Seven Stones to Stand or Fall

by Diana Gabaldon

  “Oh, indeed.” It couldn’t be patricide, could it? he thought. Strangling a stepfather, particularly under the circumstances…

  “It’s all right, me lord,” Tom put in helpfully. “I’ve brought your full-dress uniform. Just in case you might need it.”

  IN THE EVENT, the officer of the battery guarding the boom chain declined to allow Mr. Rimes to pass, but neither did he offer to sink him. There were a good many curious looks directed at the cutter, but Grey’s party was allowed to come ashore. The officer’s English was on a par with Grey’s Spanish, but after a long conversation filled with vehement gesticulations, Rodrigo convinced him to provide transport into the city.

  “What did you tell him?” Grey asked curiously, when at last they were allowed to pass through the battery guarding the west side of the harbor. An imposing fortress with a tall watchtower stood on a promontory in the distance, and he wondered whether this was Morro Castle or the other one.

  Rodrigo shrugged and said something to Azeel, who answered.

  “He didn’t understand the word ‘consul’—we don’t, either,” she added apologetically. “So Rodrigo said you have come to visit your mother, who is sick.”

  Rodrigo had been following her words with great concentration and here added something else, which she translated in turn.

  “He says everybody has a mother, sir.”

  The address General Stanley had given was the Casa Hechevarria, in Calle Yoenis. When Grey and his fellow travelers were eventually delivered to the casa by a wagon driver whose normal cargo appeared to be untanned hides, the place proved to be a large, pleasant, yellow-plastered house with a walled garden and a beehive-like air of peaceful busyness about it. Grey could hear the murmur of voices and occasional laughter within, but none of the bees seemed inclined to answer the door.

  After a wait of some five minutes had failed to produce anyone—let alone his mother or something comestible—Grey left his small, queasy party on the portico and ventured round the house. Splashing noises, sharp cries, and the reek of lye soap seemed to indicate that laundry was being done at no great distance. This impression was confirmed as he came round the corner of the house into a rear courtyard and was struck in the face by a thick cloud of hot, wet air, scented with dirty linen, woodsmoke, and fried plantains.

  A number of women and children were working in the vicinity of a huge cauldron, this mounted on a sort of brick hearth with a fire beneath—this in turn being fed by two or three small, mostly naked children who were poking sticks into it. Two women were stirring the mess in the cauldron with huge wooden forks, one of them bawling at the children in Spanish with what he assumed were dire warnings against being underfoot, not getting splashed with boiling water, and keeping well clear of the soap bucket.

  The courtyard itself looked like Dante’s Fifth Circle of Hell, with sullen gurglings from the cauldron and drifting wisps of steam and smoke giving the scene a sinister Stygian cast. More women were pinning up wet clothes on lines strung round the pillars supporting a sort of loggia, and still others were tending braziers and griddles in a corner, from which drifted the fragrant smells of food. Everyone was talking, all at once, in a Spanish punctuated by parrot-like shrieks of laughter. Knowing that his mother was much less likely to be interested in laundry than in food, he edged round the courtyard—totally ignored by everyone—toward the cooks.

  He saw her at once; her back was turned to him, hair hanging casually down her back in a long, thick plait, and she was talking, waving her hands, to a coal-black woman who was squatting, barefooted, on the tiles of the courtyard, patting out some sort of dough onto a hot greased stone.

  “That smells good,” he said, walking up beside her. “What is it?”

  “Cassava bread,” she said, turning to him and raising an eyebrow. “And platanos and ropa vieja. That means ‘old clothes,’ and while the name is quite descriptive, it’s actually very good. Are you hungry? Why do I bother asking?” she added before he could answer. “Naturally you are.”

  “Naturally,” he said, and was, the last vestiges of seasickness vanishing in the scents of garlic and spice. “I didn’t know you could speak Spanish, Mother.”

  “Well, I don’t know about speaking, so much,” she said, thumbing a straggle of graying blond hair out of her left eye, “but I gesture fluently. What are you doing here, John?”

  He glanced round the courtyard; everyone was still at their work, but every eye was fixed on him, interested.

  “Do any of your…um…associates here speak English? In a non-gestural sort of way?”

  “A few of them speak a little, yes, and Jacinto, the butler, is pretty fluent. They won’t understand you if you talk fast, though.”

  “I can do that,” he said, lowering his voice a little. “In short, your husband sent me, and…but before I acquaint you with the situation,—I brought several people with me, servants, and—”

  “Oh, did you bring Tom Byrd?” Her face blossomed into what could only be called a grin.

  “Certainly. He, along with two…er…Well, I left them on the portico; I couldn’t make anyone hear me at the door.”

  His mother said something in Spanish that he thought must be an indelicate expletive, as it made the black woman blink and then grin herself.

  “We have a porter, but he’s rather given to drink,” his mother said apologetically, and beckoned to one of the older girls hanging laundry. “Juanita! Aquí, if you please.”

  Juanita instantly abandoned her wet laundry and hastened over, dropping a perfunctory curtsy and staring at Grey in fascination.

  “Señora.”

  “Es mi hijo,” his mother said, pointing at him. “Amigos de el…” She twirled a forefinger, indicating circumnavigation, and pointed toward the front of the house, then jerked a thumb at a brazier over which an earthenware pot was bubbling. “Agua. Comida. Por favor?”

  “I’m deeply impressed,” John said, as Juanita nodded, said something fast and indecipherable, and vanished, presumably to rescue Tom and the Sanchezes. “Is comida food, by any chance?”

  “Very perceptive of you, my dear.” His mother gestured to the black lady, pointed in turn to John and herself, stabbed a finger at various pots and skewers, then nodded at a door on the far side of the courtyard and took John by the arm. “Gracias, Maricela.”

  She led him into a small, rather dark salon that smelled of citronella, candle wax, and the distinctively sewer-like aroma of small children.

  “I don’t suppose this is a diplomatic ambassage, is it?” she said, crossing the room to throw open a window. “I would have heard about that.”

  “I am for the moment incognito,” he assured her. “And with any luck, we’ll be out of here before anyone recognizes me. How fast can you organize Olivia and the children for travel?”

  She halted abruptly, hand on the windowsill, and stared at him.

  “Oh,” she said. Her expression had gone in an instant from surprise to calculation. “So it’s come to that already, has it? Where’s George?”

  “WHAT DO YOU mean, has it come to that already?” Grey said, startled. He stared hard at his mother. “Do you know about the”—he glanced round and lowered his voice, though no one was in sight and the laughter and chittering from the patio continued unabated—“the invasion?”

  Her eyes flew open wide.

  “The what?” she said loudly, then glanced hastily over her shoulder toward the open door. “When?” she said, turning back and lowering her own voice.

  “Well, now, more or less,” Grey said. He got up and quietly closed the door. The racket from the patio diminished appreciably.

  “General Stanley turned up on my doorstep in Jamaica a week ago, with the news that the British Navy was on its way to take Martinique and then—if all goes as planned—Cuba. He rather thought it would be a good idea for you and Olivia to leave before they get here.”

  “I quite agree with him.” His mother closed her eyes and rubbed her hands har
d over her face, then shook her head violently, as though dislodging bats, and opened her eyes again. “Where is he?” she asked, with some semblance of calm.

  “Jamaica. He’d, um, managed to borrow a naval cutter while the navy was preparing to take Martinique and came ahead as fast as he could, in hopes of warning you in time.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “very good of him. But why is he in Jamaica and not here?”

  “Gout.” And quite possibly a few other infirmities, but no point in worrying her. She looked sharply at him but didn’t ask further.

  “Poor George,” she said, and bit her lip. “Well, then. Olivia and the children are in the country, staying with a Señora Valdez.”

  “How far in the country?” Grey was making hasty calculations. Three women, two children, three men…four, with Malcolm. Ah, Malcolm…“Is Malcolm with them?”

  “Oh, no. I’m not sure where he is,” she added dubiously. “He travels a good deal, and with Olivia gone, he often stays in Havana;—he has an office in La Punta—that’s the fortress on the west side of the harbor. But he does sleep here now and then.”

  “Oh, does he?” Grey tried to keep the edge out of his voice, but his mother glanced at him sharply. He looked away. If she didn’t know about Malcolm’s proclivities, he wasn’t going to tell her.

  “I need to talk to him as quickly as possible,” he said. “Meanwhile, we must fetch Olivia and the children back here, but without giving the impression that there’s any sort of emergency. If you’ll write a note that will accomplish that, I’ll have Rodrigo and Azeel carry it—they can help Olivia to pack up and help mind the children on the way.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  There was a small secretaire, rustic in design, crouched in the shadows. He hadn’t noticed it until his mother opened it and swiftly produced paper, quill, and inkwell. She uncorked the latter, found it dry, said something under her breath in Greek that sounded like a curse but probably wasn’t, and, crossing the room quickly, removed a bunch of yellow flowers from a pottery vase and poured some of the water from it into the empty well.

  She shook ink powder into the well and was stirring the mixture briskly with a bedraggled quill when something occurred belatedly to Grey.

  “What did you mean, Mother, when you said, ‘It’s come to that already’? Because you didn’t know about the invasion, did you?”

  She glanced up at him sharply, ceasing to stir. Then she took a deep breath, like one marshaling her mental forces, visibly made a decision, and put down the quill and ink.

  “No,” she said, turning to him. “George had told me such a thing was being quietly discussed—but I left England with Olivia in September. War with Spain hadn’t yet been declared, though anyone could have seen that it was coming. No,” she repeated, and looked at him intently. “I meant the slave revolt.”

  John stared at his mother for the space of thirty seconds or so, then slowly sank onto a wooden pew that ran along the side of the room. He closed his eyes briefly, shook his head, and opened them.

  “Is there anything to drink in this establishment, Mother?”

  FED, WASHED, AND fortified with Spanish brandy, Grey left Tom to see to the unpacking and made his way on foot back through the city to the harbor, where the fortress of La Punta—smaller than El Morro (what was a morro? he wondered), but still impressive—guarded the western shore.

  A few people glanced at him but with no more interest than he might attract in London, and upon reaching La Punta, he was surprised at the ease with which he was not only admitted but escorted promptly to the oficina del Señor Stubbs. Granted, the Spaniards had their own notions of military readiness, but this seemed quite lax for an island at war.

  The soldier accompanying him rapped on a door, said something in Spanish, and, with a brief nod, left him.

  Footsteps, and the door opened.

  Malcolm Stubbs looked twenty years older than he had last time Grey had seen him. He was still broad-shouldered and thick-bodied, but he seemed to have softened and fallen in on himself, like a slightly decayed melon.

  “Grey!” he said, his tired face brightening. “Wherever did you spring from?”

  “Zeus’s forehead, no doubt,” Grey said. “Where have you come from, for that matter?” The skirts of Stubbs’s coat were thick with red dust, and he smelled strongly of horse.

  “Oh…here and there.” Malcolm beat the dust perfunctorily from his coat and subsided into his chair with a groan. “Oh, God. Stick your head out and call for a servant, will you? I need a drink and some food before I perish.”

  Well, he did know the Spanish word for “beer”…Sticking his head out into the corridor as advised, he spotted two servant girls loitering by the window at the far end, evidently talking to someone in the courtyard below, their conversation accompanied by a good deal of giggling.

  Interrupting this colloquy with a brief “Hoy!” he said, “Cerveza?” in a tone of polite inquiry, following this with scooping motions toward his mouth.

  “Sí, señor!” one of the girls said, with a hasty bob, adding something else in a questioning voice.

  “Certainly,” he said cordially. “Er…I mean, sí! Um…gracias,” he added, wondering what he had just agreed to. Both girls curtsied and vanished in a swirl of skirts, though, presumably to fetch something edible.

  “What is pulpo?” he asked, returning to the office and sitting down opposite Malcolm.

  “Octopus,” Malcolm replied, emerging from the folds of a linen towel with which he’d been wiping dirt from his face. “Why?”

  “Just wondered. Putting aside the usual inquiries about your health—are you all right, by the way?” he interrupted himself, looking down at what used to be Malcolm’s right foot. The boot encircled a sort of cup or stirrup, made of stiff leather with wooden reinforcements on the sides. Both wood and leather were deeply stained from long use, but there was fresh bright blood on the stocking above.

  “Oh, that.” Malcolm glanced down indifferently. “It’s all right. My horse broke down a few miles from the city, and I had to walk some way before I got another.” Bending down with a grunt, he unbuckled the appurtenance and took it off—an action that Grey found oddly more disconcerting than sight of the stump itself.

  The flesh was deeply ridged from the boot, and when Malcolm peeled the ragged stocking off, Grey saw that a wide ring of skin about the calf had been flayed raw. Malcolm hissed a little and closed his eyes, gently rubbing the end of the stump, the flesh there showing the pale blue of fresh bruising.

  “Did I ever thank you, by the way?” Malcolm asked, opening his eyes.

  “For what?” Grey said blankly.

  “Not letting me bleed to death on that field in Quebec,” Malcolm said dryly. “That slipped your mind, did it?”

  Actually, it had. There had been a great many things happening on and off that field in Quebec, and the frantic moments of grappling to get his belt loose and jerked tight round Malcolm’s spurting leg were just fragments—though vivid ones—of a fractured space where neither time nor thought existed; he’d been actually conscious that day of nothing beyond a sense of constant thunder—of the guns, of his heart, of the hooves of the Indians’ horses, all one and pounding through his blood.

  “You’re welcome,” he said politely. “As I say—putting the social courtesies to one side for the moment, I came to inform you that a rather large British fleet is on its way to invade and capture the island. Am I correct, by the way, in my assumption that the local commander does not yet realize that war has been declared?”

  Malcolm blinked. He stopped massaging his leg, straightened up, and said, “Yes. When?” His face had changed in an instant, from exhaustion and pain to alertness.

  “I think you may have as long as two weeks, but it might be less.” He gave Malcolm what details he had, as concisely as he could. Malcolm nodded, a line of concentration deepening between his brows.

  “So I’ve come to remove you and your
family,” Grey finished. “And my mother, of course.”

  Malcolm glanced at him, one eyebrow raised.

  “Me? You’ll take Olivia and the children, of course—I’m very much obliged to you and General Stanley. But I’m staying.”

  “What? What the devil for?” John was conscious of a sudden surge of temper. “Besides a pending invasion, my mother tells me there’s a bloody slave revolt in progress!”

  “Well, yes,” Malcolm said calmly. “That’s mine.”

  Before Grey could sort out a coherent response to this statement, the door opened suddenly and a sweet-faced black girl with a yellow scarf round her head and an enormous battered tin tray in her hands sidled through it.

  “Señores,” she said, curtsying despite the tray, and deposited it on the desk. “Cerveza, vino rústico, y un poco comida: moros y cristianos”—she unlidded one of the dishes, loosing a savory steam—“maduros”—that was fried plantains; Grey was familiar with those—“y pulpo con tomates, aceitunas, y vinagre!”

  “Muchas gracias, Inocencia,” Malcolm said, in what sounded like a surprisingly good accent. “Es suficiente.” He waved a hand in dismissal, but instead of leaving, she came round the desk and knelt down, frowning at his mangled leg.

  “Está bien,” Malcolm said. “No te preocupes.” He tried to turn away, but she put a hand on his knee, her face turned up to his, and said something rapid in Spanish, in a tone of scolding concern that made Grey raise his brows. It reminded him of the way Tom Byrd spoke to him when he was sick or injured—as though it were all his own fault, and he therefore ought to submit meekly to whatever frightful dose or treatment was being proposed—but there was a distinct note in the girl’s voice that Tom Byrd’s lacked entirely.

  Malcolm shook his head and replied, his own manner dismissive but kindly, and laid his hand on the girl’s yellow head for a moment. It might have been merely a friendly gesture, but it wasn’t, and Grey stiffened.