“James MacKenzie Fraser,” he murmured. He looked up from the paper to the sleeping woman on the sofa. The light had just touched the curve of her ear; she stirred briefly and turned her head, then her face lapsed back into somnolence.
“I don’t know who you were, mate,” he whispered to the unseen Scot, “but you must have been something, to deserve her.”
Very gently, he replaced the rug over Claire’s shoulders, and lowered the blind of the window behind her. Then he squatted and gathered up the scattered papers from the Ardsmuir folder. Ardsmuir. That was all he needed for now; even if Jamie Fraser’s eventual fate was not recorded in the pages in his hands, it would be somewhere in the history of Ardsmuir prison. It might take another foray into the Highland archives, or even a trip to London, but the next step in the link had been forged; the path was clear.
Brianna was coming down the stairs as he pulled the door of the study closed, moving with exaggerated caution. She arched a brow in question and he lifted the folder, smiling.
“Got him,” he whispered.
She didn’t speak, but an answering smile spread across her face, bright as the rising sun outside.
PART FOUR
14
GENEVA
“I think,” Grey said carefully, “that you might consider changing your name.”
He didn’t expect an answer; in four days of travel, Fraser had not spoken a single word to him, managing even the awkward business of sharing an inn room without direct communication. Grey had shrugged and taken the bed, while Fraser, without gesture or glance, had wrapped himself in his threadbare cloak and lain down before the hearth. Scratching an assortment of bites from fleas and bedbugs, Grey thought that Fraser might well have had the better end of the sleeping arrangements.
“Your new host is not well disposed toward Charles Stuart and his adherents, having lost his only son at Prestonpans,” he went on, addressing the iron-set profile visible next to him. Gordon Dunsany had been only a few years older than himself, a young captain in Bolton’s regiment. They might easily have died together on that field—if not for that meeting in the wood near Carryarrick.
“You can scarcely hope to conceal the fact that you are a Scot, and a Highlander at that. If you will condescend to consider a piece of well-meant advice, it might be judicious not to use a name which would be as easily recognized as your own.”
Fraser’s stony expression didn’t alter in the slightest particular. He nudged his horse with a heel and guided it ahead of Grey’s bay, seeking the remains of the track, washed out by a recent flood.
It was late afternoon when they crossed the arch of Ashness Bridge and started down the slope toward Watendlath Tarn. The Lake District of England was nothing like Scotland, Grey reflected, but at least there were mountains here. Round-flanked, fat and dreamy mountains, not sternly forbidding like the Highland crags, but mountains nonetheless.
Watendlath Tarn was dark and ruffled in the early autumn wind, its edges thick with sedge and marsh grass. The summer rains had been more generous even than usual in this damp place, and the tips of drowned shrubs poked limp and tattered above water that had run over its banks.
At the crest of the next hill, the track split, going off in two directions. Fraser, some distance ahead, pulled his horse to a stop and waited for direction, the wind ruffling his hair. He had not plaited it that morning, and it blew free, the flaming strands lifting wild about his head.
Squelching his way up the slope, John William Grey looked up at the man above him, still as a bronze statue on his mount, save for that rippling mane. The breath dried in his throat, and he licked his lips.
“O Lucifer, thou son of the morning,” he murmured to himself, but forbore to add the rest of the quotation.
For Jamie, the four-day ride to Helwater had been torture. The sudden illusion of freedom, combined with the certainty of its immediate loss, gave him a dreadful anticipation of his unknown destination.
This, with the anger and sorrow of his parting from his men fresh in memory—the wrenching loss of leaving the Highlands, with the knowledge that the parting might well be permanent—and his waking moments suffused with the physical pain of long-unused saddle muscles, were together enough to have kept him in torment for the whole of the journey. Only the fact that he had given his parole kept him from pulling Major John William Grey off his horse and throttling him in some peaceful lane.
Grey’s words echoed in his ears, half-obliterated by the thrumming beat of his angry blood.
“As the renovation of the fortress has largely been completed—with the able assistance of yourself and your men”—Grey had allowed a tinge of irony to show in his voice—“the prisoners are to be removed to other accommodation, and the fortress of Ardsmuir garrisoned by troops of His Majesty’s Twelfth Dragoons.
“The Scottish prisoners of war are to be transported to the American Colonies,” he continued. “They will be sold under bond of indenture, for a term of seven years.”
Jamie had kept himself carefully expressionless, but at that news, had felt his face and hands go numb with shock.
“Indenture? That is no better than slavery,” he said, but did not pay much attention to his own words. America! A land of wilderness and savages—and one to be reached across three thousand miles of empty, roiling sea! Indenture in America was a sentence tantamount to permanent exile from Scotland.
