The Custom of the Army (Novella): An Outlander Novella

by Diana Gabaldon

  Malcolm lived, long enough to make it to the rear of the lines, where the army surgeons were already at work. By the time Grey and the other officer had turned him over to the surgeons, the battle was over.

  Grey turned to see the French scattered and demoralized, fleeing toward the fortress. British troops were flooding across the trampled field, cheering, overrunning the abandoned French cannon.

  The entire battle had lasted less than a quarter of an hour.

  He found himself sitting on the ground, his mind quite blank, with no notion how long he had been there, though he supposed it couldn’t have been much time at all.

  He noticed an officer standing near him and thought vaguely that the man seemed familiar. Who … Oh, yes. Wolfe’s adjutant. He’d never learned the man’s name.

  He stood up slowly, stiff as a nine-day pudding.

  The adjutant was simply standing there. His eyes were turned in the direction of the fortress and the fleeing French, but Grey could tell that he wasn’t really seeing either. Grey glanced over his shoulder, toward the hillock where Wolfe had stood earlier, but the general was nowhere in sight.

  “General Wolfe?” he said.

  “The general …” the adjutant said, and swallowed thickly. “He was struck.”

  Of course he was, silly ass, Grey thought uncharitably. Standing up there like a bloody target, what could he expect? But then he saw the tears standing in the adjutant’s eyes and understood.

  “Dead, then?” he asked, stupidly, and the adjutant—why had he never thought to ask the man’s name?—nodded, rubbing a smoke-stained sleeve across a smoke-stained countenance.

  “He … In the wrist first. Then in the body. He fell and crawled—then he fell again. I turned him over … told him the battle was won, the French were scattered.”

  “He understood?”

  The adjutant nodded and took a deep breath that rattled in his throat. “He said—” He stopped and coughed, then went on more firmly. “He said that in knowing he had conquered, he was content to die.”

  “Did he?” Grey said blankly. He’d seen men die, often, and imagined it much more likely that if James Wolfe had managed anything beyond an inarticulate groan, his final word had likely been either “shit,” or “oh, God,” depending upon the general’s religious leanings, of which Grey had no notion.

  “Yes, good,” he said meaninglessly, and turned toward the fortress. Ant trails of men were streaming toward it, and in the midst of one such stream he saw Montcalm’s colors, fluttering in the wind. Below the colors, small in the distance, a man in general’s uniform rode his horse, hatless, hunched and swaying in the saddle, his officers bunched close on either side, anxious lest he fall.

  The British lines were reorganizing, though it was clear no further fighting would be required. Not today. Nearby, he saw the tall officer who had saved his life and helped him to drag Malcolm Stubbs to safety, limping back toward his troops.

  “The major over there,” he said, nudging the adjutant and nodding. “Do you know his name?”

  The adjutant blinked, then firmed his shoulders.

  “Yes, of course. That’s Major Siverly.”

  “Oh. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?”

  Admiral Holmes, third in command after Wolfe, accepted the surrender of Quebec five days later, Wolfe and his second, Brigadier Monckton, having perished in battle. Montcalm was dead, too; had died the morning following the battle. There was no way out for the French save surrender; winter was coming on, and the fortress and its city would starve long before its besiegers.

  Two weeks after the battle, John Grey returned to Gareon and found that smallpox had swept through the village like an autumn wind. The mother of Malcolm Stubbs’s son was dead; her mother offered to sell him the child. He asked her politely to wait.

  Charlie Carruthers had perished, too, the smallpox not waiting for the weakness of his body to overcome him. Grey had the body burned, not wishing Carruthers’s hand to be stolen, for both the Indians and the local habitants regarded such things superstitiously. He took a canoe by himself and, on a deserted island in the St. Lawrence, scattered his friend’s ashes to the wind.

  He returned from this expedition to discover a letter, forwarded by Hal, from Dr. John Hunter, surgeon and anatomist. He checked the level of brandy in the decanter and opened it with a sigh.

  My dear Lord John,

  I have heard some recent conversation regarding the unfortunate death of Mr. Nicholls, including comments indicating a public perception that you were responsible for his death. In case you shared this perception, I thought it might ease your mind to know that in fact you were not.

  Grey sank slowly onto a stool, eyes glued to the sheet.

  It is true that your ball did strike Mr. Nicholls, but this accident contributed little or nothing to his demise. I saw you fire upward into the air—I said as much to those present at the time, though most of them did not appear to take much notice. The ball apparently went up at a slight angle and then fell upon Mr. Nicholls from above. At this point, its power was quite spent, and, the missile itself being negligible in size and weight, it barely penetrated the skin above his collarbone, where it lodged against the bone, doing no further damage.

  The true cause of his collapse and death was an aortic aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of one of the great vessels emergent from the heart; such weaknesses are often congenital. The stress of the electric shock and the emotion of the duello that followed apparently caused this aneurysm to rupture. Such an occurrence is untreatable and invariably fatal, I am afraid. There is nothing that could have saved him.

  Your servant,

  John Hunter, Surgeon

  Grey was conscious of a most extraordinary array of sensations. Relief—yes, there was a sense of profound relief, as of waking from a nightmare. There was also a sense of injustice, colored by the beginnings of indignation; by God, he had nearly been married! He might, of course, also have been maimed or killed as a result of the imbroglio, but that seemed relatively inconsequent; he was a soldier, after all—such things happened.

  His hand trembled slightly as he set the note down. Beneath relief, gratitude, and indignation was a growing sense of horror.

  I thought it might ease your mind … He could see Hunter’s face saying this; sympathetic, intelligent, and cheerful. It was a straightforward remark but one fully cognizant of its own irony.

  Yes, he was pleased to know he had not caused Edwin Nicholls’s death. But the means of that knowledge … Gooseflesh rose on his arms and he shuddered involuntarily, imagining—

  “Oh, God,” he said. He’d been once to Hunter’s house—to a poetry reading, held under the auspices of Mrs. Hunter, whose salons were famous. Dr. Hunter did not attend these but sometimes would come down from his part of the house to greet guests. On this occasion, he had done so and, falling into conversation with Grey and a couple of other scientifically minded gentlemen, had invited them up to see some of the more interesting items of his famous collection: the rooster with a transplanted human tooth growing in its comb, the child with two heads, the fetus with a foot protruding from its stomach.

  Hunter had made no mention of the walls of jars, these filled with eyeballs, fingers, sections of livers … or of the two or three complete human skeletons that hung from the ceiling, fully articulated and fixed by a bolt through the tops of their skulls. It had not occurred to Grey at the time to wonder where—or how—Hunter had acquired these.

  Nicholls had had an eyetooth missing, the front tooth beside the empty space badly chipped. If he ever visited Hunter’s house again, might he come face-to-face with a skull with a missing tooth?

  He seized the brandy decanter, uncorked it, and drank directly from it, swallowing slowly and repeatedly, until the vision disappeared.

  His small table was littered with papers. Among them, under his sapphire paperweight, was the tidy packet that the widow Lambert had handed him, her face blotched with weeping. He put a hand o
n it, feeling Charlie’s doubled touch, gentle on his face, soft around his heart.

  “You won’t fail me.”

  “No,” he said softly. “No, Charlie, I won’t.”

  With Manoke’s help as translator, Grey bought the child, after prolonged negotiation, for two golden guineas, a brightly colored blanket, a pound of sugar, and a small keg of rum. The grandmother’s face was sunken, not with grief, he thought, but with dissatisfaction and weariness. With her daughter dead of the smallpox, her life would be harder. The English, she conveyed to Grey through Manoke, were cheap bastards; the French were much more generous. He resisted the impulse to give her another guinea.

  It was full autumn now, and the leaves had all fallen. The bare branches of the trees spread black ironwork flat against a pale-blue sky as he made his way upward through the town, to the French mission. There were several small buildings surrounding the tiny church, with children playing outside; some of them paused to look at him, but most of them ignored him—British soldiers were nothing new.

  Father LeCarré took the bundle gently from him, turning back the blanket to look at the child’s face. The boy was awake; he pawed at the air, and the priest put out a finger for him to grasp.

  “Ah,” he said, seeing the clear signs of mixed blood, and Grey knew the priest thought the child was his. He started to explain, but, after all, what did it matter?

  “We will baptize him as a Catholic, of course,” Father LeCarré said, looking up at Grey. The priest was a young man, rather plump, dark, and clean-shaven, but with a gentle face. “You do not mind that?”

  “No.” Grey drew out a purse. “For his maintenance. I will send an additional five pounds each year, if you will advise me once a year of his continued welfare. Here—the address to which to write.” A sudden inspiration struck him—not that he did not trust the good father, he assured himself, only … “Send me a lock of his hair,” he said. “Every year.”

  He was turning to go when the priest called him back, smiling.

  “Has the infant a name, sir?”

  “A—” He stopped dead. The boy’s mother had surely called him something, but Malcolm Stubbs hadn’t thought to tell Grey what it was before being shipped back to England. What should he call the child? Malcolm, for the father who had abandoned him? Hardly.

  Charles, maybe, in memory of Carruthers …

  “… one of these days, it isn’t going to.”

  “His name is John,” he said abruptly, and cleared his throat. “John Cinnamon.”

  “Mais oui,” the priest said, nodding. “Bon voyage, Monsieur—et voyez avec le Bon Dieu.”

  “Thank you,” he said politely, and went away, not looking back, down to the riverbank where Manoke waited to bid him farewell.

  The End

  Author’s Notes

  The Battle of Quebec is justly famous as one of the great military triumphs of the eighteenth-century British Army. If you go today to the battlefield at the Plains of Abraham (in spite of this poetic name, it really was just named for the farmer who owned the land, one Abraham Martin; I suppose “The Plains of Martin” just didn’t have the same ring to it), you’ll see a plaque at the foot of the cliff there, commemorating the heroic achievement of the Highland troops who climbed this sheer cliff from the river below, clearing the way for the entire army—and their cannon, mortars, howitzers, and accompanying impedimenta—to make a harrowing overnight ascent and confront General Montcalm with a jaw-dropping spectacle by the dawn’s early light.

  If you go up onto the field itself, you’ll find another plaque, this one put up by the French, explaining (in French) what a dirty, unsportsmanlike trick this was for those sneaky British to have played on the noble troops defending the Citadel. Ah, perspective.

  General James Wolfe, along with Montcalm, was of course a real historical character, as was Brigadier Simon Fraser (whom you will have met—or will meet later—in An Echo in the Bone). My own rule of thumb when dealing with historical persons in the context of fiction is to try not to portray them as having done anything worse than what I know they did, according to the historical record.

  In General Wolfe’s case, Hal’s opinion of his character and abilities is one commonly held and recorded by a number of contemporary military commentators. And there is documentary proof of his attitude toward the Highlanders, whom he used for this endeavor, in the form of the letter quoted in the story: “.… no great mischief if they fall.” (Allow me to recommend a wonderful novel by Alistair MacLeod, titled No Great Mischief. It isn’t about Wolfe; it’s a novelized history of a family of Scots who settle in Nova Scotia, beginning in the eighteenth century and carrying on through the decades, but it is from Wolfe’s letter that the book takes its title, and he’s mentioned.)

  Wolfe’s policy with regard to the habitant villages surrounding the Citadel (looting, burning, general terrorizing of the populace) is a matter of record. It wasn’t (and isn’t) an unusual thing for an invading army to do.

  General Wolfe’s dying words are also a matter of historical record, but like Lord John, I take leave to doubt that that’s really what he said. He is reported by several sources to have recited Gray’s “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard” in the boat on the way to battle—and I think that’s a sufficiently odd thing to have done, that the reports are probably true.

  As for Simon Fraser, he’s widely reported to have been the British officer who fooled the French lookouts by calling out to them in French as the boats went by in the darkness—and he undoubtedly spoke excellent French, having campaigned in France years before. As for the details of exactly what he said—accounts vary, and that’s not really an important detail, so I rolled my own.

  Now, speaking of French … Brigadier Fraser spoke excellent French. I don’t. I can read that language, but I can’t speak or write it, possess absolutely no grammar, and have a really low tolerance for diacritical marks. So for the purposes of this story I did as I always do in such cases; I solicit the opinions of several native speakers of French for those bits of dialogue that occur in that language. What you see in this story is due to the assistance of these kind and helpful speakers. I fully expect—because it happens every time I include French in a story—to receive indignant email from assorted French speakers denouncing the French dialogue. If the French was provided to me by a Parisian, someone from Montreal will tell me that’s not right; if the original source was Quebecois, outraged screams emanate from the mother country. And if it came from a textbook or (quelle horreur) an academic source … well, bonne chance with that. There’s also the consideration that it’s very difficult to spot typographical errors in a language you can’t speak. But we do our best. My apologies for anything egregious.

  Now, you may notice that John Hunter is referred to in various places either as “Mr. Hunter,” or as “Dr. Hunter.” By long-standing tradition, English surgeons are (and were) addressed as “Mr.” rather than “Dr.”—presumably a nod to their origins as barbers with a sanguinary sideline. However, John Hunter, with his brother William, was also a formally trained physician, as well as an eminent scientist and anatomist—hence entitled also to the honorific “Dr.”

  Chronology of the Outlander Series

  The Outlander series includes three kinds of stories:

  The Big, Enormous Books that have no discernible genre (or all of them);

  the Shorter, Less Indescribable Novels that are more or less historical mysteries (though dealing also with battles, eels, and mildly deviant sexual practices);

  and the Bulges—these being short(er) pieces that fit somewhere inside the story lines of the novels, much in the nature of squirming prey swallowed by a large snake. These deal frequently—but not exclusively—with secondary characters, are prequels or sequels, and/or fill some lacuna left in the original story lines.

  Now. Most of the shorter novels (so far) fit within a large lacuna left in the middle of Voyager, in the years between 1757 and 1761. Some of the Bulges als
o fall in this period; others don’t.

  So, for the reader’s convenience, here is a detailed Chronology, showing the sequence of the various elements in terms of the storyline. However, it should be noted that the shorter novels and novellas are all designed suchly that they may be read alone, without reference either to each other or to the Big, Enormous Books—should you be in the mood for a light literary snack instead of the nine-course meal with wine-pairings and dessert trolley.

  OUTLANDER (novel)—If you’ve never read any of the series, I’d suggest starting here. If you’re unsure about it, open the book anywhere and read three pages; if you can put it down again, I’ll give you a dollar. (1946/1743)

  DRAGONFLY IN AMBER (novel)—It doesn’t start where you think it’s going to. And it doesn’t end how you think it’s going to, either. Just keep reading; it’ll be fine. (1968/1744-46)

  VOYAGER (novel)—This won an award from EW magazine for “Best Opening Line.” (To save you having to find a copy just to read the opening, it was: “He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd, in the circumstances.”) If you’re reading the series in order, rather than piecemeal, you do want to read this book before tackling the novellas. (1968/1766-67)

  LORD JOHN AND THE HAND OF DEVILS/“Lord John and the Hellfire Club” (novella)—Just to add an extra layer of confusion, The Hand of Devils is a collection that includes three novellas. The first one, “Lord John and the Hellfire Club,” is set in London in 1757, and deals with a red-haired man who approaches Lord John Grey with an urgent plea for help, just before dying in front of him. [Originally published in the anthology Past Poisons, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, 1998.]