Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

“I know,” he said quietly. “Things…happen sometimes. That you don’t intend—that you’d give your life to have back.”


Grey wiped his face, glancing at his brother under cover of the gesture. Hal looked suddenly older than his years, his face drawn by more than worry over Grey.

“Nathaniel Twelvetrees, you mean?” Normally he wouldn’t have mentioned that matter, but both men’s guards were down.

Hal gave him a sharp look, then glanced away.

“No, not Twelvetrees. I hadn’t any choice about that. And I did mean to kill him. I meant…what led to that duel.” He grimaced. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” He looked at the note on the table and shook his head. His hand passed gently over Dottie’s head. “I won’t have you repeat my mistakes, John,” he said quietly.

Grey nodded, wordless. Hal’s first wife had been seduced by Nathaniel Twelvetrees. Hal’s mistakes notwithstanding, Grey had never intended marriage with anyone and didn’t now.

Hal frowned, tapping the folded letter on the table in thought. He darted a glance at John and sighed, then set the letter down, reached into his coat, and withdrew two further documents, one clearly official, from its seal.

“Your new commission,” he said, handing it over. “For Crefeld,” he said, raising an eyebrow at his brother’s look of blank incomprehension. “You were brevetted lieutenant-colonel. You didn’t remember?”

“I—well…not exactly.” He had a vague feeling that someone—probably Hal—had told him about it, soon after Crefeld, but he’d been badly wounded then and in no frame of mind to think about the army, let alone to care about battlefield promotion. Later—

“Wasn’t there some confusion over it?” Grey took the commission and opened it, frowning. “I thought they’d changed their minds.”

“Oh, you do remember, then,” Hal said, eyebrow still cocked. “General Wiedman gave it to you after the battle. The confirmation was held up, though, because of the inquiry into the cannon explosion, and then the…ah…kerfuffle over Adams.”

“Oh.” Grey was still shaken by the news of Nicholls’s death, but mention of Adams started his brain functioning again. “Adams. Oh. You mean Twelvetrees held up the commission?” Colonel Reginald Twelvetrees, of the Royal Artillery: brother to Nathaniel and cousin to Bernard Adams, the traitor awaiting trial in the Tower as a result of Grey’s efforts the preceding autumn.

“Yes. Bastard,” Hal added dispassionately. “I’ll have him for breakfast, one of these days.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” Grey said dryly.

“Oh, no,” Hal assured him, jiggling his daughter gently to prevent her fussing. “It will be a purely personal pleasure.”

Grey smiled at that, despite his disquiet, and put down the commission. “Right,” he said, with a glance at the fourth document, which still lay folded on the table. It was an official-looking letter and had been opened; the seal was broken. “A proposal of marriage, a denunciation for murder, and a new commission—what the devil’s that one? A bill from my tailor?”

“Ah, that. I didn’t mean to show it to you,” Hal said, leaning carefully to hand it over without dropping Dottie. “But under the circumstances…”

Hal waited, noncommittal, as Grey opened the letter and read it. It was a request—or an order, depending how you looked at it—for the attendance of Major Lord John Grey at the court-martial of one Captain Charles Carruthers, to serve as witness of character for the same. In…

“In Canada?” John’s exclamation startled Dottie, who crumpled up her face and threatened to cry.

“Hush, sweetheart.” Hal jiggled faster, hastily patting her back. “It’s all right; only Uncle John being an ass.”

Grey ignored this, waving the letter at his brother.

“What the devil is Charlie Carruthers being court-martialed for? And why on earth am I being summoned as a character witness?”

“Failure to suppress a mutiny,” Hal said. “As to why you—he asked for you, apparently. An officer under charges is allowed to call his own witnesses, for whatever purpose. Didn’t you know that?”

Grey supposed that he had, in an academic sort of way. But he had never attended a court-martial himself; it wasn’t a common proceeding, and he had no real idea of the shape of the proceedings. He glanced sideways at Hal.

“You say you didn’t mean to show it to me?”

Hal shrugged and blew softly over the top of his daughter’s head, making the short blond hairs furrow and rise like wheat in the wind.

“No point. I meant to write back and say that as your commanding officer I required you here; why should you be dragged off to the wilds of Canada? But given your talent for awkward situations…What did it feel like?” he inquired curiously.

“What did—oh, the eel.” Grey was accustomed to his brother’s lightning shifts of conversation and made the adjustment easily. “Well, it was rather a shock.”

He laughed—if tremulously—at Hal’s glower, and Dottie squirmed round in her father’s arms, reaching out her own plump little arms appealingly to her uncle.

“Flirt,” he told her, taking her from Hal. “No, really, it was remarkable. You know how it feels when you break a bone? That sort of jolt that goes right through you before you feel the pain, and you go blind for a moment and feel as if someone’s driven a nail through your belly? It was like that, only much stronger, and it went on for longer. Stopped my breath,” he admitted. “Quite literally. And my heart, too, I think. Dr. Hunter—you know, the anatomist?—was there and pounded on my chest to get it started again.”

Hal was listening with close attention and asked several questions, which Grey answered automatically, his mind occupied with this latest surprising communiqué.

Charlie Carruthers. They’d been young officers together, though from different regiments. Fought beside each other in Scotland, gone round London together for a bit on their next leave. They’d had—well, you couldn’t call it an affair. Three or four brief encounters—sweating, breathless quarters of an hour in dark corners that could be conveniently forgotten in daylight or shrugged off as the result of drunkenness, not spoken of by either party.

That had been in the Bad Time, as he thought of it: those years after Hector’s death, when he’d sought oblivion wherever he could find it—and found it often—before slowly recovering himself.

Likely he wouldn’t have recalled Carruthers at all, save for the one thing.