Dragonfly In Amber

Malchance

18 RAPE IN PARIS

There was an explosion at the Royal Armory, near the beginning of May. I heard later that a careless porter had put down a torch in the wrong place, and a minute later, the largest assortment of gunpowder and firearms in Paris had gone up with a noise that startled the pigeons off Notre Dame.

At work in L’Hôpital des Anges, I didn’t hear the explosion itself, but I certainly noticed the echoes. Though the Hôpital was on the opposite side of the city from the Armory, there were sufficient victims of the explosion that a good many of them overflowed the other hospitals and were brought to us, mangled, burned, and moaning in the backs of wagons, or supported on pallets by friends who carried them through the streets.

It was full dark before the last of the victims had been attended to, and the last bandage-swathed body laid gently down among the grubby, anonymous ranks of the Hôpital’s patients.

I had dispatched Fergus home with word that I would be late, when I saw the magnitude of the task awaiting the sisters of des Anges. He had come back with Murtagh, and the two of them were lounging on the steps outside, waiting to escort us home.

Mary and I emerged wearily from the double doors, to find Murtagh demonstrating the art of knife-throwing to Fergus.

“Go on then,” he was saying, back turned to us. “Straight as ye can, on the count of three. One… two… three!” At “three,” Fergus bowled the large white onion he was holding, letting it bounce and hop over the uneven ground.

Murtagh stood relaxed, arm drawn back at a negligent cock, dirk held by the tip between his fingers. As the onion spun past, his wrist flicked once, quick and sharp. Nothing else moved, not so much as a stir of his kilts, but the onion leaped sideways, transfixed by the dirk, and fell mortally wounded, rolling feebly in the dirt at his feet.

“B-bravo, Mr. Murtagh!” Mary called, smiling. Startled, Murtagh turned, and I could see the flush rising on his lean cheeks in the light from the double doors behind us.

“Mmmphm,” he said.

“Sorry to take so long,” I said apologetically. “It took rather a time to get everyone squared away.”

“Och, aye,” the little clansman answered laconically. He turned to Fergus. “We’ll do best to find a coach, lad; it’s late for the ladies to be walking.”

“There aren’t any here,” Fergus said, shrugging. “I’ve been up and down the street for the last hour; every spare coach in the Cité has gone to the Armory. We might get something in the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, though.” He pointed down the street, at a dark, narrow gap between buildings that betrayed the presence of a passageway through to the next street. “It’s quick through there.”

After a short, frowning pause for thought, Murtagh nodded agreement. “All right, lad. Let’s go, then.”

It was cold in the alleyway, and I could see my breath in small white puffs, despite the moonless night. No matter how dark it got in Paris, there was always light somewhere; the glow of lamps and candles seeped through shutters and chinks in the walls of wooden buildings, and light pooled around the stalls of the street vendors and scattered from the small horn and metal lanterns that swung from cart tails and coach trees.

The next street was one of merchants, and here and there the proprietors of the various businesses had hung lanterns of pierced metal above their doors and shopyard entrances. Not content to rely upon the police to protect their property, often several businessmen would join together and hire a watchman to guard their premises at night. When I saw one such figure in front of the sailmaker’s shop, sitting hunched in the shadows atop a pile of folded canvas, I nodded in response to his gruff “Bonsoir, Monsieur, mesdames.”

As we passed the sailmaker’s shop, though, I heard a sudden cry of alarm from the watchman.

“Monsieur! Madame!”

Murtagh swung round at once to meet the challenge, sword already hissing from its scabbard. Slower in my reflexes, I was only halfway turned as he stepped forward, and my eye caught the flicker of movement from the doorway behind him. The blow took Murtagh from behind before I could shout a warning, and he went sprawling facedown in the street, arms and legs gone loose and nerveless, sword and dirk flying from his hands to clatter on the stones.

I stooped quickly for the dirk as it slid past my foot, but a pair of hands seized my arms from behind.

“Take care of the man,” ordered a voice behind me. “Quickly!”

I wrenched at my captor’s grip; the hands dropped to my wrists and twisted them sharply, making me cry out. There was a billow of white, ghost-like in the dim street, and the “watchman” bent over Murtagh’s prone body, a length of white fabric trailing from his hands.

“Help!” I shrieked. “Leave him alone! Help! Brigands! Assassins! HELP!”

“Be still!” A quick clout over the ear made my head spin for a moment. When my eyes stopped watering, I could make out a long, white sausage-shape in the gutter; Murtagh, shrouded and neatly secured in a canvas sail-bag. The false watchman was crouched over him; he rose, grinning, and I could see that he was masked, a dark strip of fabric extending from forehead to upper lip.

A thin strip of light from the nearby chandler’s fell across his body as he rose. In spite of the cold evening, he was wearing no more than a shirt that glowed momentarily emerald green in the passing light. A pair of breeches, buckled at the knee, and what amazingly appeared to be silk hose and leather shoes, not the bare feet or sabots I had expected. Not ordinary bandits, then.

I caught a quick glimpse of Mary, at one side. One of the masked figures had her in a tight grip from behind, one arm clasped across her midriff, the other rummaging its way under her skirts like a burrowing animal.

The one in front of me put a hand ingratiatingly behind my head and pulled me close. The mask covered him from forehead to upper lip, leaving his mouth free for obvious reasons. His tongue thrust into my mouth, tasting strongly of drink and onions. I gagged, bit it, and spat as it was removed. He cuffed me heavily, knocking me to my knees in the gutter.

Mary’s silver-buckled shoes were kicking dangerously near my nose as the ruffian holding her unceremoniously yanked her skirt above her waist. There was a tearing of satin, and a loud screech from above as his fingers plunged between her struggling thighs.

“A virgin! I’ve got a virgin!” he crowed. One of the men bowed mockingly to Mary.

“Mademoiselle, my congratulations! Your husband will have cause to thank us on his wedding night, as he will encounter no awkward obstructions to hinder his pleasure. But we are selfless – we ask for no thanks for the performance of our duties. The doing of service is pleasure in itself.”

If I had needed anything beyond the silk hose to tell me that our assailants were not street ruffians, this speech – greeted with howls of laughter – would have done it. Fitting names to the masked faces was something else again.

The hands that grasped my arm to haul me to my feet were manicured, with a small beauty mark just above the fork of the thumb. I must remember that, I thought grimly. If they let us live afterward, it might be useful.

Someone else grabbed my arms from behind, yanking them back so strongly that I cried out. The posture thus induced made my breasts stand out in the low-cut bodice as though they were being offered on a platter.

The man who seemed in charge of operations wore a loose shirt of some pale color, decorated with darker spots – embroidery perhaps. It gave him an imprecise outline in the shadows, making it difficult to look at him closely. As he leaned forward and ran a finger appraisingly over the tops of my breasts, though, I could see the dark hair greased flat to his head and smell the heavy pomade. He had large ears, the better to hold up the strings of his mask.

“Do not worry yourselves, mesdames,” Spotted-shirt said. “We mean you no harm; we intend only to give you a little gentle exercise – your husbands or fiancés need never know – and then we shall release you.”

“Firstly, you may honor us with your sweet lips, mesdames,” he announced, stepping back and tugging at the lacings of his breeches.

“Not that one,” protested Green-shirt, pointing at me. “She bites.”

“Not if she wants to keep her teeth,” replied his companion. “On your knees, Madame, if you please.” He shoved down strongly on my shoulders, and I jerked back, stumbling. He grabbed me to keep me from getting away, and the full hood of my cloak fell back, freeing my hair. Pins loosened in the struggle, it fell over my shoulders, strands flying like banners in the night wind, blinding me as they whipped across my face.

I staggered backward, pulling away from my assailant, shaking my head to clear my eyes. The street was dark, but I could see a few things in the faint gleam of lanterns through the shuttered shop windows, or in the glow of starlight that struck through the shadows to the street.

Mary’s silver shoe buckles caught the light, kicking. She was on her back, struggling, with one of the men on top of her, swearing as he fought to get his breeches down and to control her at the same time. There was the sound of tearing cloth, and his buttocks gleamed white in a shaft of light from a court-yard gate.

Someone’s arms seized me round the waist and dragged me backward, raising my feet off the ground. I scraped my heel down the length of his shin, and he squealed in outrage.

“Hold her!” ordered Spotted-shirt, coming out of the shadows.

“You hold her!” My captor thrust me unceremoniously into the arms of his friend, and the light from the courtyard shone into my eyes, temporarily blinding me.

“Mother of God!” The hands clutching my arms slackened their grip, and I yanked loose, to see Spotted-shirt, mouth hanging open in horrified amazement below the mask. He backed away from me, crossing himself as he went.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” he babbled, crossing and recrossing. “ La Dame Blanche!”

“ La Dame Blanche!” The man behind me echoed the cry, in tones of terror.

Spotted-shirt was still backing away, now making signs in the air which were considerably less Christian than the sign of the Cross, but which presumably had the same intent. Pointing index and little fingers at me in the ancient horned sign against evil, he was working his way steadily down a list of spiritual authorities, from the Trinity to powers on a considerably lower level, muttering the Latin names so fast that the syllables blurred together.

I stood in the street, shaken and dazed, until a terrible shriek from the ground near my feet recalled me to my senses. Too occupied with his own business to pay any attention to matters above him, the man on top of Mary made a gutteral sound of satisfaction and began to move his hips rhythmically, to the accompaniment of throat-tearing screams from Mary.

Acting purely from instinct, I took a step toward them, drew back my leg, and kicked him as hard as I could in the ribs. The breath exploded from his lungs in a startled “Oof!” and he rocked to one side.

One of his friends darted forward and seized him by the arm, shouting urgently, “Up! Up! It’s La Dame Blanche! Run!”

Still sunk in the frenzy of rape, the man stared stupidly and tried to turn back to Mary, who was frantically writhing and twisting, trying to free the folds of her skirts from the weight that held her trapped. Both Green-shirt and Spotted-shirt were now pulling on her assailant’s arms, and succeeded in getting him to his feet. His torn breeches drooped about his thighs, the blood-smeared rod of his erection trembling with mindless eagerness between the dangling shirttails.

The clatter of running feet approaching seemed finally to rouse him. His two helpers, hearing the sound, dropped his arms and fled precipitately, leaving him to his fate. With a muffled curse, he made his way down the nearest alley, hopping and hobbling as he tried to yank his breeches up around his waist.

“Au secours! Au secours! Gendarmes!” A breathless voice was shouting down the alleyway for help, as its owner fumbled his way in our direction, stumbling over rubbish in the dark. I hardly thought a footpad or other miscreant would be staggering down an alleyway shouting for the gendarmerie, though in my present state of shock, almost nothing would have surprised me.

I was surprised, though, when the black shape that flapped out of the alley proved to be Alexander Randall, swathed in black cape and slouch hat. He glanced wildly around the small cul-de-sac, from Murtagh, masquerading as a bag of rubbish, to me, standing frozen and gasping against a wall, to the huddled shape of Mary, nearly invisible among the other shadows. He stood helpless for a moment, then whirled and clambered up the iron gate from which our assailants had emerged. From the top of this, he could just reach the lantern suspended from the rafter above.

The light was a comfort; pitiful as was the sight it revealed, at least it banished the lurking shadows that threatened at any moment to turn into new dangers.

Mary was on her knees, curled into herself. Head buried in her arms, she was shaking, in total silence. One shoe lay on its side on the cobbles, silver buckle winking in the swaying light of the lantern.

Like a bird of ill omen, Alex swooped down beside her.

“Miss Hawkins! Mary! Miss Hawkins! Are you all right?”

“Of all the damn-fool questions,” I said with some asperity as she moaned and shrank away from him. “Naturally she isn’t all right. She’s just been raped.” With a considerable effort, I pried myself from the comforting wall at my back, and started toward them, noting with clinical detachment that my knees were wobbling.

They gave way altogether in the next moment as a huge, batlike shape swooped down a foot in front of me, landing on the cobbles with a substantial thud.

“Well, well, look who’s dropped in!” I said, and started to laugh in an unhinged sort of way. A large pair of hands grabbed me by the shoulders and administered a good shake.

“Be quiet, Sassenach,” said Jamie, blue eyes gleaming black and dangerous in the lanternlight. He straightened up, the folds of his blue velvet cloak falling back over his shoulders as he stretched his arms toward the roof from which he had jumped. He could just grasp the edge of it, standing on his toes.

“Well, come down, then!” he said impatiently, looking up. “Put your feet over the edge onto my shoulders, and ye can slide down my back.” With a grating of loose roof slates, a small black figure wriggled its way cautiously backward, then swarmed down the tall figure like a monkey on a stick.

“Good man, Fergus.” Jamie clapped the boy casually on the shoulder, and even in the dim light I could see the glow of pleasure that rose in his cheeks. Jamie surveyed the landscape with a tactician’s eye, and with a muttered word, sent the lad down the alley to keep watch for approaching gendarmes. The essentials taken care of, he squatted down before me once more.

“Are ye all right, Sassenach?” he inquired.

“Nice of you to ask,” I said politely. “Yes, thanks. She’s not so well, though.” I waved vaguely in Mary’s direction. She was still rolled into a ball, shuddering and quaking like a jelly, oozing away from Alex’s fumbling efforts to pat her.

Jamie spared no more than a glance at her. “So I see. Where in hell is Murtagh?”

“Over there,” I answered. “Help me up.”

I staggered over to the gutter, where the sack that held Murtagh was heaving to and fro like an agitated caterpillar, emitting a startling mixture of muffled profanities in three languages.

Jamie drew his dirk, and with what seemed to be a rather callous disregard for the contents, slit the sack from end to end. Murtagh popped out of the opening like a Jack out of its box. Half his spiky black hair was pasted to his head by whatever noisome liquid the bag had rested in. The rest stood on end, lending a fiercer cast to a face rendered already sufficiently warlike by a large purple knot on the forehead and a rapidly darkening eye.

“Who hit me?” he barked.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” answered Jamie, raising one eyebrow. “Come along, man, we havena got all night.”

“This is never going to work,” I muttered, stabbing pins decorated with brilliants at random through my hair. “She ought to have medical care, for one thing. She needs a doctor!”

“She has one,” Jamie pointed out, lifting his chin and peering down his nose into the mirror as he tied his stock. “You.” Stock tied, he grabbed a comb and pulled it hurriedly through the thick, ruddy waves of his hair.

“No time to braid it,” he muttered, holding a thick tail behind his head as he rummaged in a drawer. “Have ye a bit of ribbon, Sassenach?”

“Let me.” I moved swiftly behind him, folding under the ends of the hair and wrapping the club in a length of green ribbon. “Of all the bloody nights to have a dinner party on!”

And not just any dinner party, either. The Duke of Sandringham was to be guest of honor, with a small but select party to greet him. Monsieur Duverney was coming, with his eldest son, a prominent banker. Louise and Jules de La Tour were coming, and the d’Arbanvilles. Just to make things interesting, the Comte St. Germain had also been invited.

“St. Germain!” I had said in astonishment, when Jamie had told me the week before. “Whatever for?”

“I do business with the man,” Jamie had pointed out. “He’s been to dinner here before, with Jared. But what I want is to have the opportunity of watching him talk to you over dinner. From what I’ve seen of him in business, he’s not the man to hide his thoughts.” He picked up the white crystal that Master Raymond had given me and weighed it thoughtfully in his palm.

“It’s pretty enough,” he had said. “I’ll have it set in a gold mounting, so you can wear it about your neck. Toy with it at dinner until someone asks ye about it, Sassenach. Then tell them what it’s for, and make sure to watch St. Germain’s face when ye do. If it was him gave ye the poison at Versailles, I think we’ll see some sign of it.”

What I wanted at the moment was peace, quiet, and total privacy in which to shake like a rabbit. What I had was a dinner party with a duke who might be a Jacobite or an English agent, a Comte who might be a poisoner, and a rape victim hidden upstairs. My hands shook so that I couldn’t fasten the chain that held the mounted crystal; Jamie stepped behind me and snicked the catch with one flick of his thumb.

“Haven’t you got any nerves?” I demanded of him. He grimaced at me in the mirror and put his hands over his stomach.

“Aye, I have. But it takes me in the belly, not the hands. Have ye some of that stuff for cramp?”

“Over there.” I waved at the medicine box on the table, left open from my dosing of Mary. “The little green bottle. One spoonful.”

Ignoring the spoon, he tilted the bottle and took several healthy gulps. He lowered it and squinted at the liquid within.

“God, that’s foul stuff! Are ye nearly ready, Sassenach? The guests will be here any minute.”

Mary was concealed for the moment in a spare room on the second floor. I had checked her carefully for injuries, which seemed limited to bruises and shock, then dosed her quickly with as large a slug of poppy syrup as seemed feasible.

Alex Randall had resisted all Jamie’s attempts to send him home, and instead had been left to stand guard over Mary, with strict instructions to fetch me if she woke.

“How on earth did that idiot happen to be there?” I asked, scrabbling in the drawer for a box of powder.

“I asked him that,” Jamie replied. “Seems the poor fool’s in love with Mary Hawkins. He’s been following her to and fro about the town, drooping like a wilted flower because he knows she’s to wed Marigny.”

I dropped the box of powder.

“H-h-he’s in love with her?” I wheezed, waving away the cloud of floating particles.

“So he says, and I see nay reason to doubt it,” Jamie said, brushing powder briskly off the bosom of my dress. “He was a bit distraught when he told me.”

“I should imagine so.” To the conflicting welter of emotions that filled me, I now added pity for Alex Randall. Of course he wouldn’t have spoken to Mary, thinking the devotion of an impoverished secretary nothing compared to the wealth and position of a match with the House of Gascogne. And now what must he feel, seeing her subjected to brutal attack, virtually under his nose?

“Why in hell didn’t he speak up? She would have run off with him in a moment.” For the pale English curate, of course, must be the “spiritual” object of Mary’s speechless devotion.

“Randall’s a gentleman,” Jamie replied, handing me a feather and the pot of rouge.

“You mean he’s a silly ass,” I said uncharitably.

Jamie’s lip twitched. “Well, perhaps,” he agreed. “He’s also a poor one; he hasna the income to support a wife, should her family cast her off – which they certainly would, if she eloped with him. And his health is feeble; he’d find it hard to find another position, for the Duke would likely dismiss him without a character.”

“One of the servants is bound to find her,” I said, returning to an earlier worry in order to avoid thinking about this latest manifestation of tragedy.

“No, they won’t. They’ll all be busy serving. And by the morning, she may be recovered enough to go back to her uncle’s house. I sent round a note,” he added, “to tell them she was staying the night with a friend, as it was late. Didna want them searching for her.”

“Yes, but-”

“Sassenach.” His hands on my shoulders stopped me, and he peered over my shoulder to meet my eyes in the mirror. “We canna let her be seen by anyone, until she’s able to speak and to act as usual. Let it be known what’s happened to her, and her reputation will be ruined entirely.”

“Her reputation! It’s hardly her fault she was raped!” My voice shook slightly, and his grip on my shoulders tightened.

“It isna right, Sassenach, but it’s how it is. Let it be known that she’s a maid no more, and no man will take her – she’ll be disgraced, and live a spinster to the end of her days.” His hand squeezed my shoulder, left it, and returned to help guide a pin into the precariously anchored hair.

“It’s all we can do for her, Claire,” he said. “Keep her from harm, heal her as best we can – and find the filthy bastards who did it.” He turned away and groped in my casket for his stick pin. “Christ,” he added softly, speaking into the green velvet lining, “d’ye think I don’t know what it is to her? Or to him?”

I laid my hand on his groping fingers and squeezed. He squeezed back, then lifted my hand and kissed it briefly.

“Lord, Sassenach! Your fingers are cold as snow.” He turned me around to look earnestly into my face. “Are you all right, lass?”

Whatever he saw in my face made him mutter “Christ” again, sink to his knees, and pull me against his ruffled shirtfront. I gave up the pretense of courage, and clung to him, burying my face in the starchy warmth.

“Oh, God, Jamie. I was so scared. I am so scared. Oh, God, I wish you could make love to me now.”

His chest vibrated under my cheek with his laugh, but he hugged me closer.

“You think that would help?”

“Yes.”

In fact, I thought that I would not feel safe again, until I lay in the security of our bed, with the sheltering silence of the house all about us, feeling the strength and the heat of him around and within me, buttressing my courage with the joy of our joining, wiping out the horror of helplessness and near-rape with the sureness of mutual possession.

He held my face between his hands and kissed me, and for a moment, the fear of the future and the terror of the night fell away. Then he drew back and smiled. I could see his own worry etched in the lines of his face, but there was nothing in his eyes but the small reflection of my face.

“On account, then,” he said softly.

We had reached the second course without incident, and I was beginning to relax slightly, though my hand still had a tendency to tremble over the consommé.

“How perfectly fascinating!” I said, in response to a story of the younger Monsieur Duverney’s, to which I wasn’t listening, my ears being tuned for any suspicious noises abovestairs. “Do tell me more.”

I caught Magnus’s eye as he served the Comte St. Germain, seated across from me, and beamed congratulations at him as well as I could with a mouthful of fish. Too well trained to smile in public, he inclined his head a respectful quarter-inch and went on with the service. My hand went to the crystal at my neck, and I stroked it ostentatiously as the Comte, with no sign of perturbation on his saturnine features, dug into the trout with almonds.

Jamie and the elder Duverney were close in conversation at the other end of the table, food ignored as Jamie scribbled left-handed figures on a scrap of paper with a stub of chalk. Chess, or business? I wondered.

As guest of honor, the Duke sat at the center of the table. He had enjoyed the first courses with the gusto of a natural-born trencherman, and was now engaged in animated conversation with Madame d’Arbanville, on his right. As the Duke was the most obviously prominent Englishman in Paris at the time, Jamie had thought it worthwhile cultivating his acquaintance, in hopes of uncovering any rumors that might lead to the sender of the musical message to Charles Stuart. My attention, though, kept straying from the Duke to the gentleman seated across from him – Silas Hawkins.

I had thought I might just die on the spot and save trouble all round when the Duke had walked through the door, gesturing casually over his shoulder, and saying, “I say, Mrs. Fraser, you do know Hawkins here, don’t you?”

The Duke’s small, merry blue eyes had met mine with a look of guileless confidence that his whims would be accommodated, and I had had no choice but to smile and nod, and tell Magnus to be sure another place was set. Jamie, seeing Mr. Hawkins as he came through the door of the drawing room, had looked as though he were in need of another dose of stomach medicine, but had pulled himself together enough to extend a hand to Mr. Hawkins and start a conversation about the quality of the inns on the road to Calais.

I glanced at the carriage clock over the mantelpiece. How long before they would all be gone? I mentally tallied the courses already served, and those to come. Nearly to the sweet course. Then the salad and cheese. Brandy and coffee, port for the men, liqueurs for the ladies. An hour or two for stimulating conversation. Not too stimulating, please God, or they would linger ’til dawn.

Now they were talking of the menace of street gangs. I abandoned the fish and picked up a roll.

“And I have heard that some of these roving bands are composed not of rabble, as you would expect, but of some of the younger members of the nobility!” General d’Arbanville puffed out his lips at the monstrousness of the idea. “They do it for sport – sport! As though the robbery of decent men and the outraging of ladies were nothing more than a cockfight!”

“How extraordinary,” said the Duke, with the indifference of a man who never went anywhere without a substantial escort. The platter of savouries hovered near his chin, and he scooped half a dozen onto his plate.

Jamie glanced at me, and rose from the table.

“If you’ll excuse me, mesdames, messieurs,” he said with a bow, “I have something rather special in the way of port that I would like to have His Grace taste. I’ll fetch it from the cellar.”

“It must be the Belle Rouge,” said Jules de La Tour, licking his lips in anticipation. “You have a rare treat in store, Your Grace. I have never tasted such a wine anywhere else.”

“Ah? Well, you soon will, Monsieur le Prince,” the Comte St. Germain broke in. “Something even better.”

“Surely there is nothing better than Belle Rouge!” General d’Arbanville exclaimed.

“Yes, there is,” the Comte declared, looking smug. “I have found a new port, made and bottled on the island of Gostos, off the coast of Portugal. A color rich as rubies, and a flavor that makes Belle Rouge taste like colored water. I have a contract for delivery of the entire vintage in August.”

“Indeed, Monsieur le Comte?” Silas Hawkins raised thick, graying brows toward our end of the table. “Have you found a new partner for investment, then? I understood that your own resources were… depleted, shall we say? following the sad destruction of the Patagonia.” He took a cheese savoury from the plate and popped it delicately into his mouth.

The Comte’s jaw muscles bulged, and a sudden chill descended on our end of the table. From Mr. Hawkins’s sidelong glance at me, and the tiny smile that lurked about his busily chewing mouth, it was clear that he knew all about my role in the destruction of the unfortunate Patagonia.

My hand went again to the crystal at my neck, but the Comte didn’t look at me. A hot flush had risen from his lacy stock, and he glared at Mr. Hawkins with open dislike. Jamie was right; not a man to hide his emotions.

“Fortunately, Monsieur,” he said, mastering his choler with an apparent effort, “I have found a partner who wishes to invest in this venture. A fellow countryman, in fact, of our gracious host.” He nodded sardonically toward the doorway, where Jamie had just appeared, followed by Magnus, who bore an enormous decanter of the Belle Rouge port.

Hawkins stopped chewing for a moment, his mouth unattractively open with interest. “A Scotsman? Who? I didn’t think there were any Scots in the wine business in Paris besides the house of Fraser.”

A definite gleam of amusement lit the Comte’s eyes as he glanced from Mr. Hawkins to Jamie. “I suppose it is debatable whether the investor in question could be considered Scottish at the moment; nonetheless, he is milord Broch Tuarach’s fellow countryman. Charles Stuart is his name.”

This bit of news had all the impact the Comte might have hoped for. Silas Hawkins sat bolt upright with an exclamation that made him choke on the remnants of his mouthful. Jamie, who had been about to speak, closed his mouth and sat down, regarding the Comte thoughtfully. Jules de La Tour began to spray exclamations and globules of spit, and both d’Arbanvilles made ejaculations of amazement. Even the Duke took his eyes off his plate and blinked at the Comte in interest.

“Really?” he said. “I understood the Stuarts were poor as church mice. You’re sure he’s not gulling you?”

“I have no wish to cast aspersions, or arouse suspicions,” chipped in Jules de La Tour, “but it is well known at Court that the Stuarts have no money. It is true that several of the Jacobite supporters have been seeking funds lately, but without luck, so far as I have heard.”

“That’s true,” interjected the younger Duverney, leaning forward with interest. “Charles Stuart himself has spoken privately with two bankers of my acquaintance, but no one is willing to advance him any substantial sum in his present circumstances.”

I shot a quick glance at Jamie, who answered with an almost imperceptible nod. This came under the heading of good news. But then what about the Comte’s story of an investment?

“It is true,” he said belligerently. “His Highness has secured a loan of fifteen thousand livres from an Italian bank, and has placed the entire sum at my disposal, to be used in commissioning a ship and purchasing the bottling of the Gostos vineyard. I have the signed letter right here.” He tapped the breast of his coat with satisfaction, then sat back and looked triumphantly around the table, stopping at Jamie.

“Well, milord,” he said, with a wave at the decanter that sat on the white cloth in front of Jamie, “are you going to allow us to taste this famous wine?”

“Yes, of course,” Jamie murmured. He reached mechanically for the first glass.

Louise, who had sat quietly eating through most of the dinner, noted Jamie’s discomfort. A kind friend, she turned to me in an obvious effort to change the course of the conversation to a neutral topic.

“That is a beautiful stone you wear about your neck, ma chère,” she said, gesturing at my crystal. “Where did you get it?”

“Oh, this?” I said. “Well, in fact-”

I was interrupted by a piercing scream. It stopped all conversation, and the brittle echoes of it chimed in the crystals of the chandelier overhead.

“Mon Dieu,” said the Comte St. Germain, into the silence. “What-”

The scream was repeated, and then repeated again. The noise spilled down the wide stairway and into the foyer.

The guests, rising from the dinner table like a covey of flushed quail, also spilled into the foyer, in time to see Mary Hawkins, clad in the shredded remnants of her shift, lurch into view at the top of the stair. There she stood, as though for maximum effect, mouth stretched wide, hands splayed across her bosom, where the ripped fabric all too clearly displayed the bruises left by grappling hands on her breasts and arms.

Her pupils shrunk to pinpoints in the light of the candelabra, her eyes seemed blank pools in which horror was reflected. She looked down, but plainly saw neither stairway nor crowd of gaping onlookers.

“No!” she shrieked. “No! Let me go! Please, I beg you! DON’T TOUCH ME!” Blinded by the drug as she was, apparently she sensed some movement behind her, for she turned and flailed wildly, hands clawing at the figure of Alex Randall, who was trying vainly to get hold of her, to calm her.

Unfortunately, from below, his attempts looked rather like those of a rejected seducer bent on further attack.

“Nom de Dieu,” burst out General d’Arbanville. “Racaille! Let her go at once!” The old soldier leaped for the stair with an agility belying his years, hand reaching instinctively for his sword – which, luckily, he had laid aside at the door.

I hastily thrust myself and my voluminous skirts in front of the Comte and the younger Duverney, who showed symptoms of following the General to the rescue, but I could do nothing about Mary’s uncle, Silas Hawkins. Eyes popping from his head, the wine merchant stood stunned for a moment, then lowered his head and charged like a bull, forcing his way through the onlookers.

I looked wildly about for Jamie, and found him on the edge of the crowd. I caught his eye and raised my brows in silent question; in any case, nothing I said could have been heard above the hubbub in the foyer, punctuated by Mary’s steam-whistle shrieks from above.

Jamie shrugged at me, then glanced around him. I saw his eyes light for a moment on a three-legged table near the wall, holding a tall vase of chrysanthemums. He glanced up, measuring the distance, closed his eyes briefly as though commending his soul to God, then moved with decision.

He sprang from the floor to the table, grasped the banister railing and vaulted over it, onto the stairway, a few feet in advance of the General. It was such an acrobatic feat that one or two ladies gasped, little cries of admiration intermingled with their exclamations of horror.

The exclamations grew louder as Jamie bounded up the remaining stairs, elbowed his way between Mary and Alex, and seizing the latter by the shoulder, took careful aim and hit him solidly on the point of the jaw.

Alex, who had been staring at his employer below in openmouthed amazement, folded gently at the knees and crumpled into a heap, eyes still wide, but gone suddenly blank and empty as Mary’s.

19 AN OATH IS SWORN

The clock on the mantelpiece had an annoyingly loud tick. It was the only sound in the house, other than the creakings of the boards, and the far-off thumps of servants working late in the kitchens below. I had had enough noise to last me some time, though, and wanted only silence to mend my frazzled nerves. I opened the clock’s case and removed the counterweight, and the tick ceased at once.

It had undeniably been the dinner party of the season. People not fortunate enough to have been present would be claiming for months that they had been, bolstering their case with bits of repeated gossip and distorted description.

I had finally got my hands on Mary long enough to force another strong dose of poppy juice down her throat. She collapsed in a pitiful heap of bloodstained clothes, leaving me free to turn my attention to the three-sided argument going on among Jamie, the General, and Mr. Hawkins. Alex had the good sense to stay unconscious, and I arranged his limp form neatly alongside Mary’s on the landing, like a couple of dead mackerel. They looked like Romeo and Juliet laid out in the public square as a reproach to their relatives, but the resemblance was lost on Mr. Hawkins.

“Ruined!” he kept shrieking. “You’ve ruined my niece! The Vicomte will never have her now! Filthy Scottish prick! You and your strumpet” – he swung on me – “whore! Procuress! Seducing innocent young girls into your vile clutches for the pleasure of bastardly scum! You-” Jamie, with a certain long-suffering grimness, put a hand on Mr. Hawkins’s shoulders, turned him about, and hit him, just under the fleshy jaw. Then he stood abstractedly rubbing his abused knuckles, watching as the stout wine merchant’s eyes rolled upward. Mr. Hawkins fell back against the paneling and slid gently down the wall into a sitting position.

Jamie turned a cold blue gaze on General d’Arbanville, who, observing the fate of the fallen, wisely put down the wine bottle he had been waving, and took a step back.

“Oh, go ahead,” urged a voice behind my shoulder. “Why stop now, Tuarach? Hit all three of them! Make a clean sweep of it!” The General and Jamie focused a glance of united dislike on the dapper form behind me.

“Go away, St. Germain,” Jamie said. “This is none of your affair.” He sounded weary, but raised his voice in order to be heard above the uproar below. The shoulder seams of his coat had been split, and folds of his linen shirt showed white through the rents.

St. Germain’s thin lips curved upward in a charming smile. Plainly the Comte was having the time of his life.

“Not my affair? How can such happenings not be the affair of every public-spirited man?” His amused gaze swept the landing, littered with bodies. “After all, if a guest of His Majesty has so perverted the meaning of hospitality as to maintain a brothel in his house, is that not the – no, you don’t!” he said, as Jamie took a step toward him. A blade gleamed suddenly in his hand, appearing as though by magic from the ruffled lace cascading over his wrist. I saw Jamie’s lip curl slightly, and he shifted his shoulders inside the ruins of his coat, settling himself for battle.

“Stop it at once!” said an imperious voice, and the two Duverneys, older and younger, pushed their way onto the already overcrowded landing. Duverney the younger turned and waved his arms commandingly at the herd of people on the stairs, who were sufficiently cowed by his scowl to move back a step.

“You,” said the elder Duverney, pointing at St. Germain. “If you have any feeling of public spirit, as you suggest, you will employ yourself usefully in removing some of those below.”

St. Germain locked eyes with the banker, but after a moment, the noble shrugged, and the dagger disappeared. St. Germain turned without comment and made his way downstairs, pushing those before him and loudly urging them to leave.

Despite his exhortations, and those of Gérard, the younger Duverney, behind him, the bulk of the dinner guests departed, brimming with scandal, only upon the arrival of the King’s Guard.

Mr. Hawkins, recovered by this time, at once lodged a charge of kidnapping and pandering against Jamie. For a moment, I really thought Jamie was going to hit him again; his muscles bunched under the azure velvet, but then relaxed as he thought better of it.

After a considerable amount of confused argument and explanation, Jamie agreed to go to the Guard’s headquarters in the Bastille, there – perhaps – to explain himself.

Alex Randall, white-faced, sweating, and clearly having no idea what was going on, was taken, too – the Duke had not waited to see the fate of his secretary, but had discreetly summoned his coach and left before the arrival of the Guard. Whatever his diplomatic mission, being involved in a scandal wouldn’t help it. Mary Hawkins, still insensible, was removed to her uncle’s house, wrapped in a blanket.

I had narrowly avoided being included in the roundup when Jamie flatly refused to allow it, insisting that I was in a delicate condition and could on no account be removed to a prison. At last, seeing that Jamie was more than willing to start hitting people again in order to prove his point, the Guard Captain relented, on condition that I agreed not to leave the city. While the thought of fleeing Paris had its attractions, I could hardly leave without Jamie, and gave my parole d’honneur with no reservations.

As the group milled confusedly about the foyer, lighting lanterns and gathering hats and cloaks, I saw Murtagh, bruised face set grimly, hovering on the outskirts of the mob. Plainly he intended to accompany Jamie, wherever he was going, and I felt a quick stab of relief. At least my husband wouldn’t be alone.

“Dinna worry yourself, Sassenach.” He hugged me briefly, whispering in my ear. “I’ll be back in no time. If anything goes wrong…” He hesitated, then said firmly, “It wilna be necessary, but if ye need a friend, go to Louise de La Tour.”

“I will.” I had no time for more than a glancing kiss, before the Guardsmen closed in about him.

The doors of the house swung open, and I saw Jamie glance behind him, catch sight of Murtagh, and open his mouth as though to say something. Murtagh, setting hands to his swordbelt, glared fiercely and pushed his way toward Jamie, nearly shoving the younger Duverney into the street. A short, silent battle of wills ensued, conducted entirely by means of ferocious glares, and then Jamie shrugged and tossed up his hands in resignation.

He stepped out into the street, ignoring the Guardsmen who pressed close on all sides, but stopped at sight of a small figure standing near the gate. He stooped and said something, then straightened, turned toward the house and gave me a smile, clearly visible in the lanternlight. Then, with a nod to the elder Monsieur Duverney, he stepped into the waiting coach and was borne away, Murtagh clinging to the rear of the carriage.

Fergus stood in the street, looking after the coach as long as it was in sight. Then, mounting the steps with a firm tread, he took me by the hand and led me inside.

“Come, milady,” he said. “Milord has said I am to care for you, ’til his return.”

Now Fergus slipped into the salon, the door closing silently behind him.

“I have made the rounds of the house, milady,” he whispered. “All buttoned up.” Despite the worry, I smiled at his tone, so obviously an imitation of Jamie’s. His idol had entrusted him with a responsibility, and he plainly took his duties seriously.

Having escorted me to the sitting room, he had gone to make the rounds of the house as Jamie did each night, checking the fastenings of the shutters, the bars on the outer doors – which I knew he could barely lift – and the banking of the fires. He had a smudge of soot from forehead to cheekbone on one side, but had rubbed his eye with a fist at one point, so his eye blinked out of a clear white ring, like a small raccoon.

“You should rest, milady,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be here.”

I didn’t laugh, but smiled at him. “I couldn’t sleep, Fergus. I’ll just sit here for a bit. Perhaps you should go to bed, though; you’ve had an awfully long night of it.” I was reluctant to order him to bed, not wanting to impair his new dignity as temporary man of the house, but he was clearly exhausted. The small, bony shoulders drooped, and dark smudges showed beneath his eyes, darker even than the coating of soot.

He yawned unashamedly, but shook his head.

“No, milady. I will stay with you… if you do not mind?” he added hastily.

“I don’t mind.” In fact, he was too tired either to talk or to fidget in his usual manner, and his sleepy presence on the hassock was comforting, like that of a cat or a dog.

I sat gazing into the low-burning flames, trying to conjure up some semblance of serenity. I tried summoning images of still pools, forest glades, even the dark peace of the Abbey chapel, but nothing seemed to be working; over all the images of peace lay those of the evening: hard hands and gleaming teeth, coming out of a darkness filled with fear; Mary’s white and stricken face, a twin to Alex Randall’s; the flare of hatred in Mr. Hawkins’s piggy eyes; the sudden mistrust on the faces of the General and the Duverneys; St. Germain’s ill-concealed delight in scandal, shimmering with malice like the crystal drops of the chandeliers. And last of all, Jamie’s smile, reassurance and uncertainty mingled in the shifting light of jostling lanterns.

What if he didn’t come back? That was the thought I had been trying to suppress, ever since they took him away. If he was unable to clear himself of the charge? If the magistrate was one of those suspicious of foreigners – well, more suspicious than usual, I amended – he could easily be imprisoned indefinitely. And above and beyond the fear that this unlooked- for crisis could undo all the careful work of the last weeks, was the image of Jamie in a cell like the one where I had found him at Wentworth. In light of the present crisis, the news that Charles Stuart was investing in wine seemed trivial.

Left alone, I now had plenty of time to think, but my thoughts didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere. Who or what was “ La Dame Blanche ”? What sort of “white lady,” and why had the mention of that name made the attackers run off?

Thinking back over the subsequent events of the dinner party, I remembered the General’s remarks about the criminal gangs that roamed the streets of Paris, and how some of them included members of the nobility. That was consistent with the speech and the dress of the leader of the men who had attacked me and Mary, though his companions seemed a good deal rougher in aspect. I tried to think whether the man reminded me of anyone I knew, but the memory of him was indistinct, clouded by darkness and the receding haze of shock.

In general form, he had been not unlike the Comte St. Germain, though surely the voice was different. But then, if the Comte was involved, surely he would take pains to disguise his voice as well as his face? At the same time, I found it almost impossible to believe that the Comte could have taken part in such an attack, and then sat calmly across the table from me two hours later, sipping soup.

I ran my fingers through my hair in frustration. There was nothing that could be done before morning. If morning came, and Jamie didn’t, then I could begin to make the rounds of acquaintances and presumed friends, one of whom might have news or help to offer. But for the hours of the night, I was helpless; powerless to move as a dragonfly in amber.

My fingers jammed against one of the decorated hairpins, and I yanked at it impatiently. Tangled in my hair, it stuck.

“Ouch!”

“Here, milady. I’ll get it.”

I hadn’t heard him pass behind me, but I felt Fergus’s small, clever fingers in my hair, disentangling the tiny ornament. He laid it aside, then, hesitating, said, “The others, milady?”

“Oh, thank you, Fergus,” I said, grateful. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

His pickpocket’s touch was light and sure, and the thick locks began to fall around my face, released from their moorings. Little by little, my breathing slowed as my hair came down.

“You are worried, milady?” said the small, soft voice behind me.

“Yes,” I said, too tired to keep up a false bravado.

“Me, too,” he said simply.

The last of the hairpins clinked on the table, and I slumped in the chair, eyes closed. Then I felt a touch again, and realized that he was brushing my hair, gently combing out the tangles.

“You permit, milady?” he said, feeling it as I tensed in surprise. “The ladies used to say it helped them, if they were feeling worried or upset.”

I relaxed again under the soothing touch.

“I permit,” I said. “Thank you.” After a moment, I said, “What ladies, Fergus?”

There was a momentary hesitation, as of a spider disturbed in the building of a web, and then the delicate ordering of strands resumed.

“At the place where I used to sleep, milady. I couldn’t come out because of the customers, but Madame Elise would let me sleep in a closet under the stairs, if I was quiet. And after all the men had gone, near morning, then I would come out and sometimes the ladies would share their breakfast with me. I would help them with the fastening of their underthings – they said I had the best touch of anyone,” he added, with some pride, “and I would comb their hair, if they liked.”

“Mm.” The soft whisper of the brush through my hair was hypnotic. Without the clock on the mantel, there was no telling time, but the silence of the street outside meant it was very late indeed.

“How did you come to sleep at Madame Elise’s, Fergus?” I asked, barely suppressing a yawn.

“I was born there, milady,” he answered. The strokes of the brush grew slower, and his voice was growing drowsy. “I used to wonder which of the ladies was my mother, but I never found out.”

The opening of the sitting-room door woke me. Jamie stood there, red-eyed and white-faced with fatigue, but smiling in the first gray light of the day.

“I was afraid you weren’t coming back,” I said, a moment later, into the top of his head. His hair had the faint acrid scent of stale smoke and tallow, and his coat had completed its descent into total disreputability, but he was warm and solid, and I wasn’t disposed to be critical about the smell of the head I was cradling next my bosom.

“So was I,” he said, somewhat muffled, and I could feel his smile. The arms around my waist tightened and released, and he sat back, smoothing my hair out of my eyes.

“God, you are so beautiful,” he said softly. “Unkempt and unslept, wi’ the waves of your hair all about your face. Bonny love. Have ye sat here all night long, then?”

“I wasn’t the only one.” I motioned toward the floor, where Fergus lay curled up on the carpet, head on a cushion by my feet. He shifted slightly in his sleep, mouth open a bit, soft pink and full-lipped as the baby he so nearly was.

Jamie laid a big hand gently on his shoulder.

“Come on, then, laddie. Ye’ve done well to guard your mistress.” He scooped the boy up and laid him against his shoulder, mumbling and sleepy-eyed. “You’re a good man, Fergus, and ye’ve earned your rest. Come on to your bed.” I saw Fergus’s eyes flare wide in surprise, then half-close as he relaxed, nodding in Jamie’s arms.

I had opened the shutters and rekindled the fire by the time Jamie returned to the sitting room. He had shed his ruined coat, but still wore the rest of last night’s finery.

“Here.” I handed him a glass of wine, and he drank it standing, in three gulps, shuddered, then collapsed onto the small sofa, and held out the cup for more.

“Not a drop,” I said, “until you tell me what’s going on. You aren’t in prison, so I assume everything’s all right, but-”

“Not all right, Sassenach,” he interrupted, “but it could be worse.”

After a great deal of argument to and fro – a good deal of it Mr. Hawkins’s reiterations of his original impressions – the judge-magistrate who had been hustled out of his cozy bed to preside over this impromptu investigation had ruled grumpily that since Alex Randall was one of the accused, he could hardly be considered an impartial witness. Nor could I, as the wife and possible accomplice of the other accused. Murtagh had been, by his own testimony, insensible during the alleged attack, and the child Claudel was not legally capable of bearing witness.

Clearly, Monsieur le Juge had said, aiming a vicious glare at the Guard Captain, the only person capable of providing the truth of the matter was Mary Hawkins, who was by all accounts incapable of doing so at the present time. Therefore, all the accused should be locked up in the Bastille until such time as Mademoiselle Hawkins could be interviewed, and surely Monsieur le Capitaine should have been able to think that out for himself?

“Then why aren’t you locked up in the Bastille?” I asked.

“Monsieur Duverney the elder offered security for me,” Jamie replied, pulling me down onto the sofa beside him. “He sat rolled up in the corner like a hedgehog, all through the clishmaclaver. Then when the judge made his decision, he stood up and said that, having had the opportunity to play chess with me on several occasions, he didna feel that I was of a moral character so dissolute as to permit of my having conspired in the commission of an act so depraved-” He broke off and shrugged.

“Well, ye ken what he talks like, once he’s got going. The general idea was that a man who could take him at chess six times in seven wouldna lure innocent young lasses to his house to be defiled.”

“Very logical,” I said dryly. “I imagine what he really meant was, if they locked you up, you wouldn’t be able to play with him anymore.”

“I expect so,” he agreed. He stretched, yawned, and blinked at me, smiling.

“But I’m home, and right now, I don’t greatly care why. Come here to me, Sassenach.” Grasping my waist with both hands, he boosted me onto his lap, wrapped his arms around me, and sighed with pleasure.

“All I want to do,” he murmured in my ear, “is to shed these filthy clouts, and lie wi’ you on the hearthrug, go to sleep straight after, with my head on your shoulder, and stay that way ’til tomorrow.”

“Rather an inconvenience to the servants,” I remarked. “They’ll have to sweep round us.”

“Damn the servants,” he said comfortably. “What are doors for?”

“To be knocked on, evidently,” I said as a soft rap sounded outside.

Jamie paused a moment, nose buried in my hair, then sighed, and raised his head, sliding me off his lap onto the sofa.

“Thirty seconds,” he promised me in an undertone, then said, “Entrez!” in a louder voice.

The door swung open and Murtagh stepped into the room. I had rather overlooked Murtagh in the bustles and confusion of the night before, and now thought to myself that his appearance had not been improved by neglect.

He lacked as much sleep as Jamie; the one eye that was open was red-rimmed and bloodshot. The other had darkened to the color of a rotten banana, a slit of glittering black visible in the puffed flesh. The knot on his forehead had now achieved full prominence: a purple goose-egg just over one brow, with a nasty split through it.

The little clansman had said barely a word since his release from the bag the night before. Beyond a brief inquiry as to the whereabouts of his knives – retrieved by Fergus, who, questing in his usual rat-terrier fashion, had found both dirk and sgian dhu behind a pile of rubbish – he had preserved a grim silence through the exigencies of our getaway, guarding the rear as we hurried on foot through the dim Paris alleys. And once arrived at the house, a piercing glance from his operating eye had been sufficient to quell any injudicious questions from the kitchen servants.

I supposed he must have said something at the commissariat de police if only to bear witness to the good character of his employer – though I did wonder just how much credibility I would be inclined to place in Murtagh, were I a French judge. But now he was silent as the gargoyles on Notre Dame, one of which he strongly resembled.

However disreputable his appearance, though, Murtagh never seemed to lack for dignity, nor did he now. Back straight as a ramrod, he advanced across the carpet, and knelt formally before Jamie, who looked nonplussed at this behavior.

The wiry little man drew the dirk from his belt, without flourishes, but with a good deal of deliberateness, and held it out, haft first. The bony, seamed face was expressionless, but the one black eye rested unwaveringly on Jamie’s face.

“I’ve failed ye,” the little man said quietly. “And I’ll ask ye, as my chief, to take my life now, so I needna live longer wi’ the shame of it.”

Jamie drew himself slowly upright, and I felt him push away his own tiredness as he brought his gaze to bear on his retainer. He was quite still for a moment, hands resting on his knees. Then he reached out and placed one hand gently over the purple knot on Murtagh’s head.

“There’s nay shame to ha’ fallen in battle, mo caraidh,” he said softly. “The greatest of warriors may be overcome.”

But the little man shook his head stubbornly, black eye unwinking.

“Nay,” he said. “I didna fall in battle. Ye gave me your trust; your own lady and your child unborn to guard, and the wee English lassie as well. And I gave the task sae little heed that I had nay chance to strike a blow when the danger came. Truth to tell, I didna even see the hand that struck me down.” He did blink then, once.

“Treachery-” Jamie began.

“And now see what’s come of it,” Murtagh interrupted. I had never heard him speak so many words in a row in all the time I had known him. “Your good name smirched, your wife attacked, and the wee lass…” The thin line of his mouth clamped tight for a moment, and his stringy throat bobbed once as he swallowed. “For that alone, the bitter sorrow chokes me.”

“Aye.” Jamie spoke softly, nodding. “Aye, I do see, man. I feel it, too.” He touched his chest briefly, over his heart. The two men might have been alone together, their heads inches apart as Jamie bent toward the older man. Hands folded in my lap, I neither moved nor spoke; it was not my affair.

“But I’m no your chief, man,” Jamie went on, in a firmer tone. “Ye’ve sworn me no vow, and I hold nay power ower ye.”

“Aye, that ye do.” Murtagh’s voice was firm as well, and the haft of the dirk never trembled.

“But-”

“I swore ye my oath, Jamie Fraser, when ye were no more than a week old, and a bonny lad at your mother’s breast.”

I could feel the tiny start of astonishment as Jamie’s eyes opened wide.

“I knelt at Ellen’s feet, as I kneel now by yours,” the little clansman went on, narrow chin held high. “And I swore to her by the name o’ the threefold God, that I would follow ye always, to do your bidding, and guard your back, when ye became a man grown, and needing such service.” The harsh voice softened then, and the eyelid drooped over the one tired eye.

“Aye, lad. I do cherish ye as the son of my own loins. But I have betrayed your service.”

“That ye havena and never could.” Jamie’s hands rested on Murtagh’s shoulders, squeezing firmly. “Nay, I wilna have your life from ye, for I’ve need of ye still. But I will lay an oath on ye, and you’ll take it.”

There was a long moment’s hesitation, then the spiky black head nodded imperceptibly.

Jamie’s voice dropped still further, but it was not a whisper. Holding the middle three fingers of his right hand stiff, he laid them together over the hilt of the dirk, at the juncture of haft and tang.

“I charge ye, then, by your oath to me and your word to my mother – find the men. Hunt them, and when they be found, I do charge ye wi’ the vengeance due my wife’s honor – and the blood of Mary Hawkins’s innocence.”

He paused a moment, then took his hand from the knife. The clansman raised it, holding it upright by the blade. Acknowledging my presence for the first time, he bowed his head toward me and said, “As the laird has spoken, lady, so I will do. I will lay vengeance at your feet.”

I licked dry lips, not knowing what to say. No response seemed necessary, though; he brought the dirk to his lips and kissed it, then straightened with decision and thrust it home in its sheath.

20 LA DAME BLANCHE

The dawn had broadened into day by the time we had changed our clothes, and breakfast was on its way up the stairs from the kitchen.

“What I want to know,” I said, pouring out the chocolate, “is who in bloody hell is La Dame Blanche?”

“ La Dame Blanche?” Magnus, leaning over my shoulder with a basket of hot bread, started so abruptly that one of the rolls fell out of the basket. I fielded it neatly and turned round to look up at the butler, who was looking rather shaken.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “You’ve heard the name, Magnus?”

“Why, yes, milady,” the old man answered. “ La Dame Blanche is une sorcière.”

“A sorceress?” I said incredulously.

Magnus shrugged, tucking in the napkin around the rolls with excessive care, not looking at me.

“The White Lady,” he murmured. “She is called a wisewoman, a healer. And yet… she sees to the center of a man, and can turn his soul to ashes, if evil be found there.” He bobbed his head, turned, and shuffled off hastily in the direction of the kitchen. I saw his elbow bob, and realized that he was crossing himself as he went.

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, turning back to Jamie. “Did you ever hear of La Dame Blanche?”

“Um? Oh? Oh, aye, I’ve… heard the stories.” Jamie’s eyes were hidden by long auburn lashes as he buried his nose in his cup of chocolate, but the blush on his cheeks was too deep to be put down to the heat of the rising steam.

I leaned back in my chair, crossed my arms, and regarded him narrowly.

“Oh, you have?” I said. “Would it surprise you to hear that the men who attacked Mary and me last night referred to me as La Dame Blanche?”

“They did?” He looked up quickly at that, startled.

I nodded. “They took one look at me in the light, shouted ‘ La Dame Blanche,’ and then ran off as though they’d just noticed I had plague.”

Jamie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The red color was fading from his face, leaving it pale as the white china plate before him.

“God in heaven,” he said, half to himself. “God… in… heaven!”

I leaned across the table and took the cup from his hand.

“Would you like to tell me just what you know about La Dame Blanche?” I suggested gently.

“Well…” He hesitated, but then looked at me sheepishly. “It’s only… I told Glengarry that you were La Dame Blanche.”

“You told Glengarry what?” I choked on the bite of roll I had taken. Jamie pounded me helpfully on the back.

“Well, it was Glengarry and Castellotti, was what it was,” he said defensively. “I mean, playing at cards and dice is one thing, but they wouldna leave it at that. And they thought it verra funny that I’d wish to be faithful to my wife. They said… well, they said a number of things, and I… I got rather tired of it.” He looked away, the tips of his ears burning.

“Mm,” I said, sipping tea. Having heard Castellotti’s tongue in action, I could imagine the sort of merciless teasing Jamie had taken.

He drained his own cup at one swallow, then occupied himself with carefully refilling it, keeping his eyes fixed on the pot to avoid meeting mine. “But I couldna just walk out and leave them, either, could I?” he demanded. “I had to stay with His Highness through the evening, and it would do no good to have him thinkin’ me unmanly.”

“So you told them I was La Dame Blanche,” I said, trying hard to keep any hint of laughter out of my voice. “And if you tried any funny business with ladies of the evening, I’d shrivel your private parts.”

“Er, well…”

“My God, they believed it?” I could feel my own face flushing as hotly as Jamie’s, with the effort to control myself.

“I was verra convincing about it,” he said, one corner of his mouth beginning to twitch. “Swore them all to secrecy on their mothers’ lives.”

“And how much did you all have to drink before this?”

“Oh, a fair bit. I waited ’til the fourth bottle.”

I gave up the struggle and burst out laughing.

“Oh, Jamie!” I said. “You darling!” I leaned over and kissed his furiously blushing cheek.

“Well,” he said awkwardly, slathering butter over a chunk of bread. “It was the best I could think of. And they did stop pushing trollops into my arms.”

“Good,” I said. I took the bread from him, added honey, and gave it back.

“I can hardly complain about it,” I observed. “Since in addition to guarding your virtue, it seems to have kept me from being raped.”

“Aye, thank God.” He set down the roll and grasped my hand. “Christ, if anything had happened to you, Sassenach, I’d-”

“Yes,” I interrupted, “but if the men who attacked us knew I was supposed to be La Dame Blanche…”

“Aye, Sassenach.” He nodded down at me. “It canna have been either Glengarry nor Castellotti, for they were with me at the house where Fergus came to fetch me when you were attacked. But it must have been someone they told of it.”

I couldn’t repress a slight shiver at the memory of the white mask and the mocking voice behind it.

With a sigh, he let go of my hand. “Which means, I suppose, that I’d best go and see Glengarry, and find out just how many people he’s been regaling wi’ tales of my married life.” He rubbed a hand through his hair in exasperation. “And then I must go call on His Highness, and find out what in hell he means by this arrangement with the Comte St. Germain.”

“I suppose so,” I said thoughtfully, “though knowing Glengarry, he’s probably told half of Paris by now. I have some calls to make this afternoon, myself.”

“Oh, aye? And who are you going to call upon, Sassenach?” he asked, eyeing me narrowly. I took a deep breath, bracing myself at the thought of the ordeal that lay ahead.

“First, on Master Raymond,” I said. “And then, on Mary Hawkins.”

“Lavender, perhaps?” Raymond stood on tiptoe to take a jar from the shelf. “Not for application, but the aroma is soothing; it calms the nerves.”

“Well, that depends on whose nerves are involved,” I said, recalling Jamie’s reaction to the scent of lavender. It was the scent Jack Randall had favored, and Jamie found exposure to the herb’s perfume anything but soothing. “In this case, though, it might help. Do no harm, at any rate.”

“Do no harm,” he quoted thoughtfully. “A very sound principle.”

“That’s the first bit of the Hippocratic Oath, you know,” I said, watching him as he bent to rummage in his drawers and bins. “The oath a physician swears. ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

“Ah? And have you sworn this oath yourself, madonna?” The bright, amphibious eyes blinked at me over the edge of the high counter.

I felt myself flushing before that unblinking gaze.

“Er, well, no. Not actually. I’m not a real physician. Not yet.” I couldn’t have said what made me add that last sentence.

“No? Yet you are seeking to mend that which a ‘real’ physician would never try, knowing that a lost maidenhead is not restorable.” His irony was evident.

“Oh, isn’t it?” I answered dryly. Fergus had, with encouragement, told me quite a bit about the “ladies” at Madame Elise’s house. “What’s that bit with the shoat’s bladder full of chicken blood, hm? Or do you claim that things like that fall into an apothecary’s realm of competence, but not a physician’s?”

He had no eyebrows to speak of, but the heavy shelf of his forehead lifted slightly when he was amused.

“And who is harmed by that, madonna? Surely not the seller. Not the buyer, either – he is likely to get more enjoyment for his money than the purchaser of the genuine article. Not even the maidenhead itself is harmed! Surely a very moral and Hippocratic endeavor, which any physician might be pleased to assist?”

I laughed. “And I expect you know more than a few who do?” I said. “I’ll take the matter up with the next Medical Review Board I see. In the meantime, short of manufactured miracles, what can we do in the present case?”

“Mm.” He laid out a gauze square on the counter and poured a handful of finely shredded dried leaves into the center of it. A sharp, pleasant tang rose from the small heap of grayish-green vegetation.

“This is Saracen’s consound,” he said, skilfully folding the gauze into a tidy square with the ends tucked in. “Good for soothing irritated skin, minor lacerations, and sores of the privy parts. Useful, I think?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, a little grimly. “As an infusion or a decoction?”

“Infusion. Warm, probably, under the circumstances.” He turned to another shelf and abstracted one of the large white jars of painted porcelain. This one said CHELIDONIUM on the side.

“For the inducement of sleep,” he explained. His lipless mouth stretched back at the corners. “I think perhaps you had better avoid the use of the opium-poppy derivatives; this particular patient appears to have an unpredictable response to them.”

“Heard all about it already, have you?” I said resignedly. I could hardly have hoped he hadn’t. I was well aware that information was one of the more important commodities he sold; consequently the little shop was a nexus for gossip from dozens of sources, from street vendors to gentlemen of the Royal Bedchamber.

“From three separate sources,” Raymond replied. He glanced out the window, craning his neck to see the huge horloge that hung from the wall of the building near the corner. “And it’s barely two o’clock. I expect I will hear several more versions of the events at your dinner before nightfall.” The wide, gummy mouth opened, and a soft chuckle emerged. “I particularly liked the version in which your husband challenged General d’Arbanville to a duel in the street, while you more pragmatically offered Monsieur le Comte the enjoyment of the unconscious girl’s body, if he would refrain from calling the King’s Guard.”

“Mmphm,” I said, sounding self-consciously Scottish. “Have you any particular interest in knowing what actually did happen?”

The horned-poppy tonic, a pale amber in the afternoon sunlight, sparkled as he poured it into a small vial.

“The truth is always of use, madonna,” he answered, eyes fixed on the slender stream. “It has the value of rarity, you know.” He set the porcelain jar on the counter with a soft thump. “And thus is worth a fair price in exchange,” he added. The money for the medicines I had bought was lying on the counter, the coins gleaming in the sun. I narrowed my eyes at him, but he merely smiled blandly, as though he had never heard of froglegs in garlic butter.

The horloge outside struck two. I calculated the distance to the Hawkins’s house in Rue Malory. Barely half an hour, if I could get a carriage. Plenty of time.

“In that case,” I said, “shall we step into your private room for a bit?”

“And that’s it,” I said, taking a long sip of cherry brandy. The fumes in the workroom were nearly as strong as those rising from my glass, and I could feel my head expanding under their influence, rather like a large, cheerful red balloon. “They let Jamie go, but we’re still under suspicion. I can’t imagine that will last long, though, do you?”

Raymond shook his head. A draft stirred the crocodile overhead, and he rose to shut the window.

“No. A nuisance, nothing more. Monsieur Hawkins has money and friends, and of course he is distraught, but still. Plainly you and your husband were guilty of nothing more than excessive kindness, in trying to keep the girl’s misfortune a secret.” He took a deep swallow from his own glass.

“And that is your concern at present, of course. The girl?”

I nodded. “One of them. There’s nothing I can do about her reputation at this point. All I can do is try to help her to heal.”

A sardonic black eye peered over the rim of the metal goblet he was holding.

“Most physicians of my acquaintance would say, ‘All I can do is try to heal her.’ You will help her to heal? It’s interesting that you perceive the difference, madonna. I thought you would.”

I set down the cup, feeling that I had had enough. Heat was radiating from my cheeks, and I had the distinct feeling that the tip of my nose was pink.

“I told you I’m not a real physician.” I closed my eyes briefly, determined that I could still tell which way was up, and opened them again. “Besides, I’ve… er, dealt with a case of rape once before. There isn’t a great deal you can do, externally. Maybe there isn’t a great deal you can do, period,” I added. I changed my mind and picked up the cup again.

“Perhaps not,” Raymond agreed. “But if anyone is capable of reaching the patient’s center, surely it would be La Dame Blanche?”

I set the cup down, staring at him. My mouth was unbecomingly open, and I closed it. Thoughts, suspicions, and realizations were rioting through my head, colliding with each other in tangles of conjecture. Temporarily sidestepping the traffic jam, I seized on the other half of his remark, to give me time to think.

“The patient’s center?”

He reached into an open jar on the table, withdrew a pinch of white powder, and dropped it into his goblet. The deep amber of the brandy immediately turned the color of blood, and began to boil.

“Dragon’s blood,” he remarked, casually waving at the bubbling liquid. “It only works in a vessel lined with silver. It ruins the cup, of course, but it’s most effective, done under the proper circumstances.”

I made a small, gurgling noise.

“Oh, the patient’s center,” he said, as though recalling something we had talked about many days ago. “Yes, of course. All healing is done essentially by reaching the… what shall we call it? the soul? the essence? say, the center. By reaching the patient’s center, from which they can heal themselves. Surely you have seen it, madonna. The cases so ill or so wounded that plainly they will die – but they don’t. Or those who suffer from something so slight that surely they must recover, with the proper care. But they slip away, despite all you can do for them.”

“Everyone who minds the sick has seen things like that,” I replied cautiously.

“Yes,” he agreed. “And the pride of the physician being what it is, most often he blames himself for those that die, and congratulates himself upon the triumph of his skill for those that live. But La Dame Blanche sees the essence of a man, and turns it to healing – or to death. So an evildoer may well fear to look upon her face.” He picked up the cup, raised it in a toast to me, and drained the bubbling liquid. It left a faint pink stain on his lips.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I think. So it wasn’t just Glengarry’s gullibility?”

Raymond shrugged, looking pleased with himself. “The inspiration was your husband’s,” he said modestly. “And a really excellent idea, too. But of course, while your husband has the respect of men for his own natural gifts, he would not be considered an authority on supernatural manifestations.”

“You, of course, would.”

The massive shoulders lifted slightly under the gray velvet robe. There were several small holes in one sleeve, charred around the edges, as though a number of tiny coals had burned their way through. Carelessness while conjuring, I supposed.

“You have been seen in my shop,” he pointed out. “Your background is a mystery. And as your husband noted, my own reputation is somewhat suspect. I do move in… circles, shall we say?” – the lipless mouth broadened in a grin – “where a speculation as to your true identity may be taken with undue seriousness. And you know how people talk,” he added with an air of prim disapproval that made me burst out laughing.

He set down the cup and leaned forward.

“You said that Mademoiselle Hawkins’s health was one concern, madonna. Have you others?”

“I have.” I took a small sip of brandy. “I’d guess that you hear a great deal about what goes on in Paris, don’t you?”

He smiled, black eyes sharp and genial. “Oh, yes, madonna. What is it that you want to know?”

“Have you heard anything about Charles Stuart? Do you know who he is, for that matter?”

That surprised him; the shelf of his forehead lifted briefly. Then he picked up a small glass bottle from the table in front of him, rolling it meditatively between his palms.

“Yes, madonna,” he said. “His father is – or should be – King of Scotland, is he not?”

“Well, that depends on your perspective,” I said, stifling a small belch. “He’s either the King of Scotland in exile, or the Pretender to the throne, but that’s of no great concern to me. What I want to know is… is Charles Stuart doing anything that would make one think he might be planning an armed invasion of Scotland or England?”

He laughed out loud.

“Goodness, madonna! You are a most uncommon woman. Have you any idea how rare such directness is?”

“Yes,” I admitted, “but there isn’t really any help for it. I’m not good at beating round bushes.” I reached out and took the bottle from him. “Have you heard anything?”

He glanced instinctively toward the half-door, but the shopgirl was occupied in mixing perfume for a voluble customer.

“Something small, madonna, only a casual mention in a letter from a friend – but the answer is most definitely yes.”

I could see him hesitating in how much to tell me. I kept my eyes on the bottle in my hand, to give him time to make up his mind. The contents rolled with a pleasant sensation as the little vial twisted in my palm. It was oddly heavy for its size, and had a strange, dense, fluid feel to it, as though it was filled with liquid metal.

“It’s quicksilver,” Master Raymond said, answering my unspoken question. Apparently whatever mind-reading he had been doing had decided him in my favor, for he took back the bottle, poured it out in a shimmering silver puddle on the table before us, and sat back to tell me what he knew.

“One of His Highness’s agents has made inquiries in Holland,” he said. “A man named O’Brien – and a man more inept at his job I hope never to employ,” he added. “A secret agent who drinks to excess?”

“Everyone around Charles Stuart drinks to excess,” I said. “What was O’Brien doing?”

“He wished to open negotiations for a shipment of broadswords. Two thousand broadswords, to be purchased in Spain, and sent through Holland, so as to conceal their place of origin.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked. I wasn’t sure whether I was naturally stupid, or merely fuddled with cherry brandy, but it seemed a pointless undertaking, even for Charles Stuart.

Raymond shrugged, prodding the puddle of quicksilver with a blunt forefinger.

“One can guess, madonna. The Spanish king is a cousin of the Scottish king, is he not? As well as of our good King Louis?”

“Yes, but…”

“Might it not be that he is willing to help the cause of the Stuarts, but not openly?”

The brandy haze was receding from my brain.

“It might.”

Raymond tapped his finger sharply downward, making the puddle of quicksilver shiver into several small round globules, that shimmied wildly over the tabletop.

“One hears,” he said mildly, eyes still on the droplets of mercury, “that King Louis entertains an English duke at Versailles. One hears also that the Duke is there to seek some arrangements of trade. But then it is rare to hear everything, madonna.”

I stared at the rippling drops of mercury, fitting all this together. Jamie, too, had heard the rumor that Sandringham’s embassage concerned more than trade rights. What if the Duke’s visit really concerned the possibilities of an agreement between France and England – perhaps with regard to the future of Brussels? And if Louis was negotiating secretly with England for support for his invasion of Brussels – then what might Philip of Spain be inclined to do, if approached by an impecunious cousin with the power to distract the English most thoroughly from any attention to foreign ventures?

“Three Bourbon cousins,” Raymond murmured to himself. He shepherded one of the drops toward another; as the droplets touched, they merged at once, a single shining drop springing into rounded life as though by magic. The prodding finger urged another droplet inward, and the single drop grew larger. “One blood. But one interest?”

The finger struck down again, and glittering fragments ran over the tabletop in every direction.

“I think not, madonna,” Raymond said calmly.

“I see,” I said, with a deep breath. “And what do you think about Charles Stuart’s new partnership with the Comte St. Germain?”

The wide amphibian smile grew broader.

“I have heard that His Highness goes often to the docks these days – to talk with his new partner, of course. And he looks at the ships at anchor – so fine and quick, so… expensive. The land of Scotland does lie across the water, does it not?”

“It does indeed,” I said. A ray of light hit the quicksilver with a flash, attracting my attention to the lowering sun. I would have to go.

“Thank you,” I said. “Will you send word? If you hear anything more?”

He inclined his massive head graciously, the swinging hair the color of mercury in the sun, then jerked it up abruptly.

“Ah! Do not touch the quicksilver, madonna!” he warned as I reached toward a droplet that had rolled toward my edge of the table. “It bonds at once with any metal it touches.” He reached across and tenderly scooped the tiny pellet toward him. “You do not wish to spoil your lovely rings.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll admit you’ve been helpful so far. No one’s tried to poison me lately. I don’t suppose you and Jamie between you are likely to get me burnt for witchcraft in the Place de la Bastille, do you?” I spoke lightly, but my memories of the thieves’ hole and the trial at Cranesmuir were still fresh.

“Certainly not,” he said, with dignity. “No one’s been burnt for witchcraft in Paris in… oh, twenty years, at least. You’re perfectly safe. As long as you don’t kill anyone,” he added.

“I’ll do my best,” I said, and rose to go.

Fergus found me a carriage with no difficulty, and I spent the short trip to the Hawkins house musing over recent developments. I supposed that Raymond had in fact done me a service by expanding on Jamie’s original wild story to his more superstitious clients, though the thought of having my name bandied about in séances or Black Masses left me with some misgivings.

It also occurred to me that, rushed for time, and beset with speculations of kings and swords and ships, I had not had time to ask Master Raymond where – if anywhere – the Comte St. Germain entered into his own realm of influence.

Public opinion seemed to place the Comte firmly in the center of the mysterious “circles” to which Raymond referred. But as a participant – or a rival? And did the ripples of these circles spread as far as the King’s chamber? Louis was rumored to take interest in astrology; could there be some connection, through the dark channels of Cabbalism and sorcery, among Louis, the Comte, and Charles Stuart?

I shook my head impatiently, to clear it of brandy fumes and pointless questions. The only thing that could be said for certain was that he had entered into a dangerous partnership with Charles Stuart, and that was concern enough for the present.

The Hawkins residence on the Rue Malory was a solid, respectable-looking house of three stories, but its internal disruption was apparent even to the casual observer. The day was warm, but all the shutters were still sealed tight against any intrusion of prying eyes. The steps had not been scrubbed this morning, and the marks of dirty feet smeared the white stone. No sign of cook or housemaid out front to bargain for fresh meat and gossip with the barrowmen. It was a house battened down against the coming of disaster.

Feeling not a little like a harbinger of doom myself, despite my relatively cheerful yellow gown, I sent Fergus up the steps to knock for me. There was some give-and-take between Fergus and whoever opened the door, but one of Fergus’s better character traits was an inability to take “no” for an answer, and shortly I found myself face-to-face with a woman who appeared to be the lady of the house, and therefore Mrs. Hawkins, Mary’s aunt.

I was forced to draw my own conclusions, as the woman seemed much too distraught to assist me by offering any sort of tangible information, such as her name.

“But we can’t see anybody!” she kept exclaiming, glancing furtively over her shoulder, as though expecting the bulky form of Mr. Hawkins suddenly to materialize accusingly behind her. “We’re… we have… that is…”

“I don’t want to see you,” I said firmly. “I want to see your niece, Mary.”

The name seemed to throw her into fresh paroxysms of alarm.

“She… but… Mary? No! She’s… she’s not well!”

“I don’t suppose she is,” I said patiently. I lifted my basket into view. “I’ve brought some medicines for her.”

“Oh! But… but… she… you… aren’t you…?”

“Havers, woman,” said Fergus in his best Scots accent. He viewed this spectacle of derangement disapprovingly. “The maid says the young mistress is upstairs in her room.”

“Just so,” I said. “Lead on, Fergus.” Waiting for no further encouragement, he ducked under the outstretched forearm that barred our way, and made off into the gloomy depths of the house. Mrs. Hawkins turned after him with an incoherent cry, allowing me to slip past her.

There was a maid on duty outside Mary’s door, a stout party in a striped apron, but she offered no resistance to my statement that I intended to go in. She shook her head mournfully. “I can do nothing with her, Madame. Perhaps you will have better luck.”

This didn’t sound at all promising, but there was little choice. At least I wasn’t likely to do further harm. I straightened my gown and pushed open the door.

It was like walking into a cave. The windows were covered with heavy brown velvet draperies, drawn tight against the daylight, and what chinks of light seeped through were immediately quenched in the hovering layer of smoke from the hearth.

I took a deep breath and let it out again at once, coughing. There was no stir from the figure on the bed; a pathetically small, hunched shape under a goose-feather duvet. Surely the drug had worn off by now, and she couldn’t be asleep, after all the racket there had been in the hallway. Probably playing possum, in case it was her aunt come back for further blithering harangues. I would have done the same, in her place.

I turned and shut the door firmly in Mrs. Hawkins’s wretched face, then walked over to the bed.

“It’s me,” I said. “Why don’t you come out, before you suffocate in there?”

There was a sudden upheaval of bedclothes, and Mary shot out of the quilts like a dolphin rising from the sea waves, and clutched me round the neck.

“Claire! Oh, Claire! Thank God! I thought I’d n-never see you again! Uncle said you were in prison! He s-said you-”

“Let go!” I managed to detach her grip, and force her back enough to get a look at her. She was red-faced, sweaty, and disheveled from hiding beneath the covers, but otherwise looked fine. Her brown eyes were wide and bright, with no sign of opium intoxication, and while she looked excited and alarmed, apparently a night’s rest, coupled with the resilience of youth, had taken care of most of her physical injuries. The others were what worried me.

“No, I’m not in prison,” I said, trying to stem her eager questions. “Obviously not, though it isn’t for any lack of trying on your uncle’s part.”

“B-but I told him-” she began, then stammered and let her eyes fall. “ – at least I t-t-tried to tell him, but he – but I…”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured her. “He’s so upset he wouldn’t listen to anything you said, no matter how you said it. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The important thing is you. How do you feel?” I pushed the heavy dark hair back from her forehead and looked her over searchingly.

“All right,” she answered, and gulped. “I… bled a little bit, but it stopped.” The blood rose still higher in her fair cheeks, but she didn’t drop her eyes. “I… it’s… sore. D-does that go away?”

“Yes, it does,” I said gently. “I brought some herbs for you. They’re to be brewed in hot water, and as the infusion cools, you can apply it with a cloth, or sit in it in a tub, if one’s handy. It will help.” I got the bundles of herbs from my reticule and laid them on her side table.

She nodded, biting her lip. Plainly there was something more she wanted to say, her native shyness battling her need for confidence.

“What is it?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.

“Am I going to have a baby?” she blurted out, looking up fearfully. “You said…”

“No,” I said, as firmly as I could. “You aren’t. He wasn’t able to… finish.” In the folds of my skirt, I crossed both pairs of fingers, hoping fervently that I was right. The chances were very small indeed, but such freaks had been known to happen. Still, there was no point in alarming her further over the faint possibility. The thought made me faintly ill. Could such an accident be the possible answer to the riddle of Frank’s existence? I put the notion aside; a month’s wait would prove or dispel it.

“It’s hot as a bloody oven in here,” I said, loosening the ties at my throat in order to breathe. “And smoky as hell’s vestibule, as my old uncle used to say.” Unsure what on earth to say to her next, I rose and went round the room throwing back drapes and opening windows.

“Aunt Helen said I mustn’t let anyone see me,” Mary said, kneeling up in bed as she watched me. “She says I’m d-disgraced, and people will point at me in the street if I go out.”

“They might, the ghouls.” I finished my airing and came back to her. “That doesn’t mean you need bury yourself alive and suffocate in the process.” I sat down beside her, and leaned back in my chair, feeling the cool fresh air blow through my hair as it swept the smoke from the room.

She was silent for a long time, toying with the bundles of herbs on the table. Finally she looked up at me, smiling bravely, though her lower lip trembled slightly.

“At least I won’t have to m-marry the Vicomte. Uncle says he’ll n-never have me now.”

“No, I don’t suppose so.”

She nodded, looking down at the gauze wrapped square on her knee. Her fingers fiddled restlessly with the string, so that one end came loose and a few crumbs of goldenrod fell out onto the coverlet.

“I… used to th-think about it; what you told me, about how a m-man…” She stopped and swallowed, and I saw a single tear fall onto the gauze. “I didn’t think I could stand to let the Vicomte do that to me. N-now it’s been done… and n-nobody can undo it and I’ll never have to d-do it again… and… and… oh, Claire, Alex will never speak to me again! I’ll never see him again, never!”

She collapsed into my arms, weeping hysterically and scattering herbs. I clutched her against my shoulder and patted her, making small shushing noises, though I shed a few tears myself that fell unnoticed into the dark shininess of her hair.

“You’ll see him again,” I whispered. “Of course you will. It won’t make a difference to him. He’s a good man.”

But I knew it would. I had seen the anguish on Alex Randall’s face the night before, and at the time thought it only the same helpless pity for suffering that I saw in Jamie and Murtagh. But since I had learned of Alex Randall’s professed love for Mary, I had realized how much deeper his own pain must go – and his fear.

He seemed a good man. But he was also a poor, younger son, in ill health and with little chance of advancement; what position he did have was entirely dependent on the Duke of Sandringham’s goodwill. And I had little hope that the Duke would look kindly on the idea of his secretary’s union with a disgraced and ruined girl, who had now neither social connections nor dowry to bless herself with.

And if Alex found somewhere the courage to wed her in spite of everything – what chance would they have, penniless, cast out of polite society, and with the hideous fact of the rape overshadowing their knowledge of each other?

There was nothing I could do but hold her, and weep with her for what was lost.

It was twilight by the time I left, with the first stars coming out in faint speckles over the chimneypots. In my pocket was a letter written by Mary, properly witnessed, containing her statement of the events of the night before. Once this was delivered to the proper authorities, we should at least have no further trouble from the law. Just as well; there was plenty of trouble pending from other quarters.

Mindful, this time, of danger, I made no objection to Mrs. Hawkins’s unwilling offer to have me and Fergus transported home in the family carriage.

I tossed my hat on the card table in the vestibule, observing the large number of notes and small nosegays that overflowed the salver there. Apparently we weren’t yet pariahs, though the news of the scandal must long since have spread through the social strata of Paris.

I waved away the anxious inquiries of the servants, and drifted upward toward the bedchamber, shedding my outer garments carelessly along the way. I felt too drained to care about anything.

But when I pushed open the bedchamber door and saw Jamie, lying back in a chair by the fire, my apathy was at once supplanted by a surge of tenderness. His eyes were closed and his hair sticking up in all directions, sure sign of mental turmoil at some point. But he opened his eyes at the slight noise of my entrance and smiled at me, eyes clear and blue in the warm light of the candelabrum.

“It’s all right” was all he whispered to me as he gathered me into his arms. “You’re home.” Then we were silent, as we undressed each other and went finally to earth, each finding delayed and wordless sanctuary in the other’s embrace.

21 UNTIMELY RESURRECTION

My mind was still on bankers when our coach pulled up to the Duke’s rented residence on the Rue St. Anne. It was a large, handsome house, with a long, curving drive lined with poplar trees, and extensive grounds. A wealthy man, the Duke.

“Do you suppose it was the loan Charles got from Manzetti that he’s investing with St. Germain?” I asked.

“It must be,” Jamie replied. He pulled on the pigskin gloves suitable for a formal call, grimacing slightly as he smoothed the tight leather over the stiff fourth finger of his right hand. “The money his father thinks he’s spending to maintain himself in Paris.”

“So Charles really is trying to raise money for an army,” I said, feeling a reluctant admiration for Charles Stuart. The coach came to a halt, and the footman hopped down to open the door.

“Well, he’s trying to raise money, at least,” Jamie corrected, handing me out of the coach. “For all I ken, he wants it to elope with Louise de La Tour and his bastard.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Not from what Master Raymond told me yesterday. Besides, Louise says she hasn’t seen him since she and Jules… well…”

Jamie snorted briefly. “At least she’s got some sense of honor, then.”

“I don’t know whether that’s it,” I observed, taking his arm as we climbed the steps to the door. “She said Charles was so furious at her for sleeping with her husband that he stormed off, and she hasn’t seen him since. He writes her passionate letters from time to time, swearing to come and take her and the child away with him as soon as he comes into his rightful place in the world, but she won’t let him come to see her; she’s too afraid of Jules finding out the truth.”

Jamie made a disapproving Scottish noise.

“God, is there any man safe from cuckoldry?”

I touched his arm lightly. “Likely some more than others.”

“Ye think so?” he said, but smiled down at me.

The door swung open to reveal a short, tubby butler, with a bald head, a spotless uniform, and immense dignity.

“Milord,” he said, bowing to Jamie, “and milady. You are expected. Please come in.”

The Duke was charm itself as he received us in the main drawing room.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” he said, dismissing Jamie’s apologies for the contretemps of the dinner party. “Damned excitable fellows, the French. Make an ungodly fuss over everything. Now, do let us look over all these fascinating propositions, shall we? And perhaps your good lady would like to… um, amuse herself with a perusal of… eh?” He waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the wall, leaving it open to question whether I might amuse myself by looking at the several large paintings, the well-furnished bookshelf, or the several glass cases in which the Duke’s collection of snuffboxes resided.

“Thank you,” I murmured, with a charming smile, and wandered over to the wall, pretending to be absorbed in a large Boucher, featuring the backview of an amply endowed nude woman seated on a rock in the wilderness. If this was a reflection of current tastes in female anatomy, it was no wonder that Jamie appeared to think so highly of my bottom.

“Ha,” I said. “What price foundation garments, eh?”

“Eh?” Jamie and the Duke, startled, looked up from the portfolio of investment papers that formed the ostensible reason for our visit.

“Never mind me,” I said, waving a gracious hand. “Just enjoying the art.”

“I’m deeply gratified, ma’am,” said the Duke politely, and at once reimmersed himself in the papers, as Jamie began the tedious and painstaking real business of the visit – the inconspicuous extraction of such information as the Duke might be willing to part with regarding his own sympathies – or otherwise – toward the Stuart cause.

I had my own agenda for this visit, as well. As the men became more immersed in their discussions, I edged my way toward the door, pretending to look through the well-furnished shelves. As soon as the coast looked clear, I meant to slip out into the hallway and try to find Alex Randall. I had done what I could to repair the damage done to Mary Hawkins; anything further would have to come from him. Under the rules of social etiquette, he couldn’t call upon her at her uncle’s house, nor could she contact him. But I could easily make an opportunity for them to meet at the Rue Tremoulins.

The conversation behind me had dropped to a confidential murmur. I stuck my head into the hall, but didn’t see a footman immediately. Still, one couldn’t be far away; a house of this size must have a staff numbering in the dozens. As large as it was, I would need directions in order to locate Alexander Randall. I chose a direction at random and walked along the hallway, looking for a servant of whom to inquire.

I saw a flicker of motion at the end of the hall, and called out. Whoever it was made no answer, but I heard a surreptitious scuttle of feet on polished boards.

That seemed curious behavior for a servant. I stopped at the end of the hall and looked around. Another hall extended at right angles to the one I stood in, lined on one side with doors, on the other with long windows that opened on the drive and the garden. Most of the doors were closed, but the one closest to me was slightly ajar.

Moving quietly, I stepped up to it and put my ear next to the paneling. Hearing nothing, I took hold of the handle and boldly pushed the door open.

“What in the name of God are you doing here?” I exclaimed in astonishment.

“Oh, you scared me! Gracious, I thought I was g-going to die.” Mary Hawkins pressed both hands against her bodice. Her face was blanched white, and her eyes dark and wide with terror.

“You’re not,” I said. “Unless your uncle finds out you’re here; then he’ll probably kill you. Or does he know?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t t-tell anyone. I took a public fiacre.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

She glanced around like a frightened rabbit looking for a bolthole, but failing to find one, instead drew herself up and tightened her jaw.

“I had to find Alex. I had to t-talk to him. To see if he – if he…” Her hands were wringing together, and I could see the effort it cost her to get the words out.

“Never mind,” I said, resigned. “I understand. Your uncle won’t, though, and neither will the Duke. His Grace doesn’t know you’re here, either?”

She shook her head, mute.

“All right,” I said, thinking. “Well, the first thing we must do is-”

“Madame? May I assist you?”

Mary started like a hare, and I felt my own heart leap uncomfortably into the back of my throat. Bloody footmen; never in the right place at the right time.

There was nothing to do now but brazen it out. I turned to the footman, who was standing stiff as a ramrod in the doorway, looking dignified and suspicious.

“Yes,” I said, with as much hauteur as I could summon on short notice. “Will you please tell Mr. Alexander Randall that he has visitors.”

“I regret that I cannot do so, Madame,” said the footman, with remote formality.

“And why not?” I demanded.

“Because, Madame,” he answered, “Mr. Alexander Randall is no longer in His Grace’s employ. He was dismissed.” The footman glanced at Mary, then lowered his nose an inch and unbent sufficiently to say, “I understand that Monsieur Randall has taken ship back to England.”

“No! He can’t be gone, he can’t!”

Mary darted toward the door, and nearly cannoned into Jamie as he entered. She drew up short with a startled gasp, and he stared at her in astonishment.

“What-” he began, then saw me behind her. “Oh, there ye are, Sassenach. I made an excuse to come and find ye – His Grace just told me that Alex Randall-”

“I know,” I interrupted. “He’s gone.”

“No!” Mary moaned. “No!” She darted toward the door, and was through it before either of us could stop her, her heels clattering on the polished parquet.

“Bloody fool!” I kicked off my own shoes, picked up my skirts, and whizzed after her. Stocking-footed, I was much faster than she in her high-heeled slippers. Maybe I could catch her before she ran into someone else and was caught, with the concomitant scandal that would involve.

I followed the whisk of her disappearing skirts round the bend of the hall. The floor here was carpeted; if I didn’t hurry, I might lose her at an intersection, unable to hear from the footsteps which way she had gone. I put my head down, charged round the last corner, and crashed head-on into a man coming the other way.

He let out a startled “Whoof!” as I struck him amidships, and clutched me by the arms to keep upright as we swayed and staggered together.

“I’m sorry,” I began, breathlessly. “I thought you were – oh, Jesus H. fucking Christ!”

My initial impression – that I had encountered Alexander Randall – had lasted no more than the split second necessary to see the eyes above that finely chiseled mouth. The mouth was much like Alex’s, bar the deep lines around it. But those cold eyes could belong to only one man.

The shock was so great that for a moment everything seemed paradoxically normal; I had an impulse to apologize, dust him off, and continue my pursuit, leaving him forgotten in the corridor, as just a chance encounter. My adrenal glands hastened to remedy this impression, dumping such a dose of adrenaline into my bloodstream that my heart contracted like a squeezed fist.

He was recovering his own breath by now, along with his momentarily shattered self-possession.

“I am inclined to concur with your sentiments, Madam, if not precisely with their manner of expression.” Still clutching me by the elbows, he held me slightly away from him, squinting to see my face in the shadowed hall. I saw the shock of recognition blanch his features as my face came into the light. “Bloody hell, it’s you!” he exclaimed.

“I thought you were dead!” I wrenched at my arms, trying to free them from the iron-tight grip of Jonathan Randall.

He let go of one arm, in order to rub his middle, surveying me coldly. The thin, fine-cut features were bronzed and healthy; he gave no outward sign of having been trampled five months before by thirty quarter-ton beasts. Not so much as a hoofprint on his forehead.

“Once more, Madam, I find myself sharing your sentiments. I was under a very similar misapprehension concerning your state of health. Possibly you are a witch, after all – what did you do, turn yourself into a wolf?” The wary dislike stamped on his face was mingled with a touch of superstitious awe. After all, when you turn someone out into the midst of a pack of wolves on a cold winter evening, you rather expect them to cooperate by being eaten forthwith. The sweatiness of my own palms and the drumlike beating of my heart were testimony to the unsettling effect of having someone you thought safely dead suddenly rise up in front of you. I supposed he must be feeling a trifle queasy as well.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” The urge to annoy him – to disturb that icy calm – was the first emotion to surface from the seething mass of feelings that had erupted within me at sight of his face. His fingers tightened on my arm, and his lips thinned. I could see his mind working, starting to tick off possibilities.

“If it wasn’t yours, whose body did Sir Fletcher’s men take out of the dungeon?” I demanded, trying to take advantage of any break in his composure. An eyewitness had described to me the removal of “a rag doll, rolled in blood” – presumably Randall – from the scene of the cattle stampede that had masked Jamie’s escape from that same dungeon.

Randall smiled, without much humor. If he was as rattled as I, he didn’t show it. His breathing was a trifle faster than usual, and the lines that edged mouth and eyes cut deeper than I remembered, but he wasn’t gasping like a landed fish. I was. I took in as much oxygen as my lungs would allow and tried to breathe through my nose.

“It was my orderly, Marley. Though if you aren’t answering my questions, why should I answer yours?” He looked me up and down, carefully evaluating my appearance: silk gown, hair ornaments, jewelry, and stockinged feet.

“Married a Frenchman, did you?” he asked. “I always did think you were a French spy. I trust your new husband keeps you in better order than…”

The words died in his throat as he looked up to see the source of the footsteps that had just turned into the hall behind me. If I had wanted to discompose him, that urge was now fully gratified. No Hamlet on the stage had ever reacted to the appearance of a ghost with more convincing terror than I saw stamped on that aristocratic face. The hand still holding my arm clawed deep into my flesh, and I felt the jolt of shock that surged through him like an electric charge.

I knew what he saw behind me, and was afraid to turn. There was a deep silence in the hall; even the wash of the cypress branches against the windows seemed part of the quiet, like the ear-roaring silence that waves make, at the bottom of the sea. Very slowly, I disengaged my arm from his grasp, and his hand fell nerveless to his side. There was no sound behind me, though I could hear voices start up from the room at the end of the hall. I prayed that the door would stay closed, and tried desperately to remember how Jamie was armed.

My mind went blank, then blazed with the reassuring vision of his small-sword, hung by its belt from a hook on the wardrobe, sun glowing on the enameled hilt. But he still had his dirk, of course, and the small knife he habitually carried in his stocking. Come to that, I was entirely sure that in a pinch, he would consider his bare hands perfectly adequate. And if you cared to describe my present situation, standing between the two of them, as a pinch… I swallowed once and slowly turned around.

He was standing quite still, no more than a yard behind me. One of the tall, paned casements opened near him, and the dark shadows of the cypress needles rippled over him like water over a sunken rock. He showed no more expression than a rock, either. Whatever lived behind those eyes was hidden; they were wide and blank as windowpanes, as though the soul they mirrored were long since flown.

He didn’t speak, but after a moment, reached out one hand to me. It floated open in the air, and I finally summoned the presence of mind to take it. It was cool and hard, and I clung to it like the wood of a raft.

He drew me in, close to his side, took my arm and turned me, all without speaking or changing expression. As we reached the turning of the hall, Randall spoke behind us.

“Jamie,” he said. The voice was hoarse with shock, and held a note halfway between disbelief and pleading.

Jamie stopped then, and turned to look at him. Randall’s face was a ghastly white, with a small red patch livid on each cheekbone. He had taken off his wig, clenched in his hands, and sweat pasted the fine dark hair to his temples.

“No.” The voice that spoke above me was soft, almost expressionless. Looking up, I could see that the face still matched it, but a quick, hot pulse beat in his neck, and the small, triangular scar above his collar flushed red with heat.

“I am called Lord Broch Tuarach for formality’s sake,” the soft Scottish voice above me said. “And beyond the requirements of formality, you will never speak to me again – until you beg for your life at the point of my sword. Then, you may use my name, for it will be the last word you ever speak.”

With sudden violence, he swept around, and his flaring plaid swung wide, blocking my view of Randall as we turned the corner of the hall.

The carriage was still waiting by the gate. Afraid to look at Jamie, I climbed in and absorbed myself in tucking the folds of yellow silk around my legs. The click of the carriage door shutting made me look up abruptly, but before I could reach the handle, the carriage started with a jerk that threw me back in my seat.

Struggling and swearing, I fought my way to my knees and peered out of the back window. He was gone. Nothing moved on the drive but the swaying shadows of cypress and poplar.

I hammered frenziedly on the roof of the carriage, but the coachman merely shouted to the horses and urged them on faster. There was little traffic at this hour, and we hurtled through the narrow streets as though the devil were after us.

When we drew up in the Rue Tremoulins, I sprang out of the coach, at once panicked and furious.

“Why didn’t you stop?” I demanded of the coachman. He shrugged, safely impervious atop his perch.

“The master ordered me to drive you home without delay, Madame.” He picked up the whip and touched it lightly to the off-horse’s rump.

“Wait!” I shouted. “I want to go back!” But he only hunched himself turtle-like into his shoulders, pretending not to hear me, as the coach rattled off.

Fuming with impotence, I turned toward the door, where the small figure of Fergus appeared, thin brows raised questioningly at my appearance.

“Where’s Murtagh?” I snapped. The little clansman was the only person I could think of who might be able first, to find Jamie, and secondly, to stop him.

“I don’t know, Madame. Maybe down there.” The boy nodded in the direction of the Rue Gamboge, where there were several taverns, ranging in respectability from those where a traveling lady might dine with her husband, to the dens near the river, which even an armed man might hesitate to enter alone.

I laid a hand on Fergus’s shoulder, as much for support as in exhortation.

“Run and find him, Fergus. Quickly as you can!”

Alarmed by my tone, he leaped off the step and was gone, before I could add “Be careful!” Still, he knew the lower levels of Paris life much better than I did; no one was better adapted to eeling through a tavern crowd than an ex-pickpocket. At least I hoped he was an ex-pickpocket.

But I could worry effectively about only one thing at a time, and visions of Fergus being captured and hanged for his activities receded before the vision Jamie’s final words to Randall had evoked.

Surely, surely he would not have gone back into the Duke’s house? No, I reassured myself. He had no sword. Whatever he might be feeling – and my soul sank within me to think of what he felt – he wouldn’t act precipitously. I had seen him in battle before, mind working in an icy calm, severed from the emotions that could cloud his judgment. And for this, above all things, surely he would adhere to the formalities. He would seek the rigid prescriptions, the formulae for the satisfaction of honor, as a refuge – something to cling to against the tides that shook him, the bone-deep surge of bloodlust and revenge.

I stopped in the hallway, mechanically shedding my cloak and pausing by the mirror to straighten my hair. Think, Beauchamp, I silently urged my pale reflection. If he’s going to fight a duel, what’s the first thing he’ll need?

A sword? No, couldn’t be. His own was upstairs, hanging on the armoire. While he might easily borrow one, I couldn’t imagine his setting out to fight the most important duel of his life armed with any but his own. His uncle, Dougal MacKenzie, had given it to him at seventeen, seen him schooled in its use, taught him the tricks and the strengths of a left-handed swordsman, using that sword. Dougal had made him practice, left hand against left hand, for hours on end, until, he told me, he felt the length of Spanish metal come alive, an extension of his arm, hilt welded to his palm. Jamie had said he felt naked without it. And this was not a fight to which he would go naked.

No, if he had needed the sword at once, he would have come home to fetch it. I ran my hand impatiently through my hair, trying to think. Damn it, what was the protocol of dueling? Before it came to swords, what happened? A challenge, of course. Had Jamie’s words in the hallway constituted that? I had vague ideas of people being slapped across the face with gloves, but had no idea whether that was really the custom, or merely an artifact of memory, born of a film-maker’s imagination.

Then it came to me. First the challenge, then a place must be arranged – a suitably circumspect place, unlikely to come to the notice of the police or the King’s Guard. And to deliver the challenge, to arrange the place, a second was required. Ah. That was where he had gone, then; to find his second. Murtagh.

Even if Jamie found Murtagh before Fergus did, still there would be the formalities to arrange. I began to breathe a little easier, though my heart was still pounding, and my laces still seemed too tight. None of the servants was visible; I yanked the laces loose and drew a deep, expanding breath.

“I didna know ye were in the habit of undressing in the hallways, or I would ha’ stayed in the drawing room,” said an ironic Scots voice behind me.

I whirled, my heart leaping high enough to choke me. The man standing stretched in the drawing room doorway, arms outspread to brace him casually against the frame, was big, nearly as large as Jamie, with the same taut grace of movement, the same air of cool self-possession. The hair was dark, though, and the deep-set eyes a cloudy green. Dougal MacKenzie, appearing suddenly in my home as though called by my thought. Speak of the devil.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” The shock of seeing him was subsiding, though my heart still pounded. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and a sudden wave of queasiness washed over me. He stepped forward and grasped me by the arm, pulling me toward a chair.

“Sit ye down, lass,” he said. “Ye’ll no be feeling just the thing, it looks like.”

“Very observant of you,” I said. Black spots floated at the edge of my vision, and small bright flashes danced before my eyes. “Excuse me,” I said politely, and put my head between my knees.

Jamie. Frank. Randall. Dougal. The faces flickered in my mind, the names seemed to ring in my ears. My palms were sweating, and I pressed them under my arms, hugging myself to try to stop the tremblings of shock. Jamie wouldn’t be facing Randall immediately; that was the important thing. There was a little time, in which to think, to take preventive action. But what action? Leaving my subconscious to wrestle with this question, I forced my breathing to slow and turned my attention to matters closer to hand.

“I repeat,” I said, sitting up and smoothing back my hair, “what are you doing here?”

The dark brows flickered upward.

“Do I need a reason to visit a kinsman?”

I could still taste the bile at the back of my throat, but my hands had stopped trembling, at least.

“Under the circumstances, yes,” I said. I drew myself up, grandly ignoring my untied laces, and reached for the brandy decanter. Anticipating me, Dougal took a glass from the tray and poured out a teaspoonful. Then, after a considering glance at me, he doubled the dose.

“Thanks,” I said dryly, accepting the glass.

“Circumstances, eh? And which circumstances would those be?” Not waiting for answer or permission, he calmly poured out another glass for himself and lifted it in a casual toast. “To His Majesty.”

I felt my mouth twist sideways. “King James, I suppose?” I took a small sip of my own drink, and felt the hot aromatic fumes sear the membranes behind my eyes. “And does the fact that you’re in Paris mean that you’ve converted Colum to your way of thinking?” For while Dougal MacKenzie might be a Jacobite, it was his brother Colum who led the MacKenzies of Leoch as chieftain. Legs crippled and twisted by a deforming disease, Colum no longer led his clan into battle; Dougal was the war chieftain. But while Dougal might lead men into battle, it was Colum who held the power to say whether the battle would take place.

Dougal ignored my question, and having drained his glass, immediately poured out another drink. He savored the first sip of this one, rolling it visibly around his mouth and licking a final drop from his lips as he swallowed.

“Not bad,” he said. “I must take some back for Colum. He needs something a bit stronger than the wine, to help him sleep nights.”

This was indeed an oblique answer to my question. Colum’s condition was degenerating, then. Always in some pain from the disease that eroded his body, Colum had taken fortified wine in the evenings, to help him to sleep. Now he needed straight brandy. I wondered how long it would be before he might be forced to resort to opium for relief.

For when he did, that would be the end of his reign as chieftain of his clan. Deprived of physical resources, still he commanded by sheer force of character. But if the strength of Colum’s mind were lost to pain and drugs, the clan would have a new leader – Dougal.

I gazed at him over the rim of my glass. He returned my stare with no sign of abashment, a slight smile on that wide MacKenzie mouth. His face was much like his brother’s – and his nephew’s – strong and boldly modeled, with broad, high cheekbones and a long, straight nose like the blade of a knife.

Sworn as a boy of eighteen to support his brother’s chieftainship, he had kept that vow for nearly thirty years. And would keep it, I knew, until the day that Colum died or could lead no longer. But on that day, the mantle of chief would descend on his shoulders, and the men of clan MacKenzie would follow where he led – after the saltire of Scotland, and the banner of King James, in the vanguard of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

“Circumstances?” I said, turning to his earlier question. “Well, I don’t suppose one would consider it in the best of taste to come calling on a man whom you’d left for dead and whose wife you’d tried to seduce.”

Being Dougal MacKenzie, he laughed. I didn’t know quite what it would take to disconcert the man, but I certainly hoped I was there to see it when it finally happened.

“Seduction?” he said, lips quirked in amusement. “I offered ye marriage.”

“You offered to rape me, as I recall,” I snapped. He had, in fact, offered to marry me – by force – after declining to help me in rescuing Jamie from Wentworth Prison the winter before. While his principal motive had been the possession of Jamie’s estate of Lallybroch – which would belong to me upon Jamie’s death – he hadn’t been at all averse to the thought of the minor emoluments of marriage, such as the regular enjoyment of my body.

“As for leaving Jamie in the prison,” he went on, ignoring me as usual, “there seemed no way to get him out, and no sense in risking good men in a vain attempt. He’d be the first to understand that. And it was my duty as his kinsman to offer his wife my protection, if he died. I was the lad’s foster father, no?” He tilted back his head and drained his glass.

I took a good gulp of my own, and swallowed quickly so as not to choke. The spirit burned down my throat and gullet, matching the heat that was rising in my cheeks. He was right; Jamie hadn’t blamed him for his reluctance to break into Wentworth Prison – he hadn’t expected me to do it, either, and it was only by a miracle that I had succeeded. But while I had told Jamie, briefly, of Dougal’s intention of marrying me, I hadn’t tried to convey the carnal aspects of that intention. I had, after all, never expected to see Dougal MacKenzie again.

I knew from past experience that he was a seizer of opportunities; with Jamie about to be hanged, he had not even waited for execution of the sentence before trying to secure me and my about-to-be-inherited property. If – no, I corrected myself, when – Colum died or became incompetent, Dougal would be in full command of clan MacKenzie within a week. And if Charles Stuart found the backing he was seeking, Dougal would be there. He had some experience in being a power behind the throne, after all.

I tipped up the glass, considering. Colum had business interests in France; wine and timber, mostly. These undoubtedly were the pretext for Dougal’s visit to Paris, might even be his major ostensible reason. But he had other reasons, I was sure. And the presence in the city of Prince Charles Edward Stuart was almost certainly one of them.

One thing to be said for Dougal MacKenzie was that an encounter with him stimulated the mental processes, out of the sheer necessity of trying to figure out what he was actually up to at any given moment. Under the inspiration of his presence and a good slug of Portuguese brandy, my subconscious was stirring with the birth of an idea.

“Well, be that as it may, I’m glad you’re here now,” I said, replacing my empty glass on the tray.

“You are?” The thick dark brows rose incredulously.

“Yes.” I rose and gestured toward the hall. “Fetch my cloak while I do up my laces. I need you to come to the commissariat de police with me.”

Seeing his jaw drop, I felt the first tiny upsurge of hope. If I had managed to take Dougal MacKenzie by surprise, surely I could stop a duel?

“D’ye want to tell me what you think you’re doing?” Dougal inquired, as the coach bumped around the Cirque du Mireille, narrowly avoiding an oncoming barouche and a cart full of vegetable marrows.

“No,” I said briefly, “but I suppose I’ll have to. Did you know that Jack Randall is still alive?”

“I’d not heard he was dead,” Dougal said reasonably.

That took me up short for a moment. But of course he was right; we had thought Randall dead only because Sir Marcus MacRannoch had mistaken the trampled body of Randall’s orderly for the officer himself, during Jamie’s rescue from Wentworth Prison. Naturally no news of Randall’s death would have gone round the Highlands, since it hadn’t occurred. I tried to gather my scattered thoughts.

“He isn’t dead,” I said. “But he is in Paris.”

“In Paris?” That got his attention; his brows went up, and then his eyes widened with the next thought.

“Where’s Jamie?” he asked sharply.

I was glad to see he appreciated the main point. While he didn’t know what had passed between Jamie and Randall in Wentworth Prison – no one was ever going to know that, save Jamie, Randall, and, to some extent, me – he knew more than enough about Randall’s previous actions to realize exactly what Jamie’s first impulse would be on meeting the man here, away from the sanctuary of England.

“I don’t know,” I said, looking out the window. We were passing Les Halles, and the smell of fish was ripe in my nostrils. I pulled out a scented handkerchief and covered my nose and mouth. The strong, sharp tang of the wintergreen with which I scented it was no match for the reek of a dozen eel-sellers’ stalls, but it helped a bit. I spoke through the spicy linen folds.

“We met Randall unexpectedly at the Duke of Sandringham’s today. Jamie sent me home in the coach, and I haven’t seen him since.”

Dougal ignored both the stench and the raucous cries of fishwives calling their wares. He frowned at me.

“He’ll mean to kill the man, surely?”

I shook my head, and explained my reasoning about the sword.

“I can’t let a duel happen,” I said, dropping the handkerchief in order to speak more clearly. “I won’t!”

Dougal nodded abstractedly.

“Aye, that would be dangerous. Not that the lad couldna take Randall with ease – I taught him, ye ken,” he added with some boastfulness, “but the sentence for dueling…”

“Got it in one,” I said.

“All right,” he said slowly. “But why the police? You dinna mean to have the lad locked up beforehand, do ye? Your own husband?”

“Not Jamie,” I said. “Randall.”

A broad grin broke out on his face, not unmixed with skepticism.

“Oh, aye? And how d’ye mean to work that one?”

“A friend and I were… attacked on the street a few nights ago,” I said, swallowing at the memory. “The men were masked; I couldn’t tell who they were. But one of them was about the same height and build as Jonathan Randall. I mean to say that I met Randall at a house today and recognized him as one of the men who attacked us.”

Dougal’s brows shot up and then drew together. His cool gaze flickered over me. Suddenly there was a new speculation in his appraisal.

“Christ, you’ve the devil’s own nerve. Robbery, was it?” he asked softly. Against my will, I could feel the rage rising in my cheeks.

“No,” I said, clipping the word between my teeth.

“Ah.” He sat back against the coach’s squabs, still looking at me. “Ye’ll have taken no harm, though?” I glanced aside, at the passing street, but could feel his eyes, prying at the neck of my gown, sliding over the curve of my hips.

“Not me,” I said. “But my friend…”

“I see.” He was quiet for a moment, then said meditatively, “Ever heard of ‘Les Disciples,’ have you?”

I jerked my head back around to him. He lounged in the corner like a crouching cat, watching me through eyes narrowed against the sun.

“No. What are they?” I demanded.

He shrugged and sat upright, peering past me at the approaching bulk of the Quai des Orfèvres, hovering gray and dreary above the glitter of the Seine.

“A society – of a sort. Young men of family, with an interest in things… unwholesome, shall we say?”

“Let’s,” I said. “And just what do you know about Les Disciples?”

“Only what I heard in a tavern in the Cité,” he said. “That the society demands a good deal from its members, and the price of initiation is high… by some standards.”

“That being?” I dared him with my eyes. He smiled rather grimly before replying.

“A maidenhead, for one thing. The nipples of a married woman, for another.” He shot a quick glance at my bosom. “Your friend’s a virgin, is she? Or was?”

I felt hot and cold by turns. I wiped my face with the handkerchief and tucked it into the pocket of my cloak. I had to try twice, for my hand trembled.

“She was. What else have you heard? Do you know who’s involved with Les Disciples?”

Dougal shook his head. There were threads of silver in the russet hair over his temples, that caught the light of the afternoon.

“Only rumors. The Vicomte de Busca, the youngest of the Charmisse sons – perhaps. The Comte St. Germain. Eh! Are ye all right, lass?”

He leaned forward in some consternation, peering at me.

“Fine,” I said, breathing deeply through my nose. “Bloody fine.” I pulled out the handkerchief and wiped the cold sweat off my brow.

“We mean you no harm, mesdames.” The ironic voice echoed in the dark of my memory. The green-shirted man was medium-height and dark, slim and narrow-shouldered. If that description fit Jonathan Randall, it also fit the Comte St. Germain. Would I have recognized his voice, though? Could any normal man conceivably have sat across from me at dinner, eating salmon mousse and making genteel conversation, barely two hours after the incident in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré?

Considered logically, though, why not? I had, after all. And I had no particular reason for supposing the Comte to be a normal man – by my standards – if rumor were true.

The coach was drawing to a halt, and there was little time for contemplation. Was I about to ensure that the man responsible for Mary’s violation went free, while I also ensured the safety of Jamie’s most loathed enemy? I took a deep, quivering breath. Damn little choice about it, I thought. Life was paramount; justice would just have to wait its turn.

The coachman had alighted and was reaching for the door handle. I bit my lip and glanced at Dougal MacKenzie. He met my gaze with a slight shrug. What did I want of him?

“Will you back my story?” I asked abruptly.

He looked up at the towering bulk of the Quai des Orfèvres. Brilliant afternoon light blazed through the open door.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

“Yes.” My mouth was dry.

He slid across the seat and extended a hand to me.

“Pray God we dinna both end in a cell, then,” he said.

An hour later, we stepped into the empty street outside the commissariat de police. I had sent the coach home, lest anyone who knew us should see it standing outside the Quai des Orfèvres. Dougal offered me an arm, and I took it perforce. The ground here was muddy underfoot, and the cobbles in the street made uncertain going in high-heeled slippers.

“Les Disciples,” I said as we made our way slowly along the banks of the Seine toward the towers of Notre Dame. “Do you really think the Comte St. Germain might have been one of the men who… who stopped us in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré?” I was beginning to tremble with reaction and fatigue – and with hunger; I had had nothing since breakfast, and the lack was making itself felt. Sheer nerve had kept me going through the interview with the police. Now the need to think was passing, and with it, the ability to do so.

Dougal’s arm was hard under my hand, but I couldn’t look up at him; I needed all my attention to keep my footing. We had turned into the Rue Elise and the cobbles were shiny with damp and smeared with various kinds of filth. A porter lugging a crate paused in our path to clear his throat and hawk noisily into the street at my feet. The greenish glob clung to the curve of a stone, finally slipping off to float sluggishly onto the surface of a small mud puddle that lay in the hollow of a missing cobble.

“Mphm.” Dougal was looking up and down the street for a carriage, brow creased in thought. “I canna say; I’ve heard worse than that of the man, but I havena had the honor of meeting him.” He glanced down at me.

“You’ve managed brawly so far,” he said. “They’ll have Jack Randall in the Bastille within the hour. But they’ll have to let the man go sooner or later, and I wouldna wager much on the chances of Jamie’s temper cooling in the meantime. D’ye want me to speak to him – convince him to do nothing foolish?”

“No! For God’s sake, stay out of it!” The thunder of carriage wheels was loud on the cobbles, but my voice was rose high enough to make Dougal brows lift in surprise.

“All right, then,” he said, mildly. “I’ll leave it to you to manage him. He’s stubborn as a stone… but I suppose you have your ways, no?” This was said with a sidelong glance and knowing smirk.

“I’ll manage.” I would. I would have to. For everything I had told Dougal was true. All true. And yet so far from the truth. For I would send Charles Stuart and his father’s cause to the devil gladly, sacrifice any hope of stopping his headlong dash to folly, even risk the chance of Jamie’s imprisonment, for the sake of healing the breach Randall’s resurrection had opened in Jamie’s mind. I would help him to kill Randall, and feel only joy in the doing of it, except for the one thing. The one consideration strong enough to outweigh Jamie’s pride, loom larger than his sense of manhood, than his threatened soul’s peace. Frank.

That was the single idea that had driven me through this day, sustained me well past the point where I would have welcomed collapse. For months I had thought Randall dead and childless, and feared for Frank’s life. But for those same months I had been comforted by the presence of the plain gold ring on the fourth finger of my left hand.

The twin of Jamie’s silver ring upon my right, it was a talisman in the dark hours of the night, when doubts came on the heels of dreams. If I wore his ring still, then the man who had given it to me would live. I had told myself that a thousand times. No matter that I didn’t know how a man dead without issue could sire a line of descent that led to Frank; the ring was there, and Frank would live.

Now I knew why the ring still shone on my hand, metal chilly as my own cold finger. Randall was alive, could still marry, could still father the child who would pass life on to Frank. Unless Jamie killed him first.

I had taken what steps I could for the moment, but the fact I had faced in the Duke’s corridor remained. The price of Frank’s life was Jamie’s soul, and how was I to choose between them?

The oncoming fiacre, ignoring Dougal’s hail, barreled past without stopping, wheels passing close enough to splash muddy water on Dougal’s silk hose and the hem of my gown.

Desisting from a volley of heartfelt Gaelic, Dougal shook a fist after the retreating coach.

“Well, and now what?” he demanded rhetorically.

The blob of mucus-streaked spittle floated on the puddle at my feet, reflecting gray light. I could feel its cold slime viscid on my tongue. I put out a hand and grasped Dougal’s arm, hard as a smooth-skinned sycamore branch. Hard, but it seemed to be swaying dizzily, swinging me far out over the cold and glittering, fish-smelling, slimy water nearby. Black spots floated before my eyes.

“Now,” I said, “I’m going to be sick.”

It was nearly sunset when I returned to the Rue Tremoulins. My knees trembled, and it was an effort to put one foot in front of the other on the stairs. I went directly to the bedroom to shed my cloak, wondering whether Jamie had returned yet.

He had. I stopped dead in the doorway, surveying the room. My medicine box lay open on the table. The scissors I used for cutting bandages lay half-open on my dressing table. They were fanciful things, given to me by a knifemaker who worked now and then at L’Hôpital des Anges; the handles were gilt, worked in the shape of storks’ heads, with the long bills forming the silver blades of the scissors. They gleamed in the rays of the setting sun, lying amid a cloud of reddish gold silk threads.

I took several steps toward the dressing table, and the silky, shimmering strands lifted in the disturbed air of my movement, drifting across the tabletop.

“Jesus bloody Christ,” I breathed. He had been here, all right, and now he was gone. So was his sword.

The hair lay in thick, gleaming strands where it had fallen, littering dressing table, stool and floor. I plucked a shorn lock from the table and held it, feeling the fine, soft hairs separate between my fingers like the threads of embroidery silk. I felt a cold panic that started somewhere between my shoulder blades and prickled down my spine. I remembered Jamie, sitting on the fountain behind the Rohans’ house, telling me how he had fought his first duel in Paris.

“The lace that held my hair back broke, and the wind whipped it into my face so I could scarcely see what I was doing.”

He was taking no chance of that happening again. Seeing the evidence left behind, feeling the lock of hair in my hand, soft and alive-feeling still, I could imagine the cold deliberation with which he had done it; the snick of metal blades against his skull as he cut away all softness that might obscure his vision. Nothing would stand between him and the killing of Jonathan Randall.

Nothing but me. Still holding the lock of his hair, I went to the window and stared out, as though hoping to see him in the street. But the Rue Tremoulins was quiet, nothing moving but the flickering shadows of the poplar trees by the gates and the small movement of a servant, standing at the gate of the house to the left, talking to a watchman who brandished his pipe to emphasize a point.

The house hummed quietly around me, with dinner preparations taking place belowstairs. No company was expected tonight, so the usual bustle was subdued; we ate simply when alone.

I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes, folding my hands across my swelling stomach, the lock of hair gripped tight, as though I could keep him safe, so long as I didn’t let go.

Had I been in time? Had the police found Jack Randall before Jamie did? What if they had arrived concurrently, or just in time to find Jamie challenging Randall to a formal duel? I rubbed the lock of hair between thumb and forefinger, splaying the cut ends in a small spray of roan and amber. Well, if so, at least they would both be safe. In prison, perhaps, but that was a minor consideration by contrast to other dangers.

And if Jamie had found Randall first? I glanced outside; the light was fading fast. Duels were traditionally fought at dawn, but I didn’t know whether Jamie would have waited for morning. They might at this moment be facing each other, somewhere in seclusion, where the clash of steel and the cry of mortal wounding would attract no attention.

For a mortal fight it would be. What lay between those two men would be settled only by death. And whose death would it be? Jamie’s? Or Randall’s – and with him, Frank’s? Jamie was likely the better swordsman, but as the challenged, Randall would have the choice of weapons. And success with pistols lay less with the skill of the user than with his fortune; only the best-made pistols aimed true, and even those were prone to misfire or other accidents. I had a sudden vision of Jamie, limp and quiet on the grass, blood welling from an empty eye socket, and the smell of black powder strong among the scents of spring in the Boìs de Boulogne.

“What in hell are you doing, Claire?”

My head snapped up, so hard I bit my tongue. Both his eyes were present and in their correct positions, staring at me from either side of the knife-edged nose. I had never seen him with his hair so close-clipped before. It made him look like a stranger, the strong bones of his face stark beneath the skin and the dome of his skull visible under the short, thick turf of his hair.

“What am I doing?” I echoed. I swallowed, working some moisture back into my dry mouth. “What am I doing? I’m sitting here with a lock of your hair in my hand, wondering whether you were dead or not! That’s what I’m doing!”

“I’m not dead.” He crossed to the armoire and opened it. He wore his sword, but had changed clothes since our visit to Sandringham’s house; now he was dressed in his old coat – the one that allowed him free movement of his arms.

“Yes, I noticed,” I said. “Thoughtful of you to come tell me.”

“I came to fetch my clothes.” He pulled out two shirts and his full-length cloak and laid them across a stool while he went to rummage in the chest of drawers for clean linen.

“Your clothes? Where on earth are you going?” I hadn’t known what to expect when I saw him again, but I certainly hadn’t expected this.

“To an inn.” He glanced at me, then apparently decided I deserved more than a three-word explanation. He turned and looked at me, his eyes blue and opaque as azurite.

“When I sent ye home in the coach, I walked for a bit, until I had a grip on myself once more. Then I came home to fetch my sword, and returned to the Duke’s house to give Randall a formal challenge. The butler told me Randall had been arrested.”

His gaze rested on me, remote as the ocean depths. I swallowed once more.

“I went to the Bastille. They told me you’d sworn to an accusation against Randall, saying he’d attacked you and Mary Hawkins the other night. Why, Claire?”

My hands were shaking, and I dropped the lock of hair I had been holding. Its cohesion disturbed by handling, it disintegrated, and the fine red hairs spilled loose across my lap.

“Jamie,” I said, and my voice was shaking, too, “Jamie, you can’t kill Jack Randall.”

One corner of his mouth twitched, very slightly.

“I dinna ken whether to be touched at your concern for my safety, or to be offended at your lack of confidence. But in either case, you needna worry. I can kill him. Easily.” The last word was spoken quietly, with an underlying tone that mingled venom with satisfaction.

“That isn’t what I mean! Jamie-”

“Fortunately,” he went on, as though not hearing me, “Randall has proof that he was at the Duke’s residence all during the evening of the rape. As soon as the police finish interviewing the guests who were present, and satisfy themselves that Randall is innocent – of that charge, at least – then he’ll be let go. I shall stay at the inn until he’s free. And then I shall find him.” His eyes were fixed on the wardrobe, but plainly he was seeing something else. “He’ll be waiting for me,” he said softly.

He stuffed the shirts and linen into a traveling-bag and slung his cloak over his arm. He was turning to go through the door when I sprang up from the bed and caught him by the sleeve.

“Jamie! For God’s sake, Jamie, listen to me! You can’t kill Jack Randall because I won’t let you!”

He stared down at me in utter astonishment.

“Because of Frank,” I said. I let go of his sleeve and stepped back.

“Frank,” he repeated, shaking his head slightly as though to clear a buzzing in his ears. “Frank.”

“Yes,” I said. “If you kill Jack Randall now, then Frank… he won’t exist. He won’t be born. Jamie, you can’t kill an innocent man!”

His face, normally a pale, ruddy bronze, had faded to a blotchy white as I spoke. Now the red began to rise again, burning the tips of his ears and flaming in his cheeks.

“An innocent man?”

“Frank is an innocent man! I don’t care about Jack Randall-”

“Well, I do!” He snatched up the bag and strode toward the door, cloak streaming over one arm. “Jesus God, Claire! You’d try to stop me taking my vengeance on the man who made me play whore to him? Who forced me to my knees and made me suck his cock, smeared with my own blood? Christ, Claire!” He flung the door open with a crash and was in the hallway by the time I could reach him.

It had grown dark by now, but the servants had lit the candles, and the hallway was aglow with soft light. I grasped him by the arm and yanked at him.

“Jamie! Please!”

He jerked his arm impatiently out of my grasp. I was almost crying, but held back the tears. I caught the bag and pulled it out of his hand.

“Please, Jamie! Wait, just for a year! The child – Randall’s – it will be conceived next December. After that, it won’t matter. But please – for my sake, Jamie – wait that long!”

The candelabra on the gilt-edged table threw his shadow huge and wavering against the far wall. He stared up at it, hands clenched, as though facing a giant, blank-faced and menacing, that towered above him.

“Aye,” he whispered, as though to himself, “I’m a big chap. Big and strong. I can stand a lot. Yes, I can stand it.” He whirled on me, shouting.

“I can stand a lot! But just because I can, does that mean I must? Do I have to bear everyone’s weakness? Can I not have my own?”

He began to pace up and down the hall, the shadow following in silent frenzy.

“You cannot ask it of me! You, you of all people! You, who know what… what…” He choked, speechless with rage.

He hit the stone wall of the passage repeatedly as he walked, smashing the side of his fist viciously into the limestone wall. The stone swallowed each blow in soundless violence.

He turned back and came to a halt facing me, breathing heavily. I stood stock-still, afraid to move or speak. He nodded once or twice, rapidly, as though making up his mind about something, then drew the dirk from his belt with a hiss and held it in front of my nose. With a visible effort, he spoke calmly.

“You may have your choice, Claire. Him, or me.” The candle flames danced in the polished metal as he turned the knife slowly. “I cannot live while he lives. If ye wilna have me kill him, then kill me now, yourself!” He grabbed my hand and forced my fingers around the handle of the dirk. Ripping the lacy jabot open, he bared his throat and yanked my hand upward, fingers hard around my own.

I pulled back with all my strength, but he forced the tip of the blade against the soft hollow above the collarbone, just below the livid cicatrice that Randall’s own knife had left there years before.

“Jamie! Stop it! Stop it right now!” I brought my other hand down on his wrist as hard as I could, jarring his grip enough to jerk my fingers free. The knife clattered to the floor, bouncing from the stones to a quiet landing on a corner of the leafy Aubusson carpet. With that clarity of vision for small details that afflicts life’s most awful moments, I saw that the blade lay stark across the curling stem of a bunch of fat green grapes, as though about to sever it and cut them free of the weft to roll at our feet.

He stood frozen before me, face white as bone, eyes burning. I gripped his arm, hard as wood beneath my fingers.

“Please believe me, please. I wouldn’t do this if there were any other way.” I took a deep, quivering breath to quell the leaping pulse beneath my ribs.

“You owe me your life, Jamie. Not once, twice over. I saved you from hanging at Wentworth, and when you had fever at the Abbey. You owe me a life, Jamie!”

He stared down at me for a long moment before answering. When he did, his voice was quiet again, with an edge of bitterness.

“I see. And ye’ll claim your debt now?” His eyes burned with the clear, deep blue that burns in the heart of a flame.

“I have to! I can’t make you see reason any other way!”

“Reason. Ah, reason. No, I canna say that reason is anything I see just now.” He folded his arms behind his back, gripping the stiff fingers of his right hand with the curled ones of his left. He walked slowly away from me, down the endless hall, head bowed.

The passage was lined with paintings, some lighted from below by torchere or candelabra, some from above by the gilded sconces; a few less favored, skulked in the darkness between. Jamie walked slowly between them, glancing up now and again as though in converse with the wigged and painted gallery.

The hall ran the length of the second floor, carpeted and tapestried, with enormous stained-glass windows set into the walls at either end of the corridor. He walked all the way to the far end, then, wheeling with the precision of a soldier on parade, all the way back, still at a slow and formal pace. Down and back, down and back, again and again.

My legs trembling, I subsided into a fauteuil near the end of the passage. Once one of the omnipresent servants approached obsequiously to ask if Madame required wine, or perhaps a biscuit? I waved him away with what politeness I could muster, and waited.

At last he came to a halt before me, feet planted wide apart in silver-buckled shoes, hands still clasped behind his back. He waited for me to look up at him before he spoke. His face was set, with no twitch of agitation to betray him, though the lines near his eyes were deep with strain.

“A year, then” was all he said. He turned at once and was several feet away by the time I struggled out of the deep green-velvet chair. I had barely gained my feet when he suddenly whirled back past me, reached the huge stained-glass window in three strides, and smashed his right hand through it.

The window was made up of thousands of tiny colored panes, held in place by strips of melted lead. Though the entire window, a mythological scene of the Judgment of Paris, shuddered in its frame, the leading held most of the panes intact; in spite of the crash and tinkle, only a jagged hole at the feet of Aphrodite let in the soft spring air.

Jamie stood a moment, pressing both hands tight into his midriff. A dark red stain grew on the frilled cuff, lacy as a bridal shirt. He brushed past me once again as I moved toward him, and stalked away unspeaking.

I collapsed once more into the armchair, hard enough to make a small puff of dust rise from the plush. I lay there limp, eyes closed, feeling the cool night breeze wash over me. The hair was damp at my temples, and I could feel my pulse, quick as a bird’s, racing at the base of my throat.

Would he ever forgive me? My heart clenched like a fist at the memory of the knowledge of betrayal in his eyes. “How could you ask it?” he had said. “You, you who know…” Yes, I knew, and I thought the knowing might tear me from Jamie as I had been torn from Frank.

But whether Jamie could forgive me or not, I could never forgive myself, if I condemned an innocent man – and one I had once loved.

“The sins of the fathers,” I murmured to myself. “The sins of the fathers shall not be visited upon the children.”

“Madame?”

I jumped, opening my eyes to find an equally startled chambermaid backing away. I put a hand to my pounding heart, gasping for air.

“Madame, you are unwell? Shall I fetch-”

“No,” I said, as firmly as I could. “I am quite well. I wish to sit here for a time. Please go away.”

The girl seemed only too anxious to oblige. “Qui, Madame!” she said, and vanished down the corridor, leaving me gazing blankly at a scene of amorous love in a garden, hanging on the opposite wall. Suddenly cold, I drew up the folds of the cloak I had had no time to shed, and closed my eyes again.

It was past midnight when I went at last to our bedroom. Jamie was there, seated before a small table, apparently watching a pair of lacewings fluttering dangerously around the single candlestick which was all the light there was in the room. I dropped my cape on the floor and went toward him.

“Don’t touch me,” he said. “Go to bed.” He spoke almost abstractedly, but I halted in my tracks.

“But your hand-” I started.

“It doesn’t matter. Go to bed,” he repeated.

The knuckles of his right hand were laced with blood, and the cuff of his shirt was stiff with it, but I would not have dared touch him then had he had a knife stuck in his belly. I left him staring at the death-dance of the lacewings and went to bed.

I woke sometime near dawn, with the first light of the coming day fuzzing the outlines of the furniture in the room. Through the double doors to the anteroom, I could see Jamie as I had left him, still seated at the table. Now the candle was burnt out, the lacewings gone, and he sat with his head in his hands, fingers furrowed in the brutally cropped hair. The light stole all color from the room; even the hair spiking up like flames between his fingers was quenched to the color of ashes.

I slid out of bed, cold in the thin embroidered nightdress. He didn’t turn as I came up behind him, but he knew I was there. When I touched his hand he let it drop to the table, and allowed his head to fall back until it rested just below my breasts. He sighed deeply as I rubbed it, and I felt the tension begin to go out of him. My hands worked their way down over neck and shoulders, feeling the chill of his flesh through the thin linen. Finally I came around in front of him. He reached up and grasped me around the waist, pulling me to him and burying his head in my nightdress, just above the round swell of the unborn child.

“I’m cold,” I said at last, very softly. “Will you come and warm me?”

After a moment, he nodded, and stumbled blindly to his feet. I led him to bed, stripped him as he sat unresisting, and tucked him under the quilts. I lay in the curve of his arm, pressed tight against him, until the chill of his skin had faded and we lay ensconced in a pocket of soft warmth.

Tentatively, I laid a hand on his chest, stroking lightly back and forth until the nipple stood up, a tiny nub of desire. He laid his hand over mine, stilling it. I was afraid he would push me away, and he did, but only so that he could roll toward me.

The light was growing stronger, and he spent a long time just looking down at my face, stroking it from temple to chin, drawing his thumb down the line of my throat and out along the wing of my collarbone.

“God, I do love you,” he whispered, as though to himself. He kissed me, preventing response, and circling one breast with his maimed right hand, prepared to take me.

“But your hand-” I said, for the second time that night.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, for the second time that night.