“Peace, woman. I am no’ here for you.” He gestured to the back of the horse he led where Jeannie saw what looked like a bundle. No, it was a man.
She gasped. “What has happened?” What had he brought to her door?
“I need a place to lay him down. I fear he is dying.” Finnan stopped at Jeannie’s side and turned to the bundle, which she now saw possessed a brown head and a young man’s face. He already looked dead.
Instinct made her block the way. Trouble, that was what he brought, and Jeannie had already experienced enough of that in her life. Yet he slid the lad down from the back of the horse, which stood like a rock, and then lifted him in his arms like a child.
His tawny eyes, grave and intent, met Jeannie’s. “I fear he is dying,” he repeated. “I will never get him all the way back to Dun Mhor.”
Jeannie made a swift decision. “Come.” She turned and led the way into the cottage, catching a glimpse of Aggie’s horrified face in passing. The cottage possessed but the two ground floor rooms, one of which was Jeannie’s bedroom, and the loft. She knew MacAllister would never make it up the ladder with his burden, so she led him straight into her room and indicated the bed.
A small, bare place this was, with only the bed, a single chest below the window, and the few meager possessions Jeannie had been able to bring from Dumfries.
Finnan eased the young man down on Jeannie’s bed as tenderly as he might a child, and she got her first good look at the lad.
“Sweet heavens!”
Finnan MacAllister had not lied; the lad, sore hurt and awash with blood, looked past saving.
“What befell him?” A hunting accident? But these looked like no wounds taken in the hunt. The lad’s clothing had been rent as with a sharp blade, and the blood came hot and fast.
Finnan shook his head. “An attack in the copse not far north of here. Danny is no warrior, and he was unarmed.” Hard anger colored his voice, far too well disciplined at the moment to qualify as rage.
Jeannie turned to Aggie who, clearly aghast, hovered in the bedroom doorway. “Bring water and what bandaging you can find. Use a sheet if you have to.” Jeannie possessed very few linens, but needs must.
She glanced at Finnan. “Who would do such a thing?”
“Avrie’s men.”
That made her stare at him harder. “Surely not. There is no one at Avrie House save the Dowager.” Unless the rumors Aggie had brought home were true.
He flicked at her a glance sharp as a sword. “Her grandsons have returned.”
Jeannie contemplated it even as she watched Finnan open the lad’s rent tunic. His hands, already stained red, moved with the competence of one skilled in tending wounds.
“Have you been trained to treat injuries?”
“Nay, but a man who makes his way with the sword learns a few things about stanching wounds. That scar on Geordie’s belly? ’Twas I sewed that up on a cold winter’s day, with coarse twine.”
Jeannie had never seen Geordie’s belly, but it seemed no fit time to say so. The red cloth came away and the lad’s chest into view. The stroke, high toward his left shoulder, had surely just missed his heart.
“Could be worse,” Finnan grunted, clearly agreeing with Jeannie’s assessment. “Where is your maid with those cloths?”
Jeannie, half dizzy from the metallic smell of blood, went to the door, where she was in time to take a basin from Aggie before its contents spilled. She bore it back to the bed and set it on the floor.
“Here, mistress.” Aggie tiptoed in with cloths which Jeannie recognized as portions of her very best sheet. She sighed and folded a pad even as Aggie stood staring down at the lad—Danny, Finnan had called him—like a woman in a dream. “Is he dead?”
As if in response to her voice, the lad opened his eyes, wide and gray-blue, full of a sweetness that might belong to a child.
“What happened, Master Finnan?”
“You ha’ been struck, lad.” Finnan’s tone, harsh and rough, belied the great tenderness with which he worked at the wound at Danny’s shoulder. He bathed away the blood and revealed a ragged rent, the sight of which turned Jeannie’s stomach queasy. Surely human flesh had never been meant to suffer such abuse.
The water in the basin immediately turned pink. Without looking at Jeannie, Finnan reached for another pad of cloth, which she folded as quickly as possible and handed to him.
“He has but one arm.” Aggie whispered the words as if unaware she spoke.
“Hush,” Jeannie told her even as Danny’s gaze found Aggie’s face. “Go and heat more water, quick as you can.”
