The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [157]
“Whatever are you doing to your poor uncle John?” she demanded. “Look what you’ve done to his bed! Off with the lot of you!”
The bedroom purged, she looked down her nose at John and shook her head. She had on a tiny lace cap, with her ripe-wheat hair put up, and looked charmingly domestic.
“Hal says the doctor be damned and Cook, too: you are to have steak and eggs, with a mixed grill. So steak you shall have, and if you die or burst or rot as a result, it will be your own fault.”
Grey had already plunged a fork into a succulent grilled tomato and was chewing blissfully.
“Oh, God,” he said. “Thank you. Thank Hal. Thank Cook. Thank everybody.” He swallowed and speared a mushroom.
Despite her earlier disavowal, Minnie looked pleased. She loved feeding people. She motioned the footman off and sat down on the edge of the bed to enjoy the spectacle.
“Hal said you wanted to scold me about something.” She didn’t look at all apprehensive at the prospect.
“I didn’t say that,” Grey protested, pausing with a chunk of bloody steak held in transit. “I just said I could do with a word.”
She folded her hands and looked at him, not quite batting her eyelashes.
“Well, actually, I meant to reproach you with sharing your insights regarding my motives with Mr. Fraser, but as it is …”
“As it is, I was right about them?”
He shrugged, mouth too full of steak to answer.
“Of course I was,” she answered for him. “And as Mr. Fraser is no fool, I doubt he needed telling. He did, however, ask me why I thought you’d challenged Edward Twelvetrees. So I told him.”
“Where … um … where is Mr. Fraser at the moment?” he asked, swallowing and reaching at once for a forkful of egg.
“I suppose he’s where he has been for the last three days, reading his way through Hal’s library. And speaking of reading …” She lifted a small stack of letters—which he hadn’t noticed, his whole attention being focused on food—off the tray and deposited them on his stomach.
They were tinted pink or blue and smelled of perfume. He looked at her, brows raised in inquiry.
“Billets-doux,” she said sweetly. “From your admirers.”
“What admirers?” he demanded, setting down his fork in order to remove the letters. “And how do you know what’s in them?”
“I read them,” she said without the faintest blush. “As for whom, I doubt you know many of the ladies, though you’ve likely danced with some of them. There are a great many women, though—particularly young and giddy ones—who positively swoon over men who fight duels. The ones who survive, that is,” she added pragmatically.
He opened a letter with his thumb and held it in one hand, going on eating with the other as he read it. His brows went up.
“I’ve never met this woman. Yet she professes herself besotted with me—well, she’s certainly besotted, I’ll say that much—consumed with admiration for my valor, my excessive courage, my … Oh, dear.” He felt a slow blush rising in his own cheeks and put the letter down. “Are they all like that?”
“Some much worse,” Minnie assured him, laughing. “Do you never think of marriage, John? It is the only way to preserve yourself from this sort of attention, you know.”
“No,” he said absently, scanning another of the missives as he wiped sauce from his plate with a chunk of bread. “I should be a most unsatisfactory husband. Holy Lord! I am enraptured by the vision of your valiance, the power of your puissant sword—Stop laughing, Minerva, you’ll rupture something. This didn’t happen when I fought Edwin Nicholls.”
“Actually, it did,” she said, picking up the discarded letters, some of which had fallen to the floor. “You weren’t here, having absconded to Canada in the most craven fashion, and all just to avoid marrying Caroline Woodford. Putting aside the question of a wife, do you not long for children, John? Do you not want a son?”
“Having just spent half an hour with yours, no,” he said, though in fact this was not true, and Minerva knew it; she merely laughed again and handed him the tidy pile