Claire didn’t answer for a moment; she was looking into the glowing bars of the electric fire, a look of unutterable distance on her face. Roger repeated his question, and slowly she came back from wherever she was.
“No,” she said. She reached for another folder, and smiled at Roger, the look of distance lingering in her eyes. “You go on, Roger,” she said. “I’ll—just look a little longer.”
When I finally found it, I nearly flipped right past it. I had not been reading the names carefully, but only skimming the pages for the letter “J.” “John, Joseph, Jacques, James.” There were James Edward, James Alan, James Walter, ad infinitum. Then it was there, the writing small and precise across the page: “Jms. MacKenzie Fraser, of Brock Turac.”
I put the page down carefully on the table, shut my eyes for a moment to clear them, then looked again. It was still there.
“Jamie,” I said aloud. My heart was beating heavily in my chest. “Jamie,” I said again, more quietly.
It was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Everyone was asleep, but the house, in the manner of old houses, was still awake around me, creaking and sighing, keeping me company. Strangely enough, I had no desire to leap up and wake Brianna or Roger, to tell them the news. I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit, as though I were alone here in the lamp-lit room with Jamie himself.
My finger traced the line of ink. The person who had written that line had seen Jamie—perhaps had written this with Jamie standing in front of him. The date at the top of the page was May 16, 1753. It had been close to this time of year, then. I could imagine how the air had been, chilly and fresh, with the rare spring sun across his shoulders, lighting sparks in his hair.
How had he worn his hair then—short, or long? He had preferred to wear it long, plaited or tailed behind. I remembered the casual gesture with which he would lift the weight of it off his neck to cool himself in the heat of exercise.
He would not have worn his kilt—the wearing of all tartans had been outlawed after Culloden. Breeks, then, likely, and a linen shirt. I had made such sarks for him; I could feel the softness of the fabric in memory, the billowing length of the three full yards it took to make one, the long tails and full sleeves that let the Highland men drop their plaids and sleep or fight with a sark their only garment. I could imagine his shoulders broad beneath the rough-woven cloth, his skin warm through it, hands touched with the chill of the Scottish spring.
He had been imprisoned before. How would he have looked, facing an English prison clerk, knowing all too well what waited for him? Grim as hell, I thought, staring down that long, straight nose with his eyes a cold, dark blue —dark and forbidding as the waters of Loch Ness.
I opened my own eyes, realizing only then that I was sitting on the edge of my chair, the folder of photocopied pages clasped tight to my chest, so caught up in my conjuration that I had not even paid attention to which prison these registers had come from.
There were several large prisons that the English had used regularly in the eighteenth century, and a number of minor ones. I turned the folder over, slowly. Would it be Berwick, near the border? The notorious Tolbooth of Edinburgh? Or one of the southern prisons, Leeds Castle or even the Tower of London?
“Ardsmuir,” said the notecard neatly stapled to the front of the folder.
“Ardsmuir?” I said blankly. “Where the hell is
8
HONOR’S PRISONER
“Ardsmuir is the carbuncle on God’s bum,” Colonel Harry Quarry said. He raised his glass sardonically to the young man by the window. “I’ve been here a twelvemonth, and that’s eleven months and twenty-nine days too long. Give you joy of your new posting, my Lord.”
Major John William Grey turned from the window over the courtyard, where he had been surveying his new domain.
“It does appear a trifle incommodious,” he agreed dryly, picking up his own glass. “Does it rain
“Of course. It’s Scotland—and the backside of bloody Scotland, at that.” Quarry took a deep pull at his whisky, coughed, and exhaled noisily as he set down the empty glass.
“The drink is the only compensation,” he said, a trifle hoarsely. “Call on the local booze-merchants in your best uniform, and they’ll make you a decent price. It’s astounding cheap, without the tariff. I’ve left you a note of the best stills.” He nodded toward the massive oaken desk at the side of the room, planted four-square on its island of carpet like a small fortress confronting the barren room. The illusion of fortifications was enhanced by the banners of regiment and nation that hung from the stone wall behind it.
“The guards’ roster is here,” Quarry said, rising and groping in the top desk drawer. He slapped a battered leather folder on the desktop, and added another on top of that. “And the prisoners’ roll. You have one hundred and ninety-six at the moment; two hundred is the usual count, give or take a few deaths from sickness or the odd poacher taken up in the countryside.”
“Two hundred,” Grey said. “And how many in the guards’ barracks?”
“Eighty-two, by number. In use, about half that.” Quarry reached into the drawer again and withdrew a brown glass bottle with a cork. He shook it, heard it slosh, and smiled sardonically. “The commander isn’t the only one to find consolation in drink. Half the sots are usually incapable at roll call. I’ll leave this for you, shall I? You’ll need it.” He put the bottle back and pulled out the lower drawer.
“Requisitions and copies here; the paperwork’s the worst of the post. Not a great deal to do, really, if you’ve a decent clerk. You haven’t, at the moment; I had a corporal who wrote a fairish hand, but he died two weeks ago. Train up another, and you’ll have nothing to do save to hunt for grouse and the Frenchman’s Gold.” He laughed at his own joke; rumors of the gold that Louis of France had supposedly sent to his cousin Charles Stuart were rife in this end of Scotland.
“The prisoners are not difficult?” Grey asked. “I had understood them to be mostly Jacobite Highlanders.”
