The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [82]
Fraser gave him a sidelong glance. “No,” he said bluntly.
Grey wouldn’t have believed any other answer, but the bluntness—and its implications—gave him a mild shock. “Which is it?” he asked after a moment. “Or is it both?”
Fraser inhaled strongly through his nose, like a man much tried.
“Quinn’s affairs are his own, Colonel. If he has secrets, they are not mine to share.”
Grey gave a short laugh. “That’s nicely phrased,” he said. “Do you imply that you are in ignorance of Quinn’s aims? Or that you know what he’s up to but your sense of honor prevents your telling me?”
“Take your choice.” Fraser’s lips thinned, and his eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead.
They rode in silence for a bit. The lush green of the countryside was monotonous and soothing but was having little effect on Grey’s temper.
“I suppose it is frivolous to point out that assisting the king’s enemies—even by inaction—is treason,” he remarked eventually.
“It is not frivolous to point out that I am a convicted traitor,” Fraser replied evenly. “Are there judicial degrees of that crime? Is it additive? Because when they tried me, all they said was ‘treason’ before putting a rope around my neck.”
“A rope … but you were not sentenced to hanging, were you?” It was certainly possible; a good many Jacobites had been executed, but a good many more had had their sentences commuted to transportation or imprisonment.
“No.” Fraser’s color was already high, from sun and wind. It became noticeably deeper. For a moment, Grey thought that was all he meant to say on the matter, but after another moment the words burst out of him, as though he could not contain them.
“They marched me—us—from Inverness to Ardsmuir. With ropes about our necks, to show that our lives were forfeit, given back to us only by the generosity”—he choked, actually choked, on the word, and shook his head, clearing his throat with violence—“the generosity of the king.”
He kicked his horse suddenly; it snorted and jolted a little way ahead, then, lacking further stimulus from its rider, lapsed back into a trot, looking curiously over its shoulder at Grey and his mount, as though wondering how they’d got so far behind.
Grey rode for a bit, turning half a dozen things over in his mind at once, then nudged his horse, which was already attempting to catch up with its fellow, not liking to be left.
“Thank you,” he said, coming even with Fraser again. “For not allowing the Irishman to kill me.”
Fraser nodded, not turning his head. “You’re welcome.”
“May I expect this courtesy to continue?”
He could have sworn that the corner of Fraser’s mouth twitched. “You may.”
Quinn was visible now, a quarter mile ahead. He had turned aside to wait for them, and was leaning on a stile, chatting to a cottager who was holding a small white pig, by his gestures evidently displaying the animal’s finer points.
They had almost reached Quinn when Fraser spoke again, turning this time to look at him, his face now cool-skinned and sober.
“Ye’ll do what ye have to, Colonel. And so shall I.”
17
Castle Athlone
ATHLONE CASTLE WAS BLACK AND SQUAT. IT REMINDED GREY vaguely of an oasthouse, those cone-shaped structures in Kent where hops were dried. Much bigger, though.
“Something of a family seat,” he said to Jamie, joking. “One of my ancestors built it, back in the thirteenth century. Justiciar John de Gray, he was called.”
“Oh, aye? Was your family Irish, then?”
“No,” Grey admitted. “English back to the Conquest, largely Normans before that. Though I do have that one disreputable Scottish connection, of course.” His mother’s father had been Scottish, from one of the powerful Border families.
Fraser snorted. He didn’t think much more of Lowlanders than of Englishmen.
Quinn had gracefully taken leave of them once in Athlone and gone off with vague murmurs of looking up a friend—and the assurance that he would rejoin them in the morning, to see them along their way. Grey rather resented the implication that, lacking such assistance, they would wander helplessly about