The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [37]
He took another sip. He wasn’t liking this; the memories of the Rising were too vivid. He felt Claire there by his elbow, was afraid to turn his head and look.
“Saw no profit,” the duke echoed. “No, I daresay he didn’t.” He sounded bitter. He sat looking into his cup for a moment, then tossed the rest back, made a houghing noise, set it down, and reached for the bundle of papers.
“Read that. If you will,” he added, the courtesy clearly an afterthought.
Jamie glanced at the papers, feeling an obscure sense of unease. But again, there was no reason to refuse, and, despite his reluctance, he picked up the top few sheets and began to read.
The duke wasn’t a man who seemed comfortable sitting still. He twitched, coughed, got up and lit the candle, sat down again … coughed harder. Jamie sighed, concentrating against the distraction.
Siverly seemed to have made the most of his army career in Canada. While Jamie disapproved of the man’s behavior on general principles and admired the eloquent passion displayed by the man who had written about it, he felt no personal animus. When he came to the part about the pillaging and terrorizing of the habitant villages, though, he felt the blood begin to rise behind his eyes. Siverly might be a proper villain, but this wasn’t personal villainy.
This was the Crown’s way. The way of dealing with resistant natives. Theft, rape, murder … and fire.
Cumberland had done it, “cleansing” the Highlands after Culloden. And James Wolfe had done it, too—to deprive the Citadel at Quebec of support from the countryside. Taken livestock, killed the men, burned houses … and left the women to starve and freeze.
God, that she might be safe! he thought in sudden agony, closing his eyes for an instant. And the child with her.
He glanced up from the paper. The duke was still coughing but had now dug a pipe out of the midden and was packing it with tobacco. Lord Melton had commanded troops at Culloden. Those troops—and the man who sat before him—had very likely remained to take part in the cleansing of the Highlands.
“No lingering sense of injury,” he’d said. Jamie muttered something very rude under his breath in the Gàidhlig and went on reading, though he found his attention still distracted.
Blood pressure. That’s what Claire called it. To do with how hard your heart beat and the force with which it drove the blood round your body. When your heart failed you and blood no longer reached the brain, that’s what caused fainting, she said. And when it beat hard, in the grip of fear or passion, that was when you felt the blood beat in your temples and swell in your chest, ready for bed or battle.
His own blood pressure was rising like a rocket, and he’d no desire to bed Pardloe.
The duke took a spill from a pottery dish and put it to the candle flame, then used it to light his pipe. It had grown dark outside, and the smell of oncoming rain came in through the half-open window, mingling with the musky sweet scent of the tobacco. Pardloe’s lean cheeks hollowed as he sucked at the pipe, the orbits of his eyes shadowed by the light that fell on brow and nose. He looked like a skull.
Abruptly, Jamie set down the papers.
“What do you want of me?” he demanded.
Pardloe took the pipe from his mouth and exhaled slow wisps of smoke.
“I want you to translate that bit of Irish. And to tell me more—whatever you know or recall of Gerald Siverly’s background and connections. Beyond that …” The pipe was in danger of going out, and the duke took a long pull at it.
“And ye think I’ll do it, for the asking?”
Pardloe gave him a level look, smoke purling from his lips.
“Yes, I do. Why not?” He raised the middle finger of one hand. “I would consider it a debt, to be paid.”
“Put that bloody finger back down before I ram it up your backside.”
The duke’s mouth twitched, but he put the finger down without comment.
“I also wished to see you, to determine