“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?”

“Make him stand up,” I said, reaching the waistband of the captain’s breeches. “If he can stand upright for thirty seconds, he can have whisky. If not, give him honey-water and make him lie down flat on the floor. No matter what he says.”

“We’ve already been giving him honey-water,” she said, and looked closely at our patient. “Should the captain maybe have some, too?” I had one hand on the captain’s femoral artery—we’d cut his breeches, jacket, and shirt down the fronts and peeled the cloth away from his body—and the other underneath him. His pulse was surprisingly strong, which encouraged me. So did the fact that while blood was dripping off the table, it wasn’t pulsing out into my hand. I thought the shot hadn’t struck a major vessel. On the other hand … his feet still weren’t moving.

“Yes,” I said. “Bring some; Mrs. Cunningham can give it to him while I … see about this.”

Elspeth laid her son’s bandaged arm gently across his middle and smoothed the wet hair off his forehead, wiping his face with a towel.