Outlander [08] Written in My Own Heart's Blood Read online

  Grey dismissed Smith’s question as rhetorical and took another tack—though a dangerous one.

  “Woodbine gave you a correct assessment of the circumstances in which he discovered me,” he said. “Plainly I was not discovered in flagrante by Colonel Fraser, as he would simply have done what Corporal Woodbine did and arrested me.”

  “Are you asserting that Colonel Fraser met you by arrangement, to pass on information?”

  Jesus Christ. He’d known this tack was dangerous but hadn’t foreseen that possibility—that Jamie Fraser could be suspected of being his confederate. But of course Smith would be particularly sensitive to such a possibility, given his own change of loyalties.

  “Certainly not,” Grey said, allowing a certain asperity to creep into his tone. “The encounter that Corporal Woodbine witnessed was of a purely personal nature.”

  Smith, who plainly knew a thing or two about interrogation, cocked a brow at him. Grey knew a thing or two about it, too, and sat back, sipping his applejack insouciantly, as though quite sure his statement had settled matters.

  “They will probably hang you, you know,” Smith said after a suitable pause. He spoke quite casually, eyes on the amber stream as he refilled both cups again. “After what Howe did to Captain Hale? Even more, after Paoli. Charles Grey is your cousin, is he not?”

  “Second or third cousin, yes.” Grey knew the man, though they didn’t move in the same circles, either socially or militarily. Charles Grey was a pig-faced professional killer, rather than a soldier, and while he doubted that the Paoli Massacre had been entirely as described—what sort of idiots would lie on the ground waiting to be bayoneted in their beds? Because he didn’t for an instant think a column of infantry was capable of sneaking up in the dark over rough country to within stabbing distance without giving some notice of their presence—he did know about Charles’s merciless bayonet tactics at Culloden.

  “Nonsense,” Grey said, with as much confidence as he could summon. “Whatever one may think of the American high command, I doubt it is composed entirely of fools. My execution would yield nothing, whereas my exchange might be of value. My brother does have some small influence.”

  Smith smiled, not without sympathy.

  “An excellent argument, Lord John, and one I’m sure would find favor with General Washington. Unfortunately, the Congress and the King remain at loggerheads over the matter of exchange; at present, there is no mechanism to allow the exchange of prisoners.”

  That one struck him in the pit of the stomach. He knew all too well that there were no official channels of exchange; he’d been trying to have William exchanged for months.

  Smith upended the bottle, dribbling the last amber drops into Grey’s cup.

  “Are you a Bible-reading man, Colonel Grey?”

  Grey looked at him blankly.

  “Not habitually. I have read it, though. Some of it. Well … bits. Why?”

  “I wondered if you were familiar with the concept of a scapegoat.” Smith rocked back a little on his stool, gazing at Grey with his lovely deep-set eyes, which seemed to hold a certain sympathy—though perhaps it was just the applejack. “Because I’m afraid that is where your chief value lies, Colonel. It is no secret that the Continental army is in poor condition, lacking money, disillusion and desertion rife. Nothing would hearten and unify the troops more—or send a more potent message to General Clinton—than the trial and very public execution of a high-ranking British officer, a convicted spy and close relation to the infamous ‘No Flints’ Grey.”

  He belched softly and blinked, eyes still fixed on Grey.

  “You asked what I meant to do with you.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Smith ignored this, leveling a long, knobby finger at him.

  “I’m sending you to General Wayne, who, believe me, has ‘Paoli’ carved upon his heart.”

  “How very painful for him,” Grey said politely, and drained his cup.

  EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK

  THE INTERMINABLE DAY was reluctantly ending, the heat at last beginning to fade from the forest along with the waning light. He didn’t suppose that he would be taken directly to General Wayne, unless that worthy were close at hand, and he thought not. He could tell from the sounds and the feel of the camp that it was a small one, and plainly Colonel Smith was the senior officer present.

  Smith had asked him, pro forma, to give his parole—and been substantially taken aback when Grey had courteously refused to do so.

  “If I am in fact a duly commissioned British officer,” Grey had pointed out, “then clearly it is my duty to escape.”

  Smith eyed him, the failing light shading his face with sufficient ambiguity that Grey was not sure whether he was fighting an impulse to smile or not. Probably not.

  “You’re not escaping,” he said definitely, and went out. Grey could hear a brief, heated discussion, conducted in low voices outside the tent, as to just what to do with him. A militia camp on the move had no facilities for prisoners. Grey amused himself by composing a mental entertainment in which Smith was obliged to share his narrow cot with Grey, in the interests of keeping his prisoner secure.

  In the end, though, a corporal came in, carrying a rusty set of fetters that looked as though they had last seen use during the Spanish Inquisition, and took Grey to the edge of camp, where a soldier who had been a blacksmith in private life banged them into place with a stout hammer, using a flattish rock as an anvil.

  He felt the oddest sensations, kneeling on the ground in the twilight, an interested group of militiamen gathered round in a circle to watch. He was forced to lean forward in a crouching posture, hands laid before him, as though he were about to be beheaded, and the hammer blows echoed through the metal, into the bones of his wrists and arms.

  He kept his eyes on the hammer, and not only from fear that the smith would miss his aim in the growing dusk and smash one of his hands. Under the influence of intoxication and a growing, deeper fear that he didn’t want to acknowledge, he sensed the mingled curiosity and animus surrounding him and felt it as he would a nearby thunderstorm, electricity crawling over his skin, the threat of lightning annihilation so close he could smell its sharp odor, mixed with gunpowder and the heavy tang of the sweat of men.

  Ozone. His mind seized on the word, a small escape into rationality. That’s what Claire called the smell of lightning. He’d told her he thought it was from the Greek ozon, the neuter present participle of ozein, meaning “to smell.”

  He began to work his way methodically through the complete conjugation; by the time he’d finished, surely they would be done with it. Ozein, to smell. I smell …

  He could smell his own sweat, sharp and sweet. In the old days, it was considered a better death, beheading. To be hanged was shameful, a commoner’s death, a criminal’s death. Slower. He knew that for a fact.

  A final reverberating blow, and a visceral sound of satisfaction from the watching men. He was made prisoner.

  THERE BEING NO shelter other than the brushy wigwams and scraps of canvas the militiamen rigged near their fires, he was escorted back to Smith’s big, threadbare tent, given supper—which he forced down, not much noticing what he ate—and then tethered to the tent pole with a long, thin rope run through the chain of his irons, with sufficient play as to allow him to lie down or use the utensil.

  At Smith’s insistence, he took the cot and did lie down with a slight groan of relief. His temples throbbed with each heartbeat, and so did the entire left side of his face, which was now radiating small jolts down into his upper teeth, very unpleasant. The pain in his side had dulled to a deep ache, almost negligible by comparison. Luckily, he was so tired that sleep swamped all discomfort, and he fell into it with a sense of profound gratitude.

  He woke in the full dark sometime later, slicked with sweat, heart hammering from some desperate dream. He raised a hand to push the soaked hair off his face and felt the heavy, chafing weight of the fetters, which he’d forgotte
n about. They clanked, and the dark figure of a sentry silhouetted in the fire glow at the entrance of the tent turned sharply toward him, but then relaxed as he turned over on the cot, clanking further.

  Bugger, he thought, still groggy with sleep. Couldn’t even masturbate if I wanted to. The thought made him laugh, though fortunately it came out as a mere breath of sound.

  Another body turned over, rustling, shifting heavily near him. Smith, he supposed, sleeping on a canvas bed sack stuffed with grass; Grey could smell the meadow scent of dry hay, faintly musty in the humid air. The bed sack was standard issue to the British army; Smith must have kept it, along with his tent and other equipment, changing only his uniform.

  Why had he turned his coat? Grey wondered vaguely, peering at Smith’s humped shape, just visible against the pale canvas. Advancement? Starved as they were for professional soldiers, the Continentals offered rank as inducement; a captain in any European army might become anything from a major to a general in the blink of an eye, whereas the only means of achieving higher rank in England was to find the money to purchase it.

  What was rank without pay, though? Grey was no longer a spy, but he had been one, once—and still knew men who labored in those dark fields. From what he’d heard, the American Congress had no money at all and depended upon loans—these unpredictable in amount and erratic in occurrence. Some from French or Spanish sources, though the French wouldn’t admit to it, of course. Some from Jewish moneylenders, said one of his correspondents. Salomon, Solomon … some name like that.

  These random musings were interrupted by a sound that made him stiffen. A woman’s laughter.

  There were women in the camp, wives who had come along to war with their husbands. He’d seen a few when they took him across the campground, and one had brought his supper, glancing suspiciously up at him from under her cap. But he thought he knew that laugh—deep, gurgling, and totally unself-conscious.

  “Jesus,” he whispered under his breath. “Dottie?”

  It wasn’t impossible. He swallowed, trying to clear his left ear, to listen through the multitude of small sounds outside. Denzell Hunter was a Continental surgeon, and Dottie had—to her brother’s, cousin’s, and uncle’s horror—joined the camp followers at Valley Forge in order to help her fiancé, though she rode into Philadelphia regularly to visit her brother Henry. If Washington’s forces were moving—and very plainly they were—it was entirely possible that a surgeon might be anywhere among them.

  A high, clear voice, raised in question. An English voice, and not common. He strained to hear but couldn’t make out the words. He wished she’d laugh again.

  If it was Dottie … he breathed deep, trying to think. He couldn’t call out to her; he’d felt the avid hostility directed at him from every man in camp—letting the relationship be known would be dangerous for her and Denzell, both, and certainly wouldn’t help Grey. And yet he had to risk it—they’d move him in the morning.

  Out of sheer inability to think of anything better, he sat up on the cot and began to sing “Die Sommernacht.” Quietly at first, but gathering strength and volume. As he hit “In den Kulungen wehn” at the top of his very resonant tenor voice, Smith sat up like a jack-in-the-box and said, “What?” in tones of utter amazement.

  “So umschatten mich Gedanken an das Grab

  Meiner Geliebten, und ich seh’ im Walde

  Nur es dämmern, und es weht mir

  Von der Blüte nicht her.”

  Grey went on, reducing his volume somewhat. He didn’t want Dottie—if it was Dottie—coming to look, only to let her know he was here. He’d taught her this lied when she was fourteen; she sang it often at musicales.

  “Ich genoß einst, o ihr Toten, es mit euch!

  Wie umwehten uns der Duft und die Kühlung,

  Wie verschönt warst von dem Monde,

  Du, o schöne Natur!”

  He stopped, coughed a little, and spoke into the marked silence before him, slurring his words a bit, as though still drunk. In fact, he discovered, he was.

  “Might I have some water, Colonel?”

  “Will you sing anymore if I give it to you?” Smith asked, deeply suspicious.

  “No, I think I’m finished now,” Grey assured him. “Couldn’ sleep, you know—too much to drink—but I find a song settles the mind rem-remarkably.”

  “Oh, does it?” Smith breathed heavily for a moment, but clambered to his feet and fetched the ewer from his basin. Grey could feel him repressing an urge to douse his prisoner with the contents, but Smith was a man of strong character and merely held the pitcher for him to drink, then put it back and resumed his own bed with no more than a few irritable snorts.

  The lied had caused some comment in the camp, and a few musical souls took it as inspiration and began singing everything from “Greensleeves”—a very poignant and tender rendition—to “Chester.” Grey quite enjoyed the singing, though it was only by exercise of his own strong character that he refrained from shaking his fetters at the end of:

  “Let tyrants shake their iron rods. And slavery clank her galling chains.”

  They were still singing when he fell asleep again, to dream in anxious fragments, the fumes of applejack drifting through the hollow spaces of his head.

  Number 17 Chestnut Street

  THE BELL OF the Presbyterian church struck midnight, but the city wasn’t sleeping. The sounds were more furtive now, muffled by darkness, but the streets were still alive with hurrying feet and the sound of moving wagons—and, in the far distance, I heard a faint cry of “Fire!” being raised.

  I stood by the open window, sniffing the air for smoke and watching out for any sign of flames that might spread in our direction. I wasn’t aware of Philadelphia having ever burned to the ground like London or Chicago, but a fire that merely engulfed the neighborhood would be just as bad from my point of view.

  There was no wind at all; that was something. The summer air hung heavy, damp as a sponge. I waited for a bit, but the cries stopped, and I saw no red glimmer of flames against the half-clouded sky. No trace of fire save the cool green sparks of fireflies, drifting among the shadowed leaves in the front garden.

  I stood for a bit, letting my shoulders slump, letting go of my half-formed plans for emergency evacuation. I was exhausted but unable to sleep. Beyond the need to keep an eye on my unsettled patient, and the unsettled atmosphere beyond the quiet room, I was most unsettled in myself. I’d been listening all day, constantly on the alert for a familiar footstep, the sound of Jamie’s voice. But he hadn’t come.

  What if he had learned from John that I had shared his bed on that one drunken evening? Would the shock of that, given without preparation or suitable explanation, be enough to have made him run away—for good?

  I felt sudden tears come to my eyes and shut them, hard, to stem the flow, gripping the sill with both hands.

  Don’t be ridiculous. He’ll come as soon as he can, no matter what. You know he will. I did know. But the shocked joy of seeing him alive had wakened nerves that had been numb for a long time, and while I might seem calm externally, on the inside my emotions were at a rolling boil. The steam was building up, and I had no way to release the pressure—save pointless tears, and I wouldn’t give way to those.

  For one thing, I might not be able to stop. I pressed the sleeve of my dressing gown briefly to my eyes, then turned back resolutely into the darkness of the room.

  A small brazier burned near the bed under a tented wet cloth, casting a flickering red glow on Pardloe’s sharp-cut features. He was breathing with an audible rasp and I could hear his lungs rattle with each exhalation, but it was a deep breathing, and regular. It occurred to me that I might not have been able to smell the smoke of a fire outside, had there been one: the atmosphere in the room was thick with oil of peppermint, eucalyptus … and cannabis. Despite the wet cloth, enough smoke had escaped the brazier to form a hanging cloud of purling wisps, moving pale as ghosts in the darkened air.

  I sp
rinkled more water on the muslin tent and sat down in the small armchair beside the bed, breathing the saturated atmosphere in cautiously but with an agreeable small sense of illicit pleasure. Hal had told me that he was in the habit of smoking hemp to relax his lungs and that it seemed to be effective. He’d said “hemp,” and that was undoubtedly what he’d been smoking; the psychoactive form of the plant didn’t grow in England and wasn’t commonly imported.

  I hadn’t any hemp leaves in my medical supply but did have a good bit of ganja, which John had acquired from a Philadelphia merchant who had two Indiamen. It was useful in the treatment of glaucoma, as I’d learned when treating Jamie’s aunt Jocasta, it relieved nausea and anxiety—and it had occasional non-medicinal uses, as John had informed me, to my private amusement.

  Thought of John gave me a small internal qualm, to add to my anxiety over Jamie, and I took a deep, deliberate breath of the sweet, spicy air. Where was he? What had Jamie done with him?

  “Do you ever make bargains with God?” Hal’s voice came quietly out of the half dark.

  I must subconsciously have known he wasn’t sleeping, for I wasn’t startled.

  “Everyone does,” I said. “Even people who don’t believe in God. Do you?”

  There was the breath of a laugh, followed by coughing, but it stopped quickly. Perhaps the smoke was helping.

  “Have you got such a bargain in mind?” I asked, as much from real curiosity as to make conversation. “You aren’t going to die, you know. I won’t let you.”

  “Yes, you said that,” he replied dryly. After a moment’s hesitation, he turned on his side to face me. “I do believe you,” he said rather formally. “And … I thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome. I can’t let you die in John’s house, you know; he’d be upset.”

  He smiled at that, his face visible in the brazier’s glow. We didn’t speak for a bit but sat looking at each other, with no particular sense of self-consciousness, both of us calmed by the smoke and the sleepy chirping of crickets outside. The sound of wagon wheels had ceased, but there were still people passing by. Surely I would know Jamie’s step, be able to distinguish his, even among so many.…