Seven Stones to Stand or Fall by Diana Gabaldon (3)

ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, it was probably the fault of the electric eel. John Grey could—and for a time, did—blame the Honorable Caroline Woodford, as well. And the surgeon. And certainly that blasted poet. Still…no, it was the eel’s fault.

The party had been at Lucinda Joffrey’s house. Sir Richard was absent; a diplomat of his stature could not have countenanced something so frivolous. Electric-eel parties were a mania in London just now, but owing to the scarcity of the creatures, a private party was a rare occasion. Most such parties were held at public theaters, with the fortunate few selected for encounter with the eel summoned onstage, there to be shocked and sent reeling like ninepins for the entertainment of the audience.

“The record is forty-two at once!” Caroline had told him, her eyes wide and shining as she looked up from the creature in its tank.

“Really?” It was one of the most peculiar things he’d seen, though not very striking. Nearly three feet long, it had a heavy, squarish body with a blunt head, which looked to have been inexpertly molded out of sculptor’s clay, and tiny eyes like dull glass beads. It had little in common with the lashing, lithesome eels of the fish market—and certainly did not seem capable of felling forty-two people at once.

The thing had no grace at all, save for a small thin ruffle of a fin that ran the length of its lower body, undulating as a gauze curtain does in the wind. Lord John expressed this observation to the Honorable Caroline and was accused in consequence of being poetic.

“Poetic?” said an amused voice behind him. “Is there no end to our gallant major’s talents?”

Lord John turned, with an inward grimace and an outward smile, and bowed to Edwin Nicholls.

“I should not think of trespassing upon your province, Mr. Nicholls,” he said politely. Nicholls wrote execrable verse, mostly upon the subject of love, and was much admired by young women of a certain turn of mind. The Honorable Caroline wasn’t one of them; she’d written a very clever parody of his style, though Grey thought Nicholls had not heard about it. He hoped not.

“Oh, don’t you?” Nicholls raised one honey-colored brow at him and glanced briefly but meaningfully at Miss Woodford. His tone was jocular, but his look was not, and Grey wondered just how much Mr. Nicholls had had to drink. Nicholls was flushed of cheek and glittering of eye, but that might be only the heat of the room, which was considerable, and the excitement of the party.

“Do you think of composing an ode to our friend?” Grey asked, ignoring Nicholls’s allusion and gesturing toward the large tank that contained the eel.

Nicholls laughed, too loudly—yes, quite a bit the worse for drink—and waved a dismissive hand.

“No, no, Major. How could I think of expending my energies upon such a gross and insignificant creature, when there are angels of delight such as this to inspire me?” He leered—Grey did not wish to impugn the fellow, but he undeniably leered—at Miss Woodford, who smiled, with compressed lips, and tapped him rebukingly with her fan.

Where was Caroline’s uncle? Grey wondered. Simon Woodford shared his niece’s interest in natural history and would certainly have escorted her….Oh, there. Simon Woodford was deep in discussion with Dr. Hunter, the famous surgeon—what had possessed Lucinda to invite him? Then he caught sight of Lucinda, viewing Dr. Hunter over her fan with narrowed eyes, and realized that she hadn’t invited him.

John Hunter was a famous surgeon—and an infamous anatomist. Rumor had it that he would stop at nothing to bag a particularly desirable body—whether human or not. He did move in society, but not in the Joffreys’ circles.

Lucinda Joffrey had most expressive eyes. Her one claim to beauty, they were almond-shaped, clear gray in color, and capable of sending remarkably minatory messages across a crowded room.

Come here! they said. Grey smiled and lifted his glass in salute to her but made no move to obey. The eyes narrowed further, gleaming dangerously, then cut abruptly toward the surgeon, who was edging toward the tank, his face alight with curiosity and acquisitiveness.

The eyes whipped back to Grey.

Get rid of him! they said.

Grey glanced at Miss Woodford. Mr. Nicholls had seized her hand in his and appeared to be declaiming something; she looked as though she wanted the hand back. Grey looked back at Lucinda and shrugged, with a small gesture toward Mr. Nicholls’s ochre-velvet back, expressing regret that social responsibility prevented his carrying out her order.

“Not only the face of an angel,” Nicholls was saying, squeezing Caroline’s fingers so hard that she squeaked, “but the skin, as well.” He stroked her hand, the leer intensifying. “What do angels smell like in the morning, I wonder?”

Grey measured him up thoughtfully. One more remark of that sort, and he might be obliged to invite Mr. Nicholls to step outside. Nicholls was tall and heavily built, outweighed Grey by a couple of stone, and had a reputation for bellicosity. Best try to break his nose first, Grey thought, shifting his weight, then run him headfirst into a hedge. He won’t come back in if I make a mess of him.

“What are you looking at?” Nicholls inquired unpleasantly, catching Grey’s gaze upon him.

Grey was saved from reply by a loud clapping of hands—the eel’s proprietor calling the party to order. Miss Woodford took advantage of the distraction to snatch her hand away, cheeks flaming with mortification. Grey moved at once to her side and put a hand beneath her elbow, fixing Nicholls with an icy stare.

“Come with me, Miss Woodford,” he said. “Let us find a good place from which to watch the proceedings.”

“Watch?” said a voice beside him. “Why, surely you don’t mean to watch, do you, sir? Are you not curious to try the phenomenon yourself?”

It was Hunter himself, bushy hair tied carelessly back, though decently dressed in a damson-red suit, and grinning up at Grey; the surgeon was broad-shouldered and muscular but quite short—barely five foot two, to Grey’s five-six. Evidently he had noted Grey’s wordless exchange with Lucinda.

“Oh, I think—” Grey began, but Hunter had his arm and was tugging him toward the crowd gathering round the tank. Caroline, with an alarmed glance at the glowering Nicholls, hastily followed him.

“I shall be most interested to hear your account of the sensation,” Hunter was saying chattily. “Some people report a remarkable euphoria, a momentary disorientation…shortness of breath or dizziness—sometimes pain in the chest. You have not a weak heart, I hope, Major? Or you, Miss Woodford?”

“Me?” Caroline looked surprised.

Hunter bowed to her.

“I should be particularly interested to see your own response, ma’am,” he said respectfully. “So few women have the courage to undertake such an adventure.”

“She doesn’t want to,” Grey said hurriedly.

“Well, perhaps I do,” she said, and gave him a little frown, before glancing at the tank and the long gray form inside it. She gave a brief shiver—but Grey recognized it, from long acquaintance with the lady, as a shiver of anticipation rather than revulsion.

Dr. Hunter recognized it, too. He grinned more broadly and bowed again, extending his arm to Miss Woodford.

“Allow me to secure you a place, ma’am.”

Grey and Nicholls both moved purposefully to prevent him, collided, and were left scowling at each other as Dr. Hunter escorted Caroline to the tank and introduced her to the eel’s owner, a small dark-looking creature named Horace Suddfield.

Grey nudged Nicholls aside and plunged into the crowd, elbowing his way ruthlessly to the front. Hunter spotted him and beamed.

“Have you any metal remaining in your chest, Major?”

“Have I—what?”

“Metal,” Hunter repeated. “Arthur Longstreet described to me the operation in which he removed thirty-seven pieces of metal from your chest—most impressive. If any bits remain, though, I must advise you against trying the eel. Metal conducts electricity, you see, and the chance of burns—”

Nicholls had made his way through the throng, as well, and gave an unpleasant laugh, hearing this.

“A good excuse, Major,” he said, a noticeable jeer in his voice. He was very drunk indeed, Grey thought. Still—

“No, I haven’t,” he said abruptly.

“Excellent,” Suddfield said politely. “A soldier, I understand you are, sir? A bold gentleman, I perceive—who better to take first place?”

And before Grey could protest, he found himself next to the tank, Caroline Woodford’s hand clutching his, her other held by Nicholls, who was glaring malevolently.

“Are we all arranged, ladies and gentlemen?” Suddfield cried. “How many, Dobbs?”

“Forty-five!” came a call from his assistant in the next room, through which the line of participants snaked, joined hand-to-hand and twitching with excitement, the rest of the party standing well back, agog.

“All touching, all touching?” Suddfield cried. “Take a firm grip of your friends, please, a very firm grip!” He turned to Grey, his small face alight. “Go ahead, sir! Grip it tightly, please—just there, just there before the tail!”

Disregarding his better judgment and the consequences to his lace cuff, Grey set his jaw and plunged his hand into the water.

In the split second when he grasped the slimy thing, he expected something like the snap one got from touching a Leyden jar and making it spark. Then he was flung violently backward, every muscle in his body contorted, and he found himself on the floor, thrashing like a landed fish, gasping in a vain attempt to recall how to breathe.

The surgeon, Mr. Hunter, squatted next to him, observing him with bright-eyed interest.

“How do you feel?” he inquired. “Dizzy at all?”

Grey shook his head, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s, and with some effort thumped his chest. Thus invited, Mr. Hunter leaned down at once, unbuttoned Grey’s waistcoat, and pressed an ear to his shirtfront. Whatever he heard—or didn’t—seemed to alarm him, for he jerked up, clenched both fists together, and brought them down on Grey’s chest with a thud that reverberated to his backbone.

This blow had the salutary effect of forcing breath out of his lungs; they filled again by reflex, and suddenly he remembered how to breathe. His heart also seemed to have been recalled to a sense of its duty, and began beating again. He sat up, fending off another blow from Mr. Hunter, and sat blinking at the carnage round him.

The floor was filled with bodies. Some still writhing, some lying still, limbs outflung in abandonment; some already recovered and being helped to their feet by friends. Excited exclamations filled the air, and Suddfield stood by his eel, beaming with pride and accepting congratulations. The eel itself seemed annoyed; it was swimming round in circles, angrily switching its heavy body.

Edwin Nicholls was on hands and knees, Grey saw, rising slowly to his feet. He reached down to grasp Caroline Woodford’s arms and help her to rise. This she did, but so awkwardly that she lost her balance and fell face-first into Mr. Nicholls. He in turn lost his own balance and sat down hard, the Honorable Caroline atop him. Whether from shock, excitement, drink, or simple boorishness, he seized the moment—and Caroline—and planted a hearty kiss upon her astonished lips.

Matters thereafter were somewhat confused. He had a vague impression that he had broken Nicholls’s nose—and there was a set of burst and swollen knuckles on his right hand to give weight to the supposition. There was a lot of noise, though, and he had the disconcerting feeling of not being altogether firmly confined within his own body. Parts of him seemed to be constantly drifting off, escaping the outlines of his flesh.

What did remain inside was distinctly jangled. His hearing—still somewhat impaired from the cannon explosion a few months before—had given up entirely under the strain of electric shock. That is, he could hear, but what he heard made no sense. Random words reached him through a fog of buzzing and ringing, but he could not connect them sensibly to the moving mouths around him. He wasn’t at all sure that his own voice was saying what he meant it to, for that matter.

He was surrounded by voices, faces—a sea of feverish sound and movement. People touched him, pulled him, pushed him. He flung out an arm, trying as much to discover where it was as to strike anyone, but felt the impact of flesh. More noise. Here and there a face he recognized: Lucinda, shocked and furious; Caroline, distraught, her red hair disheveled and coming down, all its powder lost.

The net result of everything was that he was not positive whether he had called Nicholls out or the reverse. Surely Nicholls must have challenged him? He had a vivid recollection of Nicholls, gore-soaked handkerchief held to his nose and a homicidal light in his narrowed eyes. But then he’d found himself outside, in his shirtsleeves, standing in the little park that fronted the Joffreys’ house, with a pistol in his hand. He wouldn’t have chosen to fight with a strange pistol, would he?

Maybe Nicholls had insulted him, and he had called Nicholls out without quite realizing it?

It had rained earlier, was chilly now; wind was whipping his shirt round his body. His sense of smell was remarkably acute; it seemed to be the only thing working properly. He smelled smoke from the chimneys, the damp green of the plants, and his own sweat, oddly metallic. And something faintly foul—something redolent of mud and slime. By reflex, he rubbed the hand that had touched the eel against his breeches.

Someone was saying something to him. With difficulty, he fixed his attention on Mr. Hunter, standing by his side, still with that look of penetrating interest. Well, of course. They’d need a surgeon, he thought dimly. Have to have a surgeon at a duel.

“Yes,” he said, seeing Hunter’s eyebrows raised in inquiry of some sort. Then, seized by a belated fear that he had just promised his body to the surgeon were he killed, seized Hunter’s coat with his free hand.

“You…don’t…touch me,” he said. “No…knives. Ghoul,” he added for good measure, finally locating the word. Hunter nodded, seeming unoffended.

The sky was overcast, the only light shed by the distant torches at the house’s entrance. Nicholls was a whitish blur, coming closer.

Someone grabbed Grey, turned him forcibly about, and he found himself back-to-back with Nicholls, the bigger man’s heat startling, so near.

Shit, he thought suddenly. Is he any kind of a shot?

Someone spoke and he began to walk—he thought he was walking—until an outthrust arm stopped him, and he turned in answer to someone pointing urgently behind him.

Oh, hell, he thought wearily, seeing Nicholls’s arm come down. I don’t care.

He blinked at the muzzle flash—the report was lost in the shocked gasp from the crowd—and stood for a moment, wondering whether he’d been hit. Nothing seemed amiss, though, and someone nearby was urging him to fire.

Frigging poet, he thought. I’ll delope and have done. I want to go home. He raised his arm, aiming straight up into the air, but his arm lost contact with his brain for an instant, and his wrist sagged. He jerked, correcting it, and his hand tensed on the trigger. He had barely time to jerk the barrel aside, firing wildly.

To his surprise, Nicholls staggered a bit, then sank down onto the grass. He sat propped on one hand, the other clutched dramatically to his shoulder, head thrown back.

It had begun to rain, quite hard. Grey blinked water off his lashes and shook his head. The air tasted sharp, like cut metal, and for an instant he had the impression that it smelled…purple.

“That can’t be right,” he said aloud, and found that his ability to speak seemed to have come back. He turned to speak to Hunter, but the surgeon had, of course, darted across to Nicholls, was peering down the neck of the poet’s shirt. There was blood on it, Grey saw, but Nicholls was refusing to lie down, gesturing vigorously with his free hand. Blood was running down his face from his nose; perhaps that was it.

“Come away, sir,” said a quiet voice at his side. “It’ll be bad for Lady Joffrey else.”

“What?” He looked, surprised, to find Richard Tarleton, who had been his ensign in Germany, now in the uniform of a Lancers lieutenant. “Oh. Yes, it will.” Dueling was illegal in London; for the police to arrest Lucinda’s guests in the park before her house would be a scandal—not something that would please her husband, Sir Richard, at all.

The crowd had already melted away, as though the rain had rendered them soluble. The torches by the door had been extinguished. Nicholls was being helped off by Hunter and someone else, lurching away through the increasing rain. Grey shivered. God knew where his coat or cloak was.

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

GREY OPENED HIS eyes.

“Did you say something, Tom?”

Tom Byrd, his valet, had produced a cough like a chimney sweep’s, at a distance of approximately one foot from Grey’s ear. Seeing that he had obtained his employer’s attention, he presented the chamber pot at port arms.

“His Grace is downstairs, me lord. With her ladyship.”

Grey blinked at the window behind Tom, where the open drapes showed a dim square of rainy light.

“Her ladyship? What, the duchess?” What could have happened? It couldn’t be past nine o’clock. His sister-in-law never paid calls before afternoon, and he had never known her to go anywhere with his brother during the day.

“No, me lord. The little ’un.”

“The little—oh. My goddaughter?” He sat up, feeling well but strange, and took the utensil from Tom.

“Yes, me lord. His Grace said as he wants to speak to you about ‘the events of last night.’ ” Tom had crossed to the window and was looking censoriously at the remnants of Grey’s shirt and breeches, these stained with grass, mud, blood, and powder stains, and flung carelessly over the back of the chair. He turned a reproachful eye on Grey, who closed his own, trying to recall exactly what the events of last night had been.

He felt somewhat odd. Not drunk, he hadn’t been drunk; he had no headache, no uneasiness of digestion….

“Last night,” he repeated, uncertain. Last night had been confused, but he did remember it. The eel party. Lucinda Joffrey, Caroline…Why on earth ought Hal to be concerned with…what, the duel? Why should his brother care about such a silly affair—and even if he did, why appear at Grey’s door at the crack of dawn with his six-month-old daughter?

It was more the time of day than the child’s presence that was unusual; his brother often did take his daughter out, with the feeble excuse that the child needed air. His wife accused him of wanting to show the baby off—she was beautiful—but Grey thought the cause somewhat more straightforward. His ferocious, autocratic, dictatorial brother—Colonel of his own regiment, terror of both his own troops and his enemies—had fallen in love with his daughter. The regiment would leave for its new posting within a month’s time. Hal simply couldn’t bear to have her out of his sight.

Thus he found the Duke of Pardloe seated in the morning room, Lady Dorothea Jacqueline Benedicta Grey cradled in his arm and gnawing on a rusk her father held for her. Her wet silk bonnet, her tiny rabbit-fur bunting, and two letters, one open, one still sealed, lay upon the table at the duke’s elbow.

Hal glanced up at him.

“I’ve ordered your breakfast. Say hallo to Uncle John, Dottie.” He turned the baby gently round. She didn’t remove her attention from the rusk but made a small chirping noise.

“Hallo, sweetheart.” John leaned over and kissed the top of her head, covered with a soft blond down and slightly damp. “Having a nice outing with Daddy in the pouring rain?”

“We brought you something.” Hal picked up the opened letter and, raising an eyebrow at his brother, handed it to him.

Grey raised an eyebrow back and began to read.

“What?!” He looked up from the sheet, mouth open.

“Yes, that’s what I said,” Hal agreed cordially, “when it was delivered to my door, just before dawn.” He reached for the sealed letter, carefully balancing the baby. “Here, this one’s yours. It came just after dawn.”

Grey dropped the first letter as though it were on fire and seized the second, ripping it open.

Oh, John, it read without preamble, forgive me, I couldn’t stop him, I really couldn’t, I’m SO sorry. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen. I’d run away, but I don’t know where to go. Please, please do something! It wasn’t signed but didn’t need to be. He’d recognized the Honorable Caroline Woodford’s writing, scribbled and frantic as it was. The paper was blotched and puckered—with tearstains?

He shook his head violently, as though to clear it, then picked up the first letter again. It was just as he’d read it the first time—a formal demand from Alfred, Lord Enderby, to His Grace the Duke of Pardloe, for satisfaction regarding the injury to the honor of his sister, the Honorable Caroline Woodford, by the agency of His Grace’s brother, Lord John Grey.

Grey glanced from one document to the other, several times, then looked at his brother.

“What the devil?”

“I gather you had an eventful evening,” Hal said, grunting slightly as he bent to retrieve the rusk Dottie had dropped on the carpet. “No, darling, you don’t want that anymore.”

Dottie disagreed violently with this assertion and was distracted only by Uncle John picking her up and blowing in her ear.

“Eventful,” he repeated. “Yes, it was, rather. But I didn’t do anything to Caroline Woodford save hold her hand whilst being shocked by an electric eel, I swear it. Gleeglgleeglgleegl-pppppssssshhhhh,” he added to Dottie, who shrieked and giggled in response. He glanced up to find Hal staring at him.

“Lucinda Joffrey’s party,” he amplified. “Surely you and Minnie were invited?”

Hal grunted. “Oh. Yes, we were, but I had a prior engagement. Minnie didn’t mention the eel. What’s this I hear about you fighting a duel over the girl, though?”

“What? It wasn’t—” He stopped, trying to think. “Well, perhaps it was, come to think. Nicholls—you know, that swine who wrote the ode to Minnie’s feet?—he kissed Miss Woodford, and she didn’t want him to, so I punched him. Who told you about the duel?”

“Richard Tarleton. He came into White’s cardroom late last night and said he’d just seen you home.”

“Well, then, you likely know as much about it as I do. Oh, you want Daddy back now, do you?” He handed Dottie to his brother and brushed at a damp patch of saliva on the shoulder of his coat.

“I suppose that’s what Enderby’s getting at.” Hal nodded at the earl’s letter. “That you made the poor girl publicly conspicuous and compromised her virtue by fighting a scandalous duel over her. I suppose he’s got a point.”

Dottie was now gumming her father’s knuckle, making little growling noises. Hal dug in his pocket and came out with a silver teething ring, which he offered her in lieu of his finger, meanwhile giving Grey a sidelong look.

“You don’t want to marry Caroline Woodford, do you? That’s what Enderby’s demand amounts to.”

“God, no.” Caroline was a good friend—bright, pretty, and given to mad escapades—but marriage? Him?

Hal nodded.

“Lovely girl, but you’d end in Newgate or Bedlam within a month.”

“Or dead,” Grey said, gingerly picking at the bandage Tom had insisted on wrapping round his knuckles. “How’s Nicholls this morning, do you know?”

“Ah.” Hal rocked back a little, drawing a deep breath. “Well…dead, actually. I had rather a nasty letter from his father, accusing you of murder. That one came over breakfast; didn’t think to bring it. Did you mean to kill him?”

Grey sat down quite suddenly, all the blood having left his head.

“No,” he whispered. His lips felt stiff and his hands had gone numb. “Oh, Jesus. No.”

Hal swiftly pulled his snuffbox from his pocket, one-handed, dumped out the vial of smelling salts he kept in it, and handed it to his brother. Grey was grateful; he hadn’t been going to faint, but the assault of ammoniac fumes gave him excuse for watering eyes and congested breathing.

“Jesus,” he repeated, and sneezed explosively several times in a row. “I didn’t aim to kill—I swear it, Hal. I deloped. Or tried to,” he added honestly.

Lord Enderby’s letter now made more sense, as did Hal’s presence. What had been a silly affair that should have disappeared with the morning dew had become—or would, directly the gossip had time to spread—not merely a scandal but quite possibly something worse. It was not unthinkable that he might be arrested for murder. Quite without warning, the figured carpet yawned at his feet, an abyss into which his life might vanish.

Hal nodded and gave him his own handkerchief.

“I know,” he said quietly. “Things…happen sometimes. That you don’t intend—that you’d give your life to have back.”

Grey wiped his face, glancing at his brother under cover of the gesture. Hal looked suddenly older than his years, his face drawn by more than worry over Grey.

“Nathaniel Twelvetrees, you mean?” Normally he wouldn’t have mentioned that matter, but both men’s guards were down.

Hal gave him a sharp look, then glanced away.

“No, not Twelvetrees. I hadn’t any choice about that. And I did mean to kill him. I meant…what led to that duel.” He grimaced. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” He looked at the note on the table and shook his head. His hand passed gently over Dottie’s head. “I won’t have you repeat my mistakes, John,” he said quietly.

Grey nodded, wordless. Hal’s first wife had been seduced by Nathaniel Twelvetrees. Hal’s mistakes notwithstanding, Grey had never intended marriage with anyone and didn’t now.

Hal frowned, tapping the folded letter on the table in thought. He darted a glance at John and sighed, then set the letter down, reached into his coat, and withdrew two further documents, one clearly official, from its seal.

“Your new commission,” he said, handing it over. “For Crefeld,” he said, raising an eyebrow at his brother’s look of blank incomprehension. “You were brevetted lieutenant-colonel. You didn’t remember?”

“I—well…not exactly.” He had a vague feeling that someone—probably Hal—had told him about it, soon after Crefeld, but he’d been badly wounded then and in no frame of mind to think about the army, let alone to care about battlefield promotion. Later—

“Wasn’t there some confusion over it?” Grey took the commission and opened it, frowning. “I thought they’d changed their minds.”

“Oh, you do remember, then,” Hal said, eyebrow still cocked. “General Wiedman gave it to you after the battle. The confirmation was held up, though, because of the inquiry into the cannon explosion, and then the…ah…kerfuffle over Adams.”

“Oh.” Grey was still shaken by the news of Nicholls’s death, but mention of Adams started his brain functioning again. “Adams. Oh. You mean Twelvetrees held up the commission?” Colonel Reginald Twelvetrees, of the Royal Artillery: brother to Nathaniel and cousin to Bernard Adams, the traitor awaiting trial in the Tower as a result of Grey’s efforts the preceding autumn.

“Yes. Bastard,” Hal added dispassionately. “I’ll have him for breakfast, one of these days.”

“Not on my account, I hope,” Grey said dryly.

“Oh, no,” Hal assured him, jiggling his daughter gently to prevent her fussing. “It will be a purely personal pleasure.”

Grey smiled at that, despite his disquiet, and put down the commission. “Right,” he said, with a glance at the fourth document, which still lay folded on the table. It was an official-looking letter and had been opened; the seal was broken. “A proposal of marriage, a denunciation for murder, and a new commission—what the devil’s that one? A bill from my tailor?”

“Ah, that. I didn’t mean to show it to you,” Hal said, leaning carefully to hand it over without dropping Dottie. “But under the circumstances…”

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…

He peeled her gently off and gave her back to Hal.

“I don’t know what use Charles Carruthers thinks I might be to him—but, all right, I’ll go.” He glanced at Lord Enderby’s note, Caroline’s crumpled missive. “After all, I suppose there are worse things than being scalped by red Indians.”

Hal nodded, sober.

“I’ve arranged your sailing. You leave tomorrow.” He stood and lifted Dottie. “Here, sweetheart. Kiss your Uncle John goodbye.”

A MONTH LATER, Grey found himself, Tom Byrd at his side, climbing off the Harwood and into one of the small boats that would land them and the battalion of Louisbourg grenadiers with whom they had been traveling on a large island near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.

He had never seen anything like it. The river itself was larger than any he had ever seen, nearly half a mile across, running wide and deep, a dark blue-black under the sun. Great cliffs and undulating hills rose on either side of the river, so thickly forested that the underlying stone was nearly invisible. It was hot, and the sky arched brilliant overhead, much brighter and much wider than any sky he had seen before. A loud hum echoed from the lush growth—insects, he supposed, birds, and the rush of the water, though it felt as if the wilderness were singing to itself, in a voice heard only in his blood. Beside him, Tom was fairly vibrating with excitement, his eyes out on stalks, not to miss anything.

“Cor, is that a red Indian?” he whispered, leaning close to Grey in the boat.

“I don’t suppose he can be anything else,” Grey replied, as the gentleman loitering by the landing was naked save for a breechclout, a striped blanket slung over one shoulder, and a coating of what—from the shimmer of his limbs—appeared to be grease of some kind.

“I thought they’d be redder,” Tom said, echoing Grey’s own thought. The Indian’s skin was considerably darker than Grey’s own, to be sure, but a rather pleasant soft brown in color, something like dried oak leaves. The Indian appeared to find them nearly as interesting as they had found him; he was eyeing Grey in particular with intent consideration.

“It’s your hair, me lord,” Tom hissed in Grey’s ear. “I told you you ought to have worn a wig.”

“Nonsense, Tom.” At the same time, Grey experienced an odd frisson up the back of the neck, constricting his scalp. Vain of his hair, which was blond and thick, he didn’t commonly wear a wig, choosing instead to bind and powder his own for formal occasions. The present occasion wasn’t formal in the least. With the advent of freshwater aboard, Tom had insisted upon washing Grey’s hair that morning, and it was still spread loose upon his shoulders, though it had long since dried.

The boat crunched on the shingle, and the Indian flung aside his blanket and came to help the men run it up the shore. Grey found himself next to the man, close enough to smell him. He smelled quite unlike anyone Grey had ever encountered: gamy, certainly—he wondered, with a small thrill, whether the grease the man wore might be bear fat—but with the tang of herbs and a sweat like fresh-sheared copper.

Straightening up from the gunwale, the Indian caught Grey’s eye and smiled.

“You be careful, Englishman,” he said, in a voice with a noticeable French accent, and, reaching out, ran his fingers quite casually through Grey’s loose hair. “Your scalp would look good on a Huron’s belt.”

This made the soldiers from the boat all laugh, and the Indian, still smiling, turned to them.

“They are not so particular, the Abenaki who work for the French. A scalp is a scalp—and the French pay well for one, no matter what color.” He nodded genially to the grenadiers, who had stopped laughing. “You come with me.”

THERE WAS A small camp on the island already, a detachment of infantry under a Captain Woodford—whose name gave Grey a slight wariness but who turned out to be no relation, thank God, to Lord Enderby’s family.

“We’re fairly safe on this side of the island,” he told Grey, offering him a flask of brandy outside his own tent after supper. “But the Indians raid the other side regularly—I lost four men last week, three killed and one carried off.”

“You have your own scouts, though?” Grey asked, slapping at the mosquitoes that had begun to swarm in the dusk. He had not seen the Indian who had brought them to the camp again, but there were several more in camp. Most clustered together around their own fire, but one or two squatted, bright-eyed and watchful, among the Louisbourg grenadiers who had crossed with Grey on the Harwood.

“Yes, and trustworthy for the most part,” Woodford said, answering Grey’s unasked question. He laughed, though not with any humor. “At least we hope so.”

Woodford gave him supper, and they had a hand of cards, Grey exchanging news of home for gossip of the current campaign.

General Wolfe had spent no little time at Montmorency, below the town of Quebec, but had nothing but disappointment from his attempts there, and so had abandoned that post, regathering the main body of his troops some miles upstream from the Citadel of Quebec. The so-far impregnable fortress, perched on sheer cliffs above the river, commanded both the river and the plains to the west with her cannon, obliging English warships to steal past under cover of night—and not always successfully.

“Wolfe’ll be champing at the bit, now his grenadiers are come,” Woodford predicted. “He puts great store by those fellows; fought with ’em at Louisbourg. Here, Colonel, you’re being eaten alive—try a bit of this on your hands and face.” He dug about in his campaign chest and came up with a tin of strong-smelling grease, which he pushed across the table.

“Bear grease and mint,” he explained. “The Indians use it—that, or cover themselves with mud.”

Grey helped himself liberally; the scent wasn’t quite the same as what he had smelled earlier on the scout, but it was very similar, and he felt an odd sense of disturbance in its application. Though it did discourage the biting insects.

He had made no secret of the reason for his presence and now asked openly about Carruthers.

“Where is he held, do you know?”

Woodford frowned and poured more brandy.

“He’s not. He’s paroled; has a billet in the town at Gareon, where Wolfe’s headquarters are.”

“Ah?” Grey was mildly surprised—but, then, Carruthers was not charged with mutiny but rather with failure to suppress one—a rare charge. “Do you know the particulars of the case?”

Woodford opened his mouth, as though to speak, but then drew a deep breath, shook his head, and drank brandy. From which Grey deduced that probably everyone knew the particulars but that there was something fishy about the affair. Well, time enough. He’d hear about the matter directly from Carruthers.

Conversation became general, and after a time Grey said good night. The grenadiers had been busy; a new little city of canvas tents had sprung up at the edge of the existing camp, and the appetizing smells of fresh meat roasting and tea brewing were rising on the air.

Tom had doubtless managed to raise his own tent, somewhere in the mass. Grey was in no hurry to find it, though; he was enjoying the novel sensations of firm footing and solitude, after weeks of crowded shipboard life. He cut outside the orderly rows of new tents, walking just beyond the glow of the firelight, feeling pleasantly invisible, though still close enough for safety—or at least he hoped so. The forest stood only a few yards away, the outlines of trees and bushes still visible, the dark not quite complete.

A drifting spark of green drew his eye, and he felt delight well up in him. There was another…another…ten, a dozen, and the air was suddenly full of fireflies, soft green sparks that winked on and off, glowing like tiny distant candles among the dark foliage. He’d seen fireflies once or twice before, in Germany, but never in such abundance. They were simple magic, pure as moonlight.

He could not have said how long he watched them, wandering slowly along the edge of the encampment, but at last he sighed and turned toward the center, full-fed, pleasantly tired, and with no immediate responsibility to do anything. He had no troops under his command, no reports to write…nothing, really, to do until he reached Gareon and Charlie Carruthers.

With a sigh of peace, he closed the flap of his tent and shucked his outer clothing.

He was roused abruptly from the edge of sleep by screams and shouts, and sat bolt upright. Tom, who had been asleep on his bed sack at Grey’s feet, sprang up like a frog onto hands and knees, scrabbling madly for pistol and shot in the chest.

Not waiting, Grey seized the dagger he had hung on the tent peg before retiring and, flinging back the flap, peered out. Men were rushing to and fro, colliding with tents, shouting orders, yelling for help. There was a glow in the sky, a reddening of the low-hanging clouds.

“Fireships!” someone shouted. Grey shoved his feet into his shoes and joined the throng of men now rushing toward the water.

Out in the center of the broad dark river stood the bulk of the Harwood, at anchor. And coming slowly down upon her were one, two, and then three blazing vessels. A raft, stacked with flammable waste, doused with oil and set afire. A small boat, its mast and sail flaming bright against the night. Something else—an Indian canoe, with a heap of burning grass and leaves? Too far to see, but it was coming closer.

He glanced at the ship and saw movement on deck—too far to make out individual men, but things were happening. The ship couldn’t raise anchor and sail away, not in time—but she was lowering her boats, sailors setting out to try to deflect the fireships, keep them away from the Harwood.

Absorbed in the sight, he had not noticed the shrieks and shouts still coming from the other side of the camp. But now, as the men on the shore fell silent, watching the fireships, they began to stir, realizing belatedly that something else was afoot.

“Indians,” the man beside Grey said suddenly, as a particularly high, ululating screech split the air. “Indians!”

This cry became general, and everyone began to rush in the other direction.

“Stop! Halt!” Grey flung out an arm, catching a man across the throat and knocking him flat. He raised his voice in the vain hope of stopping the rush. “You! You and you—seize your neighbor, come with me!” The man he had knocked down bounced up again, white-eyed in the starlight.

“It may be a trap!” Grey shouted. “Stay here! Stand to your arms!”

“Stand! Stand!” A short gentleman in his nightshirt took up the cry in a cast-iron bellow, adding to its effect by seizing a dead branch from the ground and laying about himself, turning back those trying to get past him to the encampment.

Another spark grew upstream, and another beyond it: more fireships. The boats were in the water now, mere dots in the darkness. If they could fend off the fireships, the Harwood might be saved from immediate destruction; Grey’s fear was that whatever was going on in the rear of the encampment was a ruse designed to pull men away from the shore, leaving the ship protected only by her marines. The French could then send down a barge loaded with explosives, or a boarding craft, hoping to elude detection while everyone was dazzled or occupied by the blazing fireships and the raid.

The first of the fireships had drifted harmlessly onto the far shore and was burning itself out on the sand, brilliant and beautiful against the night. The short gentleman with the remarkable voice—clearly he was a sergeant, Grey thought—had succeeded in rallying a small group of soldiers, whom he now presented to Grey with a brisk salute.

“Will they go and fetch their muskets, all orderly, sir?”

“They will,” Grey said. “And hurry. Go with them, Sergeant—it is Sergeant?”

“Sergeant Aloysius Cutter, sir,” the short gentleman replied with a nod, “and pleased to know an officer what has a brain in his head.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. And fetch back as many more men as fall conveniently to hand, if you please. With arms. A rifleman or two, if you can find them.”

Matters thus momentarily attended to, he turned his attention once more to the river, where two of the Harwood’s small boats were herding one of the fireships away from the transport, circling it and pushing water with their oars; he caught the splash of their efforts and the shouts of the sailors.

“Me lord?”

The voice at his elbow nearly made him swallow his tongue. He turned with an attempt at calmness, ready to reproach Tom for venturing out into the chaos, but before he could summon words, his young valet stooped at his feet, holding something.

“I’ve brought your breeches, me lord,” Tom said, voice trembling. “Thought you might need ’em, if there was fighting.”

“Very thoughtful of you, Tom,” he assured his valet, fighting an urge to laugh. He stepped into the breeches and pulled them up, tucking in his shirt. “What’s been happening in the camp, do you know?”

He could hear Tom swallow hard.

“Indians, me lord,” Tom said. “They came screaming through the tents, set one or two afire. They killed one man I saw, and…and scalped him.” His voice was thick, as though he might be about to vomit. “It was nasty.”

“I daresay.” The night was warm, but Grey felt the hairs rise on arms and neck. The chilling screams had stopped, and while he could still hear considerable hubbub in the camp, it was of a different tone now: no random shouting, just the calls of officers, sergeants, and corporals ordering the men, beginning the process of assembly, of counting noses and reckoning damage.

Tom, bless him, had brought Grey’s pistol, shot bag, and powder, as well as his coat and stockings. Aware of the dark forest and the long, narrow trail between the shore and the camp, Grey didn’t send Tom back but merely told him to keep out of the way as Sergeant Cutter—who, with good military instinct, had also taken time to put his breeches on—came up with his armed recruits.

“All present, sir,” Cutter said, saluting. “ ’Oom ’ave I the honor of h’addressing, sir?”

“I am Lieutenant-Colonel Grey. Set your men to watch the ship, please, Sergeant, with particular attention to dark craft coming downstream, and then come back to report what you know of matters in camp.”

Cutter saluted and promptly vanished with a shout of “Come on, you shower o’ shit! Look lively, look lively!”

Tom gave a brief, strangled scream, and Grey whirled, drawing his dagger by reflex, to find a dark shape directly behind him.

“Don’t kill me, Englishman,” said the Indian who had led them to the camp earlier. He sounded mildly amused. “Le capitaine sent me to find you.”

“Why?” Grey asked shortly. His heart was still pounding from the shock. He disliked being taken at a disadvantage, and disliked even more the thought that the man could easily have killed him before Grey knew he was there.

“The Abenaki set your tent on fire; he supposed they might have dragged you and your servant into the forest.”

Tom uttered an extremely coarse expletive and made as though to dive directly into the trees, but Grey stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Stay, Tom. It doesn’t matter.”

“The bloody hell you say,” Tom replied heatedly, agitation depriving him of his normal manners. “I daresay I can find you more smallclothes, not as that will be easy, but what about your cousin’s painting of her and the little ’un she sent for Captain Stubbs? What about your good hat with the gold lace?!?”

Grey had a brief moment of alarm—his young cousin Olivia had sent a miniature of herself and her newborn son, charging Grey to deliver this to her husband, Captain Malcolm Stubbs, presently with Wolfe’s troops. He clapped a hand to his side, though, and felt with relief the oval shape of the miniature in its wrappings, safe in his pocket.

“That’s all right, Tom; I’ve got it. As to the hat…we’ll worry about that later, I think. Here—what is your name, sir?” he inquired of the Indian, unwilling to address him simply as “you.”

“Manoke,” said the Indian, still sounding amused.

“Quite. Will you take my servant back to the camp?” He saw the small, determined figure of Sergeant Cutter appear at the mouth of the trail and, firmly overriding Tom’s protests, shooed him off in care of the Indian.

IN THE EVENT, all five fireships either drifted or were steered away from the Harwood. Something that might—or might not—have been a boarding craft did appear upstream but was frightened off by Grey’s impromptu troops on the shore, firing volleys—though the range was woefully short; there was no possibility of hitting anything.

Still, the Harwood was secure, and the camp had settled into a state of uneasy watchfulness. Grey had seen Woodford briefly upon his return, near dawn, and learned that the raid had resulted in the deaths of two men and the capture of three more, dragged off into the forest. Three of the Indian raiders had been killed, another wounded—Woodford intended to interview this man before he died but doubted that any useful information would result.

“They never talk,” he’d said, rubbing at his smoke-reddened eyes. His face was pouchy and gray with fatigue. “They just close their eyes and start singing their damned death songs. Not a blind bit of difference what you do to ’em—they just keep on singing.”

Grey had heard it, or thought he had, as he crawled wearily into his borrowed shelter toward daybreak. A faint, high-pitched chant that rose and fell like the rush of the wind in the trees overhead. It kept up for a bit, then stopped abruptly, only to resume again, faint and interrupted, as he teetered on the edge of sleep.

What was the man saying? he wondered. Did it matter that none of the men hearing him knew what he said? Perhaps the scout—Manoke, that was his name—was there; perhaps he would know.

Tom had found Grey a small tent at the end of a row. Probably he had ejected some subaltern, but Grey wasn’t inclined to object. It was barely big enough for the canvas bed sack that lay on the ground and a box that served as table, on which stood an empty candlestick, but it was shelter. It had begun to rain lightly as he walked up the trail to camp, and the rain was now pattering busily on the canvas overhead, raising a sweet, musty scent. If the death song continued, it was no longer audible over the sound of the rain.

Grey turned over once, the grass stuffing of the bed sack rustling softly beneath him, and fell at once into sleep.

HE WOKE ABRUPTLY, face-to-face with an Indian. His reflexive flurry of movement was met with a low chuckle and a slight withdrawal, rather than a knife across the throat, though, and he broke through the fog of sleep in time to avoid doing serious damage to the scout Manoke.

“What?” he muttered, and rubbed the heel of his hand across his eyes. “What is it?” And why the devil are you lying on my bed?

In answer to this, the Indian put a hand behind his head, drew him close, and kissed him. The man’s tongue ran lightly across his lower lip, darted like a lizard’s into his mouth, and then was gone.

So was the Indian.

He rolled over onto his back, blinking. A dream. It was still raining, harder now. He breathed in deeply; he could smell bear grease, of course, on his own skin, and mint—was there any hint of metal? The light was stronger—it must be day; he heard the drummer passing through the aisles of tents to rouse the men, the rattle of his sticks blending with the rattle of the rain, the shouts of corporals and sergeants—but still faint and gray. He could not have been asleep for more than half an hour, he thought.

“Christ,” he muttered, and, turning himself stiffly over, pulled his coat over his head and sought sleep once again.

THE HARWOOD TACKED slowly upriver, with a sharp eye out for French marauders. There were a few alarms, including another raid by hostile Indians while camped on shore. This one ended more happily, with four marauders killed and only one cook wounded, not seriously. They were obliged to loiter for a time, waiting for a cloudy night, in order to steal past the fortress of Quebec, menacing on its cliffs. They were spotted, in fact, and one or two cannon fired in their direction, but to no effect. And at last came into port at Gareon, the site of General Wolfe’s headquarters.

The town itself had been nearly engulfed by the growing military encampment that surrounded it, acres of tents spreading upward from the settlement on the riverbank, the whole presided over by a small French Catholic mission, whose tiny cross was just visible at the top of the hill that lay behind the town. The French inhabitants, with the political indifference of merchants everywhere, had given a Gallic shrug and set about happily overcharging the occupying forces.

The general himself was elsewhere, Grey was informed, fighting inland, but would doubtless return within the month. A lieutenant-colonel without brief or regimental affiliation was simply a nuisance; he was provided with suitable quarters and politely shooed away. With no immediate duties to fulfill, he gave a shrug of his own and set out to discover the whereabouts of Captain Carruthers.

It wasn’t difficult to find him. The patron of the first tavern Grey visited directed him at once to the habitat of le capitaine, a room in the house of a widow named Lambert, near the mission church. Grey wondered whether he would have received the information as readily from any other tavern-keeper in the village. Charlie had liked to drink when Grey knew him, and evidently he still did, judging from the genial attitude of the patron when Carruthers’s name was mentioned. Not that Grey could blame him, under the circumstances.

The widow—young, chestnut-haired, and quite attractive—viewed the English officer at her door with a deep suspicion, but when he followed his request for Captain Carruthers by mentioning that he was an old friend of the captain’s, her face relaxed.

“Bon,” she said, swinging the door open abruptly. “He needs friends.”

He ascended two flights of narrow stairs to Carruthers’s attic, feeling the air about him grow warmer. It was pleasant at this time of day but must grow stifling by mid-afternoon. He knocked and felt a small shock of pleased recognition at hearing Carruthers’s voice bid him enter.

Carruthers was seated at a rickety table in shirt and breeches, writing, an inkwell made from a gourd at one elbow, a pot of beer at the other. He looked at Grey blankly for an instant, then joy washed across his features, and he rose, nearly upsetting both.

“John!”

Before Grey could offer his hand, he found himself embraced—and returned the embrace wholeheartedly, a wash of memory flooding through him as he smelled Carruthers’s hair, felt the scrape of his unshaven cheek against Grey’s own. Even in the midst of this sensation, though, he felt the slightness of Carruthers’s body, the bones that pressed through his clothes.

“I never thought you’d come,” Carruthers was repeating, for perhaps the fourth time. He let go and stepped away smiling as he dashed the back of his hand across his eyes, which were unabashedly wet.

“Well, you have an electric eel to thank for my presence,” Grey told him, smiling himself.

“A what?” Carruthers stared at him blankly.

“Long story—tell you later. For the moment, though—what the devil have you been doing, Charlie?”

The happiness faded somewhat from Carruthers’s lean face but didn’t disappear altogether.

“Ah. Well. That’s a long story, too. Let me send Martine for more beer.” He waved Grey toward the room’s only stool and went out before Grey could protest. He sat, gingerly, lest the stool collapse, but it held his weight. Besides the stool and table, the attic was very plainly furnished; a narrow cot, a chamber pot, and an ancient washstand with an earthenware basin and ewer completed the ensemble. It was very clean, but there was a faint smell of something in the air—something sweet and sickly, which he traced at once to a corked bottle standing at the back of the washstand.

Not that he had needed the smell of laudanum; one look at Carruthers’s gaunt face told him enough. He glanced at the papers Carruthers had been working on. They appeared to be notes in preparation for the court-martial; the one on top was an account of an expedition undertaken by troops under Carruthers’s command, on the orders of a Major Gerald Siverly.

Our orders instructed us to march to a village called Beaulieu, there to ransack and fire the houses, driving off such animals as we encountered. This we did. Some men of the village offered us resistance, armed with scythes and other implements. Two of these were shot, the others fled. We returned with two wagons filled with flour, cheeses, and small household goods, three cows, and two good mules.

Grey got no further before the door opened. Carruthers came in and sat on the bed, nodding toward the papers.

“I thought I’d best write everything down. Just in case I don’t live long enough for the court-martial.” He spoke matter-of-factly and, seeing the look on Grey’s face, smiled faintly. “Don’t be troubled, John. I’ve always known I’d not make old bones. This”—he turned his right hand upward, letting the drooping cuff of his shirt fall back—“isn’t all of it.” He tapped his chest gently with his left hand.

“More than one doctor’s told me I have some gross defect of the heart. Don’t know, quite, if I have two of those, too”—he grinned, the sudden, charming smile Grey remembered so well—“or only half of one, or what. Used to be I just went faint now and then, but it’s getting worse. Sometimes I feel it stop beating and just flutter in my chest, and everything begins to go all black and breathless. So far, it’s always started beating again—but one of these days it isn’t going to.”

Grey’s eyes were fixed on Charlie’s hand, the small dwarf hand curled against its larger fellow, looking as though Charlie held a strange flower cupped in his palm. As Grey watched, both hands opened slowly, the fingers moving in strangely beautiful synchrony.

“All right,” he said quietly. “Tell me.”

Failure to suppress a mutiny was a rare charge—difficult to prove and thus unlikely to be brought, unless other factors were involved. Which, in the present instance, they undoubtedly were.

“Know Siverly, do you?” Carruthers asked, taking the papers onto his knee.

“Not at all. I gather he’s a bastard.” Grey gestured at the papers. “What kind of bastard, though?”

“A corrupt one.” Carruthers tapped the pages square, carefully evening the edges, eyes fixed on them. “That—what you read—it wasn’t Siverly. It’s General Wolfe’s directive. I’m not sure whether the point is to deprive the fortress of provisions, in hopes of starving them out eventually, or to put pressure on Montcalm to send out troops to defend the countryside, where Wolfe could get at them—possibly both. But he means deliberately to terrorize the settlements on both sides of the river. No, we did this under the general’s orders.” His face twisted a little, and he looked up suddenly at Grey. “You remember the Highlands, John?”

“You know that I do.” No one involved in Cumberland’s cleansing of the Highlands would ever forget. He had seen many Scottish villages like Beaulieu.

Carruthers took a deep breath.

“Yes. Well. The trouble was that Siverly took to appropriating the plunder we took from the countryside—under the pretext of selling it in order to make an equitable distribution among the troops.”

“What?” This was contrary to the normal custom of the army, whereby any soldier was entitled to what plunder he seized. “Who does he think he is, an admiral?” The navy did divide shares of prize money among the crew, according to formula—but the navy was the navy; crews acted much more as single entities than did army companies, and there were Admiralty courts set up to deal with the sale of captured prize ships.

Carruthers laughed at the question.

“His brother’s a commodore. Perhaps that’s where he got the notion. At any rate,” he added, sobering, “he never did distribute the funds. Worse—he began withholding the soldiers’ pay. Paying later and later, stopping pay for petty offenses, claiming that the pay chest hadn’t been delivered—when several men had seen it unloaded from the coach with their own eyes.

“Bad enough—but the soldiers were still being fed and clothed adequately. But then he went too far.”

Siverly began to steal from the commissary, diverting quantities of supplies and selling them privately.

“I had my suspicions,” Carruthers explained, “but no proof. I’d begun to watch him, though—and he knew I was watching him, so he trod carefully for a bit. But he couldn’t resist the rifles.”

A shipment of a dozen new rifles, vastly superior to the ordinary Brown Bess musket, and very rare in the army.

“I think it must have been a clerical oversight that sent them to us in the first place. We hadn’t any riflemen, and there was no real need for them. That’s probably what made Siverly think he could get away with it.”

But he hadn’t. Two private soldiers had unloaded the box and, curious at the weight, had opened it. Excited word had spread—and excitement had turned to disgruntled surprise when, instead of new rifles, muskets showing considerable wear were later distributed. The talk—already angry—had escalated.

“Egged on by a hogshead of rum we confiscated from a tavern in Levi,” Carruthers said with a sigh. “They drank all night—it was January; the nights are damned long in January here—and made up their minds to go and find the rifles. Which they did—under the floor in Siverly’s quarters.”

“And where was Siverly?”

“In his quarters. He was rather badly used, I’m afraid.” A muscle by Carruthers’s mouth twitched. “Escaped through a window, though, and made his way through the snow to the next garrison. It was twenty miles. Lost a couple of toes to frostbite but survived.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes, it was.” The muscle twitched again.

“What happened to the mutineers?”

Carruthers blew out his cheeks, shaking his head.

“Deserted, most of them. Two were caught and hanged pretty promptly; three more rounded up later; they’re in prison here.”

“And you—”

“And I.” Carruthers nodded. “I was Siverly’s company adjutant. I didn’t know about the mutiny—one of the ensigns ran to fetch me when the men started to move toward Siverly’s quarters—but I did arrive before they’d finished.”

“Not a great deal you could do under those circumstances, was there?”

“I didn’t try,” Carruthers said bluntly.

“I see,” Grey said.

“Do you?” Carruthers gave him a crooked smile.

“Certainly. I take it Siverly is still in the army and still holds a command? Yes, of course. He might have been furious enough to prefer the original charge against you, but you know as well as I do that, under normal circumstances, the matter would likely have been dropped as soon as the general facts were known. You insisted on a court-martial, didn’t you? So that you can make what you know public.” Given Carruthers’s state of health, the knowledge that he risked a long imprisonment if convicted apparently didn’t trouble him.

The smile straightened and became genuine.

“I knew I chose the right man,” Carruthers said.

“I am exceedingly flattered,” Grey said dryly. “Why me, though?”

Carruthers had laid aside his papers and now rocked back a little on the cot, hands linked around one knee.

“Why you, John?” The smile had vanished, and Carruthers’s gray eyes were level on his. “You know what we do. Our business is chaos, death, destruction. But you know why we do it, too.”

“Oh? Perhaps you’d have the goodness to tell me, then. I’ve always wondered.”

Humor lighted Charlie’s eyes, but he spoke seriously.

“Someone has to keep order, John. Soldiers fight for all kinds of reasons, most of them ignoble. You and your brother, though—” He broke off, shaking his head. Grey saw that his hair was streaked with gray, though he knew Carruthers was no older than himself.

“The world is chaos and death and destruction. But people like you—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.”

Grey felt he should say something but was at a loss as to what that might be. Carruthers rose and came to Grey, putting a hand—the left—on his shoulder, the other gently against his face.

“What is it the Bible says?” Carruthers said quietly. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied? I hunger, John,” he whispered. “And you thirst. You won’t fail me.” The fingers of Charlie’s secret moved on his skin, a plea, a caress.

The custom of the army is that a court-martial be presided over by a senior officer and such a number of other officers as he shall think fit to serve as council, these being generally four in number, but can be more but not generally less than three. The person accused shall have the right to call witnesses in his support, and the council shall question these, as well as any other persons whom they may wish, and shall thus determine the circumstances and, if conviction ensue, the sentence to be imposed.

THAT RATHER VAGUE statement was evidently all that existed in terms of written definition and directive regarding the operations of courts-martial—or was all that Hal had turned up for him in the brief period prior to his departure. There were no formal laws governing such courts, nor did the law of the land apply to them. In short, the army was—as always, Grey thought—a law unto itself.

That being so, he might have considerable leeway in accomplishing what Charlie Carruthers wanted—or not, depending upon the personalities and professional alliances of the officers who composed the court. It would behoove him to discover these men as soon as possible.

In the meantime, he had another small duty to discharge.

“Tom,” he called, rummaging in his trunk, “have you discovered Captain Stubbs’s billet?”

“Yes, me lord. And if you’ll give over ruining your shirts there, I’ll tell you.” With a censorious look at his master, Tom nudged him deftly aside. “What you a-looking for in there, anyway?”

“The miniature of my cousin and her child.” Grey stood back, permitting Tom to bend over the open chest, tenderly patting the abused shirts back into their tidy folds. The chest itself was rather scorched, but the soldiers had succeeded in rescuing it—and Grey’s wardrobe, to Tom’s relief.

“Here, me lord.” Tom withdrew the packet and handed it gently to Grey. “Give me best to Captain Stubbs. Reckon he’ll be glad to get that. The little ’un’s got quite the look of him, don’t he?”

It took some time, even with Tom’s direction, to discover Malcolm Stubbs’s billet. The address—insofar as it could be called one—lay in the poorer section of the town, somewhere down a muddy lane that ended abruptly at the river. Grey was surprised at this; Stubbs was a most sociable sort, and a conscientious officer. Why was he not billeted at an inn, or a good private house, near his troops?

By the time Grey found the lane, he had an uneasy feeling; this grew markedly as he poked his way through the ramshackle sheds and the knots of filthy, polyglot children that broke from their play, brightening at the novel sight. They followed him, hissing unintelligible speculations to one another but staring blankly at him, mouths open, when he asked after Captain Stubbs, pointing at his own uniform by way of illustration, with a questioning wave at their surroundings.

He had made his way all the way down the lane, and his boots were caked with mud, dung, and a thick plastering of the leaves that drifted lazily from the giant trees, before he discovered someone willing to answer him. This was an ancient Indian sitting peacefully on a rock at the river’s edge, wrapped in a striped British trade blanket, fishing. The man spoke a mixture of three or four languages, only two of which Grey understood, but this basis of understanding was adequate.

“Un, deux, trois, in back,” the ancient told him, pointing a thumb up the lane, then jerking this appendage sideways. Something in an aboriginal tongue followed, in which Grey thought he detected a reference to a woman—doubtless the owner of the house where Stubbs was billeted. A concluding reference to “le bon capitaine” seemed to reinforce this impression, and, thanking the gentleman in both French and English, Grey retraced his steps to the third house up the lane, still trailing a line of curious urchins like the ragged tail of a kite.

No one answered his knock, but he went round the house—followed by the children—and discovered a small hut behind it, smoke coming from its gray stone chimney.

The day was beautiful, with a sky the color of sapphires, and the air was suffused with the ripeness of late summer. The door of the hut was ajar, to admit the fresh air, but he did not push it open. Instead, he drew his dagger from his belt and knocked with the hilt—to admiring gasps from his audience at the appearance of the knife. He repressed the urge to turn round and bow to them.

He heard no footsteps from within, but the door opened suddenly, revealing a young Indian woman, whose face blazed with joy at beholding him.

He blinked, startled, and in that blink of an eye, the joy disappeared and the young woman clutched at the doorjamb for support, her other hand fisted into her chest.

“Batinse!?” she gasped, clearly terrified. “Qu’est-ce qui s’passe?”

“Rien,” he replied, equally startled. “Ne vous inquietez pas, madame. Est-ce que Capitaine Stubbs habite ici?” Don’t perturb yourself, madame. Does Captain Stubbs live here?

Her eyes, already huge, rolled back in her head, and he seized her arm, fearing lest she faint at his feet. The largest of the urchins following him rushed forward and pushed the door open, and he put an arm round the woman’s waist and half-dragged, half-carried her into the house.

Taking this as invitation, the rest of the children crowded in behind him, murmuring in what appeared to be sympathy, as he lugged the young woman to the bed and deposited her thereon. A small girl, wearing little more than a pair of drawers snugged round her insubstantial waist with a piece of string, pressed in beside him and said something to the young woman. Not receiving an answer, the girl behaved as though she had, turning and racing out of the door.

Grey hesitated, not sure what to do. The woman was breathing, though pale, and her eyelids fluttered.

“Voulez-vous un petit eau?” he inquired, turning about in search of water. He spotted a bucket of water near the hearth, but his attention was distracted by an object propped beside it: a cradleboard, with a swaddled infant bound to it, blinking large, curious eyes in his direction.

He knew already, of course, but knelt down before the infant and waggled a tentative forefinger at it. The baby’s eyes were big and dark, like its mother’s, and the skin a paler shade of her own. The hair, though, was not straight, thick, and black. It was the color of cinnamon and exploded from the child’s skull in a nimbus of the same curls that Malcolm Stubbs kept rigorously clipped to his scalp and hidden beneath his wig.

“Wha’ happen with le capitaine?” a peremptory voice demanded behind him. He turned on his heels and, finding a rather large woman looming over him, rose to his feet and bowed.

“Nothing whatever, madame,” he assured her. Not yet, it hasn’t. “I was merely seeking Captain Stubbs to give him a message.”

“Oh.” The woman—French, but plainly the younger woman’s mother or aunt—left off glowering at him and seemed to deflate somewhat, settling back into a less threatening shape. “Well, then. D’un urgence, this message?” She eyed him; clearly, other British officers were not in the habit of visiting Stubbs at home. Most likely Stubbs had an official billet elsewhere, where he conducted his regimental business. No wonder they thought he’d come to say that Stubbs was dead or injured. Not yet, he added grimly to himself.

“No,” he said, feeling the weight of the miniature in his pocket. “Important, but not urgent.” He left then. None of the children followed him.

NORMALLY, IT WAS not difficult to discover the whereabouts of a particular soldier, but Malcolm Stubbs seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Over the course of the next week, Grey combed headquarters, the military encampment, and the village, but no trace of his disgraceful cousin-by-marriage could be found. Still odder, no one appeared to have missed the captain. The men of Stubbs’s immediate company merely shrugged in confusion, and his superior officer had evidently gone off upriver to inspect the state of various postings. Frustrated, Grey retired to the riverbank to think.

Two logical possibilities presented themselves—no, three. One, Stubbs had heard about Grey’s arrival, supposed that Grey would discover exactly what he had discovered, and had in consequence panicked and deserted. Two, he’d fallen afoul of someone in a tavern or back alley, been killed, and was presently decomposing quietly under a layer of leaves in the woods. Or, three—he’d been sent somewhere to do something, quietly.

Grey doubted the first exceedingly; Stubbs wasn’t prone to panic, and if he had heard of Grey’s arrival, Malcolm’s first act would have been to come and find him, thus preventing his poking about in the village and finding what he’d found. He dismissed that possibility accordingly.

He dismissed the second still more promptly. Had Stubbs been killed, either deliberately or by accident, the alarm would have been raised. The army did generally know where its soldiers were, and if they weren’t where they were meant to be, steps were taken. The same held true for desertion.

Right, then. If Stubbs was gone and no one was looking for him, it naturally followed that the army had sent him to wherever he’d gone. Since no one seemed to know where that was, his mission was presumably secret. And given Wolfe’s current position and present obsession, that almost certainly meant that Malcolm Stubbs had gone downriver, searching for some way to attack Quebec. Grey sighed, satisfied with his deductions. Which in turn meant that—barring his being caught by the French, scalped or abducted by hostile Indians, or eaten by a bear—Stubbs would be back eventually. There was nothing to do but wait.

He leaned against a tree, watching a couple of fishing canoes make their way slowly downstream, hugging the bank. The sky was overcast and the air light on his skin, a pleasant change from the day’s earlier heat. Cloudy skies were good for fishing; his father’s gamekeeper had told him that. He wondered why—were the fish dazzled by sun, and thus sought murky hiding places in the depths, but rose toward the surface in dimmer light?

He thought suddenly of the electric eel, which Suddfield had told him lived in the silt-choked waters of the Amazon. The thing did have remarkably small eyes, and its proprietor had opined that it was able to use its electrical abilities in some way to discern, as well as to electrocute, its prey.

He couldn’t have said what made him raise his head at that precise moment, but he looked up to find one of the canoes hovering in the shallow water a few feet from him. The Indian paddling the canoe gave him a brilliant smile.

“Englishman!” he called. “You want to fish with me?”

A small jolt of electricity ran through him and he straightened up. Manoke’s eyes were fixed on his, and he felt in memory the touch of lips and tongue and the scent of fresh-sheared copper. His heart was racing—go off in company with an Indian he barely knew? It might easily be a trap. He could end up scalped or worse. But electric eels were not the only ones to discern things by means of a sixth sense, he thought.

“Yes!” he called. “Meet you at the landing!”

TWO WEEKS LATER, he stepped out of Manoke’s canoe onto the landing, thin, sunburned, cheerful, and still in possession of his hair. Tom Byrd would be beside himself, he reflected; he’d left word as to what he was doing but naturally had been able to give no estimate of his return. Doubtless poor Tom would be thinking he’d been captured and dragged off into slavery or scalped, his hair sold to the French.

In fact, they had drifted slowly downriver, pausing to fish wherever the mood took them, camping on sandbars and small islands, grilling their catch and eating their supper in smoke-scented peace, beneath the leaves of oak and alder. They had seen other craft now and then—not only canoes but many French packet boats and brigs, as well as two English warships, tacking slowly up the river, sails bellying, the distant shouts of the sailors as foreign to him just then as the tongues of the Iroquois.

And in the late summer dusk of the first day, Manoke had wiped his fingers after eating, stood up, casually untied his breechclout, and let it fall. Then waited, grinning, while Grey fought his way out of shirt and breeches.

They’d swum in the river to refresh themselves before eating; the Indian was clean, his skin no longer greasy. And yet he seemed to taste of wild game, the rich, uneasy tang of venison. Grey had wondered whether it was the man’s race that was responsible or only his diet?

“What do I taste like?” he’d asked, out of curiosity.

Manoke, absorbed in his business, had said something that might have been “cock” but might equally have been some expression of mild disgust, so Grey thought better of pursuing this line of inquiry. Besides, if he did taste of beef and biscuit or Yorkshire pudding, would the Indian recognize that? For that matter, did he really want to know, if he did? He did not, he decided, and they enjoyed the rest of the evening without benefit of conversation.

He scratched the small of his back where his breeches rubbed, uncomfortable with mosquito bites and the peel of fading sunburn. He’d tried the native style of dress, seeing its convenience, but had scorched his bum by lying too long in the sun one afternoon and thereafter resorted to breeches, not wishing to hear any further jocular remarks regarding the whiteness of his arse.

Thinking such pleasant but disjointed thoughts, he’d made his way halfway through the town before noticing that there were many more soldiers in evidence than there had been when he’d left. Drums were pattering up and down the sloping, muddy streets, calling men from their billets, the rhythm of the military day making itself felt. His own steps fell naturally into the beat of the drums; he straightened and felt the army reach out suddenly, seizing him, shaking him out of his sunburned bliss.

He glanced involuntarily up the hill and saw the flags fluttering above the large inn that served as field headquarters. Wolfe had returned.

GREY FOUND HIS own quarters, reassured Tom as to his well-being, submitted to having his hair forcibly untangled, combed, perfumed, and tightly bound up in a formal queue, and, with his clean uniform chafing his sunburned skin, went to present himself to the general, as courtesy demanded. He knew James Wolfe by sight—Wolfe was about his own age, had fought at Culloden, been a junior officer under Cumberland during the Highland campaign—but did not know him personally. He’d heard a great deal about him, though.

“Grey, is it? Pardloe’s brother, are you?” Wolfe lifted his long nose in Grey’s direction, as though sniffing at him, in the manner of one dog inspecting another’s backside. Grey trusted he would not be required to reciprocate and instead bowed politely.

“My brother’s compliments, sir.”

Actually, what his brother had had to say was far from complimentary.

“Melodramatic ass” was what Hal had said, hastily briefing him before his departure. “Showy, bad judgment, terrible strategist. Has the devil’s own luck, though, I’ll give him that. Don’t follow him into anything stupid.”

Wolfe nodded amiably enough.

“And you’ve come as a witness for who is it—Captain Carruthers?”

“Yes, sir. Has a date been set for the court-martial?”

“Dunno. Has it?” Wolfe asked his adjutant, a tall, spindly creature with a beady eye.

“No, sir. Now that his lordship is here, though, we can proceed. I’ll tell Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; he’s to chair the proceeding.”

Wolfe waved a hand.

“No, wait a bit. The brigadier will have other things on his mind. ’Til after…”

The adjutant nodded and made a note.

“Yes, sir.”

Wolfe was eyeing Grey, in the manner of a small boy bursting to share some secret.

“D’you understand Highlanders, Colonel?”

Grey blinked, surprised.

“Insofar as such a thing is possible, sir,” he replied politely, and Wolfe brayed with laughter.

“Good man.” The general turned his head to one side and appraised Grey. “I’ve got a hundred or so of the creatures; been thinking what use they might be. I think I’ve found one—a small adventure.”

The adjutant smiled despite himself, then quickly erased the smile.

“Indeed, sir?” Grey said cautiously.

“Somewhat dangerous,” Wolfe went on carelessly. “But, then, it’s the Highlanders—no great mischief should they fall. Would you care to join us?”

“Don’t follow him into anything stupid.” Right, Hal, he thought. Any suggestions on how to decline an offer like that from one’s titular commander?

“I should be pleased, sir,” he said, feeling a brief ripple of unease down his spine. “When?”

“In two weeks—at the dark of the moon.” Wolfe was all but wagging his tail in enthusiasm.

“Am I permitted to know the nature of the…er…expedition?”

Wolfe exchanged a look of anticipation with his adjutant, then turned eyes shiny with excitement on Grey.

“We’re going to take Quebec, Colonel.”

SO WOLFE THOUGHT he had found his point d’appui. Or, rather, his trusted scout, Malcolm Stubbs, had found it for him. Grey returned briefly to his quarters, put the miniature of Olivia and little Cromwell in his pocket, and went to find Stubbs.

He didn’t bother thinking what to say to Malcolm. It was as well, he thought, that he hadn’t found Stubbs immediately after his discovery of the Indian mistress and her child; he might simply have knocked Stubbs down, without the bother of explanation. But time had elapsed, and his blood was cooler now. He was detached.

Or so he thought, until he entered a prosperous tavern—Malcolm had elevated tastes in wine—and found his cousin-by-marriage at a table, relaxed and jovial among his friends. Stubbs was aptly named, being approximately five foot four in both dimensions, a fair-haired fellow with an inclination to become red in the face when deeply entertained or deep in drink.

At the moment, he appeared to be experiencing both conditions, laughing at something one of his companions had said, waving his empty glass in the barmaid’s direction. He turned back, spotted Grey coming across the floor, and lit up like a beacon. He’d been spending a good deal of time out of doors, Grey saw; he was nearly as sunburned as Grey himself.

“Grey!” he cried. “Why, here’s a sight for sore eyes! What the devil brings you to the wilderness?” Then he noticed Grey’s expression, and his joviality faded slightly, a puzzled frown growing between his thick brows.

It hadn’t time to grow far. Grey lunged across the table, scattering glasses, and seized Stubbs by the shirtfront.

“You come with me, you bloody swine,” he whispered, face shoved up against the younger man’s, “or I’ll kill you right here, I swear it.”

He let go then and stood, blood hammering in his temples. Stubbs rubbed at his chest, affronted, startled—and afraid. Grey could see it in the wide blue eyes. Slowly, Stubbs got up, motioning to his companions to stay.

“No bother, chaps,” he said, making a good attempt at casualness. “My cousin—family emergency, what?”

Grey saw two of the men exchange knowing glances, then look at Grey, wary. They knew, all right.

Stiffly, he gestured for Stubbs to precede him, and they passed out of the door in a pretense of dignity. Once outside, though, he grabbed Stubbs by the arm and dragged him round the corner into a small alleyway. He pushed Stubbs hard, so that he lost his balance and fell against the wall; Grey kicked his legs out from under him, then knelt on his thigh, digging his knee viciously into the thick muscle. Stubbs uttered a strangled noise, not quite a scream.

Grey dug in his pocket, hand trembling with fury, and brought out the miniature, which he showed briefly to Stubbs before grinding it into the man’s cheek. Stubbs yelped, grabbed at it, and Grey let him have it, rising unsteadily off the man.

“How dare you?” he said, low-voiced and vicious. “How dare you dishonor your wife, your son?”

Malcolm was breathing hard, one hand clutching his abused thigh, but was regaining his composure.

‘It’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing to do with Olivia at all.” He swallowed, wiped a hand across his mouth, and took a cautious glance at the miniature in his hand. “That the sprat, is it? Good…good-looking lad. Looks like me, don’t he?”

Grey kicked him brutally in the stomach.

“Yes, and so does your other son,” he hissed. “How could you do such a thing?”

Malcolm’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. He struggled for breath like a landed fish. Grey watched without pity. He’d have the man split and grilled over charcoal before he was done. He bent and took the miniature from Stubbs’s unresisting hand, tucking it back in his pocket.

After a long moment, Stubbs achieved a whining gasp, and the color of his face, which had gone puce, subsided back toward its normal brick color. Saliva had collected at the corners of his mouth; he licked his lips, spat, then sat up, breathing heavily, and looked at Grey.

“Going to hit me again?”

“Not just yet.”

“Good.” He stretched out a hand, and Grey took it, grunting as he helped Stubbs to his feet. Malcolm leaned against the wall, still panting, and eyed him.

“So, who made you God, Grey? Who are you to sit in judgment of me, eh?”

Grey nearly hit him again but desisted.

“Who am I?” he echoed. “Olivia’s fucking cousin, that’s who! The nearest male relative she’s got on this continent! And you, need I remind you—and evidently I do—are her fucking husband. Judgment? What the devil d’you mean by that, you filthy lecher?”

Malcolm coughed and spat again.

“Yes. Well. As I said, it’s nothing to do with Olivia—and so it’s nothing to do with you.” He spoke with apparent calmness, but Grey could see the pulse hammering in his throat, the nervous shiftiness of his eyes. “It’s nothing out of the ordinary—it’s the bloody custom, for God’s sake. Everybody—”

He kneed Stubbs in the balls.

“Try again,” he advised Stubbs, who had fallen down and was curled into a fetal position, moaning. “Take your time; I’m not busy.”

Aware of eyes upon him, Grey turned to see several soldiers gathered at the mouth of the alley, hesitating. He was still wearing his dress uniform, though—somewhat the worse for wear but clearly displaying his rank—and when he gave them an evil look, they hastily dispersed.

“I should kill you here and now, you know,” he said to Stubbs after a few moments. The rage that had propelled him was draining away, though, as he watched the man retch and heave at his feet, and he spoke wearily. “Better for Olivia to have a dead husband, and whatever property you leave, than a live scoundrel, who will betray her with her friends—likely with her own maid.”

Stubbs muttered something indistinguishable, and Grey bent, grasping him by the hair, and pulled his head up.

“What was that?”

“Wasn’t…like that.” Groaning and clutching himself, Malcolm maneuvered gingerly into a sitting position, knees drawn up. He gasped for a bit, head on his knees, before being able to go on.

“You don’t know, do you?” He spoke low-voiced, not raising his head. “You haven’t seen the things I’ve seen. Not…done what I’ve had to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“The…the killing. Not…battle. Not an honorable thing. Farmers. Women…” Grey saw Stubbs’s heavy throat move, swallowing. “I—we—for months now. Looting the countryside, burning farms, villages.” He sighed, broad shoulders slumping. “The men, they don’t mind. Half of them are brutes to begin with.” He breathed. “Think…nothing of shooting a man on his doorstep and taking his wife next to his body.” He swallowed. “ ’Tisn’t only Montcalm who pays for scalps,” he said in a low voice. Grey couldn’t avoid hearing the rawness in his voice, a pain that wasn’t physical.

“Every soldier’s seen such things, Malcolm,” he said after a short silence, almost gently. “You’re an officer. It’s your job to keep them in check.” And you know damned well it isn’t always possible, he thought.

“I know,” Malcolm said, and began to cry. “I couldn’t.”

Grey waited while he sobbed, feeling increasingly foolish and uncomfortable. At last, the broad shoulders heaved and subsided. After a moment, Malcolm said, in a voice that quivered only a little, “Everybody finds a way, don’t they? And there’re not that many ways. Drink, cards, or women.” He raised his head and shifted a bit, grimacing as he eased into a more comfortable position. “But you don’t go in much for women, do you?” he added, looking up.

Grey felt the bottom of his stomach drop but realized in time that Malcolm had spoken matter-of-factly, with no tone of accusation.

“No,” he said, and drew a deep breath. “Drink, mostly.”

Malcolm nodded, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

“Drink doesn’t help me,” he said. “I fall asleep, but I don’t forget. I just dream about…things. And whores—I—well, I didn’t want to get poxed and maybe…well, Olivia,” he muttered, looking down. “No good at cards,” he said, clearing his throat. “But sleeping in a woman’s arms—I can sleep then.”

Grey leaned against the wall, feeling nearly as battered as Malcolm Stubbs. Pale green aspen leaves drifted through the air, whirling round them, settling in the mud.

“All right,” he said eventually. “What do you mean to do?”

“Dunno,” Stubbs said, in a tone of flat resignation. “Think of something, I suppose.”

Grey reached down and offered a hand; Stubbs got carefully to his feet and, nodding to Grey, shuffled toward the alley’s mouth, bent over and holding himself as though his insides might fall out. Halfway there, though, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder. There was an anxious look on his face, half embarrassed.

“Can I…The miniature? They are still mine, Olivia and the—my son.”

Grey heaved a sigh that went to the marrow of his bones; he felt a thousand years old.

“Yes, they are,” he said, and, digging the miniature out of his pocket, tucked it carefully into Stubbs’s coat. “Remember it, will you?”

TWO DAYS LATER, a convoy of troop ships arrived, under the command of Admiral Holmes. The town was flooded afresh with men hungry for unsalted meat, fresh baked bread, liquor, and women. And a messenger arrived at Grey’s quarters, bearing a parcel for him from his brother, with Admiral Holmes’s compliments.

It was small but packaged with care, wrapped in oilcloth and tied about with twine, the knot sealed with his brother’s crest. That was unlike Hal, whose usual communiqués consisted of hastily dashed-off notes, generally employing slightly fewer than the minimum number of words necessary to convey his message. They were seldom signed, let alone sealed.

Tom Byrd appeared to think the package slightly ominous, too; he had set it by itself, apart from the other mail, and weighted it down with a large bottle of brandy, apparently to prevent it escaping. That, or he suspected Grey might require the brandy to sustain him in the arduous effort of reading a letter consisting of more than one page.

“Very thoughtful of you, Tom,” he murmured, smiling to himself and reaching for his penknife.

In fact, the letter within occupied less than a page, bore neither salutation nor signature, and was completely Hal-like.

Minnie wishes to know whether you are starving, though I don’t know what she proposes to do about it, should the answer be yes. The boys wish to know whether you have taken any scalps—they are confident that no red Indian would succeed in taking yours; I share this opinion. You had better bring three tommyhawks when you come home.

Here is your paperweight; the jeweler was most impressed by the quality of the stone. The other thing is a copy of Adams’s confession. They hanged him yesterday.

The other contents of the parcel consisted of a small washleather pouch and an official-looking document on several sheets of good parchment, this folded and sealed—this time with the insignia of George II. Grey left it lying on the table, fetched one of the pewter cups from his campaign chest, and filled it to the brim with brandy, wondering anew at his valet’s perspicacity.

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.

Yes, he knew.

NEARLY TWO WEEKS later, just after full dark, they boarded the ships. The convoy included Admiral Holmes’s flagship, the Lowestoff; three men of war: the Squirrel, Sea Horse, and Hunter; a number of armed sloops; others loaded with ordnance, powder, and ammunition; and a number of transports for the troops—1,800 men in all. The Sutherland had been left below, anchored just out of firing range of the fortress, to keep an eye on the enemy’s motions; the river there was littered with floating batteries and prowling small French craft.

Grey traveled with Wolfe and the Highlanders aboard Sea Horse and spent the journey on deck, too keyed up to bear being below.

His brother’s warning kept recurring in the back of his mind—“Don’t follow him into anything stupid”—but it was much too late to think of that, and, to block it out, he challenged one of the other officers to a whistling contest. Each party was to whistle the entirety of “The Roast Beef of Old England,” the loser the man who laughed first. He lost, but did not think of his brother again.

Just after midnight, the big ships quietly furled their sails, dropped anchor, and lay like slumbering gulls on the dark river. Anse au Foulon, the landing spot that Malcolm Stubbs and his scouts had recommended to General Wolfe, lay seven miles downriver, at the foot of sheer and crumbling slate cliffs that led upward to the Plains of Abraham.

“Is it named for the biblical Abraham, do you think?” Grey had asked curiously, hearing the name, but had been informed that, in fact, the cliff top comprised a farmstead belonging to an ex-pilot named Abraham Martin.

On the whole, he thought this prosaic origin just as well. There was likely to be drama enough enacted on that ground, without thought of ancient prophets, conversations with God, nor any calculation of how many just men might be contained within the fortress of Quebec.

With a minimum of fuss, the Highlanders and their officers, Wolfe and his chosen troops—Grey among them—debarked into the small bateaux that would carry them silently down to the landing point.

The sounds of oars were mostly drowned by the river’s rushing, and there was little conversation in the boats. Wolfe sat in the prow of the lead boat, facing his troops, looking now and then over his shoulder at the shore. Quite without warning, he began to speak. He didn’t raise his voice, but the night was so still that those in the boat had little trouble in hearing him. To Grey’s astonishment, he was reciting “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Melodramatic ass, Grey thought—and yet could not deny that the recitation was oddly moving. Wolfe made no show of it. It was as though he was simply talking to himself, and a shiver went over Grey as Wolfe intoned:

“The paths of glory lead but to the grave,” Wolfe ended, so low-voiced that only the three or four men closest heard him. Grey was near enough to hear him clear his throat, with a small “hem” noise, and saw his shoulders lift.

“Gentlemen,” Wolfe said, lifting his voice, as well, “I should rather have written those lines than have taken Quebec.”

There was a faint stir and a breath of laughter among the men.

So would I, Grey thought. The poet who wrote them is likely sitting by his cozy fire in Cambridge, eating buttered crumpets, not preparing to fall from a great height or get his arse shot off.

He didn’t know whether this was simply more of Wolfe’s characteristic drama. Possibly—possibly not, he thought. He’d met Colonel Walsing by the latrines that morning, and Walsing had mentioned that Wolfe had given him a pendant the night before, with instructions to deliver it to Miss Landringham, to whom Wolfe was engaged.

But, then, it was nothing out of the ordinary for men to put their personal valuables into the care of a friend before a hot battle. Were you killed or badly injured, your body might be looted before your comrades managed to retrieve you, and not everyone had a trustworthy servant with whom to leave such items. Grey himself had often carried snuffboxes, pocket watches, or rings into battle for friends—he’d had a reputation for luck, prior to Crefeld. No one had asked him to carry anything tonight.

He shifted his weight by instinct, feeling the current change, and Simon Fraser, next to him, swayed in the opposite direction, bumping him.

“Pardon,” Fraser murmured. Wolfe had made them all recite poetry in French round the dinner table the night before, and it was agreed that Fraser had the most authentic accent, he having fought with the French in Holland some years prior. Should they be hailed by a sentry, it would be his job to reply. Doubtless, Grey thought, Fraser was now thinking frantically in French, trying to saturate his mind with the language, lest any stray bit of English escape in panic.

“De rien,” Grey murmured back, and Fraser chuckled, deep in his throat.

It was cloudy, the sky streaked with the shredded remnants of retreating rain clouds. That was good; the surface of the river was broken, patched with faint light, fractured by stones and drifting tree branches. Even so, a decent sentry could scarcely fail to spot a train of boats.

Cold numbed his face, but his palms were sweating. He touched the dagger at his belt again; he was aware that he touched it every few minutes, as if needing to verify its presence, but couldn’t help it and didn’t worry about it. He was straining his eyes, looking for anything—the glow of a careless fire, the shifting of a rock that was not a rock…Nothing.

How far? he wondered. Two miles, three? He’d not yet seen the cliffs himself, was not sure how far below Gareon they lay.

The rush of water and the easy movement of the boat began to make him sleepy, tension notwithstanding, and he shook his head, yawning exaggeratedly to throw it off.

“Quel est ce bateau?” What boat is that? The shout from the shore seemed anticlimactic when it came, barely more remarkable than a night bird’s call. But the next instant Simon Fraser’s hand crushed his, grinding the bones together, as Fraser gulped air and shouted, “Celui de la Reine!!”

Grey clenched his teeth, not to let any blasphemous response escape. If the sentry demanded a password, he’d likely be crippled for life, he thought. An instant later, though, the sentry shouted, “Passez!” and Fraser’s death grip relaxed. Simon was breathing like a bellows but nudged him and whispered, “Pardon,” again.

“De fucking rien,” he muttered, rubbing his hand and tenderly flexing the fingers.

They were getting close. Men were shifting to and fro in anticipation, even more than Grey—checking their weapons, straightening coats, coughing, spitting over the side, readying themselves. Still, it was a nerve-wracking quarter-hour more before they began to swing toward shore—and another sentry called from the dark.

Grey’s heart squeezed like a fist, and he nearly gasped with the twinge of pain from his old wounds.

“Qui etes-vous? Que sont ces bateaux?” a French voice demanded suspiciously. Who are you? What boats are those?

This time, he was ready and seized Fraser’s hand himself. Simon held on and, leaning out toward the shore, called hoarsely, “Des bateaux de provisions! Tasiez-vous—les anglais sont proches!” Provision boats! Be quiet—the British are nearby! Grey felt an insane urge to laugh but didn’t. In fact, the Sutherland was nearby, lurking out of cannon shot downstream, and doubtless the frogs knew it. In any case, the guard called, more quietly, “Passez!” and the train of boats slid smoothly past and round the final bend.

The bottom of the boat grated on sand, and half the men were over at once, tugging it farther up. Wolfe half-leapt, half-fell over the side in eagerness, all trace of somberness gone. They’d come aground on a small sandbar just offshore, and the other boats were beaching now, a swarm of black figures gathering like ants.

Twenty-four of the Highlanders were meant to try the ascent first, finding—and, insofar as possible, clearing, for the cliff was defended not only by its steepness but by abatis, nests of sharpened logs—a trail for the rest. Simon’s bulky form faded into the dark, his French accent changing at once into the sibilant Gaelic as he hissed the men into position. Grey rather missed his presence.

He was not sure whether Wolfe had chosen the Highlanders for their skill at climbing or because he preferred to risk them rather than his other troops. The latter, he thought. Wolfe regarded the Highlanders with distrust and a certain contempt, as did most English officers. Those officers, at least, who’d never fought with them—or against them.

From his spot at the foot of the cliff, Grey couldn’t see them, but he could hear them: the scuffle of feet, now and then a wild scrabble and a clatter of falling small stones, loud grunts of effort, and what he recognized as Gaelic invocations of God, his mother, and assorted saints. One man near him pulled a string of beads from the neck of his shirt, kissed the tiny cross attached to it, and tucked it back; then, seizing a small sapling that grew out of the rock face, he leapt upward, kilt swinging, broadsword swaying from his belt in brief silhouette, before the darkness took him. Grey touched his dagger’s hilt again, his own talisman against evil.

It was a long wait in the darkness; to some extent he envied the Highlanders, who, whatever else they might be encountering—and the scrabbling noises and half-strangled whoops as a foot slipped and a comrade grabbed a hand or arm suggested that the climb was just as impossible as it seemed—were not dealing with boredom.

A sudden rumble and crashing came from above, and the shore party scattered in panic as several sharpened logs plunged out of the dark, dislodged from an abatis. One of them had struck point-down no more than six feet from Grey and stood quivering in the sand. With no discussion, the shore party retreated to the sandbar.

The scrabblings and gruntings grew fainter and abruptly ceased. Wolfe, who had been sitting on a boulder, stood up, straining his eyes upward.

“They’ve made it,” he whispered, and his fists curled in an excitement that Grey shared. “God, they’ve made it!”

Well enough, and the men at the foot of the cliff held their breaths; there was a guard post at the top of the cliff. Silence, bar the everlasting noise of tree and river. And then a shot.

Just one. The men below shifted, touching their weapons, ready, not knowing for what.

Were there sounds above? Grey could not tell and, out of sheer nervousness, turned aside to urinate against the side of the cliff. He was fastening his flies when he heard Simon Fraser’s voice above.

“Got ’em, by God!” he said. “Come on, lads—the night’s not long enough!”

The next few hours passed in a blur of the most arduous endeavor Grey had seen since he’d crossed the Scottish Highlands with his brother’s regiment, bringing cannon to General Cope. No, actually, he thought, as he stood in darkness, one leg wedged between a tree and the rock face, thirty feet of invisible space below him and rope burning through his palms with an unseen deadweight of two hundred pounds or so on the end, this was worse.

The Highlanders had surprised the guard, shot their fleeing captain in the heel, and made all of them prisoner. That was the easy part. The next thing was for the rest of the landing party to ascend to the cliff top, now that the trail—if there was such a thing—had been cleared. There they would make preparations to raise not only the rest of the troops now coming down the river aboard the transports but also seventeen battering cannon, twelve howitzers, three mortars, and all of the necessary encumbrances in terms of shell, powder, planks, and limbers necessary to make this artillery effective. At least, Grey reflected, by the time they were done, the vertical trail up the cliffside would likely have been trampled into a simple cow path.

As the sky lightened, Grey looked up for a moment from his spot at the top of the cliff, where he was now overseeing the last of the artillery as it was heaved over the edge, and saw the bateaux coming down again like a flock of swallows, they having crossed the river to collect an additional 1,200 troops that Wolfe had directed to march to Levi on the opposite shore, there to lie hidden in the woods until the Highlanders’ expedient should have been proved.

A head, cursing freely, surged up over the edge of the cliff. Its attendant body lunged into view, tripped, and sprawled at Grey’s feet.

“Sergeant Cutter!” Grey said, grinning as he bent to yank the little sergeant to his feet. “Come to join the party, have you?”

“Jesus fuck,” replied the sergeant, belligerently brushing dirt from his coat. “We’d best win, that’s all I can say.” And, without waiting for reply, he turned round to bellow down the cliff, “Come ON, you bloody rascals! ’Ave you all eaten lead for breakfast, then? Shit it out and step lively! CLIMB, God damn your eyes!”

The net result of this monstrous effort being that, as dawn spread its golden glow across the Plains of Abraham, the French sentries on the walls of the Citadel of Quebec gaped in disbelief at the sight of more than four thousand British troops drawn up in battle array before them.

Through his telescope, Grey could see the sentries. The distance was too great to make out their facial expressions, but their attitudes of alarm and consternation were easy to read, and he grinned, seeing one French officer clutch his head briefly, then wave his arms like one dispelling a flock of chickens, sending his subordinates rushing off in all directions.

Wolfe was standing on a small hillock, long nose lifted as though to sniff the morning air. Grey thought he probably considered his pose noble and commanding; he reminded Grey of a dachshund scenting a badger; the air of alert eagerness was the same.

Wolfe wasn’t the only one. Despite the ardors of the night, skinned hands, battered shins, twisted knees and ankles, and a lack of food and sleep, a gleeful excitement ran through the troops like wine. Grey thought they were all giddy with fatigue.

The sound of drums came faintly to him on the wind: the French, beating hastily to quarters. Within minutes, he saw horsemen streaking away from the fortress, and he smiled grimly. They were going to rally whatever troops Montcalm had within summoning distance, and Grey felt a tightening of the belly at the sight.

The matter hadn’t really been in doubt; it was September, and winter was coming on. The town and fortress had been unable to provision themselves for a long siege, owing to Wolfe’s scorched-earth policies. The French were there, the English before them—and the simple fact, apparent to both sides, was that the French would starve long before the English did. Montcalm would fight; he had no choice.

Many of the men had brought canteens of water, some a little food. They were allowed to relax sufficiently to eat, to ease their muscles—though none of them ever took their attention from the French gathering before the fortress. Employing his telescope further, Grey could see that, while the mass of milling men was growing, they were by no means all trained troops; Montcalm had called his militias from the countryside—farmers, fishermen, and coureurs du bois, by the look of them—and his Indians. Grey eyed the painted faces and oiled topknots warily, but his acquaintance with Manoke had deprived the Indians of much of their terrifying aspect—and they would not be nearly so effective on open ground, against cannon, as they were sneaking through the forest.

It took surprisingly little time for Montcalm to ready his troops, impromptu as they might be. The sun was no more than halfway up the sky when the French lines began their advance.

“HOLD your fucking fire, you villains! Fire before you’re ordered, and I’ll give your fuckin’ heads to the artillery to use for cannonballs!” He heard the unmistakable voice of Sergeant Aloysius Cutter, some distance back but clearly audible. The same order was being echoed, if less picturesquely, through the British lines, and if every officer on the field had one eye firmly on the French, the other was fixed on General Wolfe, standing on his hillock, aflame with anticipation.

Grey felt his blood twitch and moved restlessly from foot to foot, trying to ease a cramp in one leg. The advancing French line stopped, knelt, and fired a volley. Another from the line standing behind them. Too far, much too far to have any effect. A deep rumble came from the British troops—something visceral and hungry.

Grey’s hand had been on his dagger for so long that the wire-wrapped hilt had left its imprint on his fingers. His other hand was clenched upon a saber. He had no command here, but the urge to raise his sword, gather the eyes of his men, hold them, focus them, was overwhelming. He shook his shoulders to loosen them and glanced at Wolfe.

Another volley, close enough this time that several British soldiers in the front lines fell, knocked down by musket fire.

“Hold, hold!” The order rattled down the lines like gunfire. The brimstone smell of slow match was thick, pungent above the scent of powder smoke; the artillerymen held their fire, as well.

French cannon fired, and balls bounced murderously across the field, but they seemed puny, ineffectual, despite the damage they did. How many French? he wondered. Perhaps twice as many, but it didn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter.

Sweat ran down his face, and he rubbed a sleeve across to clear his eyes.

“Hold!”

Closer, closer. Many of the Indians were on horseback; he could see them in a knot on the left, milling. Those would bear watching….

“Hold!”

Wolfe’s arm rose slowly, sword in hand, and the army breathed deep. His beloved grenadiers were next to him, solid in their companies, wrapped in sulfurous smoke from the match tubes at their belts.

“Come on, you buggers,” the man next to Grey was muttering. “Come on, come on!”

Smoke was drifting over the field, low white clouds. Forty paces. Effective range.

“Don’t fire, don’t fire, don’t fire…” someone was chanting to himself, struggling against panic.

Through the British lines, sun glinted on the rising swords, the officers echoing Wolfe’s order.

“Hold…hold…”

The swords fell as one.

“FIRE!” and the ground shook.

A shout rose in Grey’s throat, part of the roar of the army, and he was charging with the men near him, swinging his saber with all his might, finding flesh.

The volley had been devastating; bodies littered the ground. He leapt over a fallen Frenchman, brought his saber down upon another, caught halfway in the act of loading, took him in the cleft between neck and shoulder, yanked his saber free of the falling man, and went on.

The British artillery was firing as fast as the guns could be served. Each boom shook his flesh. He gritted his teeth, squirmed aside from the point of a half-seen bayonet, and found himself panting, eyes watering from the smoke, standing alone.

Chest heaving, he turned round in a circle, disoriented. There was so much smoke around him that he could not for a moment tell where he was. It didn’t matter.

An enormous blur of something passed him, shrieking, and he dodged by instinct and fell to the ground as the horse’s feet churned by. Grey heard as an echo the Indian’s grunt, the rush of the tomahawk blow that had missed his head.

“Shit,” he muttered, and scrambled to his feet.

The grenadiers were hard at work nearby; he heard their officers’ shouts, the bang and pop of their explosions as they worked their way stolidly through the French like the small mobile batteries they were.

A grenade struck the ground a few feet away, and he felt a sharp pain in his thigh; a metal fragment had sliced through his breeches, drawing blood.

“Christ,” he said, belatedly aware that being in the vicinity of a company of grenadiers was not a good idea. He shook his head to clear it and made his way away from them.

He heard a familiar sound that made him recoil for an instant from the force of memory—wild Highland screams, filled with rage and berserk glee. The Highlanders were hard at work with their broadswords—he saw two of them appear from the smoke, bare legs churning beneath their kilts, pursuing a pack of fleeing Frenchman, and felt laughter bubble up through his heaving chest.

He didn’t see the man in the smoke. His foot struck something heavy and he fell, sprawling across the body. The man screamed, and Grey scrambled hastily off him.

“Sorry. Are you—Christ, Malcolm!”

He was on his knees, bending low to avoid the smoke. Stubbs was gasping, grasping desperately at Grey’s coat.

“Jesus.” Malcolm’s right leg was gone below the knee, flesh shredded and the white bone splintered, butcher-stained with spurting blood. Or…no. It wasn’t gone. It—the foot, at least—was lying a little way beyond, still clad in shoe and tattered stocking.

Grey turned his head and threw up.

Bile stinging the back of his nose, he choked and spat, turned back, and grappled with his belt, wrenching it free.

“Don’t—” Stubbs gasped, putting out a hand as Grey began wrapping the belt round his thigh. His face was whiter than the bone of his leg. “Don’t. Better—better if I die.”

“The devil you will,” Grey replied briefly.

His hands were shaking, slippery with blood. It took three tries to get the end of the belt through the buckle, but it went at last, and he jerked it tight, eliciting a yell from Stubbs.

“Here,” said an unfamiliar voice by his ear. “Let’s get him off. I’ll—shit!” He looked up, startled, to see a tall British officer lunge upward, blocking the musket butt that would have brained Grey. Without thinking, he drew his dagger and stabbed the Frenchman in the leg. The man screamed, his leg buckling, and the strange officer pushed him over, kicked him in the face, and stamped on his throat, crushing it.

“I’ll help,” the man said calmly, bending to take hold of Malcolm’s arm, pulling him up. “Take the other side; we’ll get him to the back.” They got Malcolm up, his arms round their shoulders, and dragged him, paying no heed to the Frenchman thrashing and gurgling on the ground behind them.

Malcolm lived, long enough to make it to the rear of the lines, where the army surgeons were already at work. By the time Grey and the other officer had turned him over to the surgeons, the battle was over.

Grey turned to see the French scattered and demoralized, fleeing toward the fortress. British troops were flooding across the trampled field, cheering, overrunning the abandoned French cannon.

The entire battle had lasted less than a quarter of an hour.

He found himself sitting on the ground, his mind quite blank, with no notion how long he had been there, though he supposed it couldn’t have been much time at all.

He noticed an officer standing near him and thought vaguely that the man seemed familiar. Who…Oh, yes. Wolfe’s adjutant. He’d never learned the man’s name.

He stood up slowly, stiff as a nine-day pudding.

The adjutant was simply standing there. His eyes were turned in the direction of the fortress and the fleeing French, but Grey could tell that he wasn’t really seeing either. Grey glanced over his shoulder, toward the hillock where Wolfe had stood earlier, but the general was nowhere in sight.

“General Wolfe?” he said.

“The general…” the adjutant said, and swallowed thickly. “He was struck.”

Of course he was, silly ass, Grey thought uncharitably. Standing up there like a bloody target, what could he expect? But then he saw the tears standing in the adjutant’s eyes and understood.

“Dead, then?” he asked, stupidly, and the adjutant—why had he never thought to ask the man’s name?—nodded, rubbing a smoke-stained sleeve across a smoke-stained countenance.

“He…In the wrist first. Then in the body. He fell and crawled—then he fell again. I turned him over…told him the battle was won, the French were scattered.”

“He understood?”

The adjutant nodded and took a deep breath that rattled in his throat. “He said—” He stopped and coughed, then went on more firmly. “He said that in knowing he had conquered, he was content to die.”

“Did he?” Grey said blankly. He’d seen men die, often, and imagined it much more likely that if James Wolfe had managed anything beyond an inarticulate groan, his final word had likely been either “shit,” or “oh, God,” depending upon the general’s religious leanings, of which Grey had no notion.

“Yes, good,” he said meaninglessly, and turned toward the fortress. Ant trails of men were streaming toward it, and in the midst of one such stream he saw Montcalm’s colors, fluttering in the wind. Below the colors, small in the distance, a man in general’s uniform rode his horse, hatless, hunched and swaying in the saddle, his officers bunched close on either side, anxious lest he fall.

The British lines were reorganizing, though it was clear no further fighting would be required. Not today. Nearby, he saw the tall officer who had saved his life and helped him to drag Malcolm Stubbs to safety, limping back toward his troops.

“The major over there,” he said, nudging the adjutant and nodding. “Do you know his name?”

The adjutant blinked, then firmed his shoulders.

“Yes, of course. That’s Major Siverly.”

“Oh. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”

ADMIRAL HOLMES, third in command after Wolfe, accepted the surrender of Quebec five days later, Wolfe and his second, Brigadier Monckton, having perished in battle. Montcalm was dead, too; had died the morning following the battle. There was no way out for the French save surrender; winter was coming on, and the fortress and its city would starve long before its besiegers.

Two weeks after the battle, John Grey returned to Gareon and found that smallpox had swept through the village like an autumn wind. The mother of Malcolm Stubbs’s son was dead; her mother offered to sell him the child. He asked her politely to wait.

Charlie Carruthers had perished, too, the smallpox not waiting for the weakness of his body to overcome him. Grey had the body burned, not wishing Carruthers’s hand to be stolen, for both the Indians and the local habitants regarded such things superstitiously. He took a canoe by himself and, on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence, scattered his friend’s ashes to the wind.

He returned from this expedition to discover a letter, forwarded by Hal, from Dr. John Hunter, surgeon and anatomist. He checked the level of brandy in the decanter and opened it with a sigh.

My dear Lord John,

I have heard some recent conversation regarding the unfortunate death of Mr. Nicholls, including comments indicating a public perception that you were responsible for his death. In case you shared this perception, I thought it might ease your mind to know that in fact you were not.

Grey sank slowly onto a stool, eyes glued to the sheet.

It is true that your ball did strike Mr. Nicholls, but this accident contributed little or nothing to his demise. I saw you fire upward into the air—I said as much to those present at the time, though most of them did not appear to take much notice. The ball apparently went up at a slight angle and then fell upon Mr. Nicholls from above. At this point, its power was quite spent, and, the missile itself being negligible in size and weight, it barely penetrated the skin above his collarbone, where it lodged against the bone, doing no further damage.

The true cause of his collapse and death was an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of one of the great vessels emergent from the heart; such weaknesses are often congenital. The stress of the electric shock and the emotion of the duello that followed apparently caused this aneurysm to rupture. Such an occurrence is untreatable and invariably fatal, I am afraid. There is nothing that could have saved him.

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.