Young Ian licked his lips, steeling himself.
“I think I kilt him,” he whispered.
Startled, Jamie glanced at me, then back at Young Ian.
“How?” he asked.
“Well…I lied a bit,” Ian began, voice trembling. The tears were still welling in his eyes, but he brushed them aside. “When I went into the printshop—I had the key ye gave me—the man was already inside.”
The seaman had been in the backmost room of the shop, where the stacks of newly printed orders were kept, along with the stocks of fresh ink, the blotting papers used to clean the press, and the small forge where worn slugs were melted down and recast into fresh type.
“He was taking some o’ the pamphlets from the stack, and putting them inside his jacket,” Ian said, gulping. “When I saw him, I screeched at him to put them back, and he whirled round at me wi’ a pistol in his hand.”
The pistol had discharged, scaring Young Ian badly, but the ball had gone wild. Little daunted, the seaman had rushed at the boy, raising the pistol to club him instead.
“There was no time to run, or to think,” he said. He had let go my hand by now, and his fingers twisted together upon his knee. “I reached out for the first thing to hand and threw it.”
The first thing to hand had been the lead-dipper, the long-handled copper ladle used to pour molten lead from the melting pot into the casting molds. The forge had been still alight, though well-banked, and while the melting pot held no more than a small puddle, the scalding drops of lead had flown from the dipper into the seaman’s face.
“God, how he screamed!” A strong shudder ran through Young Ian’s slender frame, and I came round the end of the sofa to sit next to him and take both his hands.
The seaman had reeled backward, clawing at his face, and upset the small forge, knocking live coals everywhere.
“That was what started the fire,” the boy said. “I tried to beat it out, but it caught the edge of the fresh paper, and all of a sudden, something went whoosh! in my face, and it was as though the whole room was alight.”
“The barrels of ink, I suppose,” Jamie said, as though to himself. “The powder’s dissolved in alcohol.”
The sliding piles of flaming paper fell between Young Ian and the back door, a wall of flame that billowed black smoke and threatened to collapse upon him. The seaman, blinded and screaming like a banshee, had been on his hands and knees between the boy and the door into the front room of the printshop and safety.
“I—I couldna bear to touch him, to push him out o’ the way,” he said, shuddering again.
Losing his head completely, he had run up the stairs instead, but then found himself trapped as the flames, racing through the back room and drawing up the stair like a chimney, rapidly filled the upper room with blinding smoke.
“Did ye not think to climb out the trapdoor onto the roof?” Jamie asked.
Young Ian shook his head miserably. “I didna ken it was there.”
“Why was it there?” I asked curiously.
Jamie gave me the flicker of a smile. “In case of need. It’s a foolish fox has but one exit to his bolthole. Though I must say, it wasna fire I was thinking of when I had it made.” He shook his head, ridding himself of the distraction.
“But ye think the man didna escape the fire?” he asked.
“I dinna see how he could,” Young Ian answered, beginning to sniffle again. “And if he’s dead, then I killed him. I couldna tell Da I was a m-mur—mur—” He was crying again, too hard to get the word out.
“You’re no a murderer, Ian,” Jamie said firmly. He patted his nephew’s shaking shoulder. “Stop now, it’s all right—ye havena done wrong, laddie. Ye haven’t, d’ye hear?”
The boy gulped and nodded, but couldn’t stop crying or shaking. At last I put my arms around him, turned him and pulled his head down onto my shoulder, patting his back and making the sort of small soothing noises one makes to little children.
He felt very odd in my arms; nearly as big as a full-grown man, but with fine, light bones, and so little flesh on them that it was like holding a skeleton. He was talking into the depths of my bosom, his voice so disjointed by emotion and muffled by fabric that it was difficult to make out the words.
“…mortal sin…” he seemed to be saying, “…damned to hell…couldna tell Da…afraid…canna go home ever…”
Jamie raised his brows at me, but I only shrugged helplessly, smoothing the thick, bushy hair on the back of the boy’s head. At last Jamie leaned forward, took him firmly by the shoulders and sat him up.
“Look ye, Ian,” he said. “No, look—look at me!”
By dint of supreme effort, the boy straightened his drooping neck and fixed brimming, red-rimmed eyes on his uncle’s face.
“Now then.” Jamie took hold of his nephew’s hands and squeezed them lightly. “First—it’s no a sin to kill a man that’s trying to kill you. The Church allows ye to kill if ye must, in defense of yourself, your family, or your country. So ye havena committed mortal sin, and you’re no damned.”
“I’m not?” Young Ian sniffed mightily, and mopped at his face with a sleeve.
“No, you’re not.” Jamie let the hint of a smile show in his eyes. “We’ll go together and call on Father Hayes in the morning, and ye’ll make your confession and be absolved then, but he’ll tell ye the same as I have.”
“Oh.” The syllable held profound relief, and Young Ian’s scrawny shoulders rose perceptibly, as though a burden had rolled off of them.
Jamie patted his nephew’s knee again. “For the second thing, ye needna fear telling your father.”
“No?” Young Ian had accepted Jamie’s word on the state of his soul without hesitation, but sounded profoundly dubious about this secular opinion.
“Well, I’ll not say he’ll no be upset,” Jamie added fairly. “In fact, I expect it will turn the rest of his hair white on the spot. But he’ll understand. He isna going to cast ye out or disown ye, if that’s what you’re scairt of.”
“You think he’ll understand?” Young Ian looked at Jamie with eyes in which hope battled with doubt. “I—I didna think he…has my Da ever killed a man?” he asked suddenly.
Jamie blinked, taken aback by the question. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose—I mean, he’s fought in battle, but I—to tell ye the truth, Ian, I dinna ken.” He looked a little helplessly at his nephew.
“It’s no the sort of thing men talk much about, aye? Except sometimes soldiers, when they’re deep in drink.”
Young Ian nodded, absorbing this, and sniffed again, with a horrid gurgling noise. Jamie, groping hastily in his sleeve for a handkerchief, looked up suddenly, struck by a thought.
“That’s why ye said ye must tell me, but not your Da? Because ye knew I’ve killed men before?”
His nephew nodded, searching Jamie’s face with troubled, trusting eyes. “Aye. I thought…I thought ye’d know what to do.”
“Ah.” Jamie drew a deep breath, and exchanged a glance with me. “Well…” His shoulders braced and broadened, and I could see him accept the burden Young Ian had laid down. He sighed.
“What ye do,” he said, “is first to ask yourself if ye had a choice. You didn’t, so put your mind at ease. Then ye go to confession, if ye can; if not, say a good Act of Contrition—that’s good enough, when it’s no a mortal sin. Ye harbor no fault, mind,” he said earnestly, “but the contrition is because ye greatly regret the necessity that fell on ye. It does sometimes, and there’s no preventing it.
“And then say a prayer for the soul of the one you’ve killed,” he went on, “that he may find rest, and not haunt ye. Ye ken the prayer called Soul Peace? Use that one, if ye have leisure to think of it. In a battle, when there is no time, use Soul Leading—‘Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the City of Heaven, Amen.’”
“Be this soul on Thine arm, O Christ, Thou King of the City of Heaven, Amen,” Young Ian repeated under his breath. He nodded slow
ly. “Aye, all right. And then?”
Jamie reached out and touched his nephew’s cheek with great gentleness. “Then ye live with it, laddie,” he said softly. “That’s all.”
28
VIRTUE’S GUARDIAN
“You think the man Young Ian followed has something to do with Sir Percival’s warning?” I lifted a cover on the supper tray that had just been delivered and sniffed appreciatively; it seemed a very long time since Moubray’s stew.
Jamie nodded, picking up a sort of hot stuffed roll.
“I should be surprised if he had not,” he said dryly. “While there’s likely more than one man willing to do me harm, I canna think it likely that gangs o’ them are roaming about Edinburgh.” He took a bite and chewed industriously, shaking his head.
“Nay, that’s clear enough, and nothing to be greatly worrit over.”
“It’s not?” I took a small bite of my own roll, then a bigger one. “This is delicious. What is it?”
Jamie lowered the roll he had been about to take a bite of, and squinted at it. “Pigeon minced wi’ truffles,” he said, and stuffed it into his mouth whole.
“No,” he said, and paused to swallow. “No,” he said again, more clearly. “That’s likely just a matter of a rival smuggler. There are two gangs that I’ve had a wee bit of difficulty with now and then.” He waved a hand, scattering crumbs, and reached for another roll.
“The way the man behaved—smellin’ the brandy, but seldom tasting it—he may be a dégustateur de vin; someone that can tell from a sniff where a wine was made, and from a taste, which year it was bottled. A verra valuable fellow,” he added thoughtfully, “and a choice hound to set on my trail.”
Wine had come along with the supper. I poured out a glass and passed it under my own nose.
“He could track you—you, personally—through the brandy?” I asked curiously.
“More or less. You’ll remember my cousin Jared?”
“Of course I do. You mean he’s still alive?” After the slaughter of Culloden and the erosions of its aftermath, it was wonderfully heartening to hear that Jared, a wealthy Scottish émigré with a prosperous wine business in Paris, was still among the quick, and not the dead.
“I expect they’ll have to head him up in a cask and toss him into the Seine to get rid of him,” Jamie said, teeth gleaming white in his soot-stained countenance. “Aye, he’s not only alive, but enjoying it. Where d’ye think I get the French brandy I bring into Scotland?”
The obvious answer was “France,” but I refrained from saying so. “Jared, I suppose?” I said instead.
Jamie nodded, mouth full of another roll. “Hey!” He leaned forward and snatched the plate out from under the tentative reach of Young Ian’s skinny fingers. “You’re no supposed to be eating rich stuff like that when your wame’s curdled,” he said, frowning and chewing. He swallowed and licked his lips. “I’ll call for more bread and milk for ye.”
“But Uncle,” said Young Ian, looking longingly at the savory rolls. “I’m awfully hungry.” Purged by confession, the boy had recovered his spirits considerably, and evidently, his appetite as well.
Jamie looked at his nephew and sighed. “Aye well. Ye swear you’re no going to vomit on me?”
“No, Uncle,” Young Ian said meekly.
“All right, then.” Jamie shoved the plate in the boy’s direction, and returned to his explanation.
“Jared sends me mostly the second-quality bottling from his own vineyards in the Moselle, keepin’ the first quality for sale in France, where they can tell the difference.”
“So the stuff you bring into Scotland is identifiable?”
He shrugged, reaching for the wine. “Only to a nez, a dégustateur, that is. But the fact is, that wee Ian here saw the man taste the wine at the Dog and Gun and at the Blue Boar, and those are the two taverns on the High Street that buy brandy from me exclusively. Several others buy from me, but from others as well.
“In any case, as I say, I’m none so concerned at havin’ someone look for Jamie Roy at a tavern.” He lifted his wineglass and passed it under his own nose by reflex, made a slight, unconscious face, and drank. “No,” he said, lowering the glass, “what worries me is that the man should have found his way to the printshop. For I’ve taken considerable pains to make sure that the folk who see Jamie Roy on the docks at Burntisland are not the same ones who pass the time o’ day in the High Street with Mr. Alec Malcolm, the printer.”
I knitted my brows, trying to work it out.
“But Sir Percival called you Malcolm, and he knows you’re a smuggler,” I protested.
Jamie nodded patiently. “Half the men in the ports near Edinburgh are smugglers, Sassenach,” he said. “Aye, Sir Percival kens fine I’m a smuggler, but he doesna ken I’m Jamie Roy—let alone James Fraser. He thinks I bring in bolts of undeclared silk and velvet from Holland—because that’s what I pay him in.” He smiled wryly. “I trade brandy for them, to the tailor on the corner. Sir Percival’s an eye for fine cloth, and his lady even more. But he doesna ken I’ve to do wi’ the liquor—let alone how much—or he’d be wanting a great deal more than the odd bit of lace and yardage, I’ll tell ye.”
“Could one of the tavern owners have told the seaman about you? Surely they’ve seen you.”
He ruffled a hand through his hair, as he did when thinking, making a few short hairs on the crown stand up in a whorl of tiny spikes.
“Aye, they’ve seen me,” he said slowly, “but only as a customer. Fergus handles the business dealings wi’ the taverns—and Fergus is careful never to go near the printshop. He always meets me here, in private.” He gave me a crooked grin. “No one questions a man’s reasons for visiting a brothel, aye?”
“Could that be it?” I asked, struck by a sudden thought. “Any man can come here without question. Could the seaman Young Ian followed have seen you here—you and Fergus? Or heard your description from one of the girls? After all, you’re not the most inconspicuous man I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t, either. While there might be any number of redheaded men in Edinburgh, few of them towered to Jamie’s height, and fewer still strode the streets with the unconscious arrogance of a disarmed warrior.
“That’s a verra useful thought, Sassenach,” he said, giving me a nod. “It will be easy enough to find out whether a pigtailed seaman with one eye has been here recently; I’ll have Jeanne ask among her lassies.”
He stood up, and stretched rackingly, his hands nearly touching the wooden rafters.
“And then, Sassenach, perhaps we’ll go to bed, aye?” He lowered his arms and blinked at me with a smile. “What wi’ one thing and another, it’s been the bloody hell of a day, no?”
“It has, rather,” I said, smiling back.
Jeanne, summoned for instructions, arrived together with Fergus, who opened the door for the madam with the easy familiarity of a brother or cousin. Little wonder if he felt at home, I supposed; he had been born in a Paris brothel, and spent the first ten years of his life there, sleeping in a cupboard beneath the stairs, when not making a living by picking pockets on the street.
“The brandy is gone,” he reported to Jamie. “I have sold it to MacAlpine—at a small sacrifice in price, I regret, milord. I thought a quick sale the best.”
“Better to have it off the premises,” Jamie said, nodding. “What have ye done wi’ the body?”
Fergus smiled briefly, his lean face and dark forelock lending him a distinctly piratical air.
“Our intruder also has gone to MacAlpine’s tavern, milord—suitably disguised.”
“As what?” I demanded.
The pirate’s grin turned on me; Fergus had turned out a very handsome man, the disfigurement of his hook notwithstanding.
“As a cask of crème de menthe, milady,” he said.
“I do not suppose anyone has drunk crème de menthe in Edinburgh any time in the last hundred years,” observed Madame Jeanne. “The heathen Scots are not accustomed to the use of civi
lized liqueurs; I have never seen a customer here take anything beyond whisky, beer, or brandywine.”
“Exactly, Madame,” Fergus said, nodding. “We do not want Mr. MacAlpine’s tapmen broaching the cask, do we?”
“Surely somebody’s going to look in that cask sooner or later,” I said. “Not to be indelicate, but—”
“Exactly, milady,” Fergus said, with a respectful bow to me. “Though crème de menthe has a very high content of alcohol. The tavern’s cellar is but a temporary resting place on our unknown friend’s journey to his eternal rest. He goes to the docks tomorrow, and thence to somewhere quite far away. It is only that I did not want him cluttering up Madame Jeanne’s premises in the meantime.”
Jeanne addressed a remark in French to St. Agnes that I didn’t quite catch, but then shrugged and turned to go.
“I will make inquiries of les filles concerning this seaman tomorrow, Monsieur, when they are at leisure. For now—”
“For now, speaking of leisure,” Fergus interrupted, “might Mademoiselle Sophie find herself unemployed this evening?”
The madam favored him with a look of ironic amusement. “Since she saw you come in, mon petit saucisse, I expect that she has kept herself available.” She glanced at Young Ian, slouched against the cushions like a scarecrow from which all the straw stuffing has been removed. “And will I find a place for the young gentleman to sleep?”
“Oh, aye.” Jamie looked consideringly at his nephew. “I suppose ye can lay a pallet in my room.”
“Oh, no!” Young Ian blurted. “You’ll want to be alone wi’ your wife, will ye not, Uncle?”
“What?” Jamie stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Well, I mean…” Young Ian hesitated, glancing at me, and then hastily away. “I mean, nay doubt you’ll be wanting to…er…mmphm?” A Highlander born, he managed to infuse this last noise with an amazing wealth of implied indelicacy.
Jamie rubbed his knuckles hard across his upper lip.
“Well, that’s verra thoughtful of ye, Ian,” he said. His voice quivered slightly with the effort of not laughing. “And I’m flattered that ye have such a high opinion of my virility as to think I’m capable of anything but sleeping in bed after a day like this. But I think perhaps I can forgo the satisfaction of my carnal desires for one night—fond as I am of your auntie,” he added, giving me a faint grin.
“But Bruno tells me the establishment is not busy tonight,” Fergus put in, glancing round in some bewilderment. “Why does the boy not—”
“Because he’s no but fourteen, for God’s sake!” Jamie said, scandalized.
“Almost fifteen!” Young Ian corrected, sitting up and looking interested.
“Well, that is certainly sufficient,” Fergus said, with a glance at Madame Jeanne for confirmation. “Your brothers were no older when I first brought them here, and they acquitted themselves honorably.”
“You what?” Jamie goggled at his protégé.
“Well, someone had to,” Fergus said, with slight impatience. “Normally, a boy’s father—but of course, le Monsieur is not—meaning no disrespect to your esteemed father, of course,” he added, with a nod to Young Ian, who nodded back like a mechanical toy, “but it is a matter for experienced judgment, you understand?”
“Now”—he turned to Madame Jeanne, with the air of a gourmand consulting the wine steward—“Dorcas, do you think, or Penelope?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head decidedly, “it should be the second Mary, absolutely. The small one.”
“Oh, with the yellow hair? Yes, I think you are right,” Fergus said approvingly. “Fetch her, then.”
Jeanne was off before Jamie could manage more than a strangled croak in protest.
“But—but—the lad canna—” he began.
“Yes, I can,” Young Ian said. “At least, I think I can.” It wasn’t possible for his face to grow any redder, but his ears were crimson with excitement, the traumatic events of the day completely forgotten.
“But it’s—that is to say—I canna be letting ye—” Jamie broke off and stood glaring at his nephew for a long moment. Finally, he threw his hands up in the air in exasperated defeat.
“And what am I to say to your mother?” he demanded, as the door opened behind him.
Framed in the door stood a very short young girl, plump and soft as a partridge in her blue silk chemise, her round sweet face beaming beneath a loose cloud of yellow hair. At the sight of her, Young Ian froze, scarcely breathing.
When at last he must draw breath or die, he drew it, and turned to Jamie. With a smile of surpassing sweetness, he said, “Well, Uncle Jamie, if I were you”—his voice soared up in a sudden alarming soprano, and he stopped, clearing his throat before resuming in a respectable baritone—“I wouldna tell her. Good night to ye, Auntie,” he said, and walked purposefully forward.
* * *
“I canna decide whether I must kill Fergus or thank him.” Jamie was sitting on the bed in our attic room, slowly unbuttoning his shirt.
I laid the damp dress over the stool and knelt down in front of him to