The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [7]
“Give me that, butterfingers.” Hal took the decanter from him, and poured carefully, eyes fixed on the rising amber liquid. “And, yes, I did.”
Grey wondered, reeling, whether Minnie had been a virgin and decided instantly not to ask.
“Then I put her into a coach, made her tell me her address, and said I would call on her in the morning, to ask after her welfare,” Hal said offhandedly, and passed John a glass. “Here. Hang on to it this time. You look as though you need it.”
He did, and drank off the sherry—which wasn’t bad—in a couple of gulps.
“She didn’t … actually give you her address, did she?” he asked, and cleared his throat, trying not to glance at the hearth rug. It had been there for years and years, a very worn small carpet with the family crest woven into it, much pocked with burn marks and the edge of it scorched. He thought it had been a wedding present from Hal’s first wife, Esmé, to her husband.
Hal laughed.
“No, of course not. Neither did she tell it to the coachman—persuaded him to let her out at Kettrick’s Eel-Pye House, then legged it down the alley and disappeared. Took me nearly six months to find her.”
Hal disposed of his own sherry with dispatch, then plucked the questionable sheet off the desk again.
“Let me show her this. She’s not had much opportunity to practice of late, but she might be able at least to tell us if it is encoded.”
Left alone with the decanter and the hearth rug, Grey poured another drink and went back to the balcony. The garden was quiet now; the sky had clouded over and the boys had gone in for their tea—he could hear them rumpusing in the nursery overhead. Dottie and her nurse were both sound asleep on the grass by the fish pool, Dottie’s gown still firmly in the nurse’s grasp.
He wasn’t quite sure whether Hal’s story had shocked him or not. Hal made his own rules; John had long been aware of that. And if he’d temporarily had the upper hand of Minerva Wattiswade, he’d long since lost it—Hal himself knew that.
He glanced up at the ceiling, the recipient of a loud crash as a chair was overturned, shrill voices rising in the aftermath. How old was his nephew Benjamin? He glanced at the hearth rug. He’d been abroad when Benjamin was born, but his mother had written to apprise him of the event—he remembered reading the letter in a tent, with rain pattering on the canvas overhead. He’d lost three men the day before and was suffering some depression of spirit; news of the child’s birth had comforted him.
He imagined it had comforted Hal, too. Grey had learned—recently, and quite by accident—that Hal’s first wife, Esmé, who had died in childbirth and the child with her, had been seduced by one of Hal’s friends, Nathaniel Twelvetrees, and that Hal had subsequently killed Twelvetrees in a duel. He thought that his brother had likely been quite insane at the time. How long after that had he met Minnie?
A flash of white showed at the door of the conservatory, on the far side of the garden. Minnie herself, and he drew back instinctively, though she couldn’t see him. She looked up calculatingly at the sky, then glanced at the house. It wasn’t raining yet, though, and she went back into the conservatory. A moment later, Hal appeared from the kitchen door and went in after her, paper in hand.
He was deeply startled at what Hal had told him—but not, on consideration, all that surprised that Hal had told him. His brother was secretive and self-controlled to a fault, but a tight-closed kettle will spurt steam when it reaches the boiling point. To Grey’s knowledge, Hal had only three people in whom he would confide—his own mother not being among them.
The three were Grey himself, Harry Quarry—one of the regimental colonels—and Minnie.
So what, he wondered, was presently boiling under Hal? Something to do with Minnie? But Grey had spoken to her when he came in, and she’d given no indication that anything was wrong.
A spatter of rain on the window and shrieks from below made him look; a sudden shower had floated over the garden, and the nursemaid was dashing for the house,