HE’D BEEN EXPECTING the walleyed maid, but Mrs. Sylvie came to the door herself. She recalled him; he saw a flicker of recognition and—he thought—pleasure in her eyes, though it didn’t go so far as a smile, of course.
“Mr. Murray,” she said, cool and calm. She looked down then, and lost a trifle of her composure. She pushed the wire-rimmed spectacles up on her nose for a better look at what accompanied him, then raised her head and fixed him with suspicion.
“What’s this?”
He’d been expecting this reaction and was ready for it. Without answering, he held up the fat wee pouch he’d made ready and shook it, so she could hear the metal clink inside.
Her face changed at that, and she stood back to let them in, though she went on looking wary.
Not so wary as the little heathens—he still had trouble thinking of them as girls—who hung back until he took them each by a scrawny neck and propelled them firmly into Mrs. Sylvie’s parlor. They sat—under compulsion—but looked as though they had something in mind, and he kept a beady gaze on them, even as he talked with the proprietor of the establishment.
“Maids?” she said, in open disbelief, looking at the girls. He’d washed them in their clothes—forcibly, and had several bites to show for it, though luckily none had festered yet—but there had been nothing to do about their hair save chop it off, and he wasn’t about to come near either one with a knife, for fear of injuring them or himself in the subsequent struggle. They sat and glared through the mats of their hair like gargoyles, red-eyed and malignant.
“Well, they dinna want to be whores,” he said mildly. “And I dinna want them to be, either. Not that I’ve any objection to the profession personally,” he added for the sake of politeness.
A muscle twitched by her mouth and she shot him a sharp glance—tinged with amusement—through her spectacles.
“I’m glad to hear it,” she said dryly. And dropped her eyes to his feet and raised them slowly, almost appraisingly, up the length of his body in a way that made him feel suddenly as though he’d been dipped in hot water. The eyes came to rest on his face again, and the look of amusement had intensified considerably.
He coughed, recollecting—with a mixture of embarrassment and lust—a number of interesting images from their encounter more than two years before. Outwardly, she was a plain woman past thirty, her face and manner much more those of an autocratic nun than a whore. Beneath the unassuming calico gown and muslin apron, though … she gave fair value, did Mistress Sylvie.
“I’m no asking as a favor, aye?” he said, and nodded at the pouch, which he had put down on the table by his chair. “I had it in mind to apprentice them, maybe?”
“Apprentice girls. In a brothel.” She didn’t make it a question, but her mouth twitched again.
“Ye could start them as maids—surely ye’ve cleaning to be done? Chamber pots to be emptied, and the like? And then if they should be clever enough”—he shot them a narrow glance of his own, and Hermione stuck out her tongue at him—“ye could maybe train them up to be cooks. Or sempstresses. Ye must need a deal of mending done, aye? Torn sheets and the like?”
“Torn shifts, more like,” she said, very dryly. Her eyes flickered toward the ceiling, where a sound of rhythmic squeaking indicated the presence of a paying customer.
The girls had sidled off their stools and were prowling the parlor like wild cats, nosing things and bristling with caution. He realized suddenly that they’d never seen a town, let alone a civilized person’s house.
Mrs. Sylvie leaned forward and picked up the pouch, her eyes widening in surprise at the weight of it. She opened it and poured a handful of greasy black shot into her hand, glancing sharply up from it to him. He didn’t speak, but smiled and, reaching forward, took one of the balls from the palm of her hand, dug his thumbnail hard into it, and dropped it back into her hand, the scored line glinting bright gold amid the darkness.
She pursed her lips, weighing the bag again.
“All of it?” It was, he’d estimated, more than fifty pounds’ worth of gold: half what he’d been carrying.
He made a long reach and took a china ornament out of Hermione’s hands.
“It’ll no be an easy job,” he said. “Ye’ll earn it, I think.”
“I think so, too,” she said, watching Trudy, who—with extreme nonchalance—had lowered her breeches and was relieving herself in a corner of the hearth. The secret of their sex revealed, the girls had quite abandoned their requirements of privacy.
Mrs. Sylvie rang her silver bell, and both girls turned toward the sound in surprise.
“Why me?” she asked.
“I couldna think of anyone else who might be able to deal with them,” Ian said simply.
“I’m very flattered.”
“Ye should be,” he said, smiling. “Have we a bargain, then?”
She drew a deep breath, eyeing the girls, who had their heads together, whispering, as they viewed her with the deepest suspicion. She let it out again, shaking her head.
“I think it’s likely a bad bargain—but times are hard.”
“What, in your business? I should think the demand must be fairly constant.” He’d meant to joke, but she rounded on him, eyes narrowing.
“Oh, the customers are ready enough to knock on my door, no matter what,” she said. “But they’ve no money these days—no one does. I’ll take a chicken or a flitch of bacon—but half of them haven’t got so much as that. They’ll pay with proclamation money, or Continentals, or scrip from a militia unit—want to guess how much any of those are worth in the market?”
“Aye, I—” But she was steaming like a kettle, and turned on him, hissing.
“Or they don’t pay at all. When times are fair, so are men, mostly. But pinch them a bit, and they stop seeing just why they need to pay for their pleasure—after all, what does it cost me? And I cannot refuse, or they will simply take what they want and then burn my house or hurt us for my temerity. You see that, I suppose?”
The bitterness in her voice stung like a nettle, and he abruptly abandoned a half-formed impulse to propose that they seal their bargain in a personal way.
“I see that,” he replied, as evenly as he could. “Is such a thing not always a risk of your profession, though? And ye’ve prospered so far, aye?”
Her mouth compressed for an instant.
“I had a … patron. A gentleman who offered me protection.”
“In return for … ?”
A hot flush rose in her thin cheeks.
“None of your business, sir.”
“Is it not?” He nodded at the pouch in her hand. “If I’m placing my—these—well, them”—he gestured at the girls, now fingering the fabric of a curtain—“with you, surely I am entitled to ask whether I might be placing them in danger by doing so?”
“They’re girls,” she replied briefly. “They were born in danger and will live their lives in that condition, regardless of circumstance.” But her hand had tightened on the pouch, knuckles white. He was that bit impressed that she was so honest, given that she plainly did need the money badly. In spite of her bitterness, though, he was rather enjoying the joust.
“D’ye think life’s no dangerous for a man, then?” he asked, and without pausing, “What happened to your pimp?”
The blood washed abruptly from her face, leaving it white as bleached bone. Her eyes flashed in it like sparks.
“He was my brother,” she said, and her voice dropped to a furious whisper. “The Sons of Liberty tarred and feathered him and left him on my doorstep to die. Now, sir—have you any further questions regarding my affairs, or is our business done?”
Before he could make shift to find any response at all to this, the door opened and a young woman came in. He felt a visceral shock at seeing her, and the edges of his vision went white. Then the room steadied round him and he found he could draw breath again.
It wasn’t Emily. The young woman—looking curiously from him to the little savages wrapped in the curtains—was part-Indian, small and gracefully built, with Emily’s long, thick, raven’s-wing hair flowing loose down her back. With Emily’s broad cheekbones and delicate round chin. But she wasn’t Emily.
Thank God, he thought, but at the same time suffered a hollowness of the wame. He felt as though the sight of her had been a cannonball that had struck him and, having passed straight through his body, left a gaping hole in its wake.
Mrs. Sylvie was giving the Indian girl brisk instructions, pointing at Hermione and Trudy. The girl’s black brows rose briefly, but she nodded, and smiling at the girls, invited them to accompany her to the kitchen for some food.
The little girls promptly disentangled themselves from the curtains; it had been a long time since breakfast, and he’d had nothing for them then save a bit of drammach and some jerked bear meat, hard as shoe leather.
They followed the Indian girl to the door of the room, sparing him not a glance. At the door, though, Hermione turned, and hitching up her baggy-seated breeches, fixed him with a glare and pointed a long, skinny finger of accusation at him.
“If we turns out to be whores after all, you fucker, I’m gonna hunt you down, cut your balls off, and stuff ’em up your arse.”
He took his leave with what dignity he could, the peals of Mrs. Sylvie’s laughter ringing in his ears.
PULLING TEETH
New Bern, colony of North Carolina
April 1777
I HATED PULLING TEETH. The figure of speech that likens something of extreme difficulty to pulling teeth is not hyperbole. Even in the best of situations—a large person with a big mouth and a placid temperament, the affected tooth one of those toward the front of the mouth and in the upper jaw (less in the way of roots and much easier of access)—it was a messy, slippery, bone-crack business. And underlying the sheer physical unpleasantness of the job was usually an inescapable feeling of depression at the probable outcome.
It was necessary—beyond the pain of an abscessed tooth, a bad abscess could release bacteria into the bloodstream, causing septicemia and even death—but to remove a tooth, with no good means of replacing it, was to compromise not merely the patient’s appearance but also the function and structure of the mouth. A missing tooth allowed all those near it to shift out of place, altering the bite and making chewing much less efficient. Which in turn affected the patient’s nutrition, general health, and prospects for a long and happy life.
Not, I reflected grimly, changing position yet again in hopes of gaining a view of the tooth I was after, that even the removal of several teeth would greatly damage the dentition of the poor little girl whose mouth I was working on.
She couldn’t be more than eight or nine, with a narrow jaw and a pronounced overbite. Her canine baby teeth had not fallen out on time, and the permanent ones had come in behind them, giving her a sinister double-fanged appearance. This was aggravated by the unusual narrowness of her upper jaw, which had forced the two emergent front incisors to buckle inward, turning toward each other in such a way that the front surfaces of each tooth almost touched each other.
I touched the abscessed upper molar and she jerked against the straps that bound her to the chair, letting out a shriek that ran under my fingernails like a bamboo splinter.
“Give her a bit more, please, Ian.” I straightened up, feeling as though my lower back had been squeezed in a vise; I’d been working for several hours in the front room of Fergus’s printshop, and had a small bowl full of bloodstained teeth at my elbow and a rapt crowd outside the window to show for it.
Ian made a dubious Scottish noise, but picked up the bottle of whisky and made an encouraging clucking noise toward the little girl, who screamed again at sight of his tattooed face and clamped her mouth shut. The girl’s mother, out of patience, slapped her briskly, snatched the bottle from Ian’s hand, and inserting it into her daughter’s mouth, upended it, pinching the girl’s nose shut with the other hand.
The child’s eyes went round as pennies and an explosion of whisky droplets sprayed from the corners of her mouth—but her scrawny little neck bobbed convulsively as she swallowed, nonetheless.
“I really think that’s enough,” I said, rather alarmed at the quantity of whisky the child was swallowing. It was very bad whisky, acquired locally, and while Jamie and Ian had both tasted it and, after some discussion, decided that it probably wouldn’t make anyone go blind, I had reservations about using it in any great amount.
“Hmm,” said the mother, examining her daughter critically, but not removing the bottle. “That’ll do it, I suppose.”
The child’s eyes had rolled back in her head, and the straining little body suddenly relaxed, falling limp against the chair. The mother removed the whisky bottle, wiped the mouth of it tidily on her apron, and handed it back to Ian with a nod.
I hastily examined her pulse and breathing, but she seemed in reasonably good shape—so far, at least.
“Carpe diem,” I muttered, grabbing my tooth pliers. “Or perhaps I mean carpe vinorum? Watch to see she keeps breathing, Ian.”
Ian laughed and tilted the bottle, wetting a tiny swab of clean cloth with whisky for the mopping up.
“I think ye’ll have time to take more than the one tooth, Auntie, if ye want. Ye could likely pull every tooth in the poor lassie’s head and she wouldna twitch.”
“It’s a thought,” I said, turning the child’s head. “Can you bring the mirror, Ian?”
I had a tiny square of looking glass which could, with luck, be used to direct sunlight into a patient’s mouth. And there was sunlight streaming through the window in abundance, warm and bright. Unfortunately, there were any number of curious heads pressed against the window, too, which kept moving into the path of the sun, frustrating Ian’s attempts to beam sunlight where I needed it.
“Marsali!” I called, a thumb on the girl’s pulse, just in case.
“Aye?” She came through from the back room where she’d been cleaning—or, rather, dirtying—type, wiping inky hands on a rag. “D’ye need Henri-Christian again?”
“If you—or he—don’t mind.”
“Not him,” she assured me. “Likes nothing better, the wee praise-hog. Joanie! Félicité! Come fetch the wean, will ye? He’s wanted out front.”
Félicité and Joan—aka the hell-kittens, as Jamie called them—came eagerly; they enjoyed Henri-Christian’s performances nearly as much as he did.
“Come on, Bubbles!” Joanie called, holding open the door to the kitchen. Henri-Christian came scampering out, rolling from side to side on short, bowed legs, ruddy face beaming.
“Hoopla, hoopla, hoopla!” he shouted, making for the door.
“Put his hat on him!” Marsali called. “The wind will get in his ears.”
It was a bright day, but was windy, and Henri-Christian had a tendency to ear infection. He had a woolen hat that tied under the chin, though, knitted in blue and white stripes and decorated with a row of red bobbles—Brianna had made it for him, and the sight of it squeezed my heart a little, warmth and pain together.
The girls each took him by a hand—Félicité stretching up at the last moment to grab an old slouch hat of her father’s from the peg, to put out for coins—and went out, to cheers and whistles from the crowd. Through the window, I could see Joanie clearing the books displayed on the table outside, and Félicité hoisting Henri-Christian up in their stead. He spread his stubby, powerful arms, beaming, and bowed in accomplished fashion to one side and the other. Then he bent, put his hands on the tabletop, and, with a remarkable degree of controlled grace, stood on his head.
I didn’t wait to watch the rest of his show—it was mostly simple dancing and kicks, interspersed with somersaults and headstands, but made enchanting by his dwarfed stature and vivid personality. He had shifted the crowd away from the window momentarily, though, which was what I wanted.
“Now, Ian,” I said, and went back to work. With the flickering light from the mirror, it was a little easier to see what I was doing, and I got to grips with the tooth almost at once. This was the tricky part, though; the tooth was badly cracked, and there was a good chance that it might fracture when I twisted it, rather than draw cleanly. And if that should happen …
But it didn’t. There was a small, muffled crack! as the roots of the tooth parted from the jawbone, and I was holding the tiny white thing, intact.
The child’s mother, who had been watching intently, sighed and relaxed a little. The little girl sighed, too, and settled in the chair. I checked again, but her pulse was fine, though her breathing was shallow. She’d likely sleep for—
A thought struck me.
“You know,” I said to the mother, a little hesitantly, “I could draw one or two more teeth without hurting her. See …” I moved aside, motioning her to look. “These”—I touched the overdue baby canines—“ought to be drawn at once, to let the teeth behind take their places. And you see these front teeth, of course…. Well, I’ve taken the upper bicuspid molar on the left; if I were to take the same tooth on the right, I think that perhaps her teeth would shift a bit, to fill the empty space. And if you could persuade her to press with her tongue against those front teeth, whenever she thought of it …” It wasn’t orthodontia by any means, and it did carry some increased risk of infection, but I was sorely tempted. The poor child looked like a cannibal bat.
“Hmmmm,” said the mother, frowning into her daughter’s mouth. “How much will you give me for them?”
“How much … you want me to pay you?”
“They’re fine, sound teeth,” the mother replied promptly. “The tooth-drawer down to the harbor ’ud give me a shilling apiece. And Glory’ll need the money for her dowry.”
“Her dowry?” I repeated, surprised. The mother shrugged.
“No one’s likely to take the poor creature for her looks, now, are they?”
I was obliged to admit that this was likely true; her deplorable dentition quite aside, calling the child homely would be a compliment.
“Marsali,” I called. “Have you got four shillings?” The gold in my hem swung heavily round my feet, but I couldn’t make use of it in this situation.
Marsali turned from the window, where she’d been keeping an eye on Henri-Christian and the girls, startled.
“Not cash money, no.”
“It’s all right, Auntie. I’ve some money.” Ian put down the mirror and dug in his sporran, emerging with a handful of coins. “Mind,” he said, fixing the woman with a hard eye, “ye’d no get more nor thruppence each for sound teeth—and likely no but a penny for a child’s.”
The woman, nothing daunted, looked down her nose at him.
“There speaks a grasping Scotchman,” she said. “For all you’re tattooed like a savage. Sixpence each, then, you penny-pinching miser!”
Ian grinned at her, displaying his own fine teeth, which, if not entirely straight, were in excellent condition.
“Going to carry the wean down to the quay and let yon butcher rip her mouth to shreds?” he inquired pleasantly. “She’ll be awake by then, ken. And screaming. Three.”
“Ian!” I said.
“Well, I’m no going to let her cheat ye, Auntie. Bad enough she’s wantin’ ye to draw the lassie’s teeth for nothing, let alone pay for the honor!”
Emboldened by my intervention, the woman stuck out her chin and repeated, “Sixpence!”
Marsali, attracted by the altercation, came to peer into the girl’s mouth.
“Ye’ll not find that one a husband for less than ten pound,” she informed the woman bluntly. “Not lookin’ like that. A man would be feart of bein’ bitten when he kissed her. Ian’s right. In fact, ye should be payin’ double for it.”
“Ye agreed to pay when ye came in, no?” Ian pressed. “Tuppence to have the tooth drawn—and my aunt made ye a bargain at that, out of pity for the wean.”
“Bloodsuckers!” the woman exclaimed. “It’s true what they say—you Scots ’ud take the pennies from a dead man’s eyes!”
Plainly this wasn’t going to be settled in a hurry; I could feel both Ian and Marsali settling down to an enjoyable session of tag-team haggling. I sighed and took the mirror out of Ian’s hand. I wouldn’t need it for the canines, and perhaps by the time I got to the other bicuspid, he’d be paying attention again.
In fact, the canines were simple; baby teeth, almost without roots, and ready to fall—I could probably have tweaked them out with my fingers. One quick twist each and they were out, the gums barely bleeding. Pleased, I dabbed the sites with a whisky-soaked swab, then considered the bicuspid.
It was on the other side of the mouth, which meant that by tilting the girl’s head back, I could get a bit of light without using the mirror. I took Ian’s hand—he was so engaged in argument that he barely noticed—and put it on the girl’s head to hold it back and steady, then carefully insinuated my pliers.
A shadow crossed my light, vanished—then came back, blocking it utterly. I turned in annoyance, to find a rather elegant-looking gentleman peering through the window, a look of interest on his face.
I scowled at him and motioned him aside. He blinked at me, but then nodded apology and stepped aside. Not waiting for any further interruption, I crouched, got hold of the tooth, and twisted it free with a lucky wrench.
Humming with satisfaction, I dribbled whisky over the bleeding hole, then tilted her head to the other side and pressed a swab gently over the gum, to help drain the abscess. Felt a sudden extra slackness in the wobbly little neck and froze.
Ian felt it, too; he broke off in the middle of a sentence and shot me a startled look.
“Untie her,” I said. “Quick.”
He had her loosed in an instant, and I seized her under the arms and laid her on the floor, her head flopping like a rag doll’s. Ignoring startled exclamations from Marsali and the girl’s mother, I tilted back her head, swiped the swab out of her mouth, and, pinching shut her nose with my fingers, sealed my mouth to hers and started resuscitation.
It was like blowing up a small, tough balloon: reluctance, resistance, then, finally, a rise of the chest. But chests don’t yield like rubber; the blowing didn’t get easier.
I had the fingers of my other hand on her neck, feeling desperately for a carotid pulse. There … Was it? … Yes, it was! Her heart was still beating, though faintly.
Breathe. Pause. Breathe. Pause … I felt the tiny gush of exhalation, and then the narrow chest moved by itself. I waited, blood pounding in my ears, but it didn’t move again. Breathe. Pause. Breathe …
Again the chest moved, and this time continued to rise and fall under its own power. I sat up on my heels, my own breath coming fast and a cold sweat misting my face.
The girl’s mother was staring down at me, her mouth half open. I noted dimly that her own dentition wasn’t bad; God knew what her husband looked like.
“She’s—is she … ?” the woman asked, blinking and glancing back and forth between me and her daughter.
“She’s fine,” I said flatly. I stood up slowly, feeling light-headed. “She can’t go until the whisky’s worn off, though; I think she’ll be all right, but she might stop breathing again. Someone needs to watch her ’til she wakes. Marsali … ?”
“Aye, I’ll put her in the trundle,” Marsali said, coming to look. “Oh, there ye are, Joanie—will ye come and keep an eye on this poor wean for a bit? She needs to lie down on your bed.”
The children had come in, red-cheeked and giggling, with a hatful of small coins and buttons, but seeing the girl on the floor, hurried over to look, too.
“Hoopla,” Henri-Christian remarked, impressed.
“Is she deid?” Félicité asked, more practically.
“If she was, Maman wouldna be asking me to watch her,” Joanie pointed out. “She’s no going to sick up in my bed, is she?”
“I’ll put a towel down,” Marsali promised, squatting to scoop the little girl up. Ian beat her to it, lifting the child gently.
“We’ll just charge ye tuppence, then,” he said to the mother. “But we’ll give ye all the teeth for free, aye?”
Looking stunned, she nodded, then followed the crowd into the back of the house. I heard the thunder of multiple feet going up the stairs, but didn’t follow; my own legs had gone to water, and I sat down quite suddenly.
“Are you all right, madame?” I looked up to find the elegant stranger inside the shop, looking curiously at me.
I picked up the half-empty bottle of whisky and took a substantial swallow. It burned like brimstone and tasted like charred bones. I made wheezing noises and my eyes watered, but I didn’t actually cough.
“Fine,” I said hoarsely. “Perfectly fine.” I cleared my throat and wiped my eyes on my sleeve. “Can I help you?”
A faint look of amusement crossed his features.
“I do not require to have a tooth drawn, which is probably good luck for both of us. However—may I?” He withdrew a slim silver flask from his pocket and handed it to me, then sat down. “I think it’s perhaps a little more fortifying than … that.” He nodded at the uncorked whisky bottle, his nose wrinkling a little.
I uncorked the flask, and the full-bodied scent of very good brandy floated out like a genie.
“Thank you,” I said briefly, and drank, closing my eyes. “Very much indeed,” I added a moment later, opening them. Fortifying, indeed. Warmth collected in my center and purled like smoke through my limbs.
“My pleasure, madame,” he said, and smiled. He was undeniably a dandy, and a rich one, too, with a good deal of lace about his person, gilt buttons on his waistcoat, a powdered wig, and two black silk beauty patches on his face—a star beside his left brow, and a rearing horse on his right cheek. Not a getup one saw often in North Carolina, especially not these days.
Despite the encrustations, he was a handsome man, I thought, perhaps forty or so, with soft dark eyes that glinted with humor, and a delicate, sensitive face. His English was very good, though it carried a distinct Parisian accent.
“Have I the honor of addressing Mrs. Fraser?” he asked. I saw his eyes pass over my scandalously bare head, but he politely made no comment.
“Well, you have,” I said dubiously. “But I may not be the one you want. My daughter-in-law is Mrs. Fraser, too; she and her husband own this shop. So if you were wanting something printed—”
“Mrs. James Fraser?”
I paused instinctively, but there wasn’t much alternative to answering.
“I am, yes. Is it my husband you want?” I asked warily. People wanted Jamie for a lot of things, and it wasn’t always desirable that they find him.
He smiled, eyes crinkling pleasantly.
“It is indeed, Mrs. Fraser. The captain of my ship said that Mr. Fraser had come to speak with him this morning, seeking passage.”
My heart gave a sharp leap at this.
“Oh! You have a ship, Mr…. ?”
“Beauchamp,” he said, and, picking up my hand, kissed it gracefully. “Percival Beauchamp, at your service, madame. I do—she is called Huntress.”
I actually thought my heart had stopped for a moment, but it hadn’t, and resumed beating with a noticeable thump.
“Beauchamp,” I said. “Beechum?” He’d pronounced it in the French way, but at this, he nodded, smile growing wider.
“Yes, the English say it that way. You said your daughter-in-law … so the Mr. Fraser who owns this shop is your husband’s son?”
“Yes,” I said again, but automatically. Don’t be silly, I scolded myself. It isn’t an uncommon name. Likely he hasn’t anything at all to do with your family! And yet—a French-English connection. I knew my father’s family had come from France to England sometime in the eighteenth century—but that was all I knew about them. I stared at him in fascination. Was there anything familiar about his face, anything I could match with my faint recollections of my parents, the stronger ones of my uncle?
He had pale skin, like mine, but then, most upper-class people did, they taking great pains to shelter their faces from the sun. His eyes were much darker than mine, and beautiful, but shaped differently, rounder. The brows—had my uncle Lamb’s brows had that shape, heavy near the nose, trailing off in a graceful arch … ?
Absorbed in this tantalizing puzzle, I’d missed what he was saying.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The little boy,” he repeated, with a nod toward the door through which the children had disappeared. “He was shouting, ‘Hoopla!’ As French street performers do. Has the family a French connection of some kind?”
Belated alarms began to go off, and unease rippled the hairs on my forearms.
“No,” I said, trying to iron my face into a politely quizzical expression. “Likely he’s just heard it from someone. There was a small troupe of French acrobats who passed through the Carolinas last year.”
“Ah, doubtless that’s it.” He leaned forward a little, dark eyes intent. “Did you see them yourself?”
“No. My husband and I … don’t live here,” I ended hurriedly. I’d been about to tell him where we did live, but I didn’t know how much—if anything—he knew about Fergus’s circumstances. He sat back, pursing his lips a little in disappointment.
“Ah, too bad. I thought perhaps the gentleman I am in search of might have belonged to this troupe. Though I suppose you would not have known their names, even had you seen them,” he added as an afterthought.
“You’re looking for someone? A Frenchman?” I lifted the bowl of bloodstained teeth and began to pick through it, affecting nonchalance.
“A man named Claudel. He was born in Paris—in a brothel,” he added, with a faint air of apology for using such an indelicate term in my presence. “He would be in his early forties now—forty-one or -two, perhaps.”
“Paris,” I repeated, listening for Marsali’s footfalls on the stair. “What leads you to suppose that he’s in North Carolina?”
He lifted one shoulder in a graceful shrug.
“He may well not be. I do know that roughly thirty years ago, he was taken from the brothel by a Scotsman, and that this man was described as of striking appearance, very tall, with brilliant red hair. Beyond that, I encountered a morass of possibilities …” He smiled wryly. “Fraser was described to me variously as a wine merchant, a Jacobite, a Loyalist, a traitor, a spy, an aristocrat, a farmer, an importer—or a smuggler; the terms are interchangeable—with connections reaching from a convent to the Royal court.”
Which was, I thought, an extremely accurate portrait of Jamie. Though I could see why it hadn’t been much help in finding him. On the other hand … here Beauchamp was.
“I did discover a wine merchant named Michael Murray, who, upon hearing this description, told me that it resembled his uncle, one James Fraser, who had emigrated to America more than ten years ago.” The dark eyes were less humorous now, fixed intently upon me.
“When I inquired about the child Claudel, though, Monsieur Murray professed complete ignorance of such a person. In rather vehement terms.”
“Oh?” I said, and picked up a large molar with serious caries, squinting at it. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ. I knew Michael only by name; one of Young Ian’s elder brothers, he had been born after my departure and had already gone to France by the time I returned to Lallybroch—there to be educated and taken into the wine business with Jared Fraser, an elderly and childless cousin of Jamie’s. Michael had, of course, grown up with Fergus at Lallybroch and knew bloody well what his original name was. And apparently had detected or suspected something in this stranger’s demeanor that had alarmed him.
“Do you mean to say that you came all the way to America, knowing nothing except a man’s name and that he has red hair?” I asked, trying to seem mildly incredulous. “Goodness—you must have considerable interest in finding this Claudel!”
“Oh, I do, madame.” He looked at me, smiling faintly, head on one side. “Tell me, Mrs. Fraser—has your husband red hair?”
“Yes,” I said. There was no point in denying it, since anyone in New Bern would tell him so—and likely had already, I reflected. “So do any number of his relations—and about half the population of the Scottish Highlands.” This was a wild overstatement, but I was reasonably sure that Mr. Beauchamp hadn’t been combing the Highlands personally, either.
I could hear voices upstairs; Marsali might be coming down any minute, and I didn’t want her walking into the midst of this particular conversation.
“Well,” I said, and got to my feet in a decided manner. “I’m sure you’ll be wanting to talk to my husband—and he to you. He’s gone on an errand, though, and won’t be back until sometime tomorrow. Are you staying somewhere in the town?”
“The King’s Inn,” he said, rising, as well. “If you will tell your husband to find me there, madame? I thank you.” Bending low, he took my hand and kissed it again, then smiled at me and backed out of the shop, leaving a scent of bergamot and hyssop mingled with the ghost of good brandy.