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“I fought in Ireland with a severed arm.”
There was simply no arguing with him when he was in this frame of mind, so she stood back, arms folded, refusing to pass him the broadsword. “If you can’t pick it up you are wasting your time.”
Grimacing he grasped the hilt, lips pressed tightly together, willing his arm to obey. He could just manage to hold it if he kept his elbow bent and the sword close to his body but as soon as he tried to lift the blade, his face contorted with pain, and his arm fell defeated to his side.
“Lucinda!” he barked. “Where’s your grandmother?”
“Gone to a confinement, remember?” Clearly, he did not.
“Could have picked a better time,” he grumbled as if the birthing woman deliberately timed her labor to inconvenience him. “Come and strap my shoulder then,” he barked.
She already had the binding ready. Grandma warned her it would come to this. Using six-inch-wide strips of well-worn cloth, she wound lengths around his chest to support his injured shoulder blade before changing to a diagonal pattern that looped under his armpit and around the slope of his neck. She finished off the binding with a few passes that crossed to his opposite shoulder, paying no heed to his sharp intake of breath as she pulled the binding tight and tied off the end in a knot. Why should she show him any sympathy when it was his own pig-headedness causing him pain?
Once again, her father attempted to lift the sword. With the binding on he could raise it a little more, enough to maintain an inside guard, which was still a long way from being able to fight with it, a fact she itched to point out.
“Do we have something stronger than willow bark tea?” he said.
“No,” she said firmly, “we do not.” Under no circumstances, Grandma had warned her, give him any of my poppy syrup, even going so far as to hide her supply in the chamber pot beneath her bed. Grandma was worried that if Father over-exerted himself, he might bring on another spasming attack.
“My first student this morning is McCrae,” Father said, prowling around the fencing room, albeit more slowly than he normally would. “We have been comparing Scottish broadsword technique with the English manner of sword craft. I believe he may be teaching me as much as I am teaching him.”
In his current state her father was in no state to teach or to be taught anything, but he needed to reach that conclusion for himself. Pointing it out would only result in having her head bitten off, so she opted for an oblique question instead. “If anyone asks, how are we to explain your injury?”
This gave him pause for thought. “Do we need to mention it?” The look on her face was the answer to that. “A foolish accident perhaps?”
“We could say you got up in the night to go to the privy and tripped over the cat.”
A faint smile twitched the corner of his lips. “A Master of Defense brought down by a cat? My pupils would have great sport with that.”
“Exactly,” Lucinda said.
“Then that is what happened,” he agreed. “Far better to be thought an old fool than possessed by the devil.” Sadly that was no idle jest. Many people believed that convulsions were evidence of satanic possession and for that reason alone they had to make sure that no one ever discovered the true cause of his injured shoulder.
Truth might be a virtue, but it was also a dangerous beast. Robert McCrae, the world’s nosiest, most impossible Scotsman, already suspected she was up to something, and this would only make matters infinitely worse.
