Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

  “Oh.” Hal looked somewhat abashed. “You mean your name really is Wattiswade, then.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “All right. Wattiswade. Why—never mind. You’ll tell me later why you’ve been calling yourself Rennie.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  He glanced at her, brows raised high, and she could see him—for once—debating whether to say something. But then his eyes lost the look of a man talking to himself and focused on hers.

  “All right,” he said softly, and held out his hand to her, palm upward.

  She took another breath, looked out into the void, and jumped.

  “Cunnegunda,” she said, and put her hand in his. “Minerva Cunnegunda Wattiswade.”

  He said nothing, but she could feel him vibrating slightly. She carefully didn’t look at him. Harry seemed to be arguing about something with the woman—something to do with the need for a second witness, she thought, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to make out the words. The smell of tobacco smoke and stale sweat was making her gorge rise again, and she swallowed hard, several times.

  All right. They’d decided that Mrs. Ten Boom could be the second witness. Good. Mortimer turned a somersault, landing heavily. Perspiration had broken out on Minnie’s temples, and her ears felt hot.

  Suddenly she was possessed by the fear that her father would burst through the door at any moment. She wasn’t afraid of his stopping this impromptu ceremony; she was quite sure Hal wouldn’t let him—and that certainty steadied her. Still…she didn’t want him here. This was hers alone.

  “Hurry,” she said to Hal, in a low voice. “Please, hurry.”

  “Get on with it,” he said to the minister, in a voice that wasn’t particularly loud but plainly expected to be obeyed. The Reverend Ten Boom blinked, coughed, and opened his book.

  It was all in Dutch; she could have followed the words but didn’t—what echoed in her ears were the never-spoken phrases from the letters.

  Not Esmé’s—his. Letters written to a dead wife, in passionate grief, in fury, in despair. He might as well have punctured his own wrist with the sharpened quill and written those words in blood. She looked up at him now, white as the winter sky, as though all the blood had run out of his body, leaving him drained.

  But his eyes were a pale and piercing blue when he turned his dark-browed face toward her, and the fire in him was not quenched, by any means.

  You didn’t deserve him, she thought toward the absent Esmé and rested her free hand on her gently heaving stomach. But you loved him. Don’t fret; I’ll take care of them both.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IF YOU NEVER read Madeleine L’Engle’s marvelous A Wrinkle in Time in your younger years, it’s not too late. It’s a wonderful story and I highly recommend it. If you did read it, though, you’ll certainly remember this iconic line: There is such a thing as a tesseract.

  In fact, there is such a thing as a tesseract, both as a geometrical and a scientific concept: Putting it crudely, it’s a four-dimensional construct, in which the fourth dimension is time. And it’s used as a fictional device to bring two separate space/time lines together, obviating the linear time between them. Much more convenient than a clunky old time machine.

  Now, it’s also a well-known fact that I stink at ages. I have only the vaguest general notion as to how old anyone in these stories is at any given point, I usually don’t know when their birthdays are, and I don’t really care. This drives both my copy editor and the more OCD-prone of my readers to distraction, and they Aren’t Going to Be Happy about this, but really, there’s no choice.

  When I wrote The Scottish Prisoner, I randomly assigned ages to Hal’s and Minnie’s young sons, never thinking we’d see them again until they were adults (we have in fact seen all of them at one time or another as adults in An Echo in the Bone and in Written in My Own Heart’s Blood).

  Now…I also noted in The Scottish Prisoner that Jamie Fraser had met Minnie prior to her marriage, in Paris, and that they had known each other in the context of the Jacobite plots of that time. That’s something of a plot point, has to do with both their characters and their subsequent actions, and so is important.

  And I allowed Minnie to tell Lord John the circumstances of her marriage to his brother Hal. That’s also important, as indicating something of the relationships between Minnie and Hal and just why he calls on her for help in intelligence matters at various points in later stories.

  So—those two facts are important. How old the kids are isn’t important.

  But going back to tell more of Minnie and Hal’s backstory, naturally I wanted to include Minnie’s acquaintance with Jamie Fraser. Okay, that had to take place sometime in 1744, when the Frasers were in Paris, plotting away.

  Minnie’s pregnancy and the impending birth of her first son, Benjamin, had much to do with the marriage between Minnie and Hal and with her feelings about it. Ergo, Benjamin has to have been conceived sometime in 1744.

  As the more nitpicking sort of reader will have instantly realized, if Benjamin was conceived in 1744 and born in 1745—as he has to have been—then he can’t have been eight years old in 1760, when The Scottish Prisoner takes place. Only he was.

  Obviously, the only way to reconcile Benjamin’s age—as well as those of his brothers, Henry and Adam—is to draw the logical conclusion that a tesseract occurred somewhere between the writing of The Scottish Prisoner and “A Fugitive Green,” and the boys will all be full-grown men next time we see them and it won’t matter. Luckily, I have full confidence in the mental ability of my Very Intelligent Readers to grasp this concept and enjoy the story without further pointless fretting.

  Whale Painters

  At one point, while contemplating the subtle color of her eau-de-nil dress, Minnie refers mentally to her acquaintance with a Mr. Vernet, who is a whale painter.

  Whale painting was actually a thing in the eighteenth century: There was great demand for the production of romantically watery, adventurous paintings, and thus there were specialists in that production. Claude Joseph Vernet was a real historical artist whose profession consisted mostly of painting seascapes, many including whales. As such, he would also be a great expert in the delineation of water and its many colors and thus in a position to tell Minnie about the concept of “a fugitive green”—i.e., green paint at that time was made with a pigment given to fading out eventually, unlike the more robust and permanent blues and grays.

  And of course you all understand the metaphorical allusion of the title. (I actually included M. Vernet in order to make it clear to readers who don’t speak French and don’t necessarily stop to Google unknown terms while reading that eau-de-nil is, in fact, a shade of green.)

  BESIEGED

  Jamaica

  Early May 1762

  LORD JOHN GREY DIPPED a finger gingerly into the little stone pot, withdrew it, glistening, and sniffed cautiously.

  “Jesus!”

  “Yes, me lord. That’s what I said.” His valet, Tom Byrd, face carefully averted, put the lid back on the pot. “Was you to rub yourself with that stuff, you’d be drawing flies in their hundreds, same as if you were summat that was dead. Long dead,” he added, and muffled the pot in a napkin for additional protection.

  “Well, in justice,” Grey said dubiously, “I suppose the whale is long dead.” He looked at the far wall of his office. There were a number of flies resting along the wainscoting, as usual, fat and black as currants against the white plaster. Sure enough, a couple of them had already risen into the air, circling lazily toward the pot of whale oil. “Where did you get that stuff?”

  “The owner of the Moor’s Head keeps a keg of it; he burns it in his lamps—cheaper nor even tallow candles, he says, let alone proper wax ones.”

  “Ah. I daresay.” Given the usual smell of the Moor’s Head on a busy night, nobody would notice the stink of whale oil above the symphony of other reeks.

  “Easier to
come by on Jamaica than bear grease, I reckon,” Tom remarked, picking up the pot. “D’you want me to try it with the mint, me lord? It might help,” he added, with a dubious wrinkle of the nose.

  Tom had automatically picked up the oily rag that lived on the corner of Grey’s desk and, with a dexterous flick, snapped a fat fly out of the air and into oblivion.

  “Dead whale garnished with mint? That should cause my blood to be especially attractive to the more discriminating biting insects in Charles Town—to say nothing of Canada.” Jamaican flies were a nuisance but seldom carnivorous, and the sea breeze and muslin window screening kept most mosquitoes at bay. The swamps of coastal America, though…and the deep Canadian woods, his ultimate destination…

  “No,” Grey said reluctantly, scratching his neck at the mere thought of Canadian deer flies. “I can’t attend Mr. Mullryne’s celebration of his new plantation house basted in whale oil. Perhaps we can get bear grease in South Carolina. Meanwhile…sweet oil, perhaps?”

  Tom shook his head decidedly.

  “No, me lord. Azeel says sweet oil draws spiders. They come and lick it off your skin whilst you’re asleep.”

  Lord John and his valet shuddered simultaneously, recollecting last week’s experience with a banana spider—a creature with a leg span the size of a child’s hand—that had burst unexpectedly out of a ripe banana, followed by what appeared at the time to be several hundred small offspring, at a garden party given by Grey to mark his departure from the island and to welcome the Honorable Mr. Houghton Braythwaite, his successor as governor.

  “I thought he’d have an apoplexy on the spot,” Grey said, lips twitching.

  “Likely wishes he had.”

  Grey looked at Tom, Tom at Grey, and they burst into suffocated snorts of laughter at the memory of the Honorable Mr. Braythwaite’s face on this occasion.

  “Come, come,” Lord John said, getting himself under control. “This will never do. Have you—”

  The rumble of a carriage coming up the gravel drive of King’s House interrupted him.

  “Oh, God, is that him now?” Grey glanced guiltily round at the disarray of his office: A gaping half-packed portmanteau lolled in the corner, and the desk was strewn with scattered documents and the remnants of lunch, in no condition to be viewed by the man who would inherit it tomorrow. “Run out and distract him, will you, Tom? Take him to the receiving room and pour rum into him. I’ll come and fetch him as soon as I’ve done…something…about this.” He waved a hand at the debris, and Tom obligingly vanished.

  Grey picked up the oiled rag and disposed of an unwary fly, then seized a plate scattered with bread crusts, blobs of custard, and fruit peelings and decanted this out of the window into the garden beneath. Thrusting the empty plate out of sight under the desk, he began hurriedly to gather papers into piles but was interrupted almost at once by the reappearance of Tom, looking excited.

  “Me lord! It’s General Stanley!”

  “Who?” Grey said blankly. His mind, occupied with the details of imminent escape, refused to deal with anything that might interfere with said escape, but “Stanley” did ring a distant, small bell.

  “Might be as he’s your mother’s husband, me lord?” Tom said, with a becoming diffidence.

  “Oh…that General Stanley. Why didn’t you say so?” John hastily grabbed his coat from its hook and shrugged into it, brushing crumbs off his waistcoat as he did so. “Show him in, by all means!”

  John in fact liked his mother’s third husband—she having been twice widowed when she acquired the general four years before—though any military intrusion at this point was something to be regarded warily.

  Wariness was, as usual, justified. The General Stanley who eventually appeared was not the bluff, jaunty, self-confident man last seen in his mother’s company. This General Stanley was hobbling with a stick, his right foot bound up in an immense bandage, and his face gray with pain, effort…and profound anxiety.

  “General!” John seized him by the arm before he could fall over and guided him to the nearest chair, hastily removing a pile of maps from it. “Do sit down, please—Tom, would you…?”

  “Just here, me lord.” Tom had dug Grey’s flask out of the open traveling bag with commendable promptitude and now thrust it into General Stanley’s hand.

  The general accepted this without question and drank deeply.

  “Dear Lord,” he said, setting the flask on his knee and breathing heavily. “I thought I shouldn’t make it from the landing.” He took another drink, somewhat more slowly, eyes closed.

  “More brandy, Tom, if you please?” Grey said, watching this. Tom gave the general an assessing look, not sure whether he might die before more brandy could be fetched, but decided to bet on the general’s survival and disappeared in search of sustenance.

  “God.” The general looked a good deal short of human but distinctly better than he had. He nodded thanks to John and handed back the empty flask with a trembling hand. “The doctor says I mustn’t drink wine—apparently it’s bad for the gout—but I don’t recall his mentioning brandy.”

  “Good,” John said, glancing at the bandaged foot. “Did he say anything about rum?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Excellent. I’m down to my last bottle of French brandy, but we’ve got quite a lot of rum.”

  “Bring the cask.” The general was beginning to show a tinge of color and, at this point, began to be cognizant of his surroundings. “You were packing to leave?”

  “I am packing to leave, yes,” John said, the feeling of wariness developing small, prickling feet inside his stomach. “I’m meant to sail tonight, for Charles Town.”

  “Thank God. I was afraid I shouldn’t make it in time.” The general breathed audibly for a moment, then gathered himself. “It’s your mother.”

  “What’s my mother?” The wariness turned instantly to a flare of alarm. “What’s happened to her?”

  “Nothing, yet. Or at least I sincerely hope not.” The general patted the air in a vague gesture of reassurance that failed singularly to reassure.

  “Where the devil is she? And what in God’s name is she up to now?” Grey spoke with more heat than filial respect, but panic made him edgy.

  “She’s in Havana,” General Stanley said. “Minding your cousin Olivia.”

  This seemed like a moderately respectable thing for an elderly lady to be doing, and Grey relaxed slightly. But only slightly.

  “Is she ill?” he asked.

  “I hope not. She said in her last letter that there was an outbreak of some sort of ague in the city, but she herself was in good health.”

  “Fine.” Tom had come back with the brandy bottle, and John poured himself a small glass. “I trust she’s enjoying the weather.” He raised an eyebrow at his stepfather, who sighed deeply and put his hands on his knees.

  “I’m sure she is. The problem, my boy, is that the British Navy is on its way to lay siege to the city of Havana, and I really think it would be a good idea if your mother wasn’t in the city when they get there.”

  FOR A MOMENT, John stood frozen, glass in hand, mouth open, and his brain so congested with questions that he was unable to articulate any of them. At last, he gulped the remains of his drink, coughed, and said mildly, “Oh, I see. How does my mother come to be in Havana to start with?”

  The general leaned back and let out a long breath.

  “It’s all the fault of that Stubbs fellow.”

  “Stubbs…?” It sounded vaguely familiar, but stunned as he was, Grey couldn’t think why.

  “You know, chap who married your cousin Olivia. Looks like a builder’s brick. What’s his Christian name…Matthew? No, Malcolm, that’s it. Malcolm Stubbs.”

  Grey reached for the brandy bottle, but Tom was already pouring a fresh glass, which he thrust into his employer’s hand. He carefully avoided meeting Grey’s eye.

  “Malcolm Stubbs.” Grey sipped brandy, to give himself time to think. “Yes, of
course. I…take it that he’s quite recovered, then?” On one level, this was good news; Malcolm Stubbs had lost a foot and part of the adjoining leg to a cannonball at the Battle of Quebec, more than two years before. By good luck, Grey had fallen over him on the field and had the presence of mind to use his belt as a tourniquet, thus preventing Stubbs from bleeding to death. He vividly recalled the splintered bone protruding from the remnants of Malcolm’s shin, and the hot, wet smell of blood and shit, steaming in the cold air. He took a deeper swallow of brandy.

  “Yes, quite. Got an artificial foot, gets around quite well—even rides.”

  “Good for him,” Grey said, rather shortly. There were a few other things he recalled about Malcolm Stubbs. “Is he in Havana?”

  The general looked surprised.

  “Yes, didn’t I say? He’s a diplomat of some kind now—sent to Havana last September.”

  “A diplomat,” Grey repeated. “Well, well.” Stubbs probably did diplomacy well—given his demonstrated skills at lying, deceit, and dishonor….

  “He wanted his wife and children to join him in Havana, once he had a suitable establishment, so—”

  “Children? He had only the one son when I last saw him.” Only the one legitimate son, he added silently.

  “Two, now—Olivia gave birth to a daughter two years ago; lovely child called Charlotte.”

  “How nice.” His memory of the birth of Olivia’s first child, Cromwell, was nearly as horrifyingly vivid as his memories of the Battle of Quebec, if for somewhat different reasons. Both had involved blood and shit, though. “But Mother—”

  “Your mother offered to accompany Olivia, to help with the children. Olivia’s expecting again, and a long sea voyage…”

  “Again?” Well, it wasn’t as though Grey didn’t know what Stubbs’s attitude toward sex was…and at least the man was doing it with his wife. John kept his temper with some difficulty, but the general didn’t notice, continuing with his explanations.

  “You see, I was meant to be sailing to Savannah in the spring—now, I mean—to advise a Colonel Folliott, who’s raising a local militia to assist the governor, and your mother was going to come with me. So it seemed reasonable that she go ahead with Olivia and help her to get settled, and I would arrange for her to join me when I came.”