Her Wounded Outlaw

Fenella Dunbar sets bones because there is no one else in the glen to do it, and she does not ask questions about where her patients come from. At midnight, two men bring her a third with a musket ball in his shoulder. He offers her coin. She tells him to keep it and never come back. Ten days later he comes back on foot, alone, with the wound gone bad. She lets him sleep in the byre because she is not going to watch a man die of her own pride. He does not talk about himself. He does, over one slow winter, get a name in the glen anyway — and when a magistrate's party of eleven armed men rides up the road looking for him, it is Fenella who opens the door to them. He cannot ride. She has to lie. She does it well. Then he asks her to come with him, and Fenella has a glen, a brother and a job, and none of them travel.