PART EIGHT
On the Water
40
I SHALL GO DOWN TO THE SEA
“It will have to be the Artemis.” Jared flipped shut the cover of his portable writing desk and rubbed his brow, frowning. Jamie’s cousin had been in his fifties when I knew him before, and was now well past seventy, but the snub-nosed hatchet face, the spare, narrow frame, and the tireless capacity for work were just the same. Only his hair marked his age, gone from lank darkness to a scanty, pure and gleaming white, jauntily tied with a red silk ribbon.
“She’s no more than a midsized sloop, with a crew of forty or so,” he remarked. “But it’s late in the season, and we’ll not likely do better—all of the Indiamen will have gone a month since. Artemis would have gone with the convoy to Jamaica, was she not laid up for repair.”
“I’d sooner have a ship of yours—and one of your captains,” Jamie assured him. “The size doesna matter.”
Jared cocked a skeptical eyebrow at his cousin. “Oh? Well, and ye may find it matter more than ye think, out at sea. It’s like to be squally, this late in the season, and a sloop will be bobbin’ like a cork. Might I ask how ye weathered the Channel crossing in the packet boat, cousin?”
Jamie’s face, already drawn and grim, grew somewhat grimmer at this question. The completest of landlubbers, he was not just prone to seasickness, but prostrated by it. He had been violently ill all the way from Inverness to Le Havre, though sea and weather had been quite calm. Now, some six hours later, safe ashore in Jared’s warehouse by the quay, there was still a pale tinge to his lips and dark circles beneath his eyes.
“I’ll manage,” he said shortly.
Jared eyed him dubiously, well aware of his response to seagoing craft of any kind. Jamie could scarcely set foot on a ship at anchor without going green; the prospect of his crossing the Atlantic, sealed inescapably in a small and constantly tossing ship for two or three months, was enough to boggle the stoutest mind. It had been troubling mine for some time.
“Well, I suppose there’s no help for it,” Jared said with a sigh, echoing my thought. “And at least you’ll have a physician to hand,” he added, with a smile at me. “That is, I suppose you intend accompanying him, my dear?”
“Yes indeed,” I assured him. “How long will it be before the ship is ready? I’d like to find a good apothecary’s, to stock my medicine chest before the voyage.”
Jared pursed his lips in concentration. “A week, God willing,” he said. “Artemis is in Bilbao at the moment; she’s to carry a cargo of tanned Spanish hides, with a load of copper from Italy—she’ll ship that here, once she arrives, which should be day after tomorrow, with a fair wind. I’ve no captain signed on for the voyage yet, but a good man in mind; I may have to go to Paris to fetch him, though, and that will be two days there and two back. Add a day to complete stores, fill the water casks, add all the bits and pieces, and she should be ready to leave at dawn tomorrow week.”
“How long to the West Indies?” Jamie asked. The tension in him showed in the lines of his body, little affected either by our journey or by the brief rest. He was strung taut as a bow, and likely to remain so until we had found Young Ian.
“Two months, in the season,” Jared replied, the small frown still lining his forehead. “But you’re a month past the season now; hit the winter gales and it could be three. Or more.”
Or never, but Jared, ex-seaman that he was, was too superstitious—or too tactful—to voice this possibility. Still, I saw him touch the wood of his desk surreptitiously for luck.
Neither would he voice the other thought that occupied my mind; we had no positive proof that the blue ship was headed for the West Indies. We had only the records Jared had obtained for us from the Le Havre harbormaster, showing two visits by the ship—aptly named Bruja—within the last five years, each time giving her home port as Bridgetown, on the island of Barbados.
“Tell me about her again—the ship that took Young Ian,” Jared said. “How did she ride? High in the water, or sunk low, as if she were loaded heavy for a voyage?”
Jamie closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating, then opened them with a nod. “Heavy-laden, I could swear it. Her gunports were no more than six feet from the water.”
Jared nodded, satisfied. “Then she was leaving port, not coming in. I’ve messengers out to all the major ports in France, Portugal and Spain. With luck, they’ll find the port she shipped from, and then we’ll know her destination for sure from her papers.” His thin lips quirked suddenly downward. “Unless she’s turned pirate, and sailing under false papers, that is.”
The old wine merchant carefully set aside the lap desk, its carved mahogany richly darkened by years of use, and rose to his feet, moving stiffly.
“Well, that’s the most that can be done for the moment. Let’s go to the house, now; Mathilde will have supper waiting. Tomorrow I’ll take ye over the manifests and orders, and your wife can find her bits of herbs.”
It was nearly five o’clock, and full dark at this time of year, but Jared had two linksmen waiting to escort us the short distance to his house, equipped with torches to light the way and armed with stout clubs. Le Havre was a thriving port city, and the quay district was no place to walk alone after dark, particularly if one was known as a prosperous wine merchant.
Despite the exhaustion of the Channel crossing, the oppressive clamminess and pervasive fish-smell of Le Havre, and a gnawing hunger, I felt my spirits rise as we followed the torches through the dark, narrow streets. Thanks to Jared, we had at least a chance of finding Young Ian.
Jared had concurred with Jamie’s opinion that if the pirates of the Bruja—for so I thought of them—had not killed Young Ian on the spot, they were likely to keep him unharmed. A healthy young male of any race could be sold as a slave or indentured servant in the West Indies for upward of two hundred pounds; a respectable sum by current standards.
If they did intend so to dispose of Young Ian profitably, and if we knew the port to which they were sailing, it should be a reasonably easy matter to find and recover the boy. A gust of wind and a few chilly drops from the hovering clouds dampened my optimism slightly, reminding me that while it might be no great matter to find Ian once we had reached the West Indies, both the Bruja and the Artemis had to reach the islands first. And the winter storms were beginning.
* * *
The rain increased through the night, drumming insistently on the slate roof above our heads. I would normally have found the sound soothing and soporific; under the circumstances, the low thrum seemed threatening, not peaceful.
Despite Jared’s substantial dinner and the excellent wines that accompanied it, I found myself unable to sleep, my mind summoning images of rain-soaked canvas and the swell of heavy seas. At least my morbid imaginings were keeping only myself awake; Jamie had not come up with me but had stayed to talk with Jared about the arrangements for the upcoming voyage.
Jared was willing to risk a ship and a captain to help in the search. In return, Jamie would sail as supercargo.
“As what?” I had said, hearing this proposal.
“The supercargo,” Jared had explained patiently. “That’s the man whose duty it is to oversee the loading, the unloading, and the sale and disposition of the cargo. The captain and the crew merely sail the ship; someone’s got to look after the contents. In a case where the welfare of the cargo will be affected, the supercargo’s orders may override even the captain’s authority.”
And so it was arranged. While Jared was more than willing to go to some risk in order to help a kinsman, he saw no reason not to profit from the arrangement. He had therefore made quick provision for a miscellaneous cargo to be loaded from Bilbao and Le Havre; we would sail to Jamaica to upload the bulk of it, and would arrange for the reloading of the Artemis with rum produced by the sugarcane plantation of Fraser et Cie on Jamaica, for the return trip.
The return trip, however, would not occur until good sailing weather returned, in late April or early May. For the time between arrival on Jamaica in February and return to Scotland in May, Jamie would have disposal of the Artemis and her crew, to travel to Barbados—or other places—in search of Young Ian. Three months. I hoped it would be enough.
It was a generous arrangement. Still, Jared, who had been an expatriate wine-seller for many years in France, was wealthy enough that the loss of a ship, while distressing, would not cripple him. The fact did not escape me that while Jared was risking a small portion of his fortune, we were risking our lives.
The wind seemed to be dying; it no longer howled down the chimney with quite such force. Sleep proving still elusive, I got out of bed, and with a quilt wrapped round my shoulders for warmth, went to the window.
The sky was a deep, mottled gray, the scudding rain clouds edged with brilliant light from the moon that hid behind them, and the glass was streaked with rain. Still, enough light seeped through the clouds for me to make out the masts of the ships moored at the quay, less than a quarter of a mile away. They swayed to and fro, their sails furled tight against the storm, rising and falling in uneasy rhythm as the waves rocked the boats at anchor. In a week’s time, I would be on one.
I had not dared to think what life might be like once I had found Jamie, lest I not find him after all. Then I had found him, and in quick succession, had contemplated life as a printer’s wife among the political and literary worlds of Edinburgh, a dangerous and fugitive existence as a smuggler’s lady, and finally, the busy, settled life of a Highland farm, which I had known before and loved.
Now, in equally quick succession, all these possibilities had been jerked away, and I faced an unknown future once more.
Oddly enough, I was not so much distressed by this as excited by it. I had been settled for twenty years, rooted as a barnacle by my attachments to Brianna, to Frank, to my patients. Now fate—and my own actions—had ripped me loose from all those things, and I felt as though I were tumbling free in the surf, at the mercy of forces a great deal stronger than myself.
My breath had misted the glass. I traced a small heart in the cloudiness, as I had used to do for Brianna on cold mornings. Then, I would put her initials inside the heart—B.E.R., for Brianna Ellen Randall. Would she still call herself Randall? I wondered, or Fraser, now? I hesitated, then drew two letters inside the outline of the heart—a “J” and a “C.”
I was still standing before the window when the door opened and Jamie came in.
“Are ye awake still?” he asked, rather unnecessarily.
“The rain kept me from sleeping.” I went and embraced him, glad of his warm solidness to dispel the cold gloom of the night.
He hugged me, resting his cheek against my hair. He smelt faintly of seasickness, much more strongly of candlewax and ink.
“Have you been writing?” I asked.
He looked down at me in astonishment. “I have, but how did ye know that?”
“You smell of ink.”
He smiled slightly, stepping back and running his hand through his hair. “You’ve a nose as keen as a truffle pig’s, Sassenach.”
“Why, thank you, what a graceful compliment,” I said. “What were you writing?”
The smile disappeared from his face, leaving him looking strained and tired.
“A letter to Jenny,” he said. He went to the table, where he shed his coat and began to unfasten his stock and jabot. “I didna want to write her until we’d seen Jared, and I could tell her what plans we had, and what the prospects were for bringing Ian home safe.” He grimaced, and pulled the shirt over his head. “God knows what she’ll do when she gets it—and thank God, I’ll be at sea when she does,” he added wryly, emerging from the folds of linen.
It couldn’t have been an easy piece of composition, but I thought he seemed easier for the writing of it. He sat down to take off his shoes and stockings, and I came behind him to undo the clubbed queue of his hair.
“I’m glad the writing’s over, at least,” he said, echoing my thought. “I’d been dreading telling her, more than anything else.”
“You told her the truth?”
He shrugged. “I always have.”
Except about me. I didn’t voice the thought, though, but began to rub his shoulders, kneading the knotted muscles.
“What did Jared do with Mr. Willoughby?” I asked, massage bringing the Chinese to mind. He had accompanied us on the Channel crossing, sticking to Jamie like a small blue-silk shadow. Jared, used to seeing everything on the docks, had taken Mr. Willoughby in stride, bowing gravely to him and addressing him with a few words of Mandarin, but his housekeeper had viewed this unusual guest with considerably more suspicion.
“I believe he’s gone to sleep in the stable.” Jamie yawned, and stretched himself luxuriously. “Mathilde said she wasna accustomed to have heathens in the house and didna mean to start now. She was sprinkling the kitchen wi’ holy water after he ate supper there.” Glancing up, he caught sight of the heart I had traced on the windowpane, black against the misted glass, and smiled.
“What’s that?”
“Just silliness,” I said.
He reached up and took my right hand, the ball of his thumb caressing the small scar at the base of my own thumb, the letter “J” he had made with the point of his knife, just before I left him, before Culloden.
“I didna ask,” he said, “whether ye wished to come with me. I could leave ye here; Jared would have ye stay wi’ him and welcome, here or in Paris. Or ye could go back to Lallybroch, if ye wished.”
“No, you didn’t ask,” I said. “Because you knew bloody well what the answer would be.”
We looked at each other and smiled. The lines of heartsickness and weariness had lifted from his face. The candlelight glowed softly on the burnished crown of his head as he bent and gently kissed the palm of my hand.
The wind still whistled in the chimney, and the rain ran down the glass like tears outside, but it no longer mattered. Now I could sleep.
* * *
The sky had cleared by morning. A brisk, cold breeze rattled the windowpanes of Jared’s study, but couldn’t penetrate to the cozy room inside. The house at Le Havre was much smaller than his lavish Paris residence, but still boasted three stories of solid, half-timbered comfort.
I pushed my feet farther toward the crackling fire, and dipped my quill into the inkwell. I was making up a list of all the things I thought might be needed in the medical way for a two-month voyage. Distilled alcohol was both the most important and the easiest to obtain; Jared had promised to get me a cask in Paris.
“We’d best label it something else, though,” he’d told me. “Or the sailors will have drunk it before you’ve left port.”
Purified lard, I wrote slowly, St.-John’s-wort; garlic, ten pounds; yarrow. I wrote borage, then shook my head and crossed it out, replacing it with the older name by which it was more likely known now, bugloss.
It was slow work. At one time, I had known the medicinal uses of all the common herbs, and not a few uncommon ones. I had had to; they were all that was available.
At that, many of them were surprisingly effective. Despite the skepticism—and outspoken horror—of my supervisors and colleagues at the hospital in Boston, I had used them occasionally on my modern patients to good effect. (“Did you see what Dr. Randall did?” a shocked intern’s cry echoed in memory, making me smile as I wrote. “She fed the stomach in 134B boiled flowers!”)
The fact remained that one wouldn’t use yarrow and comfrey on a wound if iodine were available, nor treat a systemic infection with bladderwort in preference to penicillin.
I had forgotten a lot, but as I wrote the names of the herbs, the look and the smell of each one began to come back to me—the dark, bituminous look and pleasant light smell of birch oil, the sharp tang of the mint family, the dusty sweet smell of chamomile and the astringency of bistort.
Across the table, Jamie was struggling with his own lists. A poor penman, he wrote laboriously with his crippled right hand, pausing now and then to rub the healing wound above his left elbow and mutter curses under his breath.
“Have ye lime juice on your list, Sassenach?” he inquired, looking up.
“No. Ought I to have?”
He brushed a strand of hair out of his face and frowned at the sheet of paper in front of him.
“It depends. Customarily, it would be the ship’s surgeon who provides the lime juice, but in a ship the size of the Artemis, there generally isn’t a surgeon, and the provision of foodstuffs falls to the purser. But there isn’t a purser, either; there’s no time to find a dependable man, so I shall fill that office, too.”
“Well, if you’ll be purser and supercargo, I expect I’ll be the closest thing to a ship’s surgeon,” I said, smiling slightly. “I’ll get the lime juice.”
“All right.” We returned to a companionable scratching, unbroken until the entrance of Josephine, the parlormaid, to announce the arrival of a person. Her long nose wrinkled in unconscious disapproval at the information.
“He waits upon the doorstep. The butler tried to send him away, but he insists that he has an appointment with you, Monsieur James?” The questioning tone of this last implied that nothing could seem more unlikely, but duty compelled her to relay the improbable suggestion.
Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “A person? What sort of person?” Josephine’s lips primmed together as though she really could not bring herself to say. I was becoming curious to see this person, and ventured over to the window. Sticking my head far out, I could see the top of a very dusty black slouch hat on the doorstep, and not much more.
“He looks like a peddler; he’s got a bundle of some kind on his back,” I reported, craning out still farther, hands on the sill. Jamie clutched me by the waist and drew me back, thrusting his own head out in turn.
“Och, it’s the coin dealer Jared mentioned!” he exclaimed. “Bring him up, then.”
With an eloquent expression on her narrow face, Josephine departed, returning in short order with a tall, gangling youth of perhaps twenty, dressed in a badly outmoded style of coat, wide unbuckled breeches that flapped limply about his skinny shanks, drooping stockings and the cheapest of wooden sabots.
The filthy black hat, courteously removed indoors, revealed a thin face with an intelligent expression, adorned with a vigorous, if scanty, brown beard. Since virtually no one in Le Havre other than a few seamen wore a beard, it hardly needed the small shiny black skullcap on the newcomer’s head to tell me he was a Jew.
The boy bowed awkwardly to me, then to Jamie, struggling with the straps of his peddler’s pack.
“Madame,” he said, with a bob that made his curly sidelocks dance, “Monsieur. It is most good of you to receive me.” He spoke French oddly, with a singsong intonation that made him hard to follow.
While I entirely understood Josephine’s reservations about this…person, still, he had wide, guileless blue eyes that made me smile at him despite his generally unprepossessing appearance.
“It’s we who should be grateful to you,” Jamie was saying. “I had not expected you to come so promptly. My cousin tells me your name is Mayer?”
The coin dealer nodded, a shy smile breaking out amid the sprigs of his youthful beard.
“Yes, Mayer. It is no trouble; I was in the city already.”
“Yet you come from Frankfort, no? A long way,” Jamie said politely. He smiled as he looked over Mayer’s costume, which looked as though he had retrieved it from a rubbish tip.“And a dusty one, too, I expect,” he added. “Will you take wine?”
Mayer looked flustered at this offer, but after opening and closing his mouth a few times, finally settled on a silent nod of acceptance.
His shyness vanished, though, once the pack was opened. Though from the outside the shapeless bundle looked as though it might contain, at best, a change of ragged linen and Mayer’s midday meal, once opened it revealed several small wooden racks, cleverly fitted into a framework inside the pack, each rack packed carefully with tiny leather bags, cuddling together like eggs in a nest.
Mayer removed a folded square of fabric from beneath the racks, whipped it open, and spread it with something of a flourish on Jamie’s desk. Then one by one, Mayer opened the bags and drew out the contents, placing each gleaming round reverently on the deep blue velvet of the cloth.
“An Aquilia Severa aureus,” he said, touching one small coin that glowed with the deep mellowness of ancient gold from the velvet. “And here, a Sestercius of the Calpurnia family.” His voice was soft and his hands sure, stroking the edge of a silver coin only slightly worn, or cradling one in his palm to demonstrate the weight of it.
He looked up from the coins, eyes bright with the reflections of the precious metal.
“Monsieur Fraser tells me that you desire to inspect as many of the Greek and Roman rarities as possible. I have not my whole stock with me, of course, but I have quite a few—and I could send to Frankfort for others, if you desire.”
Jamie smiled, shaking his head. “I’m afraid we haven’t time, Mr. Mayer. We—”
“Just Mayer, Monsieur Fraser,” the young man interrupted, perfectly polite, but with a slight edge in his voice.
“Indeed.” Jamie bowed slightly. “I hope my cousin shall not have misled you. I shall be most happy to pay the cost of your journey, and something for your time, but I am not wishful to purchase any of your stock myself…Mayer.”
The young man’s eyebrows rose in inquiry, along with one shoulder.
“What I wish,” Jamie said slowly, leaning forward to look closely at the coins on display, “is to compare your stock with my recollection of several ancient coins I have seen, and then—should I see any that are similar—to inquire whether you—or your family, I should say, for I expect you are too young yourself—should be familiar with anyone who might have purchased such coins twenty years ago.”
He glanced up at the young Jew, who was looking justifiably astonished, and smiled.
“That may be asking a bit much of you, I know. But my cousin tells me that your family is one of the few who deals in such matters, and is by far the most knowledgeable. If you can acquaint me likewise with any persons in the West Indies with interests in this area, I should be deeply obliged to you.”
Mayer sat looking at him for a moment, then inclined his head, the sunlight winking from the border of small jet beads that adorned his skullcap. It was plain that he was intensely curious, but he merely touched his pack and said, “My father or my uncle would have sold such coins, not me; but I have here the catalogue and record of every coin that has passed through our hands in thirty years. I will tell you what I can.”
He drew the velvet cloth toward Jamie and sat back.
“Do you see anything here like the coins you remember?”
Jamie studied the rows of coins with close attention, then gently nudged a silver piece, about the size of an American quarter. Three leaping porpoises circled its edge, surrounding a charioteer in the center.
“This one,” he said. “There were several like it—small differences, but several with these porpoises.” He looked again, picked out a worn gold disc with an indistinct profile, then a silver one, somewhat larger and in better condition, with a man’s head shown both full-face and in profile.
“These,” he said. “Fourteen of the gold ones, and ten of the ones with two heads.”
“Ten!” Mayer’s bright eyes popped wide with astonishment. “I should not have thought there were so many in Europe.”
Jamie nodded. “I’m quite certain—I saw them closely; handled them, even.”
“These are the twin heads of Alexander,” Mayer said, touching the coin with reverence. “Very rare indeed. It is a tetradrachm, struck to commemorate the battle fought at Amphipolos, and the founding of a city on the site of the battlefield.”
Jamie listened with attention, a slight smile on his lips. While he had no great interest in ancient money himself, he did have a great appreciation for a man with a passion.
A quarter of an hour more, another consultation of the catalogue, and the business was complete. Four Greek drachmas of a type Jamie recognized had been added to the collection, several small gold and silver coins, and a thing called a quintinarius, a Roman coin in heavy gold.
Mayer bent and reached into his pack once more, this time pulling out a sheaf of foolscap pages furled into a roll and tied with ribbon. Untied, they showed row upon row of what looked from a distance like bird tracks; on closer inspection, they proved to be Hebraic writing, inked small and precise.
He thumbed slowly through the pages, stopping here and there with a murmured “Um,” then passing on. At last he laid the pages on his shabby knee and looked up at Jamie, head cocked to one side.
“Our transactions are naturally carried out in confidence, Monsieur,” he said, “and so while I could tell you, for example, that certainly we had sold such and such a coin, in such and such a year, I should not be able to tell you the name of the purchaser.” He paused, evidently thinking, then went on.
“We did in fact sell coins of your description—three drachmas, two each of the heads of Egalabalus and the double head of Alexander, and no fewer than six of the gold Calpurnian aurei in the year 1745.” He hesitated.
“Normally, that is all I could tell you. However…in this case, Monsieur, I happen to know that the original buyer of these coins is dead—has been dead for some years, in fact. Really, I cannot see that under the circumstances…” He shrugged, making up his mind.
“The purchaser was an Englishman, Monsieur. His name was Clarence Marylebone, Duke of Sandringham.”
“Sandringham!” I exclaimed, startled into speech.
Mayer looked curiously at me, then at Jamie, whose face betrayed nothing beyond polite interest.
“Yes, Madame,” he said. “I know that the Duke is dead, for he possessed an extensive collection of ancient coins, which my uncle bought from his heirs in 1746—the transaction is listed here.” He raised the catalogue slightly, and let it fall.
I knew the Duke of Sandringham was dead, too, and by more immediate experience. Jamie’s godfather, Murtagh, had killed him, on a dark night in March 1746, soon before the battle of Culloden brought an end to the Jacobite rebellion. I swallowed briefly, recalling my last sight of the Duke’s face, its blueberry eyes fixed in an expression of intense surprise.
Mayer’s eyes went back and forth between us, then he added hesitantly, “I can tell you also this; when my uncle purchased the Duke’s collection after his death, there were no tetradrachms in it.”
“No,” Jamie murmured, to himself. “There wouldn’t have been.” Then, recollecting himself, he stood and reached for the decanter that stood on the sideboard.
“I thank you, Mayer,” he said formally. “And now, let us drink to you and your wee book, there.”
A few minutes later, Mayer was kneeling on the floor, doing up the fastenings of his ragged pack. The small pouch filled with silver livres that Jamie had given him in payment was in his pocket. He rose and bowed in turn to Jamie and to me before straightening and putting on his disreputable hat.
“I bid you goodbye, Madame,” he said.
“Goodbye to you, too, Mayer,” I replied. Then I asked, somewhat hesitantly, “Is ‘Mayer’ really your only name?”
Something flickered in the wide blue eyes, but he answered politely, heaving the heavy sack onto his back, “Yes, Madame. The Jews of Frankfort are not allowed to use family names.” He looked up and smiled lopsidedly. “For the sake of convenience, the neighbors call us after an old red shield that was painted on the front of our house, many years ago. But beyond that…no, Madame. We have no name.”
Josephine came then to conduct our visitor to the kitchen, taking care to walk several paces in front of him, her nostrils pinched white as though smelling something foul. Mayer stumbled after her, his clumsy sabots clattering on the polished floor.
Jamie relaxed in his chair, eyes abstracted in deep thought.
I heard the door close downstairs a few minutes later, with what was almost a slam, and the click of sabots on the stone steps below. Jamie heard it too, and turned toward the window.
“Well, Godspeed to ye, Mayer Red-Shield,” he said, smiling.
“Jamie,” I said, suddenly thinking of something, “do you speak German?”
“Eh? Oh, aye,” he said vaguely, his attention still fixed on the window and the noises outside.
“What is ‘red shield’ in German?” I asked.
He looked blank for a moment, then his eyes cleared as his brain made the proper connection.
“Rothschild, Sassenach,” he said. “Why?”
“Just a thought,” I said. I looked toward the window, where the clatter of wooden shoes was long since lost in the noises of the street. “I suppose everyone has to start somewhere.”
* * *
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” I observed. “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.”
Jamie gave me a look.
“Oh, aye?” he said.
“The Duke being the dead man,” I explained. “Do you think the seals’ treasure was really his?”
“I couldna say for sure, but it seems at least likely.” Jamie’s two stiff fingers tapped briefly on the table in a meditative rhythm. “When Jared mentioned Mayer the coin dealer to me, I thought it worth inquiring—for surely the most likely person to have sent the Bruja to retrieve the treasure was the person who put it there.”
“Good reasoning,” I said, “but evidently it wasn’t the same person, if it was the Duke who put it there. Do you think the whole treasure amounted to fifty thousand pounds?”
Jamie squinted at his reflection in the rounded side of the decanter, considering. Then he picked it up and refilled his glass, to assist thought.
“Not as metal, no. But did ye notice the prices that some of those coins in Mayer’s catalogue have sold for?”
“I did.”
“As much as a thousand pound—sterling!—for a moldy bit of metal!” he said, marveling.
“I don’t think metal molds,” I said, “but I take your point. Anyway,” I said, dismissing the question with a wave of my hand, “the point here is this; do you suppose the seals’ treasure could have been the fifty thousand pounds that the Duke had promised to the Stuarts?”
In the early days of 1744, when Charles Stuart had been in France, trying to persuade his royal cousin Louis to grant him some sort of support, he had received a ciphered offer from the Duke of Sandringham, of fifty thousand pounds—enough to hire a small army—on condition that he enter England to retake the throne of his ancestors.
Whether it had been this offer that finally convinced the vacillating Prince Charles to undertake his doomed excursion, we would never know. It might as easily have been a challenge from someone he was drinking with, or a slight—real or imagined—by his mistress, that had sent him to Scotland with nothing more than six companions, two thousand Dutch broadswords, and several casks of brandywine with which to charm the Highland chieftains.
In any case, the fifty thousand pounds had never been received, because the Duke had died before Charles reached England. Another of the speculations that troubled me on sleepless nights was the question of whether that money would have made a difference. If Charles Stuart had received it, would he have taken his ragged Highland army all the way to London, retaken the throne and regained his father’s crown?
If he had—well, if he had, the Jacobite rebellion might have succeeded, Culloden might not have happened, I should never have gone back through the circle of stone…and I and Brianna would likely both have died in childbed and been dust these many years past. Surely twenty years should have been enough to teach me the futility of “if.”
Jamie had been considering, meditatively rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“It might have been,” he said at last. “Given a proper market for the coins and gems—ye ken such things take time to sell; if ye must dispose of them quickly, you’ll get but a fraction of the price. But given long enough to search out good buyers—aye, it might reach fifty thousand.”
“Duncan Kerr was a Jacobite, wasn’t he?”
Jamie frowned, nodding. “He was. Aye, it could be—though God knows it’s an awkward kind of fortune to be handing to the commander of an army to pay his troops!”
“Yes, but it’s also small, portable, and easy to hide,” I pointed out. “And if you were the Duke, and busy committing treason by dealing with the Stuarts, that might be important to you. Sending fifty thousand pounds in sterling, with strongboxes and carriages and guards, would attract the hell of a lot more attention than sending one man secretly across the Channel with a small wooden box.”
Jamie nodded again. “Likewise, if ye had a collection of such rarities already, it would attract no attention to be acquiring more, and no one would likely notice what coins ye had. It would be a simple matter to take out the most valuable, replace them with cheap ones, and no one the wiser. No banker who might talk, were ye to shift money or land.” He shook his head admiringly.
“It’s a clever scheme, aye, whoever made it.” He looked up inquiringly at me.
“But then, why did Duncan Kerr come, nearly ten years after Culloden? And what happened to him? Did he come to leave the fortune on the silkies’ isle then, or to take it away?”
“And who sent the Bruja now?” I finished for him. I shook my head, too.
“Damned if I know. Perhaps the Duke had a confederate of some sort? But if he did, we don’t know who it was.”
Jamie sighed, and impatient with sitting for so long, stood up and stretched. He glanced out the window, estimating the height of the sun, his usual method of telling time, whether a clock was handy or not.
“Aye, well, we’ll have time for speculation once we’re at sea. It’s near on noon, now, and the Paris coach leaves at three o’clock.”
* * *
The apothecary’s shop in the Rue de Varennes was gone. In its place were a thriving tavern, a pawnbroker’s, and a small goldsmith’s shop, crammed companionably cheek by jowl.
“Master Raymond?” The pawnbroker knitted grizzled brows. “I have heard of him, Madame”—he darted a wary glance at me, suggesting that whatever he had heard had not been very admirable—“but he has been gone for several years. If you are requiring a good apothecary, though, Krasner in the Place d’Aloes, or perhaps Madame Verrue, near the Tuileries…” He stared with interest at Mr. Willoughby, who accompanied me, then leaned over the counter to address me confidentially.
“Might you be interested in selling your Chinaman, Madame? I have a client with a marked taste for the Orient. I could get you a very good price—with no more than the usual commission, I assure you.”
Mr. Willoughby, who did not speak French, was peering with marked contempt at a porcelain jar painted with pheasants, done in an Oriental style.
“Thank you,” I said, “but I think not. I’ll try Krasner.”
Mr. Willoughby had attracted relatively little attention in Le Havre, a port city teeming with foreigners of every description. On the streets of Paris, wearing a padded jacket over his blue-silk pajamas, and with his queue wrapped several times around his head for convenience, he caused considerable comment. He did, however, prove surprisingly knowledgeable about herbs and medicinal substances.
“Bai jei ai,” he told me, picking up a pinch of mustard seed from an open box in Krasner’s emporium. “Good for shen-yen—kidneys.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, surprised. “How did you know?”
He allowed his head to roll slightly from side to side, as I had learned was his habit when pleased at being able to astonish someone.
“I know healers one time,” was all he said, though, before turning to point at a basket containing what looked like balls of dried mud.
“Shan-yü,” he said authoritatively. “Good—very good—cleanse blood, liver he work good, no dry skin, help see. You buy.”
I stepped closer to examine the objects in question and found them to be a particularly homely sort of dried eel, rolled into balls and liberally coated with mud. The price was quite reasonable, though, so to please him, I added two of the nasty things to the basket over my arm.
The weather was mild for early December, and we walked back toward Jared’s house in the Rue Tremoulins. The streets were bright with winter sunshine, and lively with vendors, beggars, prostitutes, shopgirls, and the other denizens of the poorer part of Paris, all taking advantage of the temporary thaw.
At the corner of the Rue du Nord and the Allée des Canards, though, I saw something quite out of the ordinary; a tall, slope-shouldered figure in black frock coat and a round black hat.
“Reverend Campbell!” I exclaimed.
He whirled about at being so addressed, then, recognizing me, bowed and removed his hat.
“Mistress Malcolm!” he said. “How most agreeable to see you again.” His eye fell on Mr. Willoughby, and he blinked, features hardening in a stare of disapproval.
“Er…this is Mr. Willoughby,” I introduced him. “He’s an…associate of my husband’s. Mr. Willoughby, the Reverend Archibald Campbell.”
“Indeed.” The Reverend Campbell normally looked quite austere, but contrived now to look as though he had breakfasted on barbed wire, and found it untasty.
“I thought that you were sailing from Edinburgh to the West Indies,” I said, in hopes of taking his gelid eye off the Chinaman. It worked; his gaze shifted to me, and thawed slightly.
“I thank you for your kind inquiries, Madame,” he said. “I still harbor such intentions. However, I had urgent business to transact first in France. I shall be departing from Edinburgh on Thursday week.”
“And how is your sister?” I asked. He glanced at Mr. Willoughby with dislike, then taking a step to one side so as to be out of the Chinaman’s direct sight, lowered his voice.
“She is somewhat improved, I thank you. The draughts you prescribed have been most helpful. She is much calmer, and sleeps quite regularly now. I must thank you again for your kind attentions.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I hope the voyage will agree with her.” We parted with the usual expressions of good will, and Mr. Willoughby and I walked down the Rue du Nord, back toward Jared’s house.
“Reverend meaning most holy fella, not true?” Mr. Willoughby said, after a short silence. He had the usual Oriental difficulty in pronouncing the letter “r,” which made the word “Reverend” more than slightly picturesque, but I gathered his meaning well enough.
“True,” I said, glancing down at him curiously. He pursed his lips and pushed them in and out, then grunted in a distinctly amused manner.
“Not so holy, that Reverend fella,” he said.
“What makes you say so?”
He gave me a bright-eyed glance, full of shrewdness.
“I see him one time, Madame Jeanne’s. Not loud talking then. Very quiet then, Reverend fella.”
“Oh, really?” I turned to look back, but the Reverend’s tall figure had disappeared into the crowd.
“Stinking whores,” Mr. Willoughby amplified, making an extremely rude gesture in the vicinity of his crotch in illustration.
“Yes, I gathered,” I said. “Well, I suppose the flesh is weak now and then, even for Scottish Free Church ministers.”
At dinner that night, I mentioned seeing the Reverend, though without adding Mr. Willoughby’s remarks about the Reverend’s extracurricular activities.
“I ought to have asked him where in the West Indies he was going,” I said. “Not that he’s a particularly scintillating companion, but it might be useful to know someone there.”
Jared, who was consuming veal patties in a businesslike way, paused to swallow, then said, “Dinna trouble yourself about that, my dear. I’ve made up a list for you of useful acquaintances. I’ve written letters for ye to carry to several friends there, who will certainly lend ye assistance.”
He cut another sizable chunk of veal, wiped it through a puddle of wine sauce, and chewed it, while looking thoughtfully at Jamie.
Having evidently come to a decision of some kind, he swallowed, took a sip of wine, and said in a conversational voice, “We met on the level, Cousin.”
I stared at him in bewilderment, but Jamie, after a moment’s pause, replied, “And we parted on the square.”
Jared’s narrow face broke into a wide smile.
“Ah, that’s a help!” he said. “I wasna just sure, aye? but I thought it worth the trial. Where were ye made?”
“In prison,” Jamie replied briefly. “It will be the Inverness lodge, though.”
Jared nodded in satisfaction. “Aye, well enough. There are lodges on Jamaica and Barbados—I’ll have letters for ye to the Masters there. But the largest lodge is on Trinidad—better than two thousand members there. If ye should need great help in finding the lad, that’s where ye must ask. Word of everything that happens in the islands comes through that lodge, sooner or later.”
“Would you care to tell me what you’re talking about?” I interrupted.
Jamie glanced at me and smiled.
“Freemasons, Sassenach.”
“You’re a Mason?” I blurted. “You didn’t tell me that!”
“He’s not meant to,” Jared said, a bit sharply. “The rites of Freemasonry are secret, known only to the members. I wouldna have been able to give Jamie an introduction to the Trinidad lodge, had he not been one of us already.”
The conversation became general again, as Jamie and Jared fell to discussing the provisioning of the Artemis, but I was quiet, concentrating on my own veal. The incident, small as it was, had reminded me of all the things I didn’t know about Jamie. At one time, I should have said I knew him as well as one person can know another.
Now, there would be moments, talking intimately together, falling asleep in the curve of his shoulder, holding him close in the act of love, when I felt I knew him still, his mind and heart as clear to me as the lead crystal of the wineglasses on Jared’s table.
And others, like now, when I would stumble suddenly over some unsuspected bit of his past, or see him standing still, eyes shrouded with recollections I didn’t share. I felt suddenly unsure and alone, hesitating on the brink of the gap between us.
Jamie’s foot pressed against mine under the table, and he looked across at me with a smile hidden in his eyes. He raised his glass a little, in a silent toast, and I smiled back, feeling obscurely comforted. The gesture brought back a sudden memory of our wedding night, when we had sat beside each other sipping wine, strangers frightened of each other, with nothing between us but a marriage contract—and the promise of honesty.
There are things ye maybe canna tell me, he had said. I willna ask ye, or force ye. But when ye do tell me something, let it be the truth. There is nothing between us now but respect, and respect has room for secrets, I think—but not for lies.
I drank deeply from my own glass, feeling the strong bouquet of the wine billow up inside my head, and a warm flush heat my cheeks. Jamie’s eyes were still fixed on me, ignoring Jared’s soliloquy about ship’s biscuit and candles. His foot nudged mine in silent inquiry, and I pressed back in answer.
“Aye, I’ll see to it in the morning,” he said, in reply to a question from Jared. “But for now, Cousin, I think I shall retire. It’s been a long day.” He pushed back his chair, stood up, and held out his arm to me.
“Will ye join me, Claire?”
I stood up, the wine rushing through my limbs, making me feel warm all over and slightly giddy. Our eyes met with a perfect understanding. There was more than respect between us now, and room for all our secrets to be known, in good time.
* * *
In the morning, Jamie and Mr. Willoughby went with Jared, to complete their errands. I had another errand of my own—one that I preferred to do alone. Twenty years ago, there had been two people in Paris whom I cared for deeply. Master Raymond was gone; dead or disappeared. The chances that the other might still be living were slim, but still, I had to see, before I left Europe for what might be the last time. With my heart beating erratically, I stepped into Jared’s coach, and told the coachman to drive to the H?pital des Anges.
* * *
The grave was set in the small cemetery reserved for the convent, under the buttresses of the nearby cathedral. Even though the air from the Seine was damp and cold, and the day cloudy, the walled cemetery held a soft light, reflected from the blocks of pale limestone that sheltered the small plot from wind. In the winter, there were no shrubs or flowers growing, but leafless aspens and larches spread a delicate tracery against the sky, and a deep green moss cradled the stones, thriving despite the cold.
It was a small stone, made of a soft white marble. A pair of cherub’s wings spread out across the top, sheltering the single word that was the stone’s only other decoration. “Faith,” it read.
I stood looking down at it until my vision blurred. I had brought a flower; a pink tulip—not the easiest thing to find in Paris in December, but Jared kept a conservatory. I knelt down and laid it on the stone, stroking the soft curve of the petal with a finger, as though it were a baby’s cheek.
“I thought I wouldn’t cry,” I said a little later.
I felt the weight of Mother Hildegarde’s hand on my head.
“Le Bon Dieu orders things as He thinks best,” she said softly. “But He seldom tells us why.”
I took a deep breath and wiped my cheeks with a corner of my cloak. “It was a long time ago, though.” I rose slowly to my feet and turned to find Mother Hildegarde watching me with an expression of deep sympathy and interest.
“I have noticed,” she said slowly, “that time does not really exist for mothers, with regard to their children. It does not matter greatly how old the child is—in the blink of an eye, the mother can see the child again as it was when it was born, when it learned to walk, as it was at any age—at any time, even when the child is fully grown and a parent itself.”
“Especially when they’re asleep,” I said, looking down again at the little white stone. “You can always see the baby then.”
“Ah.” Mother nodded, satisfied. “I thought you had had more children; you have the look, somehow.”
“One more.” I glanced at her. “And how do you know so much about mothers and children?”
The small black eyes shone shrewdly under heavy brow ridges whose sparse hairs had gone quite white.
“The old require very little sleep,” she said, with a deprecatory shrug. “I walk the wards at night, sometimes. The patients talk to me.”
She had shrunk somewhat with advancing age, and the wide shoulders were slightly bowed, thin as a wire hanger beneath the black serge of her habit. Even so, she was still taller than I, and towered over most of the nuns, more scarecrow-like, but imposing as ever. She carried a walking stick but strode erect, firm of tread and with the same piercing eye, using the stick more frequently to prod idlers or direct underlings than to lean on.
I blew my nose and we turned back along the path to the convent. As we walked slowly back, I noticed other small stones set here and there among the larger ones.
“Are those all children?” I asked, a little surprised.
“The children of the nuns,” she said matter-of-factly. I gaped at her in astonishment, and she shrugged, elegant and wry as always.
“It happens,” she said. She walked a few steps farther, then added, “Not often, of course.” She gestured with her stick around the confines of the cemetery.
“This place is reserved for the sisters, a few benefactors of the H?pital—and those they love.”
“The sisters or the benefactors?”
“The sisters. Here, you lump!”
Mother Hildegarde paused in her progress, spotting an orderly leaning idly against the church wall, smoking a pipe. As she berated him in the elegantly vicious Court French of her girlhood, I stood back, looking around the tiny cemetery.
Against the far wall, but still in consecrated ground, was a row of small stone tablets, each with a single name, “Bouton.” Below each name was a Roman numeral, I through XV. Mother Hildegarde’s beloved dogs. I glanced at her current companion, the sixteenth holder of that name. This one was coal-black, and curly as a Persian lamb. He sat bolt upright at her feet, round eyes fixed on the delinquent orderly, a silent echo of Mother Hildegarde’s outspoken disapproval.
The sisters, and those they love.
Mother Hildegarde came back, her fierce expression altering at once to the smile that transformed her strong gargoyle features into beauty.
“I am so pleased that you have come again, ma chère,” she said. “Come inside; I shall find things that may be useful to you on your journey.” Tucking the stick in the crook of her arm, she instead took my forearm for support, grasping it with a warm bony hand whose skin had grown paperthin. I had the odd feeling that it was not I who supported her, but the other way around.
As we turned into the small yew alley that led to the entrance to the H?pital, I glanced up at her.
“I hope you won’t think me rude, Mother,” I said hesitantly, “but there is one question I wanted to ask you…”
“Eighty-three,” she replied promptly. She grinned broadly, showing her long yellow horse’s teeth. “Everyone wants to know,” she said complacently. She looked back over her shoulder toward the tiny graveyard, and lifted one shoulder in a dismissive Gallic shrug.
“Not yet,” she said confidently. “Le Bon Dieu knows how much work there is still to do.”