Текст книги "The Scottish Prisoner"

HAROLD, DUKE OF PARDLOE, COLONEL OF THE 46TH FOOT, visited the Judge Advocate’s office, attended by both his regimental colonels and by his brother, Lieutenant Colonel Lord John Grey, to file the necessary documents to call a posthumous general court-martial of one Major Gerald Siverly, on a variety of charges ranging from theft and corruption, to failure to suppress mutiny, to willful murder—and treason.

After hours of discussion, they had decided to proceed with the court-martial at once and to add the charge of treason. It would cause talk—an immense amount of talk—and perhaps bring more of Siverly’s connections to the surface. Meanwhile, those men they had managed to identify from Siverly’s list of the Wild Hunt—a half dozen or so—would be carefully watched, to see whether news of the court-martial might cause them to run, to act, or to seek out others in the plot.

Even with the documents filed, it would be nearly a month before the court-martial was convened. Unable to bear the inactivity of waiting, Grey invited Jamie Fraser to go with him to a race meeting at Newmarket. Returning two days later, they stopped at the Beefsteak, where they took rooms, intending to dine and change before going on to a play in the evening.

By unspoken mutual consent, they had avoided any reference to Ireland, Siverly, Twelvetrees, court-martials, or poetry. Fraser was quiet, occasionally withdrawn—but he relaxed in the presence of horses, and Grey felt a small relaxation of his own tension in seeing it. He had arranged for Jamie’s parole at Helwater because of the horses and the relative degree of freedom, and while he could not deceive himself that Jamie was content as a prisoner, at least he had some hope that he was not completely unhappy.

Am I right to treat him thus?he wondered, watching Fraser’s broad back as the Scot preceded him from the dining room. Will it give him something to remember, to recollect with pleasure when he goes back—or only increase the bitterness of his position? God, I wish I knew.

But then … there was the possibility of freedom. He felt his stomach knot at the thought but wasn’t sure whether it was from fear that Fraser would gain his freedom—or that he wouldn’t. Hal had certainly mentioned it as a possibility, but if there proved to be a fresh Jacobite plot, the country would be swept up once more in fear and hysteria; it would be nearly impossible to have Fraser pardoned in such circumstances.

He was so caught up in these reflections that it was some moments before he realized that he knew the voice coming from the billiards room to his right.

Edward Twelvetrees was at the green-baize table. He looked up from a successful shot, his face alight with pleasure, then caught a glimpse of Grey in the hallway, and his face went stiff, the smile freezing into a tooth-baring rictus. The friend with whom he’d been playing stared at him in astonishment, then turned a bewildered face toward Grey.

“Colonel Grey?” he said, tentative. It was Major Berkeley Tarleton, the father of Richard Tarleton, who had been Grey’s ensign at Crefeld. He knew Grey, of course, but plainly could not understand the sudden hostility that had sprung up like a wall of thorns between the two men.

“Major Tarleton,” Grey said, with a nod that did not take his eyes away from Twelvetrees. The tip of Twelvetrees’s nose had gone white. He’d received his summons to the court-martial, then.

“You unspeakable whelp.” Twelvetrees’s voice was almost conversational.

Grey bowed.

“Your servant, sir,” he said. He felt Jamie come up behind him and saw Twelvetrees’s eyes narrow at sight of the Scot.

“And you.” Twelvetrees shook his head, as though so appalled that he could find no speech to address the situation. He turned his gaze upon Grey again. “I wonder at it, sir. Indeed, I wonder at it. Who would bring such as this fellow, this depraved Scotch creature, a convicted traitor”—his voice rose a little on the word—“into the sacred precincts of this club?” He was still holding his cue, clutching it like a quarterstaff.

“Captain Fraser is my particular friend, sir,” Grey said coldly.

Twelvetrees uttered a most unpleasant laugh.

“I daresay he is. A very closefriend, I have heard.” The edge of his lip lifted in a sneer.

“What do you imply, sir?” Fraser’s voice came from behind him, calm, and so formal as almost to lack his usual accent. Twelvetrees’s hot eyes left Grey, rising to Fraser’s face.

“Why, sir, since you are so civil as to inquire, I implythat this arse-wipe is your”—he hesitated for an instant, and then said, elaborately sardonic—“not merely your most particular friend. For surely only the loyalty of a bedfellow can have led him to do your bidding.”

Grey felt a ringing in his ears, like the aftereffects of cannon fire. He was dimly conscious of thoughts pinging off the inside of his skull like the shards of an exploding grenade, even as he shifted his weight: He’s trying to goad you, does he want to provoke a fight—he’ll bloody get one!—or does he want a challenge, if so, why not give one? Because he wants to look the aggrieved party? He’s just called me a sodomite in public, he means to discredit me, I’ll have to kill him. This last thought arrived simultaneously with the flexing of his knees—and the grasp of Tarleton’s fingers on his arm.

“Gentlemen!” Tarleton was shocked but firm. “Surely you cannot mean such things as your conversation might suggest. I say you should command your passions for the moment, go and have a cooling drink, take sober thought, perhaps sleep on the matter. I am sure that in the morning—”

Grey wrenched his arm free.

“You bloody murderer!” he said. “I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Fucking sodomite!” Twelvetrees’s hands were clenched on the cue stick, his knuckles white.

A much bigger hand came down on Grey’s shoulder and dragged him out of the way. Fraser stepped in front of him, reached across the corner of the table, and plucked the cue out of Twelvetrees’s hands as though it were a broomstraw. He took it in his hands and, with a visible effort, broke it neatly in two and laid the pieces on the table.

“Do you call me traitor, sir?” he said politely to Twelvetrees. “I take no offense at this, for I stand convicted of that crime. But I say to you that you are a greater traitor still.”

“You—what?” Twelvetrees looked mildly stunned.

“You speak of particular friends, sir. Your own most particular friend, Major Siverly, faces a posthumous court-martial for corruption and treason of a most heinous kind. And I say that you should be tried along with him, for you have been partner to his crimes—and if justice is served, doubtless you will be. And if the justice of the Almighty be served, you will then join him in hell. I pray it may be swift.”

Tarleton made a small gobbling noise that Grey would have found funny in other circumstances.

Twelvetrees stood stock-still, beady eyes a-bulge, and then his face convulsed and he leapt upon the table, launching himself from it at Jamie Fraser. Fraser dodged aside, and Twelvetrees struck him no more than a glancing blow, falling to the floor at Grey’s feet.

He remained in a crumpled heap for a moment, panting heavily, then rose slowly to his feet. No one tried to assist him.

He stood up, slowly straightened his clothing, and then walked toward Fraser, who had withdrawn into the hall. He reached the Scotsman, looked up as though gauging the distance, then, drawing back his arm, slapped Fraser bare-handed across the face with a sound like a pistol shot.

“Let your seconds call upon me, sir,” he said, in a voice little more than a whisper.

The hall was full of men, emerged from smoking room, library, and dining room at the sound of raised voices. They parted like the waves of the Red Sea for Twelvetrees, who walked deliberately away, back ramrod-straight and eyes fixed straight ahead.

Major Tarleton, with some presence of mind, had fished a handkerchief out of his sleeve and handed it to Fraser, who was wiping his face with it, Twelvetrees’s blow having been hard enough to make his eyes water and slightly bloody his nose.

“Sorry about that,” Grey said to Tarleton. He could breathe again, though his muscles were jumping with the need to move. He put a hand on the edge of the billiards table, not to steady himself but merely to keep himself from flying out in some unsuitable way. He saw that Twelvetrees’s bootheel had made a small tear in the baize of the table.

“I cannot imagine what—” Tarleton swallowed, looking deeply unhappy. “I cannot imagine what should have led the captain to speak in such a—to say such—” He flung out his hands in total helplessness.

Fraser had regained his self-possession—well, in justice, Grey thought, he’d never lost it—and now handed Tarleton back his handkerchief, neatly folded.

“He spoke so in an effort to discredit Colonel Grey’s testimony,” he said quietly—but audibly enough to be heard by everyone in the hallway. “For what I said to him is the truth. He is a Jacobite traitor and deeply involved, both in Siverly’s treason—and in his death.”

“Oh,” said Tarleton. He coughed and turned a helpless face on Grey, who shrugged apologetically. The witnesses out in the hallway—for he realized that this was what they were, what Fraser had intended them to be—had begun to whisper and buzz among themselves.

“Your servant, sir,” Fraser said to Tarleton, and bowing politely he turned and went out. He didn’t go toward the front door, as Twelvetrees had, but rather toward the stairway, which he ascended in apparent unawareness of the many eyes fixed on his broad back.

Tarleton coughed again. “I say, Colonel. Will you take a glass of brandy with me in the library?”

Grey closed his eyes for an instant, flooded with gratitude for Tarleton’s support. “Thank you, Major,” he said. “I could do with a drink. Possibly two.”

IN THE END, they shared the bottle, Grey taking the lion’s share. Various friends of Grey’s joined them, tentatively at first, but then with more confidence, until there were more than a dozen men clustered round three tiny tables shoved together, the tables crowded with glasses, coffee dishes, bottles, decanters, plates of cake and sandwich crumbs, and crumpled napkins. The talk, at first carefully casual, swung round quickly to loudly expressed shock at Twelvetrees’s effrontery, with a general consensus that the man must be mad. No word was said regarding Fraser’s remarks.

Grey knew they did not think Twelvetrees mad, but as he was in no way prepared to discuss the matter himself, he merely shook his head and murmured a general bewildered agreement with this assessment.

Twelvetrees had his supporters, too, of course, but there were fewer of them, and they had retreated to a stronghold in the smoking room, from which a stream of uneasy but decidedly hostile murmuring flowed like the tobacco smoke that shielded them. Mr. Bodley’s face was pinched as the steward set down a fresh tray of savories in the library. The Beefsteak was no stranger to controversy—no London club was—but the staff disliked the sort of argument that led to broken furniture.

What the devil made him do it?was the refrain that pulsed in Grey’s temples, along with the brandy. He didn’t mean Twelvetrees, though he wondered that, as well; he meant James Fraser. He wanted urgently to go find out but made himself sit until the bottle was empty and the conversation had turned to other things.

Only until they get outside, he thought. The news would spread like ink on white linen—and be just as impossible to eradicate. He stood up, wondering vaguely what he’d tell Hal, took his leave of Tarleton and the remaining company, and walked—very steadily, concentrating—up the stairs to the bedrooms.

The door to Fraser’s room stood open, and a male servant—the Beefsteak employed no chambermaids—knelt on the hearth, sweeping out the ashes. The room was otherwise empty.

“Where is Mr. Fraser?” he asked, putting a hand on the doorjamb and looking carefully from corner to corner of the room, lest he might have overlooked a large Scotsman somewhere among the furnishings.

“ ’E’s gone out, sir,” said the servant, scrambling to his feet and bowing respectfully. “ ’E didn’t say where.”

“Thank you,” Grey said after a pause, and walked—a little less steadily—to his own room, where he carefully shut the door, lay on his bed, and fell asleep.

I CALLED HIM a murderer.

That was the thought in his mind when he woke an hour later. I called him a murderer, he called me a sodomite … and yet it’s Fraser he called out. Why?

Because Fraser accused him, point-blank and publicly, of treason. He had to challenge that; he couldn’t let the statement stand. An accusation of murder might be mere insult, but not an accusation of treason. And particularly not if there was any truth in it.

Of course. He’d known that, really. What he didn’t know was what had possessed Fraser to make the accusation now, and in such a public manner.

He got up, used the pot, then splashed water from the ewer over his face and, tilting the pitcher, drank most of the rest. It was nearly evening; his room was growing dark, and he could smell the luscious scents of tea preparing downstairs: fried sardines, fresh buttered crumpets, lemon sponge, cucumber sandwiches, sliced ham. He swallowed, suddenly ravenous.

He was strongly tempted to go down and have his tea instantly, but there were things he wanted more than food. Clarity, for one.

He can’t have done it for me. The thought carried some regret; he wished it were true. But he was realist enough to know that Fraser wouldn’t have gone to such lengths merely to distract attention from Twelvetrees’s accusation of sodomy, no matter what he personally thought of Grey at the moment—and Grey didn’t even know that.

He realized that he was unlikely to divine Fraser’s motives without asking the man. And he was reasonably sure where Fraser had gone; there weren’t many places he could go, in all justice.

Justice. There were a good many different ways to achieve that enigmatic state of affairs, in descending levels of social acceptability. Statute. Court-martial. Duello. Murder.

He sat down on the bed and thought for a few moments. Then he rang for paper and ink, wrote a brief note, folded it, and, without sealing it, gave it to the servant with instructions for its delivery.

He at once felt better, having taken action, and, smoothing his crumpled neckcloth, went in search of fried sardines.

31

Betrayal

FRASER HAD, AS GREY THOUGHT, GONE BACK TO ARGUS House. When he arrived himself, Grey had barely ascertained as much from Nasonby when Hal came storming up the steps behind him, his tempestuous entrance nearly jerking the door from the butler’s grasp.

“Where is that bloody Scotchman?” he demanded, dividing a glare between Grey and Nasonby.

That was fast, Grey thought. News of what had happened at the Beefsteak had clearly spread through the coffeehouses and clubs of London within hours.

“Here, Your Grace,” said a deep, cold voice, and Jamie Fraser emerged from the library, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautifulin his hand. “Did you wish to speak with me?”

Grey had a moment’s relief that Fraser had finished the collected disputations of Marcus Tullius Cicero; Burke would make much less of a dent in Hal’s skull if it came to blows—which looked likely at the moment.

“Yes, I bloody wish to speak with you! Come in here! You, too!” He turned to glower at Grey, including him in this command, then swept past Fraser into the library.

Jamie walked across the room and sat down deliberately, looking coolly at Hal. The door had barely closed behind them when Hal swung round to face Fraser, face livid with shock and fury.

“What have you done?” Hal was making an effort to control himself, but his right hand was flexing, closing and unclosing, as though he were keeping himself with an effort from hitting something. “You knew what I—what we”—he corrected himself, with a brief nod at Grey—“intended. We have done you the honor of including you in all our counsels, and this is how you repay—”

He stopped abruptly, because Fraser had risen to his feet. Fast. He took a quick step toward Hal, and Hal, by pure reflex, took a step back. His face was flushed now, but his color was nothing to Fraser’s.

“Honor,” Fraser said, and his voice shook with fury. “You dare speak to me of honor?”

“I—”

A large fist crashed down on the table, and all the ornaments rattled. The bud vase fell over.

“Be still! Ye seize a man who is your captive—and your captive by honor alone, sir, for believe me, if I had none, I should have been in France these four years past! Seize and compel him by threat to do your bidding, and by that bidding to betray ancient comrades, to forswear vows, betray friendship and loyalty, to become your very creature … and ye think ye do me honorto count me an Englishman!?”

The air seemed to shiver with the force of his words. No one spoke for a long moment, and there was no sound save the drip of water from the fallen vase, dropping from the edge of the table.

“Why, then?” Grey said quietly, at last.

Fraser rounded on him, dangerous—and beautiful—as a red stag at bay, and Grey felt his heart seize in his chest.

Fraser’s own chest heaved visibly, as he sought to control his emotions.

“Why,” he repeated, and it was not a question, but the preface to a statement. He closed his eyes for an instant, then opened them, fixing them on Grey with great intensity.

“Because what I said of Twelvetrees is true. With Siverly dead, he holds the finances of the rising in his hands. He must not be allowed to act. Mustnot.”

“The rising?” Hal had subsided into his chair as Fraser spoke but now sprang to his feet. “There is a rising, then? You know this for a fact?”

Fraser spared him a single glance of contempt.

“I know it.” And in a few words, he laid the plan before them: Quinn’s acquisition of the Druid king’s cup, the involvement of the Irish regiments, and the Wild Hunt’s plan. His voice shook with some strong emotion at moments in the telling; Grey could not tell whether it was rage at them or fear at the enormity of what he said. Perhaps it was sorrow.

He seemed to have stopped speaking, letting his head fall forward. But then he drew a deep, trembling breath and looked up again.

“If I thought that there was the slightest chance of success,” he said, “I should ha’ kept my own counsel. But there is not, and I know it. I canna let it happen again.”

Grey heard the desolation in his voice and glanced briefly at Hal. Did his brother know the enormity of what Fraser had just done? He doubted it, though Hal’s face was intent, his eyes live as coals.

“A minute,” Hal said abruptly, and left the room. Grey heard him in the hall, urgently summoning the footmen, sending them at once for Harry Quarry and the other senior officers of the regiment. Calling for his secretary.

“A note to the prime minister, Andrews,” Hal’s voice floated back from the hallway, tense. “Ask if I may wait upon him this evening. A matter of the greatest importance.”

A murmur from Andrews, a great rush of exodus, then a silence, and Hal’s footsteps on the stairs.

“He’s gone to tell Minnie,” Grey said aloud, listening.

Fraser sat by the hearth, elbow on his knee and his head sunk upon one hand. He didn’t answer or move.

After a few moments, Grey cleared his throat.

“Dinna speak to me,” Fraser said softly. “Not now.”

THEY SAT IN SILENCE for half an hour by the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, which chimed the quarter in a small silver voice. The only interruption was the entrance of the butler, coming in first to light the candles, and then again, bringing a note for Grey. He opened this, read it briefly, and thrust it into his waistcoat pocket, hearing Hal’s footsteps on the stair, coming down.

His brother was pale when he came in and clearly excited, though plainly in command of himself.

“Claret and biscuits, please, Nasonby,” he said to the butler, and waited ’til the man had left before speaking further. Fraser had risen to his feet when Hal came in—not out of respect, Grey thought, but only to be ready for whatever bloody thing was coming next.

Hal folded his hands behind him and essayed a small smile, meant to be cordial.

“As you point out, Mr. Fraser, you are not an Englishman,” Hal said. Fraser gave him a blank stare, and the smile died aborning. Hal pressed his lips together, breathed in through his nose, and went on.

“You are, however, a paroled prisoner of war, and my responsibility. I must reluctantly forbid you to fight Twelvetrees. Much as I agree that the man needs killing,” he added.

“Forbid me,” Fraser said, in a neutral tone. He stood looking at Hal as he might have examined something found on the bottom of his shoe, with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

“You cause me to betray my friends,” Jamie said, as reasonably as one might lay out a geometric proof, “to betray my nation, my king, and myself—and now you suppose that you will deprive me of my honor as a man? I think not, sir.”

And, without another word, he strode out of the library, brushing past a surprised Nasonby, coming in with the refreshments. The butler, nobly concealing any response to current goings-on—he had worked for the family for some time, after all—set down his tray and retired.

“That went well,” said Grey. “Minnie’s advice?” His brother gave him a look of measured dislike.

“I didn’t need Minnie to tell me the sort of trouble that will happen if this duel takes place.”

“You could stop him,” Grey observed, and poured claret into one of the crystal cups, the wine dark red and fragrant.

Hal snorted.

“Could I? Yes, possibly—if I wanted to lock him up. Nothing else would work.” He noticed the fallen bud vase and absently righted it, picking up the small daisy it had held. “He has the choice of weapon.” Hal frowned. “Sword, do you think? It’s surer than a pistol if you truly mean to kill someone.”

Grey made no reply to this; Hal had killed Nathaniel Twelvetrees with a pistol; he himself had killed Edwin Nicholls with a pistol much more recently—though, granted, it had been sheer accident. Nonetheless, Hal was technically right. Pistols were prone to misfire, and very few were accurate at distances beyond a few feet.

“I don’t know how he is with a sword,” Hal went on, frowning, “but I’ve seen the way he moves, and he’s got a six-inch reach on Twelvetrees, at least.”

“To the best of my knowledge—which is reasonably good—he hasn’t had any sort of weapon in his hands for the last seven or eight years. I don’t doubt his reflexes”—a fleeting memory of Fraser’s catching him as he fell on a dark Irish road, the scream of frogs and toads in his ears—“but it’s you who is constantly prating on at me about the necessity of practice, is it not?”

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