The Scottish Prisoner (29 page)

Thomas Lally came suddenly to mind, as did what Minnie had said about that bloody verse. A white rose, the Jacobite symbol. Fraser hadn’t mentioned the white rose, nor had Lally. And Lally had been one of Charles Stuart’s officers before going off to involve himself with the French. What had Lally and Fraser said to each other in those brief sentences of stilted Erse?

Grey closed his eyes briefly in dismay. More bloody Jacobites? Would they never give up?

By what Fraser said, he had met Quinn in London. So much for Hal’s insistence that Fraser be treated as a gentleman and not a prisoner, allowed to walk out freely as he liked!

“Serve you right if that Irish blackguard had cut my throat,” he muttered to his absent brother.

Still, this was beside the point. The important thing, he reminded himself, was that Jamie didn’t want him dead—a warming thought—and had stopped Quinn from killing him.

Would that continue to be the case, if he spoke directly to Fraser about the matter?

As he saw it, he had only two alternatives: say nothing, watch them, and do his best never to sleep … or talk to Jamie Fraser. He scratched his chest meditatively. He could go one night without sleep, possibly two. That would bring them within reach of Siverly. But he didn’t wish to face Gerald Siverly exhausted and fuzzy-minded.

While Fraser’s reasons for not allowing Quinn to kill him were neither personal nor flattering, another point was that he plainly wanted nothing to do with what Quinn intended—but Quinn needed or wanted Fraser to be involved with it.

The air about him was still black-dark, but it had shifted, rising in some way, the night beginning to lift, restless to depart. At some distance, he heard the small sounds of a man waking: a cough, the clearing of a throat, a soft groan as gravity made its fresh demands. He couldn’t tell which man it was, but both of them would doubtless make their presence known as soon as it was light, looking for breakfast.

If Quinn suspected anything, he might well try to kill Grey regardless of Jamie’s threat. Just how well did the Irishman know Jamie? Grey wondered. Anyone who knew him well would take him at his word—but someone who didn’t might not.

Quinn did know him, though. He’d called him
“Mac Dubh.”
That’s what the prisoners at Ardsmuir had called Fraser; Grey had heard it often enough that he’d asked one of the Gaelic-speaking orderlies what it meant.
“Son of the Black One,”
he’d been told, in a matter-of-fact way. He’d wondered at the time whether this was a satanic reference of some sort, but it didn’t seem so, from his informant’s attitude. Perhaps it was a literal reference to some aspect of Fraser’s father’s character or appearance,
and he spared an instant to wonder what Fraser’s father had been like.

The horses were drowsing under the tower wall; one of them released a long, rumbling fart and another shook its head, mane flapping. Now the birds were at it, tentative chirps from the distant hedgerows.

He’d talk to Fraser.

AFTER SOME THOUGHT
, Grey decided that directness was the simplest way of obtaining privacy.

“Mr. Quinn,” he said pleasantly, when the Irishman came back from his morning ablutions, water droplets shining in his curls. “I need to discuss various aspects of our business with Mr. Fraser before we arrive at Athlone. Would you do me the favor of riding on? We shall follow shortly and catch you up before noon.”

The Irishman looked startled and glanced quickly at Jamie, who gave no indication that this was an out-of-the-way request, then looked back to Grey and nodded awkwardly.

“Certainly.”

Grey thought that Quinn was not a particularly experienced
intrigant
and hoped he had even less experience as an assassin. On the other hand, it wasn’t necessarily a job requiring skill. More, of course, if your victim was forewarned. He smiled at Quinn, who looked taken aback.

Breakfast was even more cursory than supper had been, though Jamie toasted two pieces of bread with cheese between, so that the cheese melted, something Grey hadn’t seen before but thought very tasty. Quinn mounted up without comment afterward and headed back to the road.

Grey sat on a moss-covered rock, watching until the Irishman had got well away, then swiveled back to face Fraser, who was tidily rolling up a pair of stockings into a ball.

“I woke up last night,” he said without preamble.

Fraser stuffed the stockings into his portmanteau and reached for the heel of bread, which followed the stockings.

“Did you,” he said, not looking up.

“Yes. One question—does Mr. Quinn know the nature of our business with Siverly?”

Fraser hesitated a moment before answering.

“Probably not.” He looked up, eyes a startlingly deep blue. “If he does, he didna hear it from me.”

“Where the devil else might he have heard it?” Grey demanded, and Fraser glared at him.

“From your brother’s servants, I imagine. That’s where he learned that ye had business in Ireland and that I was to go with ye.”

Grey blinked, but it was all too likely. He’d sent Tom Byrd often enough to extract information from other people’s servants.

“How did he come to be in London?”

Fraser’s eyes narrowed, but he answered.

“He followed me, when your brother had me taken from Helwater. And if ye want to know how he came to be at Helwater, ye’ll need to ask him, because I don’t know.”

Grey raised one brow; if Fraser didn’t know, he probably could make a damned good guess, but it wasn’t necessary to go into that. Not now, at least.

Fraser stood up suddenly and, picking up the portmanteau, went to saddle his horse. Grey followed.

They made their way back to the road; Quinn was well out of sight. It was a beautiful morning, with the birds whose tentative
chirpings had greeted the dawn now gone mad, swooping to and fro overhead and whooping out of the meadows in riotous flocks, flushed by their passage. The road was wide enough to ride side by side, and they continued in that fashion for a quarter of an hour or so before Grey spoke again.

“Will you swear to me that Quinn’s matter does not threaten either our intent with regard to Major Siverly or the safety of England?”

Fraser gave him a sidelong glance. “No,” he said bluntly.

Grey wouldn’t have believed any other answer, but the bluntness—and its implications—gave him a mild shock. “Which is it?” he asked after a moment. “Or is it both?”

Fraser inhaled strongly through his nose, like a man much tried.

“Quinn’s affairs are his own, Colonel. If he has secrets, they are not mine to share.”

Grey gave a short laugh. “That’s nicely phrased,” he said. “Do you imply that you are in ignorance of Quinn’s aims? Or that you know what he’s up to but your sense of honor prevents your telling me?”

“Take your choice.” Fraser’s lips thinned, and his eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead.

They rode in silence for a bit. The lush green of the countryside was monotonous and soothing but was having little effect on Grey’s temper.

“I suppose it is frivolous to point out that assisting the king’s enemies—even by inaction—is treason,” he remarked eventually.

“It is not frivolous to point out that I am a convicted traitor,” Fraser replied evenly. “Are there judicial degrees of that crime? Is it additive? Because when they tried me, all they said was ‘treason’ before putting a rope around my neck.”

“A rope … but you were not sentenced to hanging, were you?” It was certainly possible; a good many Jacobites had been
executed, but a good many more had had their sentences commuted to transportation or imprisonment.

“No.” Fraser’s color was already high, from sun and wind. It became noticeably deeper. For a moment, Grey thought that was all he meant to say on the matter, but after another moment the words burst out of him, as though he could not contain them.

“They marched me—us—from Inverness to Ardsmuir. With ropes about our necks, to show that our lives were forfeit, given back to us only by the generosity”—he choked, actually choked, on the word, and shook his head, clearing his throat with violence—“the generosity of the king.”

He kicked his horse suddenly; it snorted and jolted a little way ahead, then, lacking further stimulus from its rider, lapsed back into a trot, looking curiously over its shoulder at Grey and his mount, as though wondering how they’d got so far behind.

Grey rode for a bit, turning half a dozen things over in his mind at once, then nudged his horse, which was already attempting to catch up with its fellow, not liking to be left.

“Thank you,” he said, coming even with Fraser again. “For not allowing the Irishman to kill me.”

Fraser nodded, not turning his head. “You’re welcome.”

“May I expect this courtesy to continue?”

He could have sworn that the corner of Fraser’s mouth twitched. “You may.”

Quinn was visible now, a quarter mile ahead. He had turned aside to wait for them, and was leaning on a stile, chatting to a cottager who was holding a small white pig, by his gestures evidently displaying the animal’s finer points.

They had almost reached Quinn when Fraser spoke again, turning this time to look at him, his face now cool-skinned and sober.

“Ye’ll do what ye have to, Colonel. And so shall I.”

Castle Athlone

ATHLONE CASTLE WAS BLACK AND SQUAT. IT REMINDED GREY
vaguely of an oasthouse, those cone-shaped structures in Kent where hops were dried. Much bigger, though.

“Something of a family seat,” he said to Jamie, joking. “One of my ancestors built it, back in the thirteenth century. Justiciar John de Gray, he was called.”

“Oh, aye? Was your family Irish, then?”

“No,” Grey admitted. “English back to the Conquest, largely Normans before that. Though I do have that one disreputable Scottish connection, of course.” His mother’s father had been Scottish, from one of the powerful Border families.

Fraser snorted. He didn’t think much more of Lowlanders than of Englishmen.

Quinn had gracefully taken leave of them once in Athlone and gone off with vague murmurs of looking up a friend—and the assurance that he would rejoin them in the morning, to see them along their way. Grey rather resented the implication that, lacking such assistance, they would wander helplessly about the countryside like a pack of boobies, but swallowed his annoyance and thanked Quinn tersely for his help—though in fact he proposed
to learn where Siverly’s estate was from the justiciar, rather than depend on an Irishman who would happily assassinate him were it not for Fraser’s threatening presence.

The guard who admitted them to the castle led them up the curving walkway into the center of the fortress, past a series of arrow slits set into the immense outer wall. These were narrow in their outer aspect but much wider on the inside, to allow an archer to draw a longbow, Grey supposed, and wondered idly if he could fit his head through one.

It was an ancient construction, originally a motte and bailey, and remnants of this were still evident, the central donjon rising like a twelve-sided pepperpot from the old bailey, now a paved courtyard ringed with smaller structures that crowded up against the huge surrounding wall.

The present justiciar was a man named Sir Melchior Williamson, also English, and while neither Grey nor Hal knew him, Harry did, and a note from the brother of the Duke of Pardloe had been enough to secure an invitation to dine at the castle.

“Is it wise to advertise your presence?” Jamie had asked, frowning, when Grey had written the note, enclosing Harry’s introduction. “If we need to take Siverly by force, best if no one knows who ye are, surely.”

“It’s a thought,” Grey agreed, folding and stamping the note. “But force should be our last resort. And I want to know whatever the justiciar can tell us about Siverly before I go to see him. Best to know the terrain before a battle.” The terrain in this case included Sir Melchior’s disposition and potential to be of assistance, should Plan B need to be invoked—but that judgment would have to wait until he saw the man.

Fraser snorted a little but seemed resigned.