The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [161]
Reginald Twelvetrees hadn’t said a word, though. What, after all, could he say? He’d left just before the final verdict—guilty, of course, on all charges.
Grey supposed he should feel victorious, or at least vindicated. He’d kept his promise to Charlie, found the truth—a good deal more of it than he’d expected or wanted—and, he supposed, achieved justice.
If you could call it that, he thought dimly, seeing three or four Fleet Street scribblers elbowing one another in an effort to talk to young Eldon Garlock, the ensign who had been the youngest member of the court and thus first to give his verdict.
God knew what they’d write. He only hoped none of it would be about him; he’d experienced the attentions of the press before, though in an entirely favorable way. Having seen the favors of the printers at close range, he could only hope that God would have mercy on those they didn’t like.
He had walked away from the crowd, but with no real direction in mind, only wanting to put distance between himself and this day. Absorbed in his thoughts—at least Jamie Fraser had not been required to testify; that was something—he failed for some time to realize that he was accompanied. Some faint sense of arrhythmia disturbed him, though, an echo of his own footsteps, and at last he glanced aside to see what might be causing it.
He stopped dead, and Hubert Bowles, who had been walking a half step behind him, came up even and stopped, bowing.
“My lord,” he said politely. “How do you do?”
“Not that well,” he said. “I must ask you to excuse me, Mr. Bowles.” He turned to go on, but Bowles stopped him with a hand on his arm. Affronted by the familiarity, Grey jerked back.
“I must ask your forbearance, my lord,” Bowles said, with a faint lisp that made it almost “forbearanth.” He spoke mildly but with an authority that stopped Grey’s making any protest. “I have something to say that you must hear.”
Hubert Bowles was small and shapeless, with a round head and rounded back, and with his shabby wig and worn coat, no one would have looked at him twice. Even his face was bland as a boiled pudding, with little black-currant eyes put in. Nonetheless, Grey slowly inclined his head in unwilling acknowledgment.
“Shall we take coffee?” he said, nodding toward a nearby coffeehouse. He wasn’t about to invite something like Bowles into any of the clubs where he had membership. He had no notion of the man’s antecedents, but his presence made Grey want to wash.
Bowles shook his head. “I think it better if we merely walk,” he said, suiting his actions to his words and compelling Grey by a touch on the elbow.
“I am most annoyed with you, my lord,” he said in a conversational tone, as they made their way slowly into Gresham Street.
“Are you,” Grey said shortly. “I am concerned to hear it.”
“You should be. You have killed one of my most valued agents.”
“One of—what?”
He stopped, staring down at Bowles, but was urged on by the other’s gesture.
“Edward Twelvetrees hath been for some years involved in the suppression of Jacobite plots.” A shadow of annoyance crossed Bowles’s face at his lisp’s struggle with the word “suppression,” but Grey was too disturbed at Bowles’s statement to take much pleasure in it.
“What, you mean that he has been working for you?” He didn’t even try to stop it sounding rude, but Bowles didn’t react to his tone.
“I mean precisely that, my lord. He had spent a great deal of time and effort in insinuating himself with Major Siverly, once we had determined that Siverly was a person of interest in that regard. His father had been one of the Wild Geese who flew from Limerick, did you know?”
“Yes,” Grey said. His lips felt stiff. “I did.”
“It is a great inconvenience,” Bowles said reprovingly, “when gentlemen will be conducting their own investigations, rather than leaving such things to those whose profession it is.”
“So sorry to inconvenience you,” Grey said, beginning to grow angry. “Do you mean to tell me that Edward Twelvetrees was not a traitor?