Hugo and the Maiden

sir. That is where you are currently a guest—in Scotland, in the Orkneys. This is the island of Stroma.” She hesitated and then added, “Small Cailean understands both English and Scots Gaelic—he knows two languages, which, I imagine, is one more than you know.”
The man glanced around the meeting hall, his expression horrified, as if she’d just told him that he’d crossed the River Styx into Hades.
“How the bloody damned hell did—”
Martha spun on her heel.
“Oi!” he yelled after her. “Where are you going? I’m not finished with you. You can’t just turn your bleeding—”
“You needn’t hold him, Small Cailean. Please put him on one of the pews and I will attend to him when he stops using such language.” She tossed the words over her shoulder, ignoring the stranger’s response, which was to squawk like an angry gull. If he was able to emote as loudly as that, he could not be too badly hurt.
Martha worked her way down the pews, on which the patients—all male—had been laid head-to-head and foot-to-foot. Every single man had horrible chafing on their ankles which she suspected was due to manacles. She splinted broken fingers, one broken wrist, stitched up a nasty gash, and smeared salve on raw wounds.
She was busy treating the seventh or eighth man, when her patient spoke. “He is the reason most of us are alive.”
Martha looked up from his left hand, on which the two smallest fingers were broken. One of the things people learned on Stroma—which had no resident doctor—was to use splints, stitch small wounds, and do other general medical care. “I beg your pardon?”
“The, er, gentleman who was yelling—”
“Get your big bloody paws off me!” The words cut through the other chatter.
Martha’s patient—surprisingly well-spoken for a convict—grimaced, “Well, the man who is still yelling is the same person responsible for most of us who are alive.”
She glanced up at the yeller.
He was glaring repressively at Small Cailean, who appeared to have taken a liking to him and refused to put him down. Martha clucked her tongue before returning to her task. Small Cailean was sweet and gentle, but he did have a tendency to develop, well, fixations, and then cling like a burr. A huge burr.
“What is his name?” she asked her patient.
“I’m afraid we weren’t in a situation where exchanging names was—well, let’s just say the subject did not come up.”
Martha didn’t even want to think of the hellish conditions these men must have endured.
“He may be foul-mouthed and obnoxious,” her patient continued, “but he stopped that maniac from killing a lot of us.”
She looked up, arrested. “What maniac?
Her patient turned an even paler shade than his already white skin, causing his many freckles to stand out even more. “A prisoner in the hold—Graybow was his name, or at least that was what was tattooed on his chest. Anyhow, he began inciting some of the others to, er, well to acts of extreme violence. Soon there were a dozen of them, slamming their chains against the hull and making a horrendous racket. The crew—there weren’t nearly as many of them as there were of us—locked the hold shut, leaving us at that monster’s mercy for days.” He shivered. “When they stopped feeding us, Graybow sawed off the feet of the two prisoners next to him and it didn’t seem like he would stop.”
Martha sat rapt, his damaged hand forgotten in her lap. “And then what happened?”
“Well, that man”—he gestured to the obstreperous black-haired convict, who was currently asking everyone around him if they spoke proper English—“convinced everyone that we had to stop Graybow before he came after us. It took him a while to get enough people to agree, but finally we were able to rush him when his back was turned.
“It was the mouthy yeller who jumped on Graybow’s back and wrapped the chain around his neck, squeezing, until the big bastard, er …” He paused, his pale cheeks coloring. “Begging your pardon. He, um, subdued Graybow until he was no longer a danger.”
“Do you mean he—”
“I’ll not say anything about that,” the man said, his tone suddenly firm. “I will say that if that maniac Graybow had lived there would be a lot fewer of us breathing right now.”
Martha held his gaze for a long moment. “Go on.”
“That fellow took the blade that the monster had been using to kill and used it to pick open our manacles. He and one other man worked for hours freeing convicts. He kept on working even when the deck caught fire over our heads.” He swallowed, his forehead suddenly sheened in sweat. “And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the ship struck something hard and water came in faster than I would have believed possible. Men were screaming, fighting, and panicking, and yet he kept picking locks right up until the moment the water covered our heads. Those men who’d not managed to get free held onto men who were and pulled them down. Somebody grabbed one of my legs and I thought—I thought—” He began shaking.
“Shhh, it’s alright Mr.—”
“Franks. My name is Albert Franks.”
“You mustn’t agitate yourself, Mr. Franks. You are safe now.”
As Martha finished splinting his fingers and smearing his scratches and abrasions with rapidly diminishing salve, she couldn’t help casting another glance at the savior in Mr. Franks’s story.
A less likely looking hero Martha had never seen.
◆◆◆
Hugo could not understand a damned word anyone said—except for the stern-faced school mistress who’d scolded him and then left him with one of the hugest men he’d seen in his entire life.
Hugo stood five foot ten inches in his stocking feet and weighed a good thirteen stone, but this man was a bloody giant and he held Hugo as if he were a babe. And the woman had called him Small Cailean? Hugo shivered at the thought of a Big Cailean.
At his shivering the big man propped Hugo on his hip like an infant and solicitously pulled the blanket up to his chin.
Hugo smiled up