An apology. One that did genuinely seem sincere.
And then she went on, offering to work, to clean of all things. Her hand swept outward in a graceful arc, the loose fall of her hair swaying across her slim back with the motion, as she indicated the whole sorry length of the room. It was the laborof Cory and others like him she named, not the sort of task a woman of her ilk should be committing herself to.
Aye, a woman of her ilk, though he’d yet to figure out what that was. She had none of the weary deference of the peasants, nor the unquestioning servitude of washerwomen. Neither did she bear herself like a lady of rank, lofty in her manner or guarded in her speech. She spoke too boldly for a noblewoman, too refined for a servant, and too learned by half for either. She didn’t fit the shape of anything he knew, and that unsettled him more than her strange claims of coming from another time.
His jaw worked, unsettled. Against his will, something shifted in him as he listened to her.
Had he misjudged her?
He didn’t even like to consider it, did not like believing he understood her only to discover reasons to doubt himself. And he refused to give up his suspicion, no matter how pretty her speech or how generous her offer of labor. Suspicion kept him sharp, kept everyone at Caeravorn safe. He would not loosen his grip on it, not for flaxen hair catching the sun or a sweet apology given in a soft voice.
Still, he lingered by the door, silent, watching her. He told himself it was to rescue her or remove her as needed, to ensure she caused no further disruption. But in truth, he had some inkling that wasn’t true, wasn’t the only reason.
Nevertheless, he did take his leave before she might have turned and discovered his eavesdropping.
***
What followed over the ensuing week consumed the better part of each day. She rolled up her sleeves and set to work, ignoring Diarmad’s lingering scowls. With more help from Cory, by way of further translating, she convinced the keep’s washerwomento add one extra load to their weekly schedule, boiling every rag and cloth Claire could get her hands on. She proudly showed them to Diarmad, who made nothing of it, and then went about changing every strip of dressing in the barn—after having Cory explain in Scots to Diarmad what she was about and why. She got the impression that he wasn’t too concerned, maybe only glad that she would be busy and leave him alone.
That’s when she met Callum. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, with a face still boyish beneath the wispy stubble that shadowed his jaw. His wound troubled her most of all—an ugly, diagonal slash across his midsection, as though an axe had caught him while he twisted away. Without surgery there was no way to know if any organs had been damaged. She assumed the sloppy stitches had come by Diarmad’s hand, and wondered if even that, just enough to mostly stop the bleeding, had somehow kept the poor kid alive. When she’d carefully changed his dressing, she’d been distressed by the continued oozing of pus and blood. She spent more time cleaning his wound than any other, while the boy drifted in and out of a faintness that looked too near death for her liking. He didn’t speak a word of English, and only stared at her with dark, glassy eyes when he was wakeful. Claire gave him what comfort she could, a smile, a hand to his shoulder, the same quiet reassurance she’d offered countless patients tethered to ventilators in her own world. His answering blink, slow and trusting, was enough to keep her trying.
The next battle was the floor. She set Cory to fetching buckets of sand from the shore, and together they scattered it thick across the packed earth, working it in with stiff straw brushes until the old blood lifted. Claire knelt until her knees ached, scraping dried clots away with a broken board, sweeping the foul slurry out the door. Each day the earth lightened a little, until thestink lessened and the ground no longer seemed a map of men’s suffering pressed into dirt.
Next, she turned her eye to the men themselves. They lay on the floor itself, vulnerable to filth and vermin, and too close to each other. At Ivy’s helpful suggestion and with Cory translating, she pressed her case to the carpenter, that she desired crude wooden frames, nothing fancy, just enough to raise a man off the ground. The first arrived two days later, rough-hewn but sturdy. Claire coaxed a pallet of straw onto it and, with Cory’s help, eased one of the fevered soldiers onto the cot. When Diarmad approached, bristling—or more aptly, looking as if he were about to explode, Claire smiled innocently at him and offered, “See? Now you won’t have to bend and stoop until your back breaks—or sit in the muck beside them to tend them.”
His reply then was a string of words that made Cory wince—and refuse to repeat—but Diarmad didn’t argue when the next frame came, and then another, until more and more men were lifted from the blood-stained earth.
She found other small victories. With the carpenter already on board—a man thankfully blessed with four sons, old enough to apprentice with their father but too young to fight wars—she convinced him to build shelves along the short wall just inside the barn on the left. At last, the boiled cloths had a place, neatly rolled and stacked away from the dirty pile waiting to be laundered. Pots of salves, jars of herbs, and the surgeon’s tools all found order there. Cory joked that she was arranging the sick house like a noblewoman’s pantry, but even he seemed impressed by the changes wrought.
Fresh air became her next crusade. She ordered the shutters propped open whenever the weather allowed, scolding anyone who tried to bar them shut. To keep the swallows from swooping in, she stretched scraps of thin linen, procured somehow by Ivy, across the openings, tied in place with twine. It wasn’t perfect,but the breeze that stirred through the long room chased away the worst of the stench.
Even waste had its place now. She had Cory, with the help of several soldiers, dig a pit beyond the stable yard, insisting all dirty water be dumped there, not left to rot outside the door. It was a miserable job, but once the pit filled with the foul runoff, she could see the difference—the ground near the threshold stayed dry, the air cleaner.
Finally, she began to track the men themselves. With a scrap of charcoal, she marked their names onto the plank boards of another wall. Beside each, she drew crude lines for fevers broken, for wounds mending, for those worsening. At first, the writing silenced the sick house. While the soldiers who were awake had watched her earlier labors with amused grins—some even with a curl of derision at the sight of her scouring the floor like the lowest servant—they grew quiet when she lifted the stub of charcoal and began making marks on the wall beam.
It was Cory who bent close to whisper the truth. “Most dinna ken their letters,” he said. “Mayhap nae even the laird. And him”—he tilted his chin at Diarmad—“he kens naught of it for certain.”
Claire blinked, suddenly aware of the weight of every watching gaze. “Tell Diarmad it’s a way of keeping track—of remembering. If a man’s fever rises, I can see when it began. If his wound worsens, I’ll know how long it’s been. And if he improves—if he sits up tomorrow—I can mark that too.”
The boy translated, stumbling over a few words and requesting alternates, but eventually he got through it. Claire tapped the beam, where the first marks were etched beside a name.
“One mark for fever,” she explained further, “a short note about treatment, another mark for progress. It helps us know what’s working. Helps us see who needs more or different care.”
More than once afterward, Claire caught Diarmad sneaking a look at her marks, squinting as if trying to make sense of her patient charts.
It was crude—everything was only half as perfect as she imagined it. It was also exhausting. And yet, as the days passed, the sick house no longer reeked like a slaughter yard. The moans of the men were fewer, their color a little less ashen, their eyes a little brighter. Setbacks still came, but not as swiftly, and not as often.
Claire felt the difference deep in her bones and was thrilled for having purpose now, never once wondering why shewanteda purpose here, in this time, or why she wasn’t wishing more fervently that she might somehow return home.
Chapter Nine
Lost and Found
––––––––
Claire happened to spot Ciaran crossing the yard through one of the newly opened window bays. She didn’t think of them as true windows—there was no glass, only a rough opening in the wall with a hinged panel of planks that could be dropped down or propped up beneath the low eaves.
The rain had eased, leaving the ground slick, but Ciaran strode across the muck as if it didn’t suck at his boots, maybe even as if he dared it to try. For a moment, she found herself transfixed by the breadth of his shoulders and the long line of his back, and the way the sun caught on the red glints in his dark auburn hair. She shook off the foolish fascination quickly enough and hurried after him, only to find the yard’s muck far less intimidated by her. It clung greedily to her poor, abused sneakers, releasing each foot with a wet, suckingsquelchthat made her grimace with each step.
