The Scottish Prisoner - Diana Gabaldon [89]
True, Jamie might have mentioned this disability to Quinn in passing sometime during the last two days—but Grey doubted it extremely. Jamie was an extraordinarily private man, and while capable of extreme civility when he wanted to be, his cordiality was often used as a shield to keep his conversant at arm’s length.
Grey flattered himself that he knew Fraser better than most people did—and paused for an instant to ask himself whether he was perhaps only discomfited to think that Fraser might have shared this personal bit of information with a stranger. But he dismissed that possibility at once. Which left the logical, if equally discomfiting, conclusion that Quinn had known Fraser before he joined their company. Long before London. With a sudden jolt, he recalled Quinn’s remark about ostriches and the King of France’s zoo. He, too, had been in France. And by the mathematical principle of equality, if A equaled B … then B equaled A. Fraser had known Quinn before—intimately. And had said nothing.
19
Quagmire
THE MONASTERY OF INCHCLERAUN STOOD ON THE EDGE OF A small lake, a cluster of small stone buildings surrounding the church. There had once been a surrounding wall and a tall, circular tower, but these had crumbled—or been knocked down—and the stones lay tumbled, half sunk in the soft soil and mottled with lichens and moss.
Despite the signs of past depredation, the monastery was unquestionably inhabited and lively. Jamie had heard the bell from the far side of the lake and now saw the monks coming out of the church, scattering to their labors. There was a fenced pasture behind the buildings, where a small flock of sheep was grazing, and a stone archway showed the ordered rows of a vegetable garden, where two lay brothers hoed weeds in the resigned manner of men who had long since accepted their Sisyphean lot.
One of these directed him to the largest of the stone buildings, where a long-nosed clerk took his particulars, then left him in an anteroom. The atmosphere of the place was peaceful, but Jamie wasn’t. Besides the conflict between Grey and Quinn—one more remark from either one, and he was seriously tempted to crack their heads together—there was the looming confrontation with Siverly to be thought about, and the duchess’s cryptic warnings about Twelvetrees … and, somewhere far down underneath the more pressing concerns, an uneasy awareness that Quinn’s Druid cup was presumably here, and he had not quite made up his mind whether to ask about it or not. And if it was here, what then?
Despite these agitations, his first sight of the abbot made him break into a smile. Michael FitzGibbons was a leprechaun. Jamie recognized him at once from Quinn’s description of the race.
The man came up perhaps to Jamie’s elbow but stood straight as a sawn-off arrow, a stiff white beard bristling pugnaciously from the edges of his jaw and with a pair of green eyes, bright with curiosity.
These eyes had fixed upon Jamie at once, and lit with cordiality when he introduced himself and mentioned his uncle by way of bona fides.
“Alexander’s nephew!” Abbot Michael exclaimed, in good English. “Aye, I mind you, boy. I heard a good deal of your adventures, years agone—you and your English wife.” He grinned in his beard, displaying small, even white teeth.
“She turned St. Anne’s finely upon its ear, from what I heard. Is she with you now, by chance? In Ireland, I mean.”
Jamie could tell from the sudden look of awareness and horror on the abbot’s face what his own must look like. He felt the abbot’s hand on his forearm, amazingly strong for its size.
“No, Father,” he heard his own voice say, calm and remote. “I lost her. In the Rising.”
The abbot drew a breath of audible pain, clicked his tongue three times, and drew Jamie toward a chair.
“May God rest her soul, poor dear lady. Come, lad, sit. You’ll have a tint of whiskey.”
This wasn