Behind her, the water in the tin bathtub turned black.
Callie battled with a vision of a small broken body lying among jagged rocks and shuddered. He would be all right, he would. She prayed silently.
“Step onto the mat.”
All resistance scrubbed out of him, Jim stood, like a drowned but extremely clean rat, his hair in wet spikes, as he was briskly dried and wrapped in a large towel.
“Now sit! And eat that—and don’t argue!” Mrs. Barrow handed him a plate covered by a huge slab of pork pie. The pie disappeared in seconds.
Callie glanced out of the window for the twentieth time. Still no sign of a tall man and a small boy on a black horse. Anxiety gnawed at her.
Mrs. Barrow fetched a pair of scissors. “I’m going to cut your hair,” she told Jim. “It’s too knotted to comb out and besides, it’s the only way for us to check for any cuts on your head.”
He shrank back against the seat. “There ain’t none! I’m all right, honest!”
“Isn’t any, notain’t none,” she corrected him. “And sit still or I’ll end up chopping off your ears as well.”
Jim sat very, very still. Hair fell in matted clumps around him.
“That’s better, you look almost human now.” Mrs. Barrow stood back and regarded him severely. “Now, let’s have a look at this nose.” Jim’s hands came up protectively and she pushed them away. “Don’t be silly. Do you think I’m going to hurt you?”
Barrow winked at Callie. “Aye, why would you fear Mrs. Barrow, lad?” he said in a deep rumble. “She’s only scrubbed every inch of your body raw, threatened to boil you in lye and cut off your ears. Nothing to be worried about, there.”
“Oh pshaw! The lad knows full well I wouldn’t hurt him.”
The boy gave her a wide-eyed look of amazement.
“Oh, don’t give me that look—you knew! Now, sit still while I tend to that nose or I won’t give you any fresh bread and jam. With clotted cream.”
Jim worked out that threat and sat like a lamb while she cleaned and examined his nose. Barrow winked at Callie again.
She gave him a quick smile. Five-and-twenty years of rigid training slipping away, unregretted.
Papa would have pointed out that this is what came of such laxness—grooms winked at her in the most familiar way, and cooks cuddled her and called her lovie.
And the worst of it was, Callie quite liked it. Or she would if she weren’t so worried.
“And you’re sure that Jim is all right?” Nicky asked Gabe for the third time.
“Yes. It looked worse than it was. It’s sore, that’s all. The most important thing was to get it cleaned of all that mud. Wounds can fester if they’re left dirty.” Gabe finished strapping the portmanteau to Trojan’s back. “You weren’t worried about being left here?”
“No,” Nicky said. “Here, I can see for miles. I can see the sea and the path and nobody could creep up to grab me. I saw you coming ages before you got here.”
Gabe frowned at the boy. “Are you worried about people grabbing you?”
“Yes, of course.” He spoke as if it was a perfectly normal fear.
“Has anyone ever tried to grab you before?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” So Nicky’s mother had grounds for her anxieties after all.
“How did you get that?” Nicky pointed at Gabe’s ear.
Gabe automatically touched the thin, pale line that went along his jaw and ended with his severed earlobe. “A bayonet.”
“If he’d got you a bit lower down you would have been killed,” said Nicky with a child’s blunt relish.
