Page 91 of Go, Rogue

“Can you ride?”

“Aye.” But he’s unsteady on his feet again as he stands.

They make their way slowly back through the underbrush to where McNeil left the horses, but there’s still no sign of him—or of Rogers or Childers. Catherine looks up the main road and then back at Andrew, weighing her options. Go back for Rogers and send McGann on alone, or accompany him herself to make sure he gets the help he so clearly needs.

The bright sunlight of the road shows her the ravages of his face in a way the shaded underbrush hadn’t. His skin is ashen, his cheeks hollow. His ankle is swollen and an ugly green-yellow-gray color. The wound on his thigh smells. Heavens, she leans in slightly. It smells terribly.

That decides her. The smell of the wound and Violet’s words that replay in her mind: we must be vigilant about infection.

Andrew can’t make the trip alone. He can barely make it onto the horse, and in the end, they only take one—her riding behind him to hold him upright.

Her arms and thighs strain with the effort to keep them both astride, but the horse bears their weight amiably as they follow McGann’s muttered directions to the outskirts of Kingston, where many of the free villages are located. She will get him to his grandmother’s house, and then she’ll send help back for the others.

She ties the horse in front of a row of tiny, well-kept cabins that Andrew indicates, and helps him descend the mount and limp to the front door. She’s lost her bonnet somewhere, and the heat blazes down on the top of her head. She can feel herself soaked through with sweat and her sunburned skin pulls tight across her cheekbones, itchy and raw. Both of them are filthy, and she hopes that if it is his grandmother who answers the door, she won’t take one look at them and slam it shut.

She needn’t have worried.

The small, wizened woman who swings the door open at her knock is so clearly McGann’s relation it almost takes her breath away. Their faces have exactly the same shape, as if they’ve been cut from different-sized but identical molds. His grandmother’s skin is a deep, ebony black, while his is a lighter shade of brown, and Andrew is nearly twice the woman’s size—but otherwise they are the same.

The phrase spit and image comes to her mind.

“I’ve brought—” Catherine starts, but the woman only stands aside and waves them into her home.

“On the bed,” she directs Catherine, who dutifully does as told, helping Andrew limp across the room and down onto the bed. She’s glad it’s only a few steps; he’s too unsteady, and she’s too exhausted for either of them to go any farther.

McGann’s grandmother eyes him up and down. “Ankle and thigh. Anything else?” she asks as she takes hold of Catherine’s elbow and steers her back toward the door.

“A fever, I think,” Catherine says. She wants to stay with him, but his grandmother is already gently but firmly pushing her across the threshold.

“Best leave him with me,” the older woman says. “And aloe vera for that sunburn of yours. It looks angry.”

And then the door is politely but firmly closed in her face.

Catherine stands for a moment on the other side. She wants to hold Andrew’s hand and put a cold cloth over his brow. She wants to hold him close and tell him how much he means to her. But so does his grandmother. And she has more right to the man than Catherine does.

And there’s still Rogers to think about. And a duke to apprehend.

She frowns but leaves him there, riding back to Spanish Town in the intense island heat, trying to figure out exactly what she’s going to say to Mrs. Masters. She’s definitely going to need her help.

McGann wakes in a small, one-room cabin. His large body has been laid out on the single bed in the corner of the room, the length of which is augmented by bundles of dried grasses stacked high to accommodate his feet. The bale, slightly elevated from the rest of the bed, gives him a good view of his ankle, which has been cleaned and neatly wrapped.

“Sprained,” says a warm voice from the other side of the room. A voice he knows and has wanted—so very badly—to hear again.

He turns his head to find his grandmother seated at the single table against the far wall.

“Your ankle’s sprained, not broken,” she says. “The rest of you was harder to patch up, though.”

He raises his head slightly to look at the wound on his thigh. It’s been cleaned too, stitched up and bound in linen.

“Took all of my rum and my moonshine to clean that one.” She wrinkles her nose. “Smelled like fish guts.”

“Gran.” He smiles at her, something lifting in his chest. “Thank you.”

“Of course. Now, you best tell me, child, what it is you’ve gotten yourself into. Last time you came, I hoped that would be the end of your trouble, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“The lockbox,” McGann begins, “from my last visit. Did you—”

“That accursed thing? Yes, I did.”