The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [132]
He knew what it was: Quinn’s farewell. So he’d gone, then—to use the cup. John Grey would have to find another ferryman. Ironic, considering where he’d just decided his duty lay—but he had promised Quinn to speak to the abbot and would just have to leave the matter now to God and hope the Almighty shared his view of the situation.
He nearly threw the note away, but some obscure impulse of civility made him open it. He glanced cursorily at it, then stiffened.
It was neither addressed nor signed.
You’ve a great loyalty to your friends, and God himself will surely bless you for it on the last day. But I should be less than a friend myself, did I not tell you the truth.
It was the Englishman who did for Major Siverly. I saw him with my own eyes, as I was watching from the wood behind the summerhouse.
Captain Twelvetrees is a great friend to our cause, and with Major Siverly dead, the means lie now in his hand. I urge you to protect him and give him what help you can when you return to London.
God willing, we will meet there and, with our other friends, see the green branch burst into flower.
By reflex, he crumpled the note in his hand. John Grey had come out of the abbot’s office, pausing there to turn and say something to Brother Ambrose.
“Friends!” he said aloud. “God help me.” He grimaced and, putting the rosary back in his pocket, tore the note to tiny pieces, which he scattered to the wind.
28
Amplexus
JAMIE REFUSED TO ALLOW GREY TO TRY TO HIRE HORSES, ON grounds that the Irish liked gossip as much as did Highlanders, and were Grey to be seen in his uniform, the castle would know it by noon of the following day.
So they walked through the night from Lough Ree, keeping to the fields in the crepuscule, resting in the woods during light of day—when Jamie went into Ballybonaggin for food—then coming out onto the roads again at dark, where they kept up a fine pace, lighted by a sympathetic moon that rose above them huge, pale, and mottled as a ball of gleaming alabaster.
The countryside was empty of people—and anything else.
They had passed from open meadows into a wooded area, and the trees clustered thick and dark, roots intruding into the road, branches overhanging, so that they walked through pools of darkness, the road invisible beneath their feet, emerging suddenly into clearer spots where the trees drew back a little, and the moon caught the sudden white flash of face or shirtfront, the glint of a sword hilt.
Even the shuffle of their feet was lost in the murmur of the woods, a fresh wind rising, rattling the new leaves. John felt the night as something wild creeping upon him, the force of spring itself rising from the ground into his feet, his legs, bursting through his body ’til the blood throbbed in his fingers, pulsed in his chest.
Perhaps it was freedom, the exhilaration of their escape. Perhaps the excitement of a hunt by night, adventure and danger before them. Or the knowledge that he was an outlaw—with pursuit and danger certainly behind him.
The road was narrow, and they jostled against each other now and then, blinded between the dark wood and the brilliance of the rising moon. He could hear Jamie’s breath, or thought he could—it seemed part of the soft wind that touched his face. He could smell Jamie, smell the musk of his body, the dried sweat and dust in his clothes, and felt suddenly wolflike and feral, longing changed to outright hunger.
He wanted.
Master me, he thought, breathing deep, or shall I your master be?
There were frogs in the ditches, in the bogs that lay beyond the scrim of trees. They called, high and low, shrill and bass, cascading over one another in a vast, pulsating chorus. At a distance, sitting on a lawn with that chorus as background, watching the stars come out, the sound might be no more than a pastoral, the song of spring.
This close, it was still the song of spring, but that song was revealed to be what the pagans had always known it to be—the blind