Page 7 of Highland Crown
“Your wish might come true. He’s more dead than alive.”
If this was the man who was shot, she imagined there’d be no mercy shown if the villagers found him alive. And his body would never be found. The rising tide was washing up around his boots.
“Help me turn him over.”
“I’ll not help ye with any such thing. And if ye have any sense, ye’ll leave him be and let the sea take him.”
Isabella wiped the salty rain from her face and pulled his arm, managing on her own to turn him onto his side. A growth of beard covered his face, but his skin was pale as ash, his breathing shallow. Taking hold of his jacket, she rolled him onto his back. Her hand came away red. She pushed his coat open and saw a hole in his black waistcoat an inch or so above the heart. Blood was seeping from the wound.
“I knew it.” She pressed her hand against the wound to stop the bleeding.
“Let him go.”
She pressed harder. The storm and the rage of the sea blended with Jean’s warnings before fading away. Her mind was transported back to their house in Edinburgh. The stranger’s face was Archibald’s. Warm blood oozed through her fingers. All her years of training and she hadn’t been able to save him. His life had just slipped away.
Isabella would not let this man die.
Archibald was her friend, her mentor, and her teacher. Just as when her father died, losing him had slapped her down with the cruelty of life’s uncertainties. The responsibility for the well-being of her sister and her stepdaughter was overwhelming. In a moment, she’d been stripped of the ideal existence she’d been living. At four and thirty years of age, she had to learn how to survive. She had to run for her life.
“Not much is washing ashore.” Jean’s voice came to her from the gap in the boulders, where she was watching the villagers down the beach. “Folk’ll be coming this way to see if anything drifted this far.”
Blood continued to pulse from the wound.
The old woman shuffled back to Isabella’s side. “Ye have to go in, mistress. Now. They won’t be any too happy with this one.”
“I can’t let him die. Not again. I can’t,” she said, her voice belonging to a stranger.
Isabella reached for a clump of seaweed that washed up beside them. She pressed it into the wound. The bullet was still in him. If she could extract it, sew the wound shut, she could stop the bleeding. It was the only way to save him. Ten years ago, she’d helped her father operate on the bloodied men carted back to Wurzburg from the battle at Leipzig. After a week, they’d still carried Russian musket balls and shrapnel in their festering wounds. The death rate had been dreadful.
The bag containing her surgical instruments was beside the cot. “Help me take him up the hill.”
“This one will never see the inside of my cottage. Just leave him.”
“I’ll drag him up there by myself, then.”
Jean tugged at Isabella’s cloak again. “Yer daft, woman. Ye remember nothing of what I said last night, do ye?”
The patch of seaweed was helping staunch the flow of the blood. Isabella looked up at the sandy stretch, trying to decide on how she could get him up the hill.
“Ye listen to me now, mistress—”
“I amnotleaving him,” she cut in sternly. “Do you hear? I am not letting him die out here on the beach. Now, you do what you see fit. But if you want to deliver this man up to your friends, then you can just hand me over with him.”
The older woman let go of the cloak and straightened up, staring at her as if she were a creature with two heads.
They both started at the sound of someone calling from the beach beyond the boulders. A man’s voice.
Too soon, Isabella thought. Her bravado was being tested. “I stand by my words.”
“Stay down and don’t move,” Jean hissed. “Mind me now.”
The urgency in the old woman’s voice sank in. Isabella crouched beside the injured man. She kept firm pressure on the seaweed over the wound.
Concealed by the boulder at the edge of the water, she watched Jean climb with surprising agility onto the rocks to head off the villager.
“Oy, Auld Jean. Anything come in along this stretch?”
From where Isabella waited, she could see the man was carrying a stout cudgel.
