Claimed by a Scottish Lord (31 page)

―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

A
fter 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 stone
doocot
fluttering 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 if they 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 had
never
pretended 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‘
Kathy
me, 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 in her 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.‖

I
ndeed, 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 to Duncan 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.‖

―Aye, we do, most of the time. But some are thinking Duncan should be chieftain. There is grumbling and some do no‘ like that a Kerr has taken hisself a Sassenach bride.‖

She focused on the lad‘s face. ―I see.‖

She wondered why, if so much was at stake for Ruark, he had ensured that their vows could not be easily annulled. ―Then let us make sure nothing happens to me.‖

Rose walked to the end of the bed and removed the blanket covering her patient‘s lower legs.

Her breath caught like a hot iron in her throat, and, looking away, she knew it was all she could do not to betray her expression to the lad.

He had been wearing shoes at the inn when she had examined the wounds left by the ankle chains. Now as she pulled a stool to the end of the bed and sat, she wondered how the boy could ever have stood or walked at all. Three of the toes had been broken within the last week of his incarceration and had attempted to heal. The irons that had bound his ankle had left raw wounds that had healed over open sores. The newly healed-over scabs would have to be cut away and the wounds beneath lanced and drained to rid the body of the oozing infection.

Nausea clenched her stomach. Closing her eyes, she breathed in slowly, drawing from the fresh air coming through the window.

The enormity of the task ahead suddenly paralyzed her. She could not do this. Sensing Rufus‘s eyes on her, she found him watching her from beneath half-closed lids. ―Will I lose my foot?‖

―Nay,‖ she lied.

He could very well loose his leg if gangrene set in. He would surely lose his life if sepsis poisoned his blood. His body was warm to the touch, which meant he was already fighting infection.

She stood and, turning her back to him, retied the red scarf on her head to give her trembling hands something to do. She wished she could faint about now and be spared what she knew needed to be done.

―Gavin and me, we should no‘ have laughed at ye at the inn,‖ Rufus said.

Her back to him, she bit her lower lip. ―I am sure it was the ale that gave you your courage,‖ she said, her voice even.

The door opened and Duncan entered carting two bottles of wine.

―May I talk to you?‖ she asked, wanting to step past him into the corridor, but he put his arm on the door.

―Speak in here,‖ he said.

She glanced over her shoulder at Rufus. ―I think we need—‖

―In here,‖ Duncan said again, his voice losing the ever-present humor. ―The lad has a right to know what it is ye have to say.‖

Duncan wasn‘t going to allow her to tell him she couldn‘t do this. He wasn‘t going to allow her to leave this room. Panic filled her.

―Sometimes we have to do a thing we do no‘ want to do, lass, because it must be done. Now I will be in here with ye. And Rufus there‖—he tipped his chin toward the bed—―he is no‘

afraid as ye are. Are ye lad?‖

Rose saw a faint smile twitch at the corner of Rufus‘s lips. Duncan was wrong. As she looked into the wounded boy‘s face, she could see someone in this room more scared than she was.

Duncan handed her the bottle of wine. ―Let‘s get on with what needs to be done, lass.‖

R
ose lost all sense of time.

She had never noticed when the sun set. The fire died sometime in the night, but the cool air from outside kept her focused on her task.

She worked by candlelight, snipping and slicing away the infected layers of skin to clean beneath until fresh blood oozed. She picked debris from both the ankle wounds and the toes then washed the wounds with water and wine as fresh blood oozed over her fingers. Somehow, she held onto the small pincers that grew heavier in her hand with each passing hour. The toes were not the worst, though she was worried she would not be able to save the smallest one. Once when Rufus screamed, Duncan kept the lad still, his voice as calming a balm as the dose of laudanum she had given him.

She took a grip on herself, concentrating only on each task, and when that was done, she moved on to the next. Duncan spoke soothingly to the young man, his voice also soothing her. The painstaking work lasted until dawn.

When she finished, she cleaned the blood from her hands. She stirred the fire until a small flame leaped from the peat, and she heated water and used burnt alum on the deeper wounds. Then she wrapped the foot in strips of cloth that she boiled in garlic and witch hazel. There would be terrible scarring, she thought and, though she had done her best with the toes, they might never heal straight.

At last, she loosened the leather Duncan had used to tie the lad‘s leg to the bedstead and sat back on the stool. She looked up to find Duncan‘s eyes on her, and he gave her a nod of approval.

―Ye did fine, lass,‖ he said. ―Real fine.‖

It was all that he said, and she doubted he was speaking about her work. She still did not like Duncan, nor did she trust him. But the words made an impression on her. One that followed her to bed as Kathleen led her to a chamber down the hall.

―You‘ve seen to my boy,‖ Kathleen said, clearly grateful. ―I‘ve no‘ a right to ask you to remain any longer.‖

―I do not mind,‖ Rose said just before her head hit the pillow and she slept.

Over the next two days, Rose took turns with Kathleen and Duncan, sitting beside the lad, reading to him, bathing his face and waiting for his fever to break. Rose felt an inner peace and confidence that it would. She didn‘t know where such an emotion came from.

Kathleen had made sure one of her other sons delivered a note to Stonehaven the night of Rose‘s arrival, reassuring Mary that Rose was safe, so she felt at ease remaining with this crowded family.

Though she could not tell exactly how they were related to Ruark, on her fourth morning, she felt comfortable enough to ask.

She sat in the stone-paved kitchen boiling water for chamomile tea while Kathleen worked on that day‘s meal. A few copper pots burnished to a rosy glow hung overhead, and fresh-cut flowers sat across from the hearth on the same countertop Kathleen was using. The rhythmic slap of her palms shaping the bread dough stopped abruptly as she considered the question. She thought her husband came from an offshoot branch of one of the former earl of Roxburghe‘s grandfather‘s cousin‘s uncles who had married more than one wife, ―whilst the others still lived,‖ Kathleen said and laughed.

―Though there was some discrepancy in testimonies depending on how much silver was involved. If ye wish to learn about the Kerrs, find the family Bible. All the births and marriages are recorded there. At least the legal ones are.‖

Rose liked this family. Kathleen was in her mid-thirties and mother to three sons and one small girl, Rufus being her oldest. Her husband had died less than five months ago. For some reason, she had thought her Duncan‘s wife.

―If no‘ for Duncan, I do no‘ know where the lot of us would be,‖ Kathleen said, working her hands into the bread dough, raising a small cloud of flour. ―We have no‘ always been poor, ye ken.

―My husband was the village fiscal,‖ she said. ―We had a nice home in the village. Then one day, people accused him of running away with their money and embezzling funds and were ready to tar and feather his family. If no‘ for Duncan . we might never have learned the truth.‖

―What happened?‖ Rose asked as Kathleen‘s voice faded.

―Duncan found my husband‘s body. He‘d been caught in a snowstorm and died of injuries when his horse fell. No gold was found but by then the damage had already been done to this family. This house was once Duncan‘s, but he‘s no family to speak of, least no‘ any children. He gave us the house and has taken it upon himself always to make sure our larder is full.‖

―Is it not the laird‘s responsibility to see to his tenants‘ care?‖ Rose asked.

Kathleen turned the bread dough over on a wooden block and began beating the other side with equal intensity. ―Aye, ‘tis. We shall see if the new lord Roxburghe is of a different mettle than his father,‖ she said, and though she would say nothing more to denigrate the former earl of Roxburghe, her stiff shoulders stated her feelings eloquently.

Rose grabbed a hand pad and removed the tea kettle from the fire bringing it to the countertop where she had set out a teapot and a cup on a tray. ―His lordship does not speak of his father.‖

―Humph,‖ Kathleen said. ―You have met Jamie‘s mother?‖ she asked after a moment, slanting Rose a glance, before resuming her kneading. ―Ruark may not have thought so, but Duncan did him a service back then when he shipped Ruark out of Scotland.‖