“Er, well.…” I didn’t want to disparage anyone’s reputation, but my glance across the hall at Monsieur Voleru must have been transparent.
Mother Hildegarde laughed. “Well, we take what God sends us, though occasionally I wonder whether He sends them to us only in order to keep them out of greater trouble elsewhere. Still, the bulk of our physicians are better than nothing—even if only marginally so. You”—and the teeth flashed once more, reminding me of a genial draft horse—“are a great deal better than nothing, Madame.”
“Thanks.”
“I have wondered, though,” Mother Hildegarde went on, watching as I applied the medicated dressing, “why you see only the patients with wounds and broken bones? You avoid those with spots and coughs and fevers, yet it is more common for les maîtresses to deal with such things. I don’t think I have ever seen a female chirurgien before.” Les maîtresses were the unlicensed healers, mostly from the provinces, who dealt in herbals, poultices, and charms. Les maîtresses sage-femme were the midwives, the top of the heap so far as popular healers were concerned. Many were accorded more respect than the licensed practitioners, and were much preferred by the lower-class patients, as they were likely to be both more capable and much less expensive.
I wasn’t surprised that she had observed my proclivities; I had gathered long since that very little about her Hôpital escaped Mother Hildegarde’s notice.
“It isn’t lack of interest,” I assured her. “It’s only that I’m with child, so I can’t expose myself to anything contagious, for the child’s sake. Broken bones aren’t catching.”
“Sometimes I wonder,” said Mother Hildegarde, with a glance at an incoming stretcher. “We’re having a plague of them this week. No, don’t go.” She motioned me back. “Sister Cecile will see to it. She’ll call you if there’s need.”
The nun’s small gray eyes regarded me with curiosity, mingled with appraisal.
“So, you are not only a milady, you are with child, but your husband does not object to your coming here? He must be a most unusual man.”
“Well, he’s Scottish,” I said, by way of explanation, not wishing to go into the subject of my husband’s objections.
“Oh, Scottish.” Mother Hildegarde nodded understandingly. “Just so.”
The bed trembled against my thigh as Bouton leaped off and trotted toward the door.
“He smells a stranger,” Mother Hildegarde remarked. “Bouton assists the doorkeeper as well as the physicians—with no more gratitude for his efforts, I fear.”
The sounds of peremptory barks and a high voice raised in terror came through the double doors of the entryway.
“Oh, it’s Father Balmain again! Curse the man, can’t he learn to stand still and let Bouton smell him?” Mother Hildegarde turned in haste to the succor of her companion, turning back at the last moment to smile engagingly at me. “Perhaps I will send him to assist you with your tasks, Madame, while I soothe Father Balmain. While no doubt a most holy man, he lacks true appreciation for the work of an artist.”
She strode toward the doors with her long, unhurried stride, and with a last word for the carter, I turned to Sister Cecile and the latest stretcher case.
* * *
Jamie was lying on the carpet in the sitting room when I came back to the house, with a small boy sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him. Jamie was holding a bilboquet in one hand, and had the other poised over one eye.
“Of course I can,” he was saying. “Anyday and twice on Sundays. Watch.”
Placing the hand over his eye, he fixed the other piercingly on the bilboquet and gave the ivory cup a toss. The tethered ball leaped from its socket into an arc, and dropped as though guided by radar, landing back in its cup with a snug little plop.
“See?” he said, removing the hand from his eye. He sat up and handed the cup to the boy. “Here, you try it.” He grinned at me, and slid a hand under the hem of my skirt, clasping my green silk ankle in greeting.
“Having fun?” I inquired.
“Not yet,” he replied, giving the ankle a squeeze. “I was waiting for you, Sassenach.” The long, warm fingers curled around my ankle slid higher, playfully stroking the curve of my calf, as a pair of limpid blue eyes gazed up at me, all innocence. His face had a streak of dried mud down one side, and there were dirty blotches on his shirt and kilt.
“Is that so?” I said, trying to pull my leg free of his grasp inconspicuously. “I should have thought your little playmate would have been all the company you needed.”
The boy, understanding none of the English in which these exchanges were conducted, ignored them, intent on trying to work the bilboquet with one eye closed. The first two attempts having failed, he opened the second eye and glared at the toy, as though daring it not to work. The second eye closed again, but not all the way; a small slit remained, gleaming alertly below the thick fringe of dark lashes.
Jamie clicked his tongue disapprovingly, and the eye hastily snapped tight shut.
“Nah, then, Fergus, we’ll have nay cheatin’, if ye please,” he said. “Fair’s fair.” The boy obviously caught the meaning, if not the words; he grinned sheepishly, displaying a pair of large, white, gleamingly perfect front teeth, square as a squirrel’s.
Jamie’s hand exerted an invisible pull, obliging me to move closer to him to avoid being toppled off my moroccan heels.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, Fergus here is a man of many talents, and a boon companion for the idle hours when a man’s wife has deserted him and left him to seek his own pursuits amidst the wickedness of the city”—the long fingers curled delicately into the hollow behind my knee, tickling suggestively—“but he isna qualified as a partner for the pastime I had in mind.”
“Fergus?” I said, eyeing the boy, and trying to ignore the goings-on below. The lad was possibly nine or ten, but small for his age, and fine-boned as a ferret. Clad in clean, worn clothes several sizes too big for him, he was also as French as they come, with the pale, sallow skin and big, dark eyes of a Parisian street child.
“Well, his name is really Claudel, but we decided that didna sound verra manly, so he’s to be called Fergus instead. A suitable warrior’s name, that.” Catching the sound of his name—or names—the boy glanced up and grinned shyly at me.
“This is Madame,” Jamie explained to the boy, gesturing to me with his free hand. “You may call her milady. I dinna think he could manage ‘Broch Tuarach,’ ” he added to me, “or even Fraser, for that matter.”
“ ‘Milady’ will be fine,” I said, smiling. I wriggled my leg harder, trying to shake off the leechlike grip. “Er, why, if I may ask?”
“Why what? Oh, why Fergus, ye mean?”
“That’s what I mean, all right.” I wasn’t sure just how far his arm would reach, but the hand was creeping slowly up the back of my thigh. “Jamie, take your hand away this minute!”
The fingers darted to one side, and deftly pulled loose the ribbon garter that held up my stocking. The stocking slithered down my leg to puddle round my ankle.
“You beast!” I kicked at him, but he dodged aside, laughing.
“Oh, beast, is it? What kind?”
“A cur!” I snapped, trying to bend over to pull up my stocking without falling off my heels. The child Fergus, after a brief, incurious glance at us, had resumed his trials with the bilboquet.
“As for the lad,” he continued blithely, “Fergus is now in my employ.”
“To do what?” I asked. “We already have a boy who cleans the knives and boots, and a stable-lad.”
Jamie nodded. “Aye, that’s true. We havena got a pickpocket, though. Or rather, we hadn’t; we have, now.”
I drew in my breath and blew it out again slowly.
“I see. I suppose it would be dense of me to ask exactly why we need to add a pickpocket to the household?”
“To steal letters, Sassenach,” Jamie said calmly.
“Oh,” I said, light beginning to dawn.
&nb
sp; “I canna get anything sensible out of His Highness; when he’s with me, he wilna do anything but moan about Louise de La Tour, or grind his teeth and curse because they’ve been quarreling again. In either case, all he wants to do is to get drunk as quickly as possible. Mar is losing all patience with him, for he’s haughty and sullen by turns. And I canna get anything out of Sheridan.”
The Earl of Mar was the most respected of the exiled Scottish Jacobites in Paris. A man whose long and illustrious prime was only now beginning to edge into elderliness, he had been the primary supporter of King James at the abortive Rising in 1715, and had followed his king into exile after the defeat at Sheriffsmuir. I had met the Earl and liked him; an elderly, courtly man with a personality as straight as his backbone. He was now doing his best—with little reward, it seemed—for his lord’s son. I had met Thomas Sheridan, too; the Prince’s tutor—an elderly man who handled His Highness’s correspondence, translating impatience and illiteracy into courtly French and English.
I sat down and pulled my stocking back up. Fergus, apparently hardened to the sight of female limbs, ignored me altogether, concentrating grimly on the bilboquet.
“Letters, Sassenach,” he said. “I need the letters. Letters from Rome, sealed with the Stuart crest. Letters from France, letters from England, letters from Spain. We can get them either from the Prince’s house—Fergus can go with me, as a page—or possibly from the papal messenger who brings them; that would be a bit better, as we’d have the information in advance.”
“So, we’ve made the bargain,” Jamie said, nodding at his new servant. “Fergus will do his best to get what I need, and I will provide him with clothes and lodging and thirty écus a year. If he’s caught while doing my service, I’ll do my best to buy him off. If it canna be done, and he loses a hand or an ear, then I maintain him for the rest of his life, as he wilna be able to pursue his profession. And if he’s hanged, then I guarantee to have Masses said for his soul for the space of a year. I think that’s fair, no?”
I felt a cold hand pass down my spine.
“Jesus Christ, Jamie” was all I could find to say.
He shook his head, and reached out a hand for the bilboquet. “Not our Lord, Sassenach. Pray to St. Dismas. The patron saint of thieves and traitors.”
Jamie reached over and took the bilboquet from the boy. He flicked his wrist sharply and the ivory ball rose in a perfect parabola, to descend into its cup with an inevitable plop.
“I see,” I said. I eyed the new employee with interest as he took the toy Jamie offered him and started in on it once more, dark eyes gleaming with concentration. “Where did you get him?” I asked curiously.
“I found him in a brothel.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. “To be sure.” I eyed the dirt and smears on his clothes. “Which you were visiting for some really excellent reason, I expect?”
“Oh, aye,” he said. He sat back, arms wrapped about his knees, grinning as he watched me make repairs to my garter. “I thought you’d prefer me to be found in such an establishment, to the alternative of bein’ found in a dark alleyway, wi’ my head bashed in.”
I saw the boy Fergus’s eyes focus at a spot somewhat past the bilboquet, where a tray of iced cakes stood on a table near the wall. A small, pointed pink tongue darted out across his lower lip.
“I think your protégé is hungry,” I said. “Why don’t you feed him, and then you can tell me just what in bloody hell happened this afternoon.”
“Well, I was on my way to the docks,” he began, obediently rising to his feet, “and just past the Rue Eglantine, I began to have a queer feeling up the back of my neck.”
Jamie Fraser had spent two years in the army of France, fought and stolen with a gang of Scottish “broken men,” and been hunted as an outlaw through the moors and mountains of his native land. All of which had left him with an extreme sensitivity to the sensation of being followed.
He couldn’t have said whether it was the sound of a footfall, too close behind, or the sight of a shadow that shouldn’t be there, or something less tangible—the scent of evil on the air, perhaps—but he had learned that the prickle of warning among the short hairs of his neck was something to be ignored at his peril.
Promptly obeying the dictates of his cervical vertebrae, he turned left instead of right at the next corner, ducked around a whelk-seller’s stall, cut between a barrow filled with steamed puddings and another of fresh vegetable marrows, and into a small charcuterie.
Pressed against the wall near the doorway, he peered out through a screen of hanging duck carcasses. Two men entered the street no more than a second later, walking close together, glancing quickly from side to side.
Every workingman in Paris carried the marks of his trade upon his person, and it didn’t take much of a nose to detect the whiff of sea-salt on these two. If the small gold hoop in the shorter man’s ear had not been a dead giveaway, the deep reddish-brown of their faces would have made it clear they were deep-water sailors.
Accustomed to the cramped quarters of shipboard and quay taverns, seamen seldom walked in a straight line. These two slid through the crowded alley like eels through rocks, eyes flicking past beggars, servingmaids, housewives, merchants; sea wolves assessing potential prey.
“I let them get well past the shop,” Jamie explained, “and I was just about to step out and go back the other way, when I saw another of them at the mouth of the alley.”
This man wore the same uniform as the other two; sidelocks heavily coated with grease, a fish knife at his side and a marlinspike the length of a man’s forearm thrust through his belt. Short and thickset, the man stood still at the end of the alley, holding his ground against the buffeting waves of commerce that ebbed and flowed through the narrow passage. Clearly he had been left on guard, while his fellows quested ahead.
“So I was left wondering what best to do,” Jamie said, rubbing his nose. “I was safe enough where I was, but there was no back way from the shop, and the moment I stepped from the doorway, I’d be seen.” He glanced down reflectively, smoothing the crimson fabric of his kilt across his thigh. An enormous red barbarian was going to be conspicuous, no matter how thick the crowd.
“So what did you do?” I asked. Fergus, ignoring the conversation, was stuffing his pockets methodically with cakes, pausing for a hasty bite every so often in the process. Jamie caught my glance at the boy and shrugged.
“He’ll not have been in the habit of eating regularly,” he said. “Let him be.”
“All right,” I said. “But go on—what did you do?”
“Bought a sausage,” he said promptly.
A Dunedin, to be exact. Made of spiced duck, ham and venison, boiled, stuffed and sun-dried, a Dunedin sausage measured eighteen inches from end to end and was as hard as seasoned oakwood.
“I couldna step out wi’ my sword drawn,” Jamie explained, “but I didna like the idea of stepping past the fellow in the alleyway wi’ no one at my back, and empty hands.”
Bearing the Dunedin at port arms, and keeping a weather eye on the passing crowd, Jamie had stepped boldly down the alley, toward the watcher at its mouth.
The man had met his gaze quite calmly, showing no sign of any malign intent. Jamie might have thought his original premonition mistaken, had he not seen the watcher’s eyes flick briefly to something over Jamie’s shoulder. Obeying the instincts that had kept him alive thus far, he had dived forward, knocking the watcher down and sliding on his face across the filthy cobbles of the street.
The crowd scattered before him with shrieks of alarm, and he rolled to his feet to see the flung knife that had missed him, quivering in the boards of a ribbon stall.
“If I’d had a bit of doubt it was me they wanted, I didna fret about it longer,” he said dryly.
He had kept hold of the sausage, and now found use for it, swinging it smartly across the face of one attacker.
“I broke his nose, I think,” he said meditatively. “Anyway, he reel
ed back, and I shoved past and took off running, down the Rue Pelletier.”
The inhabitants of the street scattered before him like geese, startled by the sight of a hurtling Scotsman, kilts flying around his churning knees. He didn’t stop to look behind; by the shouts of indignant passersby, he could tell that the assailants were still in pursuit.
This part of the city was seldom patrolled by the King’s Guard, and the crowd itself offered little protection other than a simple obstruction that might slow his pursuers. No one was likely to interfere in a matter of violence on a foreigner’s behalf.
“There are no alleys off the Rue Pelletier. I needed at least to get to a place where I could draw my sword and have a wall at my back,” Jamie explained. “So I pushed at the doors as I passed, ’til I hit one that opened.”
Dashing into a gloomy hallway, past a startled porter, and through a hanging drape, he had shot into the center of a large, well-lighted room, and come to a screeching halt in the middle of one Madame Elise’s salon, the scent of perfume heavy in his nostrils.
“I see,” I said, biting my lip. “I, um, trust you didn’t draw your sword in there?”
Jamie narrowed his eyes at me, but didn’t deign to reply directly.
“I’ll leave it to you, Sassenach,” he said dryly, “to imagine what it feels like to arrive unexpectedly in the midst of a brothel, in possession of a verra large sausage.”
My imagination proved fully equal to this task, and I burst out laughing.
“God, I wish I could have seen you!” I said.
“Thank God ye didn’t!” he said fervently. A furious blush glowed on his cheekbones.
Ignoring remarks from the fascinated inmates, Jamie had made his way awkwardly through what he described, shuddering, as “tangles o’ bare limbs,” until he had spotted Fergus against one wall, regarding the intruder with a round-eyed astonishment.
Seizing upon this unexpected manifestation of maleness, Jamie had gripped the lad by the shoulder, and fervently implored him to show the way to the nearest exit, without loss of a moment.
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