The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [201]
Her face was marked with red where he’d held her, and her eyes were wild. She backed away, scrubbing at her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Get … out!” she gasped.
He didn’t need telling twice. He rushed past her, shouldered his way past a burly man charging up the stairs, and ran down the alley, realizing only when he reached the street that he was in his shirtsleeves, having left coat and waistcoat behind, and his breeches were undone.
“Ellesmere!” said an appalled voice nearby. He looked up in horror, to find himself the cynosure of several English officers, including Alexander Lindsay, Earl Balcarres.
“Good Christ, Ellesmere, what happened?” Sandy was by way of being a friend, and was already pulling a voluminous, snowy handkerchief from his sleeve. He clapped this to William’s nose, pinching his nostrils and insisting that he put his head back.
“Have you been set upon and robbed?” one of the others demanded. “God! This filthy place!”
He felt at once comforted by their company—and hideously embarrassed by it. He was not one of them; not any longer.
“Was it? Was it robbery?” another said, glaring round eagerly. “We’ll find the bastards who did it, ’pon my honor we will! We’ll get your property back and teach whoever did it a lesson!”
Blood was running down the back of his throat, harsh and iron-tasting, and he coughed, but did his best to nod and shrug simultaneously. He had been robbed. But no one was ever going to give him back what he’d lost today.
Meanwhile, outside Philadelphia, Lord John and Jamie continue an Interesting Conversation …
HE’D BEEN QUITE RESIGNED TO DYING; HAD EXPECTED IT from the moment that he’d blurted out, “I have had carnal knowledge of your wife.” The only question in his mind had been whether Fraser would shoot him, stab him, or eviscerate him with his bare hands.
To have the injured husband regard him calmly and say merely, “Oh? Why?” was not merely unexpected, but … infamous. Absolutely infamous.
“Why?” John Grey repeated, incredulous. “Did you say ‘why’?”
“I did. And I should appreciate an answer.”
Now that Grey had both eyes open, he could see that Fraser’s outward calm was not quite so impervious as he’d first supposed. There was a pulse beating in Fraser’s temple, and he’d shifted his weight a little, like a man might do in the vicinity of a tavern brawl, not quite ready to commit violence, but readying himself to meet it. Perversely, Grey found this sight steadying.
“What do you bloody mean, ‘why’?” he said, suddenly irritated. “And why aren’t you fucking dead?”
“I often wonder that myself,” Fraser replied politely. “I take it ye thought I was?”
“Yes, and so did your wife! Do you have the faintest idea what the knowledge of your death did to her?”
The dark blue eyes narrowed just a trifle.
“Are ye implying that the news of my death deranged her to such an extent that she lost her reason and took ye to her bed by force? Because,” he went on, neatly cutting off Grey’s heated reply, “unless I’ve been seriously misled regarding your own nature, it would take substantial force to compel ye to any such action. Or am I wrong?”
The eyes stayed narrow. Grey stared back at them. Then he closed his own eyes briefly and rubbed both hands hard over his face, like a man waking from a nightmare. He dropped his hands and opened his eyes again.
“You are not misled,” he said through clenched teeth. “And you are wrong.”
Fraser’s ruddy eyebrows shot up—in genuine astonishment, he thought.
“Ye went to her because—from desire?” His voice rose, too. “And she let ye? I dinna believe it.”
The color was creeping up Fraser’s tanned neck, vivid as a climbing rose. Grey had seen that happen before, and decided recklessly that the best—the only—defense was to lose his own temper first. It was a relief.
“We thought you were dead, you bloody arsehole!” he said, furious. “Both of us! Dead! And we—we—took too much to