The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [60]
He supposed it was reasonable that the Greys would want to check his translation of the poem—he’d told them that the Gaidhlig and the Gaeilge were different and that he did not certify his translation as completely accurate, though he could give them the overall sense of what it said. Still, there was the one small thing that he had deliberately omitted, and it gave him a minor qualm. If the graf had brought an Irish-speaker to give a new translation, the line about the Wild Hunt strewing white roses to mark the victorious path of their queen was sure to show up in contrast to his version, which had merely mentioned the faeries strewing roses.
He’d recognized it as a coded Jacobite document at once; he’d seen any number of such things during his spying days in Paris. But having no idea who had written it or what the code said, he had chosen not to mention that aspect; if there were hidden Jacobites operating in Ireland—and Tobias Quinn had told him there were—it was not his business to expose them to the interest of the English. But if—
His thoughts stopped abruptly as he followed the graf and Grey into the private room, and the gentleman already there rose to greet them.
He wasn’t shocked. Or rather, he thought, it was simply that he didn’t believe what he was seeing. Whichever it was, he took Thomas Lally’s proffered hand with a feeling of total calm.
“Broch Tuarach,” Lally said, in that clipped way of his, formal as a topiary bush at Versailles.
“Monsieur le Comte,” Jamie said, shaking Lally’s hand. “Comment ça va?”
Thomas Lally had been one of Charles Stuart’s aides-decamp. Half Irish and born in Ireland but half French, he had fled Scotland after Falkirk and promptly taken up a commission with the French army, where he had been courageous but unpopular.
How the devil did he come to be here?
Jamie hadn’t voiced that thought, but it must have shown on his face, for Lally smiled sourly.
“I am, like you, a prisoner of the English,” he said in French. “I was captured at Pondicherry. Though my captors are sufficiently generous as to maintain my parole in London.”
“Ah, I see you are acquainted,” said von Namtzen, who undoubtedly spoke French fluently but diplomatically pretended that he didn’t. He beamed cordially. “How nice! Shall we eat first?”
They did, enjoying a solid dinner in the English style—Lally ate his way ravenously through three courses, and Jamie thought that while the English might be maintaining him, they weren’t doing it lavishly. Lally was twenty years Jamie’s senior but looked even older, deeply weathered from the Indian sun and half toothless, with hollowed cheeks that made his prominent nose and chin even more prominent than they would otherwise be and a deeply furrowed brow that gave him an air of suppressed fury rather than worry. He didn’t wear a uniform, and his suit was old-fashioned, very worn at cuff and elbow, though his linen was clean.
In the course of the meal, Jamie learned that Lally’s case was somewhat more complicated than his own: while the Comte de Lally was a prisoner of the English Crown, the French had charged him with treason, and Lally was agitating to be returned to France on parole, demanding a court martial there, by which he might clear his name.
The graf did not say so, but Jamie got the impression that von Namtzen had promised to put in a good word for Lally in this endeavor and thus secured his presence and—presumably—his cooperation.
He was aware that Lally was studying him as closely as he was observing Lally—and doubtless for the same reasons, wondering just what Jamie’s relations were with his captors, and what was the nature of his cooperation with them.
The conversation over dinner was general