The Scottish Prisoner (26 page)

“No, I hadn’t the chance—only heard a few choice bits that Diderot read out over the piss pot … Oh, Christ!” He’d flipped the book open at random and now read out,
“Bent upon scratching his unseemly itch / This self-fellating son of a bitch …”

Hal gave a strangled whoop and laughed so hard that he had to lean momentarily against the wall for support. “Self-fellating? Is that even possible?”

“You’re asking me? I certainly can’t do it,” said Grey.

“I havena any personal experience in that regard myself,” said a dry Scottish voice behind him, “but dogs dinna seem to find it difficult.”

Both Greys swung round, startled; they hadn’t heard him approach. He looked well, John thought, with a slight sense of pride. Upon Fraser’s arrival, Minnie had sent hastily to the Pettigrews, who kept a pair of immense blackamoor servants to carry their sedan chair, and borrowed a fairly new suit of livery. The shirt had been washed, starched, and ironed and the plain coat and waistcoat well brushed, and while neither the color—a deep navy blue—nor style were what a fashionable gentleman would wear, it suited Fraser’s own vivid coloring amazing well.

“It
is
possible, though,” Fraser added, coming even with them. “For a man, I mean.”

Hal had straightened up at Fraser’s arrival but didn’t abandon his own amusement, smiling broadly at Fraser’s remark.

“Really? Dare I ask how you come by this knowledge, Captain?”

Fraser’s mouth twitched slightly, and he shot a glance at Grey. He answered Hal readily, though.

“On one memorable evening in Paris, some years ago, I was the guest of the Duc di Castellotti, a gentleman with … individual
tastes. He took a number of his dinner guests on a tour of some of the city’s more interesting establishments, one of which featured a pair of acrobats. Extremely”—he paused—“flexible.” Hal laughed and turned to his brother.

“D’you think Harry’s writing from personal experience, John?”

“It’s my impression that Colonel Quarry has considerable experience of various kinds upon which to draw,” Fraser said, before John could answer. “Though I shouldna have taken him for a man of letters. D’ye mean to say that he composed that remarkable bit o’ verse?”

“Astonishingly enough, yes,” Hal said. “And quite a lot more of a similar nature, if I am to believe the reports. Wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?”

Hal had turned, quite naturally, with a lift of the shoulder that invited Fraser to walk beside him, and they now went down the corridor, conversing in a pleasant manner, leaving Grey to follow, book in hand.

Minnie had gone out to the theater with a friend, and the men dined alone, in a surprising atmosphere of friendliness. There was no sign of wariness or resentment in Fraser’s manner; he behaved with immense civility, as though the Greys were cordial acquaintances. Grey felt a sense of grateful astonishment; evidently Fraser had meant it when he said he would take Grey at his word.

Master me. Or let me your master be
.

He thought he would settle for mutual respect—and, for the first time since Hal had put this scheme in hand, began to look forward to Ireland.

SECTION III
Beast in View

The Return of Tobias Quinn

“IS HE ALL RIGHT, ME LORD?” TOM ASKED IN LOWERED VOICE
, nodding toward the dock. Turning, Grey saw Fraser standing there like a great rock in the middle of a stream, obliging hands and passengers to flow around him. Despite his immobility, there was something in his face that reminded Grey irresistibly of a horse about to bolt, and by instinct he fought his way down the gangway and laid a hand on Fraser’s sleeve before he could think about it.

“It will be all right,” he said. “Come, it will be all right.”

Fraser glanced at him, torn from whatever dark thought had possessed him.

“I doubt it,” he said, but absently, as though to himself. He didn’t pull away from John’s hand on his arm, but rather walked out from under it without noticing and trudged up the gangway like a man going to his execution.

The one good thing, Grey reflected a few hours later, was that Tom had quite lost his fear of the big Scot. It wasn’t possible to be afraid of someone you had seen rendered so utterly helpless, so reduced by physical misery—and placed in so undignified a position.

“He did tell me once that he was prone to
mal de mer
,” Grey said to Tom, as they stood by the rail for a grateful moment of fresh air, despite the lashing of rain that stung their faces.

“I haven’t seen a cove that sick since me uncle Morris what was a sailor in a merchant man come down with the hocko-grockle,” said Tom, shaking his head. “And
he
died of it.”

“I am reliably informed that no one actually dies of seasickness,” Grey said, trying to sound authoritative and reassuring. The sea was rough, white froth flying from the tops of the surging billows, and the small craft lurched sickeningly from moment to moment, plunging nose down into troughs, only to be hurled abruptly upward by a rising wave. He was a good sailor himself—and smug about it—but if he thought about it for more than a few seconds …

“Wish I’d a-known,” Tom said, his round face creased with worry. “Me old gran says a sour pickle’s the thing for seasickness. She made me uncle Morris take a jar of ’em, put up special with dill weed, whenever he set to sea. And he never had seasickness, to start with.” He looked at Grey, his expression under the wet seeming to accuse his employer of gross negligence in the provisioning of pickles.

Grey felt himself falling under some kind of horrid trance, as he watched the surface of the ocean rise and fall, rise and fall …

“Yes,” he said faintly. “What a good idea. But perhaps …”

“Your pardon, your honor,” said a voice at his elbow. “Would ye be by way of being friends of the gentleman downstairs what’s sick as a dog, and a tremenjous big dog, too?”

Grateful for the distraction, Grey turned his back on the roiling sea and blinked water from his lashes. The Irishman was a few inches taller than himself, but painfully thin. Despite that, sailing seemed to agree with him; his face was ruddy with cold
and wind, pale eyes sparkling, and water gleamed in his spray-soaked curls.

“Yes,” Grey said. “Is he worse?” He made to go past the man, but his new acquaintance put out a hand, reaching with the other into a capacious cloak that billowed round him like a cloud.

“If he was any the worse for it, he’d be dead,” the Irishman said, bringing out a small, square black bottle. “I only wondered, would ye maybe accept a bit o’ medicine for him? I offered it to him meself, only he was too far gone to answer.”

“I thank you, sir,” Grey said, accepting the bottle. “Er … what is it, if you please?”

“Mostly bad whisky,” the Irishman said frankly. “But with the ginger-root and a small little spoon of powdered opium stirred into it, as well.” He smiled, showing a missing eyetooth. “Works wonders, it does. But do shake it first.”

“What have we got to lose?” Tom said practically. He gestured at the deck, now thronged with passengers who had emerged from the companionway, driven upward by the insalubrious conditions in the cramped space below. Many of them were hanging over the rail themselves; the rest glared at Grey, plainly holding him responsible.

“If we don’t do something about him prompt-like, one of that lot’s a-going to knock him on the head.
And
us.”

JAMIE HEARD FOOTSTEPS
approaching and hoped fervently that whoever it was intended to shoot him; he’d heard a few such intentions expressed within his hearing recently. He was all for it but lacked the strength to say so.

“A bit under the weather, are ye, now?” He cracked one eye
open, to see Toby Quinn’s beaming face bending over him, surrounded by crazily fluttering shadows cast by the swinging lanterns. He closed the eye and curled himself into a tighter ball.

“Go away,” he managed, before the next wrench of nausea seized him. Quinn leapt nimbly back, just in time, but came forward again, cautiously skirting the fetid little pool surrounding Jamie.

“Now, then, good sir,” Quinn said soothingly. “I’ve a draught here will help.”

The word “draught,” with its implication of swallowing something, made Jamie’s stomach writhe afresh. He clapped a hand to his mouth and breathed through his nose, though it hurt to do so, as spewing bile had seared the sensitive membranes of his nasal passages. He closed his eyes against the horrible rhythmic sway of the shadows. Each one seemed to take his mind swinging with it, leaving his belly poised over some hideous sheer drop.

It won’t stop, itwonteverstopohGod …

“Mr. Fraser.” There was a hand on his shoulder. He twitched feebly, trying to get rid of it. If they wouldn’t have the decency to kill him, could they not just let him die in peace?

The sense of alarm at Quinn’s presence, which would in other circumstances have been pronounced, was so faint as barely to register on the blank slate of his mind. But it wasn’t Quinn touching him; it was John Grey.
“Take your hand off me,”
he wanted to say, but couldn’t.
“Kill you. Take your hand … kill you …”

A general chorus of blasphemy greeted the results when he opened his mouth in an attempt to utter the threat. It was followed by more varied response, including a shocked female voice: “Dear bleedin’ heart o’ Mairy, the poor man’s spittin’ blood!”

He curled up again, knees clasped as tight to his belly as he
could get them. He’d heard himself whimpering and, shocked at the sound, had bitten the inside of his cheek hard to stop it.

The chorus were saying something about the draught, all of them urging him to take it. An uncorked bottle of something hot-smelling and sickly-sweet was waved under his nose. Opium. The word flared a warning in his mind. He’d had opium before, in France. He still remembered the dreams, a nasty mix of lust and nightmare. And he remembered being told that he’d raved in the midst of them, too, talking wildly of the naked demons that he saw. Again, on the crossing to France: he’d been wounded then, and had suffered all those wounds again—and worse—in opium dreams. And what had happened later, at the abbey, when he’d fought the shade of Black Jack Randall in fire and shadow, had done something terrible to him against a stone wall … that was opium, too.

The whole cabin shot into the air and then fell with shocking violence, flinging people into the bulkheads like birds smashing into windowpanes. Jamie rolled off the bench on which he’d been lying, crashed into several bodies, and ended entangled with one of them, both wedged between the bulkhead and a large sliding crate of chickens that no one had thought to secure.

“Bloody get off me!” A strangled English voice came from somewhere under him and, realizing that it was John Grey he lay on, he rose like a rocket, cracking his head on the low beam above. Clutching his head—obviously shattered—he sank to his knees and fell half upon the crate, to the great consternation of the chickens. Shrieks and squawks and an explosion of down feathers and bits of chicken shit erupted through the slats, in an ammoniac reek that stabbed right through his nose and into what was left of his brain.