I rise to a crouch. He reaches to pull me down again, gesturing at the road, and I frown. Why should I not stand if I am able? It is storming, and we really ought to take shelter.

Men. Guns.

I blink. However did I forget that?

Nicolas’s mouth is moving, but no words reach my ears.

“I really do feel quite odd,” I say. “Faint, even. I do hope I do not swoon. That would be terribly—”

I swoon, straight into his arms, and the world goes dark.

5

My eyelids flutter open. I did swoon, didn’t I? How terribly embarrassing. I turn to apologize to Nicolas, only to find I am in . . .

I am not certain where I am.

I’m lying down, for one thing. When I inhale, I smell hay and dried manure. I try to push up, and my hand comes down on straw. A coarse blanket covers me. I tug at it to discover it is a burlap sack, ripped open into a rough sheet. Rain pounds a wooden roof.

I squint upward to see a dove peering down at me from the rafters.

“Oh, bother,” I grumble. “I did swoon, didn’t I? And then I needed to be carried and nursed back to health.”

“You sound quite annoyed at that. Most young ladies would swoon again at the very thought.”

I snort. “If you believe that, then you are acquainted with very few young ladies. There are many who would prefer to avoid the embarrassment of being rescued.”

“Even by a charming and notorious pirate?” His tone is light, teasing, as he walks from the shadows, an apple and knife in hand.

“I thought you weren’t a pirate?”

He shrugs. “Charming and notorious privateer does not sound quite the same, so I will allow myself the title of pirate, just this once.”

“And the title of Robin Hood? You are the one they seek, are you not?”

He peels a strip off the apple, pops it in his mouth and chews. I wait for my answer, but he only motions for me to lift the sack from my leg.

“I must examine this wound as well as the arm,” he says, “to be sure it does not fester.”

When I lift the sheet, my leg is bare. That gives me pause. I am not prudish, but I have been raised in a world where even a doctor will avoid unclothing a lady. Nicolas doesn’t bat an eye at my naked leg. He munches another slice of apple, hands me the rest, wipes his hands on his trousers and goes to work.

As a testament to my mental confusion, there is a moment where I think it is excellent that the future world has overcome excessive modesty. Then I remember that we are in the past, and I must acknowledge, with chagrin, that my century’s notions of modest are largely our own. In this time period, a doctor obviously thinks nothing of asking a woman to bare her thigh if that’s where she was wounded.