The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [41]
“Christ, Harry!” His eye flickered hastily over the careful script.
“Give that back!” Harry growled, making a snatch at the paper.
Holding Harry off with one hand, he read further, out loud: “With thighs bedew’d and foaming cunt—Jesus, Harry, foaming?”
“It’s a bloody rough draft!”
“Oh, it’s rough, all right!” He stepped nimbly backward into the hall, evading Harry’s grasp, and collided heavily with a gentleman who had just come in.
“Lord John! I do beg your pardon most humbly! Are you injured?”
Grey blinked stupidly for a moment at the enormous fair man looming solicitously over him, then straightened up from his ignominious collapse against the paneling.
“Von Namtzen!” He clasped the big Hanoverian’s hand, absurdly delighted to see him again. “What brings you to London? What brings you here? Come and have supper with me, can you?”
Captain von Namtzen’s sternly handsome face was wreathed in smiles, though Grey saw that it bore the marks of some recent difficulty, the lines between nose and mouth harsher than they had been, hollows beneath the broad cheekbones and the deep-set eyes. He squeezed Grey’s hand to express his pleasure at their reacquaintance, and Grey felt a few bones give, though nothing actually cracked.
“I should be so pleased,” von Namtzen said. “But I am engaged …” He turned, looking vaguely behind him and gesturing toward a well-dressed gentleman who had been standing out of range. “You know Mr. Frobisher? His lordship John Grey,” he explained to Frobisher, who bowed.
“Certainly,” the gentleman replied courteously. “It would give me great pleasure, Lord John, was you to join us. I have two brace of partridge ordered, a fresh-caught salmon, and a vast great trifle to follow—Captain von Namtzen and I will be quite unequal to the occasion, I am sure.”
Grey, with some experience of von Namtzen’s capacities, rather thought that the Hanoverian was likely to engulf the entire meal single-handedly and then require a quick snack before retiring, but before he could excuse himself, Harry snatched the kidnapped papers from his hand, thus requiring an introduction to Frobisher and von Namtzen, and in the social muddle that ensued, all four found themselves going in to supper together, with a salmagundi and a few bottles of good Burgundy hastily ordered to augment the meal.
CHRIST, IT WAS CATCHING. He’d led the conversation over the soup to the subject of poetry, meaning only to chaff Harry, but it had led to an enthusiastic declamation of a poem from Brockes’s Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott—in German—by Mr. Frobisher, and then a heated discussion between von Namtzen and Frobisher regarding the structure of a particular German verse form and whether this was or was not the parent of the English sonnet.
Harry, asked for his opinion, grinned at Grey over his soup spoon.
“Me?” he said blandly. “Oh, I’m certainly not qualified to give an opinion. ‘Mary had a little lamb’ is about as far as I go in that direction. Grey, now, he’s the lad for rhymes; best ask him.”
Grey had hurriedly disclaimed any such knowledge, but it had set the table to the game of finding rhymes, going in turn until one man should not be able to find a rhyming word, whereat the next would choose a new one.
They’d got from the simple things like moon/June/spoon/spittoon/poltroon onto the more delicate issue of whether “porringer” could be legitimately rhymed with “oranger,” the latter being arguably a real word. The worst of it was that the conversation—coupled with the sight of von Namtzen sitting opposite him, his broad face lightened a little by the wordplay, his soft fair hair curling gently round the back of his ears—had caused him to start rhyming things privately. Only rude words, to start with, but then a little couplet—he thought that was the right term for it—had begun to chant itself.
He was startled by it. Was this how Harry did it? Just have words show up and start something, all by themselves?
The words that had shown up in his own mind had fallen into an irritating