Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [130]
I shuddered briefly, remembering the streets through which Monsieur Forez’s carriage had traveled. Beggars dressed in rags and sores clung stubbornly to their territories, sleeping on the ground even on the coldest nights, lest some rival steal a profitable corner from them. Children much smaller than Fergus darted through the market crowds like hungry mice, eyes always watching for the dropped crumb, the unguarded pocket. And for those too unhealthy to work, too unattractive to sell to the brothels, or simply too unlucky—it would be a short life indeed, and far from merry. Little wonder if the prospect of being thrust from the luxury of three meals a day and clean clothes back into that sordid stew had been sufficient to send Fergus into paroxysms of needless guilt.
“I suppose so,” I said. My manner of intake had declined from gulps to a more genteel sipping by this time. I sipped genteelly, then handed the bottle back, noting in a rather detached manner that it was more than half empty. “Still, I hope you didn’t hurt him.”
“Weel, nay doubt he’ll be a bit sore.” His Scots accent, usually faint, always grew more pronounced when he drank a lot. He shook his head, squinting through the bottle to judge the level of spirit remaining. “D’ye know, Sassenach, I never ’til tonight realized just how difficult it must ha’ been for my father to beat me? I always thought it was me had the hardest part of that particular transaction.” He tilted his head back and drank again, then set down the bottle and stared owl-eyed into the fire. “Being a father might be a bit more complicated than I’d thought. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Well, don’t think too hard,” I said. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“Och, don’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “There’s another bottle in the cupboard.”
15
IN WHICH MUSIC PLAYS A PART
We stayed up late with the second bottle, going over and over the latest of the abstracted letters from the Chevalier de St. George—otherwise known as His Majesty, James III—and the letters to Prince Charles from Jacobite supporters.
“Fergus got a large packet, bound for His Highness,” Jamie explained. “There was a lot of stuff in it, and we couldna copy it all quickly enough, so I kept some to go back the next time.”
“See,” he said, extracting one sheet from the pile and laying it on my knee, “the majority of the letters are in code, like this one—‘I hear that the prospects for grouse seem most favorable this year in the hills above Salerno; hunters in that region should find themselves successful.’ That’s easy; it’s a reference to Manzetti, the Italian banker; he’s from Salerno. I found that Charles had been dining with him, and managed to borrow fifteen thousand livres—apparently James’s advice was good. But here—” He shuffled through the stack, pulling out another sheet.
“Look at this,” Jamie said, handing me a sheet covered with his lopsided scrawls.
I squinted obediently at the paper, from which I could pick out single letters, connected with a network of arrows and question marks.
“What language is that?” I asked, peering at it. “Polish?” Charles Stuart’s mother, the late Clementina Sobieski, had been Polish, after all.
“No, it’s in English,” Jamie said, grinning. “You canna read it?”
“You can?”
“Oh, aye,” he said smugly. “It’s a cipher, Sassenach, and no a verra complicated one. See, all ye must do is break the letters up into groups of five, to start—only ye don’t count the letters Q or X. The X’s are meant as breaks between sentences, and the Q’s are only stuck in here and there to make it more confusing.”
“If you say so,” I said, looking from the extremely confusing-looking letter, which began “Mrti ocruti dlopro qahstmin…” to the sheet in Jamie’s hand, with a series of five-letter groups written on one line, single letters printed in carefully above them, one at a time.
“So, one letter is only substituted for another, but in the same order,” Jamie was explaining, “so if you have a fair amount of text to work from, and you can guess a word here or there,