Seven Stones to Stand or Fall Read online

  Your servant,

  John Hunter, Surgeon

  Grey was conscious of a most extraordinary array of sensations. Relief—yes, there was a sense of profound relief, as of waking from a nightmare. There was also a sense of injustice, colored by the beginnings of indignation; by God, he had nearly been married! He might, of course, also have been maimed or killed as a result of the imbroglio, but that seemed relatively inconsequent; he was a soldier, after all—such things happened.

  His hand trembled slightly as he set the note down. Beneath relief, gratitude, and indignation was a growing sense of horror.

  I thought it might ease your mind…He could see Hunter’s face saying this; sympathetic, intelligent, and cheerful. It was a straightforward remark but one fully cognizant of its own irony.

  Yes, he was pleased to know he had not caused Edwin Nicholls’s death. But the means of that knowledge…Gooseflesh rose on his arms and he shuddered involuntarily, imagining—

  “Oh, God,” he said. He’d been once to Hunter’s house—to a poetry reading, held under the auspices of Mrs. Hunter, whose salons were famous. Dr. Hunter did not attend these but sometimes would come down from his part of the house to greet guests. On this occasion, he had done so and, falling into conversation with Grey and a couple of other scientifically minded gentlemen, had invited them up to see some of the more interesting items of his famous collection: the rooster with a transplanted human tooth growing in its comb, the child with two heads, the fetus with a foot protruding from its stomach.

  Hunter had made no mention of the walls of jars, these filled with eyeballs, fingers, sections of livers…or of the two or three complete human skeletons that hung from the ceiling, fully articulated and fixed by a bolt through the tops of their skulls. It had not occurred to Grey at the time to wonder where—or how—Hunter had acquired these.

  Nicholls had had an eyetooth missing, the front tooth beside the empty space badly chipped. If he ever visited Hunter’s house again, might he come face-to-face with a skull with a missing tooth?

  He seized the brandy decanter, uncorked it, and drank directly from it, swallowing slowly and repeatedly, until the vision disappeared.

  His small table was littered with papers. Among them, under his sapphire paperweight, was the tidy packet that the widow Lambert had handed him, her face blotched with weeping. He put a hand on it, feeling Charlie’s doubled touch, gentle on his face, soft around his heart.

  “You won’t fail me.”

  “No,” he said softly. “No, Charlie, I won’t.”

  WITH MANOKE’S HELP as translator, Grey bought the child, after prolonged negotiation, for two golden guineas, a brightly colored blanket, a pound of sugar, and a small keg of rum. The grandmother’s face was sunken, not with grief, he thought, but with dissatisfaction and weariness. With her daughter dead of the smallpox, her life would be harder. The English, she conveyed to Grey through Manoke, were cheap bastards; the French were much more generous. He resisted the impulse to give her another guinea.

  It was full autumn now, and the leaves had all fallen. The bare branches of the trees spread black ironwork flat against a pale-blue sky as he made his way upward through the town, to the French mission. There were several small buildings surrounding the tiny church, with children playing outside; some of them paused to look at him, but most of them ignored him—British soldiers were nothing new.

  Father LeCarré took the bundle gently from him, turning back the blanket to look at the child’s face. The boy was awake; he pawed at the air, and the priest put out a finger for him to grasp.

  “Ah,” he said, seeing the clear signs of mixed blood, and Grey knew the priest thought the child was his. He started to explain, but, after all, what did it matter?

  “We will baptize him as a Catholic, of course,” Father LeCarré said, looking up at Grey. The priest was a young man, rather plump, dark, and clean-shaven, but with a gentle face. “You do not mind that?”

  “No.” Grey drew out a purse. “For his maintenance. I will send an additional five pounds each year, if you will advise me once a year of his continued welfare. Here—the address to which to write.” A sudden inspiration struck him—not that he did not trust the good father, he assured himself, only…“Send me a lock of his hair,” he said. “Every year.”

  He was turning to go when the priest called him back, smiling.

  “Has the infant a name, sir?”

  “A—” He stopped dead. The boy’s mother had surely called him something, but Malcolm Stubbs hadn’t thought to tell Grey what it was before being shipped back to England. What should he call the child? Malcolm, for the father who had abandoned him? Hardly.

  Charles, maybe, in memory of Carruthers…

  “…one of these days, it isn’t going to.”

  “His name is John,” he said abruptly, and cleared his throat. “John Cinnamon.”

  “Mais oui,” the priest said, nodding. “Bon voyage, Monsieur—et voyez avec le Bon Dieu.”

  “Thank you,” he said politely, and went away, not looking back, down to the riverbank where Manoke waited to bid him farewell.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  THE BATTLE OF Quebec is justly famous as one of the great military triumphs of the eighteenth-century British Army. If you go today to the battlefield at the Plains of Abraham (in spite of this poetic name, it really was just named for the farmer who owned the land, one Abraham Martin; I suppose “The Plains of Martin” just didn’t have the same ring to it), you’ll see a plaque at the foot of the cliff there, commemorating the heroic achievement of the Highland troops who climbed this sheer cliff from the river below, clearing the way for the entire army—and their cannon, mortars, howitzers, and accompanying impedimenta—to make a harrowing overnight ascent and confront General Montcalm with a jaw-dropping spectacle by the dawn’s early light.

  If you go up onto the field itself, you’ll find another plaque, this one put up by the French, explaining (in French) what a dirty, unsportsmanlike trick this was for those sneaky British to have played on the noble troops defending the Citadel. Ah, perspective.

  General James Wolfe, along with Montcalm, was of course a real historical character, as was Brigadier Simon Fraser (whom you will have met—or will meet later—in An Echo in the Bone). My own rule of thumb when dealing with historical persons in the context of fiction is to try not to portray them as having done anything worse than what I know they did, according to the historical record.

  In General Wolfe’s case, Hal’s opinion of his character and abilities is one commonly held and recorded by a number of contemporary military commentators. And there is documentary proof of his attitude toward the Highlanders, whom he used for this endeavor, in the form of the letter quoted in the story: “…no great mischief if they fall.” (Allow me to recommend a wonderful novel by Alistair MacLeod, titled No Great Mischief. It isn’t about Wolfe; it’s a novelized history of a family of Scots who settle in Nova Scotia, beginning in the eighteenth century and carrying on through the decades, but it is from Wolfe’s letter that the book takes its title, and he’s mentioned.)

  Wolfe’s policy with regard to the habitant villages surrounding the Citadel (looting, burning, general terrorizing of the populace) is a matter of record. It wasn’t (and isn’t) an unusual thing for an invading army to do.

  General Wolfe’s dying words are also a matter of historical record, but like Lord John, I take leave to doubt that that’s really what he said. He is reported by several sources to have recited Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in the boat on the way to battle—and I think that’s a sufficiently odd thing to have done, that the reports are probably true.

  As for Simon Fraser, he’s widely reported to have been the British officer who fooled the French lookouts by calling out to them in French as the boats went by in the darkness—and he undoubtedly spoke excellent French, having campaigned in France years before. As for the details of exactly what he said—accounts vary, and tha
t’s not really an important detail, so I rolled my own.

  Now, speaking of French…Brigadier Fraser spoke excellent French. I don’t. I can read that language, but I can’t speak or write it, possess absolutely no grammar, and have a really low tolerance for diacritical marks. So for the purposes of this story I did as I always do in such cases; I solicit the opinions of several native speakers of French for those bits of dialogue that occur in that language. What you see in this story is due to the assistance of these kind and helpful speakers. I fully expect—because it happens every time I include French in a story—to receive indignant email from assorted French speakers denouncing the French dialogue. If the French was provided to me by a Parisian, someone from Montreal will tell me that’s not right; if the original source was Quebecois, outraged screams emanate from the mother country. And if it came from a textbook or (quelle horreur) an academic source…well, bonne chance with that. There’s also the consideration that it’s very difficult to spot typographical errors in a language you can’t speak. But we do our best. My apologies for anything egregious.

  Now, you may notice that John Hunter is referred to in various places either as “Mr. Hunter,” or as “Dr. Hunter.” By long-standing tradition, English surgeons are (and were) addressed as “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”—presumably a nod to their origins as barbers with a sanguinary sideline. However, John Hunter, with his brother William, was also a formally trained physician, as well as an eminent scientist and anatomist—hence entitled also to the honorific “Dr.”

  THE SPACE BETWEEN

  INTRODUCTION

  The Comte St. Germain

  THERE WAS AN historical person (quite possibly more than one) who went by this name. There are also numerous reports (mostly unverified) of a person by this name who appears in various parts of Europe over parts of two centuries. These observations have led some to speculate that the Comte (or a Comte of that name) was a practitioner of the occult, a mystic, or even a time traveler.

  Let’s put it this way: The Comte St. Germain in this story is not intended to portray the documented historical person of that name.

  Paris, March 1778

  HE STILL DIDN’T KNOW why the frog hadn’t killed him. Paul Rakoczy, Comte St. Germain, picked up the vial, pulled the cork, and sniffed cautiously, for the third time, but then recorked it, still dissatisfied. Maybe. Maybe not. The scent of the dark-gray powder in the vial held the ghost of something familiar—but it had been thirty years.

  He sat for a moment, frowning at the array of jars, bottles, flasks, and pelicans on his workbench. It was late afternoon, and the early spring sun of Paris was like honey, warm and sticky on his face, but glowing in the rounded globes of glass, throwing pools of red and brown and green on the wood from the liquids contained therein. The only discordant note in this peaceful symphony of light was the body of a large rat, lying on its back in the middle of the workbench, a pocket watch open beside it.

  The comte put two fingers delicately on the rat’s chest and waited patiently. It didn’t take so long this time; he was used to the coldness as his mind felt its way into the body. Nothing. No hint of light in his mind’s eye, no warm red of a pulsing heart. He glanced at the watch: half an hour.

  He took his fingers away, shaking his head.

  “Mélisande, you evil bitch,” he murmured, not without affection. “You didn’t think I’d try anything you sent me on myself, did you?”

  Still…he himself had stayed dead a great while longer than half an hour when the frog had given him the dragon’s blood. It had been early evening when he went into Louis’s Star Chamber thirty years before, heart beating with excitement at the coming confrontation—a duel of wizards, with a king’s favor as the stakes—and one he’d thought he’d win. He remembered the purity of the sky, the beauty of the stars just visible, Venus bright on the horizon, and the joy of it in his blood. Everything always had a greater intensity when you knew life could cease within the next few minutes.

  And an hour later he thought his life had ceased, the cup falling from his numbed hand, the coldness rushing through his limbs with amazing speed, freezing the words “I’ve lost,” an icy core of disbelief in the center of his mind. He hadn’t been looking at the frog; the last thing he had seen through darkening eyes was the woman—La Dame Blanche—her face over the cup she’d given him appalled and white as bone. But what he recalled, and recalled again now, with the same sense of astonishment and avidity, was the great flare of blue, intense as the color of the evening sky beyond Venus, that had burst from her head and shoulders as he died.

  He didn’t recall any feeling of regret or fear, just astonishment. This was nothing, however, to the astonishment he’d felt when he regained his senses, naked on a stone slab in a revolting subterranean chamber next to a drowned corpse. Luckily, there had been no one alive in that disgusting grotto, and he had made his way—reeling and half blind, clothed in the drowned man’s wet and stinking shirt—out into a dawn more beautiful than any twilight could ever be. So—ten to twelve hours from the moment of apparent death to revival.

  He glanced at the rat, then put out a finger and lifted one of the small, neat paws. Nearly twelve hours. Limp; the rigor had already passed. It was warm up here at the top of the house. Then he turned to the counter that ran along the far wall of the laboratory, where a line of rats lay, possibly insensible, probably dead. He walked slowly along the line, prodding each body. Limp, limp, stiff. Stiff. Stiff. All dead, without doubt. Each had had a smaller dose than the last, but all had died—though he couldn’t yet be positive about the latest. Wait a bit more, then, to be sure.

  He needed to know. Because the Court of Miracles was talking. And they said the frog was back.

  The English Channel

  THEY DID SAY that red hair was a sign of the devil. Joan eyed her escort’s fiery locks consideringly. The wind on deck was fierce enough to make her eyes water, and it jerked bits of Michael Murray’s hair out of its binding so they did dance round his head like flames, a bit. You might expect his face to be ugly as sin if he was one of the devil’s, though, and it wasn’t.

  Lucky for him, he looked like his mother in the face, she thought critically. His younger brother, Ian, wasn’t so fortunate, and that without the heathen tattoos. Michael’s was a fairly pleasant face, for all it was blotched with windburn and the lingering marks of sorrow, and no wonder, him having just lost his father, and his wife dead in France no more than a month before that.

  But she wasn’t braving this gale in order to watch Michael Murray, even if he might burst into tears or turn into Auld Horny on the spot. She touched her crucifix for reassurance, just in case. It had been blessed by the priest, and her mother’d carried it all the way to St. Ninian’s Spring and dipped it in the water there, to ask the saint’s protection. And it was her mother she wanted to see, as long as ever she could.

  She pulled her kerchief off and waved it, keeping a tight grip lest the wind make off with it. Her mother was growing smaller on the quay, waving madly, too, Joey behind her with his arm round her waist to keep her from falling into the water.

  Joan snorted a bit at sight of her new stepfather but then thought better and touched the crucifix again, muttering a quick Act of Contrition in penance. After all, it was she herself who’d made that marriage happen, and a good thing, too. If not, she’d still be stuck to home at Balriggan, not on her way at last to be a Bride of Christ in France.

  A nudge at her elbow made her glance aside, to see Michael offering her a handkerchief. Well, so. If her eyes were streaming—aye, and her nose—it was no wonder, the wind so fierce as it was. She took the scrap of cloth with a curt nod of thanks, scrubbed briefly at her cheeks, and waved her kerchief harder.

  None of his family had come to see Michael off, not even his twin sister, Janet. But they were taken up with all there was to do in the wake of Old Ian Murray’s death, and no wonder. No need to see Michael to the ship, either—Michael Murray was a wine merchant in
Paris, and a wonderfully well-traveled gentleman. She took some comfort from the knowledge that he knew what to do and where to go and had said he would see her safely delivered to the Convent of Angels, because the thought of making her way through Paris alone and the streets full of people all speaking French—though she knew French quite well, of course. She’d been studying it all the winter, and Michael’s mother helping her—though perhaps she had better not tell the reverend mother about the sorts of French novels Jenny Murray had in her bookshelf, because…

  “Voulez-vous descendre, mademoiselle?”

  “Eh?” She glanced at him, to see him gesturing toward the hatchway that led downstairs. She turned back, blinking—but the quay had vanished, and her mother with it.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. I’ll just…” She wanted to see the land so long as she could. It would be her last sight of Scotland, ever, and the thought made her wame curl into a small, tight ball. She waved a vague hand toward the hatchway. “You go, though. I’m all right by myself.”

  He didn’t go but came to stand beside her, gripping the rail. She turned away from him a little, so he wouldn’t see her weep, but on the whole she wasn’t sorry he’d stayed.

  Neither of them spoke, and the land sank slowly, as though the sea swallowed it, and there was nothing round them now but the open sea, glassy gray and rippling under a scud of clouds. The prospect made her dizzy, and she closed her eyes, swallowing.