The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [3]
He could still feel the pressure of her hand on his backside and squirmed his arse irritably into his pallet, the straw under his blanket poking him. Damn the woman. She’d given him an eye when he’d first come to Helwater from Ardsmuir prison three years before, a paroled Jacobite traitor, but a lady’s maid had little to do with a groom, and it was easy enough not to see her long-eyed glances when she came to tell him that Lady Geneva wanted her horse. Not so easy to avoid Lady Geneva.
He grimaced in the dark at thought of Geneva. He wasn’t feeling charitable at the moment but crossed himself nonetheless and said a brief prayer for the repose of her soul, as he did whenever she came into his mind. He owed her that much, poor lass, no matter what she’d done to him.
But why the devil was Betty playing the loon now? Geneva had been dead more than two years, and Betty herself had come back to Helwater soon after her mistress’s death in childbirth. She’d not spoken a word to him in the last six months; why go to the risk of coming to the stable at night—and, come to that, what had the silly wee bitch intended? Climbing the creaking ladder and sliding into his bed unannounced, with Hanks and Crusoe curled under their blankets six feet away, their great ears flapping? Sneaking him into the servants’ attic?
She couldn’t have meant to wait below for him; she hadn’t known he’d come down. For that matter … she said she’d seen him descend the ladder, but she hadn’t come to him then. Why not?
The logical answer presented itself, with a small jolt to the pit of his stomach. She hadn’t been looking for him at all.
He sat bolt upright before the train of his thought had entirely finished, his body grasping the point at once. She’d come to meet someone else, and that meeting had been interrupted by his own inopportune appearance.
An intruder couldn’t have hidden in an occupied stall or anywhere else … save the vacant loose box near the door.
And that’s why she woke me, he thought, hands clenching on the blanket. She had to draw me away, so the fellow could get out. Christ, he was in there with me! His skin prickled with mingled embarrassment and fury. The notion that … could it be possible … surely he would have sensed someone …?
But he wouldn’t. He’d been so desperate to find solitude in which to reach Claire for that one necessary moment that he wouldn’t have noticed a bear lurking in the shadows, provided it hadn’t tried to interrupt him.
One of the cocks in the hen coop crowed, two more on its heels. A sleepy “Oh, fuuuck” came from a nearby pallet. A loud rustle of someone sitting up, and the hawking and snorting started. Hanks smoked heavily—when he could afford it—and took a good quarter hour to start breathing in the morning.
Jamie breathed deep himself, thinking. Then flung back his blanket and rose to meet what was likely to be an interesting day.
2
Erse
London
Argus House, residence of Harold,
Duke of Pardloe
LORD JOHN GREY EYED THE RIBBON-TIED PACKET ON HIS KNEE as though it were a bomb. In fact, it couldn’t have been more explosive had it been filled with black powder and equipped with a fuse.
His attitude as he handed it to his brother must have reflected this knowledge, for Hal fixed him with a gimlet eye and raised one brow. He said nothing, though, flicking loose both ribbon and wrapping with an impatient gesture and bending his head at once over the thick sheaf of densely written sheets that emerged.
Grey couldn’t stand to watch him read through Charles Carruthers’s postmortem denunciation, recalling each damning page as Hal read it. He stood up and went to the window of the library that looked out into the back garden of Argus House, ignoring the swish of turning pages and the occasional blasphemous mutterings behind him.
Hal’s three boys were playing a game of tigers and hunters,