* * *
An hour later, we stepped into the empty street outside the commissariat de police. I had sent the coach home, lest anyone who knew us should see it standing outside the Quai des Orfèvres. Dougal offered me an arm, and I took it perforce. The ground here was muddy underfoot, and the cobbles in the street made uncertain going in high-heeled slippers.
“Les Disciples,” I said as we made our way slowly along the banks of the Seine toward the towers of Notre Dame. “Do you really think the Comte St. Germain might have been one of the men who…who stopped us in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré?” I was beginning to tremble with reaction and fatigue—and with hunger; I had had nothing since breakfast, and the lack was making itself felt. Sheer nerve had kept me going through the interview with the police. Now the need to think was passing, and with it, the ability to do so.
Dougal’s arm was hard under my hand, but I couldn’t look up at him; I needed all my attention to keep my footing. We had turned into the Rue Elise and the cobbles were shiny with damp and smeared with various kinds of filth. A porter lugging a crate paused in our path to clear his throat and hawk noisily into the street at my feet. The greenish glob clung to the curve of a stone, finally slipping off to float sluggishly onto the surface of a small mud puddle that lay in the hollow of a missing cobble.
“Mphm.” Dougal was looking up and down the street for a carriage, brow creased in thought. “I canna say; I’ve heard worse than that of the man, but I havena had the honor of meeting him.” He glanced down at me.
“You’ve managed brawly so far,” he said. “They’ll have Jack Randall in the Bastille within the hour. But they’ll have to let the man go sooner or later, and I wouldna wager much on the chances of Jamie’s temper cooling in the meantime. D’ye want me to speak to him—convince him to do nothing foolish?”
“No! For God’s sake, stay out of it!” The thunder of carriage wheels was loud on the cobbles, but my voice was rose high enough to make Dougal brows lift in surprise.
“All right, then,” he said, mildly. “I’ll leave it to you to manage him. He’s stubborn as a stone…but I suppose you have your ways, no?” This was said with a sidelong glance and knowing smirk.
“I’ll manage.” I would. I would have to. For everything I had told Dougal was true. All true. And yet so far from the truth. For I would send Charles Stuart and his father’s cause to the devil gladly, sacrifice any hope of stopping his headlong dash to folly, even risk the chance of Jamie’s imprisonment, for the sake of healing the breach Randall’s resurrection had opened in Jamie’s mind. I would help him to kill Randall, and feel only joy in the doing of it, except for the one thing. The one consideration strong enough to outweigh Jamie’s pride, loom larger than his sense of manhood, than his threatened soul’s peace. Frank.
That was the single idea that had driven me through this day, sustained me well past the point where I would have welcomed collapse. For months I had thought Randall dead and childless, and feared for Frank’s life. But for those same months I had been comforted by the presence of the plain gold ring on the fourth finger of my left hand.
The twin of Jamie’s silver ring upon my right, it was a talisman in the dark hours of the night, when doubts came on the heels of dreams. If I wore his ring still, then the man who had given it to me would live. I had told myself that a thousand times. No matter that I didn’t know how a man dead without issue could sire a line of descent that led to Frank; the ring was there, and Frank would live.
Now I knew why the ring still shone on my hand, metal chilly as my own cold finger. Randall was alive, could still marry, could still father the child who would pass life on to Frank. Unless Jamie killed him first.
I had taken what steps I could for the moment, but the fact I had faced in the Duke’s corridor remained. The price of Frank’s life was Jamie’s soul, and how was I to choose between them?
The oncoming fiacre, ignoring Dougal’s hail, barreled past without stopping, wheels passing close enough to splash muddy water on Dougal’s silk hose and the hem of my gown.
Desisting from a volley of heartfelt Gaelic, Dougal shook a fist after the retreating coach.
“Well, and now what?” he demanded rhetorically.
The blob of mucus-streaked spittle floated on the puddle at my feet, reflecting gray light. I could feel its cold slime viscid on my tongue. I put out a hand and grasped Dougal’s arm, hard as a smooth-skinned sycamore branch. Hard, but it seemed to be swaying dizzily, swinging me far out over the cold and glittering, fish-smelling, slimy water nearby. Black spots floated before my eyes.
“Now,” I said, “I’m going to be sick.”