Seven Stones to Stand or Fall Page 43

  Jamie couldn’t see and could barely move but kept moving anyway, groping blindly. He was on the floor, could feel boards, wetness…His pawing hand struck flesh, and he lunged forward and bit Mathieu as hard as he could in the calf of the leg. Fresh blood filled his mouth, hotter than his own, and he gagged but kept his teeth locked in the hairy flesh, clinging stubbornly as the leg kicked in frenzy. His ears were ringing, he was vaguely aware of screaming and shouting, but it didn’t matter.

  Something had come upon him, and nothing mattered. Some small remnant of his consciousness registered surprise, and then that was gone, too. No pain, no thought. He was a red thing, and while he saw other things—faces, blood, bits of room—they didn’t matter. Blood took him, and when some sense of himself came back, he was kneeling astride the man, hands locked around the big man’s neck, fingers throbbing with a pounding pulse—his or his victim’s, he couldn’t tell.

  Him. Him. He’d lost the man’s name. His eyes were bulging, the ragged mouth slobbered and gaped, and there was a small, sweet crack as something broke under Jamie’s thumbs. He squeezed with all he had, squeezed and squeezed and felt the huge body beneath him go strangely limp.

  He went on squeezing, couldn’t stop, until a hand seized him by the arm and shook him, hard.

  “Stop,” a voice croaked, hot in his ear. “Jamie. Stop.”

  He blinked up at the white bony face, unable to put a name to it. Then drew breath—the first he could remember drawing for some time—and with it came a thick stink, blood and shit and reeking sweat, and he became suddenly aware of the horrible spongy feeling of the body he was sitting on. He scrambled awkwardly off, sprawling on the floor as his muscles spasmed and trembled.

  Then he saw her.

  She was lying crumpled against the wall, curled into herself, her brown hair spilling across the boards. He got to his knees, crawling to her.

  He was making a small whimpering noise, trying to talk, having no words. Got to the wall and gathered her into his arms, limp, her head lolling, striking his shoulder, her hair soft against his face, smelling of smoke and her own sweet musk.

  “A nighean,” he managed. “Christ, a nighean. Are ye…”

  “Jesus,” said a voice by his side, and he felt the vibration as Ian—thank God, the name had come back, of course it was Ian—collapsed next to him. His friend had a bloodstained dirk still clutched in his hand. “Oh, Jesus, Jamie.”

  He looked up, puzzled, desperate, and then looked down as the girl’s body slipped from his grasp and fell back across his knees with impossible boneless grace, the small dark hole in her white breast stained with only a little blood. Not much at all.

  HE’D MADE JAMIE come with him to the cathedral of Saint André and insisted he go to Confession. Jamie had balked—no great surprise.

  “No. I can’t.”

  “We’ll go together.” Ian had taken him firmly by the arm and very literally dragged him over the threshold. He was counting on the atmosphere of the place to keep Jamie there, once inside.

  His friend stopped dead, the whites of his eyes showing as he glanced warily around.

  The stone vault of the ceiling soared into shadow overhead, but pools of colored light from the stained-glass windows lay soft on the worn slates of the aisle.

  “I shouldna be here,” Jamie muttered under his breath.

  “Where better, eejit? Come on,” Ian muttered back, and pulled Jamie down the side aisle to the chapel of Saint Estèphe. Most of the side chapels were lavishly furnished, monuments to the importance of wealthy families. This one was a tiny, undecorated stone alcove, containing little more than an altar, a faded tapestry of a faceless saint, and a small stand where candles could be placed.

  “Stay here.” Ian planted Jamie dead in front of the altar and ducked out, going to buy a candle from the old woman who sold them near the main door. He’d changed his mind about trying to make Jamie go to Confession; he knew fine when ye could get a Fraser to do something and when ye couldn’t.

  He worried a bit that Jamie would leave and hurried back to the chapel, but Jamie was still there, standing in the middle of the tiny space, head down, staring at the floor.

  “Here, then,” Ian said, pulling him toward the altar. He plunked the candle—an expensive one, beeswax and large—on the stand and pulled the paper spill the old lady had given him out of his sleeve, offering it to Jamie. “Light it. We’ll say a prayer for your da. And…and for her.”

  He could see tears trembling on Jamie’s lashes, glittering in the red glow of the sanctuary lamp that hung above the altar, but Jamie blinked them back and firmed his jaw.

  “All right,” he said, low-voiced, but he hesitated.

  Ian sighed, took the spill out of his hand, and, standing on tiptoe, lit it from the sanctuary lamp. “Do it,” he whispered, handing the spill to Jamie, “or I’ll gie ye a good one in the kidney, right here.”

  Jamie made a sound that might have been the breath of a laugh and lowered the lit spill to the candle’s wick. The fire rose up, a pure high flame with blue at its heart, then settled as Jamie pulled the spill away and shook it out in a plume of smoke.

  They stood for some time, hands clasped loosely in front of them, watching the candle burn. Ian prayed for his mam and da, his sister and her bairns…with some hesitation (was it proper to pray for a Jew?) for Rebekah bat-Leah, and, with a sidelong glance at Jamie to be sure he wasn’t looking, for Jenny Fraser. Then for the soul of Brian Fraser…and finally, eyes tight shut, for the friend beside him.

  The sounds of the church faded, the whispering stones and echoes of wood, the shuffle of feet and the rolling gabble of the pigeons on the roof. Ian stopped saying words but was still praying. And then that stopped, too, and there was only peace and the soft beating of his heart.

  He heard Jamie sigh, from somewhere deep inside, and opened his eyes. Without speaking, they went out, leaving the candle to keep watch.

  “Did ye not mean to go to Confession yourself?” Jamie asked, stopping near the church’s main door. There was a priest in the confessional; two or three people stood a discreet distance away from the carved wooden stall, out of earshot, waiting.

  “It’ll bide,” Ian said, with a shrug. “If ye’re goin’ to hell, I might as well go, too. God knows, ye’ll never manage alone.”

  Jamie smiled—a wee bit of a smile, but still—and pushed the door open into sunlight.

  They strolled aimlessly for a bit, not talking, and found themselves eventually on the river’s edge, watching the Garonne’s dark waters flow past, carrying debris from a recent storm.

  “It means ‘peace,’ ” Jamie said at last. “What he said to me. The doctor. ‘Shalom.’ ”

  Ian kent that fine. “Aye,” he said. “But peace is no our business now, is it? We’re soldiers.” He jerked his chin toward the nearby pier, where a packet boat rode at anchor. “I hear the King of Prussia needs a few good men.”

  “So he does,” said Jamie, and squared his shoulders. “Come on, then.”

  A FUGITIVE GREEN

  1

  SURVIVAL

  Paris, April 1744

  MINNIE RENNIE HAD SECRETS. Some were for sale and some were strictly her own. She touched the bosom of her dress and glanced toward the latticework door at the rear of the shop. Still closed, the blue curtains behind it drawn firmly shut.

  Her father had secrets, too; Andrew Rennie (as he called himself in Paris) was outwardly a dealer in rare books but more privately a collector of letters whose writers had never meant them to be read by any but the addressee. He also kept a stock of more fluid information, this soaked out of his visitors with a combination of tea, wine, small amounts of money, and his own considerable charm.

  Minnie had a good head for wine, needed no money, and was impervious to her father’s magnetism. She did, however, have a decently filial respect for his powers of observation.

  The murmur of voices from the back room didn’t have the rhythm of leave-taking, no scr
aping of chairs…She nipped across the book-crammed shop to the shelves of tracts and sermons.

  Taking down a red-calf volume with marbled endpapers, titled Collected Sermons of the Reverend George V. Sykes, she snatched the letter from the bosom of her dress, tucked it between the pages, and slid the book back into place. Just in time: there was movement in the back room, the putting down of cups, the slight raising of voices.

  Heart thumping, she took one more glance at the Reverend Sykes and saw to her horror that she’d disturbed the dust on the shelf—there was a clear track pointing to the oxblood-leather spine. She darted back to the main counter, seized the feather duster kept under it, and had the entire section flicked over in a matter of moments.

  She took several deep breaths; she mustn’t look flushed or flustered. Her father was an observant man—a trait that had (he often said, when instructing her in the art) kept him alive on more than one occasion.

  But it was all right; the voices had changed again—some new point had come up.

  She strolled composedly along the shelves and paused to look through the stacks of unsorted volumes that sat on a large table against the west wall. A strong scent of tobacco rose from the books, along with the usual smell of leather, buckram, glue, paper, and ink. This batch had plainly belonged to a man who liked a pipe when he read. She was paying little attention to the new stock, though; her mind was still on the letter.

  The carter who had delivered this latest assemblage of books—the library of a deceased professor of history from Exeter—had given her a nod and a wink, and she’d slipped out with a market basket, meeting him round the corner by a fruiterer’s shop. A livre tournois to the carter, and five sous for a wooden basket of strawberries, and she’d been free to read the letter in the shelter of the alley before sauntering back to the shop, fruit in hand to explain her absence.

  No salutation, no signature, as she’d requested—only the information:

  Have found her, it read simply. Mrs. Simpson, Chapel House, Parson’s Green, Peterborough Road, London.

  Mrs. Simpson. A name, at last. A name and a place, mysterious though both were.

  Mrs. Simpson.

  It had taken months, months of careful planning, choosing the men among the couriers her father used who might be amenable to making a bit extra on the side and a bit more for keeping her inquiries quiet.

  She didn’t know what her father might do should he find out that she’d been looking for her mother. But he’d refused for the last seventeen years to say a word about the woman; it was reasonable to assume he wouldn’t be pleased.

  Mrs. Simpson. She said it silently, feeling the syllables in her mouth. Mrs. Simpson…Was her mother married again, then? Did she have other children?

  Minnie swallowed. The thought that she might have half brothers or sisters was at once horrifying, intriguing…and startlingly painful. That someone else might have had her mother—hers!—for all those years…

  “This will not do,” she said aloud, though under her breath. She had no idea of Mrs. Simpson’s personal circumstances, and it was pointless to waste emotion on something that might not exist. She blinked hard to refocus her mind and suddenly saw it.

  The thing sitting atop a pigskin-bound edition of Volume III of History of the Papacy (Antwerp) was as long as her thumb and, for a cockroach, remarkably immobile. Minnie had been staring at it unwittingly for nearly a minute, and it hadn’t so much as twitched an antenna. Perhaps it was dead? She picked a ratty quill out of the collection in the Chinese jar and gingerly poked the thing with the quill’s pointy end.

  The thing hissed like a teakettle and she let out a small yelp, dropping the quill and leaping backward. The roach, disturbed, turned round in a slow, huffy circle, then settled back on the gilt-embossed capital “P” and tucked its thorny legs back under itself, obviously preparing to resume its nap.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said to it, and turned to the shelves in search of something heavy enough to smash it but with a cover that wouldn’t show the stain. She’d set her hand on a Vulgate Bible with a dark-brown pebble-grain cover when the secret door beside the shelves opened, revealing her father.

  “Oh, you’ve met Frederick?” he said, stepping forward and taking the Bible out of her hand. “You needn’t worry, my dear; he’s quite tame.”

  “Tame? Who would trouble to domesticate a cockroach?”

  “The inhabitants of Madagascar, or so I’m told. Though the trait is heritable; Frederick here is the descendant of a long and noble line of hissing cockroaches but has never set foot on the soil of his native land. He was born—or hatched, I suppose—in Bristol.”

  Frederick had suspended his nap long enough to nuzzle inquiringly at her father’s thumb, extended as one might hold out one’s knuckles to a strange dog. Evidently finding the scent acceptable, the roach strolled up the thumb and onto the back of her father’s hand. Minnie twitched, unable to keep the gooseflesh from rippling up her arms.

  Mr. Rennie edged carefully toward the big shelves on the east wall, hand cradled next to his chest. These shelves contained the salable but less-valuable books: a jumble of everything from Culpeper’s Herbal to tattered copies of Shakespeare’s plays and—by far the most popular—a large collection of the more lurid gallows confessions of an assortment of highwaymen, murderers, forgers, and husband-slayers. Amid the volumes and pamphlets was scattered a miscellany of small curiosities, ranging from a toy bronze cannon and a handful of sharp-edged stones said to be used at the dawn of time for scraping hides to a Chinese fan that showed erotic scenes when spread. Her father picked a wicker cricket cage from the detritus and decanted Frederick neatly into it.

  “Not before time, either, old cock,” he said to the roach, now standing on its hind legs and peering out through the wickerwork. “Here’s your new master, just coming.”

  Minerva peered round her father and her heart jumped a little; she recognized that tall, broad-shouldered silhouette automatically ducking beneath the lintel in order to avoid being brained.

  “Lord Broch Tuarach!” Her father stepped forward, beaming, and inclined his head to the customer.

  “Mr. Fraser will do,” he said, as always, extending a hand. “Your servant, sir.”

  He’d brought a scent of the streets inside with him: the sticky sap of the plane trees, dust, manure and offal, and Paris’s pervasive smell of piss, lightly perfumed by the orange-sellers outside the theater down the street. He carried his own deep tang of sweat, wine, and oak casks, as well; he often came from his warehouse. She inhaled appreciatively, then let her breath out as he turned, smiling, from her father toward her.

  “Mademoiselle Rennie,” he said, in a deep Scotch accent that rolled the “R” delightfully. He seemed a bit surprised when she held out her hand, but he obligingly bent over it, breathing courteously on her knuckles. If I were married, he’d kiss it, she thought, her grip tightening unconsciously on his. He blinked, feeling it, but straightened up and bowed to her, as elegantly as any courtier.

  Her father made a slight sound in his throat and tried to catch her eye, but she ignored him, picking up the feather duster and heading industriously for the shelves behind the counter—the ones containing a select assortment of erotica from a dozen different countries. She knew perfectly well what his glance would have said.

  “Frederick?” she heard Mr. Fraser say, in a bemused tone of voice. “Does he answer to his name?”

  “I—er—I must admit that I’ve never called him to heel,” her father replied, a little startled. “But he’s very tame; will come to your hand.” Evidently her father had unlatched the cricket cage in order to demonstrate Frederick’s talents, for she heard a slight shuffle of feet.

  “Nay, dinna bother,” Mr. Fraser—his Christian name was James; she’d seen it on a bill of sale for a calf-bound octavo of Persian Letters with gilt impressions—said, laughing. “The beastie’s not my pet. A gentleman of my acquaintance wants something exotic to present to his
mistress—she’s a taste for animals, he says.”

  Her sensitive ear easily picked up the delicate hesitation before “gentleman of my acquaintance.” So had her father, for he invited James Fraser to take coffee with him, and in the next instant the two of them had vanished behind the latticework door that concealed her father’s private lair and she was blinking at Frederick’s stubby antennae, waving inquisitively from the cricket cage her father had dropped onto the shelf in front of her.

  “Put up a bit of food for Mr. Fraser to take along,” her father called back to her from behind the screen. “For Frederick, I mean.”

  “What does he eat?” she called.

  “Fruit!” came a faint reply, and then a door closed behind the screen.

  She caught one more glimpse of Mr. Fraser when he left half an hour later, giving her a smile as he took the parcel containing Frederick and the insect’s breakfast of strawberries. Then he ducked once more beneath the lintel, the afternoon sun glinting off his bright hair, and was gone. She stood staring at the empty door.

  Her father had emerged from the back room, as well, and was regarding her, not without sympathy.

  “Mr. Fraser? He’ll never marry you, my dear—he has a wife, and quite a striking woman she is, too. Besides, while he’s the best of the Jacobite agents, he doesn’t have the scope you’d want. He’s only concerned with the Stuarts, and the Scottish Jacobites will never amount to anything. Come, I’ve something to discuss with you.” Without waiting, he turned and headed for the Chinese screen.

  A wife. Striking, eh? While the word “wife” was undeniably a blow to the liver, Minnie’s next thought was that she didn’t necessarily need to marry Jamie Fraser. And if it came to striking, she could deal a man a good, sharp buffet in the cods herself. She twirled a lock of ripe-wheat hair around one finger and tucked it behind her ear.