“Me, too,” she said. “You mean London, and this Matthew Stubbs?”
“Malcolm, but yes.”
“What sort of man is he?” she asked curiously. “Have you met him?”
“Yes, twice that I recall. Once at Ascot and once at one of my f—one of Lord John’s clubs.” He glanced at her to see whether she’d noticed, but of course she had.
“It’s okay—all right, I mean—to call Lord John your father,” she said, the expression of sympathy transferring itself to him. “Da wouldn’t mind.”
Blood rose in his cheeks, but he was saved from saying what he thought about Jamie Fraser’s preferences in the matter by Brianna’s instantly returning to the subject of Malcolm Stubbs.
“So, what’s he like, this Stubbs?”
He couldn’t help a smile at the suspicious tone of “this Stubbs.”
“To look at, very aptly named. Short and thick—with hair just like Cinnamon’s, though it’s a sort of a sandy blond. It may be gray by now, though,” he added. “He always wears a wig in public.”
She lifted her brows at him—thick brows, for a woman, and red to boot, but very expressive.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly, in response to the brows’ question. “There’s the one thing that might help. Pa—Papa, I mean,” he said, giving her a brief glare that dared her to comment, “told me that he has a black wife. Stubbs has, I mean,” he amended. “Not Papa.”
She blinked.
“In London?”
She sounded so shocked that he laughed.
“Why should the place make a difference? I imagine she’d be just as surprising here”—he waved a hand at the stately, shattered houses surrounding St. James Square—“if not more so.”
“Hm!” she said. Then, curiously, “Did he free her from slavery, and then marry her?”
“She wasn’t a slave,” William said, somewhat surprised. “My father said that he—he and Stubbs both, he meant—had met her in Cuba. Stubbs’s first wife had just died of some sort of fever, and he brought this woman—Inocencia, that’s her name, I knew it was some sort of Spanish virtue—brought her back to London with him and married her. Anyway,” he said, bringing the conversation back to its point, “I’m sure that Papa said Stubbs had children by this woman.”
“You mean he wouldn’t necessarily turn his back on John Cinnamon because of being …” She waved a hand, indicating Cinnamon’s noticeable Indian-ness.
“Yes.” William felt doubtful, despite the firmness of his answer. Having children of an unusual hue would cause comment, but wasn’t necessarily a scandalous thing, provided they were legitimate, which the junior Stubbses certainly were. Having an enormous and very obviously extra-legal adult Indian turn up and claim parentage might well be a horse of a different color. And he found that he very much wanted John Cinnamon not to be hurt.
Brianna made a clicking noise, and her horse moved obligingly out of the shade of the live oaks and into Jones Street. There were a large number of people out, William saw; overnight, the sense of fearful oppression had lifted with the siege, and while the smell of burning still tinged the air and broken tree limbs were scattered everywhere, people had to eat and business must be done. The normal tide of daily life was coming in apace.
“Will you go with him? To London?” Brianna asked over her shoulder. She nudged her horse with both heels, reining him out of the way of an oncoming wagon filled with barrels and sweetly smelling of beer.
“London?” William repeated. “I don’t know.” He didn’t, and let so much uncertainty show in his voice that his sister pulled up a bit to wait for him, then nodded toward a lane that ran behind the Baptist church, indicating that he should follow her.
“It’s not my business,” she said, as they passed into the cold shadow of the church, “but—what are you planning to do? I mean, now the siege is lifted, I suppose you can go anywhere you want …”
Excellent question.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “Truly, I don’t.”
She nodded.
“Well, you have options, don’t you?”
“Options?” he said. He was amused, but the word still gave him a sense that he’d swallowed a live eel. You have no idea, sister mine …
“Lord John says you own a small plantation in Virginia,” she pointed out. “If you didn’t want to go back to England, I suppose you could live there?”
“It’s possible, I suppose.” He could hear the doubt in his own voice, and so could she; she glanced sharply at him, eyebrow lifted.
“The place is a ruin,” he said, “though the fields have been kept in fairly good condition. But the war—” He gestured at the nearest house, pocked by cannonballs and its bright-blue paint scorched and fire-blackened on one side. “I think it might not just flow round me like a rock in the water, you know.”
Something odd moved over her face, and he looked at her in considerable surprise.
“You’ve thought of something?” he asked.
“Yes, but it’s not—I mean—it’s not relevant right this minute.” She waved away whatever the thought had been. “I know Lord John and your uncle—the duke still thinks of himself as your uncle, I know—”
“So do I,” William said, wryly, but with a small sense of relief at the thought. Uncle Hal truly was a rock, over whom floods and torrents had often passed, leaving him unmoved.
“They want you to go back to England,” Brianna said. “I was wondering, myself—you’re an earl; doesn’t that mean you have … people? Land? Things that need taking care of?”
“There is an estate, yes,” he said tersely. “I—what the devil?” His horse had stopped dead, and Brianna’s mount was trying to turn around in the alley, whuffling at some disturbing scent.
Then his feebler olfactory sense perceived it, too—a stink of death. A wagon stood at the end of the alley, its sides draped with black cloth, this threadbare and bleached by age into rusty folds. The wagon was unhitched, and there were neither horses nor mules in evidence, but a small group of roughly clad men, both black and white, stood in a patch of sun just beyond the alley’s mouth, in attitudes of watchful expectation.
There was a sound of voices in the distance, subdued, but several of them, a murmuring that was punctuated abruptly by a piercing wail that made the waiting men flinch and look away, shoulders hunched.
Brianna turned in her saddle, looking over her shoulder and gathering up her reins, evidently wanting to go back—but there were people coming into the alley behind them, mourners in dark veils and armbands. Bree glanced at William, and he shook his head and nudged his own horse toward hers, jockeying toward the side of the alley in order to give the newcomers space to pass. This they did, a few sparing a glance at the riders—one or two with eyes widened at sight of Brianna astride with her skirts hiked up and an indecent expanse of calf showing—but most so focused on present grief as to be indifferent to spectacle.
Movement near the wagon drew William’s attention back; they were bringing out the body—bodies.