An Echo in the Bone, Page 25

  shirt. Before Jamie could finish the sentence, the boy had produced two sizable frogs, one green and one a sort of vile yellow color, who huddled together on the bare boards of the table, goggling in a nervous manner.

  Fergus cuffed Germain round the ear.

  “Take those accursed creatures off the table, before we are thrown out of here. No wonder you are covered in warts, consorting with les grenouilles!”

  “Grandmère told me to,” Germain protested, nonetheless scooping up his pets and returning them to captivity.

  “She did?” Jamie was not usually startled anymore by his wife’s cures, but this seemed odd, even by her standards.

  “Well, she said there was nothing to do for the wart on my elbow except rub it with a dead frog and bury it—the frog, I mean—at a crossroads at midnight.”

  “Oh. I think she might possibly have been being facetious. What did the Frenchman say to ye, then?”

  Germain looked up, wide-eyed and interested.

  “Oh, he’s not a Frenchman, Grandpère.”

  A brief pulse of astonishment went through him.

  “He’s not? Ye’re sure?”

  “Oh, aye. He cursed most blasphemous when Simon landed on his shoe—but not the way Papa does.” Germain aimed a bland look at his father, who looked disposed to cuff him again, but desisted at Jamie’s gesture. “He is an Englishman. I’m sure.”

  “He cursed in English?” Jamie asked. It was true; Frenchmen often invoked vegetables when cursing, not infrequently mingled with sacred references. English cursing generally had nothing to do with saints, sacraments, or cucumbers, but dealt with God, whores, or excrement.

  “He did. But I cannot say what he said, or Papa will be offended. He has very pure ears, Papa,” Germain added, with a smirk at his father.

  “Leave off deviling your father and tell me what else the man said.”

  “Aye, well,” Germain said obligingly. “When he saw it was no but a pair o’ wee froggies, he laughed and asked me was I taking them home for my dinner. I said no, they were my pets, and asked him was it his ship out there, because everyone said so and it was a bonny thing, no? I was making out to be simple, aye?” he explained, in case his grandfather might not have grasped the stratagem.

  Jamie suppressed a smile.

  “Verra clever,” he said dryly. “What else?”

  “He said no, the ship is not his but belongs to a great nobleman in France. And I of course said, oh, who was that? And he said it is the Baron Amandine.”

  Jamie exchanged looks with Fergus, who looked surprised and raised one shoulder in a shrug.

  “I asked then how long he might remain, for I should like to bring my brother down to see the ship. And he says he will sail tomorrow on the evening tide, and asked me—but he was joking, I could tell—if I wished to come and be a cabin boy on the voyage. I told him no, my frogs suffer from seasickness—like my grandfather.” He turned the smirk on Jamie, who eyed him severely.

  “Has your father taught ye ‘Ne petez pas plus haute que votre cul’?”

  “Mama will wash your mouth out with soap if you say things like that,” Germain informed him virtuously. “Do you want me to pick his pocket? I saw him go into the inn on Cherry Street. I could—”

  “You could not,” Fergus said hastily. “And do not say such things where people can hear. Your mother will assassinate both of us.”

  Jamie felt a cold prickle at the back of his neck, and glanced hastily round to make sure that no one had heard.

  “Ye’ve been teaching him to—”

  Fergus looked mildly shifty.

  “I thought it a pity that the skills should be lost. It is a family legacy, you might say. I do not let him steal things, of course. We put them back.”

  “We’ll have a word in private later, I think,” Jamie said, giving the pair of them a look full of menace. Christ, if Germain had been caught at it … He’d best put the fear of God into the two of them before they both ended up pilloried, if not hanged from a tree outright for theft.

  “What about the man you were actually sent to find?” Fergus asked his son, seizing the chance of deflecting Jamie’s ire.

  “I found him,” Germain said, and nodded toward the door. “There he is.”

  DELANCEY HALL WAS a small, neat man, with the quiet, nose-twitching manner of a church mouse. Anything less like a smuggler to look at could scarcely have been imagined—which, Jamie thought, was likely a valuable attribute in that line of business.

  “A shipper of dry goods” was the way Hall discreetly described his business. “I facilitate the finding of ships for specific cargoes. Which is no easy matter these days, gentlemen, as you may well suppose.”

  “I do indeed.” Jamie smiled at the man. “I have nay cargo to ship, but I am in hopes that ye might know of a situation that would suit. Myself, my wife, and my nephew seek passage to Edinburgh.” His hand was under the table, in his sporran. He had taken some of the gold spheres and flattened them with a hammer, into irregular disks. He took three of these and, moving only slightly, placed them on Hall’s lap.

  The man didn’t change expression in the slightest, but Jamie felt the hand dart out and seize the disks, weigh them for an instant, and then vanish into his pocket.

  “I think that might be possible,” he said blandly. “I know a captain departing from Wilmington in about two weeks’ time, who might be induced to carry passengers—for a consideration.”

  Sometime later, they walked back toward the printshop, Jamie and Fergus together, discussing the probabilities of Hall’s being able to produce a ship. Germain wandered dreamily in front of them, zigzagging to and fro in response to whatever was going on inside his remarkably fertile brain.

  Jamie’s own brain was more than occupied. Baron Amandine. He knew the name, but had no face to go with it, nor did he recall the context in which he knew it. Only that he had encountered it at some point, in Paris. But when? When he had attended the université there … or later, when he and Claire—yes. That was it; he’d heard the name at court. But no matter how he cudgeled his brain, it would give up no further information.

  “D’ye want me to speak to this Beauchamp?” Jamie asked abruptly. “I could perhaps find out what he means toward you.”

  Fergus’s mouth drew in a bit, then relaxed as he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “I said I had heard this man had made inquiries concerning me in Edenton?”

  “Ye’re sure it is you?” Not that the ground in North Carolina crawled with Claudels, but still …

  “I think so, yes.” Fergus spoke very softly, with an eye on Germain, who had started emitting soft croaks, evidently conversing with the frogs in his shirt. “The person who told me of this said that man had not only a name, but a small information, of sorts. That the Claudel Fraser he sought had been taken from Paris by a tall red-haired Scotsman. Named James Fraser. So I think you cannot speak to him, no.”

  “Not without exciting his attention, no,” Jamie agreed. “But … we dinna ken what his purpose is, but it may be something of great advantage to ye, aye? How likely is it that someone in France would go to the trouble and expense of sending someone like him to do ye harm, when they could be content just to leave ye be in America?” He hesitated. “Perhaps … the Baron Amandine is some relation to ye?”

  The notion seemed the stuff of romances, and likely the sheerest moonshine. But at the same time, Jamie was at a loss to think of some sensible reason for a French nobleman to be hunting a brothel-born bastard across two continents.

  Fergus nodded, but didn’t reply at once. He was wearing his hook today, rather than the bran-stuffed glove he wore for formal occasions, and delicately scratched his nose with the tip before answering.

  “For a long time,” he said at last, “when I was small, I pretended to myself that I was the bastard of some great man. All orphans do this, I think,” he added dispassionately. “It makes life easier to bear, to pretend that it will not always
be as it is, that someone will come and restore you to your rightful place in the world.”

  He shrugged.

  “Then I grew older, and knew this was not true. No one would come to rescue me. But then—” He turned his head and gave Jamie a smile of surpassing sweetness.

  “Then I grew older still, and discovered that, after all, it was true. I am the son of a great man.”

  The hook touched Jamie’s hand, hard and capable.

  “I wish for nothing more.”

  AE FOND KISS

  Wilmington, colony of North Carolina

  April 18, 1777

  THE HEADQUARTERS of the Wilmington Gazette were easy to find. The embers had cooled, but the all-too-familiar reek of burning was still thick in the air. A roughly dressed gentleman in a slouch hat was poking through the charred timbers in a dubious way, but left off at Jamie’s hailing him and made his way out of the wreckage, lifting his feet high in ginger avoidance.

  “Are ye the proprietor of the newspaper, sir?” Jamie asked, extending a hand to help him over a pile of half-burnt books that sprawled over the threshold. “My sympathies, if so.”

  “Oh, no,” the man replied, wiping smudges of soot from his fingers onto a large, filthy handkerchief, which he then passed to Jamie. “Amos Crupp, he’d be the printer. He’s gone, though—lit out when they burnt the shop. I’m Herbert Longfield; I own the land. Did own the shop,” he added, with a rueful glance behind him. “You wouldn’t be a salvor, would you? Got a nice lump of iron, there.”

  Fergus and Marsali’s printing press was now evidently the sole press in operation between Charleston and Newport. The Gazette’s press stood twisted and blackened amid the wreckage: still recognizable, but beyond salvage as anything save scrap.

  “How long ago did it happen?” I asked.

  “Night before last. Just after midnight. It was well a-gone before the bucket brigade could get started.”

  “An accident with the furnace?” Jamie asked. He bent and picked up one of the scattered pamphlets.

  Longfield laughed cynically.

  “Not from around here, are you? You said you were looking for Amos?” He glanced warily from Jamie to me and back again. He wasn’t likely to confide anything to strangers of unknown political affiliations.

  “James Fraser,” Jamie said, reaching out to shake his hand firmly. “My wife, Claire. Who was it? The Sons of Liberty?”

  Longfield’s eyebrows arched high.

  “You really aren’t from around here.” He smiled, but not happily. “Amos was with the Sons. Not quite one of ’em, maybe, but of their mind. I told him to walk a narrow road with what he wrote and what he printed in the paper, and he mostly tried. But these days, it doesn’t take much. A whisper of treason, and a man’s beaten half to death in the street, tarred and feathered, burnt out—killed, even.”

  He eyed Jamie consideringly.

  “So you didn’t know Amos. May I ask what your business with him was?”

  “I had a question regarding a bit of news that was published in the Gazette. Ye say Crupp’s gone. D’ye ken where I might find him? I mean him nay ill,” he added.

  Mr. Longfield glanced thoughtfully at me, apparently gauging the prospects that a man bound on political violence would bring his wife along. I smiled, trying to look as respectably charming as possible, and he smiled uncertainly back. He had a long upper lip that gave him the aspect of a rather worried camel, this being substantially enhanced by his eccentric dentition.

  “No, I don’t,” he said, turning back to Jamie with the air of a man making up his mind. “He did have a business partner, though, and a devil. Might be that one of them would know what you’re looking for?”

  Now it was Jamie’s turn to size up Longfield. He made his own mind up in an instant, and handed the pamphlet to me.

  “It might be. A small item of news regarding a house fire in the mountains was published last year. I wish to discover who might have given that item to the newspaper.”

  Longfield frowned, puzzled, and scratched at his long upper lip, leaving a smudge of soot.

  “I don’t recall that, myself. But then—well, I tell you what, sir. I was bound to see George Humphries—that’s Amos’s business partner—after looking over the premises …” He looked over his shoulder, grimacing. “Why don’t you come along with me and ask your question?”

  “That’s most obliging of ye, sir.” Jamie flicked an eyebrow at me, as a signal that I was no longer required for window dressing and thus might go about my own business. I wished Mr. Longfield good day, accordingly, and went to forage in the fleshpots of Wilmington.

  Business here was somewhat better than it was in New Bern. Wilmington had a deepwater harbor, and while the English blockade had of necessity affected importing and exporting, local boats and coastal packets still came into the port. Wilmington also was substantially larger and still boasted a thriving market in the town square, where I spent a pleasant hour collecting herbs and picking up local gossip, before acquiring a cheese roll for my lunch, whereupon I wandered down to the harbor to eat it.

  I strolled casually along, hoping to spot the vessel that might be carrying us to Scotland, but saw nothing at anchor that looked in any way large enough for such a voyage. But of course—DeLancey Hall had said that we would need to embark on a small ship, perhaps his own fishing ketch, and slip out of the harbor to rendezvous with the larger ship at sea.

  I sat down on a bollard to eat, drawing a small crowd of interested seagulls, who floated down like overweight snowflakes to surround me.

  “Think again, mate,” I said, pointing a monitory finger at one particularly intransigent specimen, who was sidling toward my feet, eyeing my basket. “It’s my lunch.” I still had the half-burnt pamphlet Jamie had handed me; I flapped it vigorously at the gulls, who whirled up in a screech of alarm but then resettled round me, at a slightly more respectful distance, beady eyes all focused on the roll in my hand.

  “Ha,” I said to them, and moved the basket behind my feet, just in case. I kept a good grip on my roll and one eye on the gulls. The other was free to survey the harbor. A British man-of-war was anchored a little way out, and the sight of the Union Jack flying from its bow gave me a peculiarly paradoxical feeling of pride and unease.

  The pride was reflexive. I’d been an Englishwoman all my life. I’d served Great Britain in hospitals, on battlefields—in duty and with honor—and I’d seen many of my countrymen and women fall in that same service. While the Union Jack I saw now was slightly different in design to the one I’d lived with, it was identifiably the same flag, and I felt the same instinctive lift of the heart at sight of it.

  At the same time, I was all too aware of the menace that that flag now posed to me and mine. The ship’s upper gunports were open; evidently some drill was being conducted, for I saw the cannon rolled rapidly in and out, in succession, blunt snouts poking out, then drawing in, like the heads of pugnacious gophers. There had been two men-of-war in the harbor the day before; the other had gone … where? On a particular mission—or merely cruising restlessly up and down outside the harbor mouth, ready to board, seize, fire upon, or sink any ship that looked suspicious?

  I couldn’t think of anything that would look more suspicious than the ship belonging to Mr. Hall’s smuggling friend.

  I thought again of the mysterious Mr. Beauchamp. France was still neutral; we would be a good deal safer in a ship flying French colors. Safer from the depredations of the British Navy, at least. As for Beauchamp’s own motives … I reluctantly accepted Fergus’s desire to have nothing to do with the man, but still wondered what on earth Beauchamp’s interest in Fergus could be.

  I also still wondered whether he might have any connection to my own family of Beauchamps, but there was no way of knowing; Uncle Lamb had done a rudimentary family genealogy, I knew—mostly for my sake—but I’d paid no attention to it. Where was it now? I wondered. He’d given it to me and Frank when we married, neatly typed up and put
in a manila folder.

  Perhaps I’d mention Mr. Beauchamp in my next letter to Brianna. She’d have all our old family records—the boxes of ancient income-tax forms, the collections of her own schoolwork and art projects…. I smiled at the memory of the clay dinosaur she’d made at the age of eight, a toothy creature leaning drunkenly to one side, a small cylindrical object hanging from its jaws.

  “That’s a mammal he’s eating,” she had informed me.

  “What happened to the mammal’s legs?” I’d asked.

  “They fell off when the dinosaur stepped on it.”

  The memory had distracted me for a moment, and a bold gull swooped low and struck my hand, knocking the last remnant of my roll to the ground, where it was instantly engulfed by a shrieking crowd of its fellows.

  I said a bad word—the gull had left a bleeding scratch across the back of my hand—and, picking up the pamphlet, flung it into the midst of the scrabbling birds. It hit one of them in the head, and the bird rolled over in a mad flutter of wings and pages that dispersed the mob, who all flapped off, yelling gull curses, leaving not a crumb behind.

  “Ha,” I said again, with a certain grim satisfaction. With some obscure twentieth-century inhibition against littering—certainly no such notions existed here—I retrieved the pamphlet, which had come apart into several pieces, and tidied them back into a rough rectangle.

  An Examination of Mercy, it was titled, with a subtitle reading, Thoughts upon the Nature of Divine Compassion, its Manifestation within the Human Bosom, and the Instruction of its Inspiration to the Improvement of the Individual and Mankind. Possibly not one of Mr. Crupp’s bestselling titles, I thought, stuffing it into the end of my basket.

  Which led me to another thought. I wondered whether Roger would see it in an archive someday. I rather thought he might.

  Did that mean that we—or I—ought to be doing things on purpose to ensure our appearance in said record? Given that most of the things that made the press in any era were war, crime, tragedy, and other hideous disasters, I rather thought not. My few brushes with notoriety had not been pleasant, and the last thing I wanted Roger to find was a report of my being hanged for bank robbery, executed for witchcraft, or having been pecked to death by vengeful gulls.

  No, I concluded. I’d best just tell Bree about Mr. Beauchamp and the Beauchamp family genealogy, and if Roger wanted to poke about in that, well and good. Granted, I’d never know if he found Mr. Percival in the list, but if so, Jem and Mandy would have a little further knowledge of their family tree.

  Now, where was it, that folder? The last time I’d seen it, it had been in Frank’s office, sitting on his filing cabinet. I remembered it distinctly, because Uncle Lamb had rather whimsically drawn what I assumed to be the family coat of—

  “I beg your pardon, madam,” a deep voice said respectfully behind me. “I see that you—”

  Jarred abruptly from my memory, I turned blankly toward the voice, thinking vaguely that I knew—

  “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!” I blurted, leaping to my feet. “You!”

  I took a step backward, stumbled over the basket, and nearly fell into the harbor, saved only by Tom Christie’s instinctive grab for my arm.

  He jerked me away from the edge of the quay and I fell against his chest. He recoiled as though I were made of molten metal, then seized me in his arms, pressed me hard against himself, and kissed me with passionate abandon.

  He broke off, peered into my face, and gasped, “You’re dead!”

  “Well, no,” I said, stunned into apology.

  “I beg—I beg your pardon,” he managed, letting his arms drop. “I—I—I—” He looked white as a ghost, and I rather thought he might fall into the harbor. I doubted that I looked much better, but I did at least have my feet under me.

  “You’d better sit down,” I said.

  “I—not here,” he said abruptly.

  He was right. The quay was a very public place, and our little rencontre had attracted considerable notice. A couple of idlers were staring openly, nudging each other, and we were collecting slightly less-obvious glances from the traffic of merchants, seamen, and dock laborers going about their business. I was beginning to recover from the shock, enough to think.

  “You have a room? Oh, no—that won’t do, will it?” I could imagine all too well what sorts of stories would be flying round town within minutes of our leaving the docks; if we left and repaired to Mr. Christie’s—I couldn’t think of him presently as anything but “Mr. Christie”—room …

  “The ordinary,” I said firmly. “Come on.”

  IT WAS ONLY A FEW minutes’ walk to Symonds’ ordinary, and we passed those minutes in total silence. I stole occasional glances at him, though, both to assure myself that he wasn’t a ghost and to assess his current situation.

  The latter seemed tolerable; he was decently dressed in a dark gray suit, with clean linen, and if he was not fashionable—I bit my lip at the thought of Tom Christie being fashionable—he was at least not shabby.

  Otherwise, he looked very much as I’d last seen him—well, no, I corrected myself. He actually looked much better. I’d last seen him in the extremity of exhausted grief, shredded by the tragedy of his daughter’s death and its subsequent complications. My last sight of him had been on the Cruizer, the British ship on which Governor Martin had taken refuge when he was driven out of the colony, almost two years ago.