The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [87]
“In the Bois de Boulogne, wasn’t it? With some Englishman. I recall hearing about it—a famous fight! And did ye not end in the Bastille for it?” Quinn laughed.
Fraser glanced round with a truly awful look in his eyes, and had Quinn been watching him, he would either have been turned to stone on the spot or leapt up and run for his life.
John himself leapt in, wanting above all to disrupt the conversation.
“I once killed a man by accident during a duel—or thought I had. It was the last duel I fought; I think it might be the last altogether. A most distressing experience.”
That duel had been with pistols. He hadn’t been drunk then. He’d been suffering the aftereffects of being electrocuted by an electric eel, and the entire experience had been so unreal that he still didn’t trust his memories of it. He had no idea how it had begun, still less how it had finished.
His opponent had died, and he regretted that—though not very much, he admitted to himself; Nicholls had been a boor and a waste to society, and, besides, he’d asked for it. Still, his death had been an accident, and Grey really preferred to kill on purpose, when it was necessary.
Interrupted, but not offended, Tom shut the book with his finger in it to hold his place and leaned forward, face wary. That duel had sent him and Lord John to Canada; he hadn’t been there when Grey killed Nicholls but certainly remembered the occasion, and it occurred to Grey to wonder whether Tom had chosen the Gentleman’s admonition against dueling on purpose.
Quinn’s interest had shifted from Fraser to Grey, though, which was what Grey had intended, so he answered when Quinn inquired what he meant by saying he thought he’d killed the man by accident.
“I meant to delope—to fire up into the air?” Quinn nodded impatiently, familiar with the term. “But my man fell and sat bleeding on the grass—he was quite alive, though, and didn’t seem much hurt. The bullet had gone up and more or less fallen on him from a height but hadn’t struck him on the head or anything. He walked off, in fact, in the company of a surgeon who happened to be there—it was following a party. I was therefore entirely shocked to hear the next morning that he’d died.”
“An accident, sure. But are ye saying that really wasn’t the way of it, at all?”
“I am, indeed. It was months later that I received a letter from the surgeon, informing me that the man had had a congenital weakness of the heart—an aneurysm, he called it—that had burst as a result of the shock. It wasn’t my shot at all that had killed him—or only indirectly—and Dr. Hunter said that he might have died at any time.”
“Dr. Hunter?” Quinn sat up straight and crossed himself. “John Hunter, is it—him they call the Body-Snatcher?”
“Dr. John Hunter, yes,” Grey said warily, suddenly on dicey ground. He hadn’t meant to mention Hunter by name—and hadn’t expected either of the men to know that name, either. Hunter did indeed have a most unsavory reputation, being rapacious in the collection of bodies for dissection. And the question as to just how Dr. Hunter knew of Nicholls’s aneurysm …
“God between us and evil,” Quinn said, shuddering visibly. His usual breezy manner had quite vanished. “Think of it! To be taken off and anatomized like a criminal, skinned like an animal and your flesh cut into bloody bits … God and all angels preserve me from such a fate!”
Grey coughed and, glancing to the side, caught Tom’s eye. He hadn’t shown Tom Dr. Hunter’s letter, but Tom was his valet and knew things. Tom coughed, too, and neatly closed his book.
“It’s a nightmare I have sometimes,” Quinn confided, rubbing his hands together as though he were cold. “The anatomists have got me, and they’ve boiled up me bones and strung me up as a skellington, left hanging there grinning in some medical bugger’s surgery for all eternity. Wake from that in a cold sweat, I tell ye truly.”
“I shall keep a lookout, Quinn,” Jamie said, making a decent attempt at a grin.