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.