The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [67]
He paused for an instant outside the shed, but heard nothing from within and boldly pushed open the door.
A wave of disappointment passed through him. No, not here. There was a pile of burlap sacks stacked in one corner, the imprint of a body clear upon them, and a jug of beer standing beside it. This was someone’s refuge already. He stepped out and closed the door, then on impulse went round behind the shed.
There was a space about two feet wide between the back wall of the shed and the garden wall. Discarded bits of rubbish, broken rakes and hoes, burlap bags of manure filled most of the space—but just within the shelter of the shed, just out of sight of the garden, was an upturned bucket. He sat down on it and let his shoulders slump, feeling truly and blessedly alone for the first time in a week. He’d found his fridstool.
He spent a moment in mindless relief, then said a brief prayer for the repose of Sister Eudoxia’s soul. He thought she would not mind a Papist prayer.
She’d died two days after his conversation with her, and he’d spent a wretched night after hearing the news, convinced she’d taken a chill from the cold marble of the folly. He was infinitely relieved to learn from the kitchen gossip next day that she’d died peacefully in her sleep, and he tried to remember her in his regular prayers. It had been some time since he had, though, and he was soothed now to imagine her presence near him. Her peaceful spirit didn’t intrude upon his necessary solitude.
Would it be all right, he wondered suddenly, to ask her to look after Willie while he was gone from Helwater?
It seemed a mildly heretical thought. And yet the thought felt answered at once; it gave him a feeling of … what? Trust? Confidence? Relief at the sharing of his burden?
He shook his head, half in dismay. Here he sat in an Englishman’s rubbish, talking to a dead Protestant nun with whom he’d had two minutes’ real conversation, asking her to look after a child who had grandparents, an aunt, and servants by the score, all anxious to keep him from the slightest harm. He himself couldn’t have done a thing for William had he been still at Helwater. And yet he felt absurdly better at the notion that someone else knew about William and would help to watch over him.
He sat a few moments, letting his mind relax, and slowly it dawned upon him that the only truly important thing in this imbroglio was William. The complications and suspicions and possible dangers of the present situation mattered only insofar as they might prevent his returning to Helwater—no further.
He took a deep breath, feeling better. Aye, with that made clear, it became possible to think logically about the rest. Well, then.
Major Siverly was the ostensible root of this tangle. He was a wicked man, if half what Captain Carruthers had written about him was true, but wicked men of that sort were far from unusual, he thought. Why did the Greys want so badly to get at the man?
John Grey, by his own words, because he felt a sense of obligation to his dead friend Carruthers. Jamie might have doubted that, but given his own conversations with the dead, he was obliged to admit that John Grey might hear his own voices and have his own debts to pay.
What about Pardloe, though? It wasn’t Lord John who’d dragged Jamie to London and was forcing him to go to Ireland after Siverly. Did Pardloe feel such impersonal outrage at Siverly’s corruption as to explain his actions? Was it part of his ideal of the army, of his own profession, that he could not bear such a man to be tolerated in it? Or was he doing it primarily to support his brother’s quixotic quest?
Jamie admitted reluctantly that it might be all these things. He didn’t pretend to understand the complexities of Pardloe’s character, but he had strong