The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [104]
Quinn had gone off on unstated business of his own—and Grey would not have made a confidant of the Irishman in any case. Tom also had disappeared; Mr. Beckett had a comely daughter who served in the public room, but she had vanished, replaced by her mother. Grey didn’t mind, but he would have liked to have someone with whom to share his worry over Jamie Fraser’s prolonged absence.
There were of course excellent possible reasons for it. Siverly might have been intrigued by the poem, or by Fraser, and thus invited him to stay for supper in order to carry on their conversation. That would be the best possibility, Grey supposed.
Less good, but still acceptable, was the possibility—well, call it likelihood, given the state of the roads—that Fraser’s horse had thrown a shoe or gone lame on the way back and had had to be walked, taken to a farrier, or, at worst, shot. They had sent back the livery’s horses; Fraser was riding a nag borrowed from Mr. Beckett.
Running down the list of increasingly dire possibilities, Grey thought of highwaymen, who were attracted by the horse (surely not; the thing looked like a cow, and an elderly cow at that) and had then noticed the gaudy vest and shot Fraser when he was unable to produce any money. (He should have insisted Jamie have money; it wasn’t right to keep him penniless.) A larger than usual mudhole that had forced him off the road, there to fall into a quaking bog, which had promptly swallowed him and the horse. A sudden apoplexy—Fraser had once mentioned that his father had died of an apoplexy. Were such things hereditary?
“Or perhaps a goose fell dead out of the sky and hit him on the head,” he muttered, kicking viciously at a stone on the path. It shot into the air, struck a fence post, and ricocheted back, striking him smartly on the shin.
“Me lord?”
Clutching his shin, he looked up to see Tom hovering in the gloaming. At first assuming that his valet had been attracted by his cry of pain, he straightened up, dismissing it—but then saw the agitation of Tom’s countenance.
“What—”
“Come with me, me lord,” Tom said, low-voiced, and, glancing over his shoulder, led the way through a thick growth of weeds and brambles that put paid altogether to Grey’s stockings.
Behind the pub, Tom led the way around a ramshackle chicken run and beckoned Grey toward an overgrown hedge.
“He’s in here,” he whispered, holding up a swath of branches.
Grey crouched down and beheld an extremely cross-looking James Fraser, ribbon lost, hair coming out of its plait, and a good bit of his face obscured by dried blood. He was hunched to one side and held one shoulder stiffly, higher than the other. The light under the hedge was dim, but there was sufficient left to make out the glare in the slanted blue eyes.
“Why are you sitting in the hedge, Mr. Fraser?” he inquired, having rapidly considered and discarded several other inquiries as being perhaps impolitic.
“Because if I go inside the pub at suppertime looking like this, the whole countryside is going to be talkin’ about it by dawn, speculating about who did it. And everyone in said public house kens perfectly well that I’m wi’ you. Meaning that Major Siverly will ken it’s you on his trail by the time he’s finished his coffee tomorrow morning.” He shifted slightly and drew in his breath.
“Are you badly hurt?”
“I am not,” Fraser said testily. “It’s only bruises.”
“Er … your face is covered with blood, sir,” Tom said helpfully, in a tone suggesting that Fraser might not have noticed this, and then added, in substantially more horrified tones, “It’s got onto your waistcoat!”
Fraser shot Tom a dark look suggesting that he meant to say something cutting about waistcoats, but whatever it was, he swallowed it, turning back to Grey.
“A wee shard o’ glass cut my head, is all. It stopped bleeding some while ago. All I need is a wet cloth.”
From the slow difficulty with which Fraser wormed his way out of the hedge, Grey rather thought a bit more than a wet cloth might be needed but forbore saying so.
“What happened?