Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade(4)
Author: Diana Gabaldon

“He burnt it,” Hal whispered, and swallowed. “She said he’d burnt it.”

“Who?” Grey asked, startled. “Mother?”

Hal glanced up at him sharply, but ignored his question.

“Where did this come from?” he demanded, barely waiting for Grey’s shrug before shouting, “Mr. Beasley! I want you!”

Mr. Beasley, promptly emergent from his own pristine sanctuary, denied any knowledge of the sheet of paper and confessed complete ignorance of its means of arrival in Hal’s office. He was, though, able to supply the helpful information that the paper had definitely not been upon the desk earlier in the day.

“How on earth would you know?” Grey inquired, giving the desk and its contents a disparaging look. Two beady-eyed stares turned upon him. They’d know. Grey coughed.

“Yes. In that case…” He trailed off. He had been about to inquire who had come into the office during the day, but realized at once the difficulty of the question. Dozens of people visited the office every day: clerks, sutlers, officers, royal messengers, gunnery sergeants, weaponers…. He’d come in once and found a man with a dancing bear on a chain and a monkey on his shoulder, come to collect payment for performing at a jollification for the troops in honor of the queen’s birthday.

Still, surely some effort should be made.

“How long had you been here before I came in?” he asked. Hal rubbed a hand over his face.

“I came in just before you. Otherwise, I should have seen it at once.”

“Ought we call in the door guard, and the men in the building?” Grey suggested. “Query each of them as to anyone who might have entered the office whilst it was unoccupied?”

Hal’s lips compressed. He’d got control of himself; Grey could see his mind working again, and rapidly.

“No,” he said, and consciously relaxed his shoulders. “No, it’s not important.” He crumpled the sheet of paper into a ball, and threw it with apparent casualness into the fire. “That will be all, Mr. Beasley.”

Mr. Beasley bowed and went out. The paper glowed and burst into flame. Grey’s hands clenched involuntarily, wanting to seize it from destruction, but it was already gone, ink stark for an instant on the charring paper before it fell to ash. The unexpected sense of loss made him speak more sharply than his wont.

“Why did you do that?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hal glanced at the door, to be sure that Beasley was out of earshot, then took the poker and thrust it into the fire, stirring it so that sparks flew up the chimney like a swarm of fiery bees, making sure no trace of the paper remained. “Forget it.”

“I am not inclined to forget it. What did you mean, ‘He burnt it’?”

Hal put the poker back in its stand with a careful precision.

“That was not a suggestion,” he said softly. “It was an order—Major.”

Grey’s jaw tightened.

“I do not choose to obey you—sir.”

Hal turned, startled.

“What the hell do you mean, you bloody don’t choose to—”

“I mean I won’t,” Grey snapped, “and you frigging well know it. What do you propose to do about it? Clap me in irons? Have me locked up for a week on bread and water?”

“Don’t bloody tempt me.” Hal glared at him, but it was clear to both of them that he had given in. Partly.

“Keep your voice down, at least.” Hal went to the door, looked out into the hallway, but didn’t shut it. That was interesting, Grey thought. Did Hal suppose that Mr. Beasley might creep up to listen outside the door, if it were closed?

“Yes, it was a page from one of the journals,” Hal said, very quietly. “The last one.”

Grey nodded briefly; the date on the page had been two weeks prior to the date of their father’s death. The duke had been a meticulous diarist; there was a small bookcase in the library in Jermyn Street, filled with row upon row of his journals, kept over more than thirty years. Grey was familiar with them, and grateful to his father for having kept them; they had enabled him to know at least a little of his father as a man, once he reached his own manhood. The last journal in the bookshelf ended three months prior to the duke’s death; there must have been another, but Grey had never seen it.

“Mother told you Father had burnt it? Did she say why?”

“No, she didn’t,” Hal said briefly. “I didn’t inquire, under the circumstances.”

Hal was still watching the open door. Grey couldn’t tell whether he was merely on the alert, or avoiding meeting Grey’s eyes. Hal was a good liar when he needed to be, but Grey knew his brother extremely well—and Hal knew him. He took a deep breath, ordering his thoughts. The smell of burnt paper was sharp in his nose.

“Clearly it wasn’t burnt,” Grey said slowly. “So we must assume, first, that it was stolen, and then that whoever took it has kept it until now. Who, and why? And why does he—whoever he is—inform you now that he has it? And why did Mother—”

“Damned if I know.” Hal did look at him then, and Grey’s anger faded as he saw that his brother was indeed telling the truth. He saw something else that disquieted him extremely—his brother was afraid.

“It is a threat of some sort?” he asked, lowering his voice still further. There had been nothing on the page he had read to suggest such a thing; it had been part of an account of a meeting his father had had with a longtime friend and their discussion of astronomy, quite innocuous. Therefore, the page had plainly been meant only to inform Hal of the existence of the journal itself—and whatever else it might contain.

“God knows,” Hal said. “What the devil could it—well.” He rubbed a knuckle hard across his lips, and glanced at Grey. “Don’t speak to Mother about it. I’ll do it,” he added, seeing Grey about to protest.

The sound of boots and voices along the passage prevented further conversation. Captain Wilmot, with his sergeant and a company clerk. Hal reached out and quietly closed the door; they waited in silence as the noise died away.

“Do you know a man named Melchior Ffoulkes?” Hal asked abruptly.

“No,” Grey replied, wondering whether this had to do with the matter at hand, or was a change of subject. “I am reasonably sure I’d recall him, if I did.”

That provoked the ghost of a smile from Hal.

“Yes, you would. Or a private soldier named Harrison Otway? From the Eleventh Foot.”

“What a ridiculous name. No, who is he?”

“Captain Michael Bates?”

“Well, I’ve heard of him, at least. Horse Guards, is he not? Flash cove, as Tom Byrd puts it. What, may I ask, is the purpose of this catechism? Do sit down, Hal.” He sat himself, and after a moment’s hesitation, Hal slowly followed suit.

“Have you ever met Captain Bates?”

Grey was becoming annoyed, but answered flippantly.

“Not to remember, certainly. I couldn’t swear that I’ve never shared a bed with him in an inn, of course—”

Hal’s hand gripped his forearm, so hard that he gasped.

“Don’t,” Hal said, very softly. “Don’t make jokes.”

Grey stared into his brother’s eyes, seeing the lines of his face cut deep. The journal page had shocked him, but he had already been disturbed.

“Let go,” Grey said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

Hal slowly withdrew his hand.

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Who are these men? Have they anything to do with—” He glanced at the fireplace, but Hal shook his head.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so—but it’s possible.” The sound of footsteps echoed in the hallway, and Hal stopped speaking abruptly. The footsteps were distinctive, the sound of a heavy man with a decided limp. Ewart Symington, the second regimental colonel, Harry Quarry’s opposite number.

Hal grimaced and John nodded understanding. Neither one of them desired to speak with Symington at the moment. They stood silent, waiting. Sure enough, the steps came to a halt, and a fist thundered on the panels of the door. Symington was as brutal of manner as of appearance, resembling nothing so much as a dyspeptic boar.

Another thunderous assault on the door, a moment’s pause, and Symington uttered a muffled oath and limped off.

“He’ll be back,” Hal said, under his breath, and took his cloak from its peg by the door. “Come with me to White’s; we’ll talk on the way.”

Grey thrust his arms into his greatcoat and a moment later they had escaped into the street, Hal having instructed Mr. Beasley to tell Colonel Symington that Lord Melton had gone to Bath.

“Bath?” Grey asked, as they exited. “At this time of year?” It was no more than half-past three, yet twilight was louring. The pavement was dark with wet and the air thick with the scent of oncoming snow.

Hal waved off his waiting carriage, and turned the corner.

“Anywhere closer, and he’d follow me there. Say what you will of the man, he’s damned persistent.” That was said with grudging respect; persistence was Symington’s chief military virtue, and not a mean one. In more social situations, it was somewhat trying.

“What does he want?”

Grey asked only for the sake of delaying discussion, and was not surprised to receive only a moody shrug from Hal. His brother appeared no more eager to resume their conversation than he was, and they walked for half a mile or so in silence, each alone with his thoughts.

Grey’s own thoughts were a jumble, veering from anticipation and curiosity at the thought of Percy Wainwright to concern at his brother’s obvious agitation. Over all of it, though, was the image of the page he had held so briefly in his hands.

He forced all other thought from his mind, concentrating on remembering, committing the words he had read to memory. He still felt the shock of Hal’s throwing the paper into the fire, and could not bear the thought that those words of his father’s, pedestrian as they might be, should be lost to him. The duke’s journals were no secret, and yet he had read them secretly, abstracting one at a time and smuggling each volume to his room, returning them to their shelf, careful that no one should see.

He could not have said why it seemed important to keep this postmortem relationship with his father private. Only that it had been.

He had more or less succeeded in fixing at least the substance of the vanished page in memory, when Hal finally hunched his shoulders and spoke abruptly.

“There has been talk. Regarding conspiracies.”

“When is there not? Which particular conspiracy concerns you?”

“Not me, so much.” Hal settled his hat more firmly, bending his head into the wind. “And it has not yet blown up into open scandal, but it almost certainly will—and soon.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Grey observed caustically. “There hasn’t been a decent scandal since Christmas. Who does this one involve?”

“A sodomite conspiracy to undermine the government by assassination of selected ministers.”