Outlander 03 - Voyager

by Diana Gabaldon

  The old wine merchant carefully set aside the lap desk, its carved mahogany richly darkened by years of use, and rose to his feet, moving stiffly.

  “Well, that’s the most that can be done for the moment. Let’s go to the house, now; Mathilde will have supper waiting. Tomorrow I’ll take ye over the manifests and orders, and your wife can find her bits of herbs.”

  It was nearly five o’clock, and full dark at this time of year, but Jared had two linksmen waiting to escort us the short distance to his house, equipped with torches to light the way and armed with stout clubs. Le Havre was a thriving port city, and the quay district was no place to walk alone after dark, particularly if one was known as a prosperous wine merchant.

  Despite the exhaustion of the Channel crossing, the oppressive clamminess and pervasive fish-smell of Le Havre, and a gnawing hunger, I felt my spirits rise as we followed the torches through the dark, narrow streets. Thanks to Jared, we had at least a chance of finding Young Ian.

  Jared had concurred with Jamie’s opinion that if the pirates of the Bruja—for so I thought of them—had not killed Young Ian on the spot, they were likely to keep him unharmed. A healthy young male of any race could be sold as a slave or indentured servant in the West Indies for upward of two hundred pounds; a respectable sum by current standards.

  If they did intend so to dispose of Young Ian profitably, and if we knew the port to which they were sailing, it should be a reasonably easy matter to find and recover the boy. A gust of wind and a few chilly drops from the hovering clouds dampened my optimism slightly, reminding me that while it might be no great matter to find Ian once we had reached the West Indies, both the Bruja and the Artemis had to reach the islands first. And the winter storms were beginning.

  The rain increased through the night, drumming insistently on the slate roof above our heads. I would normally have found the sound soothing and soporific; under the circumstances, the low thrum seemed threatening, not peaceful.

  Despite Jared’s substantial dinner and the excellent wines that accompanied it, I found myself unable to sleep, my mind summoning images of rain-soaked canvas and the swell of heavy seas. At least my morbid imaginings were keeping only myself awake; Jamie had not come up with me but had stayed to talk with Jared about the arrangements for the upcoming voyage.

  Jared was willing to risk a ship and a captain to help in the search. In return, Jamie would sail as supercargo.

  “As what?” I had said, hearing this proposal.

  “The supercargo,” Jared had explained patiently. “That’s the man whose duty it is to oversee the loading, the unloading, and the sale and disposition of the cargo. The captain and the crew merely sail the ship; someone’s got to look after the contents. In a case where the welfare of the cargo will be affected, the supercargo’s orders may override even the captain’s authority.”

  And so it was arranged. While Jared was more than willing to go to some risk in order to help a kinsman, he saw no reason not to profit from the arrangement. He had therefore made quick provision for a miscellaneous cargo to be loaded from Bilbao and Le Havre; we would sail to Jamaica to upload the bulk of it, and would arrange for the reloading of the Artemis with rum produced by the sugarcane plantation of Fraser et Cie on Jamaica, for the return trip.

  The return trip, however, would not occur until good sailing weather returned, in late April or early May. For the time between arrival on Jamaica in February and return to Scotland in May, Jamie would have disposal of the Artemis and her crew, to travel to Barbados—or other places—in search of Young Ian. Three months. I hoped it would be enough.

  It was a generous arrangement. Still, Jared, who had been an expatriate wine-seller for many years in France, was wealthy enough that the loss of a ship, while distressing, would not cripple him. The fact did not escape me that while Jared was risking a small portion of his fortune, we were risking our lives.

  The wind seemed to be dying; it no longer howled down the chimney with quite such force. Sleep proving still elusive, I got out of bed, and with a quilt wrapped round my shoulders for warmth, went to the window.

  The sky was a deep, mottled gray, the scudding rain clouds edged with brilliant light from the moon that hid behind them, and the glass was streaked with rain. Still, enough light seeped through the clouds for me to make out the masts of the ships moored at the quay, less than a quarter of a mile away. They swayed to and fro, their sails furled tight against the storm, rising and falling in uneasy rhythm as the waves rocked the boats at anchor. In a week’s time, I would be on one.

  I had not dared to think what life might be like once I had found Jamie, lest I not find him after all. Then I had found him, and in quick succession, had contemplated life as a printer’s wife among the political and literary worlds of Edinburgh, a dangerous and fugitive existence as a smuggler’s lady, and finally, the busy, settled life of a Highland farm, which I had known before and loved.

  Now, in equally quick succession, all these possibilities had been jerked away, and I faced an unknown future once more.

  Oddly enough, I was not so much distressed by this as excited by it. I had been settled for twenty years, rooted as a barnacle by my attachments to Brianna, to Frank, to my patients. Now fate—and my own actions—had ripped me loose from all those things, and I felt as though I were tumbling free in the surf, at the mercy of forces a great deal stronger than myself.

  My breath had misted the glass. I traced a small heart in the cloudiness, as I had used to do for Brianna on cold mornings. Then, I would put her initials inside the heart—B.E.R., for Brianna Ellen Randall. Would she still call herself Randall? I wondered, or Fraser, now? I hesitated, then drew two letters inside the outline of the heart—a “J” and a “C.”

  I was still standing before the window when the door opened and Jamie came in.

  “Are ye awake still?” he asked, rather unnecessarily.

  “The rain kept me from sleeping.” I went and embraced him, glad of his warm solidness to dispel the cold gloom of the night.

  He hugged me, resting his cheek against my hair. He smelt faintly of seasickness, much more strongly of candlewax and ink.

  “Have you been writing?” I asked.

  He looked down at me in astonishment. “I have, but how did ye know that?”

  “You smell of ink.”

  He smiled slightly, stepping back and running his hand through his hair. “You’ve a nose as keen as a truffle pig’s, Sassenach.”

  “Why, thank you, what a graceful compliment,” I said. “What were you writing?”

  The smile disappeared from his face, leaving him looking strained and tired.

  “A letter to Jenny,” he said. He went to the table, where he shed his coat and began to unfasten his stock and jabot. “I didna want to write her until we’d seen Jared, and I could tell her what plans we had, and what the prospects were for bringing Ian home safe.” He grimaced, and pulled the shirt over his head. “God knows what she’ll do when she gets it—and thank God, I’ll be at sea when she does,” he added wryly, emerging from the folds of linen.

  It couldn’t have been an easy piece of composition, but I thought he seemed easier for the writing of it. He sat down to take off his shoes and stockings, and I came behind him to undo the clubbed queue of his hair.

  “I’m glad the writing’s over, at least,” he said, echoing my thought. “I’d been dreading telling her, more than anything else.”

  “You told her the truth?”

  He shrugged. “I always have.”

  Except about me. I didn’t voice the thought, though, but began to rub his shoulders, kneading the knotted muscles.

  “What did Jared do with Mr. Willoughby?” I asked, massage bringing the Chinese to mind. He had accompanied us on the Channel crossing, sticking to Jamie like a small blue-silk shadow. Jared, used to seeing everything on the docks, had taken Mr. Willoughby in stride, bowing gravely to him and addressing him with a few words of Mandarin, but his housekeeper ha
d viewed this unusual guest with considerably more suspicion.

  “I believe he’s gone to sleep in the stable.” Jamie yawned, and stretched himself luxuriously. “Mathilde said she wasna accustomed to have heathens in the house and didna mean to start now. She was sprinkling the kitchen wi’ holy water after he ate supper there.” Glancing up, he caught sight of the heart I had traced on the windowpane, black against the misted glass, and smiled.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just silliness,” I said.

  He reached up and took my right hand, the ball of his thumb caressing the small scar at the base of my own thumb, the letter “J” he had made with the point of his knife, just before I left him, before Culloden.

  “I didna ask,” he said, “whether ye wished to come with me. I could leave ye here; Jared would have ye stay wi’ him and welcome, here or in Paris. Or ye could go back to Lallybroch, if ye wished.”

  “No, you didn’t ask,” I said. “Because you knew bloody well what the answer would be.”

  We looked at each other and smiled. The lines of heartsickness and weariness had lifted from his face. The candlelight glowed softly on the burnished crown of his head as he bent and gently kissed the palm of my hand.

  The wind still whistled in the chimney, and the rain ran down the glass like tears outside, but it no longer mattered. Now I could sleep.

  The sky had cleared by morning. A brisk, cold breeze rattled the windowpanes of Jared’s study, but couldn’t penetrate to the cozy room inside. The house at Le Havre was much smaller than his lavish Paris residence, but still boasted three stories of solid, half-timbered comfort.

  I pushed my feet farther toward the crackling fire, and dipped my quill into the inkwell. I was making up a list of all the things I thought might be needed in the medical way for a two-month voyage. Distilled alcohol was both the most important and the easiest to obtain; Jared had promised to get me a cask in Paris.

  “We’d best label it something else, though,” he’d told me. “Or the sailors will have drunk it before you’ve left port.”

  Purified lard, I wrote slowly, St.-John’s-wort; garlic, ten pounds; yarrow. I wrote borage, then shook my head and crossed it out, replacing it with the older name by which it was more likely known now, bugloss.

  It was slow work. At one time, I had known the medicinal uses of all the common herbs, and not a few uncommon ones. I had had to; they were all that was available.

  At that, many of them were surprisingly effective. Despite the skepticism—and outspoken horror—of my supervisors and colleagues at the hospital in Boston, I had used them occasionally on my modern patients to good effect. (“Did you see what Dr. Randall did?” a shocked intern’s cry echoed in memory, making me smile as I wrote. “She fed the stomach in 134B boiled flowers!”)

  The fact remained that one wouldn’t use yarrow and comfrey on a wound if iodine were available, nor treat a systemic infection with bladderwort in preference to penicillin.

  I had forgotten a lot, but as I wrote the names of the herbs, the look and the smell of each one began to come back to me—the dark, bituminous look and pleasant light smell of birch oil, the sharp tang of the mint family, the dusty sweet smell of chamomile and the astringency of bistort.

  Across the table, Jamie was struggling with his own lists. A poor penman, he wrote laboriously with his crippled right hand, pausing now and then to rub the healing wound above his left elbow and mutter curses under his breath.

  “Have ye lime juice on your list, Sassenach?” he inquired, looking up.

  “No. Ought I to have?”

  He brushed a strand of hair out of his face and frowned at the sheet of paper in front of him.

  “It depends. Customarily, it would be the ship’s surgeon who provides the lime juice, but in a ship the size of the Artemis, there generally isn’t a surgeon, and the provision of foodstuffs falls to the purser. But there isn’t a purser, either; there’s no time to find a dependable man, so I shall fill that office, too.”

  “Well, if you’ll be purser and supercargo, I expect I’ll be the closest thing to a ship’s surgeon,” I said, smiling slightly. “I’ll get the lime juice.”

  “All right.” We returned to a companionable scratching, unbroken until the entrance of Josephine, the parlormaid, to announce the arrival of a person. Her long nose wrinkled in unconscious disapproval at the information.

  “He waits upon the doorstep. The butler tried to send him away, but he insists that he has an appointment with you, Monsieur James?” The questioning tone of this last implied that nothing could seem more unlikely, but duty compelled her to relay the improbable suggestion.

  Jamie’s eyebrows rose. “A person? What sort of person?” Josephine’s lips primmed together as though she really could not bring herself to say. I was becoming curious to see this person, and ventured over to the window. Sticking my head far out, I could see the top of a very dusty black slouch hat on the doorstep, and not much more.

  “He looks like a peddler; he’s got a bundle of some kind on his back,” I reported, craning out still farther, hands on the sill. Jamie clutched me by the waist and drew me back, thrusting his own head out in turn.

  “Och, it’s the coin dealer Jared mentioned!” he exclaimed. “Bring him up, then.”

  With an eloquent expression on her narrow face, Josephine departed, returning in short order with a tall, gangling youth of perhaps twenty, dressed in a badly outmoded style of coat, wide unbuckled breeches that flapped limply about his skinny shanks, drooping stockings and the cheapest of wooden sabots.

  The filthy black hat, courteously removed indoors, revealed a thin face with an intelligent expression, adorned with a vigorous, if scanty, brown beard. Since virtually no one in Le Havre other than a few seamen wore a beard, it hardly needed the small shiny black skullcap on the newcomer’s head to tell me he was a Jew.

  The boy bowed awkwardly to me, then to Jamie, struggling with the straps of his peddler’s pack.

  “Madame,” he said, with a bob that made his curly sidelocks dance, “Monsieur. It is most good of you to receive me.” He spoke French oddly, with a singsong intonation that made him hard to follow.

  While I entirely understood Josephine’s reservations about this…person, still, he had wide, guileless blue eyes that made me smile at him despite his generally unprepossessing appearance.

  “It’s we who should be grateful to you,” Jamie was saying. “I had not expected you to come so promptly. My cousin tells me your name is Mayer?”

  The coin dealer nodded, a shy smile breaking out amid the sprigs of his youthful beard.

  “Yes, Mayer. It is no trouble; I was in the city already.”

  “Yet you come from Frankfort, no? A long way,” Jamie said politely. He smiled as he looked over Mayer’s costume, which looked as though he had retrieved it from a rubbish tip.“And a dusty one, too, I expect,” he added. “Will you take wine?”

  Mayer looked flustered at this offer, but after opening and closing his mouth a few times, finally settled on a silent nod of acceptance.

  His shyness vanished, though, once the pack was opened. Though from the outside the shapeless bundle looked as though it might contain, at best, a change of ragged linen and Mayer’s midday meal, once opened it revealed several small wooden racks, cleverly fitted into a framework inside the pack, each rack packed carefully with tiny leather bags, cuddling together like eggs in a nest.

  Mayer removed a folded square of fabric from beneath the racks, whipped it open, and spread it with something of a flourish on Jamie’s desk. Then one by one, Mayer opened the bags and drew out the contents, placing each gleaming round reverently on the deep blue velvet of the cloth.

  “An Aquilia Severa aureus,” he said, touching one small coin that glowed with the deep mellowness of ancient gold from the velvet. “And here, a Sestercius of the Calpurnia family.” His voice was soft and his hands sure, stroking the edge of a silver coin only slightly worn, or cradling one in his p
alm to demonstrate the weight of it.

  He looked up from the coins, eyes bright with the reflections of the precious metal.

  “Monsieur Fraser tells me that you desire to inspect as many of the Greek and Roman rarities as possible. I have not my whole stock with me, of course, but I have quite a few—and I could send to Frankfort for others, if you desire.”

  Jamie smiled, shaking his head. “I’m afraid we haven’t time, Mr. Mayer. We—”

  “Just Mayer, Monsieur Fraser,” the young man interrupted, perfectly polite, but with a slight edge in his voice.

  “Indeed.” Jamie bowed slightly. “I hope my cousin shall not have misled you. I shall be most happy to pay the cost of your journey, and something for your time, but I am not wishful to purchase any of your stock myself…Mayer.”

  The young man’s eyebrows rose in inquiry, along with one shoulder.

  “What I wish,” Jamie said slowly, leaning forward to look closely at the coins on display, “is to compare your stock with my recollection of several ancient coins I have seen, and then—should I see any that are similar—to inquire whether you—or your family, I should say, for I expect you are too young yourself—should be familiar with anyone who might have purchased such coins twenty years ago.”

  He glanced up at the young Jew, who was looking justifiably astonished, and smiled.

  “That may be asking a bit much of you, I know. But my cousin tells me that your family is one of the few who deals in such matters, and is by far the most knowledgeable. If you can acquaint me likewise with any persons in the West Indies with interests in this area, I should be deeply obliged to you.”

  Mayer sat looking at him for a moment, then inclined his head, the sunlight winking from the border of small jet beads that adorned his skullcap. It was plain that he was intensely curious, but he merely touched his pack and said, “My father or my uncle would have sold such coins, not me; but I have here the catalogue and record of every coin that has passed through our hands in thirty years. I will tell you what I can.”