The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [20]
Night is falling, though, and the group is attacked in the darkness of the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. With Murtagh bound and helpless, Mary is thrown to the ground and raped. Claire seems likely to suffer a similar fate when her hood falls back and a shaft of lantern-light illuminates her face.
“Mother of God!” The hands clutching my arms slackened their grip, and I yanked loose, to see Spotted-shirt, mouth hanging open in horrified amazement below the mask. He backed away from me, crossing himself as he went.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti,” he babbled, crossing and recrossing. “La Dame Blanche!”
“La Dame Blanche!” The man behind me echoed the cry, in tones of terror.
Within moments the assailants have fled, leaving the street empty and disaster in their wake.
Fergus has run to fetch Jamie. With him comes Alex Randall; too shy and too conscious of his impecunious state to approach her directly, he has been following Mary about the city, hoping for occasional glimpses of his beloved. Freeing Murtagh, Jamie takes them all home—and then, with Claire, must make hasty preparations for a very ill-omened dinner party.
What I wanted at the moment was peace, quiet, and total privacy in which to shake like a rabbit. What I had was a dinner party with a duke who might be a Jacobite or an English agent, a Comte who might be a poisoner, and a rape victim hidden upstairs.
The dinner party is the event of the season—one that will be talked about for months, as Claire wryly observes—though not for the usual reasons. The inopportune appearance of a drugged and disheveled Mary Hawkins in the middle of dinner triggers confrontation, fistfights, and general hysteria, ending with Mary Hawkins removed to her uncles house, Silas Hawkins and Alex Randall laid out cold, the Comte St. Germain gloating, and Jamie in the hands of the Paris police.
Released at dawn, Jamie returns to the house in the Rue Tremoulins, wanting nothing but clean clothes and Claire’s arms. One more conversation awaits him, though—Murtagh kneels at his feet, his dirk held out hilt-first, and asks Jamie formally to take his life. He cannot live, he says, with the shame of having failed in his duty to protect his chief’s wife and unborn child.
Rather than grant his godfather’s request, Jamie instead lays an oath on Murtagh:
Jamie’s voice dropped still further, but it was not a whisper. Holding the middle three fingers of his right hand stiff, he laid them together over the hilt of the dirk, at the juncture of haft and tang.
“I charge ye, then, by your oath to me and your word to my mother—find the men. Hunt them, and when they be found, I do charge ye wi’ the vengeance due my wife’s honor—and the blood of Mary Hawkins’s innocence.”
He paused a moment, then took his hand from the knife. The clansman raised it, holding it upright by the blade. Acknowledging my presence for the first time, he bowed his head toward me and said, “As the laird has spoken, lady, so I will do. I will lay vengeance at your feet.”
Jamie decides to conduct his own investigation in other directions—affairs at the dinner party and the interception of a mysterious musical cipher promising aid to the Stuart cause have made it still more urgent to determine where the Duke of Sandringham’s loyalties actually lie.
Claire accompanies Jamie to the Dukes house, meaning to find an opportunity to steal away and find Alexander Randall. With the attack in the Rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré a matter of public knowledge, Marys marriage to the Vicomte is definitely off. Alex and Mary cannot meet publicly, but Claire means to invite Alex to her house, where he can talk to Mary privately.
Stealing away from Jamie’s conversation with the Duke, she finds not Alex, but Mary—who has in turn stolen away from her uncle’s house and come to find