Highland Crown Page 3

  How long she stood there, she didn’t know. But suddenly she became aware of Jean hurrying toward her from the cottage. The old woman reached her and plucked at Isabella’s cloak.

  “I told ye to stay inside,” Jean said fiercely, motioning toward the door. “This is village business. It’s no business of yers. Get back inside afore someone sees ye.”

  “Who set the ship on fire?”

  “They did, the blasted curs.” She spat in the direction of the water. “They wanted to deny us whatever they were carrying.”

  “A villager shot a man in the boat,” Isabella said, unwilling to forget what she’d seen. “In cold blood.”

  “I saw nothing of that. And neither did ye.”

  No law. No principle. No compassion. The only thing that mattered was one’s own survival. This is how they lived. And, she guessed, how they’d always lived. This was why John brought her here. Still, it was difficult to witness. But she had to remain silent. Three days, she reminded herself. Three more days and she’d sail away from the Highlands. And the events of this night would fill only one thin chapter in the tragic memoir of her life in Scotland.

  “Go in, I say.” Jean peered through a gap in the boulders at the villagers. “Now. And don’t be talking of shooting. We’ve got no guns in the Highlands.”

  Isabella planted her feet when the old woman tried to push her back toward the cottage. A movement at the sea’s edge drew her eye. At the base of one of the boulders that cut off this narrow stretch of stony beach from the long strand leading to the village and Duff Head, a man was dragging himself through the wind-whipped foam. Just above the waterline, he sank onto the beach.

  “Someone from the ship!”

  Jean gripped Isabella’s arm tightly. “I see no one.”

  She shook herself loose of the older woman. “I care nothing about salvaged goods. Your villagers can keep it all. But that man needs help.”

  “Wait. Ye can’t.”

  For many, being a physician meant following a dignified profession, one that generally garnered respect and modest financial benefits. But to Isabella, it was an obligation and an honor. She always treated her chosen path as a responsibility. It didn’t matter who or what the patient’s circumstances were. Friend or foe, poor or rich, she did the same for all. She’d been given a gift that she was determined to use.

  She moved quickly down the stony slope to the water’s edge, and Jean stayed close behind her, grumbling the entire way.

  The man’s longish dark hair was matted with seaweed and grit. His face was half-buried in the stones and sand. He was clearly a large man, tall and broad across the shoulders. From the well-made wool jacket and from the quality leather of the boots, she decided he was no ordinary tar. He was either a passenger or an officer from the ship.

  Isabella put her back to the gusts of rain and crouched beside him. Putting her fingers on his throat, she felt for a pulse. His skin was clammy and cold.

  “God willing, the dog’s dead,” Jean mumbled, hovering over her.

  “Your wish might come true. He’s more dead than alive.”

  If this was the man who was shot, she imagined there’d be no mercy shown if the villagers found him alive. And his body would never be found. The rising tide was washing up around his boots.

  “Help me turn him over.”

  “I’ll not help ye with any such thing. And if ye have any sense, ye’ll leave him be and let the sea take him.”

  Isabella wiped the salty rain from her face and pulled his arm, managing on her own to turn him onto his side. A growth of beard covered his face, but his skin was pale as ash, his breathing shallow. Taking hold of his jacket, she rolled him onto his back. Her hand came away red. She pushed his coat open and saw a hole in his black waistcoat an inch or so above the heart. Blood was seeping from the wound.

  “I knew it.” She pressed her hand against the wound to stop the bleeding.

  “Let him go.”

  She pressed harder. The storm and the rage of the sea blended with Jean’s warnings before fading away. Her mind was transported back to their house in Edinburgh. The stranger’s face was Archibald’s. Warm blood oozed through her fingers. All her years of training and she hadn’t been able to save him. His life had just slipped away.

  Isabella would not let this man die.

  Archibald was her friend, her mentor, and her teacher. Just as when her father died, losing him had slapped her down with the cruelty of life’s uncertainties. The responsibility for the well-being of her sister and her stepdaughter was overwhelming. In a moment, she’d been stripped of the ideal existence she’d been living. At four and thirty years of age, she had to learn how to survive. She had to run for her life.

  “Not much is washing ashore.” Jean’s voice came to her from the gap in the boulders, where she was watching the villagers down the beach. “Folk’ll be coming this way to see if anything drifted this far.”

  Blood continued to pulse from the wound.

  The old woman shuffled back to Isabella’s side. “Ye have to go in, mistress. Now. They won’t be any too happy with this one.”

  “I can’t let him die. Not again. I can’t,” she said, her voice belonging to a stranger.

  Isabella reached for a clump of seaweed that washed up beside them. She pressed it into the wound. The bullet was still in him. If she could extract it, sew the wound shut, she could stop the bleeding. It was the only way to save him. Ten years ago, she’d helped her father operate on the bloodied men carted back to Wurzburg from the battle at Leipzig. After a week, they’d still carried Russian musket balls and shrapnel in their festering wounds. The death rate had been dreadful.

  The bag containing her surgical instruments was beside the cot. “Help me take him up the hill.”

  “This one will never see the inside of my cottage. Just leave him.”

  “I’ll drag him up there by myself, then.”

  Jean tugged at Isabella’s cloak again. “Yer daft, woman. Ye remember nothing of what I said last night, do ye?”

  The patch of seaweed was helping staunch the flow of the blood. Isabella looked up at the sandy stretch, trying to decide on how she could get him up the hill.

  “Ye listen to me now, mistress—”

  “I am not leaving him,” she cut in sternly. “Do you hear? I am not letting him die out here on the beach. Now, you do what you see fit. But if you want to deliver this man up to your friends, then you can just hand me over with him.”

  The older woman let go of the cloak and straightened up, staring at her as if she were a creature with two heads.

  They both started at the sound of someone calling from the beach beyond the boulders. A man’s voice.

  Too soon, Isabella thought. Her bravado was being tested. “I stand by my words.”

  “Stay down and don’t move,” Jean hissed. “Mind me now.”

  The urgency in the old woman’s voice sank in. Isabella crouched beside the injured man. She kept firm pressure on the seaweed over the wound.

  Concealed by the boulder at the edge of the water, she watched Jean climb with surprising agility onto the rocks to head off the villager.

  “Oy, Auld Jean. Anything come in along this stretch?”

  From where Isabella waited, she could see the man was carrying a stout cudgel.

  “Nay, Habbie. Not a thing, curse ’em,” she wailed. “The dogs blew it up rather than giving us our deserving share. And what purpose does that serve, I’d like to know.”

  “If any of them boats land nearby, I’m thinking the lads’ll be taking it out of their hides.”

  “Well, that blast was a fine show, to be sure,” she remarked. “What do ye think they had in there to go to such trouble?”

  “French gold and Old Boney’s crown, no doubt. Wouldn’t want that lot to fall into the wrong hands.” Habbie laughed. “Though maybe they was carrying a weapon or two.”

  Illegal in the Highlands, Isabella thought.

  “And maybe a k
eg of powder or two?”

  “Ye could be on to something, woman. Wouldn’t be the first smuggler to run too close to the Head.”

  Isabella frowned at the man lying motionless in the sand beside her. A smuggler.

  The sound of others calling from the beach drew the villager’s attention. “Come for us if anything washes ashore. Don’t be dragging any crates out of the sea by yerself.”

  “Of course, ye fool. I’m too auld to be doing anything like that.”

  Isabella didn’t know if it was safe yet to let out a breath of relief. The sailor or the smuggler or the passenger or whoever this man was, remained unconscious. But beneath her palms, she could feel his beating heart. He was not giving up.

  She watched Jean make her way back down.

  “Thank you,” Isabella said. “Now can you please help me drag him up to the cottage?”

  “Best look at him again. The blasted cur looks dead enough to me.”

  “He’s not dead. He—”

  The words caught in her throat as a hand shot up and long, viselike fingers clutched her windpipe, squeezing hard.

  Isabella gasped for air, stunned by the attack. She tried desperately to yank herself free of the deadly grip. She tried to claw at his face but couldn’t reach. Her nails dug into his wrist, but he wouldn’t let go. His eyes were open but unfocused. He was intent on murder, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.

  Her lungs threatened to burst. This was the end, she thought. Her destiny was not to die beside Archibald and his rebel comrades in Edinburgh, but here, alone, her life choked out of her in a storm on a Highland shore. Jean would surely push her body into the sea, and her killer’s body would soon follow. Maisie and Morrigan’s faces flashed across her mind’s eye. The two would need to survive without her, Isabella decided, feeling herself losing consciousness. They had each other, and they were no longer children but strong women. They would need to be.

  But her end didn’t come so quickly. Unexpectedly, the man released his grip with the same suddenness that he attacked her. Isabella fell backward onto the stony beach, coughing and trying to force air back into her chest.

  One breath. Her lungs protested. Another breath. She was breathing. Breathing. She held her bruised throat.

  Jean was crouched beside the man’s head, proudly waving a good-sized rock in her hand.

  “This time I’d say the sea dog really is dead.”

  CHAPTER 4

  O, Woman! In our hours of ease,

  Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,

  And variable as the shade

  By the light quivering aspen made;

  When pain and anguish wring the brow,

  A ministering angel thou!

  —Sir Walter Scott, “Marmion,” Canto VI, stanza 30

  Cinaed looked up into a woman’s face. Fine black eyebrows arched over brown eyes that were focused on his chest. Thick dark hair was pulled back in a braid and pinned up at the back of her head. Intent on what she was doing, she was unaware that he was awake.

  Her brow was furrowed, and lines of concentration framed the corners of her mouth. The grey travel dress she wore was plain and practical. She was not old, but not young either. Not fat, not thin. From where he lay, he guessed she was neither tall nor short. She was beautiful, but not in the flashy way of the women who generally greeted sailors in the port towns. Nor was she like the eyelash-fluttering lasses in Halifax who never stopped trying to get his attention after a Sunday service. He didn’t bother to assess the pleasant symmetry of her face, however. The “brook no nonsense” expression warned that she wasn’t one to care what others thought of her looks, anyway.

  But who was she?

  The last clear memory he had was seeing a flash from the shore. The next moment his chest had been punched with what felt like a fiery poker. Everything after that floated in a jumbled haze. He recalled being in the water, trying to swim toward some distant shore. Or was he struggling to reach the longboat again?

  Cinaed didn’t know what part of his body hurt more, the fearsome pounding in his head or the burning piece of that poker still lodged in his chest.

  “Where am I?” he demanded. “Who the deuce are you?”

  Startled, she sat up straight, pulling away and scowling down at him. In one blood-covered hand, she held a needle and thread. In the other, a surgeon’s knife that she now pointed directly at his throat.

  “Try to choke me again and I’ll kill you.”

  “Choke you? For the love of God, woman!”

  His ship. The reef. The explosion. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to clear away the fog. Everything he’d been through struck him like a broadside.

  The Highland Crown was gone. He’d detonated the powder himself. Where were his men? He’d climbed into the last longboat. They’d been fired at from the beach. He’d been shot.

  Cinaed grabbed the knife-wielding wrist before she could pull it away. “Where are my men?”

  An ancient woman in Highland garb slid into his line of sight behind the younger one. She was making sure he saw the cudgel she had over one shoulder.

  “This one is worth less than auld fish bait, mistress,” she taunted. The crone was ready and obviously eager to use that club. “And thankless, too, I’m bound. I was right when I said ye should never have saved him.”

  Should never have saved him. He released the wrist, and the hand retreated. But the dark-haired woman didn’t move away. As if nothing had happened, she dropped the knife on the cot, out of his reach. The brown eyes again focused on his chest, and she put her needle back to work.

  He winced but kept his hands off the woman.

  By all rights, he should be dead. A musket ball had cut him down and knocked him into the water. He should indeed be finished. Someone on shore had tried to kill him.

  But he was alive, and apparently he owed his life to this one. Gratitude flowed through him.

  “Want me to give him another knock in the head?” the old witch asked.

  “Last stitch. Let me finish,” she said in a voice lacking the heavier burr of the northern accent. “You can kill him when I’m done.”

  A sense of humor, Cinaed thought. At least, he hoped she was joking. She tied off the knot, cut the thread, and straightened her back, inspecting her handiwork. He lifted his head to see what kind of quilt pattern she’d made of him. A puckered line of flesh, topped by a row of neat stitches, now adorned the area just below his collarbone. He’d been sewn up by surgeons before, and they’d never done such a fine job of it. He started to sit up to thank her.

  That was a grave mistake. For an instant, he thought the old woman had used her cudgel, after all. When he pushed himself up, his brain exploded, and he had no doubt it was now oozing out of his ears and eye sockets. The taste of bilge water bubbled up in his throat.

  “A bucket,” he groaned desperately.

  The woman was surprisingly strong. She rolled him and held a bucket as his stomach emptied. She’d been expecting this, it appeared. However horrible he was feeling before, it was worse now as the room twisted and rocked and spun. Long stretches of dry heaves wracked his body.

  “Blood I can deal with,” the old woman grouched from somewhere in the grey haze filling the room. He heaved again. “By all the saints!”

  “I’ll clean up later. Don’t worry about any of this. Go sit by the fire, Jean. You’ve had a long night.”

  Cinaed felt a wet cloth swab the back of his neck and his face.

  Jean mumbled something unintelligible about “weak-bellied” and “not to be trusted” and “a misery.” When he hazarded a glance at her, she was glaring at him like some demon guarding the gates of hell.

  “Does my nephew know that yer a doctor?” she asked, not taking her eyes off of him as she snatched up the knife and handed it to the younger woman.

  A doctor! He lifted his head to look at her again. She was definitely a woman. And a fine-looking one, at that. He was still breathing, and she’d do
ne an excellent job on whatever damage had been done to his chest by the bullet. But the possibility of any trained physician, or even a surgeon, being here in this remote corner of the Highlands was so implausible. Male or female.

  “John knows.”

  “But ye say yer not a midwife,” Jean persisted, a note of disbelief evident in her tone. “And not just a surgeon, in spite of all them fine, shiny instruments in that bag of yers.”

  “I trained as a physician at a university. But I’m finding that my abilities as a surgeon have more practical uses wherever I go.”

  University trained. Cinaed stole another look at her. She had an air of confidence in the way she spoke and acted that convinced him that she was telling the truth. And for the first time since the Highland Crown struck that reef, he wondered if his good fortune was still holding, if only by thread. Lady Luck, apparently, had sent him Airmid, his own goddess of healing.

  Long-forgotten words, chanted over some injury, came back to him from childhood. Bone to bone. Vein to vein. Skin to skin. Blood to blood. Sinew to sinew. Marrow to marrow. Flesh to flesh …

  From the floor, she retrieved a bowl containing bloody cloths. A musket ball lay nestled like a robin’s egg on the soaked rags. By the devil, he thought, his admiration nearly overflowing. She’d not only stitched him together, she’d dug the bullet out of him.

  The deuce! He’d never seen anyone like her. Frankly, he didn’t care if she came from the moon to practice medicine here. He owed his life to her.

  “And a woman doctor, to boot,” Jean said. “Imagine that. I never knew there were any.”

  Cinaed lifted his head to catch a glimpse of the heart-shaped face next to his. The eyes were dark and beautiful, but she wasn’t seeing him. Her attention was on wiping the sweat from his face.