Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(9)

Hal waited, noncommittal, as Grey opened the letter and read it. It was a request—or an order, depending how you looked at it—for the attendance of Major Lord John Grey at the court-martial of one Captain Charles Carruthers, to serve as witness of character for the same. In…

“In Canada?” John’s exclamation startled Dottie, who crumpled up her face and threatened to cry.

“Hush, sweetheart.” Hal jiggled faster, hastily patting her back. “It’s all right; only Uncle John being an ass.”

Grey ignored this, waving the letter at his brother.

“What the devil is Charlie Carruthers being court-martialed for? And why on earth am I being summoned as a character witness?”

“Failure to suppress a mutiny,” Hal said. “As to why you—he asked for you, apparently. An officer under charges is allowed to call his own witnesses, for whatever purpose. Didn’t you know that?”

Grey supposed that he had, in an academic sort of way. But he had never attended a court-martial himself; it wasn’t a common proceeding, and he had no real idea of the shape of the proceedings. He glanced sideways at Hal.

“You say you didn’t mean to show it to me?”

Hal shrugged and blew softly over the top of his daughter’s head, making the short blond hairs furrow and rise like wheat in the wind.

“No point. I meant to write back and say that as your commanding officer I required you here; why should you be dragged off to the wilds of Canada? But given your talent for awkward situations…What did it feel like?” he inquired curiously.

“What did—oh, the eel.” Grey was accustomed to his brother’s lightning shifts of conversation and made the adjustment easily. “Well, it was rather a shock.”

He laughed—if tremulously—at Hal’s glower, and Dottie squirmed round in her father’s arms, reaching out her own plump little arms appealingly to her uncle.

“Flirt,” he told her, taking her from Hal. “No, really, it was remarkable. You know how it feels when you break a bone? That sort of jolt that goes right through you before you feel the pain, and you go blind for a moment and feel as if someone’s driven a nail through your belly? It was like that, only much stronger, and it went on for longer. Stopped my breath,” he admitted. “Quite literally. And my heart, too, I think. Dr. Hunter—you know, the anatomist?—was there and pounded on my chest to get it started again.”

Hal was listening with close attention and asked several questions, which Grey answered automatically, his mind occupied with this latest surprising communiqué.

Charlie Carruthers. They’d been young officers together, though from different regiments. Fought beside each other in Scotland, gone round London together for a bit on their next leave. They’d had—well, you couldn’t call it an affair. Three or four brief encounters—sweating, breathless quarters of an hour in dark corners that could be conveniently forgotten in daylight or shrugged off as the result of drunkenness, not spoken of by either party.

That had been in the Bad Time, as he thought of it: those years after Hector’s death, when he’d sought oblivion wherever he could find it—and found it often—before slowly recovering himself.

Likely he wouldn’t have recalled Carruthers at all, save for the one thing.

Carruthers had been born with an interesting deformity—he had a double hand. While Carruthers’s right hand was normal in appearance and worked quite as usual, there was another, dwarf hand that sprang from his wrist and nestled neatly against its larger partner. Dr. Hunter would probably pay hundreds for that hand, Grey thought, with a mild lurch of the stomach.

The dwarf hand had only two short fingers and a stubby thumb—but Carruthers could open and close it, though not without also opening and closing the larger one. The shock when Carruthers had closed both of them simultaneously on Grey’s prick had been nearly as extraordinary as had the electric eel’s.

“Nicholls hasn’t been buried yet, has he?” he asked abruptly, the thought of the eel party and Dr. Hunter causing him to interrupt some remark of Hal’s.

Hal looked surprised.

“Surely not. Why?” He narrowed his eyes at Grey. “You don’t mean to attend the funeral, do you?”

“No, no,” Grey said hastily. “I was only thinking of Dr. Hunter. He, um, has a certain reputation, and Nicholls did go off with him. After the duel.”

“A reputation as what, for God’s sake?” Hal demanded impatiently.

“As a body snatcher,” Grey blurted.

There was a sudden silence, awareness dawning in Hal’s face. He’d gone pale.

“You don’t think—no! How could he?”

“A…um…hundredweight or so of stones substituted just prior to the coffin’s being nailed shut is the usual method—or so I’ve heard,” Grey said, as well as he could with Dottie’s fist poked up his nose.

Hal swallowed. Grey could see the hairs rise on his wrist.

“I’ll ask Harry,” Hal said, after a short silence. “The funeral can’t have been arranged yet, and if…”

Both brothers shuddered reflexively, imagining all too exactly the scene as an agitated family member insisted upon raising the coffin lid, to find…

“Maybe better not,” Grey said, swallowing. Dottie had left off trying to remove his nose and was patting her tiny hand over his lips as he talked. The feel of it on his skin…