Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(176)
Not that they were all like that. One was a simple two-line note making an assignation, another was a more thoughtful—and, surprisingly, a more intimate—letter describing Esmé’s visit to—oh, God, Minnie thought, and wiped her hand on her skirt, as she’d begun to perspire—Princess Augusta and her fabulous garden.
Esmé had noted carelessly that she had no liking for the princess, whom she thought heavy in both body and mind, but that Melton had asked her to accept the invitation to tea in order to—and here Minnie translated Esmé’s idiomatic French expression—“drench in melted butter” the vulgar woman and pave the way for Melton to discuss his military designs with the prince.
She then mentioned walking through the glass conservatories with the princess, paused to make comical, if offhandedly complimentary, comparisons between her lover’s physical parts and various exotic plants—she mentioned the euphorbias, Minnie noted—and ended with a brief remark about the Chinese flowers called chu. She was attracted—Minnie snorted, reading this—by the “purity and stillness” of the blooms.
“à les regarder, mon ame s’est apaisée,” she had written. “It soothed my soul to look at them.”
Minnie set the letter down, as gently as if it might break, and closed her eyes.
“You poor man,” she whispered.
THERE WAS A DECANTER of wine on the sideboard. She poured a small glass, very carefully, and stood sipping it, looking at the desk and its burden of letters.
Someone real. She had to admit that Esmé Grey was definitely real. The impact of her personality was as palpable as though she’d reached out of the paper and stroked her correspondent’s face. Teasing, erotic…
“Cruel,” Minnie said aloud, though softly. To write to your lover and mention your husband?
“Hmph,” she said.
And Esmé’s partner in this criminal conversation? She glanced at the bundle of Nathaniel Twelvetrees’s letters to his mistress. What bizarre quirk of mind had made Melton keep them? Was it guilt, a sort of hair shirt of the spirit?
And if so…guilt for killing Nathaniel Twelvetrees? Or guilt over Esmé’s death? She wondered how quickly the one event had followed the other—had the shock of hearing of her lover’s death brought on a miscarriage, or a fatally early labor, as gossip said?
Likely she’d never learn the answers to those questions, but while Melton had killed Nathaniel, he’d left the poet his voice; Nathaniel Twelvetrees could speak for himself.
She poured another glass of the wine—a heavy, aromatic Bordeaux; she felt she needed ballast—and unfolded the first of Nathaniel’s letters.
For a poet, Nathaniel was a surprisingly pedestrian writer. His sentiments were expressed in sufficiently passionate language but a very common prose, and while he made a distinct effort to meet Esmé on her own ground, he was clearly not her match, in either imagination or expression.
Still, he was a poet, not a novelist; perhaps it wasn’t fair to judge him by his prose style alone. In two of his letters, he mentioned an enclosure, a poem written in honor of his beloved. She checked the box: no poems. Maybe Melton had burned those—or Esmé had. Nathaniel’s tone in presenting these literary gifts reminded Minnie very much of a naturalist’s description she had read—of a type of male spider who brought his chosen mate an elaborately silk-wrapped parcel containing an insect and then leapt upon her whilst she was absorbed in unwrapping her snack, hastily achieving his purpose before she could finish eating and have him for dessert.
“She scared him,” Minnie murmured to herself, with a sense of sympathy but one tempered with a mild contempt. “Poor worm.” She was somewhat shocked to realize that contempt—and the more so to realize that Esmé had very likely felt the same.
Hence her invoking Melton’s name in the letters to Twelvetrees? An attempt to sting him into greater ardor? She’d done it more than once; in fact—Minnie turned again to Esmé’s letters—yes, she’d mentioned her husband, by name or reference, in every letter, even the two-line assignation: My husband will be gone on his regimental business—come to me tomorrow in the oratory at four o’clock.
“Huh,” Minnie said, and sat back, eyeing the letters as she sipped her wine. They lay in stacks and single sheets and fans before her, with the as-yet-unread folder that held Melton’s letters in the center. It looked not unlike a layout of the tarot—she’d had her own cards read several times in Paris, by an acquaintance of her father’s named Jacques, who was practicing the art.
“Sometimes it’s quite subtle,” Jacques had said, shuffling the gaudy cards. “Especially the minor arcana. But then—sometimes it’s obvious at first glance.” This said, smiling, as he laid Death in front of her.
She had no opinion regarding the truth laid out in tarot cards, considering that to be no more than the reflection of the client’s mind at the time of the reading. But she had definite opinions regarding letters, and she touched the two-line assignation thoughtfully.
Where had Esmé’s letters come from? Would the Twelvetrees family have sent them to Lord Melton following Nathaniel’s death? They might, she thought. What could be more painful to him? Though that argued both a subtlety of mind and a sense of refined cruelty that she saw no trace of in Nathaniel’s letters and that she hadn’t noticed in most English people.