“I’ll help ye, Sassenach,” he said, rising and turning toward my cupboards. “Tell me what ye need.”

I gave him a narrow look and he looked straight back, calmly implacable. He wasn’t leaving me alone with a man who was technically an enemy, no matter how incapacitated.

I was torn between minor irritation and an undeniable sense of relief. It was the relief that bothered me.

“Fine,” I said shortly, and he smiled. Then I paused, a question striking me.

“Jamie—will you come with me for a moment? You’ll be all right here, Mr. Jackson. Don’t move too much.” Corporal Jackson lifted sketchy eyebrows at me, but nodded.

I took Jamie back into the kitchen, closing the baize door that separated it from the front of the house.

“What are you planning to do with him?” I asked bluntly. “I mean—is he your prisoner?” I’d been planning to set the leg, bandage it, and then do what was called in this time the Basra method—augmented by my own small innovations. In essence, light—though fragile—plaster-of-Paris-soaked bandages wound over a stocking and padding (dried moss was all I had at the moment that would answer, but it worked well enough) that would immobilize the limb but let the corporal move about, with a cane and some care. But if Jamie needed him to be immobilized, I would just realign the bones, dress the wounds, and splint the limb.

“No,” he said slowly, frowning in thought. “I canna easily keep him prisoner, and there’s nay purpose in it. I ken well enough what Ulysses means to do, because he told me himself. Holding his man wouldna sway him an inch.”

“Will he come back for Mr. Jackson, do you think? I mean—he’s a British army officer now.”

Jamie looked at me for a moment, then smiled in wry realization.

“Ye still think they’re honorable men, don’t ye, Sassenach? The British army?”

“I—well, some of them are, aren’t they?” I said, rather taken aback by this question. “Lord John? His brother?”

“Mmphm.” It was a grudging acquiescence that stopped well short of full agreement. “Did I ever tell ye what His Grace did to me twenty years ago?”

“Actually, no, I don’t think so.” I wasn’t surprised that he should still carry a grudge about it, whatever it was, but that could wait. “As for the army in general … well, I suppose you have some small point. But I fought with the British army, you know—”

“Aye, I do,” he said. “But—”

“Just listen. I lived with them, I fought with them, I mended them and nursed them and held them when they died. Just—just as I did when we fought—” I had to stop and clear my throat. “When we fought for the Stuarts. And …” My voice faltered.

“And what?” He stood very still, leaning on his fists on the kitchen table, eyes fixed on my face.

“And a good officer would never leave his men.”