“Let him be carried to the castle,” said the commander of the party, a tall man sunburnt to a fiery red. “Is the other alive?”
“Only stunned, my lord, I think and not much hurt,” was the answer of an attendant officer; “but here is a poor blackamoor dead.”
“Poor Hans! Best so perhaps,” murmured Peregrine, as he was lifted. Then in a voice of alarm, “Look to the lady, she is hurt.”
“It is nothing,” cried she. “O Mr. Oakshott! that this should have happened!”
“My lord, this is the young gentlewoman I told you of, betrothed to poor young Archfield,” said Sir Edmund Nutley.
Lord Cutts, for it was indeed William’s favoured ‘Salamander,’ took off his plumed hat in salutation, and both gentlemen perceiving that she too was bleeding, she was solicitously invited to the castle, to be placed under the charge of the lieutenant-governor’s wife. She found by this time that she was in a good deal of pain, and thankfully accepted the support Sir Edmund offered her, when he dismounted and walked beside her pony, while explanations passed between them. The weather had prevented any communication with the mainland, so that he was totally ignorant of her capture, and did not know what had become of Mr. Fellowes. He himself had been just starting with Lord Cutts, who was going to join the King for his next campaign, and they were to represent the case to the King. Anne told him in return what she dared to say, but she was becoming so faint and dazed that she was in great fear of not saying what she ought; and indeed she could hardly speak, when after passing under the great gateway, she was lifted off her horse, at the door of the dwelling-house, and helped upstairs to a bedroom, where the wife of the lieutenant-governor, Mrs. Dudley, was very tender over her with essences and strong waters, and a surgeon of the suite almost immediately came to her.
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “you should be with Mr. Oakshott.”
The surgeon explained that Mr. Oakshott would have nothing done for him till he had fully made and signed his deposition, in case the power should afterwards be wanting.
So Anne submitted to the dressing of her hurt, which was only a flesh wound, the bone being happily untouched. Both the surgeon and Mrs. Dudley urged her going to bed immediately, but she was unwilling to put herself out of reach; and indeed the dressing was scarcely finished before Sir Edmund Nutley knocked at the door to ask whether she could admit him.
“Lord Cutts is very desirous of speaking with you, if you are able,” he said. “Here has this other fellow come round, declaring that Oakshott is the Pilpignon who was in the Barclay Plot, and besides, the prime leader of the Black Gang, of whom we have heard so much.”