The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (198 page)

His eyes dropped to my bosom. He sighed, raised his eyes to mine, and took a step toward me. I took three steps back, fast.

“It doesn’t matter, really, does it, sweet’art?” he said, still smiling lazily. “Not after what’s ’appened already. What’s once more, eh? And I’m an Englishman, too,” he coaxed. “Not a filthy Scot.”

“Leave the poor woman alone, Jess,” Corporal Rowbotham said, emerging silently from the screen of willows behind him. “She’s had enough trouble, poor lady.” He spoke softly enough, but Jessie glared at him, then, thinking better of whatever he’d had in mind, turned without another word and disappeared under the willow leaves.

The Corporal had waited, unspeaking, for me to gather up my fallen cloak, and then had followed me back to the camp. He had gone to pick up his own blanket, motioned to me to lie down, and placed himself six feet away, sitting up with his blanket about his shoulders Indian-style. Whenever I woke during the night, I had seen him still sitting there, staring shortsightedly into the fire.

Tavistock did have an inn. I didn’t have much time to enjoy its amenities, though. We arrived in the village at midday, and Captain Mainwaring set off at once to deliver his current crop of dispatches. He returned within the hour, though, and told me to fetch my cloak.

“Why?” I said, bewildered. “Where are we going?”

He glanced at me indifferently and said “To Bellhurst Manor.”

“Right,” I said. It sounded a trifle more impressive than my current surroundings, which featured several soldiers playing at chuck-a-luck on the floor, a flea-ridden mongrel asleep by the fire, and a strong smell of hops.

The manor house, without regard to the natural beauty of its site, stubbornly turned its back on the open meadows and huddled inland instead, facing the stark cliffside.

The drive was straight, short, and unadorned, unlike the lovely curving approaches to French manors. But the entrance was equipped with two utilitarian stone pillars, each bearing the heraldic device of the owner. I stared at it as my horse clopped past, trying to place it. A cat—perhaps a leopard?—couchant, with a lily in its paw. It was familiar, I knew. But whose?

There was a stir in the long grass near the gate, and I caught a quick glimpse of pale blue eyes as a hunched bundle of rags scuttled into the shadows, away from the churn of the horses’ hooves. Something about the ragged beggar seemed faintly familiar, too. Perhaps I was merely hallucinating; grasping at anything that didn’t remind me of English soldiers.

The escort waited in the dooryard, not bothering to dismount, while I mounted the steps with Captain Mainwaring, and waited while he hammered at the door, rather wondering what might be on the other side of it.

“Mrs. Beauchamp?” The butler, if that’s what he was, looked rather as though he suspected the worst. No doubt he was right.

“Yes,” I said. “Er, whose house is this?”

But even as I asked, I raised my eyes and looked into the gloom of the inner hall. A face stared back at me, doe-eyes wide and startled.

Mary Hawkins.

As the girl opened her mouth, I opened mine as well. And screamed as loudly as I could. The butler, taken unprepared, took a step back, tripped on a settee, and fell over sideways like a bowls pin. I could hear the startled noises of the soldiers outside, coming up the steps.

I picked up my skirts, shrieked “A mouse! A mouse!” and fled toward the parlor, yelling like a banshee.

Infected by my apparent hysteria, Mary shrieked as well, and clutched me about the middle as I cannoned into her. I bore her back into the recesses of the parlor with me, and grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Don’t tell anyone who I am,” I breathed into her ear. “No one! My life depends on it!” I had thought I was being melodramatic, but it occurred to me, as I spoke the words, that I could very well be telling the exact truth. Being married to Red Jamie Fraser was likely a dicey proposition.

Mary had time only to nod in a dazed sort of way, when the door at the far side of the room opened, and a man came in.

“Whatever is all this wretched noise, Mary?” he demanded. A plump, contented-looking man, he had also the firm chin and tightly satisfied lips of the man who is contented because he generally gets his own way.

“N-nothing, Papa,” said Mary, stuttering in her nervousness. “Only a m-m-mouse.”

The baronet squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled deeply, seeking patience. Having found a simulacrum of that state, he opened them and gazed at his offspring.

“Say it again, child,” he ordered. “But straight. I’ll not have you mumbling and blithering. Take a deep breath, steady yourself. Now. Again.”

Mary obeyed, inhaling ’til the laces of her bodice strained across the budding chest. Her fingers wound themselves in the silk brocade of her skirt, seeking support.

“It w-was a mouse, Papa. Mrs. Fr … er, this lady was frightened by a mouse.”

Dismissing this attempt as barely satisfactory, the baronet stepped forward, examining me with interest.

“Oh? And who might you be, Madam?”

Captain Mainwaring, arriving belatedly after the search for the mythical mouse, popped up at my elbow and introduced me, handing over the note of introduction from Colonel MacLeish.

“Hum. So, it seems His Grace is to be your host, Madam, at least temporarily.” He handed the note to the waiting butler, and took the hat the latter had taken from the nearby rack.

“I regret that our acquaintance should be so short, Mrs. Beauchamp. I was just leaving myself.” He glanced over his shoulder, to a short stairway that branched off the hall. The butler, dignity restored, was already mounting it, grubby note reposing on a salver held before him. “I see Walmisley has gone to tell His Grace of your arrival. I must go, or I shall miss the post-coach.
Adieu
, Mrs. Beauchamp.”

He turned to Mary, hanging back against the paneled wainscoting. “Goodbye, daughter. Do try to … well.” The corners of his mouth turned up in what was meant to be a fatherly smile. “Goodbye, Mary.”

“Goodbye, Papa,” she murmured, eyes on the ground. I glanced from one to the other. What on earth was Mary Hawkins, of all people, doing here? Plainly she was staying at the house; I supposed the owner must be some connection of her family’s.

“Mrs. Beauchamp?” A small, tubby footman was bowing at my elbow. “His Grace will see you now, Madam.”

Mary’s hands clutched at my sleeve as I turned to follow the footman. “B-b-b-but …” she began. In my keyed-up state, I didn’t think I could manage sufficient patience to hear her out. I smiled vaguely and patted her hand.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “Don’t worry, it will be all right.”

“B-but it’s my …”

The footman bowed and pushed open a door at the end of the corridor. Light within fell on the richness of brocade and polished wood. The chair I could see to one side had a family crest embroidered on its back; a clearer version of the worn stone shield I had seen outside.

A leopard couchant, holding in its paw a bunch of lilies—or were they crocuses? Alarm bells rang in my mind as the chair’s occupant rose, his shadow falling across the polished doorsill as he turned. Mary’s final anguished word made it out, neck and neck with the footman’s announcement.

“My
g-g-godfather
!” she said.

“His Grace, the Duke of Sandringham,” said the footman.

“Mrs.… Beauchamp?” said the Duke, his mouth dropping open in astonishment.

“Well,” I said weakly. “Something like that.”

The door of the drawing room closed behind me, leaving me alone with His Grace. My last sight of Mary had been of her standing out in the hall, eyes like saucers, mouth opening and shutting silently like a goldfish.

There were huge Chinese jars flanking the windows, and inlaid tables under them. A bronze Venus posed coquettishly on the mantelpiece, companioned by a pair of gold-rimmed porcelain bowls and silver-gilt candelabra, blazing with beeswax candles. A close-napped carpet that I recognized as a very good Kermanshah covered most of the floor and a spinet crouched in one corner; what little space was left bare was occupied by marquetried furniture and the odd bit of statuary.

“Nice place you have here,” I remarked graciously to the Duke, who had been standing before the fire, hands folded beneath his coattail as he watched me, an expression of wary amusement on the broad, florid face.

“Thank you,” he said, in the piping tenor that came so oddly from that barrel-chested frame. “Your presence adorns it, my dear.” Amusement won out over wariness, and he smiled, a bluff, disarming grin.

“Why Beauchamp?” he asked. “That isn’t by chance your real name, is it?”

“My maiden name,” I answered, rattled into the truth. His thick blond eyebrows shot up.

“
Are
you French?”

“No. English. I couldn’t use Fraser, though, could I?”

“I see.” Brows still raised, he nodded at a small brocaded love seat, inviting me to be seated. It was richly carved and beautifully proportioned, a museum piece, like everything else in the room. I swept my sodden skirts to one side as gracefully as I could, ignoring their liberal stains of mud and horsehair, and delicately lowered myself onto the primrose satin.

The Duke paced slowly back and forth before the fire, watching me, still with a slight smile on his features. I fought the growing warmth and comfort that spread through my aching legs, threatening to drag me into the abyss of fatigue that gaped open at my feet. This was no time to let down my guard.

“Which are you?” the Duke inquired suddenly. “An English hostage, a fervent Jacobite, or a French agent?”

I rubbed two fingers over the ache between my eyes. The correct answer was “none of the above,” but I didn’t think it would get me very far.

“The hospitality of this house seems a trifle lacking by comparison with its appointments,” I said, as haughtily as I could manage under the circumstances, which wasn’t all that much. Still, Louise’s example of great-ladydom had not been entirely in vain.

The Duke laughed, a high, chittering sort of laugh, like a bat that has just heard a good one.

“Your pardon, Madam. You’re quite right; I should have thought to offer you refreshment before presuming to question you.
Most
thoughtless of me.”

He murmured something to the footman who appeared in answer to his ring, then waited calmly before the fire for the tray to arrive. I sat in silence, glancing around the room, occasionally stealing a look at my host. Neither of us was interested in making small talk. Despite his outward geniality, this was an armed truce, and both of us knew it.

What I wanted to know was why. No stranger to people wondering who in hell I was, I rather wondered myself where the Duke came into it. Or where he thought
I
did. He had met me twice before, as Mrs. Fraser, wife of the laird of Lallybroch. Now I had turned up on his doorstep, posing as an English hostage named Beauchamp lately rescued from a gang of Scottish Jacobites. That was enough to make anyone wonder. But his attitude toward me went a long way past simple curiosity.

The tea arrived, complete with scones and cake. The Duke picked up his own cup, motioned to mine with a lift of one brow, and we took tea, still both in silence. Somewhere on the other side of the house, I could hear a muffled banging, as of someone hammering. The soft chime of the Duke’s cup against its saucer was the signal for the resumption of hostilities.

“Now, then,” he said, with as much firmness as a man who sounded like Mickey Mouse could manage. “Let me begin, Mrs. Fraser—I may call you so? Thank you. Let me begin by saying that I know a great deal about you already. I intend to know more. You will do well to answer me fully and without hesitations. I must say, Mrs. Fraser, that you are amazingly difficult to kill”—he bowed slightly in my direction, that smile still on his lips—“but I feel sure that it could be accomplished, given sufficient determination.”

I stared at him, unmoving; not out of any native sang-froid, but from simple dumbfoundedness. Adopting another of Louise’s mannerisms, I raised both eyebrows inquiringly, sipped tea, then patted my lips delicately with the monogrammed serviette provided.

“I am afraid you will think me dense, Your Grace,” I said politely, “but I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Haven’t you, my dear?”

The small, jolly blue eyes didn’t blink. He reached for the silver-gilt bell on the tray and rang it once.

The man must have been waiting in the next room for the summons, for the door opened immediately. A tall, lean man in the dark habiliments and good linen of an upper servant advanced to the Duke’s side and bowed deeply.

“Your Grace?” He spoke English, but the French accent was unmistakable. The face was French, too; long-nosed and white, with thin, tight lips and a pair of ears that stood out from his head like small wings on either side, their tips fiercely red. His lean face grew still paler as he looked up and spotted me, and he took an involuntary step backward.

Sandringham watched this with a frown of irritation, then switched his gaze to me.

“You don’t recognize him?” he asked.

I was beginning to shake my head, when the man’s right hand twitched suddenly against the cloth of his breeches. As unobtrusively as possible, he was making the sign of the horns, middle fingers folded down, index and little finger pointed at me. I knew, then, and in the next instant had seen the confirmation of my knowledge—the small beauty mark above the fork of his thumb.

I hadn’t the slightest doubt; it was the man in the spotted shirt who had attacked me and Mary in Paris. And all too obviously in the Duke’s employ.

“You bloody
bastard
!” I said. I leaped to my feet, overturning the tea table, and snatched up the nearest object to hand, a carved alabaster tobacco jar. I hurled it at the man’s head, and he turned and fled precipitately, the heavy jar missing him by inches to smash against the door frame.

The door slammed to as I started after him, and I stopped in my tracks, breathing heavily. I glared at Sandringham, hands braced on my hips.

“Who is he?” I demanded.