Page 18 of I Loved You Then (Far From Home #12)

That’s when she met Callum. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, with a face still boyish beneath the wispy stubble that shadowed his jaw.

His wound troubled her most of all—an ugly, diagonal slash across his midsection, as though an axe had caught him while he twisted away.

Without surgery there was no way to know if any organs had been damaged.

She assumed the sloppy stitches had come by Diarmad’s hand, and wondered if even that, just enough to mostly stop the bleeding, had somehow kept the poor kid alive.

When she’d carefully changed his dressing, she’d been distressed by the continued oozing of pus and blood.

She spent more time cleaning his wound than any other, while the boy drifted in and out of a faintness that looked too near death for her liking.

He didn’t speak a word of English, and only stared at her with dark, glassy eyes when he was wakeful.

Claire gave him what comfort she could, a smile, a hand to his shoulder, the same quiet reassurance she’d offered countless patients tethered to ventilators in her own world.

His answering blink, slow and trusting, was enough to keep her trying.

The next battle was the floor. She set Cory to fetching buckets of sand from the shore, and together they scattered it thick across the packed earth, working it in with stiff straw brushes until the old blood lifted.

Claire knelt until her knees ached, scraping dried clots away with a broken board, sweeping the foul slurry out the door.

Each day the earth lightened a little, until the stink lessened and the ground no longer seemed a map of men’s suffering pressed into dirt.

Next, she turned her eye to the men themselves.

They lay on the floor itself, vulnerable to filth and vermin, and too close to each other.

At Ivy’s helpful suggestion and with Cory translating, she pressed her case to the carpenter, that she desired crude wooden frames, nothing fancy, just enough to raise a man off the ground.

The first arrived two days later, rough-hewn but sturdy.

Claire coaxed a pallet of straw onto it and, with Cory’s help, eased one of the fevered soldiers onto the cot.

When Diarmad approached, bristling—or more aptly, looking as if he were about to explode, Claire smiled innocently at him and offered, “See? Now you won’t have to bend and stoop until your back breaks—or sit in the muck beside them to tend them. ”

His reply then was a string of words that made Cory wince—and refuse to repeat—but Diarmad didn’t argue when the next frame came, and then another, until more and more men were lifted from the blood-stained earth.

She found other small victories. With the carpenter already on board—a man thankfully blessed with four sons, old enough to apprentice with their father but too young to fight wars—she convinced him to build shelves along the short wall just inside the barn on the left.

At last, the boiled cloths had a place, neatly rolled and stacked away from the dirty pile waiting to be laundered.

Pots of salves, jars of herbs, and the surgeon’s tools all found order there.

Cory joked that she was arranging the sick house like a noblewoman’s pantry, but even he seemed impressed by the changes wrought.

Fresh air became her next crusade. She ordered the shutters propped open whenever the weather allowed, scolding anyone who tried to bar them shut.

To keep the swallows from swooping in, she stretched scraps of thin linen, procured somehow by Ivy, across the openings, tied in place with twine.

It wasn’t perfect, but the breeze that stirred through the long room chased away the worst of the stench.

Even waste had its place now. She had Cory, with the help of several soldiers, dig a pit beyond the stable yard, insisting all dirty water be dumped there, not left to rot outside the door.

It was a miserable job, but once the pit filled with the foul runoff, she could see the difference—the ground near the threshold stayed dry, the air cleaner.

Finally, she began to track the men themselves.

With a scrap of charcoal, she marked their names onto the plank boards of another wall.

Beside each, she drew crude lines for fevers broken, for wounds mending, for those worsening.

At first, the writing silenced the sick house.

While the soldiers who were awake had watched her earlier labors with amused grins—some even with a curl of derision at the sight of her scouring the floor like the lowest servant—they grew quiet when she lifted the stub of charcoal and began making marks on the wall beam.

It was Cory who bent close to whisper the truth. “Most dinna ken their letters,” he said. “Mayhap nae even the laird. And him”—he tilted his chin at Diarmad—“he kens naught of it for certain.”

Claire blinked, suddenly aware of the weight of every watching gaze. “Tell Diarmad it’s a way of keeping track—of remembering. If a man’s fever rises, I can see when it began. If his wound worsens, I’ll know how long it’s been. And if he improves—if he sits up tomorrow—I can mark that too.”

The boy translated, stumbling over a few words and requesting alternates, but eventually he got through it. Claire tapped the beam, where the first marks were etched beside a name.

“One mark for fever,” she explained further, “a short note about treatment, another mark for progress. It helps us know what’s working. Helps us see who needs more or different care.”

More than once afterward, Claire caught Diarmad sneaking a look at her marks, squinting as if trying to make sense of her patient charts.

It was crude—everything was only half as perfect as she imagined it.

It was also exhausting. And yet, as the days passed, the sick house no longer reeked like a slaughter yard.

The moans of the men were fewer, their color a little less ashen, their eyes a little brighter.

Setbacks still came, but not as swiftly, and not as often.

Claire felt the difference deep in her bones and was thrilled for having purpose now, never once wondering why she wanted a purpose here, in this time, or why she wasn’t wishing more fervently that she might somehow return home.