“Christ, that stings worse than the cut did,” the hostler said, wincing hard enough to rock the stool he sat on, and Walter kept the needle moving anyway, steady, unhurried, because a flinching patient was still a patient who needed the wound closed properly regardless of how loudly he objected to the process.
“Two more and you’re done, Robbie.” The thread caught wrong on the first pass through snagged, refused to draw clean and Walter freed it without comment, the small correction costing him a breath’s worth of concentration he’d rather have spent elsewhere.
“Hold still.
You’ve done worse to yourself mucking out that stall, by the look of the scar on your other hand.”
“Aye, well, that one I did to myself.
This one a horse did to me, which feels considerably more personal.” Robbie managed something close to a laugh through the wince, and Walter let himself have the small, real satisfaction of it a patient finding room for a joke mid-stitch was as good a sign as any that the wound wasn’t as bad as it had first looked.
His hands didn’t shake.
They hadn’t shaken in three weeks of exactly this kind of steady, ordinary work, and if some quieter part of him kept expecting them to kept bracing for the moment concentration finally slipped and let the missing in behind it that part hadn’t gotten its way yet, and he intended to keep it that way through sheer, stubborn habit if nothing else.
He tied off the last stitch, wrapped the hand clean, and sent Robbie off with instructions about keeping it dry that he fully expected to be ignored by evening.
The patrol came through Cranesmuir on the green’s far side an hour later, four Redcoats moving at an unhurried march that had nothing urgent in it beyond the ordinary business of being seen, and Walter clocked them from the shop’s open door the way he’d clocked every patrol since the road south information, not alarm, a fact worth having rather than a fact worth losing sleep over.
One of them broke from the file’s rhythm just long enough to look directly across the green at him a thin, sharp-faced sergeant, young for the stripe, with the particular unblinking attention of a man who made a private study of faces the way other men made a study of ledgers.
Walter held the look for exactly as long as courtesy required and inclined his head, brief, unremarkable, the gesture of a Sassenach apothecary with nothing on his conscience worth a soldier’s second glance.
The sergeant’s attention moved on without any change Walter could read in it either way, and the patrol continued its unhurried march toward whatever billet awaited it past the kirk. You are reading on NovelPing, the official source.
Sergeant, Margaret noted, entirely without alarm, the observation offered the way a colleague offers a fact worth filing rather than fearing.
Worth remembering the stripe.
Nothing more today.
“Noted,” Walter murmured, and went back inside to the counter, where Una was already holding out the next order like a woman who’d decided his brief study of the green had used up its allotted minute.
The three weeks since the Duncan garden gate had settled into a rhythm Walter recognized, distantly, as the same discipline he’d once used to get through a bad breakup without letting it show at work showing up, doing the job in front of him competently, and not performing the missing for anyone who hadn’t earned the right to see it.
He treated a fevered child, reset a dislocated thumb, checked on Eachann Murray’s leg at the family’s croft on market-day and found the boy running full-tilt across the yard, the old wound nothing now but a faded pink line and a story the boy liked telling louder than the facts strictly warranted.
He did not ride past the Duncan house.
He did not write a letter he had no business writing first.
He ate his oatcakes, held the counter alone when Una’s errands took her, and let the missing sit where it sat present, real, carried rather than performed, the way he’d learned to carry most things that mattered and couldn’t yet be fixed.
The shop-boy found him at the back-room door on the evening of the twenty-first day, breathless from running, a folded scrap of paper held out with the particular self-important urgency of a boy who’d been trusted with something and meant to discharge the trust properly.
The lady said into your hand only, and no one else’s.”
Walter took it.
The paper was good stock, better than anything the village produced, sealed with a plain drop of wax and no mark pressed into it deliberate, he understood immediately, a woman leaving herself room to deny the letter’s origin if it ever fell into the wrong hands before it fell into his.
“Who sent you,” he asked, though he already knew, the shape of the answer settling into his chest before the boy had finished catching his breath.
“Mistress Duncan’s housekeeper, sir.
Said I’d a penny for running it quick and quiet, and I’ve run it quicker than that.”
Walter turned the folded paper over once in his hand, the wax seal cool and unbroken under his thumb, three weeks of careful, disciplined silence sitting behind him and something else unread, unopened, entirely uncertain waiting in the fold ahead of him.
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