I felt my own pulse throb in hands and bones and center, but couldn’t manage any response more eloquent than a faint “Ooh.” After a bit, though, I recovered enough to stroke his hair.

“We’ll go home again soon,” I whispered to him. “And have all the time in the world.”

That got me a softly affirmative Scottish noise, and we lay there for a bit longer, not wanting to come apart and get dressed, though the packing cases were hard and the possibility of discovery increasing with each passing minute.

At last he stirred, but not to rise.

“Oh, God,” he said softly, in another tone altogether. “Three hundred men.” And held me tighter.



STINKING PAPIST

THE SUN WASN’T YET above the horizon, but the horse park was busy as an anthill, full of grooms, foragers, teamsters, and farriers, all scurrying about their business in an incongruous soft pink light filled with the sound of hundreds of pairs of steadily champing jaws. William picked up the bay gelding’s hoof and held out his hand for the hoof pick his new, small groom was clutching nervously to his chest.

“Now, come here, Zeb,” he said coaxingly. “I’ll show you how it’s done; there’s nothing to it.”

“Yes, sir.” Zebedee Jeffers edged an inch closer, eyes flicking back and forth from the hoof to the towering mass of horseflesh. Jeffers did not like horses. He particularly didn’t like Visigoth. William thought it was just as well that Zeb likely didn’t know what a Visigoth was.

“All right. See there?” He tapped the pick against the shadow: the edge of a small rock that had trapped itself under the curve of the iron shoe during the night. “It’s only a little one, but it feels just like a pebble in your own shoe would feel, and he’ll go lame if we don’t take care of it. Here, it’s not stuck fast; do you want to try?”

“No, sir,” Zeb said honestly. Zebedee came from the shore of Maryland and knew about oysters, boats, and fish. Not horses.

“He won’t hurt you,” William said, with a touch of impatience. He’d be riding back and forth along the columns a dozen times a day, carrying dispatches and gathering reports; both his horses needed to be kept ready, his regular groom, Colenso Baragwanath, was down with a fever, and he hadn’t time to find another servant.

“Yes, he will. Sir,” Zeb added as an afterthought. “See?” He held out a scrawny arm, displaying what was undoubtedly a festering bite mark.

William suppressed the urge to ask what the devil the boy had been doing to the horse. Visigoth wasn’t a bad-tempered horse on the whole, but he could be irritable, and Zeb’s nervous fidgeting was enough to try anyone, let alone a tired and hungry horse.

“All right,” he said with a sigh, and pried the rock loose with one sharp dig. “Better, then?” he said to the horse, running a hand down the leg and then patting Goth’s flank. He felt in his pocket and drew out a bunch of limp carrots, bought the night before from a farmwoman who’d come through camp with baskets of produce on a yoke across her broad shoulders.

“Here. Give him that; make friends with him,” he suggested, handing a carrot to Zeb. “Hold it flat on your hand.” Before the boy could extend this putative olive branch, though, the horse reached down and snatched it from his fingers with an audible crunch of big yellow teeth. The boy uttered a small shriek and took several steps back, collided with a bucket, and fell over it, arse over teakettle.

Torn between annoyance and an unseemly urge to laugh, William smothered both and went to pick his groom out of a manure pile.

“Tell you what,” he said, dusting the boy off with a firm hand, “you see that all my dunnage is aboard the baggage wagon, see if Colenso needs anything, and make sure there’s something for me to eat tonight. I’ll ask Sutherland’s groom to tend the horses.”

Zeb sagged with relief.

“Thank you, sir!”

“And go see one of the surgeons and have that arm tended to!” William shouted after him, above the rising sound of braying and whickering. The boy’s shoulders rose up around his ears and he walked faster, pretending he hadn’t heard.

William saddled Goth himself—he always did, not trusting anyone else to check tack that his life might depend on—then left him with his other horse, Madras, and went to find Lord Sutherland’s groom. Despite the bustle, he had no trouble finding the string; Sutherland had ten horses, all prime creatures of sixteen hands or so, and at least a dozen grooms to tend them. William was just concluding negotiations with one of these when he caught sight of a familiar face among the throng.

“Shit,” he said, under his breath, but Captain Richardson had seen him and was coming toward him, smiling genially.

“Captain Lord Ellesmere. Your servant, sir.”

“Yours, sir,” William said, as pleasantly as he could. What did the scoundrel want now? he wondered. Not that Richardson was a scoundrel—or not necessarily one, despite Randall’s warning. It might, after all, be Randall who was the scoundrel. But he did hold rather a grudge against Richardson, on Mother Claire’s account, as well as his own. The thought of Mother Claire stabbed him unexpectedly, and he forced it back. None of it was her fault.

“I’m surprised to see you here, your lordship,” Richardson said, glancing round at the roiling camp. The sun was up, and bands of gold lit the fog of dust rising from the mules’ rough coats. “You are a conventioneer, are you not?”

“I am,” William said coldly. Richardson certainly knew he was. William felt obliged to defend himself, though against what, he wasn’t sure. “I cannot fight.” He spread his arms slightly. “As you see, I carry no weapons.” He made polite motions indicating his immediate need to be elsewhere, but Richardson went on standing there, smiling with that very ordinary face, so unremarkable that his own mother probably couldn’t pick him out of a crowd, save for a large brown mole on the side of his chin.

“Ah, to be sure.” Richardson drew a little closer, lowering his voice. “That being the case … I wonder whether—”

“No,” William said definitely. “I am one of General Clinton’s aides, and I cannot leave my duty. You will excuse me, sir; I am expected.”

He turned on his heel and made off, his heart hammering—and realized rather belatedly that he had left his horse behind. Richardson was still standing at the far side of the horse park, talking to a groom who was taking down the pickets, coiling the rope around one shoulder as he did so. The crowd of horses and mules was swiftly diminishing, but there were enough still near Visigoth to enable William to duck in and pretend to be fiddling with his saddlebags, head bent to hide his face until Richardson should go away.

The conversation had left him with an unsettling image of his erstwhile stepmother as he had last seen her, disheveled and en déshabillé but glowing with a radiant life he had never seen. He didn’t suppose she was his stepmother anymore, but he’d liked her. Belatedly, it occurred to him that Claire now-Fraser still was his stepmother—by a different father… . Bloody hell.

He set his teeth, rummaging in the saddlebag for his canteen. Now that that Scotch bugger had returned from his watery grave, throwing everything and everyone into confusion … why couldn’t he have drowned and never come back?

Never come back.

“You are a stinking Papist, and your baptismal name is James.” He froze as though shot in the back. He bloody remembered it. The stables at Helwater, the warm smell of horses and mash, and the prickle of straw that worked its way through his stockings. Cold stone floors. He’d been crying … Why? All he recalled was a huge wash of desolation, total helplessness. The end of the world. Mac leaving.

He took a long, slow breath and pressed his lips together. Mac. The word didn’t bring back a face; he couldn’t remember what Mac had looked like. He’d been big, that was all. Bigger than Grandfather or any of the footmen or the other grooms. Safety. A sense of constant happiness like a soft, worn blanket.