Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [116]
“Oh,” I said, light beginning to dawn.
“I canna get anything sensible out of His Highness; when he’s with me, he wilna do anything but moan about Louise de La Tour, or grind his teeth and curse because they’ve been quarreling again. In either case, all he wants to do is to get drunk as quickly as possible. Mar is losing all patience with him, for he’s haughty and sullen by turns. And I canna get anything out of Sheridan.”
The Earl of Mar was the most respected of the exiled Scottish Jacobites in Paris. A man whose long and illustrious prime was only now beginning to edge into elderliness, he had been the primary supporter of King James at the abortive Rising in 1715, and had followed his king into exile after the defeat at Sheriffsmuir. I had met the Earl and liked him; an elderly, courtly man with a personality as straight as his backbone. He was now doing his best—with little reward, it seemed—for his lord’s son. I had met Thomas Sheridan, too; the Prince’s tutor—an elderly man who handled His Highness’s correspondence, translating impatience and illiteracy into courtly French and English.
I sat down and pulled my stocking back up. Fergus, apparently hardened to the sight of female limbs, ignored me altogether, concentrating grimly on the bilboquet.
“Letters, Sassenach,” he said. “I need the letters. Letters from Rome, sealed with the Stuart crest. Letters from France, letters from England, letters from Spain. We can get them either from the Prince’s house—Fergus can go with me, as a page—or possibly from the papal messenger who brings them; that would be a bit better, as we’d have the information in advance.”
“So, we’ve made the bargain,” Jamie said, nodding at his new servant. “Fergus will do his best to get what I need, and I will provide him with clothes and lodging and thirty écus a year. If he’s caught while doing my service, I’ll do my best to buy him off. If it canna be done, and he loses a hand or an ear, then I maintain him for the rest of his life, as he wilna be able to pursue his profession. And if he’s hanged, then I guarantee to have Masses said for his soul for the space of a year. I think that’s fair, no?”
I felt a cold hand pass down my spine.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie” was all I could find to say.
He shook his head, and reached out a hand for the bilboquet. “Not our Lord, Sassenach. Pray to St. Dismas. The patron saint of thieves and traitors.”
Jamie reached over and took the bilboquet from the boy. He flicked his wrist sharply and the ivory ball rose in a perfect parabola, to descend into its cup with an inevitable plop.
“I see,” I said. I eyed the new employee with interest as he took the toy Jamie offered him and started in on it once more, dark eyes gleaming with concentration. “Where did you get him?” I asked curiously.
“I found him in a brothel.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “To be sure.” I eyed the dirt and smears on his clothes. “Which you were visiting for some really excellent reason, I expect?”
“Oh, aye,” he said. He sat back, arms wrapped about his knees, grinning as he watched me make repairs to my garter. “I thought you’d prefer me to be found in such an establishment, to the alternative of bein’ found in a dark alleyway, wi’ my head bashed in.”
I saw the boy Fergus’s eyes focus at a spot somewhat past the bilboquet, where a tray of iced cakes stood on a table near the wall. A small, pointed pink tongue darted out across his lower lip.
“I think your protégé is hungry,” I said. “Why don’t you feed him, and then you can tell me just what in bloody hell happened this afternoon.”
“Well, I was on my way to the docks,” he began, obediently rising to his feet, “and just past the Rue Eglantine, I began to have a queer feeling up the back of my neck.”
Jamie Fraser had spent two years in the army of France, fought and stolen with a gang of Scottish “broken men,” and been hunted as an outlaw through the moors and mountains of his native land. All of which had left him with an extreme sensitivity to the sensation of being followed.
He couldn’t have said whether it was