Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(21)

Thus fortified, he sat down and took up the little pouch, from which he decanted into his hand a small, heavy gold paperweight, made in the shape of a half-moon set among ocean waves. It was set with a faceted—and very large—sapphire, which glowed like the evening star in its setting. Where had James Fraser acquired such a thing?

He turned it in his hand, admiring the workmanship, but then set it aside. He sipped his brandy for a bit, watching the official document as though it might explode. He was reasonably sure it would.

He weighed the document in his hand and felt the breeze from his window lift the pages a little, like the flap of a sail just before it fills and bellies with a snap.

Waiting wouldn’t help. And Hal plainly knew what it said, anyway; he’d tell Grey eventually, whether he wanted to know or not. Sighing, he put by his brandy and broke the seal.

I, Bernard Donald Adams, do make this confession of my own free will…



Was it? he wondered. He did not know Adams’s handwriting, could not tell whether the document had been written or dictated—no, wait. He flipped over the sheets and examined the signature. Same hand. All right, he had written it himself.

He squinted at the writing. It seemed firm. Probably not extracted under torture, then. Perhaps it was the truth.

“Idiot,” he said under his breath. “Read the goddamned thing and have done with it!”

He drank the rest of his brandy at a gulp, flattened the pages upon the stone of the parapet, and read, at last, the story of his father’s death.



THE DUKE HAD suspected the existence of a Jacobite ring for some time and had identified three men whom he thought involved in it. Still, he made no move to expose them until the warrant was issued for his own arrest, upon the charge of treason. Hearing of this, he had sent at once to Adams, summoning him to the duke’s country home at Earlingden.

Adams did not know how much the duke knew of his own involvement but did not dare to stay away, lest the duke, under arrest, denounce him. So he armed himself with a pistol and rode by night to Earlingden, arriving just before dawn.

He had come to the conservatory’s outside doors and been admitted by the duke. Whereupon “some conversation” had ensued.

I had learned that day of the issuance of a warrant for arrest upon the charge of treason, to be served upon the body of the Duke of Pardloe. I was uneasy at this, for the duke had questioned both myself and some colleagues previously, in a manner that suggested to me that he suspected the existence of a secret movement to restore the Stuart throne.

I argued against the duke’s arrest, as I did not know the extent of his knowledge or suspicion, and feared that, if placed in exigent danger himself, he might be able to point a finger at myself or my principal colleagues, these being Victor Arbuthnot, Lord Creemore, and Sir Edwin Bellman. Sir Edwin was urgent upon the point, though, saying that it would do no harm; any accusations made by Pardloe could be dismissed as simple attempts to save himself, with no grounding in fact—while the fact of his arrest would naturally cause a widespread assumption of guilt and would distract any attentions that might at present be directed toward us.

The duke, hearing of the warrant, sent to my lodgings that evening and summoned me to call upon him at his country home immediately. I dared not spurn this summons, not knowing what evidence he might possess, and therefore rode by night to his estate, arriving soon before dawn.



Adams had met the duke there, in the conservatory. Whatever the form of this conversation, its result had been drastic.

I had brought with me a pistol, which I had loaded outside the house. I meant this only for protection, as I did not know what the duke’s demeanor might be.



Dangerous, evidently. Gerard Grey, Duke of Pardloe, had also come armed to the meeting. According to Adams, the duke had withdrawn his pistol from the recesses of his jacket—whether to attack or merely threaten was not clear—whereupon Adams had drawn his own pistol in panic. Both men fired; Adams thought the duke’s pistol had misfired, since the duke could not have missed at the distance.

Adams’s shot did not misfire, nor did it miss its target, and seeing the blood upon the duke’s bosom, Adams had panicked and run. Looking back, he had seen the duke, mortally stricken but still upright, seize the branch of the peach tree beside him for support, whereupon the duke had used the last of his strength to hurl his own useless weapon at Adams before collapsing.

John Grey sat still, slowly rubbing the parchment sheets between his fingers. He wasn’t seeing the neat strokes in which Adams had set down his bloodless account. He saw the blood. A dark red, beautiful as a jewel where the sun through the glass of the roof struck it suddenly. His father’s hair, tousled as it might be after hunting. And the peach, fallen to those same tiles, its perfection spoiled and ruined.

He set the papers down on the table; the wind stirred them, and, by reflex, he reached for his new paperweight to hold them down.

What was it Carruthers had called him? Someone who keeps order. “You and your brother,” he’d said. “You don’t stand for that. If there is any order in the world, any peace—it’s because of you, John, and those very few like you.”

Perhaps. He wondered if Carruthers knew the cost of peace and order—but then recalled Charlie’s haggard face, its youthful beauty gone, nothing left in it now save the bones and the dogged determination that kept him breathing.