Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(27)

Your servant,

John Hunter, Surgeon





Grey was conscious of a most extraordinary array of sensations. Relief—yes, there was a sense of profound relief, as of waking from a nightmare. There was also a sense of injustice, colored by the beginnings of indignation; by God, he had nearly been married! He might, of course, also have been maimed or killed as a result of the imbroglio, but that seemed relatively inconsequent; he was a soldier, after all—such things happened.

His hand trembled slightly as he set the note down. Beneath relief, gratitude, and indignation was a growing sense of horror.

I thought it might ease your mind…He could see Hunter’s face saying this; sympathetic, intelligent, and cheerful. It was a straightforward remark but one fully cognizant of its own irony.

Yes, he was pleased to know he had not caused Edwin Nicholls’s death. But the means of that knowledge…Gooseflesh rose on his arms and he shuddered involuntarily, imagining—

“Oh, God,” he said. He’d been once to Hunter’s house—to a poetry reading, held under the auspices of Mrs. Hunter, whose salons were famous. Dr. Hunter did not attend these but sometimes would come down from his part of the house to greet guests. On this occasion, he had done so and, falling into conversation with Grey and a couple of other scientifically minded gentlemen, had invited them up to see some of the more interesting items of his famous collection: the rooster with a transplanted human tooth growing in its comb, the child with two heads, the fetus with a foot protruding from its stomach.

Hunter had made no mention of the walls of jars, these filled with eyeballs, fingers, sections of livers…or of the two or three complete human skeletons that hung from the ceiling, fully articulated and fixed by a bolt through the tops of their skulls. It had not occurred to Grey at the time to wonder where—or how—Hunter had acquired these.

Nicholls had had an eyetooth missing, the front tooth beside the empty space badly chipped. If he ever visited Hunter’s house again, might he come face-to-face with a skull with a missing tooth?

He seized the brandy decanter, uncorked it, and drank directly from it, swallowing slowly and repeatedly, until the vision disappeared.

His small table was littered with papers. Among them, under his sapphire paperweight, was the tidy packet that the widow Lambert had handed him, her face blotched with weeping. He put a hand on it, feeling Charlie’s doubled touch, gentle on his face, soft around his heart.

“You won’t fail me.”

“No,” he said softly. “No, Charlie, I won’t.”



WITH MANOKE’S HELP as translator, Grey bought the child, after prolonged negotiation, for two golden guineas, a brightly colored blanket, a pound of sugar, and a small keg of rum. The grandmother’s face was sunken, not with grief, he thought, but with dissatisfaction and weariness. With her daughter dead of the smallpox, her life would be harder. The English, she conveyed to Grey through Manoke, were cheap bastards; the French were much more generous. He resisted the impulse to give her another guinea.

It was full autumn now, and the leaves had all fallen. The bare branches of the trees spread black ironwork flat against a pale-blue sky as he made his way upward through the town, to the French mission. There were several small buildings surrounding the tiny church, with children playing outside; some of them paused to look at him, but most of them ignored him—British soldiers were nothing new.

Father LeCarré took the bundle gently from him, turning back the blanket to look at the child’s face. The boy was awake; he pawed at the air, and the priest put out a finger for him to grasp.

“Ah,” he said, seeing the clear signs of mixed blood, and Grey knew the priest thought the child was his. He started to explain, but, after all, what did it matter?

“We will baptize him as a Catholic, of course,” Father LeCarré said, looking up at Grey. The priest was a young man, rather plump, dark, and clean-shaven, but with a gentle face. “You do not mind that?”

“No.” Grey drew out a purse. “For his maintenance. I will send an additional five pounds each year, if you will advise me once a year of his continued welfare. Here—the address to which to write.” A sudden inspiration struck him—not that he did not trust the good father, he assured himself, only…“Send me a lock of his hair,” he said. “Every year.”

He was turning to go when the priest called him back, smiling.

“Has the infant a name, sir?”

“A—” He stopped dead. The boy’s mother had surely called him something, but Malcolm Stubbs hadn’t thought to tell Grey what it was before being shipped back to England. What should he call the child? Malcolm, for the father who had abandoned him? Hardly.

Charles, maybe, in memory of Carruthers…

“…one of these days, it isn’t going to.”

“His name is John,” he said abruptly, and cleared his throat. “John Cinnamon.”

“Mais oui,” the priest said, nodding. “Bon voyage, Monsieur—et voyez avec le Bon Dieu.”

“Thank you,” he said politely, and went away, not looking back, down to the riverbank where Manoke waited to bid him farewell.





AUTHOR’S NOTES


THE BATTLE OF Quebec is justly famous as one of the great military triumphs of the eighteenth-century British Army. If you go today to the battlefield at the Plains of Abraham (in spite of this poetic name, it really was just named for the farmer who owned the land, one Abraham Martin; I suppose “The Plains of Martin” just didn’t have the same ring to it), you’ll see a plaque at the foot of the cliff there, commemorating the heroic achievement of the Highland troops who climbed this sheer cliff from the river below, clearing the way for the entire army—and their cannon, mortars, howitzers, and accompanying impedimenta—to make a harrowing overnight ascent and confront General Montcalm with a jaw-dropping spectacle by the dawn’s early light.