Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

SHE DIDN’T READ the letters again. It would have felt like a desecration. As it was, there was no need to read them over; she thought she would never forget a word of any of them.

She had to leave her rooms and walk for some time to regain any sense of composure. Now and then she felt tears run down her cheeks and hastily blotted them before any passerby should notice and ask her trouble. She felt as though she’d wept for days or as though someone had beaten her. And yet it was nothing to do with her.

She felt one of the O’Higgins brothers following somewhere behind her, but he tactfully hung back. She walked from one end to the other of St. James’s Park, and all the way around the lake, but finally sat down on a bench near a flotilla of swans, exhausted in mind and body both. Someone sat down on the other end of the bench—Mick, she saw, from the corner of her eye.

It was teatime; the bustle of the streets was dying down as people hurried home or dropped into a tavern or an ordinary to refresh themselves after a long day’s labor. Mick coughed in a meaning manner.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “You go on, if you like.”

“Now, Bedelia. Ye know fine I’m not goin’ anywhere you don’t go.” He’d scooted along the bench and sat at her elbow, slouched and companionable. “Shall I be fetchin’ ye a pie, now? Whatever’s the trouble, it’ll seem better on a full belly.”

She wasn’t hungry, but she was empty and, after a moment’s indecision, gave in and let him buy her a meat pie from a pie man. The smell of it was so strong and good that she felt somewhat restored just from holding it. She nibbled the crust, felt the rich flood of juice and flavor in her mouth, and, closing her eyes, gave herself over to the pie.

“There, now.” Mick, having long since finished his own pie, sat gazing benevolently at her. “Better, is it not?”

“Yes,” she admitted. At least she could now think about the matter, rather than drowning in it. And while she hadn’t been conscious of actually thinking at any time since leaving her rooms, evidently some back chamber of her mind had been turning things over.

Esmé and Nathaniel were dead. Harold, theoretical Duke of Pardloe, wasn’t. That’s what it came down to. She could do something about him. And she found that she was determined to do it.

“What, though?” she asked, having explained the matter to Mick in general terms. “I can’t send those letters to the secretary at war—there’s no way His Grace wouldn’t find out, and I think it would kill him to know anyone had read them, let alone people who…who had any power over him, you know.”

Mick pulled a face but allowed that this might be so.

“So what is it ye want to happen, Lady Bedelia?” he asked. “There’s maybe another way of it?”

She drew a breath that went down to her shoes and let it out slowly.

“I suppose I want what Captain Quarry wants: to scotch the notion that His Grace is insane and to get his regiment re-commissioned. I think I have to do both those things. But how?”

“And ye can’t—or ye won’t—do it with the letters….” He eyed her sideways, to see if she might be convinced otherwise, but she shook her head at him.

“Get a false witness?” he suggested. “Bribe someone to say there was an affair betwixt the countess and the poet?”

Minnie shook her head dubiously.

“I’m not saying I couldn’t find someone who would take a bribe,” she said. “But not one who’d be believed. Most young women aren’t good liars at all.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’re one of a kind, so ye are.” It was said with admiration, and she nodded briefly at the compliment but went on with her train of thought.

“The other thing is that it’s easy enough to start a rumor, but once it’s started, it’s quite likely to take on a life of its own. You can’t control it, I mean. If I got someone—man or woman—to say he or she knew about the affair, it wouldn’t stop there. And because it wouldn’t be the truth to start with, there’s no telling where it might go. You don’t set light to a fuse without knowing where it’s laid,” she added, raising a brow at him. “My father always told me that.”

“A wise man, your father.” Mick touched the brim of his hat in respect. “If it’s not to be bribery and false witness, then…what might his honor, your da, recommend?”

“Well…forgery, most likely,” she said with a shrug. “But I don’t think writing a false version of those letters would be a great deal better than showing the originals, in terms of effect.” She rubbed her thumb across her fingers, feeling the faint slick of lard from the piecrust. “Get me another pie, will you, Mick? Thinking is hungry work.”

She finished the second pie and, thus fortified, reluctantly began to mentally revisit Esmé’s letters. It was, after all, Countess Melton who was the fons et origo of all this misery.

Would you think it was worth it, I wonder? she thought toward the absent Esmé. Likely the woman had only wanted to make her husband jealous; she probably hadn’t had the slightest intent of causing her husband to shoot one of his friends; most certainly she hadn’t had any intent of dying, along with her child. That circumstance struck Minnie with a particular poignancy and, for some odd reason, made her think of her mother.

I don’t suppose you intended anything that happened, either, she thought with compassion. You certainly didn’t intend me. Still, she thought her mother’s situation, while very regrettable, wasn’t the theatrical tragedy that Esmé’s had been. I mean, we both survived.

And speaking only for myself, she added, I’m quite glad to be here. I’m reasonably sure that Father’s pleased about that, too.

A slight sound pulled her from her thoughts, and she perceived that Mick had adjusted his position, indicating silently that he thought it was getting late and best they begin walking back to Great Ryder Street.

He was right; the shadows of the huge trees had begun to edge across the path like a seeping stain of spilled tea. And the sounds had changed, too: the cawing laughter of the society women with their parasols had mostly vanished, replaced by the male voices of soldiers and businessmen and clerks, all heading for their tea with the single-mindedness of donkeys headed for their mangers.

She stood up and shook her skirts back into place, retrieved her hat and pinned it firmly to her hair. She nodded to Mick and indicated with a small movement of the hand that he should walk with her, rather than follow. She was wearing a decent but very demure blue gingham with a plain straw hat; she might easily pass for an upper housemaid walking out with an admirer, as long as they didn’t meet anyone she knew—and that wasn’t likely at this hour.

“This chap what his lordship shot,” Mick said, after half a block. “They say he was a poet, was he?”

“So I’m told.”

“Have ye maybe read any of his poems, like?”

She glanced at him, surprised.