Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade

  No one at Jermyn Street would question Grey's occasional absence at night, for he often slept in the barracks or at the Beefsteak, if he had been kept late on regimental business or out with friends. Still, to be gone every night would cause notice, and so the nights they spent together in Percy's rooms were doubly precious--for their scarcity, and for the realization that they were coming to an end.

  "We must be circumspect in the extreme," Grey said. "On campaign. There is very little privacy."

  "Of course," Percy said, though given what he was doing at the time, Grey thought he was not paying particular attention. His fingers tightened in Percy's hair, but he did not make him stop. Time enough to repeat the warning--and he was no more eager than Percy to contemplate the inevitable interruption of their intimacy.

  An intimacy of more than body--though God knew, that was sufficiently intimate.

  Percy had taken him at his offer on their first night, again the next morning, and had used him with the greatest gentleness--a gentleness that unnerved him, even as it brought him nearly to tears.

  He had not made that particular offer again, disturbed as much by the experience as he had been by the long-ago rape, though in a very different--and admittedly more pleasant--way. Percy never pressed him, never asked; only made it clear that should Grey wish it...And perhaps he would, again. But not yet.

  The unexpected intimacy of mind between them was as intoxicating--and occasionally as unsettling--as that of the flesh.

  Percy had not referred directly to the story Grey had told him regarding the duke's murder since the night they had first lain together. He knew his friend must be thinking of it, though, and was therefore not surprised when Percy mentioned the matter a few days later. Not pleased--he did not precisely regret telling Percy the truth, but was surprised at himself for having done so after keeping the secret for so long, and felt a sort of lurking unease at the secret he had guarded for so long being now shared by another--but not surprised.

  "But what happened afterward?" Percy demanded. "What did you do? Did you not tell anyone? Your mother?"

  Grey felt a flash of annoyance, but recognized in time that the cause of it was not Percy's question but the memory of his own helplessness.

  "I was twelve years old," he said, and Percy glanced at him sharply and drew back a little, sensing the edge in his voice, despite its calm. "I said nothing."

  The gardener had found the duke's body, later in the morning. A hastily convened coroner's jury had found a verdict of death while the balance of mind was disturbed, and two days afterward Grey had been sent north, to stay with distant cousins of his mother's, in Aberdeen. The duchess, with a prudence he did not appreciate until years later, had left, too, to live in France for several years.

  "Could she not have taken you with her?" Percy asked, echoing Grey's own anguished--but unspoken--question at the time.

  "I believe," he said carefully, "she considered that there might be some risk to her own life."

  He believed--though very much ex post facto--that she had in fact courted such risk.

  "Courted it?" Percy echoed in surprise. "Whatever do you mean by that?"

  Grey sighed, rubbing two fingers between his brows. There was an unexpected relief, and even pleasure, in the intimacy of talking, finally, about all this--but this was balanced by the equally unexpected distress of reliving those events.

  "It's a gray place, Aberdeen." Grey was sitting up in bed, arms round his knees, watching the last of the night evaporate from the roofs of the city. "Stone. Rain. And Scots. The bloody Scots." He shook his head in recollection, the sound of their talk like the rumble of carriage wheels on gravel.

  "I didn't hear much. Scandals in London..." He shrugged. "Not of interest in Aberdeen. And I imagine that was the point; to shield me from the talk. My mother's cousins were kind enough, but very...remote. Still, I overheard a few things."

  The duchess--or the countess, as she had taken to styling herself--had apparently been very visible in France, to the murmurous disapproval of her Scottish Lowland relations. Not young, she was still a very handsome woman, and rich.

  "There were rumors that she had to do with some of the French Jacobites. And if there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that my mother harbored--and harbors--no sympathy whatever for that cause."

  "You think she was looking for the man who killed your father."

  Grey nodded, still looking out the window, seeing not the lightening sky above London but the gray rain clouds of Aberdeen.

  "I don't know if she found him," he said softly. "I convinced myself after a time that she had. Had killed him in turn--or in some other way contrived his destruction."

  Percy raised an incredulous eyebrow.

  "You think--or thought--that your mother had killed him?"

  "You think women are not capable of such things?" Grey didn't quite laugh, but turned his head so that Percy could see the half smile on his face.

  "Not generally, no. My mother could certainly not..." Percy trailed off, frowning, evidently trying to visualize Benedicta Grey in the act of murder. "How? Poison?"

  "I don't know. She's rather direct, my mother. Much more likely a stab to the heart. But in fact, I don't suppose she ever found the man--if indeed she was searching for him. It was just...something I told myself she was doing." He shrugged, dismissing the memory. "What happened to your father?" he asked curiously.

  Percy shook his head, but accepted the change of subject, an expression of wry humor on his face.

  "Believe it or not, he was run over by a mail coach."

  "Ass!"

  "No, I mean it, he was." Percy shrugged, helpless. "He was standing in front of a public house in Cheltenham, preaching at the top of his lungs and quite oblivious to his surroundings. We heard the coach coming--"

  "You were there?"

  "Yes, of course. He'd take me along, to give out tracts or pass the hat when he preached in public. Anyway, I pulled at his coat--I could see the coach then, and how fast it was coming--and he cuffed me away, absently, you know, like one would brush away a fly, too absorbed in his vision of heaven to notice anything on earth. He stepped forward, to get away from me. Then it was on us and I jumped back, out of the way. And...he didn't."

  "I'm sorry," Grey said.

  Percy glanced at him, mouth half turned up.

  "I wasn't. Self-righteous, heavy-handed bastard. My mother wasn't sorry, either, though his death made it very hard for her." He flipped a hand, indicating that he wished to waste no more conversation on the subject. "Going back to your much more sincerely lamented father--I have been thinking about what you told me. Do you--do you mind?"

  "No," Grey said cautiously. "What have you been thinking?"

  Percy cleared his throat. "I'll tell you, but since you mentioned the, um, inquest. You are quite, quite positive that your father did not...uhh..."

  "No, he didn't, and yes, I am sure." Grey heard the edge in his own voice and made a small gesture of apology. "Sorry. I...haven't spoken of it before. It's--"

  "Raw," Percy said softly. Grey glanced up and saw such a warmth of understanding in Percy's eyes that he was obliged to look away, his own eyes stinging.

  "Yes," he said. Like a fresh-cut onion.

  Percy squeezed his leg comfortingly, but said no more of Grey's feelings, returning to his line of thought.

  "Well, then. If--I mean, since that is the case, we know something important, do we not?"

  "What?"

  "The murderer himself didn't seek to disguise the death as suicide. Your mother did that. Do you know why, by the way? I suppose you never asked her."

  Grey managed a wry smile at that.

  "Could you have asked your mother such a thing?"

  Percy frowned, seeming to consider the question, but Grey didn't wait for an answer.

  "No. I've never spoken to my mother regarding the matter. Nor Hal."

  One of Percy's smooth dark brows rose high.

  "Really.
You mean--neither of them knows that you know that your father's death was not a suicide?"

  "I suppose they don't." It occurred to him for the first time, with a small sense of shock, to wonder whether Hal knew the truth of their father's death. He had always supposed that he must, that their mother had told Hal the truth--and resented the thought that she had but had not told him, owing to his youth. But what if she hadn't told Hal, either?

  That thought was too much to deal with at the moment. He pushed it away, returning to Percy's question.

  "I'm reasonably sure why she did it. She feared some danger--whether to herself, Hal, or even me--and that fear must have been exigent, since she preferred to allow my father's name to be disgraced rather than risk it."

  Percy caught the underlying note of bitterness in this.

  "Well, she is your mother," he said mildly. "A woman might be excused for valuing her sons' lives above their father's honor, I suppose. The point I was getting at, though, is this: the murderer didn't kill your father in order to deflect suspicion from himself by making your father appear to be a traitor. So why did he do it?"

  He looked at Grey, expectant.

  "To keep my father from revealing the murderer's own identity as a Jacobite traitor," Grey said, and shrugged. "Or so I have always supposed. Why else?"

  "So would I." Percy leaned forward a little, intent. "And whoever did it is also presumably the same person who took your father's journal, do you not think?"

  "Yes," Grey said slowly. "I imagine so. I didn't know at the time that the journal had been taken, of course..." And not knowing, had never taken that into account, during all those long gray hours of brooding, alone in Aberdeen. "You think--oh, Jesus." His mind skipped the next obvious question--might the duke have written of his suspicions in his journal--and darted to the point Percy had been coming to.

  "He wasn't in the habit of writing in his journal in the conservatory, then?" Percy was reading the progress of Grey's thoughts across his face, his own face alight with cautious excitement.

  "No, never." Grey took a moment to breathe. "The conservatory wasn't lighted, save for parties. He always wrote in his journal in the library, before retiring for the evening--and put the journal back into the bookcase there. He wrote on campaign, of course--but otherwise, no. I never saw him write in his journal anywhere else."

  Which meant two things: whoever had shot his father had known him well enough to be aware that he kept a journal and where it was--and whoever had done it was sufficiently well-known to the household that he had been able to enter the library and abstract the journal.

  "Do you think he took it...before?" Percy asked. "Might that be why, do you think? That the murderer read the journal, saw that he was exposed--or about to be--and thus..."

  Grey rubbed a hand over his face, the bristles of his sprouting beard rasping his palm, but shook his head.

  "Even assuming that my father was foolish enough to write down such suspicions in plain language--and I assure you he was not--how could someone have read it? No one looked at his journals--not even my mother; she teased him about them--and he didn't leave them lying about."

  Restless, he got out of bed and stood by the window, trying to remember. He was trying to reconstruct in his mind the library at their country house. They called it "the library" more by way of jest than anything else; it was a tiny, book-lined closet, lacking even a hearth, with barely room for a chair and a small writing desk. Not the sort of room in which his father would have entertained visitors.

  "I do agree that it's more likely that the man took the journal after the murder." Percy rubbed absently at his shoulders, cold in spite of his woolen banyan. "A visitor--coming to leave his condolences? Might he not have found opportunity to abstract it then?"

  Grey grappled with the notion. He was unwilling to relive the horrible days following his father's death, but obliged perforce to recall them. The quiet, hurried arrangements, the low-voiced conversations, always suspended when he came in sight.

  There had been a few visitors, friends who came to support the duchess in her grief, and a few of Hal's particular friends--Harry, Harry Quarry had come, he recalled that. Who else? Robert Walpole, of course. He remembered the First Lord, gray-faced and ponderous, coming slowly up the walk, leaning on his secretary for support, the shadow of his own approaching death clear upon his face.

  He closed his eyes, fingers pressed against the lids, trying to think. Faces flitted past, some with names, some strangers, all fractured by remembered shock. Bar Harry and Walpole, the only people he could recall with any clarity from that dreadful week were--

  He dropped his hand, opening his eyes.

  "It might not have been a visitor," he said slowly.

  Percy blinked, and pursed his lips.

  "A servant?" he said, shocked at the idea. "Oh, no."

  Grey felt a coldness at the heart at the thought himself. The servants had all been with his parents for years, were trusted implicitly. To consider that one of them, someone who had shared the family's house, the intimacies of its daily life, might all the while...

  He shook himself, dismissing the idea.

  "I can't think anymore," he said. "I can't." Tiredness pressed on his shoulders, and his neck ached with the weight of recalled sorrow and anger. His eyes were burning, and he leaned his forehead against the frozen windowpane, welcoming the cold pressure of it on his face. Dawn was coming up in the east; the ice-blurred glass glowed with a faint yellow light.

  There was a rustle of bedclothes, and he felt Percy's hands, warm on his shoulders. He resisted for a moment, but then let Percy pull him away from the window, hold him close, body to body.

  "Don't be sorry that you told me." Percy spoke quietly in his ear. "Please."

  "No," he murmured, not sure whether he was sorry or not. At the moment, he wished he had kept silent, only because to speak of it was to be forced to think of it again. He'd kept the secret buried for so long--he hadn't realized that he had kept it buried in his own flesh, as well as his mind. His joints ached as though he was being slowly pulled apart.

  "You're cold; you'll make yourself ill. Come to bed."

  He suffered Percy to put him to bed and draw the blankets up under his chin. He closed his eyes obediently when told to, and listened to the sounds of Percy stirring up the fire, adding wood, using the pot. Then opened them again when he heard Percy break the ice in the ewer and splash water into the tin he used to heat his shaving water.

  "Where are you going?" he demanded. Percy turned from the hearth and smiled at him, hair standing on end, his face darkly rakish with its bristling beard.

  "Some of us must work for a living, my dear," he said. "And I have it on good authority that I shall be cashiered and broken--if not actually strung up by the thumbs and flogged--should I not appear promptly on the square with my companies in good order by nine of the clock."

  "That's right--am I not inspecting your companies at nine o'clock?" Grey sat up, but Percy waved him back into the pillows.

  "Given that the bells have just rung half six, and that you have nothing to do save shave, dress, and stroll in a leisurely fashion to the parade ground, I think you may take your ease for a bit." Percy picked up his shaving mug and bent to peer into the tiny square of his looking glass, mouth half open in concentration as he applied the lather.

  Grey lay slowly back, and watched him go about the business of shaving and dressing, neat and quick. A little of Percy's warmth remained in the bedclothes; it thawed him, slowly, and he felt a great lassitude steal over him. His mind felt soggy, and tender, like a bruised fruit.

  The room was still dark, dawn some way off. He could see Percy's breath as he bent to pull on his boots, fastened the hooks of his coat.

  Wig in place, Percy paused by the bedside, looking down at him.

  "Do you think she knew? Who it was?"

  "I'm sure she did not," Grey said, with what firmness he could muster.

  Percy nodded and bendi
ng, kissed him on the forehead.

  "Try to sleep," he said. "The bells will wake you."

  He left, closing the door gently behind him.

  The warmth now enclosed Grey in a snug pocket, though the end of his nose was as cold as if he still pressed it against the windowpane. He was heavy-limbed, blanketed with the fatigue of a long day and a sleepless night--but he knew he would not sleep, bells or no.

  He was going to have to talk to Jamie Fraser again.

  Chapter 20

  Ye Jacobites by Name

  Helwater

  The Lake District

  He spent as little time as politeness required with the Dunsanys, before discovering that he had left something he required in his saddlebag.

  "No, no--I'll fetch it. Won't take a moment." He stopped Lady Dunsany, her hand on the bell rope, and was out of the library before she could protest.

  His heart beat faster as he approached the stable, but for once, it had little to do with the physical presence of Jamie Fraser.

  Dinner had been served; the stable was filled with the peaceful sounds of chewing and the smell of fresh-broken hay. One or two of the horses lifted a head to look at him, wisps of hay straggling from the champing jaws, but for the most part, they ignored him, noses firmly planted in the mangers.

  Fraser was at the far end of the stable, mucking out. The huge door there had been slid aside, and he was silhouetted against the pale light of the fading spring sky. He must have heard Grey's footsteps on the brick floor, but didn't break the rhythm of his work.

  He stopped, though, and straightened when Grey came up to him. It was cold in the stable, but there was a sheen of moisture across his jaw, and the linen shirt clung to his shoulders. He smelled of clean sweat.

  "Leaks," Grey said abruptly. "You said 'leaks.'"

  Fraser rested the manure fork on its tines, wiped his face with a sleeve, and regarded him quizzically.

  "I dinna recall having done so, Major, but I suppose it's possible--I do ken the word."

  "When you spoke of the Stuart court at our last meeting," Grey amplified. "You said, and I quote, 'The Stuart court leaks like a sieve.' I am convinced that you understand the niceties of English grammar sufficiently as to use the present tense correctly, Mr. Fraser."