David nodded. “He won’t be able to carry you, so you may have to walk. A bit of pain will toughen you up.”
David came back to me and brushed the hair away from my face. “Are you well enough to continue on?”
I nodded, and David put his arm around me, helping me stand. Julia came up behind him, her gun finally lowered.
She was the only one with enough foresight to bring a weapon, and I dashed to her side and threw my arms around her. “Thank you, Julia.”
Julia bit her lip and looked as if she were about to cry. She held back for a moment before a soft laugh escaped her throat. “For shooting my father?”
Her laughter, slight as it was, brought a strange kind of relief, and one burst of laughter escaped my mouth. “For bringing the gun. I wish I would have thought of it.”
“Oh, no. No one but a member of the Tate family should be allowed to shoot him.”
“But I am a member of the Tate family.”
This time when Julia laughed, it was deep, from her gut. “So you are. Next time, I’ll let you shoot him.”
David shook his head and took our hands. “No one else is shooting him. We need to go.”
But as we walked away, Lord Murphy slumped to the side in a faint. We all paused.
“Is he acting?” I asked.
David blew out a frustrated puff of air. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
I glanced at Lord Murphy for any signs of pretense, but I couldn’t tell. “Should we check?”
Julia shook her head. “I’m not going near him, not unless David changes his mind and wants me to kill him.”
In the end, we found a place to sit and listened for the sound of hooves. Ten minutes later, we could hear them galloping up the drive and turning down the path.
Dr. Clarke pulled his horse to a stop roughly five feet away from us. He jumped down and surveyed the scene. Lord Murphy looked as good as dead on the ground, and we all sat away from him, Julia with a gun in her hand.
Dr. Clarke watched Lord Murphy for several seconds, most likely doing the same thing we’d done over and over during the passing minutes. Watching for the rise and fall of his chest. After he found it, he ignored him and stepped toward us.
He pasted a smile on his face as if this were a social call. “I would have been here sooner, but I heard it was Lord Murphy who’d been shot.”
David snorted, and Julia let out a quiet sob of relief.
Dr. Clarke walked gently toward her and held out his hand for the revolver. “May I?” he asked.
Julia practically tossed it to him, handle first, at least, with the barrel pointing down.
Dr. Clarke pulled the bullets out of the gun and placed them in his pocket. He returned to his horse and took his doctor’s kit out of a bag on his saddle. With a march slow enough to mark him as a man in no hurry to treat Lord Murphy, he stepped over to the man’s prone form and tied a tourniquet just below Lord Murphy’s hip. Then he started prodding the wound to assess the damage.
Lord Murphy stirred, swatting at Dr. Clarke’s hands and cursing.
“Lord Murphy,” Dr. Clarke barked at him. “It looks as though you’ve been in a hunting accident. We need to get you back to Tate Hall.”
Lord Murphy cursed louder. “A hunting accident?” His breath was ragged, but he drew some kind of strength from his anger at Dr. Clarke. “What kind of idiotic doctor are you? It’s the middle of the night.”
“I don’t pretend to understand the things the nobility do to pass the time, sir. I only treat wounds. And I cannot think of any other explanation for a bullet to be in your thigh, except a hunting accident.”
Lord Murphy spat on the ground and looked at Julia, his thin lips set in a straight line. “We are a strange lot.”
Julia made a noise at the back of her throat, almost as if she were going to start laughing, but Dr. Clarke whipped his head in her direction and gave her a look of ferocious censure. She closed her eyes and stopped whatever emotion had been hurtling to the surface.
Dr. Clarke turned to David. “Will you help me get him on my horse?”
