Page 8 of The Last Debutante

“I don’t want biscuits. You are right that I have come a very long way. I made that journey in the anticipation of a lovely reunion with my grandmother and I imagined something vastly different—a house, a small village. A servant! But I find you in a crofter’s cottage without any help at all, with a wounded,nakedman.”

Mamie clucked her tongue at Daria. “You make it sound nefarious.”

“Yes,” Daria said, nodding furiously, “it rather seems nefarious to me.”

Mamie sighed. “All right, then. I will tell you. But I assure you that you and your imagination will be quite disappointed. Sit down, my love.”

Daria didn’t move.

Mamie grabbed her hand and dragged her to the kitchen table.“Sit,”she said again. She reached around to a smaller table to fetch a plate of biscuits and placed them before Daria.

“Well?” Daria asked, folding her arms over her middle and ignoring the biscuits.

Mamie took the apron from its hook and draped it around her belly. “I found him.”

Daria snorted.

“Well, I did. In the woods.” Mamie turned away, tied the apron at her back, and leaned over the hearth to check the kettle. “He’d been shot.”

“Shot.” Daria frowned. “By whom? Why?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea! Robbers, perhaps? But I couldn’t very well leave him there to die, could I? So I brought him here.”

Mamie’s explanation didn’t ring true, perhaps because she offered it with her back turned. Or because now, as she turned, her smile seemed a little too wide, a little too... fixed.

“Youbrought him here,” Daria repeated, her gaze narrowing.

“I did.”

“By yourself?”

“No! No, no, of course not. Ah... one of the Brodie men helped me. The Brodies are thick as midges in summer; one can scarcely walk without tripping over them.” She busied herself with the tea tins, examining them all as if she’d never seen them until now.

“And then...”

“And then?” Mamie asked absently.

“And then you sent for a doctor to tend to him,” Daria suggested, trying to move the story along.

“A doctor? No.”

“No?”

“Daria, this is not England. It would take far too long for a doctor to arrive and the poor man might have died. I sought the counsel of a healer and mended him myself.”

Daria stared hard at her grandmother. How could Mamie possibly know how to mend a man who had been shot?

Mamie turned away, back to the hearth. “Splendid—the water was still warm and boiled quickly.” She removed it from the fire.

“I am fairly certain,” Daria said evenly, “that when a man has been shot with lead, it is prudent to have the lead removed.”

“Yes, that is true. So I did,” Mamie said, as if it were a matter of course to remove lead from a human body. “Don’t look so alarmed, sweetling. One learns quite a lot when living in Scotland. Handy things they don’t teach you in England.” She chuckled as she made tea.

Daria’s stomach began to roil with nerves and not a little bit of horror. “I am aghast, Mamie. Youseemto be the same person who was my grandmother. But my grandmother, who left England seven years ago, was a lady. She had never, to my knowledge, carried a gun or dug lead out of human flesh, much less the flesh of a strange man.”

Mamie shrugged. “I suppose people change.”

Daria leaned forward, peering into her grandmother’s face. “Mamie? Are you all right?”