Hugo and the Maiden

said.
When neither spoke, he turned to the one who’d been praying, a younger man who resembled a human matchstick with his flaming red hair. “What about you, Vicar? Do you want to live?”
The lad nodded.
Hugo turned to the other man. “How about you, Puker?”
Eyes wide, the second man nodded, too.
“Good, now shut up and listen; this is what we’re going to do.”

Chapter 3
Martha and several others worked quickly to turn the meeting room into a field hospital. There wasn’t much they could do with the long wooden benches except cover them with sheets, blankets, and anything else that might cushion their patients and keep them warm.
Women from the small farms that dotted the island arrived carrying what little they could spare—which was still more than most could afford—and stayed to help once the patients began to arrive.
Stroma was a hard rock of a place that the rest of Britain had long forgotten. Although it was only separated from the mainland by the two miles of the Pentland Firth, the weather often ensured those two miles were as good as two hundred and Stroma could be cut off for weeks at a time from the outside world.
Of the three hundred and seventy-six people who lived on the island, only Martha and her father had moved here from the mainland. Jonathan Pringle had already been fifty-six when he’d accepted the long-vacant living on Stroma.
Not until Jonathan, his wife, and nine-month-old daughter arrived on Stroma did the vicar discover that the last clergyman to preach from the pulpit in the gray stone church building had been a follower of Mr. Penn, who—when he’d left to go to the Colonies—had taken half the islanders with him.
The remaining islanders had decided the village population could not survive another charismatic nonconformist and the church had been empty for decades.
As opposed as they were to a new spiritual leader, it hadn’t taken long for the reserved but kind-hearted islanders to accept the soft-spoken vicar and his wife and baby.
“I’ve brought a can of hot lobster stew, Martha.”
Martha looked up from the sparse contents of her medical bag to find Mrs. Morag Fergusson standing behind an enormous steaming cauldron.
“My goodness, Mrs. Fergusson. Please tell me you didn’t carry that all the way here?”
The older woman smiled, exposing a mouth missing half its complement of teeth. “No, Small Cailean brung it.” Mrs. Fergusson’s nephew, referred to by all as Small Cailean to distinguish him from his father, Big Cailean—who’d died many years ago—was easily the biggest man on the island, even though he was only sixteen. It was one of nature’s jests that he was also one of its most gentle and timid. He smiled shyly down at Martha.
“Thank you, Cailean,” Martha said.
His pale gray eyes slid away, his wind-reddened cheeks flushing darker, and he nodded. He rarely spoke and could not read or write. Martha had tried to teach him more than once, his huge form hunched over a tiny desk in the little schoolhouse where she often helped during the winter and spring, but the other children—from five to fifteen—would taunt him when she wasn’t watching and he always ran away. Thankfully it never occurred to him to strike back at any of his tormentors, as much as they might deserve it.
“Get back down the hill, Small Cailean,” his aunt ordered sharply. She tended to employ a rough tongue with her nephew, and Martha was grateful that Cailean didn’t appear to notice. “They’ll have need of yer back at the church.”
Cailean scuttled out of the house and “down the hill,” which was really a misnomer as the highest point on the island, Cairn Hill, wasn’t even two hundred feet above sea level.
Just as Small Cailean left, Mr. Clark entered. “Are you ready, Miss Pringle?”
Martha nodded.
And then her patients began to arrive.
◆◆◆
Some Hours Later …
“Put me down, you great cabbage! Good God almighty—don’t any of you people speak the King’s bloody English?”
The voice cut through the din of the meeting house like a cleaver.
Martha tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and looked up to find the voice’s owner a few feet away, swaddled and cradled like a baby in Small Cailean’s arms. The giant was grinning as he stared down at the irate man, whom he held as easily as a child.
Martha stood up and stretched, biting back a groan before resting her hands on her hips. “I understand English, although I cannot say it is the King’s.”
The stranger’s head whipped around and she startled. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting—his voice and diction had been clipped and proper—but his face…well, it was all harsh angles and dramatic planes.
His cheekbones were like blades and his eyes were so dark you couldn’t tell pupil from iris. They were also heavy-lidded and oddly tilted and it struck her that he looked like a satyr, or at least what she imagined one would look like.
“Who the devil are you?” he demanded, his black eyes sweeping over her quickly and dismissing her even quicker.
Martha’s face burned under his cursory examination. “I am Miss Martha Pringle, and I would greatly appreciate it if you would not use such language.”
He blinked, and his eyebrows, twin black-as-coal slashes, shot up until they disappeared beneath the sheaf of pitch-colored hair that hung over his forehead. “Is that so, Miss Martha Pringle? Well, perhaps you would tell this great bloody looby—”
Martha approached the man, as much as she didn’t want to. “That is not the type of thing we call each other here, Mr.—”
His thin, mobile lips curved into an unpleasant smile as he crossed his arms, looking for all the world like he was lounging on a chaise instead of lying in another man’s arms. If bloody, feces-smeared, vomit-encrusted, and soaking wet men did such a thing as lounge on chaises.
“What languageare these people speaking?” the stranger demanded.
Martha gave him her most repressive stare, the one she used on recalcitrant students. “It is English as spoken by a native Scot,