An Echo in the Bone (36 page)

Lillian nodded earnestly.

“Yes, ma’am. Faydree asked him that, too—I think she thought he was only saying it to upset her—and he said he’d read it in the newspaper.”

“The
Wilmington Gazette
,” Miriam put in, plainly not liking her sister to be hogging the limelight. “We don’t read newspapers, of course, and since Daddy … well, we seldom have callers anymore.” She glanced down involuntarily, her hand automatically pulling her neat apron straight, to hide a large patch on her skirt. The Bells were tidy and well-groomed, and their clothes had originally been of good quality but were growing noticeably threadbare round the hems and sleeves. I imagined that Mr. Bell’s business affairs must have been substantially impaired, both by his absence and by the interference of war.

“My daughter had told me about the meeting.” Mrs. Bell had recovered herself so far as to sit up, her cup of wine clasped carefully in both hands. “So when my neighbor told me last night that he had met you by the docks … well, I didn’t know quite what to think, but supposed there had been a stupid mistake of some kind—really, you cannot believe anything you read these days, the newspapers are grown quite wild. And my neighbor mentioned that you were seeking passage to Scotland. So we began to think …” Her voice trailed off, and she dipped her face toward her wine cup, embarrassed.

Jamie rubbed a finger down his nose, thinking.

“Aye, well,” he said slowly. “It’s true that I mean to go to Scotland. And of course I should be pleased to inquire after your husband and assist him if I can. But I’ve no immediate prospect of obtaining passage. The blockade—”

“But we can get you a ship!” Lillian interrupted eagerly. “That’s the point!”

“We think we can get you
to
a ship,” Miriam corrected. She gave Jamie a considering, narrow-eyed sort of look, judging his character. He smiled faintly at her, acknowledging the scrutiny, and after a moment she returned the smile, grudging.

“You remind me of someone,” she said. Evidently, whoever it was, it was someone she liked, though, for she nodded to her mother, giving permission. Mrs. Bell sighed, her shoulders slumping a little in relief.

“I do still have friends,” she said, with a tinge of defiance. “In spite of … everything.”

Among these friends was a man named DeLancey Hall, who owned a fishing ketch, and—like half the town, probably—augmented his income with the odd bit of smuggling.

Hall had told Mrs. Bell that he expected the arrival of a ship from England, coming into Wilmington sometime within the next week or so—always assuming that it hadn’t been seized or sunk
en route
. As both ship and cargo were the property of one of the local Sons of Liberty, it could not venture into the Wilmington harbor, where two British warships were still crouched. It would, therefore, lurk just outside the harbor, where assorted small local craft would make rendezvous with it, unloading the cargo for surreptitious transport to shore. After which, the ship would sail north to New Haven, there to retrieve a cargo.

“And then will sail for Edinburgh!” Lillian put in, her face bright with hope.

“My father’s kinsman there is named Andrew Bell,” Miriam put in, lifting her chin a little. “He is very well known, I believe. He is a printer, and—”

“Wee Andy Bell?” Jamie’s face had lighted up. “Him who printed the great encyclopedia?”

“The very man,” Mrs. Bell said, surprised. “You do not mean to say you know him, Mr. Fraser?”

Jamie actually laughed, startling the Bells.

“Many’s the evening I’ve passed in a tavern wi’ Andy Bell,” he assured them. “In fact, he’s the man I mean to see in Scotland, for he’s got my printing press, safe in his shop. Or at least I hope he does,” he added, though his cheerfulness was unimpaired.

This news—along with a fresh round of wine—heartened the Bell women to an amazing extent, and when they left us at last, they were flushed with animation and chattering amongst themselves like a flock of amiable magpies. I glanced out the window and saw them making their way down the street, clustered together in hopeful excitement, staggering into the street occasionally from the effects of wine and emotion.

“We don’t only sing but we dance just as good as we walk,” I murmured, watching them go.

Jamie gave me a startled look.

“Archie Bell and the Drells,” I explained. “Never mind. Do you think it’s safe? This ship?”

“God, no.” He shuddered, and kissed the top of my head. “Put aside the question of storms, woodworm, bad caulking, warped timbers, and the like, there’s the English warships in the harbor, privateers outside the harbor—”

“I didn’t mean that,” I interrupted. “That’s more or less par for the course, isn’t it? I meant the owner—and this DeLancey Hall. Mrs. Bell thinks she knows what their politics are, but …” But the thought of delivering ourselves—and our gold—so completely into the hands of unknown persons was unsettling.

“But,” he agreed. “Aye, I mean to go and speak to Mr. Hall first thing tomorrow morning. And maybe Monsieur Beauchamp, as well. For now, though—” He ran a hand lightly down my back and cupped my bottom. “Ian and the dog willna be back for an hour, at least. Will ye have another glass of wine?”

HE LOOKED LIKE a Frenchman, Jamie thought. Which was to say, thoroughly out of place in New Bern. Beauchamp had just come out of Thorogood Northrup’s warehouse and stood in casual conversation with Northrup himself, the breeze off the water fluttering the silk ribbon that tied back his dark hair. Elegant, Claire had described him as, and he was that: not—not quite—foppish, but dressed with taste and expense. A good deal of expense, he thought.

“He looks like a Frenchman,” Fergus observed, echoing his thoughts. They were seated next to the window in the Whinbush, a middling tavern that catered to the needs of fishermen and warehouse laborers, and whose atmosphere was composed of equal parts beer, sweat, tobacco, tar, and aged fish guts.

“Is that his ship?” Fergus asked, a frown creasing his brow as he nodded toward the very trim black-and-yellow sloop that rocked gently at anchor, some distance out.

“It’s the ship he travels in. Couldna say whether he owns it. Ye dinna ken his face, though?”

Fergus leaned into the window, nearly flattening his own face against the wavery panes in an attempt to get a better look at Monsieur Beauchamp.

Jamie, beer in hand, studied Fergus’s face in turn. Despite having lived in Scotland since the age of ten, and in America for the last ten years or more, Fergus himself still looked French, he thought. It was something more than a matter of feature; something in the bone itself, perhaps.

The bones of Fergus’s face were pronounced, with a jaw sharp enough to cut paper, an imperiously beaked nose, and eye sockets set deep under the ridges of a high brow. The thick dark hair brushed back from that brow was threaded with gray, and it gave Jamie a queer moment to see that; he carried within himself a permanent image of Fergus as the ten-year-old orphaned pickpocket he had rescued from a Paris brothel, and that image sat oddly on the gaunt, handsome face before him.

“No,” Fergus said at last, sitting back on the bench and shaking his head. “I have never seen him.”

Fergus’s deep-set dark eyes were alive with interest and speculation. “No one else in the town knows him, either. Though I
have
heard that he had made inquiries for this Claudel Fraser”—his nostrils flared with amusement; Claudel was his own birth name, and the only one he had, though Jamie thought likely no one had ever used it outside Paris or anytime in the last thirty years—“in Halifax and Edenton, as well.”

Jamie opened his mouth to observe that he hoped Fergus had been careful in his inquiries, but thought better of it, and drank his beer instead. Fergus hadn’t been surviving as a printer in these troublous times by having a lack of discretion.

“Does he remind ye of anyone?” he asked instead. Fergus gave him a brief look of surprise, but returned to his neck-craning before settling back, shaking his head.

“No. Should he?”

“I dinna think so.” He didn’t, but was glad of Fergus’s corroboration. Claire had told him her thought—that the man might be some relation of hers, perhaps a direct ancestor. She had tried to be casual about it, dismiss the idea even as she spoke it, but he’d seen the eager light in her eyes and been touched. The fact that she had no family or close kin in her own time had always struck him as a dreadful thing, even while he realized that it had much to do with her devotion to him.

He’d looked as carefully as he could, with that in mind, but saw nothing in Beauchamp’s face or carriage that reminded him much of Claire—let alone Fergus.

He didn’t think
that
thought—that Beauchamp might be some actual relation to himself—had crossed Fergus’s mind. Jamie was reasonably sure that Fergus thought of the Frasers of Lallybroch as his only family, other than Marsali and the children, whom he loved with all the fervor of his passionate nature.

Beauchamp was taking his leave of Northrup now, with a very Parisian bow, accompanied by a graceful flutter of his silk handkerchief. Fortuitous that the man had happened to step out of the warehouse just in front of them, Jamie thought. They’d planned to go and have a keek at him later in the day, but his timely appearance saved them having to go and look for him.

“It’s a good ship,” Fergus observed, his attention deflected to the sloop called
Huntress
. He glanced back at Jamie, considering. “You’re sure you do not wish to investigate the possibility of passage with Monsieur Beauchamp?”

“Aye, I’m sure,” Jamie said dryly. “Put myself and my wife in the power of a man I dinna ken and whose motives are suspect, in a wee boat on a wide sea? Even a man who didna suffer from seasickness might boggle at that prospect, no?”

Fergus’s face split in a grin.

“Milady proposes to stick you full of needles again?”

“She does,” Jamie replied, rather crossly. He hated being stabbed repeatedly, and disliked being obliged to appear in public—even within the limited confines of a ship—bristling with spines like some outlandish porcupine. The only thing that would make him do it was the sure knowledge that if he didn’t, he’d be puking his guts out for days on end.

Fergus didn’t notice his discontent, though; he was leaning into the window again.

“Nom d’nom …”
he said softly, with such an expression of apprehension that Jamie turned on the bench at once to look.

Beauchamp had proceeded some way down the street, but was still in sight. He had come to a stop, though, and appeared to be executing a sort of ungainly jig. This was sufficiently odd, but what was more disturbing was that Fergus’s son Germain was crouched in the street directly in front of the man, and seemed to be hopping to and fro in the manner of an agitated toad.

These peculiar gyrations continued for a few seconds longer and then came to an end, Beauchamp now standing still, but waving his arms in expostulation, while Germain seemed to be groveling in front of the man. The boy stood up, though, tucking something into his shirt, and after a few moments’ conversation, Beauchamp laughed and put out his hand. They exchanged a brief bow and handshake, and Germain came down the street toward the Whinbush while Beauchamp continued on his course.

Germain came in and, spotting them, slid onto the bench beside his father, looking pleased with himself.

“I’ve met that man,” he said without preamble. “The man who wants Papa.”

“Aye, we saw,” Jamie said, brows raised. “What the devil were ye doing with him?”

“Well, I saw him coming, but I did not think he would stop and talk to me if I only shouted at him. So I tossed Simon and Peter into his path.”

“Who—” Jamie began, but Germain was already groping within the depths of his shirt. Before Jamie could finish the sentence, the boy had produced two sizable frogs, one green and one a sort of vile yellow color, who huddled together on the bare boards of the table, goggling in a nervous manner.

Fergus cuffed Germain round the ear.

“Take those accursed creatures off the table, before we are thrown out of here. No wonder you are covered in warts, consorting with
les grenouilles
!”

“Grandmère
told me to,” Germain protested, nonetheless scooping up his pets and returning them to captivity.

“She did?” Jamie was not usually startled anymore by his wife’s cures, but this seemed odd, even by her standards.

“Well, she said there was nothing to do for the wart on my elbow except rub it with a dead frog and bury it—the frog, I mean—at a crossroads at midnight.”

“Oh. I think she might possibly have been being facetious. What did the Frenchman say to ye, then?”

Germain looked up, wide-eyed and interested.

“Oh, he’s not a Frenchman,
Grandpère
.”

A brief pulse of astonishment went through him.

“He’s not? Ye’re sure?”

“Oh, aye. He cursed most blasphemous when Simon landed on his shoe—but not the way Papa does.” Germain aimed a bland look at his father, who looked disposed to cuff him again, but desisted at Jamie’s gesture. “He is an Englishman. I’m sure.”

“He cursed
in
English?” Jamie asked. It was true; Frenchmen often invoked vegetables when cursing, not infrequently mingled with sacred references. English cursing generally had nothing to do with saints, sacraments, or cucumbers, but dealt with God, whores, or excrement.

“He did. But I cannot say
what
he said, or Papa will be offended. He has very pure ears, Papa,”

Germain added, with a smirk at his father.

“Leave off deviling your father and tell me what else the man said.”

“Aye, well,” Germain said obligingly. “When he saw it was no but a pair o’ wee froggies, he laughed and asked me was I taking them home for my dinner. I said no, they were my pets, and asked him was it his ship out there, because everyone said so and it was a bonny thing, no? I was making out to be simple, aye?” he explained, in case his grandfather might not have grasped the stratagem.

Jamie suppressed a smile.

“Verra clever,” he said dryly. “What else?”