An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana - Страница 268

“The captain threw me off,” the man said sullenly. “We had a disagreement. Where is she? On her way to Boston, I suppose.” He grinned unpleasantly. “If you swim fast enough, maybe you can catch her.”

IT TOOK THE last of his gold and a well-calculated mixture of threats and persuasion, but he found another ship. This one was headed south, to Charleston, but at the moment he would settle for being on the right continent. Once in America, he’d think again.

His sense of grim fury began finally to abate as the Philomene reached the open sea. Jenny stood beside him, small and silent, hands braced on the rail.

“What, a piuthar?” He put his hand in the small of her back, rubbing gently with his knuckles. “You’re grieving Ian?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, pressing back into his touch, then opened them and turned her face up to him, frowning.

“No, I’m troubled, thinkin’ of your wife. She’ll be peeved wi’ me—about Laoghaire.”

He couldn’t help a wry smile at thought of Laoghaire.

“Laoghaire? Why?”

“What I did—when ye brought Claire home again to Lallybroch, from Edinburgh. I’ve never said sorry to ye for that,” she added, looking up earnestly into his face.

He laughed.

“I’ve never said sorry to you, have I? For bringing Claire home and being coward enough not to tell her about Laoghaire before we got there.”

The frown between her brows eased, and a flicker of light came back into her eyes.

“Well, no,” she said. “Ye haven’t told me sorry. So we’re square, are we?”

He hadn’t heard her say that to him since he’d left home at fourteen to foster at Leoch.

“We’re square,” he said. He put an arm round her shoulders and she slipped her own around his waist, and they stood close together, watching the last of France sink into the sea.

A SERIES OF SHORT, SHARP SHOCKS

I WAS IN MARSALI’S kitchen, plaiting Felicite’s hair while keeping one eye on the porridge over the fire, when the bell over the printshop door rang. I whipped a ribbon round the end of the plait and, with a quick admonition to the girls to watch the porridge, went out to attend to the customer.

To my surprise, it was Lord John. But a Lord John I had never seen before. He was not so much disheveled as shattered, everything in order save his face.

“What?” I said, deeply alarmed. “What’s happened? Is Henry—”

“Not Henry,” he said hoarsely. He put a hand flat on the counter, as though to steady himself. “I have—bad news.”

“I can see that,” I said, a little tartly. “Sit down, for God’s sake, before you fall down.”

He shook his head like a horse shaking off flies and looked at me. His face was ghastly, shocked and white, and the rims of his eyes showed red. But if it wasn’t Henry…

“Oh, God,” I said, a fist clenching deep in my chest. “Dottie. What’s happened to her?”

“Euterpe,” he blurted, and I stopped dead, jarred to the backbone.

“What?” I whispered. “What?”

“Lost,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Lost. With all hands.”

“No,” I said, trying for reason. “No, it’s not.”

He looked at me directly then, for the first time, and seized me by the forearm.

“Listen to me,” he said, and the pressure of his fingers terrified me. I tried to jerk away but couldn’t.

“Listen,” he said again. “I heard it this morning from a naval captain I know. I met him at the coffeehouse, and he was recounting the tragedy. He saw it.” His voice trembled, and he stopped for a moment, firming his jaw. “A storm. He had been chasing the ship, meaning to stop and board her, when the storm came upon them both. His own ship survived and limped in, badly damaged, but he saw the Euterpe swamped by a broaching wave, he said—I have no notion what that is—” He waved away his own digression, annoyed. “She went down before his eyes. The Roberts—his ship—hung about in hopes of picking up survivors.” He swallowed. “There were none.”

“None,” I said blankly. I heard what he said but took no meaning from the words.

“He is dead,” Lord John said softly, and let go of my arm. “He is gone.”

From the kitchen came the smell of burning porridge.

JOHN GREY STOPPED walking because he had come to the end of the street. He had been walking up and down the length of State Street since sometime before dawn. The sun was high now, and sweat-damp grit irritated the back of his neck, mud and dung splashed his stockings, and each step seemed to drive the nails in his shoe sole into the sole of his foot. He didn’t care.

The Delaware River flowed across his view, muddy and fish-smelling, and people jostled past him, crowding toward the end of the dock in hopes of getting on the ferry making its slow way toward them from the other side. Wavelets rose and lapped against the pier with an agitated sound that seemed to provoke the people waiting, for they began to push and shove, and one of the soldiers on the dock took down his musket from his shoulder and used it to shove a woman back.

She stumbled, shrieking, and her husband, a bantam-rooster of a man, bounced forward, fists clenched. The soldier said something, bared his teeth and made a shooing motion with the gun, his fellow, attracted by the disturbance, turned to see, and with no more than incitement than that, there was suddenly a heaving knot of people at the end of the dock and shouts and screams ran through the rest, as people toward the rear tried to get away from the violence, men in the crowd tried to press toward it, and someone was pushed into the water.

Grey took three steps back and watched as two little boys rushed out of the crowd, their faces bloated with fright, and ran off up the street. Somewhere in the crowd, he heard a woman’s high call, distraught: “Ethan! Johnny! Joooooohnnny!”

Some dim instinct said he should step forward, raise his own voice, assert his authority, sort this. He turned and walked away.

He wasn’t in uniform, he told himself. They wouldn’t listen, would be confused, he might do more harm than good. But he wasn’t in the habit of lying to himself, and dropped that line of argument at once.

He’d lost people before. Some of them dearly loved, more than life itself. But now he’d lost himself.

He walked slowly back toward his house in a numb daze. He hadn’t slept since the news had come, save in the snatches of complete physical exhaustion, slumped in the chair on Mercy Woodcock’s porch, waking disoriented, sticky with sap from the sycamores in her yard and covered with the tiny green caterpillars that swung down from the leaves on invisible strands of silk.

“Lord John.” He became aware of an insistent voice, and with it, the realization that whoever was speaking had called his name several times already. He stopped, and turned to find himself facing Captain Richardson. His mind went quite blank. Possibly his face had, too, for Richardson took him by the arm in a most familiar manner and drew him into an ordinary.

“Come with me,” Richardson said in a low voice, releasing his arm, but jerking his head toward the stair. Faint stirrings of curiosity and wariness made themselves felt through the haze that wrapped him, but he followed, the sound of his shoes hollow in the wooden stairwell.

Richardson closed the door of the room behind him and began speaking before Grey could gather his wits to begin questioning him regarding the very peculiar circumstances William had recounted.

“Mrs. Fraser,” Richardson said without preamble. “How well do you know her?”

Grey was so taken aback by this that he answered.

“She is the wife—the widow”—he corrected himself, feeling as though he had stuck a pin into a raw wound—“of a good friend.”

“A good friend,” Richardson repeated, with no particular emphasis. The man could scarcely look more nondescript, Grey thought, and had a sudden creeping vision of Hubert Bowles. The most dangerous spies were men whom no one would look at twice.