“When Simon died—my grandson … two years ago …”
“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I said, and a lance of real fear stabbed me in the heart. Like everyone else present at the time, I’d been deeply moved by Charles Cunningham’s maiden sermon, and the story of his son’s death—and his last words. “I’ll see you again. In seven years.”
“What did you say?” Elspeth asked, incredulous. I flapped a hand at her in dismissal. If the captain believed his son’s word—and very plainly he did—then he must conclude that he was essentially immortal for the intervening years. Five years now.
“Holy Lord,” I said, finding a more acceptable interjection. There was an inch of buttermilk left in my cup, and I tossed it back as though it were bad whisky.
“That—I mean … it doesn’t mean that he will kill your husband,” Elspeth said, leaning forward anxiously. “Only that your husband will not kill him.”
“That must be a comfort to you.”
She flushed, embarrassed. Of course it was. She cleared her throat and tried to offer comfort, saying that Charles didn’t mean to kill Jamie, only to take him prisoner, and …
“And take him off to Patrick Ferguson to be hanged,” I finished, nastily. “For the sake of his own bloody advancement!”
“For the sake of his King and his honor as an officer of that King!” she snapped, glaring at me. “Your husband is a pardoned traitor and now he has forfeited the grace of that pardon! He has earned his own—” She realized what she was saying—what she plainly had been thinking for quite some time—and her mouth snapped shut like a trap.
The rain turned suddenly to hail, and hailstones beat upon the shutters with a sound like gunfire. We glanced at each other, but didn’t speak; we couldn’t have heard each other if we had.
We sat for some time by the fire, our chairs side by side, not speaking. Two old witches, I thought. Divided by loyalties and love; united in our fear.
But even fear becomes exhausting after a time, and I found myself nodding, the fire making white shadows flicker through my closing eyelids. Elspeth’s breathing roused me from my doze, a hoarse, rough sound, and she shifted suddenly, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her face buried in her hands. I reached across and touched her and she took my hand, holding tight. Neither of us spoke.
The hail had passed, the wind had dropped, the thunder and lightning had stopped and the storm settled down to a heavy, soaking, endless rain.
We waited, holding hands.
110
… Confused Noise and Garments Rolled in Blood …
SOMETIME LATER—TIME HAD CEASED to have meaning by then—we heard them. The sounds of a body of men and horses. Trampling and the sounds of urgency.
The noise had roused Fanny and Agnes; I heard their bare feet pattering down the stairs.
I was at the door with no memory of getting there, fumbling with the mortise bolt—I hadn’t barred the door when Elspeth came. I yanked the heavy door in as though it weighed nothing, and in the dark and flickering candlelight I saw Jamie, among a many-headed mass of black confusion, a head taller than his companions and his eyes searching for me.
“Help me, Sassenach,” he said, and stumbled into the hall, lurching to one side and striking the wall. He didn’t fall, but I saw the blood on his wet shirt, soaked and spreading.
“Where?” I said urgently, seizing his arm and looking for the source of the blood. It was running down his arm beneath the sleeve of his jacket; his hand was wet with it. “Where are you hurt?”
“Not me,” he said, chest heaving in the effort to breathe. He jerked his head backward. “Him.”
“CHARLIE!” ELSPETH’S CRY made me jerk round to see Tom MacLeod and Murdo Lindsay negotiating a makeshift stretcher composed of jackets strung on hastily lopped branches around the doorjamb, trying not to drop or injure the contents. Said contents being Charles Cunningham in a noticeable state of disrepair.
They knew where the surgery was and proceeded there at a trot. Jamie pushed himself off the wall and called to them hoarsely in Gaelic, at which they immediately slowed down, walking almost on tiptoe.
“He’s shot in the back, Sassenach,” Jamie said to me. “Maybe … a few other places.” His hand was trembling where it pressed against the wall, and his fingers left bloody smears.
“Go and sit down in the kitchen,” I said briefly. “Tell Fanny I said to get your clothes off and find out how bad it is, then come and tell me.”
The stretcher party had reached the surgery and I rushed in behind them, in time to superintend the moving of the captain onto my table.
“Don’t pick him up!” I shouted, seeing them about to lay the stretcher on the floor. “Put the whole thing on the table!”
Cunningham was alive, and more or less lucid. Elspeth was already on the other side of the table, and between us we cut his clothes off, as gently as possible, she speaking reassuringly to him, though her hands were shaking badly.
He’d been shot twice from the front; a ball in the right forearm that had broken the radius just above the wrist, and a shot that had scored his ribs on the left but fortunately not entered the body. One side of his face was scratched and bruised, but from the presence of bark in some of the scratches, I thought he had likely collided with a tree in the dark, rather than been in a fistfight with one.
“Jamie says you’ve been shot in the back,” I said, bending low to speak to him. “Can you tell me where the wound is? High? Low?”
“Low,” he gasped. “Don’t worry, Mother, it will be fine.”
“Be quiet, Charles!” she snapped. “Can you move your feet?”
His face was dead white, beard stubble like a scatter of pepper across his skin. I had my hands under him, feeling my way between the jackets of the stretcher and the layers of his own clothes, trapped under him. His clothes were sodden, but so were those of all the men—I could hear the dripping out in the hall, as several men were crammed in the doorway, listening. I pulled one hand out from under him, gingerly, and looked at it. It was scarlet to the wrist. I glanced at his feet. One of them twitched and Elspeth gasped. She was stanching the blood from his arm, but at this stopped and bent over him.
“Move the other, Charles,” she said urgently.
“I am,” he whispered. His eyes were closed and water ran from his hair. I looked down the table. Neither foot was moving.
Fanny pushed her way through the men at the door and came in, her hair loose over her wrapper and her eyes huge.
“Mr. Fraser has a bad cut from his right shoulder down across his chest,” she told me. “It just missed his left nipple, though.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good news,” I said, repressing a mildly hysterical urge to laugh. “Did you—”
“We put a compress on it,” she assured me. “Agnes is pushing on it. With both hands!”
“How fast is the blood soaking through?” I had my hands back under Captain Cunningham, feeling my way through layers of sopping cloth, in search of the wound’s exact location.
“He soaked the first compress, but the second one is doing better,” she assured me. “He wants whisky; is that all right?”