The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [188]
“Ha,” he said, though without raising his voice. “Queen’s bishop to knight four. Check. And mate, Mr … MacKenzie.”
JAMIE COULDN’T ENLIST Keren’s help this time. Instead, when Peggy the nursemaid came to fetch Willie back to the nursery for his tea, he asked her to take a note from him to Betty. Peggy couldn’t read, and while she might tell someone he was meeting Betty, she couldn’t know where. He particularly didn’t wish to be overheard.
Betty was waiting for him behind the hay shed, fastidiously eyeing the immense manure pile with a curled lip. She switched the expression to him, raising one brow in inquiry.
“I’ve a wee thing for ye, Mrs. Betty,” he said without preliminary.
“About time,” she said, the curl melting into a coquettish smile. “Though not so wee as all that, I hope. And I also hope you have a better place than this for it, too,” she added, with a glance at the manure. It was too late in the season for flies, and Jamie personally found the smell rather pleasant, but he could see she didn’t share this opinion.
“The place will do well enough,” he said. “Give me your hand, lass.”
She did, looking expectant. The look changed to one of astonishment when he put the little purse into her palm.
“What’s this?” she asked, but the chink of coins as she weighed the purse was answer enough.
“That’s your dowry, lass,” he said, smiling.
She looked at him suspiciously, plainly not knowing whether this was a joke or something else.
“A lass like you should be marrit,” he said. “But it’s not me ye should be marrying.”
“Who says so?” she asked, fixing him with a fishy eye.
“I do,” he replied equably. “Like the wicked Mr. Wilberforce, lass—I’ve got a wife.”
She blinked.
“You do? Where?”
Ah, where indeed?
“She couldna come with me, when I was captured after Culloden. But she’s alive still.”
Lord, that she may be safe …
“But there’s a man that wants ye bad, lass, and well ye know it. George Roberts is a fine man, and with that wee bawbee”—he nodded at the purse in her hand—“the two of ye could set up in a bit wee cottage, maybe.”
She didn’t say anything but pursed her lips, and he could see her envisioning the prospect.
“Ye should have your own hearth, lass—and a cradle by it, wi’ your own bairn in it.”
She swallowed and, for the first time since he’d known her, looked tremulous and uncertain.
“I—but—why?” She made a tentative gesture toward him with the purse, not quite offering it back to him. “Surely you need this?”
He shook his head and took a definite step back, waving her off.
“Believe me, lass. There’s nothing I’d rather do with it. Take it wi’ my blessing—and if ye like, ye can call your firstborn Jamie.” He smiled at her, feeling the warmth in his chest rise into the back of his eyes.
She made an incoherent sound and took a pace toward him, rose onto her toes, and kissed him on the mouth.
A strangled gasp broke them apart, and Jamie turned to see Crusoe goggling at them from the corner of the shed.
“What the devil are you looking at?” Betty snapped at him.
“Not a thing, miss,” Crusoe assured her, and put one large palm over his mouth.
43
Succession
October 26, 1760
GREY ARRIVED IN LONDON TO THE TOLLING OF PASSING BELLS.
“The king is dead!” cried the ballad sellers, the news chanters, the scribblers, the street urchins, their voices echoing through the city. “Long live the king!”
In the furious preparations and public preoccupations that attend a state funeral, the final arrests of the Irish Jacobite plotters who had called themselves the Wild Hunt took place without notice. Harold, Duke of Pardloe, neither ate nor slept for several days during this effort, nor did his brother, and it was in a state of mind somewhere between sleep and death that they came to Westminster Abbey on the night of the king’s obsequies.
The Duke of Cumberland did not look well either. Grey saw Hal’s eyes rest on Cumberland with an odd expression, somewhere between grim satisfaction and grudging sympathy. Cumberland had suffered a stroke not long before, and one side of his face still sagged, the eye