Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(149)

The handle of his porcelain teacup broke off suddenly and shot across the table, striking the pot with a tink! The cup itself had cracked right through, and tea ran down his arm, soaking his cuff.

He carefully put down the two pieces of the cup and shook tea off his hand. Harry said nothing but raised one bushy black brow at him.

Hal closed his eyes and breathed through his nose for several moments.

“All right,” he said, and opened his eyes. “One—Twelvetrees’s petition. It hasn’t been granted yet?”

“It has not.” Harry was beginning to relax a little, which gave Hal a bit more confidence in his own assumption of composure.

“Well, then. That’s the first thing—stop that petition. Do you know the secretary personally?”

Harry shook his head. “You?”

“I’ve met him once, at Ascot. Friendly wager. I won, though.”

“Ah. Too bad.” Harry drummed his fingers on the cloth for a moment, then darted a glance at Hal. “Ask your mother?”

“Absolutely not. She’s in France, anyway, and she’s not coming back.”

Harry knew why the Dowager Countess of Melton was in France—and why John was in Aberdeen—and nodded reluctantly. Benedicta Grey knew a great many people, but the suicide of her husband on the eve of his being arrested as a Jacobite traitor had barred her from the sort of circles where Hal might otherwise have found influence.

There was a long silence, unbroken by Nasonby’s appearance with a new teacup. He filled this, took up the shattered bits of the old one, and vanished as he’d come, soft-footed as a cat.

“What does this petition say, exactly?” Hal asked finally.

Harry grimaced but settled himself to answer.

“That you killed Nathaniel Twelvetrees because you had conceived the unfounded notion that he had been, er…dallying with your wife. In the grip of this delusion, you then assassinated him. And thus you are plainly mentally unfit to hold command over—”

“Unfounded?” Hal said blankly. “Assassinated?”

Harry reached out quickly and took the cup from his hand.

“You know as well as I do, Melton—it’s not what’s true; it’s what you can make people believe.” He set the full cup gingerly on its saucer. “The hound was damned discreet about it, and apparently so was Esmé. There wasn’t a breath of gossip until the news that you’d shot him on his own croquet lawn.”

“He chose the ground! And the weapons!”

“I know that,” Harry said patiently. “I was there, remember?”

“What do you think I am?” Hal snapped. “An idiot?”

Harry ignored that.

“I’ll say what I know, of course—that it was a legitimate challenge and that Nathaniel Twelvetrees accepted it. But his second—that chap Buxton—was killed last month in a carriage accident near Smithfield. And no one else was on that croquet lawn. That’s doubtless what gave Reginald the notion of trying to nobble you this way—no independent witnesses.”

“Oh…hell.” The sardines were stirring in his guts.

Harry took a breath that strained the seams of his uniform and looked down at the table.

“I—forgive me. But…is there any proof?”

Hal managed a laugh, dry as sawdust.

“Of the affair? Do you think I’d have killed him if I hadn’t been sure?”

“No, of course not. I only mean—well…bloody hell…did she just…tell you? Or perhaps you…er…saw…”

“No.” Hal was feeling dizzy. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and tried a deep breath of his own. “No, I never caught them together. And she didn’t—didn’t quite tell me. There were—there were letters.”

She’d left them where she knew he’d find them. But why? That was one of the things that killed him, over and over again. She’d never told him why. Was it simple guilt? Had she grown tired of the affair but lacked the courage to end it herself? Worse—had she wanted him to kill Nathaniel?

No. Her face when he’d come back that day, when he told her what he’d done…

His face was resting on the white cloth and there were black and white spots swarming before his eyes. He could smell starch and spilled tea, sardines with their tang of the sea. Of Esmé’s birth waters. And her blood. Oh, God, don’t let me vomit….





3





IRISH ROVERS


London, May 1744

MINNIE LAY IN BED, the remains of breakfast on a tray beside her, and contemplated the shape of her first day in London. She’d arrived late the night before and had barely taken notice of the rooms her father had engaged for her—she had a suite in a townhouse on Great Ryder Street, “convenient to everything,” as he’d assured her, complete with a housemaid and meals provided from the kitchen in the basement.

She had been filled with an intoxicating sense of freedom from the moment she’d taken an affectionate leave of her father on the dock at Calais. She could still feel the pleasure of it, bubbling in the slow, pleasant fashion of a crock of fermenting cabbage under her stays, but her innate caution kept a lid on it.

She’d done small jobs on her own before, sometimes outside of Paris, but those had been simple things like calling on the relatives of a dead bibliophile and sympathetically relieving them of their burdensome inheritance—she’d noticed that almost no one felt that a library was much of a legacy—and even then she’d had an escort, usually a stout, middle-aged, long-married man still capable of hoisting boxes and deflecting nuisances but unlikely to make improper advances to a young woman of seventeen.