“Did I not warn the lot of you at the inn? This is what comes from foolishness. He should have been tended to at once.”
Duncan turned to look down at her, his shoulder nearly brushing hers with the movement. But rather than note his proximity and move away, she stood her ground. He smelled surprisingly like soap for looking as if he had not bathed in a week.
“Aye, ye did, lass,” he said, his teeth white against his beard. “Now, I have want of a blistering iron, saw, and McBain’s scalpels.”
Her eyes widened. “You cannot mean to remove his leg?”
“Not the whole of it. I came for McBain, him being a ship’s surgeon.” His eyes narrowed speculatively on the shelves stacked with jars and tins, then on her. “But you’ll do well enough, lass.”
Chapter 19
After barely giving her enough time to gather her supplies, Duncan forced her to accompany him outside and strapped her bag to the cantle. She rode on the back of his horse clinging to him for at least an hour by the sun’s placement in the sky before he finally reined in his horse in front of a large stone cottage at the foot of a picturesque hill.
She glimpsed a barn and a shed for silage. Summer roses grew in abundance in a walled garden. Beyond the barn was a small stonedoocotfluttering with cooing pigeons. Even with the stench coming from the hog pen, this was a well-kept farm.
She shoved against Duncan as he lifted her off the horse onto legs stiff and chafed from the mad ride. “Let go of me! Oaf! I am not baggage.”
He opened the cottage’s front door and politely held it for her. “He is upstairs, lass.”
Rose remained annoyed with Duncan’s highhanded treatment of her, and told him so, even as he waited for her to follow him into the house.
She stepped past him.
The room was filled with large men who looked as ifthey had spent the day cattle lifting. It smelled of wood smoke and beeswax and looked much bigger on the outside than on the inside. Three oak beams stretched across the ceiling. Most of the men were tall enough to touch the beams. A lone woman in long skirts and a dirty bloodstained apron paced in front of the hearth. She looked up as Duncan entered, her anxious expression falling as she glimpsed Rose.
“Where is McBain?” the woman demanded, giving Duncan a look that would turn a smaller man to stone. “Ye said ye would bring back a doctor.”
Duncan wrapped his beefy hand around Rose’s upper arm and drew her deeper into the room. “He is no’ at Stonehaven, Kathleen. This is our own Ruark’s new bride. Her ladyship’s come to offer us her aide should we have to remove Rufus’s leg.”
Rose hadneverpretended to be a surgeon. She was an herbalist if she was anything at all. Aye, she knew something of medicines and she had assisted Friar Tucker when he visited the unfortunates who had been injured in farming accidents. However, looking into the suspicious, hostile faces of those standing around her, Rose elected to reveal none of this.
“Have ye lost yer brain?” the red-haired woman said sharply to Duncan, her color high. “And where is our laird that he would allow ye to steal his bonny Sassenach bride from beneath his nose to come out here and nurse the likes of us? Will he be bangin’ down this door?”
“Now, Kathy . . .”
“Och! Do no’Kathyme, Duncan Kerr. Is there no’ enough bad blood between ye already ...?”
“He’s no’ at Stonehaven . . .”
The rest of the argument was lost on Rose. Content to remain out of the family dispute, she shifted the bag inher hand, looking around her. Behind her, the stairs led upward to the room where Rufus lay.
A tug on her skirts drew her gaze downward. A small towheaded girl stood next to her, her eyes wide and serious as she stared up at Rose. “Are ye here to save me bruther?” she asked.
The arguing stopped as Kathleen stepped around Duncan to scoop up her daughter, sizing Rose up with one frank glance. “We’ve no cause to trust ye, any more than you’ve cause to trust us,” Kathleen said. “But if Duncan says ye can help my son, then we’ll trust ye will and let it be at that.”
Indeed, Rufus Kerr, a distant cousin to Ruark, and one of Lord Hereford’s former hostages, was not doing well. Rose made that diagnosis the instant she entered the sickroom and smelled the putrification in the air. He lay on a narrow bed in a closed-in room that sweltered from the heat of a fire blazing in the hearth. At least he had been washed and bathed and much of his tangled hair shorn from the last time she had seen him at the inn. She had thought him to be in his twenties. Now she could see he could be no older than seventeen.
Shabby brown curtains were shut tight over what Rose presumed was a window. Many who fancied themselves experts on the human condition and the humoral balance in the body believed keeping cool air away from ailing patients to be essential. By the look of the lancet and bowl on the nightstand beside the patient’s bed, he had been bled.
The first thing Rose did was throw open the curtains and the window, if only so she could see. The sun, though low in the sky, still provided substantially more light than the single candle on the nightstand. Then she turned toDuncan and told him to get everyone out of the room. She might not like Duncan, but she trusted him to be capable of removing everyone, including the reluctant Kathleen.
“And bring me a bottle of red wine,” Rose said.
Friar Tucker had oft touted the healthful benefits of red wine when taken internally as libation and when used as part of a dressing. She had never put either remedy to a test, but she would now.
Outside in the corridor, the arguing started again, low voices that faded down the hallway. Rufus’s eyes were open and he was watching her. “You’ll have to forgive me, mum,” he said in apology. “We’ve enough troubles without bringing our laird down on us.” A grin cracked his chapped lips. “He’ll kill Duncan if something happens to ye, to be sure. Then my kin will probably kill him.”
“Humph. Are you not all kin?” Rose tilted his face into the candlelight. His pupils were dilated. He’d been given laudanum. “All this talk of everyone killing everyone else. I thought families were supposed to love one another.”
