Kettering came to his side before Lucan’s, his earlier stilted aloofness with him now replaced by a distracted air and what appeared to be new lines of concern about the priest’s eyes and mouth. He placed a basket of pungent herbson the floor.
“Where is Beryl?” he asked as Kettering bent to inspect the wound onPadraig’s ribs.
“She went to lie down,” he muttered. “She’s been through an ordeal.”
“I ken. I was there,” Padraig reminded him. “Ow!” he exclaimed as the priest pressed into the cut.
Kettering straightened and wiped his hands on the towel hanging on his cincture. “You’ll be fine while I attend to Sir Lucan. I will plaster your wounds when I’ve finished with him.”
Padraig reached out and grabbed the priest’s arm, staying him when he would have turned away. “I want my father’s pin back.”
Kettering shook him off without a response and then picked up the basket and went at once to the end of Lucan’s cot.
“Soak the foot through three changes of water,” Kettering announced with a sigh, “and then we shall see it bandaged. You must not walk on it, Sir Lucan. I’ll need to check it hourly, that it does not fester. At the first sign—”
“No. No, no, no,” Lucan interrupted, coming onto his elbows. “You’ll not amputate my foot.”
Kettering fixed him with a look. “I’ll notwatch you die.”
“Padraig,” Lucan called crisply. “Assist me.”
Padraig turned his head with a quirked brow. “I think you should listento him, Lucan.”
“I require you to get your Scots arse over here and assist me in liberating my person from this crypt before God’s butcher turns my foot into mince.”
Padraig couldn’t help his bark of laughter. It was the first time he had heard Lucan Montague lose his composure, and his resultant language was too humorous to ignore.
“Let him soak it and bandage it, Lucan,” Padraig reasoned. “He’s nae cleaver in his handnow, doos he?”
“Thank you, Master Boyd,” the priest said stiffly, but he didn’t quite meet his eye.
“I’ll help you keep Sir Lucan under control,” Padraig said easily. “If, while you tend him, you tell me why you think my da’s pin belongs to you.”
Now Kettering did turn his eyes to Padraig’s.
But it was Lucan who came to the priest’s rescue, turning his head to regard Padraig. “Did Tommy tell you how he came to be in possession of the pin?”
Padraig shook his head. “Nay. Only that it and the man who’d given it to him had once saved his life.”
Kettering’s temper was just barely in check; Padraig could see it by the color returning to his cheeks. The priest went to the hearth to dip ladlesful of steaming water into a metal dish. When he returned to the bedside he seemed to be under a bitmore restraint.
“Thomas Annesley wasn’t given it. He stole it.”
Padraig opened his mouth to argue that his father was no thief, but Lucan again inserted himself in the argument.
“I don’t think he stole it,” Lucan said quietly as Kettering helped him into a seated position on the side of the bed. “Thomas Annesley told me the tale of the night he ran from Darlyrede House. The night he met your father, Kettering.”
Padraig felt his head draw back. “Your father was alsoat Darlyrede?”
“No,” the priest said in a clipped voice. He set the pan on the floor and added cooler water from a ewer near the bed. “He was only passing on the road with his friend, Blake, that night.”
“Yes, Blake,” Lucan agreed. He hissed for a moment as Kettering guided his foot into the water. “Thomas claimed he was direly wounded in his escape from Darlyrede, and that your father stopped on the road to help him. Thomas’s injuries were so severe that your father gave him his hat pin upon which to bite so that he could seat Thomas onhis own horse.”
Kettering looked into Lucan’s face for a solemn moment. “Yes,” he agreed quietly. “That is something he would have done, even not knowing who ThomasAnnesley was.”
“But when Thomas heard that the two men unwittingly planned to return him to the very place from which he was so desperate to escape, he became more frightened, and he used the pin to spur the horse onward, thwarting their good intentions to help him.”
“Ah-ah,” Kettering said, his thoughtful expression fleeing before the frown that cascaded over his feature. “Even was the story you were told true up until that point, Sir Lucan, you—or Thomas Annesley—have left out vital information.” Kettering looked directlyat Padraig now.
