Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(142)
The sounds of the church faded, the whispering stones and echoes of wood, the shuffle of feet and the rolling gabble of the pigeons on the roof. Ian stopped saying words but was still praying. And then that stopped, too, and there was only peace and the soft beating of his heart.
He heard Jamie sigh, from somewhere deep inside, and opened his eyes. Without speaking, they went out, leaving the candle to keep watch.
“Did ye not mean to go to Confession yourself?” Jamie asked, stopping near the church’s main door. There was a priest in the confessional; two or three people stood a discreet distance away from the carved wooden stall, out of earshot, waiting.
“It’ll bide,” Ian said, with a shrug. “If ye’re goin’ to hell, I might as well go, too. God knows, ye’ll never manage alone.”
Jamie smiled—a wee bit of a smile, but still—and pushed the door open into sunlight.
They strolled aimlessly for a bit, not talking, and found themselves eventually on the river’s edge, watching the Garonne’s dark waters flow past, carrying debris from a recent storm.
“It means ‘peace,’?” Jamie said at last. “What he said to me. The doctor. ‘Shalom.’?”
Ian kent that fine. “Aye,” he said. “But peace is no our business now, is it? We’re soldiers.” He jerked his chin toward the nearby pier, where a packet boat rode at anchor. “I hear the King of Prussia needs a few good men.”
“So he does,” said Jamie, and squared his shoulders. “Come on, then.”
A FUGITIVE GREEN
1
SURVIVAL
Paris, April 1744
MINNIE RENNIE HAD SECRETS. Some were for sale and some were strictly her own. She touched the bosom of her dress and glanced toward the latticework door at the rear of the shop. Still closed, the blue curtains behind it drawn firmly shut.
Her father had secrets, too; Andrew Rennie (as he called himself in Paris) was outwardly a dealer in rare books but more privately a collector of letters whose writers had never meant them to be read by any but the addressee. He also kept a stock of more fluid information, this soaked out of his visitors with a combination of tea, wine, small amounts of money, and his own considerable charm.
Minnie had a good head for wine, needed no money, and was impervious to her father’s magnetism. She did, however, have a decently filial respect for his powers of observation.
The murmur of voices from the back room didn’t have the rhythm of leave-taking, no scraping of chairs…She nipped across the book-crammed shop to the shelves of tracts and sermons.
Taking down a red-calf volume with marbled endpapers, titled Collected Sermons of the Reverend George V. Sykes, she snatched the letter from the bosom of her dress, tucked it between the pages, and slid the book back into place. Just in time: there was movement in the back room, the putting down of cups, the slight raising of voices.
Heart thumping, she took one more glance at the Reverend Sykes and saw to her horror that she’d disturbed the dust on the shelf—there was a clear track pointing to the oxblood-leather spine. She darted back to the main counter, seized the feather duster kept under it, and had the entire section flicked over in a matter of moments.
She took several deep breaths; she mustn’t look flushed or flustered. Her father was an observant man—a trait that had (he often said, when instructing her in the art) kept him alive on more than one occasion.
But it was all right; the voices had changed again—some new point had come up.
She strolled composedly along the shelves and paused to look through the stacks of unsorted volumes that sat on a large table against the west wall. A strong scent of tobacco rose from the books, along with the usual smell of leather, buckram, glue, paper, and ink. This batch had plainly belonged to a man who liked a pipe when he read. She was paying little attention to the new stock, though; her mind was still on the letter.
The carter who had delivered this latest assemblage of books—the library of a deceased professor of history from Exeter—had given her a nod and a wink, and she’d slipped out with a market basket, meeting him round the corner by a fruiterer’s shop. A livre tournois to the carter, and five sous for a wooden basket of strawberries, and she’d been free to read the letter in the shelter of the alley before sauntering back to the shop, fruit in hand to explain her absence.
No salutation, no signature, as she’d requested—only the information:
Have found her, it read simply. Mrs. Simpson, Chapel House, Parson’s Green, Peterborough Road, London.
Mrs. Simpson. A name, at last. A name and a place, mysterious though both were.
Mrs. Simpson.
It had taken months, months of careful planning, choosing the men among the couriers her father used who might be amenable to making a bit extra on the side and a bit more for keeping her inquiries quiet.
She didn’t know what her father might do should he find out that she’d been looking for her mother. But he’d refused for the last seventeen years to say a word about the woman; it was reasonable to assume he wouldn’t be pleased.
Mrs. Simpson. She said it silently, feeling the syllables in her mouth. Mrs. Simpson…Was her mother married again, then? Did she have other children?
Minnie swallowed. The thought that she might have half brothers or sisters was at once horrifying, intriguing…and startlingly painful. That someone else might have had her mother—hers!—for all those years…