* * *
I made my rounds inside the cottage, changing a blood-soaked dressing on one man’s leg. The bleeding should have stopped by now, but it hadn’t. Poor nutrition and brittle bones. If the bleeding hadn’t stopped before cockcrow, I would have to fetch Archie Cameron or one of the farrier-surgeons to amputate the leg, and cauterize the stump.
I hated the thought of it. Life was sufficiently hard for a man with all his limbs in good working order. Hoping for the best, I coated the new dressing with a light sprinkling of alum and sulfur. If it didn’t help, it wouldn’t hinder. Likely it would hurt, but that couldn’t be helped.
“It will burn a bit,” I murmured to the man, as I wrapped his leg in the layers of cloth.
“Dinna worry yourself, Mistress,” he whispered. He smiled at me, in spite of the sweat that ran down his cheeks, shiny in the light of my candle. “I’ll stand it.”
“Good.” I patted his shoulder, smoothed the hair off his brow, and gave him a drink of water. “I’ll check again in an hour, if you can bear it that long.”
“I’ll stand it,” he said again.
* * *
Outside once more, I thought Jamie had fallen asleep. His face rested on his folded forearms, crossed on his knees. But he looked up at the sound of my step, and took my hand as I sat beside him.
“I heard the cannon at dawn,” I said, thinking of the man inside, leg broken by a cannonball. “I was afraid for you.”
He laughed softly. “So was I, Sassenach. So were we all.”
Quiet as wisps of mist, the Highlanders advanced through the sea grass, one foot at a time. There was no sense of darkness lessening, but the feel of the night had changed. The wind had changed, that was it; it blew from the sea over the cold dawning land, and the faint thunder of waves on distant sand could be heard.
Despite his impression of continued dark, the light was coming. He saw the man at his feet just in time; one more step and he would have been headlong across the man’s curled body.
Heart pounding from the shock of the near-meeting, he dropped to his haunches to get a better look. A Redcoat, and sleeping, not dead or wounded. He squinted hard into the darkness around them, willing his ears to listen for the breathing of other sleeping men. Nothing but sea sounds, grass and wind sounds, the tiny swish of stealthy feet almost hidden in their muted roar.
He glanced hastily back, licking lips gone dry despite the moist air. There were men close behind him; he dared not hesitate long. The next man might not be so careful where he stepped, and they could risk no outcry.
He set hand to his dirk, but hesitated. War was war, but it went against the grain to slay a sleeping enemy. The man seemed to be alone, some distance from his companions. Not a sentinel; not even the slackest of guards would sleep, knowing the Highlanders to be camped on the ridge above. Perhaps the soldier had gotten up to relieve himself, thoughtfully come some distance from his fellows to do it, then, losing his direction in the dark, lain down to sleep where he was.
The metal of his musket was slick from his sweating palm. He rubbed his hand on his plaid, then stood, grasped the barrel of the musket, and swung the butt in a vicious arc, down and around. The shock of impact jolted him to the shoulder blades; an immobile head is solid. The man’s arms had flown out with the force of the impact, but beyond an explosion of breath, he had made no noise, and now lay sprawled on his face, limp as a clout.
Palms tingling, he stooped again and groped beneath the man’s jaw, looking for a pulse. He found one, and reassured, stood up. There was a muffled cry of startlement from behind, and he swung around, musket already at his shoulder, to find its barrel poking into the face of one of Keppoch’s MacDonald clansmen.
“Mon Dieu!” the man whispered, crossing himself, and Jamie clenched his teeth with aggravation. It was Keppoch’s bloody French priest, dressed, at O’Sullivan’s suggestion, in shirt and plaid like the fighting men.
“The man insisted that it was his duty to bring the sacraments to the wounded and dying on the field,” Jamie explained to me, hitching his stained plaid higher on his shoulder. The night was growing colder. “O’Sullivan’s idea was that if the English caught him on the battlefield in his cassock, they’d tear him to pieces. As to that, maybe so, maybe no. But he looked a right fool in a plaid,” he added censoriously.
Nor had the priest’s behavior done anything to ameliorate the impression caused by his attire. Realizing belatedly that his assailant was a Scot, he had sighed in relief, and then opened his mouth. Moving quickly, Jamie had clapped a hand over it before any ill-advised questions could emerge.
“What are ye doing here, Father?” he growled, mouth pressed to the priest’s ear. “You’re meant to be behind the lines.”
A widening of the priest’s eyes at this told Jamie the truth—the man of God, lost in the darkness, had thought he was behind the lines, and the belated realization that he was, in fact, in the vanguard of the advancing Highlanders, made him buckle slightly at the knees.
Jamie glanced backward; he didn’t dare send the priest back through the lines. In the misty dark, he could easily stumble into an advancing Highlander, be mistaken for an enemy, and be killed on the spot. Gripping the smaller man by the back of the neck, he pushed him to his knees.
“Lie flat and stay that way until the firing stops,” he hissed into the man’s ear. The priest nodded frantically, then suddenly saw the body of the English soldier, lying on the ground a few feet away. He glanced up at Jamie in awed horror, and reached for the bottles of chrism and holy water that he wore at his belt in lieu of a dirk.
Rolling his eyes in exasperation, Jamie made a series of violent motions, meant to indicate that the man was not dead, and thus in no need of the priest’s services. These failing to make their point, he bent, seized the priest’s hand, and pressed the fingers on the Englishman’s neck, as the simplest method of illustrating that the man was not in fact the first victim of the battle. Caught in this ludicrous position, he froze as a voice cut through the mist behind him.
“Halt!” it said. “Who goes there?”