The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(121)

‘Where is he now?’

‘Come, I will take you.’

They had found the old man below decks, sitting calmly in the chaos of the wounded and the dead. Despite his bandaged head, he had looked fit and even cheerful, as though welcoming the prospect of adventure. He had listened to their plans politely, but had answered Gordon, ‘Oh, you needn’t bother with all that, my boy. I’ll not be harmed.’

‘My Lord, if the English do take a French nobleman, he will be treated with care, but if they come upon an English noble like yourself, then they will call your presence on this ship no less than treason, and will show you little mercy. They will have your head.’

Lord Griffin’s eyes held all the patience of the aged speaking to the young. ‘I am an old man, and I’ll warrant that my bones will ache the same if I am sleeping in a palace or a prison. But,’ he said, ‘if it will give you peace, my boy, then I will come.’

He gave consent to being carried on a stretcher, so it would appear he was more gravely wounded and could be confined, upon the Leopard, to the surgeon’s care. ‘My surgeon,’ Gordon said to both Lord Griffin and the French ship’s captain, ‘is a Jacobite, as I am, and will help to keep you hidden till we can arrange to move you somewhere safer.’

Someone jostled past Gordon and, stepping to the side, he bumped another wounded man who lay insensible upon the deck, his breaths so shallow there was barely any movement of the stinking, blood-soaked rags that bound his shoulder.

In that dim light the man’s pale face was difficult to see, but Gordon saw all that he needed to. He did not look away, but in a tightened voice demanded, ‘What did happen to this man?’

Lord Griffin gave the answer. ‘He was wounded while saving the life of a young lad who had not the sense to get clear of a cannon-ball.’ When Gordon did not move, Lord Griffin thought to add, ‘The lad got out of it uninjured. I was there, I saw it all, though I confess it was that same shot brought the roof down on my head so I remember little else.’

He rubbed his neatly bandaged temple while the captain of the French ship looked more closely at the wounded man and said, ‘I do not know his face, though by his uniform he looks to be an officer of one of the king’s Irish brigades. We have several such men aboard the Salisbury.’

‘My countrymen,’ Lord Griffin said, ‘will likely not be too pleased to find them here, either.’

‘No.’ The frown on Captain Gordon’s face grew deeper. ‘No, indeed they will not.’ And he called for one more stretcher. ‘I will take this man, as well.’

‘But,’—this in protest from the French ship’s captain— ‘surely it will draw too much attention if you carry two such wounded men across on your small boat?’

Gordon’s voice froze over. ‘I remind you, sir, that “small boat” does obey my orders, as indeed your ship must now do also, and I’ll thank you not to question my command.’

There was no more said about it until both the stretchers had been lowered to his boat and they were rowing back across towards the Leopard. Gordon’s crewmen were all dutifully silent. Their allegiances lay squarely with his own, and he had no fears they would speak of what they’d seen, or heard. The wounded men upon the boat might well have been invisible.

The blanket on the stretcher of the still-unconscious officer began to slip and Gordon reached to draw it up and tuck it firmly underneath the man’s uninjured arm. He turned to find Lord Griffin lying watching him.

‘You know him.’ It was not a question.

Gordon answered, ‘Yes.’

‘His voice did mark him as a Scot.’ The aged eyes were curious. ‘And I should think a young man who could fight so fiercely in his king’s defense has done it once or twice before.’

‘He has. And earned himself a price upon his head that would enrich the English soldier who did capture him.’

Lord Griffin nodded. ‘Ah. Then it is well that you did reach your friend before them.’

Gordon turned again to study Moray’s face. ‘He would not count me as his friend.’

‘But you admire him.’

Gordon thought on this a moment. ‘He is dear to someone who is dear to me,’ he said, ‘and that itself does bind us to each other, whether either of us likes the fact.’

That said, he felt relief a short while later on the Leopard, when his surgeon gave assurances that Moray was not seriously wounded. Beneath the swinging lamps the surgeon leaned in close to show the wounds. ‘You see where something sharp has caught him right across this shoulder. Not a sword, but something rougher, like a splintered piece of wood. ’Twas that which caused the bleeding, but it is now fairly stopped, and should heal in time as neatly as this wound along his side will. Two more scars he’ll hardly notice, when he wakes.’

Lord Griffin, who had turned aside the surgeon’s offer of a hammock and was sitting in a chair against the sloping wall, glanced over and remarked, ‘It does appear that someone tries to kill the lad with regularity.’

He too had seen, as Gordon had, the other scars that Moray bore upon his chest and arms to mark his years of being slashed and shot at on the battlefield. And hanging from his neck he wore a leather cord on which was strung a single pebble, small and black and smoothly worn, the purpose of which none of them could see.