Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

by Diana Gabaldon

  She had promised Edward Twelvetrees nothing beyond an attempt to find out whether the letters did exist; if so, she’d said, then they could discuss further terms.

  Well, then. The next step, at least, was clear.

  “Rafe,” she said, interrupting an argument between Rafe and Eliza as to whether Mr. Twelvetrees more resembled a ferret or an obelisk (she assumed they meant “basilisk” but didn’t stop to find out), “I have a job for you and Mick.”

  13

  THE LETTERS

  MR. VAUXHALL GARDENS (alias Mr. Hosmer Thornapple, a wealthy broker on the Exchange, as Minnie had discovered by the simple expedient of having Mick O’Higgins follow him home) had proved to be not only an excellent client, with an insatiable appetite for Lithuanian illuminated manuscripts and Japanese erotica, but also a most valuable connection. Through him, she had acquired (besides a thin sheaf of sealed documents intended for her father’s eyes) two fifteenth-century incunabula—one in excellent condition, the other needing some repair—and a tattered but originally beautiful small book by María Anna Águeda de San Ignacio, an abbess from New Spain, with handwritten annotations said to be in the hand of the nun herself.

  Minnie hadn’t enough Spanish to make out much of the content, but it was the sort of small book that gave one pleasure simply to hold, and she had paused in her labors to do just that.

  The sturdy sideboard in her parlor was stacked on one side with books and on the other with more books, these wrapped in soft cloth, then a layer of felt, one of lambswool, and then an outer skin of oiled silk, tied with tarred twine. Piles of packing materials were arrayed on the dining table, and several large wooden crates were wedged under it.

  She trusted no one else to handle or pack the books for shipment back to Paris and was in consequence dust-stained and sweaty, in spite of the breeze from the open window. Just past Midsummer’s Day, the weather had kept fine for a whole week, much to the astonishment of every Londoner she’d spoken to.

  La Vida de la Alma. Close enough to the Latin to translate as “The Life of the Soul.” It was soft-bound in a thin oxblood leather, worn by years—a lifetime?—of reading, with a stamped pattern of tiny pecten shells, each one edged with gilt. She touched one gently, feeling a great sense of peace. Books always had something to say, beyond the words inside, but it was rare to find one with so strong a character.

  She opened it carefully; the paper inside was thin, and the ink had begun to fade with age but not to blur. The book had few illustrations, and those few, simple: a cross, the Lamb of God, the pecten shell, drawn larger—she’d seen that once or twice before, in Spanish manuscripts, but didn’t know the significance. She must remember to ask her father….

  “Ah,” she said, compressing her lips. “Father.” She’d been trying not to think of him, not until she’d had time to sort out her emotions and consider what on earth she might say to him about her mother.

  She’d thought of the woman called Sister Emmanuelle many times since leaving her in her hay-filled womb of light. The shock had faded, but the images of that meeting were printed on her mind as indelibly as the black ink inside this book. She still felt the sting of loss and the ache of sorrow—but the sense of peace from the book seemed somehow to shelter her, like a covering wing.

  “Are you an angel?”

  She sighed and set the book gently into its nest of cloth and felt. She’d have to talk to her father, yes. But what on earth would she say?

  “Raphael…”

  “If you have any answers,” she said to the book and its author, “please pray for me. For us.”

  She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were damp, and she wiped her face with the hem of her dusty apron. Before she could settle to work again, though, there came a knock at the door.

  Eliza had gone out to do the shopping, so Minnie opened the door just as she was. Mick and Rafe O’Higgins stood shoulder to shoulder in the hall, both of them smudged with soot and excited as terriers smelling a rat.

  “We’ve got the letters, Bedelia!” Rafe said.

  “All the letters!” Mick added, proudly holding up a leather bag.

  “WE WAITED FOR the butler’s day out,” Mick explained, laying his booty out ceremoniously before her. “It’s the butler what arranges for the sweeps to come in when needed, aye? So when we come to the door with our brooms and cloths—not to worry, we borrowed ’em, ye’ll not have to pay—and said Mr. Sylvester had sent for us to attend to the library chimney…”

  “Well, the housekeeper looked a bit squint-eyed,” Rafe chimed in, “but she showed us along, and when we began to bang about and shout up the chimney and kick up soot, she left us quite to ourselves. And so…”

  He swept a hand out over the table. All the letters, indeed. The bag had disgorged a small, flat wooden case, a leather folder, and a thin stack of letters, soberly bound with black grosgrain ribbon.

  “Well done!” Minnie told them sincerely. She felt a flutter of excitement at sight of the letters, though a cautious excitement. The O’Higginses had, of course, brought away every letter they could find. They must have more than the countess’s letters here, and she wondered for a brief moment whether some of the extras might be valuable…but dismissed the thought for now. As long as they’d found Esmé’s…

  “Did you get paid for sweeping the chimney?” she asked, out of curiosity.

  “Sure and ye wound us, Lady Bedelia,” Rafe said, clasping a battered hat over his heart and trying to look wounded. There was smut on his nose.

  “O’ course we did,” Mick said, grinning. “T’wouldn’t have been convincing, otherwise, would it?”

  They were cock-a-hoop over their success, and it took nearly half a bottle of Madeira to celebrate said success enough for them to leave, but at last she closed the door upon them, rubbed at a smudge on the white doorjamb with her thumb, and walked slowly back to the table to see what she had.

  She took the letters from their various wrappings and set them out in three neat piles. The letters from Esmé, Lady Melton, to her lover, Nathaniel Twelvetrees: those were the ones in the wooden box. The letters in the beribboned bundle were from said Nathaniel Twelvetrees to Esmé. And the leather folder held quite unexpected letters—from Harold, Lord Melton, to his wife.

  Minnie had never felt the slightest reservation in reading someone else’s letters. It was simply part of the work, and if she occasionally met someone in those pages whose voice struck her mind or heart, someone real—that was a bonus, something to treasure privately, with a sweet regret that she would never know the writer face-to-face.

  Well, she’d certainly never know Esmé or Nathaniel face-to-face, she thought. As for Harold, Lord Melton—just looking at the untidy pile of crumpled, smoothed-out, ink-blotted sheets made the hairs prickle at the back of her neck.

  Esmé first, she decided. Esmé was the center of it all. And it was Esmé’s letters she’d been commissioned—more or less—to steal. A faint hint of perfume rose from the wooden box, something slightly bitter, fresh, and mysterious. Myrrh? Nutmeg? Dried lemon? Not sweet at all, she thought—nor, likely, was Esmé Grey.

  Not all of the letters had dates, but she sorted them as best she could. All on the same stationery, an expensive linen rag paper, thick to the touch and pure white. The sentiments inscribed upon them were not pure at all.

  Mon cher…Dois-je vous dire ce que je voudrais que vous me fassiez? “Shall I tell you what I want you to do to me?”

  Minnie had read her way with interest through her father’s entire stock of erotica when she was fourteen, accidentally discovering in the process that one didn’t necessarily need a partner in order to experience the sensations so euphorically described therein. Esmé hadn’t much literary style, but her imagination—surely some of it must be imagination?—was remarkable and expressed with a blunt freedom that made Minnie want to squirm, ever so slightly, in her seat.

  Not that they were all like that. One was a simple two-line note making an assignati
on, another was a more thoughtful—and, surprisingly, a more intimate—letter describing Esmé’s visit to—oh, God, Minnie thought, and wiped her hand on her skirt, as she’d begun to perspire—Princess Augusta and her fabulous garden.

  Esmé had noted carelessly that she had no liking for the princess, whom she thought heavy in both body and mind, but that Melton had asked her to accept the invitation to tea in order to—and here Minnie translated Esmé’s idiomatic French expression—“drench in melted butter” the vulgar woman and pave the way for Melton to discuss his military designs with the prince.

  She then mentioned walking through the glass conservatories with the princess, paused to make comical, if offhandedly complimentary, comparisons between her lover’s physical parts and various exotic plants—she mentioned the euphorbias, Minnie noted—and ended with a brief remark about the Chinese flowers called chu. She was attracted—Minnie snorted, reading this—by the “purity and stillness” of the blooms.

  “À les regarder, mon âme s’est apaisée,” she had written. “It soothed my soul to look at them.”

  Minnie set the letter down, as gently as if it might break, and closed her eyes.

  “You poor man,” she whispered.

  THERE WAS A DECANTER of wine on the sideboard. She poured a small glass, very carefully, and stood sipping it, looking at the desk and its burden of letters.

  Someone real. She had to admit that Esmé Grey was definitely real. The impact of her personality was as palpable as though she’d reached out of the paper and stroked her correspondent’s face. Teasing, erotic…

  “Cruel,” Minnie said aloud, though softly. To write to your lover and mention your husband?

  “Hmph,” she said.

  And Esmé’s partner in this criminal conversation? She glanced at the bundle of Nathaniel Twelvetrees’s letters to his mistress. What bizarre quirk of mind had made Melton keep them? Was it guilt, a sort of hair shirt of the spirit?

  And if so…guilt for killing Nathaniel Twelvetrees? Or guilt over Esmé’s death? She wondered how quickly the one event had followed the other—had the shock of hearing of her lover’s death brought on a miscarriage, or a fatally early labor, as gossip said?

  Likely she’d never learn the answers to those questions, but while Melton had killed Nathaniel, he’d left the poet his voice; Nathaniel Twelvetrees could speak for himself.

  She poured another glass of the wine—a heavy, aromatic Bordeaux; she felt she needed ballast—and unfolded the first of Nathaniel’s letters.

  For a poet, Nathaniel was a surprisingly pedestrian writer. His sentiments were expressed in sufficiently passionate language but a very common prose, and while he made a distinct effort to meet Esmé on her own ground, he was clearly not her match, in either imagination or expression.

  Still, he was a poet, not a novelist; perhaps it wasn’t fair to judge him by his prose style alone. In two of his letters, he mentioned an enclosure, a poem written in honor of his beloved. She checked the box: no poems. Maybe Melton had burned those—or Esmé had. Nathaniel’s tone in presenting these literary gifts reminded Minnie very much of a naturalist’s description she had read—of a type of male spider who brought his chosen mate an elaborately silk-wrapped parcel containing an insect and then leapt upon her whilst she was absorbed in unwrapping her snack, hastily achieving his purpose before she could finish eating and have him for dessert.

  “She scared him,” Minnie murmured to herself, with a sense of sympathy but one tempered with a mild contempt. “Poor worm.” She was somewhat shocked to realize that contempt—and the more so to realize that Esmé had very likely felt the same.

  Hence her invoking Melton’s name in the letters to Twelvetrees? An attempt to sting him into greater ardor? She’d done it more than once; in fact—Minnie turned again to Esmé’s letters—yes, she’d mentioned her husband, by name or reference, in every letter, even the two-line assignation: My husband will be gone on his regimental business—come to me tomorrow in the oratory at four o’clock.

  “Huh,” Minnie said, and sat back, eyeing the letters as she sipped her wine. They lay in stacks and single sheets and fans before her, with the as-yet-unread folder that held Melton’s letters in the center. It looked not unlike a layout of the tarot—she’d had her own cards read several times in Paris, by an acquaintance of her father’s named Jacques, who was practicing the art.

  “Sometimes it’s quite subtle,” Jacques had said, shuffling the gaudy cards. “Especially the minor arcana. But then—sometimes it’s obvious at first glance.” This said, smiling, as he laid Death in front of her.

  She had no opinion regarding the truth laid out in tarot cards, considering that to be no more than the reflection of the client’s mind at the time of the reading. But she had definite opinions regarding letters, and she touched the two-line assignation thoughtfully.

  Where had Esmé’s letters come from? Would the Twelvetrees family have sent them to Lord Melton following Nathaniel’s death? They might, she thought. What could be more painful to him? Though that argued both a subtlety of mind and a sense of refined cruelty that she saw no trace of in Nathaniel’s letters and that she hadn’t noticed in most English people.

  Besides…what had made Melton challenge Twelvetrees in the first place? Surely Esmé hadn’t confessed the affair to him. No…Colonel Quarry had said, or at least intimated, that Melton had found incriminating letters written by his wife, and that that was what…

  She picked up the countess’s pile again, frowning at the letters. Looking carefully, she could see that each one had a blot of ink or the occasional smear—one appeared to have had water spilled over the bottom edge. So…these were drafts of letters, later copied fair to be sent to Nathaniel? If so, though, why not throw the drafts into the fire? Why keep them and risk discovery?

  “Or invite it,” she said aloud, surprising herself. She sat up straight and read the letters through again, then set them down.

  My husband will be gone… Every one. Every one of them noted Melton’s absence—and his preoccupation with his nascent regiment.

  Jacques was right; sometimes it was obvious.

  Minnie shook her head, the wine fumes mingling with the dead countess’s bitter perfume.

  “Pauvre chienne,” she said softly. “Poor bitch.”

  14

  NOTORIOUS BORES

  IT WASN’T NECESSARY TO read Lord Melton’s letters, but she couldn’t possibly have stopped herself from doing so, and she picked one up as though it were a lit grenade that might go off in her hand.

  It did. She read the five letters through without stopping. None were dated, and there was no way of telling the order in which they had been written; time had plainly been of no consequence to the writer—and yet it had meant everything. This was the voice of a man pushed off a cliff into the abyss of eternity and documenting his fall.

  I will love you forever, I cannot do otherwise, but by God, Esmé, I will hate you forever, with all the power of my soul, and had I you before me and your long white neck in my hands I would strangle you like a fucking swan and fuck you as you died, you…

  He might as well have picked up the inkwell and flung it at the page. The words were scrawled and blotted, big and black, and there were ragged holes torn through the paper where here and there he had stabbed the page with his quill.

  She took a deep, gasping breath when she came to the end, feeling as though she hadn’t breathed once in the reading. She didn’t weep, but her hands were shaking, and the last letter slipped from her fingers and floated to the floor. Weighted with loss and a grief that didn’t cut but clawed and, merciless, tore its prey to bloody ribbons.

  SHE DIDN’T READ the letters again. It would have felt like a desecration. As it was, there was no need to read them over; she thought she would never forget a word of any of them.

  She had to leave her rooms and walk for some time to regain any sense of composure. Now and then she felt tears run down her cheeks and hastily blott
ed them before any passerby should notice and ask her trouble. She felt as though she’d wept for days or as though someone had beaten her. And yet it was nothing to do with her.

  She felt one of the O’Higgins brothers following somewhere behind her, but he tactfully hung back. She walked from one end to the other of St. James’s Park, and all the way around the lake, but finally sat down on a bench near a flotilla of swans, exhausted in mind and body both. Someone sat down on the other end of the bench—Mick, she saw, from the corner of her eye.

  It was teatime; the bustle of the streets was dying down as people hurried home or dropped into a tavern or an ordinary to refresh themselves after a long day’s labor. Mick coughed in a meaning manner.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said. “You go on, if you like.”

  “Now, Bedelia. Ye know fine I’m not goin’ anywhere you don’t go.” He’d scooted along the bench and sat at her elbow, slouched and companionable. “Shall I be fetchin’ ye a pie, now? Whatever’s the trouble, it’ll seem better on a full belly.”

  She wasn’t hungry, but she was empty and, after a moment’s indecision, gave in and let him buy her a meat pie from a pie man. The smell of it was so strong and good that she felt somewhat restored just from holding it. She nibbled the crust, felt the rich flood of juice and flavor in her mouth, and, closing her eyes, gave herself over to the pie.

  “There, now.” Mick, having long since finished his own pie, sat gazing benevolently at her. “Better, is it not?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. At least she could now think about the matter, rather than drowning in it. And while she hadn’t been conscious of actually thinking at any time since leaving her rooms, evidently some back chamber of her mind had been turning things over.