by Lily Maxton
He grunted as Lachlan and Andrew lowered him to the grass, even though they were being as gentle as they could.
“We need more light. Ewan—the lantern.”
Ewan, who’d been standing there, stricken, shook himself at Georgina’s command, and a moment later, he set aside the tinderbox and brought over the glowing lamp. She drew in a sharp breath when the light fell over Mal’s pale, haggard face.
He tried to smile, but it looked more like a wince. “Now, I know I’m not very handsome, but that hurts, lass.”
Georgina felt a wild urge between laughter and tears. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Trying to make me feel better. You need to save your strength.”
And Georgina didn’t think she’d feel better for a long, long time. She kept remembering the sound of the gun, the sudden press of Mal’s body, the damp, hot blood seeping into her dress.
Lachlan knelt over him and peeled the fabric away from his skin to reveal a ragged wound in his shoulder. Then, with exceedingly gentle hands, he rolled Mal onto his side.
“It went all the way through.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Ewan asked.
“We need to stop the bleeding, though.”
Georgina looked at him. “Would the sewing kit do?”
He nodded. “It might.”
“Is there any unused fishing line?” Eleanor had gone through a short phase when she was rather obsessed with wounds and amputations and had shown Georgina depictions of sutures in a book. Most of them were done with catgut, which was what the fishing lines were made from—of course, the images had also shown curved needles, instead of straight ones, but they would have to make do with what they had.
Ewan was off and searching for it before they’d even told him to.
“Can you do it?” It took Georgina a startled moment before she realized Lachlan was talking to her. “You’re better at it than I am anyway, and…” He huffed out a helpless laugh and lifted his hands. They were shaking.
She felt a surge of sympathy for him. “I’ll do it.”
Ewan, to their surprise, came back with not only the sewing kit and unused catgut, but also a small flask, and before anyone could say a word, he splashed whisky onto Mal’s wound.
Mal made an awful noise through his teeth, half scream and half whimper. He drew in a few staggered breaths, the color rising in his face. “What the devil—”
Ewan backed up. “My ma swore by it for cuts and the like. Said it burned the infection right out.”
“It’s burning something right out,” Mal muttered. “You’d better hope it’s the infection.”
Ewan seemed to think it best to watch the rest of the proceedings from a distance.
After selecting the smallest needle, it took Georgina several tries to thread it. Her hands might not be shaking as badly as Lachlan’s, but they weren’t exactly steady, either. Once Lachlan helped Mal to a sitting position, she knelt beside him. Rested the tip of the needle against his skin.
“This will hurt,” she said, trying to steady herself as much as him.
Mal touched her hand, but, as she’d requested, he didn’t try to lighten the mood or tell her everything would be fine. They both knew too well that there were no guarantees.
“You can do this, lass,” he settled on, and, somehow, his belief in her gave her the strength to start.
She pressed the point of the needle in, alarmed and a little sickened by how easily it slipped beneath Mal’s skin. It wasn’t much different than stitching a piece of soft leather, really, like kid gloves or breeches. She made one stitch, then looked at Mal to see how he was doing—he had his eyes closed, his teeth ground together so hard a muscle in his jaw leaped.
She paused.
“Don’t stop,” he said through his teeth. “Just finish it.”
So she bent her head over the wound and returned to her task. She worked as quickly as she could while still being neat about it, hoping all the while that she was actually helping instead of making the wound worse. Looking at a few illustrations with her curious sister didn’t make her a surgeon.
Of course, as far as she knew, some surgeons didn’t have much training anyway, so maybe she was as good an option as anyone.
She tied off the catgut, cut the remaining length with scissors, then angled Mal so she could suture the exit wound. When she was finished, Andrew handed her a strip of clean, dry linen, which she wrapped around Mal’s shoulder. If Ewan’s whisky dousing had given Mal a burst of strength, enduring the stitches had sapped it from him again, and he sagged like a rag doll. Georgina wondered how much blood he’d lost while they made their escape.
“I need to…to rest…” he said.
Her heart lurched.
“Not yet,” Lachlan said. “We need to keep moving.”
“Go without me, then. I’ve taken care of you long enough.” He sounded very young and very weak. He didn’t seem to know what he was saying, but the words still hit Lachlan hard.
The other man blinked, his mouth flat and thin, and for a moment, Georgina thought he might be close to tears. “I’m sorry, Mal.”
They helped him onto the pony, Georgina settling in behind him, and she had to brace herself against his weight as he slumped back. “Can you manage?” Lachlan asked. “We have another two hours of riding.”
“Aye,” she said.
They rode on, into the darkest part of the night. The men rode beside her, in case she needed help, and she was grateful for their presence, for the way they formed a wall around herself and Mal, as if keeping the shadows at bay.
By the time they reached their destination, a lonely crofter’s cottage by the sea—long and low, stone, built with a thatched roof—the sun was just beginning to rise, and pink light spangled across the sky.
The next few minutes were a blur. A Highlander she didn’t know came out, exchanged a few words with Lachlan, and then set off again with Laddie on his heels. They moved Mal inside to a bed, where he slept, still and silent. His chest didn’t move.
For one horrible second, Georgina thought Mal might have died on the journey. She leaned close, so close that his mouth nearly touched her ear, and didn’t draw back until she felt his breath tickle her skin.
She sat back, so relieved she wanted to cry, and then made her way outside.
It hit her all of the sudden—some sort of delayed reaction to everything that had happened. To being shot at. To Mal being shot. To closing the wound with her own two hands. Her knees went weak, and her stomach churned. She had to brace herself against the side of the cottage, bent over, until she was sure she wouldn’t cast up her accounts.
When she straightened, Lachlan was there.
She tried to think of something to say. But she couldn’t ask if Mal would be all right, because Lachlan didn’t know any better than she did. “Is it safe here?” she asked instead.
“It should be. Mal will be able to rest, at least.”
“He didn’t mean what he said earlier.”
After a moment, Lachlan shrugged. “How do you know?”
“I don’t. I just don’t think he did.”
That earned her a humorless bark of a laugh. They stood in silence for a while, looking out at the vast dark sea. Georgina smelled brine on the air, and the rush of waves against the shore was a ceaseless melody, so powerful and persistent she couldn’t hear herself think. But that was all right. She didn’t really want to think.
“Thank you,” Lachlan said, taking her by surprise.
“For what?”
“For stitching him up. For keeping your head about you. You showed a lot of strength.”
Georgina didn’t know if she’d been strong or not. Mostly, she’d made herself numb, because if she hadn’t, she didn’t think she would have been able to take Mal’s body in her hands and put him back together, piece by piece.
Even now it was a difficult thing to contemplate.
“You should get some rest—there ar
e two beds inside. We can sleep out here.”
Until he’d said it, Georgina hadn’t realized how weary she was. But now, the thought of sinking down into soft sheets and not emerging for hours sounded like heaven.
“Will you wake me if…if something happens?”
At his sides, Lachlan’s hands curled tightly and then uncurled, as if he might be able to stop Mal from taking a turn for the worse through violence or sheer physical stubbornness. Jaw clenched, he finally gave one curt nod.
…
Georgina woke to a soft, plaintive whine. The beds in the one-room cottage were straw-stuffed mattresses set into a wooden box frame with a curtain that could be pulled shut for privacy. She swept aside the curtain, saw a sheepdog sitting on the dirt floor, bathed in a patch of sunlight from one of the two small windows, and blinked. She blinked again and it was still there—the dog from the raid—in the light it was easier to tell the animal was a female collie.
The dog licked her across the cheek and then trotted across the room to Mal’s bed. She paused, circled three times—for some mysterious purpose that seemed perfectly clear to the dog and perfectly unclear to Georgina—and settled down on the dirt floor in a spot that already appeared worn.
Had she followed them all this way just for Mal?
Georgina shook her head, even as her chest pinched. He collected strays without even trying. One more for their little band.
She didn’t know why they were all so drawn to him, and when she saw him, lying quiet and pale, she nearly hated him for it. She eased out from the bed, careful not to hit her head on the wooden frame, and padded over to him in stockinged feet.
He wasn’t sleeping deeply. When she approached, he opened his eyes.
And then, with that gold-green gaze on her, well, she couldn’t hate him anymore.
“How do you feel?”
“Like someone shot me through the shoulder,” he muttered. His voice was hoarse and dry.
She didn’t see any water, so she poured ale from a jug into a cup and then pulled up a chair to sit beside him while he drank it.
“You have a visitor.” She pointed at the dog. “If you’re going to add pets to your list of thievery, you should probably name her.”
“Her? Lassie, then.”
It took Georgina a moment to realize he’d just named the dog, in about two seconds flat, with no forethought. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised—naming things clearly wasn’t one of Mal’s talents. “You can’t call a female dog Lassie.”
“Why not?”
“It’s redundant. And it doesn’t really mean anything, does it? You could just as easily call her Woman or Lady.”
She wasn’t sure why this was important to her, but it was. Even a hapless sheepdog deserved her own name, and not one that more or less marked her as a female of the species and nothing else.
She hadn’t been there for Laddie’s naming. This time, she was putting her foot down.
Mal looked at the dog like he was contemplating it before he shook his head. “No, she’s clearly a lassie, not a lady.”
In spite of herself, Georgina’s mouth twitched. “What about Luath? I think it was the name of one of Rabbie Burns’s dogs. It means swift.”
“Lu, then—like Luath but spunkier. She looks like a spunky sort of dog.”
Spunky? But Mal was smiling at her and Georgina found herself smiling back. It was better than Lassie, at least.
Mal settled back against the mattress, wincing, and Georgina, in an awkward, automatic gesture, leaned closer, as if she could help him with her nearness alone. He didn’t look any better than he had the night before.
If anything, speaking to her seemed to have weakened him. Her fingers itched with the urge to touch his pale forehead. She turned away slightly, to look at Lu. But mostly so Mal wouldn’t see the worry she was sure was written across her face.
“I have something to show you,” he said. “The chest in the corner.”
She glanced at him. “A present?”
“Go look for yourself.”
When she was just about to lift the lid, he said, “I should have sold it…but I couldn’t really bear to get rid of it. It’s a beautiful piece.”
And then the chest was open, and a sob caught in Georgina’s throat. Her heart swelled, nearly shattered, with relief.
“Twist the key,” Mal said, “And then release the latch.”
But he didn’t have to instruct her. She already knew this object like she knew the back of her hand. She twisted the key, released the latch. The internal mechanism started to play a slow, quiet melody.
She cradled the smooth tortoiseshell case to her chest.
Her mother’s music box. Unsold, unharmed, unbroken.
Chapter Eleven
Mal’s head felt heavy, and his skin was overwarm. Through a haze of pain, he could tell that something seemed off about Catriona, but he couldn’t really tell what it was. She’d been quiet since she’d seen her gift. Now she was back in the chair next to him, staring down at the music box in her lap.
“Do you like it?” He felt a little unsure, suddenly. He’d thought it a fitting gift—a box that played beautiful music for the woman he admired the most. But maybe she didn’t think she deserved nice things? If so, it was a belief he was going to change.
She didn’t answer him. “Where did you get it?”
He had to cast back in his memory. Which was more difficult than usual, at the moment. “Llynmore Castle. It’s the estate of the earl of Arden.”
“It’s his?”
“I don’t know.” He wasn’t sure why she was asking. Her head was still turned down, and he couldn’t see her face. “No…Lachlan was the one who broke into the castle—he’d heard the family was away…I think… Yes, he said it looked like a woman’s room. His wife, maybe. Or…sister’s?”
He thought he’d heard something about Lord Arden having siblings, but he hadn’t cared much at the time, and he cared less now.
“It’s not like any of them need it, though.”
“Why is that?” she asked quietly.
“Why? Why should they be the only ones who have fine things? You can’t tell me any of the Arden women put together are worth one Highland lass, and what do they get? Castles and music boxes and five-course meals, and working-class Highland women get this.”
He gestured to the cottage. Ignored a pang of guilt. There was certainly nothing wrong with these one-room homes. He’d grown up in one, him and his entire family, and they’d been happy. They’d been warm and safe; they’d learned numbers and letters and music at their mother or father’s knee—no matter how busy his parents had been, they’d always made time for that. They’d had a life there, a full one, before it was taken away.
No, it wasn’t the houses themselves.
It was the disparity of the thing.
“Those Arden women aren’t even fit to polish your boots, Catriona, but they’ll think it’s the other way around.”
She was silent for a long moment. “How do you know it didn’t mean something to her?”
“To who?”
“The woman you took this from.”
“Why should I care about some spoiled aristocrat’s feelings?”
Her grip tightened on the music box. “You shouldn’t, probably.”
“If ye don’t want it, you don’t have to take it.” Mal was agitated suddenly. It felt like they were fighting—Cat’s quiet disapproval was as loud as a shout. And he’d been shot mere hours before. And his head was beginning to pound. All in all, not a very good start to the day.
She looked up, and her face changed from smoothly implacable to stark with fear. “Mal?”
“What?”
“You’re flushed.” She reached out. She touched him. It was something she tried to avoid, he realized—usually, when they made contact, it was the other way around. But this, this was glorious. Her fingertips pressed to his forehead felt like ice against his hot skin.
His eyes
closed, almost of their own volition. “Don’t stop touching me, lass. Never stop touching me.”
“Mal?”
But he was too far gone to answer. He was warm, and she was cool, and he was so, so tired.
…
Georgina could leave. She could gather up her things right now and go. She had what she’d come for.
But Mal was weak and feverish, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she left now, she would be abandoning him. He’d saved her, after all—he’d pushed her down when they’d heard gunfire, shielded her with his own body.
And she didn’t know if she could bear to leave him like this, anyway.
So, when Lachlan and the others came back in, she was waiting.
“He has a fever,” she said.
Lachlan paused. The gravity of that statement hit them all with the weight of bricks. “How does the wound look?”
“Fine.” While he slept, she’d removed his bandage and replaced it with another, relieved to see that the wound itself was unchanged.
“So it might not be infected,” Lachlan pressed.
Georgina worried at her lip. “I suppose not.” She didn’t know if there was any way to tell, until the fever either broke or got worse, or the wound actually showed signs of infection. And if it did, there wouldn’t be a thing they could do for him.
Except be with him. At the end.
Georgina felt tears sting the corners of her eyes.
She hated sickbeds. She had the overwhelming urge to run outside, swing onto the back of one of the ponies, and race across the moors like wolves were at her heels. They reminded her, too vividly, of a time when she’d been weak, when now all she wanted was to be strong.
But she found herself unwilling to leave Mal’s side.
She stood up, restlessness and fear making her heart pound. She had to do something. She would tear her hair out if she had to sit still any longer. “Is there quinine powder?”
