I LIFTED THE GLASS of brandy and took a sip, then raised it and looked critically through it.
“No, it’s just brandy,” I said. “Not opium.”
“I beg your pardon?” He looked involuntarily into his own glass, just in case, and I laughed.
“I mean,” I clarified, “that good as it is, it’s not nearly good enough to make me believe a story like that.”
He didn’t take offense but tilted his head to one side.
“Can you think of any reason why I should invent such a tale?”
“No,” I admitted, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, does it?”
“What I have told you is not impossible, is it?”
I considered that one for a moment.
“Not technically impossible,” I conceded. “But certainly implausible.”
“Have you ever seen an ostrich?” he asked, and, without inquiring, poured more brandy into my glass.
“Yes. Why?”
“You must admit that ostriches are frankly implausible,” he said. “But clearly not impossible.”
“One to you,” I conceded. “But I do think that Fergus being the lost heir to the Comte St. Germain’s fortune is slightly more implausible than an ostrich. Particularly if you consider the part about the marriage license. I mean … a lost legitimate heir? It is France we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
He laughed at that. His face had flushed with brandy and amusement, and I could see how very attractive he must have been in his youth. He wasn’t by any means bad-looking now, come to that.
“Do you mind my asking what you do for a living?” I asked curiously.
He was disconcerted by that and rubbed a hand over his jaw before answering, but met my eyes.
“I sleep with rich women,” he said, and his voice held a faint but disturbing trace of bitterness.
“Well, I do hope you aren’t regarding me in the light of a business opportunity. The gold-rimmed spectacles notwithstanding, I really haven’t got any money.”
He smiled and hid it in his brandy glass.
“No, but you would be a great deal more entertaining than the usual woman who does.”
“I’m flattered,” I said politely. We sipped brandy in silence for a bit, both thinking how to proceed. It was raining—naturally—and the patter of it on the street outside and the hiss of the fire beside us was soothing in the extreme. I felt oddly comfortable with him, but after all, I couldn’t spend all day here; I had a book to write.
“All right,” I said. “ Why have you told me this story? Wait—there are two parts to that. One, why tell me rather than Fergus himself? And two, what is your personal interest in the situation, assuming it is true?”
“I did try to tell Mr. Fraser—Fergus Fraser, that is,” he said slowly. “He declined to speak with me.”
“Oh!” I said, recalling something. “Was it you who tried to abduct him, in North Carolina?”
“No, it wasn’t,” he said promptly, and with every evidence of sincerity. “I did hear about the occasion, but I don’t know who his assailant was. More than likely, it was someone he had annoyed with his work.” He shrugged that off and continued. “As for my personal interest… that runs along with the reason for my telling your husband—because I’m telling you only as your husband is unavailable.”
“And that would be?”
He glanced quickly round to see that we were not overheard. No one was near us, but he still lowered his voice.
“I—and the interests I represent in France—wish the rebellion in America to succeed.”
I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that, and I gawked at him.
“You expect me to believe you’re an American patriot?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I don’t care about politics in the slightest. I’m a man of business.” He eyed me assessingly. “Have you ever heard of a company called Hortalez et Cie?”
“No.”
“It is ostensibly an importing and exporting business, run out of Spain. What it actually is is a facade for the purpose of funneling money to the Americans, without visibly involving the French government. We have so far moved many thousands through it, mostly to buy arms and ammunition. Madame LeGrand mentioned the company to your husband but without telling him what it was. She left it to me to decide whether to reveal the true nature of Hortalez to him.”
“You’re a French intelligence agent—is that what you’re telling me?” I said, the penny dropping at last.
He bowed.
“But you aren’t French, I don’t think,” I added, looking hard at him. “You’re English.”
“I was.” He looked away. “I am a citizen of France now.”
He fell silent, and I leaned back a little in my chair, watching him—and wondering. Wondering both how much of this was true and, in a more distant way, whether he might conceivably be an ancestor of mine. Beauchamp was not an uncommon name, and there was no great physical resemblance between us. His hands were long-fingered and graceful, like mine, but the fingers were shaped differently. The ears? His were somewhat large, though delicately shaped. I really had no idea what my own ears looked like, but assumed that if they were noticeably large, Jamie would have mentioned it at some point.
“What is it that you want?” I asked quietly at last, and he looked up.
“Tell your husband what I have told you, if you please, madame,” he said, quite serious for once. “And suggest to him that it is not only in the best interests of his foster son to pursue this matter—but very much in the interests of America.”
“How is that?”
He lifted one shoulder, slim and elegant.
“The Comte St. Germain had extensive land holdings in a part of America that is currently held by Great Britain. The French part of his estate—currently being squabbled over by a number of claimants—is extremely valuable. If Fergus Fraser can be proved to be Claudel Rakoczy—Rakoczy is the family name, you understand—and the heir to this fortune, he would be able to use it to help in financing the revolution. From what I know of him and his activities—and I know a good deal, by this time—I think he would be amenable to these aims. If the revolution is successful, then those who backed it would have substantial influence over whatever government is formed.”
“And you could stop sleeping with rich women for money?”
A wry smile spread over his face.
“Precisely.” He rose and bowed deeply to me. “A great pleasure to speak with you, madame.”
He had almost reached the door when I called after him.
“Monsieur Beauchamp!”
“Yes?” He turned and looked back, a dark, slender man whose face was marked with humor—and with pain, I thought.
“Have you any children?”
He looked completely startled at that.
“I really don’t think so.”
“Oh,” I said. “I only wondered. Good day to you, sir.”
SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI
The Scottish Highlands
IT WAS A LONG WALK from the farmhouse at Balnain. As it was early January in Scotland, it was also wet and cold. Very wet. And very cold. No snow—and I rather wished there had been, as it might have discouraged Hugh Fraser’s insane notion—but it had been raining for days, in that dismal way that makes hearths smoke, and even clothes that have not been outside grow damp, and drives the chill so far into your bones that you think you’ll never be warm again.
I’d come to this conviction myself some hours ago, but the only alternative to continuing to slog through the rain and mud was to lie down and die, and I hadn’t quite reached that extremity. Yet.
The creaking of the wheels stopped abruptly, with that slushing sound that indicated they had sunk once more in the mud. Under his breath, Jamie said something grossly inappropriate to a funeral, and Ian smothered a laugh with a cough—which became real and went hoarsely on and on, sounding like the bark of a large, tired dog.
I took the flask of whisky out from under my cloak—I didn’t think something with that kind of alcohol content would freeze, but I wasn’t taking any chances—and handed it to Ian. He gulped, wheezed as though he’d been hit by a truck, coughed some more, and then handed the flask back, breathing hard, and nodded thanks. His nose was red and running.
So were all the noses around me. Some of them possibly from grief, though I suspected that either the weather or the catarrh was responsible for most of them. The men had all gathered without comment—they’d had practice—around the coffin and, with concerted heaving, managed to get it out of the ruts and onto a firmer section of road, this covered mostly in rocks.
“How long do you think it’s been since Simon Fraser last came home?” I whispered to Jamie, as he came back to take his place beside me toward the end of the funeral procession. He shrugged and wiped his nose with a soggy handkerchief.
“Years. He wouldna really have had cause, would he?”
I supposed not. As a result of the wake held the night before at the farmhouse—a place a little smaller than Lallybroch but constructed on much the same lines—I now knew a great deal more about Simon Fraser’s military career and exploits than I had before, but the eulogy hadn’t included a timetable. If he’d fought everywhere they said he had, though, he would hardly have had time to change his socks between campaigns, let alone come home to Scotland. And the estate wasn’t his, after all; he was the second youngest of nine children. His wife, the tiny bainisq trudging at the head of the procession on her brother-in-law Hugh’s arm, had no household of her own, I gathered, and lived with Hugh’s family, she having no children alive—or nearby, at least—to care for her.
I did wonder whether she was pleased that we’d brought him home. Would it not have been better just to know that he’d died abroad, doing his duty and doing it well, than to be presented with the dismayingly pitiful detritus of her husband, no matter how professionally packaged?
But she had seemed, if not happy, at least somewhat gratified at being the center of such a fuss. Her crumpled face had flushed and seemed to unfold a little during the festivities of the night, and now she walked on with no sign of flagging, doggedly stepping over the ruts made by her husband’s coffin.
It was Hugh’s fault. Simon’s much elder brother and the owner of Balnain, he was a spindly little old man, barely taller than his widowed sister-in-law, and with romantic notions. It was his pronouncement that, instead of planting Simon decently in the family burying ground, the family’s most gallant warrior should be interred in a place more suited to his honor and the reverence due him.
Bainisq, pronounced “bann-eeshg,” meant a little old lady; was a little old man merely an “eeshg”? I wondered, looking at Hugh’s back. I thought I wouldn’t ask until we were back at the house—assuming we made it there by nightfall.
At long last, Corrimony hove into sight. According to Jamie, the name meant “a hollow in the moor,” and it was. Within the cup-shaped hollow in the grass and heather rose a low dome; as we grew closer, I saw that it was made from thousands and thousands of small river rocks, most the size of a fist, some the size of a person’s head. And around this dark gray rain-slicked cairn was a circle of standing stones.
I clutched Jamie’s arm by reflex. He glanced at me in surprise, then realized what I was looking at and frowned.
“D’ye hear anything, Sassenach?” he murmured.
“Only the wind.” This had been moaning along with the funeral procession, mostly drowning out the old man chanting the coronach before the coffin, but as we came out onto the open moor, it picked up speed and rose several tones in pitch, sending cloaks and coats and skirts flapping like ravens’ wings.
I kept a cautious eye on the stones but sensed nothing as we drew to a halt before the cairn. It was a passage tomb, of the general kind they called a clava cairn; I had no notion what that signified, but Uncle Lamb had had photographs of many such sites. The passage was meant to orient with some astronomical object on some significant date. I glanced up at the leaden, weeping sky and decided that today was probably not the day, anyway.
“We dinna ken who was buried there,” Hugh had explained to us the day before. “But clearly a great chieftain of some sort. Must ha’ been, the terrible trouble it is to build a cairn like that!”
“Aye, to be sure,” Jamie had said, adding delicately. “The great chieftain: he’s no buried there anymore?”
“Oh, no,” Hugh assured us. “The earth took him, long since. There’s no but a wee stain of his bones there now. And ye needna be worrit about there being a curse upon the place, either.”
“Oh, good,” I murmured, but he paid no attention.
“Some lang nebbit opened the tomb a hundred years ago or more, so if there was to be a curse on it, it surely went off attached to him.”
This was comforting, and in fact none of the people now standing about the cairn seemed at all put off or bothered by its proximity. Though it might just be that they had lived near it for so long that it had become no more than a feature of the landscape.
There was a certain amount of practical discussion, the men looking at the cairn and shaking their heads dubiously, gesturing in turn toward the open passage that led to the burial chamber, then toward the top of the cairn, where the stones had either been removed or had simply fallen in and been cleared away below. The women gravitated closer together, waiting. We had arrived in a fog of fatigue the day before, and while I had been introduced to all of them, I had trouble keeping the proper name attached to the proper face. In truth, their faces all looked similar—thin, worn, and pale, with a sense of chronic exhaustion about them, a tiredness much deeper than waking the dead would account for.
I had a sudden recollection of Mrs. Bug’s funeral. Makeshift and hasty—and yet carried out with dignity and genuine sorrow on the part of the mourners. I thought these people had barely known Simon Fraser.
How much better to have regarded his own last wish as stated and left him on the battlefield with his fallen comrades, I thought. But whoever said funerals were for the benefit of the living had had the right of it.
The sense of failure and futility that had followed the defeat at Saratoga had made his own officers determined to accomplish something, to make a proper gesture toward a man they had loved and a warrior they honored. Perhaps they had wanted to send him home, too, because of their desire for their own homes.
The same sense of failure—plus a deadly streak of romanticism—had doubtless made General Burgoyne insist upon the gesture; I thought he likely felt his own honor required it. And then Hugh Fraser, reduced to a hand-to-mouth existence in the wake of Culloden and faced with the unexpected homecoming of his younger brother, unable to produce much in the way of a funeral, but deeply romantic himself… and the end of it this strange procession, bringing Simon Fraser to a home no longer his and a wife who was a stranger to him.
And his place will know him no more. The line came to mind as the men made their decision and began to dismount the coffin from its wheels. I had drawn closer, along with the other women, and found I was now standing within a foot or two of one of the standing stones that ringed the cairn. These were smaller than the stones on Craigh na Dun—no more than two or three feet high. Moved by sudden impulse, I reached out and touched it.
I hadn’t expected anything to happen, and it very luckily didn’t. Though had I suddenly vanished in the midst of the burial, it would have substantially enlivened the event.
No buzzing, no screaming, no sensation at all. It was just a rock. After all, I thought, there was no reason why all standing stones should be assumed to mark time portals. Presumably the ancient builders had used stones to mark any place of significance—and surely a cairn like this one must have been significant. I wondered what sort of man—or woman, perhaps?—had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.
The coffin was lowered to the ground and—with much grunting and puffing—shoved through the passage into the burial chamber in the center of the tomb. There was a large flat slab of stone that lay against the cairn, this incised with strange cup-shaped marks, presumably made by the original builders. Four of the stronger men took hold of this and maneuvered it slowly over the top of the cairn, sealing the hole above the chamber.
It fell with a muffled thud that sent a few small rocks rolling down the sides of the cairn. The men came down then, and we all stood rather awkwardly round it, wondering what to do next.
There was no priest here. The funeral Mass for Simon had been said earlier, in a small, bare stone church, before the procession to this thoroughly pagan burial. Evidently, Hugh’s researches hadn’t discovered anything regarding rites for such things.
Just when it seemed that we would be obliged simply to turn round and slog our way back to the farmhouse, Ian coughed explosively and stepped forward.
The funeral procession was drab in the extreme, none of the bright tartans that had graced Highland ceremonies in the past. Even Jamie’s appearance was subdued, cloaked, and his hair covered with a black slouch hat. The sole exception to the general somberness was Ian.
He had provoked stares when he’d come downstairs this morning, and the staring hadn’t stopped. With good reason. He’d shaved most of his head and greased the remaining strip of hair into a stiff ridge down the middle of his scalp, to which he had attached a dangling ornament of turkey feathers with a pierced silver sixpence. He was wearing a cloak, but under it had put on his worn buckskins, with the blue-and-white wampum armlet his wife, Emily, had made for him.
Jamie had looked him slowly up and down when he appeared and nodded, one corner of his mouth turning up.
“It willna make a difference, aye?” he’d said quietly to Ian as we headed for the door. “They’ll still ken ye for who ye are.”
“Will they?” Ian had said, but then ducked out into the downpour without waiting for an answer.
Jamie had undoubtedly been right; the Indian finery was a dress rehearsal in preparation for his arrival at Lallybroch, for we were bound there directly, once Simon’s body was decently disposed of and the farewell whisky had been drunk.
It had its uses now, though. Ian slowly removed his cloak and handed it to Jamie, then walked to the entrance of the passage and turned to face the mourners—who watched this apparition, bug-eyed. He spread his hands, palms upward, closed his eyes, put back his head so the rain ran down his face, and began to chant something in Mohawk. He was no singer, and his voice was so hoarse from his cold that many words broke or disappeared, but I caught Simon’s name in the beginning. The general’s death song. It didn’t go on for long, but when he dropped his hands, the congregation uttered a deep, collective sigh.
Ian walked away, not looking back, and without a word the mourners followed. It was finished.