“Have you got any paper in your study?” I asked, sliding off the log.
“Aye. Why?” He folded the letter, raising a brow at me.
“I’m going to write to John Grey,” I said, trying to sound as though this were both a simple and an obvious thing to do. Well, it was obvious. Or so I thought.
“No, you’re not.” He said it calmly, though his answer had come so fast, I thought he’d said it from pure reflex. Then I looked at his eyes. I straightened my back, folded my arms, and fixed him with a stare of my own.
“Would you care to rephrase that?” I said politely.
One of the benefits of long marriage is that you can see quite clearly where some conversations are likely to lead—and occasionally you can sidestep the booby traps and choose another path by silent mutual assent. He pursed his lips a little, looking thoughtfully up at me. Then he took a deep breath and nodded.
“Dorothea will write to her father, if she hasna done it already,” he said reasonably. He tucked Judah’s letter into his sporran and stood up. “His Grace will do whatever can be done.”
“We don’t know that Dottie can write to her father. She may not be near Denzell—she may not even know that he’s in prison! For that matter, we don’t know where Hal—er, I mean the duke—is, either,” I added. Bloody hell, I shouldn’t have called Hal by his first name … “But he and John can both be found, at least. The British army certainly knows where they are.”
“By the time I sent a message to Savannah or New York, Denzell will likely have been released, or paroled. Or moved.”
“Or died.” I unfolded my arms. “For heaven’s sake, Jamie. If anybody knows what the conditions are like inside a British prison, it’s you!”
He’d turned to go, but at this, his head whipped round like a snake’s.
“Aye, I do.”
Aye, he did. Prison is where he met John …
“Besides,” I said, trying to scramble back onto safer ground, “I said I’d write to him. Denzell’s more my friend than yours. You needn’t be involved at all.”
The blood was rising up the column of his neck, never a good sign.
“I dinna mean to be ‘involved,’” he said, handling the word as though it had fleas. “And I dinna mean you to be ‘involved’ with John Grey. At all,” he added as an emphatic footnote, and snatched up the shovel with which he’d been digging the new well for the garden, in a manner suggesting that he would have liked nothing better than to crown John Grey with it—or, failing that, me.
“I’m not suggesting any sort of involvement,” I said, with a fair assumption of calm.
“It’s a wee bit late for that,” he said, with a nasty emphasis that sent the blood up into my own cheeks.
“For God’s sake! You know what happened. And how. You know I—”
“Aye, I ken what happened. He laid ye down in his bed, spread your thighs, and swived ye. Ye think I’m ever going to hear the man’s name and not think of that?” He said something very rude in Gaelic featuring John’s testicles, drove the blade of his shovel into the ground, then pulled it up again.
I breathed slowly through my nose, lips pressed firmly together.
“I thought,” I said after a moment, “that we’d done with that.”
I had rather thought that. Apparently that had been wishful thinking on my part. And quite suddenly, I remembered what he’d said—well, one of the things he’d said—when he’d come to find me in Bartram’s Garden, he risen from the dead and smelling of cabbages, me mud-stained and shattered with joy.
“I have loved ye since I saw you, Sassenach. I will love ye forever. It doesna matter if ye sleep with the whole English army—well, no,” he had corrected himself, “it would matter, but it wouldna stop me loving you.”
I drew a slightly calmer breath, though my mind went right ahead and presented me with something else he’d said, later in that conversation:
“I don’t say that I dinna mind this, because I do. And I don’t say that I’ll no make a fuss about it later, because I likely will.”
He moved close to me and looked down into my face, blue eyes dark with intent.
“Did I tell ye once that I am a jealous man?”
“You did, but …”
“And did I tell ye that I grudged every hour ye’d spent in another man’s bed?”
I took a deep breath to squash down the hasty words I could feel boiling up.
“You did,” I said, through only slightly clenched teeth.
He glared at me for a long moment.
“I meant it,” he said. “I still mean it. Ye’ll do what ye damn please—God knows, ye always do—but don’t pretend ye dinna ken what I feel about it!”
He turned on his heel and stalked off, shovel over his shoulder like a rifle.
My fists were clenched so hard I could feel my nails cutting into my palms. I would have thrown a rock at him, but he was already out of range and moving fast, shoulders bunched with anger.
“What about William?” I bellowed after him. “If he’s ‘involved’ with John, so are you, you pigheaded Scot!”
The shoulders bunched harder, but he didn’t turn round. His shout floated back to me, though.
“Damn William!”
A SMALL COUGH from behind me distracted me from the mental list of synonyms for “bloody Scot!” I was compiling. I turned round to find Fanny standing there, her apron bulging with dirt-covered turnips and her sweet face fixed in a troubled frown, this directed at Jamie, who was vanishing into the trees by the creek.
“What has Will-iam done, Mrs. Fraser?” she asked, glancing up at me from under her cap. I smiled, in spite of the recent upheaval. Her speech was very fluent now, save when she was upset or talking fast, but she often still had that slight hesitation between the syllables of William’s name.
“William hasn’t done anything amiss,” I assured her. “Not that I know of. We haven’t seen him since … er …” I broke off an instant too late.
“Jane’s funeral,” she said soberly, and looked down into the purple-and-white mass of turnips. “I thought … maybe Mr. Fraser had had a letter. From William. Or maybe about him,” she added, the frown returning. She nodded toward the trees. “He’s angry.”
“He’s Scottish,” I amended, with a sigh. “Which means stubborn. Also unreasonable, intolerant, contumelious, froward, pigheaded, and a few other objectionable things. But don’t worry; it really isn’t anything to do with William. Here, let’s put the turnips in the tub there and cover them with water. That will keep the tops from wilting. I’m making bashed neeps for supper, but I want to cook the tops with bacon grease and serve them alongside. If anything will make Highlanders eat a leafy green vegetable, bacon grease ought to do it.”
She nodded as though this made sense and let down her apron slowly, so the turnips rolled out into the tub in a tumbling cascade, dark-green tops waving like pom-poms.
“You probably shouldn’t have told him.” Fanny spoke with an almost clinical detachment.