Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(180)

“If he didn’t burn the letters,” Minnie said, “he wouldn’t have burnt the poems, either. The poems couldn’t possibly have contained anything worse.”

Why didn’t he burn the letters? she wondered, for at least the hundredth time. And to have kept all the letters—Esmé’s, Nathaniel’s…and his own.

Perhaps it was guilt, the need to suffer for what he’d done, obsessively reading them over. Perhaps it was confusion—some need or hope of making sense of what had happened, what they’d all done, in making this tragedy. He was the only one left to do it, after all.

Or…perhaps it was only that he still loved his wife and his friend, mourned them both, and couldn’t bear to part with these last personal relics. His own letters were certainly filled with a heartbreaking grief, easily visible amongst the blots of rage.

“I think that she deliberately left the letters where her husband would find them,” Minnie said slowly, watching a line of half-grown cygnets sailing after their mother. “But the poems…maybe those didn’t have any pointed references to Lord Melton in them. If they were only about her, she might have kept them private, put them away somewhere safe, I mean.”

“So?” Rafe was beginning to look wary. “We’ll not get back in Argus House, ye know. Every servant in the place saw us last time.”

“Ye-es.” She stretched out a leg, considering her new calf-leather court shoes. “But I was wondering…might you have a…a sister, say, or perhaps a cousin, who wouldn’t mind earning…say…five pounds?” Five pounds was half a year’s pay for a house servant.

Rafe stopped dead and stared at her.

“Are ye wanting us to burgle the house or burn it down, for all love?”

“Nothing at all dangerous,” she assured him, and batted her eyes, just once. “I just want you—or, rather, your female accomplice—to steal the countess’s Bible.”



IN THE END, stealing the book hadn’t been necessary. Cousin Aoife, in her guise as a newly hired chambermaid, had simply gone through the Bible, this still resting chastely on the night table beside the countess’s bereft bed, removed from it a handful of folded papers, pocketed these, walked down the stairs and out to the privy behind the house, from whence she had modestly disappeared through a hole in the hedge, never to return.

“Anything ye can use, Lady Bedelia?” Mick and Rafe had both come up to her rooms the day after they’d delivered their prize and collected Aoife’s wages.

“Yes.” She hadn’t slept at all the night before, and everything around her had a slightly dream-like quality, including the two Irishmen. She yawned, spreading her fan just in time, and blinked at them, then reached into her pocket and drew out a parchment cover, sealed with black wax and addressed to Sir William Yonge, Secretary at War.

“Can you ensure—and I do mean make sure—that Sir William will get this? I know,” she said dryly, seeing Rafe make doe’s eyes at her, “I wound you. Do it, though.”

They laughed and went, leaving her to the silence of her room and the company of paper. Small barricades of books protected the table on which she’d made her magic, summoning the shade of her father with half a glass of Madeira, crossing herself and asking the blessing of her mother’s prayers before picking up her quill.

Nathaniel Twelvetrees, bless his erotically inclined heart, had waxed lascivious in describing his mistress’s charms. He had also, in one of the poems, mentioned various aspects of the place in which the lovers had disported themselves. He hadn’t signed that one—but he had written Yours forever, darling—Nathaniel at the bottom of the other.

After some dithering, she had at last decided to take the risk in order to put the matter beyond doubt and, after filling two foolscap pages with practice attempts, had cut a fresh quill and written—in what she thought was a decent version of Nathaniel’s hand and style—a title for his untitled poem: Love’s Constant Flowering: in Celebration of the Seventh of April. And at the bottom—after a lot more practice: Yours, in the flesh and in the spirit, darling Esmé—Nathaniel.

If she was lucky, no one would ever think to investigate where Esmé, Countess Melton, had been on the seventh of April, but one of said countess’s letters had made an assignation for that date, and the details of the place given in Nathaniel’s poem matched what Minnie knew of the spot chosen for said assignation.

The poem made it clear, at least, that the Duke of Pardloe would have had more than adequate grounds for challenging Nathaniel Twelvetrees to a duel. And it certainly suggested that the countess had encouraged Twelvetrees’s attentions, if not more—but it didn’t disclose the true heart of the matter, let alone reveal Esmé’s character or the painful intimacies of her husband.

So. Now it was done.

The letters—all of them—were still arrayed on the table in their tarot spread before her, silent witnesses.

“And what am I to do with you?” she said to them. She filled up her glass of wine and drank it slowly, contemplating.

The simplest thing—and by far the safest—was to burn them. Two considerations stopped her, though.

One. If the poem didn’t work, the letters were the only evidence of the affair. In the last resort, she could give them to Harry Quarry and let him make what use he could—or would—of them.