The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  However, I had the same concerns regarding the main characters of the Outlander books that obtained when I wrote “Hellfire.” Reflecting that it had worked once, so why not?, I decided to call Lord John into active duty once more.

  The difficulty being, of course, that Lord John is not a time traveler, a telepath, a shape-shifter, or even an inhabitant of an alternate universe loosely based on the history and culture of Scotland or Turkestan. But, on the other hand, there was no requirement that the main character of this putative novella be himself a creature of fantasy—and a story in which a perfectly normal (well, more or less) hero comes into conflict with supernatural creatures is a solid archetype. Hey, if it was good enough for Homer, it’s good enough for me.

  Set in Germany (which didn’t exist in a political sense but was a recognizable geographical region) during the early phases of the Seven Years’ War, “Succubus” is a supernatural murder mystery with military flourishes.]

  GREY’S SPOKEN GERMAN was improving by leaps and bounds, but found itself barely equal to the present task.

  After a long, boring day of rain and paperwork, there had come the sound of loud dispute in the corridor outside his office, and the head of Lance-Korporal Helwig appeared in his doorway, wearing an apologetic expression.

  “Major Grey?” he said. “Ich habe ein kleines Englische problem.”

  A moment later, Lance-Korporal Helwig had disappeared down the corridor like an eel sliding into mud, and Major John Grey, English liaison to the Imperial Fifth Regiment of Hanoverian Foot, found himself adjudicating a three-way dispute among an English private, a gypsy prostitute, and a Prussian tavern owner.

  Having resolved the situation, Major Grey resumes a quick letter to his brother, outlining his present situation:

  …I am quartered with several other English and German officers in the house of a Princess Louisa von Lowenstein…

  We have two English regiments quartered here: Sir Peter Hicks’s 35th, and half of the 52nd—I am told Colonel Ruysdale is in command, but have not yet met him…

  French forces are reported to be within twenty miles, but we expect no immediate trouble. Still, so late in the year, the snow will come soon and put an end to the fighting; they may try for a final thrust before the winter sets in. Sir Peter begs me send his regards…

  Lord John is up to his neck in requisitions when a welcome interruption occurs.

  Captain Stephan von Namtzen, Landgrave von Erdberg, poked his handsome blond head through the doorway, ducking automatically to avoid braining himself on the lintel. The gentleman following him had no such difficulty, being a foot or so shorter.

  “Captain von Namtzen,” Grey said, standing politely. “May I be of assistance?”

  “I have here Herr Blomberg,” Stephan said in English, indicating the small, round, nervous-looking individual who accompanied him. “He wishes to borrow your horse.”

  Grey was sufficiently startled by this that he merely said, “Which one?” rather than “Who is Herr Blomberg?” or “What does he want with a horse?”

  ***

  “Herr Blomberg is the bürgermeister of the town,” Stephan explained, taking matters in a strictly logical order of importance, as was his habit. “He requires a white stallion, in order that he shall discover and destroy a succubus. Someone has told him that you possess such a horse,” he concluded, frowning at the temerity of whoever had been bandying such information.

  “A succubus?” Grey asked, automatically rearranging the logical order of this speech, as was his habit.

  With Stephan’s assistance, Lord John learns that the town of Gundwitz has been suffering mysterious and disturbing events: numbers of young men (many of them soldiers quartered in the town) have been claiming to have been victimized in their sleep by a young woman of demonic aspect. By the time these events made their way to the attention of Herr Blomberg, the situation was serious. A man had died.

  Not only a man but a soldier, and not merely a soldier but one of the Prussian cavalrymen under Stephan’s command. Obviously, something must be done.

  The unraveling of the mystery of the night hag (as the Germans refer to the succubus) leads to murder, spying, military maneuvers (as the French troops nearby begin to move, threatening Schloss Lowenstein), ancient evil, and present treachery—to say nothing of Lord John’s personal entanglements, between his growing (and possibly mutual) attraction to Stephan von Namtzen and the evident attraction of the Princess Louisa to him. Add in the penis of St. Orgevald, and you have more than enough to keep one British major busy.

  LORD JOHN AND THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE BLADE

  London, January 1758

  The Society for Appreciation of the English Beefsteak, A Gentlemen’s Club

  To the best of Lord John Grey’s knowledge, stepmothers as depicted in fiction tended to be venal, evil, cunning, homicidal, and occasion ally cannibalistic. Stepfathers, by contrast, seemed negligible, if not completely innocuous.

  “Squire Allworthy, do you think?” he said to his brother. “Or Claudius?”

  Hal stood restlessly twirling the club’s terrestrial globe, looking elegant, urbane, and thoroughly indigestible. He left off performing this activity, and gave Grey a look of incomprehension.

  “What?”

  “Stepfathers,” Grey explained. “There seem remarkably few of them among the pages of novels, by contrast to the maternal variety. I merely wondered where Mother’s new acquisition might fall, along the spectrum of character.”

  Hal’s nostrils flared. His own reading tended to be confined to Tacitus and the more detailed Greek and Roman histories of military endeavor. The practice of reading novels he regarded as a form of moral weakness; forgivable, and in fact, quite understandable in their mother, who was, after all, a woman. That his younger brother should share in this vice was somewhat less acceptable.

  However, he merely said, “Claudius? From Hamlet? Surely not, John, unless you happen to know something about Mother that I do not.”

  Grey was reasonably sure that he knew a number of things about their mother that Hal did not, but this was neither the time nor place to mention them.

  A “brother of the blade” was eighteenth-century slang for a soldier—and the Greys have been soldiers since Hal and John’s father raised a regiment to defend his king against the Jacobites in 1715, receiving a dukedom in reward for his loyalty.

  But it’s been seventeen years since Lord John’s late father, the Duke of Pardloe, was found dead, a pistol in his hand and accusations of his role as a Jacobite agent staining his family’s honor. Hal refuses to use his father’s tainted title, keeping instead the earlier family title, Earl of Melton. But now Hal has mysteriously received a page of their late father’s missing diary—and John is convinced that someone is taunting the Grey family with secrets from the grave.

  And there’s also a new brother to consider: Percy Wainwright, who John had met briefly (in Lord John and the Private Matter) in circumstances making it clear that Percy shares John’s own proclivities in the matter of sexual attraction. Percy’s stepfather is now marrying Benedicta Grey, dowager Duchess of Pardloe, and Hal and John’s mother.

  By the time the pudding arrived, though, cordial relations appeared to have been established on all fronts. Sir George had replied satisfactorily to all Hal’s questions, seeming quite untroubled by the intrusive nature of some of them. In fact, Grey had the feeling that Sir George was privately rather amused by his brother, though taking great care to ensure that Hal was not aware of it.

  Meanwhile, he and Percy Wainwright had discovered a mutual enthusiasm for horse-racing, the theater, and French novelists—a discussion of this last subject causing his brother to mutter, “Oh, God!” beneath his breath and order a fresh round of brandy.

  Snow had begun to fall outside; in a momentary lull in the conversation, Grey heard the whisper of it against the window, though the heavy drapes were closed against the winter’s chill, and candles lit the room. A pleasant shiv
er ran down his back at the sound.

  “Do you find the room cold, Lord John?” Wainwright asked, noticing.

  He did not; there was an excellent fire, roaring away in the hearth and constantly kept up by the ministrations of the Beefsteak’s servants. Beyond that, a plentitude of hot food, wine, and brandy ensured sufficient warmth. Even now, the steward was bringing in cups of mulled wine, and a Caribbean hint of cinnamon spiced the air.

  “No,” he replied, taking his cup from the proffered tray. “But there is nothing so pleasant as being inside, warm and well-fed, when the elements are hostile without. Do you not agree?”

  “Oh, yes.” Wainwright’s eyelids had gone heavy, and he leaned back in his chair, his clear skin flushed in the candlelight. “Most…pleasant.” Long fingers touched his neckcloth briefly, as though finding it a little tight.

  Awareness floated warm in the air between them, heady as the scents of cinnamon and wine. Hal and Sir George were beginning to make noises indicative of leave-taking, with many expressions of mutual regard.

  Percy’s long dark lashes rested for a moment on his cheek, and then swept up, so that his eyes met Grey’s.

  “Perhaps you would be interested to come with me to Lady Jonas’s salon—Diderot will be there. Saturday afternoon, if you are at liberty?”

  So, shall we be lovers, then?

  “Oh, yes,” said Grey, and touched the linen napkin to his mouth. His pulse throbbed in his fingertips. “I think so.”

  Well, he thought, I don’t suppose it’s really incest, and pushed his chair back to arise.

  Percy joins the family regiment, as well as the family, and John’s relationship with him deepens—only to come apart disastrously in Germany, where the regiment has been sent to fight. Percy is arrested for the crime of sodomy, threatened with hanging if convicted.

  John’s anguish over the situation is superseded, though, by more-pressing matters: the Battle of Crefeld, in the course of which he’s separated from his troops, nearly captured, and ends up taking command of a cannon crew whose captain has just been spectacularly decapitated by a bouncing enemy cannonball. Lord John and his crew fight their gun heroically, until said gun explodes, killing part of the crew and ending John’s further involvement in the battle.

  As he slowly recovers from his wounds, John returns to his interrupted investigations into his father’s death and wrestles with the dilemma of what—if anything—to do about Percy. At last, he turns to the only man who—ironically—he can speak to frankly: his prisoner, Jamie Fraser.

  He’s well aware that Fraser hates him. At the same time, Fraser is the only man who knows the truth of John’s sexuality—but cannot reveal it to anyone—and who John knows to be an honest man who will give him an honest answer. Jamie does give John the honesty he requires to make the necessary difficult decisions he’s facing—but the subsequent exchange of frankness results in an explosion that apparently ruptures the fragile relations between the two men for good.

  Still, John now sees the path before him and manages both to save Percy and to discover the ultimate truth behind his father’s death.

  Reginald Holmes, head steward of White’s Chocolate House, was spending a peaceful late evening in going over the members’ accounts in his office. He had just rung the bell for a waiter to bring him another whisky to facilitate this task when the sounds of an ungodly rumpus reached him from the public rooms below, shouts, cheers, and the noise of overturning furniture causing him to upset the ink.

  “What’s going on now, for God’s sake?” he asked crossly, mopping at the puddle with his handkerchief as one of the waiters appeared in his doorway. “Do these men never sleep? Bring me a cloth, Bob, will you?”

  “Yes, sir.” The waiter bowed respectfully. “The Duke of Pardloe has arrived, sir, with his brother. The duke’s respects, sir, and he would like you to come and witness the settling of a wager in the book.”

  “The Duke of—” Holmes stood up, forgetting the ink on his sleeve. “And he wants to settle a wager?”

  “Yes, sir. His Grace is very drunk, sir,” the waiter added delicately. “And he’s brought a number of friends in a similar condition.”

  “Yes, I hear.” Holmes stood for a moment, considering. Disjoint strains of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” reached him through the floor. He took up his accounts ledger and his quill, and turned to the page headed Earl of Melton. Drawing a neat line through this, he amended the heading to Duke of Pardloe, and with a flourish, inserted beneath it a new item reading, Breakages.

  LORD JOHN AND THE HAUNTED SOLDIER

  [Author’s Note: I’m indebted to Outlander Wiki for the first part of this excellently concise summary.]

  In November 1758, following the events of June in Brotherhood of the Blade, the surviving members of the gun crew manning the cannon “Tom Pilchard” at Crefeld are brought before a board of inquiry, including Lord John Grey.

  Grey, who commanded the cannon crew upon the abrupt death of Lt. Philip Lister, is both troubled and insulted by the questioning, and stalks out of the inquiry. He does see the remains of the burst cannon, and briefly presents a missing piece; shrapnel from the gun that had been removed from his chest by surgeons, but Grey refuses to surrender it. Eventually, this piece will be the only remaining evidence that the cannons were poorly manufactured. At least one piece of metal remains in Grey’s chest, and this along with residual damage leave Grey with severe chest pains and uncontrolled shaking.

  Harry Quarry warns Grey about Col. Twelvetrees’s willingness to use the cannon inquiry to goad John into action that will be used to discredit either him, his brother Hal, or both. He suggests Grey be seconded to the 65th or 78th regiments temporarily to stay out of Twelvetrees’s way for a while, but Grey instead begins to investigate the cannon failures himself.

  When Grey returns Lt. Lister’s sword to the man’s father, the elder Lister begs Grey’s assistance in locating the missing fiancée and child of his late son. While on these tasks, he discovers political intrigue surrounding his half-brother’s government contract for supplying black powder to the military, and meets Captain Fanshawe and the other members of Edgar’s consortium.

  GREY WRITES ON two occasions to his paroled charge, James Fraser; starkly honest confessions of his cares and worries that are never sent, but serve to help ground Grey’s thoughts and emotions. Here is an excerpt from Lord John and the Haunted Soldier:

  It was very late, but John Grey was not yet asleep. He sat by the fire in his quarters in the barracks, the distant sounds of the night watch outside his window, writing steadily.

  …and so it is ended. You may imagine the difficulties of discovering a wet-nurse in an army barracks in the middle of the night, but Tom Byrd has arranged matters and the child is cared for. I will send to Simon Coles tomorrow, that he may undertake the business of bringing the boy to his family—perhaps such an ambassage will pave the way for him in his courtship of Miss Barbara. I hope so.

  I cling to the thought of Simon Coles. His goodness, his idealism—foolish though it may be—is a single bright spot in the dark quagmire of this wretched business.

  God knows I am neither ignorant nor innocent of the ways of the world. And yet I feel unclean, so much evil as I have met tonight. It weighs upon my spirit; thus I write to cleanse myself of it.

  He paused, dipped the pen, and continued.

  I do believe in God, though I am not a religious man such as yourself. Sometimes I wish I were, so as to have the relief of confession. But I am a rationalist, and thus left to flounder in disgust and disquiet, without your positive faith in ultimate justice.

  Between the cold consciencelessness of the government and the maniac passion of Marcus Fanshawe, I am left almost to admire the common, ordinary, self-interested evil of Neil Stapleton; he is so nearly virtuous by contrast.

  He paused again, hesitating, bit the end of the quill, but then dipped it and went on.

  A strange thought occurs to me. There is of cour
se no point of similarity between yourself and Stapleton in terms of circumstance or character. And yet there is one peculiar commonality. Both you and Stapleton know. And for your separate reasons, cannot or will not speak of it to anyone. The odd result of this is that I feel quite free in the company of either one of you, in a way that I cannot be free with any other man.

  You despise me; Stapleton would use me. And yet, when I am with you or with him, I am myself, without pretense, without the masks that most men wear in commerce with their fellows. It is…

  He broke off, thinking, but there really was no way to explain further what he meant.

  …most peculiar, he finished, smiling a little despite himself.

  As for the army and the practice of war, you will agree, I think, with Mr. Lister’s assertion that it is a brutal occupation. Yet I will remain a soldier. There is hard virtue in it, and a sense of purpose that I know no other way of achieving.

  He dipped the pen again, and saw the slender splinter of metal that lay on his desk, straight as a compass needle, dully a-gleam in the candlelight.

  My regiment is due to be reposted in the spring; I shall join them, wherever duty takes me. I shall, however, come to Helwater again before I leave.