Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(177)

Besides…what had made Melton challenge Twelvetrees in the first place? Surely Esmé hadn’t confessed the affair to him. No…Colonel Quarry had said, or at least intimated, that Melton had found incriminating letters written by his wife, and that that was what…

She picked up the countess’s pile again, frowning at the letters. Looking carefully, she could see that each one had a blot of ink or the occasional smear—one appeared to have had water spilled over the bottom edge. So…these were drafts of letters, later copied fair to be sent to Nathaniel? If so, though, why not throw the drafts into the fire? Why keep them and risk discovery?

“Or invite it,” she said aloud, surprising herself. She sat up straight and read the letters through again, then set them down.

My husband will be gone… Every one. Every one of them noted Melton’s absence—and his preoccupation with his nascent regiment.

Jacques was right; sometimes it was obvious.

Minnie shook her head, the wine fumes mingling with the dead countess’s bitter perfume.

“Pauvre chienne,” she said softly. “Poor bitch.”





14





NOTORIOUS BORES


IT WASN’T NECESSARY TO read Lord Melton’s letters, but she couldn’t possibly have stopped herself from doing so, and she picked one up as though it were a lit grenade that might go off in her hand.

It did. She read the five letters through without stopping. None were dated, and there was no way of telling the order in which they had been written; time had plainly been of no consequence to the writer—and yet it had meant everything. This was the voice of a man pushed off a cliff into the abyss of eternity and documenting his fall.

I will love you forever, I cannot do otherwise, but by God, Esmé, I will hate you forever, with all the power of my soul, and had I you before me and your long white neck in my hands I would strangle you like a fucking swan and fuck you as you died, you…

He might as well have picked up the inkwell and flung it at the page. The words were scrawled and blotted, big and black, and there were ragged holes torn through the paper where here and there he had stabbed the page with his quill.

She took a deep, gasping breath when she came to the end, feeling as though she hadn’t breathed once in the reading. She didn’t weep, but her hands were shaking, and the last letter slipped from her fingers and floated to the floor. Weighted with loss and a grief that didn’t cut but clawed and, merciless, tore its prey to bloody ribbons.



SHE DIDN’T READ the letters again. It would have felt like a desecration. As it was, there was no need to read them over; she thought she would never forget a word of any of them.

She had to leave her rooms and walk for some time to regain any sense of composure. Now and then she felt tears run down her cheeks and hastily blotted them before any passerby should notice and ask her trouble. She felt as though she’d wept for days or as though someone had beaten her. And yet it was nothing to do with her.

She felt one of the O’Higgins brothers following somewhere behind her, but he tactfully hung back. She walked from one end to the other of St. James’s Park, and all the way around the lake, but finally sat down on a bench near a flotilla of swans, exhausted in mind and body both. Someone sat down on the other end of the bench—Mick, she saw, from the corner of her eye.

It was teatime; the bustle of the streets was dying down as people hurried home or dropped into a tavern or an ordinary to refresh themselves after a long day’s labor. Mick coughed in a meaning manner.

“I’m not hungry,” she said. “You go on, if you like.”

“Now, Bedelia. Ye know fine I’m not goin’ anywhere you don’t go.” He’d scooted along the bench and sat at her elbow, slouched and companionable. “Shall I be fetchin’ ye a pie, now? Whatever’s the trouble, it’ll seem better on a full belly.”

She wasn’t hungry, but she was empty and, after a moment’s indecision, gave in and let him buy her a meat pie from a pie man. The smell of it was so strong and good that she felt somewhat restored just from holding it. She nibbled the crust, felt the rich flood of juice and flavor in her mouth, and, closing her eyes, gave herself over to the pie.

“There, now.” Mick, having long since finished his own pie, sat gazing benevolently at her. “Better, is it not?”

“Yes,” she admitted. At least she could now think about the matter, rather than drowning in it. And while she hadn’t been conscious of actually thinking at any time since leaving her rooms, evidently some back chamber of her mind had been turning things over.

Esmé and Nathaniel were dead. Harold, theoretical Duke of Pardloe, wasn’t. That’s what it came down to. She could do something about him. And she found that she was determined to do it.

“What, though?” she asked, having explained the matter to Mick in general terms. “I can’t send those letters to the secretary at war—there’s no way His Grace wouldn’t find out, and I think it would kill him to know anyone had read them, let alone people who…who had any power over him, you know.”

Mick pulled a face but allowed that this might be so.

“So what is it ye want to happen, Lady Bedelia?” he asked. “There’s maybe another way of it?”