Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

Minnie set the letter down, as gently as if it might break, and closed her eyes.

“You poor man,” she whispered.



THERE WAS A DECANTER of wine on the sideboard. She poured a small glass, very carefully, and stood sipping it, looking at the desk and its burden of letters.

Someone real. She had to admit that Esmé Grey was definitely real. The impact of her personality was as palpable as though she’d reached out of the paper and stroked her correspondent’s face. Teasing, erotic…

“Cruel,” Minnie said aloud, though softly. To write to your lover and mention your husband?

“Hmph,” she said.

And Esmé’s partner in this criminal conversation? She glanced at the bundle of Nathaniel Twelvetrees’s letters to his mistress. What bizarre quirk of mind had made Melton keep them? Was it guilt, a sort of hair shirt of the spirit?

And if so…guilt for killing Nathaniel Twelvetrees? Or guilt over Esmé’s death? She wondered how quickly the one event had followed the other—had the shock of hearing of her lover’s death brought on a miscarriage, or a fatally early labor, as gossip said?

Likely she’d never learn the answers to those questions, but while Melton had killed Nathaniel, he’d left the poet his voice; Nathaniel Twelvetrees could speak for himself.

She poured another glass of the wine—a heavy, aromatic Bordeaux; she felt she needed ballast—and unfolded the first of Nathaniel’s letters.

For a poet, Nathaniel was a surprisingly pedestrian writer. His sentiments were expressed in sufficiently passionate language but a very common prose, and while he made a distinct effort to meet Esmé on her own ground, he was clearly not her match, in either imagination or expression.

Still, he was a poet, not a novelist; perhaps it wasn’t fair to judge him by his prose style alone. In two of his letters, he mentioned an enclosure, a poem written in honor of his beloved. She checked the box: no poems. Maybe Melton had burned those—or Esmé had. Nathaniel’s tone in presenting these literary gifts reminded Minnie very much of a naturalist’s description she had read—of a type of male spider who brought his chosen mate an elaborately silk-wrapped parcel containing an insect and then leapt upon her whilst she was absorbed in unwrapping her snack, hastily achieving his purpose before she could finish eating and have him for dessert.

“She scared him,” Minnie murmured to herself, with a sense of sympathy but one tempered with a mild contempt. “Poor worm.” She was somewhat shocked to realize that contempt—and the more so to realize that Esmé had very likely felt the same.

Hence her invoking Melton’s name in the letters to Twelvetrees? An attempt to sting him into greater ardor? She’d done it more than once; in fact—Minnie turned again to Esmé’s letters—yes, she’d mentioned her husband, by name or reference, in every letter, even the two-line assignation: My husband will be gone on his regimental business—come to me tomorrow in the oratory at four o’clock.

“Huh,” Minnie said, and sat back, eyeing the letters as she sipped her wine. They lay in stacks and single sheets and fans before her, with the as-yet-unread folder that held Melton’s letters in the center. It looked not unlike a layout of the tarot—she’d had her own cards read several times in Paris, by an acquaintance of her father’s named Jacques, who was practicing the art.

“Sometimes it’s quite subtle,” Jacques had said, shuffling the gaudy cards. “Especially the minor arcana. But then—sometimes it’s obvious at first glance.” This said, smiling, as he laid Death in front of her.

She had no opinion regarding the truth laid out in tarot cards, considering that to be no more than the reflection of the client’s mind at the time of the reading. But she had definite opinions regarding letters, and she touched the two-line assignation thoughtfully.

Where had Esmé’s letters come from? Would the Twelvetrees family have sent them to Lord Melton following Nathaniel’s death? They might, she thought. What could be more painful to him? Though that argued both a subtlety of mind and a sense of refined cruelty that she saw no trace of in Nathaniel’s letters and that she hadn’t noticed in most English people.

Besides…what had made Melton challenge Twelvetrees in the first place? Surely Esmé hadn’t confessed the affair to him. No…Colonel Quarry had said, or at least intimated, that Melton had found incriminating letters written by his wife, and that that was what…

She picked up the countess’s pile again, frowning at the letters. Looking carefully, she could see that each one had a blot of ink or the occasional smear—one appeared to have had water spilled over the bottom edge. So…these were drafts of letters, later copied fair to be sent to Nathaniel? If so, though, why not throw the drafts into the fire? Why keep them and risk discovery?

“Or invite it,” she said aloud, surprising herself. She sat up straight and read the letters through again, then set them down.

My husband will be gone… Every one. Every one of them noted Melton’s absence—and his preoccupation with his nascent regiment.

Jacques was right; sometimes it was obvious.

Minnie shook her head, the wine fumes mingling with the dead countess’s bitter perfume.

“Pauvre chienne,” she said softly. “Poor bitch.”





14





NOTORIOUS BORES


IT WASN’T NECESSARY TO read Lord Melton’s letters, but she couldn’t possibly have stopped herself from doing so, and she picked one up as though it were a lit grenade that might go off in her hand.

It did. She read the five letters through without stopping. None were dated, and there was no way of telling the order in which they had been written; time had plainly been of no consequence to the writer—and yet it had meant everything. This was the voice of a man pushed off a cliff into the abyss of eternity and documenting his fall.

I will love you forever, I cannot do otherwise, but by God, Esmé, I will hate you forever, with all the power of my soul, and had I you before me and your long white neck in my hands I would strangle you like a fucking swan and fuck you as you died, you…

He might as well have picked up the inkwell and flung it at the page. The words were scrawled and blotted, big and black, and there were ragged holes torn through the paper where here and there he had stabbed the page with his quill.

She took a deep, gasping breath when she came to the end, feeling as though she hadn’t breathed once in the reading. She didn’t weep, but her hands were shaking, and the last letter slipped from her fingers and floated to the floor. Weighted with loss and a grief that didn’t cut but clawed and, merciless, tore its prey to bloody ribbons.