WILLIAM SWABBED HIS face with what was left of his handkerchief. His features felt foreign to him, lumped and swollen, and he explored the inside of his mouth gingerly with his tongue: no teeth missing, a couple maybe loose, and a stinging cut inside his cheek. Not bad. He thought he’d done worse to Murray and was glad of it.
He was still trembling—not with shock but with the urge to rip someone limb from limb. At the same time, he was beginning to feel shock, though conscious thought still came in fleeting snatches. What the devil had he done?
A short column of soldiers marched past, a few of them openly staring at him. He gave them a vicious look, and their heads snapped forward so fast he could hear the leather of their stocks creak.
He hadn’t done it. Murray had attacked him. Where did Rachel Hunter get off, calling him a coward and a brute? He felt the tickle of blood crawling down from one nostril and stanched it, snorting into the filthy rag. He saw someone approaching, coming up the road, accompanied by a large dog. He straightened, stuffing the handkerchief into his pocket.
“Speak of the bloody she-devil,” he muttered, and coughed, his throat raw with the iron taste of blood.
Rachel Hunter was pale with rage. Apparently she hadn’t turned round to apologize for her insults. She had snatched off her cap and held it clutched in one hand—did she mean to throw it at him? he wondered in fogged amazement.
“Miss Hunter—” he began in a rasping voice, and would have bowed, save he was afraid the motion would make his nose bleed again.
“Thee cannot mean it, William!”
“Mean what?” he said, and she gave him a look that might have singed the small hairs off his body, had he not still been hot himself.
“Do not be obtuse!” she snapped. “What possessed thee, to—”
“What possessed your—your fiancé?” he snapped back. “Did I attack him? No!”
“Yes, you did! You struck him in the mouth, without the slightest provocation—”
“And he hit me on the head, without the least warning! If anyone is a coward—”
“Don’t you dare call Ian Murray coward, you—you—”
“I’ll call him what I bloody like—what he bloody is. Just like his goddamned uncle, goddamned Scottish bastard fu—I mean . . .”
“His uncle? Thy father?”
“Shut up!” he bellowed, and felt the blood surge into his face, stinging all the raw places. “Don’t call him my father!”
She breathed stertorously through her nose for a moment, glaring up at him.
“If thee allow this to be done, William Ransom, I will—I will—”
William could feel the blood pool in his belly and thought he might faint, but not because of her threats.
“You’ll what?” he asked, half breathless. “You’re a Quaker. You don’t believe in violence. Ergo, you can’t—or at least won’t”—he corrected himself, seeing the dangerous look in her eye—“stab me. You probably won’t even strike me. So what did you have in mind?”
She did strike him. Her hand whipped out like a snake and slapped him across the face hard enough to make him stagger.
“So now thee has doomed thy kinsman, repudiated thy father, and caused me to betray my principles. What next?!”
“Oh, bloody hell,” he said, and grabbed her arms, pulled her roughly to him, and kissed her. He let go and stepped back quickly, leaving her bug-eyed and gasping.
The dog growled at him. She glared at him, spat on the ground at his feet, then wiped her lips on her sleeve and, turning away, marched off, the dog at her heels casting a red-eyed look at William.
“Is spitting on people a part of your bloody principles?” he shouted after her.
She swung round, fists clenched at her sides.
“Is assaulting women part of thine?” she bellowed back, to the amusement of the infantrymen who had been standing still by the road, leaning on their weapons and gaping at the show provided.
Flinging her cap on the ground at his feet, she whirled on her heel and stamped away, before he could say more.
JAMIE CAUGHT SIGHT of a small group of redcoats coming down the road and slumped on the wagon’s seat, hat pulled down over his eyes. No one would be looking for him, with the British army on the move, and even were he recognized, probably no one would bother trying to detain or question him in the midst of such an exodus—but the sight of British soldiers would likely put a knot in his tailbone for the rest of his life, and today was no exception.
He turned his head casually away toward the far side of the road as the soldiers passed, but then heard a loud “Ifrinn!” in a very familiar voice, and jerked round in reflex to find himself staring straight into his nephew Ian’s startled, horrified face.
He was equally startled—and nearly as horrified—to see Ian, hands tied behind his back, smeared with dirt and blood and obviously the worse for wear, being shoved along by two cross-looking British privates, red-faced and sweating in their heavy uniforms.
He stifled his immediate urge to leap off the wagon and stared hard at Ian, willing the lad not to speak. He didn’t, just goggled back with his eyes bulging out of his head and his face pale, as though he’d seen a ghost, and walked past, speechless.
“Jesus,” Jamie murmured under his breath, realizing. “He thinks he has seen my fetch.”
“Who thinks what?” asked the driver, though without much interest.
“I think I must get down here, sir, if ye’d be so civil as to stop? Aye, thanks.” Without thought of his back, he swung down off the wagon; it twinged, but there was no warning stab of pain down his leg—and if there had been, he would still have gone up the road as fast as he could, because he saw a small figure a little way ahead, running like a rabbit with its tail on fire. The figure was plainly female, it was accompanied by a large dog, and he had the sudden thought that it might be Rachel Hunter.
It was, and he just managed to catch her up, seizing her by the arm as she ran, petticoats kirtled up in her arms and feet hammering the dust.
“Come with me, lass,” he said urgently, grabbed her round the waist, and pulled her off the road. She uttered a stifled shriek—and then a much louder one, when she looked up and saw his face.
“No, I’m not dead,” he said hurriedly. “Later, aye? Step back on the road wi’ me now, or someone’s going to come see am I raping ye in the bushes. Ciamar a tha thu, a choin?” he added to Rollo, who was sniffing him industriously.
She made an odd gargling noise in her throat and continued to stare, but after an instant blinked and nodded and they were back on the road. Jamie smiled and acknowledged a man who had stopped in the middle of the road, dropping the handles of a barrow he was trundling. The man looked suspiciously at them, but Rachel, after a moment’s stunned bewilderment, waved at him with a ghastly smile, and he shrugged and picked up his barrow.
“Wh-what—” she croaked. She looked as though she might collapse or vomit, chest heaving and her face going scarlet and white and scarlet again. She’d lost her cap, and her dark hair was matted with sweat and sticking to her face.
“Later,” he said again, but gently. “What’s happened to Ian? Where are they taking him?”
Between wrenching gasps, she told him what had happened.
“A mh’ic an diabhail,” he said softly, and wondered for a split second what—or who—he meant by that. The thought vanished, though, as he looked up the road. Perhaps a quarter mile back, he could see the large, slow-moving knot of evacuees, a sprawling mass of slow wagons and trudging people, with the neat scarlet columns of soldiers splitting to flow round them, coming on now four abreast.
“Aye, then,” he said grimly, and touched Rachel’s shoulder. “Dinna fash, lassie. Get your breath and go back after Ian, but dinna get close enough that the soldiers take notice of ye. When he’s free, tell him the two of ye must come back to the city straightaway. Go to the printshop. Oh—and best leash the hound wi’ your sash. Ye dinna want him to eat anyone.”
“Free? But what—what are you going to do?” She’d got the hair out of her eyes and was calmer, though the whites of her eyes still showed all round. She reminded him of a young badger at bay, baring its teeth in panic, and the thought made him smile a little.
“I mean to have a word with my son,” he said, and, leaving her, strode purposefully up the road.