Otherwise Engaged (Ladies of Lantern Street #3)

Chapter One

One

Are you a passenger traveling on the Northern Star, by any chance, madam?”

The voice was male, British, well educated and raw with what sounded like pain and shock. It came from the shadowy entrance of a nearby alley. Amity Doncaster stopped cold.

She had been on her way back to the ship, her notes and sketches of the local island scenes tucked into her satchel.

“Yes, I’m traveling on the Star,” she said.

She made no attempt to approach the alley. She could not see the speaker concealed in the shadows, but she was quite certain that he was not a fellow passenger. She would have recognized the dark, curiously compelling voice.

“I am in rather urgent need of a favor,” he said.

She was quite certain now that the speaker was in great pain. It was as if it took every ounce of strength and will he possessed just to speak to her.

Then, again, she had met some very fine actors in her travels and not all of them had been professional thespians. Some had been very talented con artists and criminals.

Nevertheless, if the man was injured she could not turn her back on him.

She lowered her parasol and unhooked the elegant, specially made Japanese fan from the chatelaine at her waist. The tessen was designed to look like an ordinary lady’s fan, but with its pointed steel spikes and metal leaves it was, in truth, a weapon.

Gripping the tessen in the folded position, she went cautiously toward the alley entrance.

She had seen enough of the world to be wary of strangers calling out from the shadows.

The fact that in this case the man spoke with an upper-class British accent was no guarantee that he was not a member of the criminal class.

The Caribbean had once been plagued with pirates and privateers.

The Royal Navy and, more recently, the U.S.

Navy had eliminated much of the threat from that quarter, but there was no permanent solution to the problem of ordinary thieves and footpads.

She had found them to be as ubiquitous as rats everywhere in the world.

When she arrived at the mouth of the alley, she saw at once that she had no cause to fear the man sitting with his back braced against the brick wall.

He was in desperate straits. He appeared to be in his early thirties.

His night-dark hair, damp with sweat, grew from a sharp widow’s peak.

He no doubt usually wore it sleeked back behind his ears, but now it hung limply, framing the planes and angles of a hard, intelligent face set in a grim, resolute mask.

His light brown eyes were glazed with pain and the beginnings of shock.

There was something else in those eyes, as well—a fierce, ironclad will.

He was hanging on, quite literally, for dear life.

The front of his hand-tailored, white linen shirt was soaked with fresh blood. He had removed his coat, wadded it up and now clutched it tight against his side. The pressure he was exerting was not enough to stop the slow, steady stream of blood leaking from the wound.

There were bloody fingerprints on the letter he held out to her. His hand shook with the force of the effort required to make even that small gesture.

She reattached the tessen to the chatelaine and rushed toward him.

“Good heavens, sir, what happened? Were you attacked?”

“Shot. The letter. Take it.” He sucked in a sharp breath. “Please.”

She dropped the satchel and the parasol and crouched beside him. Ignoring the letter.

“Let’s have a look,” she said.

She infused her voice with the calm authority that her father had always used with his patients. George Doncaster had claimed that the notion that the doctor knew what he was about gave the patient hope and courage.

But this particular patient was not in the mood to be reassured. He had one objective in mind and he pursued it with every ounce of his fading strength.

“No,” he said through gritted teeth. His eyes burned with determination to make certain she understood what he was saying.

“Too late. Name’s Stanbridge. I booked passage on the Star.

Looks like I’m not going to be making the voyage to New York.

Please, a favor, madam. I beg of you. Very important. Take this letter.”

He was not going to let her help him until he had made certain that she would deal with the letter.

“Very well.” She opened the satchel and dropped the letter inside.

“Promise me that you will see to it that the letter gets to my uncle in London. Cornelius Stanbridge. Ashwick Square.”

“I am on my way back to London,” she said. “I will deliver your letter. But now we must deal with your wound, sir. Please let me examine you. I have had some experience with this sort of thing.”

He fixed her with a riveting gaze. For the briefest flash of time she could have sworn that she saw something that might have been amusement in his eyes.

“I have the impression that you have had a great deal of experience in many things, madam,” he said.

“You have no idea, Mr. Stanbridge. I will take excellent care of your letter.”

He looked hard at her for a few seconds longer through half-closed eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe you will do precisely that.”

She unfastened the blood-drenched shirt and eased aside the hand he was using to press the crumpled coat against the wound.

A quick look told her what she needed to know.

The flesh of his side was ripped and bloody, but she saw no sign of arterial bleeding.

She pushed his hand and the coat back into place and got to her feet.

“The bullet passed cleanly through and I don’t believe any vital organs were struck,” she said.

Working quickly, she hiked up the skirts of her traveling dress and tore several lengths of fabric off her petticoats.

“But we must control the bleeding before we take you to the ship. There is no modern medical care available on the island. I’m afraid that you are stuck with me. ”

Stanbridge grunted something unintelligible and closed his eyes.

She fashioned a thick bandage out of one long strip of the petticoat. Once again she eased his clenched hand and the coat away from his side. She pulled the edges of the wound together as best she could, fit the bandage over the gash and then clamped his hand on top to hold the compress in place.

“Press hard,” she ordered.

He did not open his eyes but his strong hand clenched tightly around the makeshift bandage.

Swiftly she wound two long strips of petticoat fabric around his waist and tied them securely to hold the bandage in place.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Stanbridge growled. He did not open his eyes.

“My father was a doctor, sir. I was raised in a household where medicine was the chief topic of conversation at every meal. I often assisted him in his work. In addition, I traveled the world with him for a few years while he studied medical practices in various foreign lands.”

Stanbridge managed to open his eyes partway. “This is, indeed, my lucky day.”

She glanced at the bloody shirt and coat. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call it your lucky day, but I do believe that you will survive it. Under the circumstances that is no small thing. Now we must see about getting you aboard the Star.”

Her father had died a year earlier, but she still carried his medical kit with her on her own journeys abroad. The kit, however, was back in her stateroom on board the ship. Now that she had staunched the worst of the bleeding she had to figure out a way to get Stanbridge to the Star.

She rose, went to the entrance of the alley and stopped the first two people she saw, both locals on their way to the market. It was only a matter of a few minutes to get things organized. One glance at Stanbridge in the alley and the men understood what was needed.

With the assistance of two of their friends, both fishermen, they conveyed the barely conscious Stanbridge back to the ship in a makeshift litter fashioned from a fishing net. Amity tipped them quite extravagantly, but they seemed more pleased with her heartfelt gratitude than with the money.

Members of the Star’s crew got the patient into his stateroom and onto the narrow bunk.

Amity requested that her medical kit be brought from her own stateroom.

When it arrived she set to work cleaning the wound and closing it with several stitches.

Stanbridge groaned from time to time, but for the most part he drifted in and out of consciousness.

Amity knew that she was on her own with the patient.

There was no longer a doctor on board the Star.

The ship’s physician, a ruddy-faced, overweight man who had been given to smoking and heavy drinking, had succumbed to a heart attack shortly after the ship departed from its last port of call.

Amity had stepped into the breach as best she could, treating the various shipboard injuries and occasional bouts of fever that occurred among the crew.

There were only a handful of other passengers on the Star—British and American for the most part. The Star would take on a few more when it stopped at other islands along the way, but it was unlikely that Captain Harris would be able to find another doctor until they arrived in New York.

The fever set in sometime around midnight.

Stanbridge’s skin was alarmingly hot to the touch.

Amity soaked a cloth in the basin of cool water that the cabin attendant had brought to her and draped it across the patient’s forehead.

His eyes flickered open. He looked at her with a bewildered expression.

“Am I dead?” he asked.

“Far from it,” she assured him. “You are safely on board the Northern Star. We are on our way to New York.”

“You’re sure I’m not dead.”

“Positive.”

“You would not lie to me about a thing like that, would you?”

“No,” she said. “I would never lie to you about something that important.”

“The letter?”

“Safe in my satchel.”