An echo in the bone - Gabaldon Diana (читать книги TXT) 📗
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 universite 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.
