A Trail of Fire

by Diana Gabaldon

  Tom Byrd appeared to think the package slightly ominous, too; he had set it by itself, apart from the other mail, and weighted it down with a large bottle of brandy, apparently to prevent it escaping. That, or he suspected Grey might require the brandy to sustain him in the arduous effort of reading a letter consisting of more than one page.

  ‘Very thoughtful of you, Tom,’ he murmured, smiling to himself and reaching for his pen-knife.

  In fact, the letter within occupied less than a page, bore neither salutation nor signature, and was completely Hal-like.

  Minnie wishes to know whether you are starving, though I don’t know what she proposes to do about it, should the answer be yes. The boys wish to know whether you have taken any scalps – they are confident that no Red Indian would succeed in taking yours; I share this opinion. You had better bring three tommyhawks when you come home.

  Here is your paperweight; the jeweller was most impressed by the quality of the stone. The other thing is a copy of Adams’s confession. They hanged him yesterday.

  The other contents of the parcel consisted of a small wash-leather pouch, and an official-looking document on several sheets of good parchment, this folded and sealed – this time with the seal of George II. Grey left it lying on the table, fetched one of the pewter cups from his campaign chest, and filled it to the brim with brandy, wondering anew at his valet’s perspicacity.

  Thus fortified, he sat down and took up the little pouch, from which he decanted a small, heavy gold paperweight, made in the shape of a half-moon set among ocean waves, into his hand. It was set with a faceted – and very large – sapphire, that glowed like the evening star in its setting. Where had James Fraser acquired such a thing? he wondered.

  He turned it in his hand, admiring the workmanship, but then set it aside. He sipped his brandy for a bit, watching the official document as though it might explode. He was reasonably sure it would.

  He weighed the document in his hand, and felt the breeze from his window lift it a little, like the flap of a sail, just before it fills and bellies with a snap.

  Waiting wouldn’t help. And Hal plainly knew what it said, anyway; he’d tell Grey eventually, whether he wanted to know or not. Sighing, he put by his brandy and broke the seal.

  I, Bernard Donald Adams, do make this confession of my own free will . . .

  Was it? he wondered. He did not know Adams’s handwriting, could not tell whether the document had been written or dictated— no, wait. He flipped over the sheets and examined the signature. Same hand. All right, he had written it himself.

  He squinted at the writing. It seemed firm. Probably not extracted under torture, then. Perhaps it was the truth.

  ‘Idiot,’ he said under his breath. ‘Read the god-damned thing and have done with it!’

  He drank the rest of his brandy at a gulp, flattened the pages upon the stone of the parapet and read, at last, the story of his father’s death.

  The duke had suspected the existence of a Jacobite ring for some time, and had identified three men whom he thought involved in it. Still, he made no move to expose them, until the warrant was issued for his own arrest, upon the charge of treason. Hearing of this, he had sent at once to Adams, summoning him to the duke’s country home at Earlingden.

  Adams did not know how much the duke knew of his own involvement, but did not dare to stay away, lest the duke, under arrest, denounce him. So he armed himself with a pistol, and rode by night to Earlingden, arriving just before dawn.

  He had come to the conservatory’s outside doors, and been admitted by the duke. Whereupon ‘some conversation’ had ensued.

  I had learned that day of the issuance of a warrant for arrest upon the charge of treason, to be served upon the body of the Duke of Pardloe. I was uneasy at this, for the duke had questioned both myself and some colleagues previously, in a manner that suggested to me that he suspected the existence of a secret movement to restore the Stuart throne.

  I argued against the duke’s arrest, as I did not know the extent of his knowledge or suspicions, and feared that if placed in exigent danger himself, he might be able to point a finger at myself or my principal colleagues, these being Joseph Arbuthnot, Lord Creemore, and Sir Edwin Bellman. Sir Edwin was urgent upon the point, though, saying that it would do no harm; any accusations made by Pardloe could be dismissed as simple attempts to save himself, with no grounding in fact – while the fact of his arrest would naturally cause a widespread assumption of guilt, and would distract any attentions that might at present be directed toward us.

  The duke, hearing of the warrant, sent to my lodgings that evening, and summoned me to call upon him at his country home, immediately. I dared not spurn this summons, not knowing what evidence he might possess, and therefore rode by night to his estate, arriving soon before dawn.

  Adams had met the duke there, in the conservatory. Whatever the form of this conversation, its result had been drastic.

  I had brought with me a pistol, which I had loaded outside the house. I meant this only for protection, as I did not know what the duke’s demeanour might be.

  Dangerous, evidently. Gerard Grey, Duke of Pardloe, had also come armed to the meeting. According to Adams, the duke had withdrawn his own pistol from the recesses of his jacket – whether to attack or merely threaten was not clear – whereupon Adams had drawn his own pistol in panic. Both men fired; Adams thought the duke’s pistol had misfired, since the duke could not have missed, at the distance.

  Adams’s shot did not miss fire, nor did it miss its target, and seeing the blood upon the duke’s bosom, Adams had panicked and run. Looking back, he had seen the duke, mortally stricken but still upright, seize the branch of the peach tree beside him for support, whereupon the duke had used the last of his strength to hurl his own useless weapon at Adams before collapsing.

  John Grey sat still, slowly rubbing the parchment sheets between his fingers. He wasn’t seeing the neat strokes in which Adams had set down his bloodless account. He saw the blood. A dark red, beautiful as a jewel where the sun through the glass of the roof struck it suddenly. His father’s hair, tousled as it might be after hunting. And the peach, fallen to those same tiles, its perfection spoilt and ruined.

  He set the papers down on the table; the wind stirred them, and by reflex, he reached for his new paperweight to hold them down.

  What was it Carruthers had called him? Someone who keeps order. You and your brother, he’d said. You don’t stand for it. If the world has peace and order, it’s because of men like you.

  Perhaps. He wondered if Carruthers knew the cost of peace and order – but then recalled Charlie’s haggard face, its youthful beauty gone, nothing left in it now save the bones and the dogged determination that kept him breathing.

  Yes, he knew.

  Just after full dark, they boarded the ships. The convoy included Admiral Holmes’s flagship, the Lowestoff, three men of war: the Squirrel, Sea Horse, and Hunter, a number of armed sloops, others loaded with ordnance, powder and ammunition, and a number of transports for the troops – 1,800 men in all. The Sutherland had been left below, anchored just out of firing range of the fortress, to keep an eye on the enemy’s motions; the river there was littered with floating batteries and prowling small French craft.

  He travelled with Wolfe and the Highlanders aboard Sea Horse, and spent the journey on deck, too keyed up to bear being below.

  His brother’s warning kept recurring in the back of his mind – Don’t follow him into anything stupid – but it was much too late to think of that, and to block it out, he challenged one of the other officers to a whistling contest – each party to whistle the entirety of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, the loser the man who laughed first. He lost, but did not think of his brother again.

  Just after midnight, the big ships quietly furled their sails, dropped anchor, and lay like slumbering gulls on the dark river. Anse au Foulon, the landing spot that Malcolm Stubbs and his scouts had recommended to General Wolfe, l
ay seven miles downriver, at the foot of sheer and crumbling slate cliffs that led upward to the Heights of Abraham.

  ‘Is it named for the Biblical Abraham, do you think?’ Grey had asked curiously, hearing the name, but had been informed that in fact, the cliff top comprised a farmstead belonging to an ex-pilot named Abraham Martin.

  On the whole, he thought this prosaic origin just as well. There was likely to be drama enough enacted on that ground, without thought of ancient prophets, conversations with God, nor any calculation of how many just men might be contained within the fortress of Quebec.

  With a minimum of fuss, the Highlanders and their officers, Wolfe and his chosen troops – Grey among them – debarked into the small bateaux that would carry them silently down to the landing point.

  The sounds of oars were mostly drowned by the river’s rushing, and there was little conversation in the boats. Wolfe sat in the prow of the lead boat, facing his troops, looking now and then over his shoulder at the shore. Quite without warning, he began to speak. He didn’t raise his voice, but the night was so still that those in the boat had little trouble in hearing him. To Grey’s astonishment, he was reciting ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’.

  Melodramatic ass, Grey thought – and yet could not deny that the recitation was oddly moving. Wolfe made no show of it. It was as though he were simply talking to himself, and a shiver went over Grey as he reached the last verse.

  The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow’r,

  And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,

  Awaits alike the inexorable hour.

  ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave,’ Wolfe ended, so low-voiced that only the three or four men closest heard him. Grey was close enough to hear him clear his throat with a small ‘hem’ noise, and saw his shoulders lift.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Wolfe said, lifting his voice as well, ‘I should rather have written those lines than have taken Quebec.’

  There was a faint stir, and a breath of laughter among the men.

  So would I, Grey thought. The poet who wrote them is likely sitting by his cosy fire in Cambridge eating buttered crumpets, not preparing to fall from a great height or get his arse shot off.

  He didn’t know whether this was simply more of Wolfe’s characteristic drama. Possibly – possibly not, he thought. He’d met Colonel Walsing by the latrines that morning, and Walsing had mentioned that Wolfe had given him a pendant the night before, with instructions to deliver it to Miss Landringham, to whom Wolfe was engaged.

  But then, it was nothing out of the ordinary for men to put their personal valuables into the care of a friend before a hot battle. Were you killed or badly injured, your body might be looted before your comrades managed to retrieve you, and not everyone had a trustworthy servant with whom to leave such items. He himself had often carried snuffboxes, pocket-watches or rings into battle for friends – he’d had a reputation for luck, prior to Crefeld. No one had asked him to carry anything tonight.

  He shifted his weight by instinct, feeling the current change, and Simon Fraser, next to him, swayed in the opposite direction, bumping him.

  ‘Pardon,’ Fraser murmured. Wolfe had made them all recite poetry in French round the dinner table the night before, and it was agreed that Fraser had the most authentic accent, he having fought with the French in Holland some years prior. Should they be hailed by a sentry, it would be his job to reply. Doubtless, Grey thought, Fraser was now thinking frantically in French, trying to saturate his mind with the language, lest any stray bit of English escape in panic.

  ‘Ce n’est rien,’ Grey murmured back, and Fraser chuckled, deep in his throat.

  It was cloudy, the sky streaked with the shredded remnants of retreating rain-clouds. That was good; the surface of the river was broken, patched with faint light, fractured by stones and drifting tree-branches. Though even so, a decent sentry could scarcely fail to spot a train of boats.

  Cold numbed his face, but his palms were sweating. He touched the dagger at his belt again; he was aware that he touched it every few minutes, as if needing to verify its presence, but couldn’t help it, and didn’t worry about it. He was straining his eyes, looking for anything – the glow of a careless fire, the shifting of a rock that was not a rock . . . nothing.

  How far? he wondered. Two miles, three? He’d not yet seen the cliffs himself, was not sure how far below Gareon they lay.

  The rush of water and the easy movement of the boat began to make him sleepy, tension notwithstanding, and he shook his head, yawning exaggeratedly to throw it off.

  ‘Quel est ce bateau?’ What boat is that? The shout from the shore seemed anticlimactic when it came, barely more remarkable than a night bird’s call. But the next instant, Simon Fraser’s hand crushed his, grinding the bones together as Fraser gulped air and shouted ‘Celui de la Reine!’

  Grey clenched his teeth, not to let any blasphemous response escape. If the sentry demanded a password, he’d likely be crippled for life, he thought. An instant later, though, the sentry shouted, ‘Passez!’ and Fraser’s death-grip relaxed. Simon was breathing like a bellows, but nudged him and whispered ‘Pardon,’ again.

  ‘Ce n’est fucking rien,’ he muttered, rubbing his hand and tenderly flexing the fingers.

  They were getting close. Men were shifting to and fro in anticipation, more than Grey checking their weapons, straightening coats, coughing, spitting over the side, readying themselves. Still, it was a nerve-racking quarter-hour more before they began to swing toward shore – and another sentry called from the dark.

  Grey’s heart squeezed like a fist, and he nearly gasped with the twinge of pain from his old wounds.

  ‘Qui êtes-vous? Quels sont ces bateaux?’ a French voice demanded suspiciously. Who are you? What boats are those?

  This time, he was ready, and seized Fraser’s hand himself. Simon held on and leaning out toward the shore, called hoarsely, ‘Des bateaux de ravitaillement! Taisez-vous – les anglais sont proches! Provision boats! Be quiet – the British are nearby! Grey felt an insane urge to laugh, but didn’t. In fact, the Sutherland was nearby, lurking out of cannon shot downstream, and doubtless the frogs knew it. In any case, the guard called, more quietly, ‘Passez!’, and the train of boats slid smoothly past and round the final bend.

  The bottom of the boat grated on sand, and half the men were over at once, tugging it further up. Wolfe half-leapt, half-fell over the side in eagerness, all trace of sombreness gone. They’d come aground on a small sandbar, just off-shore, and the other boats were beaching now, a swarm of black figures gathering like ants.

  Twenty-four of the Highlanders were meant to try the ascent first, finding – and insofar as possible, clearing, for the cliff was defended not only by its steepness but by abatis, nests of sharpened logs – a trail for the rest. Simon’s bulky form faded into the dark, his French accent changing at once into the sibilant Gaelic as he hissed the men into position. Grey rather missed his presence.

  He was not sure whether Wolfe had chosen the Highlanders for their skill at climbing, or because he preferred to risk them rather than his other troops. The latter, he thought. Like most English officers, Wolfe regarded the Highlanders with distrust and a certain contempt. Those officers, at least, who’d never fought with them – or against them.

  From his spot at the foot of the cliff, he couldn’t see them, but he could hear them; the scuffle of feet, now and then a wild scrabble and a clatter of falling small stones, loud grunts of effort and what he recognised as Gaelic invocations of God, His mother, and assorted saints. One man near him pulled a string of beads from the neck of his shirt and kissed the tiny cross attached to it, then tucked it back, and seizing a small sapling that grew out of the rock-face, leapt upward, kilt swinging, broadsword swaying from his belt in brief silhouette, before the darkness took him. Grey touched his dagger’s hilt again, his own talisman against evil.

  It was a long wait in the darkness; to some extent, he envied the Highlanders, w
ho, whatever else they might be encountering – and the scrabbling noises and half-strangled whoops as a foot slipped and a comrade grabbed a hand or arm suggested that the climb was just as impossible as it seemed – were not dealing with boredom.

  A sudden rumble and crashing came from above, and the shore-party scattered in panic as several sharpened logs plunged out of the dark above, dislodged from an abatis. One of them had struck point down no more than six feet from Grey, and stood quivering in the sand. With no discussion, the shore-party retreated to the sandbar.

  The scrabblings and gruntings grew fainter, and suddenly ceased. Wolfe, who had been sitting on a boulder, stood up suddenly, straining his eyes upward.

  ‘They’ve made it,’ he whispered, and his fists curled in an excitement that Grey shared. ‘God, they’ve made it!’

  Well enough, and the men at the foot of the cliff held their breaths; there was a guard post at the top of the cliff. Silence, bar the everlasting noise of tree and river. And then a shot.

  Just one. The men below shifted, touching their weapons, ready, not knowing for what.

  Were there sounds above? He could not tell, and out of sheer nervousness, turned aside to urinate against the side of the cliff. He was fastening his flies when he heard Simon Fraser’s voice above.

  ‘Got ’em, by God!’ he said. ‘Come on, lads – the night’s not long enough!’

  The next few hours passed in a blur of the most arduous endeavour Grey had seen since he’d crossed the Scottish Highlands with his brother’s regiment, bringing cannon to General Cope. No, actually, he thought, as he stood in darkness, one leg wedged between a tree and the rock-face, thirty feet of invisible space below him, and rope burning through his palms with an unseen deadweight of two hundred pounds or so on the end, this was worse.

  The Highlanders had surprised the guard, shot their fleeing captain in the heel, and made all of them prisoner. That was the easy part. The next thing was for the rest of the landing party to ascend to the cliff top, now that the trail – if there was such a thing – had been cleared, where they would make preparations to raise not only the rest of the troops now coming down the river aboard the transports, but also seventeen battering cannon, twelve howitzers, three mortars, and all of the necessary encumbrances in terms of shell, powder, planks and limbers necessary to make this artillery effective. At least, Grey reflected, by the time they were done, the vertical trail up the cliffside would likely have been trampled into a simple cowpath.