An Echo in the Bone (152 page)

I spoke
French
to him, and he kent what I said, clear as day!”

“Much more clearly than he would have had ye spoken to him in the
Gaididhlig,”
he assured her. He smiled at her excitement, patting her hand. “Well done,
a nighean.”

She was not listening. Her head turned to and fro, taking in the vast array of shops and vendors that filled the crooked street, assessing the possibilities now open to her. Butter, cheese, beans, sausage, cloth, shoes, buttons … Her fingers dug into his arm.

“Jamie! I can buy anything! By myself!”

He couldn’t help sharing her joy at thus rediscovering her independence, even though it gave him a small twinge. He’d been enjoying the novel sensation of having her rely on him.

“Well, so ye can,” he agreed, taking the baguette from her. “Best not to buy a trained squirrel or a longcase clock, though. Be difficult to manage on the ship.”

“Ship,” she repeated, and swallowed. The pulse in her throat, which had subsided momentarily, resumed its fluttering. “When will we … go on the ship?”

“Not yet,
a nighean,”
he said gently. “We’ll go and ha’ a bite to eat first, aye?”

THE
EUTERPE
WAS meant to sail on the evening tide, and they went down to the docks in mid-afternoon to go aboard and settle their things. But the slip at the dock where the
Euterpe
had floated the day before was empty.

“Where the devil is the ship that was here yesterday?” he demanded, seizing a passing boy by one arm.

“What, the
Euterpe?
” The boy looked casually where he was pointing, and shrugged. “Sailed, I suppose.”

“You
suppose?”
His tone alarmed the boy, who pulled his arm free and backed off, defensive.

“How would I know,
Monsieur?
” Seeing Jamie’s face, he hastily added, “Her master went into the district a few hours ago; probably he is still there.”

Jamie saw his sister’s chin dimple slightly and realized that she was near to panic. He wasn’t so far off it himself, he thought.

“Oh, is he?” he said, very calm. “Aye, well, I’ll just be going to fetch him, then. Which house does he go to?”

The boy shrugged helplessly. “All of them,
Monsieur
.”

Leaving Jenny on the dock to guard their baggage, he went back into the streets that adjoined the quay. A broad copper halfpenny secured him the services of one of the urchins who hung about the stalls, hoping for a half-rotten apple or an unguarded purse, and he followed his guide grimly into the filthy alleys, one hand on his purse, the other on the hilt of his dirk.

Brest was a port city, and a bustling port, at that. Which meant, he calculated, that roughly one in three of its female citizenry was a prostitute. Several of the independent sort hailed him as he passed.

It took three hours and several shillings, but he found the master of the
Euterpe
at last, dead drunk. He pushed the whore sleeping with him unceremoniously aside and roused the man roughly, slapping him into semiconsciousness.

“The ship?” The man stared at him blearily, wiping a hand across his stubbled face. “Fuck. Who cares?”

“I do,” Jamie said between clenched teeth. “And so will you, ye wee arse-wipe. Where is she, and why are ye not on her?”

“The captain threw me off,” the man said sullenly. “We had a disagreement. Where is she? On her way to Boston, I suppose.” He grinned unpleasantly. “If you swim fast enough, maybe you can catch her.”

IT TOOK THE last of his gold and a well-calculated mixture of threats and persuasion, but he found another ship. This one was headed south, to Charleston, but at the moment he would settle for being on the right continent. Once in America, he’d think again.

His sense of grim fury began finally to abate as the
Philomene
reached the open sea. Jenny stood beside him, small and silent, hands braced on the rail.

“What,
a pìuthar
?” He put his hand in the small of her back, rubbing gently with his knuckles.

“You’re grieving Ian?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, pressing back into his touch, then opened them and turned her face up to him, frowning.

“No, I’m troubled, thinkin’ of your wife. She’ll be peeved wi’ me—about Laoghaire.”

He couldn’t help a wry smile at thought of Laoghaire.

“Laoghaire? Why?”

“What I did—when ye brought Claire home again to Lallybroch, from Edinburgh. I’ve never said sorry to ye for that,” she added, looking up earnestly into his face.

He laughed.

“I’ve never said sorry to
you
, have I? For bringing Claire home and being coward enough not to tell her about Laoghaire before we got there.”

The frown between her brows eased, and a flicker of light came back into her eyes.

“Well, no,” she said. “Ye haven’t told me sorry. So we’re square, are we?”

He hadn’t heard her say that to him since he’d left home at fourteen to foster at Leoch.

“We’re square,” he said. He put an arm round her shoulders and she slipped her own around his waist, and they stood close together, watching the last of France sink into the sea.

A SERIES OF SHORT, SHARP SHOCKS

I WAS IN MARSALI’S kitchen, plaiting Félicité’s hair while keeping one eye on the porridge over the fire, when the bell over the printshop door rang. I whipped a ribbon round the end of the plait and, with a quick admonition to the girls to watch the porridge, went out to attend to the customer.

To my surprise, it was Lord John. But a Lord John I had never seen before. He was not so much disheveled as shattered, everything in order save his face.

“What?” I said, deeply alarmed. “What’s happened? Is Henry—”

“Not Henry,” he said hoarsely. He put a hand flat on the counter, as though to steady himself. “I have—bad news.”

“I can see that,” I said, a little tartly. “Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down.”

He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and looked at me. His face was ghastly, shocked and white, and the rims of his eyes showed red. But if it wasn’t Henry…

“Oh, God,” I said, a fist clenching deep in my chest. “Dottie. What’s happened to her?”

“Euterpe,”
he blurted, and I stopped dead, jarred to the backbone.

“What?” I whispered.
“What?”

“Lost,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Lost. With all hands.”

“No,” I said, trying for reason. “No, it’s not.”

He looked at me directly then, for the first time, and seized me by the forearm.

“Listen to me,” he said, and the pressure of his fingers terrified me. I tried to jerk away but couldn’t.

“Listen,” he said again. “I heard it this morning from a naval captain I know. I met him at the coffeehouse, and he was recounting the tragedy. He saw it.” His voice trembled, and he stopped for a moment, firming his jaw. “A storm. He had been chasing the ship, meaning to stop and board her, when the storm came upon them both. His own ship survived and limped in, badly damaged, but he saw the
Euterpe
swamped by a broaching wave, he said—I have no notion what that is—” He waved away his own digression, annoyed. “She went down before his eyes. The
Roberts—
his ship—hung about in hopes of picking up survivors.” He swallowed. “There were none.”

“None,” I said blankly. I heard what he said but took no meaning from the words.

“He is dead,” Lord John said softly, and let go of my arm. “He is gone.”

From the kitchen came the smell of burning porridge.

JOHN GREY STOPPED walking because he had come to the end of the street. He had been walking up and down the length of State Street since sometime before dawn. The sun was high now, and sweat-damp grit irritated the back of his neck, mud and dung splashed his stockings, and each step seemed to drive the nails in his shoe sole into the sole of his foot. He didn’t care.

The Delaware River flowed across his view, muddy and fish-smelling, and people jostled past him, crowding toward the end of the dock in hopes of getting on the ferry making its slow way toward them from the other side. Wavelets rose and lapped against the pier with an agitated sound that seemed to provoke the people waiting, for they began to push and shove, and one of the soldiers on the dock took down his musket from his shoulder and used it to shove a woman back.

She stumbled, shrieking, and her husband, a bantam-rooster of a man, bounced forward, fists clenched. The soldier said something, bared his teeth and made a shooing motion with the gun, his fellow, attracted by the disturbance, turned to see, and with no more than incitement than that, there was suddenly a heaving knot of people at the end of the dock and shouts and screams ran through the rest, as people toward the rear tried to get away from the violence, men in the crowd tried to press toward it, and someone was pushed into the water.

Grey took three steps back and watched as two little boys rushed out of the crowd, their faces bloated with fright, and ran off up the street. Somewhere in the crowd, he heard a woman’s high call, distraught: “Ethan! Johnny!
Joooooohnnny!
”

Some dim instinct said he should step forward, raise his own voice, assert his authority, sort this.

He turned and walked away.

He wasn’t in uniform, he told himself. They wouldn’t listen, would be confused, he might do more harm than good. But he wasn’t in the habit of lying to himself, and dropped that line of argument at once.

He’d lost people before. Some of them dearly loved, more than life itself. But now he’d lost himself.

He walked slowly back toward his house in a numb daze. He hadn’t slept since the news had come, save in the snatches of complete physical exhaustion, slumped in the chair on Mercy Woodcock’s porch, waking disoriented, sticky with sap from the sycamores in her yard and covered with the tiny green caterpillars that swung down from the leaves on invisible strands of silk.

“Lord John.” He became aware of an insistent voice, and with it, the realization that whoever was speaking had called his name several times already. He stopped, and turned to find himself facing Captain Richardson. His mind went quite blank. Possibly his face had, too, for Richardson took him by the arm in a most familiar manner and drew him into an ordinary.

“Come with me,” Richardson said in a low voice, releasing his arm, but jerking his head toward the stair. Faint stirrings of curiosity and wariness made themselves felt through the haze that wrapped him, but he followed, the sound of his shoes hollow in the wooden stairwell.

Richardson closed the door of the room behind him and began speaking before Grey could gather his wits to begin questioning him regarding the very peculiar circumstances William had recounted.

“Mrs. Fraser,” Richardson said without preamble. “How well do you know her?”

Grey was so taken aback by this that he answered.

“She is the wife—the widow”—he corrected himself, feeling as though he had stuck a pin into a raw wound—“of a good friend.”

“A good friend,” Richardson repeated, with no particular emphasis. The man could scarcely look more nondescript, Grey thought, and had a sudden creeping vision of Hubert Bowles. The most dangerous spies were men whom no one would look at twice.

“A good friend,” Grey repeated firmly. “His political loyalties are no longer an issue, are they?”

“Not if he’s truly dead, no,” Richardson agreed. “You think he is?”

“I am quite sure of it. What is it you wish to know, sir? I have business.”

Richardson smiled a little at this patently false statement.

“I propose to arrest the lady as a spy, Lord John, and wished to be certain that there was no …

personal attachment on your part, before I did so.”

Grey sat down, rather abruptly, and braced his hands on the table.

“I—she—what the devil for?” he demanded.

Richardson courteously sat down opposite him.

“She has been passing seditious materials to and fro all over Philadelphia for the last three months—possibly longer. And before you ask, yes, I’m sure. One of my men intercepted some of the material; have a look, if you like.” He reached into his coat and withdrew an untidy wad of papers, these looking to have passed through several hands. Grey didn’t think Richardson was practicing upon him, but took his time in deliberate examination. He put down the papers, feeling bloodless.

“I heard that the lady had been received at your house, and that she is often at the house where your nephew abides,” Richardson said. His eyes rested on Grey’s face, intent. “But she is not a

… friend?”

“She is a physician,” Grey said, and had the small satisfaction of seeing Richardson’s brows shoot up. “She has been of—of the greatest service to me and my nephew.” It occurred to him that it was likely better that Richardson did not know how much esteem he might hold for Mrs.

Fraser, as if he thought there
was
a personal interest, he would immediately cease to give Grey information. “That is ended, though,” he added, speaking as casually as possible. “I respect the lady, of course, but there is no attachment, no.” He rose then, in a decided manner, and took his leave, for to ask more questions would compromise the impression of indifference.

He set off toward Walnut Street, no longer numb. He felt once more himself, strong and determined. There was, after all, one more service he might perform for Jamie Fraser.

“YOU MUST MARRY me,” he repeated.

I’d heard him the first time, but it made no more sense upon repetition. I stuck a finger in one ear and wiggled it, then repeated the process with the other.

“You can’t possibly have said what I think you said.”

“Indeed I did,” he said, his normal dry edge returning.

The numbness of shock was beginning to wear off, and something horrible was beginning to crawl out of a small hole in my heart. I couldn’t look at that and took refuge in staring at Lord John.

“I know I’m shocked,” I told him, “but I’m sure I’m neither delusional nor hearing things. Why the bloody hell are you
saying
that, for God’s sake?!” I rose abruptly, wanting to strike him. He saw it and took a smart step back.