“Not me,” he said, chest heaving in the effort to breathe. He jerked his head backward. “Him.”
“CHARLIE!” ELSPETH’S CRY made me jerk round to see Tom MacLeod and Murdo Lindsay negotiating a makeshift stretcher composed of jackets strung on hastily lopped branches around the doorjamb, trying not to drop or injure the contents. Said contents being Charles Cunningham in a noticeable state of disrepair.
They knew where the surgery was and proceeded there at a trot. Jamie pushed himself off the wall and called to them hoarsely in Gaelic, at which they immediately slowed down, walking almost on tiptoe.
“He’s shot in the back, Sassenach,” Jamie said to me. “Maybe … a few other places.” His hand was trembling where it pressed against the wall, and his fingers left bloody smears.
“Go and sit down in the kitchen,” I said briefly. “Tell Fanny I said to get your clothes off and find out how bad it is, then come and tell me.”
The stretcher party had reached the surgery and I rushed in behind them, in time to superintend the moving of the captain onto my table.
“Don’t pick him up!” I shouted, seeing them about to lay the stretcher on the floor. “Put the whole thing on the table!”
Cunningham was alive, and more or less lucid. Elspeth was already on the other side of the table, and between us we cut his clothes off, as gently as possible, she speaking reassuringly to him, though her hands were shaking badly.
He’d been shot twice from the front; a ball in the right forearm that had broken the radius just above the wrist, and a shot that had scored his ribs on the left but fortunately not entered the body. One side of his face was scratched and bruised, but from the presence of bark in some of the scratches, I thought he had likely collided with a tree in the dark, rather than been in a fistfight with one.
“Jamie says you’ve been shot in the back,” I said, bending low to speak to him. “Can you tell me where the wound is? High? Low?”
“Low,” he gasped. “Don’t worry, Mother, it will be fine.”
“Be quiet, Charles!” she snapped. “Can you move your feet?”
His face was dead white, beard stubble like a scatter of pepper across his skin. I had my hands under him, feeling my way between the jackets of the stretcher and the layers of his own clothes, trapped under him. His clothes were sodden, but so were those of all the men—I could hear the dripping out in the hall, as several men were crammed in the doorway, listening. I pulled one hand out from under him, gingerly, and looked at it. It was scarlet to the wrist. I glanced at his feet. One of them twitched and Elspeth gasped. She was stanching the blood from his arm, but at this stopped and bent over him.
“Move the other, Charles,” she said urgently.
“I am,” he whispered. His eyes were closed and water ran from his hair. I looked down the table. Neither foot was moving.
Fanny pushed her way through the men at the door and came in, her hair loose over her wrapper and her eyes huge.
“Mr. Fraser has a bad cut from his right shoulder down across his chest,” she told me. “It just missed his left nipple, though.”
“Well, that’s a bit of good news,” I said, repressing a mildly hysterical urge to laugh. “Did you—”
“We put a compress on it,” she assured me. “Agnes is pushing on it. With both hands!”
“How fast is the blood soaking through?” I had my hands back under Captain Cunningham, feeling my way through layers of sopping cloth, in search of the wound’s exact location.
“He soaked the first compress, but the second one is doing better,” she assured me. “He wants whisky; is that all right?”
“Make him stand up,” I said, reaching the waistband of the captain’s breeches. “If he can stand upright for thirty seconds, he can have whisky. If not, give him honey-water and make him lie down flat on the floor. No matter what he says.”
“We’ve already been giving him honey-water,” she said, and looked closely at our patient. “Should the captain maybe have some, too?” I had one hand on the captain’s femoral artery—we’d cut his breeches, jacket, and shirt down the fronts and peeled the cloth away from his body—and the other underneath him. His pulse was surprisingly strong, which encouraged me. So did the fact that while blood was dripping off the table, it wasn’t pulsing out into my hand. I thought the shot hadn’t struck a major vessel. On the other hand … his feet still weren’t moving.