Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(14)
Carruthers was seated at a rickety table in shirt and breeches, writing, an inkwell made from a gourd at one elbow, a pot of beer at the other. He looked at Grey blankly for an instant, then joy washed across his features, and he rose, nearly upsetting both.
“John!”
Before Grey could offer his hand, he found himself embraced—and returned the embrace wholeheartedly, a wash of memory flooding through him as he smelled Carruthers’s hair, felt the scrape of his unshaven cheek against Grey’s own. Even in the midst of this sensation, though, he felt the slightness of Carruthers’s body, the bones that pressed through his clothes.
“I never thought you’d come,” Carruthers was repeating, for perhaps the fourth time. He let go and stepped away smiling as he dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, which were unabashedly wet.
“Well, you have an electric eel to thank for my presence,” Grey told him, smiling himself.
“A what?” Carruthers stared at him blankly.
“Long story—tell you later. For the moment, though—what the devil have you been doing, Charlie?”
The happiness faded somewhat from Carruthers’s lean face but didn’t disappear altogether.
“Ah. Well. That’s a long story, too. Let me send Martine for more beer.” He waved Grey toward the room’s only stool and went out before Grey could protest. He sat, gingerly, lest the stool collapse, but it held his weight. Besides the stool and table, the attic was very plainly furnished; a narrow cot, a chamber pot, and an ancient washstand with an earthenware basin and ewer completed the ensemble. It was very clean, but there was a faint smell of something in the air—something sweet and sickly, which he traced at once to a corked bottle standing at the back of the washstand.
Not that he had needed the smell of laudanum; one look at Carruthers’s gaunt face told him enough. He glanced at the papers Carruthers had been working on. They appeared to be notes in preparation for the court-martial; the one on top was an account of an expedition undertaken by troops under Carruthers’s command, on the orders of a Major Gerald Siverly.
Our orders instructed us to march to a village called Beaulieu, there to ransack and fire the houses, driving off such animals as we encountered. This we did. Some men of the village offered us resistance, armed with scythes and other implements. Two of these were shot, the others fled. We returned with two wagons filled with flour, cheeses, and small household goods, three cows, and two good mules.
Grey got no further before the door opened. Carruthers came in and sat on the bed, nodding toward the papers.
“I thought I’d best write everything down. Just in case I don’t live long enough for the court-martial.” He spoke matter-of-factly and, seeing the look on Grey’s face, smiled faintly. “Don’t be troubled, John. I’ve always known I’d not make old bones. This”—he turned his right hand upward, letting the drooping cuff of his shirt fall back—“isn’t all of it.” He tapped his chest gently with his left hand.
“More than one doctor’s told me I have some gross defect of the heart. Don’t know, quite, if I have two of those, too”—he grinned, the sudden, charming smile Grey remembered so well—“or only half of one, or what. Used to be I just went faint now and then, but it’s getting worse. Sometimes I feel it stop beating and just flutter in my chest, and everything begins to go all black and breathless. So far, it’s always started beating again—but one of these days it isn’t going to.”
Grey’s eyes were fixed on Charlie’s hand, the small dwarf hand curled against its larger fellow, looking as though Charlie held a strange flower cupped in his palm. As Grey watched, both hands opened slowly, the fingers moving in strangely beautiful synchrony.
“All right,” he said quietly. “Tell me.”
Failure to suppress a mutiny was a rare charge—difficult to prove and thus unlikely to be brought, unless other factors were involved. Which, in the present instance, they undoubtedly were.
“Know Siverly, do you?” Carruthers asked, taking the papers onto his knee.
“Not at all. I gather he’s a bastard.” Grey gestured at the papers. “What kind of bastard, though?”
“A corrupt one.” Carruthers tapped the pages square, carefully evening the edges, eyes fixed on them. “That—what you read—it wasn’t Siverly. It’s General Wolfe’s directive. I’m not sure whether the point is to deprive the fortress of provisions, in hopes of starving them out eventually, or to put pressure on Montcalm to send out troops to defend the countryside, where Wolfe could get at them—possibly both. But he means deliberately to terrorize the settlements on both sides of the river. No, we did this under the general’s orders.” His face twisted a little, and he looked up suddenly at Grey. “You remember the Highlands, John?”
“You know that I do.” No one involved in Cumberland’s cleansing of the Highlands would ever forget. He had seen many Scottish villages like Beaulieu.
Carruthers took a deep breath.
“Yes. Well. The trouble was that Siverly took to appropriating the plunder we took from the countryside—under the pretext of selling it in order to make an equitable distribution among the troops.”
“What?” This was contrary to the normal custom of the army, whereby any soldier was entitled to what plunder he seized. “Who does he think he is, an admiral?” The navy did divide shares of prize money among the crew, according to formula—but the navy was the navy; crews acted much more as single entities than did army companies, and there were Admiralty courts set up to deal with the sale of captured prize ships.