little squeeze of water from the cloth and carefully pulls the jacket aside once the blood lets go of it.

Letting out a breath, she then sets the cloth aside and moves for his shirt. The blood doesn't bother her as much as she thought it would. Perhaps that is because she's spent the last few months hanging around the kitchen far more than she ever had before in her life and she's seen bits of bloody meat cut up for meals.

"How are you doing so far, Private?"