15

IN WHICH MUSIC PLAYS A PART

We stayed up late with the second bottle, going over and over the latest of the abstracted letters from the Chevalier de St. George—otherwise known as His Majesty, James III—and the letters to Prince Charles from Jacobite supporters.

“Fergus got a large packet, bound for His Highness,” Jamie explained. “There was a lot of stuff in it, and we couldna copy it all quickly enough, so I kept some to go back the next time.”

“See,” he said, extracting one sheet from the pile and laying it on my knee, “the majority of the letters are in code, like this one—‘I hear that the prospects for grouse seem most favorable this year in the hills above Salerno; hunters in that region should find themselves successful.’ That’s easy; it’s a reference to Manzetti, the Italian banker; he’s from Salerno. I found that Charles had been dining with him, and managed to borrow fifteen thousand livres—apparently James’s advice was good. But here—” He shuffled through the stack, pulling out another sheet.

“Look at this,” Jamie said, handing me a sheet covered with his lopsided scrawls.

I squinted obediently at the paper, from which I could pick out single letters, connected with a network of arrows and question marks.

“What language is that?” I asked, peering at it. “Polish?” Charles Stuart’s mother, the late Clementina Sobieski, had been Polish, after all.

“No, it’s in English,” Jamie said, grinning. “You canna read it?”

“You can?”

“Oh, aye,” he said smugly. “It’s a cipher, Sassenach, and no a verra complicated one. See, all ye must do is break the letters up into groups of five, to start—only ye don’t count the letters Q or X. The X’s are meant as breaks between sentences, and the Q’s are only stuck in here and there to make it more confusing.”

“If you say so,” I said, looking from the extremely confusing-looking letter, which began “Mrti ocruti dlopro qahstmin…” to the sheet in Jamie’s hand, with a series of five-letter groups written on one line, single letters printed in carefully above them, one at a time.

“So, one letter is only substituted for another, but in the same order,” Jamie was explaining, “so if you have a fair amount of text to work from, and you can guess a word here or there, then all ye need do is to translate from one alphabet to the other—see?” He waved a long strip of paper under my nose, with two alphabets printed one above the other, slightly offset.

“Well, more or less,” I said. “I gather you do, though, which is what’s important. What does it say?”

The expression of lively interest with which Jamie greeted all manner of puzzles faded a bit, and he let the sheet of paper fall to his knee. He looked at me, lower lip caught between his teeth in introspection.

“Well,” he said, “that’s what’s odd. And yet I dinna see how I can be mistaken. The tone of James’s letters overall tend one way, and this ciphered one spells it out clearly.”

Blue eyes met mine under thick, ruddy brows.

“James wants Charles to find favor with Louis,” he said slowly, “but he isna looking for support for an invasion of Scotland. James has no interest in seeking restoration to the throne.”

“What?” I snatched the sheaf of letters from his hand, my eyes feverishly scanning the scribbled text.

Jamie was right; while the letters from supporters spoke hopefully of the impending restoration, James’s letters to his son mentioned no such thing, but were all concerned with Charles’s making a good impression upon Louis. Even the loan from Manzetti of Salerno had been sought to enable Charles to live with the appearance of a gentleman in Paris; not to support any military end.

“Well, I’m thinking James is a canny wee man,” Jamie had said, tapping one of the letters. “For see, Sassenach, he’s verra little money of his own; his wife had a great deal, but Uncle Alex told me that she left it all to the church when she died. The Pope has been maintaining James’s establishment—after all, he’s a Catholic monarch, and the Pope is bound to uphold his interests against those of the Elector of Hanover.”

He clasped his hands around one knee, gazing meditatively at the pile of papers now laid between us on the sofa.

“Philip of Spain and Louis—the Old King, I mean—gave him a small number of troops and a few ships, thirty years ago, with which to try to regain his throne. But it all went wrong; bad weather sank some of the ships, and the rest had no pilots and landed in the wrong place—everything went awry, and in the end, the French simply sailed off again, with James not even setting foot upon the soil of Scotland. So perhaps in the years since, he gave up any thought of getting back his throne. But still, he had two sons coming to manhood, and no way to see them properly settled in life.

“So I ask myself, Sassenach”—he rocked backward a bit—“what would I do, in such a situation? The answer being, that I might try and see if my good cousin Louis—who’s King of France, after all—might maybe see one son established in a good position; given a military appointment, maybe, and men to lead. A General of France is no bad position in life.”

“Mm.” I nodded, thinking. “Yes, but if I were a very smart man, I might not just come to Louis and beg, as a poor relation. I might send my son to Paris, and try to shame Louis into accepting him at Court. And meanwhile keep alive the illusion that I was actively seeking restoration.”

“For once James admits openly that the Stuarts will never rule Scotland again,” Jamie added softly, “then he has no more value to Louis.”

And without the possibility of an armed Jacobite invasion to occupy the English, Louis would have little reason to give his young cousin Charles anything beyond the pittance that decency and public opinion would force him to provide.

It wasn’t certain; the letters Jamie had been able to get, a few at a time, went back only as far as last January, when Charles had arrived in France. And, couched in code, cipher, and guarded language generally, the situation was far from clear. But taken all in all, the evidence did point in that direction.

And if Jamie’s guess as to the Chevalier’s motives was correct—then our task was accomplished already; had never in fact existed at all.

Thinking over the events of the night before, I was abstracted all the next day, through a visit to Marie d’Arbanville’s morning salon to hear a Hungarian poet, through a visit to a neighborhood herbalist’s to pick up some valerian and orris root, and through my rounds at L’Hôpital des Anges in the afternoon.

Finally, I abandoned my work, afraid that I might accidentally damage someone while wool-gathering. Neither Murtagh nor Fergus had yet arrived to escort me home, so I changed out of my covering gown and sat down in Mother Hildegarde’s vacant office to wait, just inside the vestibule of the Hôpital.

I had been there for perhaps half an hour, idly pleating the stuff of my gown between my fingers, when I heard the dog outside.

The porter was absent, as he often was. Gone to buy food, no doubt, or run an errand for one of the nuns. As usual in his absence, the guardianship of the Hôpital’s portals was given into the capable paws—and teeth—of Bouton.

The first warning yip was followed by a low, burring growl that warned the intruder to stay where he was, on pain of instant dismemberment. I rose and stuck my head out of the office door, to see whether Father Balmain might be braving the peril of the demon once more, in pursuit of his sacramental duties. But the figure outlined against the huge stained-glass window of the entry hall was not the spare form of the junior priest. It was a tall figure, whose silhouetted kilts swayed gracefully around his legs as he drew back from the small, toothed animal at his feet.

Jamie blinked, brought up short by the assault. Shading his eyes against the dazzle from the window, he peered down into the shadows.

“Oh, hallo there, wee dog,” he said politely, and took a step forward, knuckles stretched out. Bouton raised the growl a few decibels, and he took a step back.

“Oh, like that, is it?” Jamie said. He eyed the dog narrowly.

“Think it over, laddie,” he advised, squinting down his long, straight nose. “I’m a damn sight bigger than you. I wouldna undertake any rash ventures, if I were you.”

Bouton shifted his ground slightly, still making a noise like a distant Fokker.

“Faster, too,” said Jamie, making a feint to one side. Bouton’s teeth snapped together a few inches from Jamie’s calf, and he stepped back hastily. Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms and nodded down at the dog.

“Well, you’ve a point there, I’ll admit. When it comes to teeth, ye’ve the edge on me, and no mistake.” Bouton cocked an ear suspiciously at this gracious speech, but went back to the low-pitched growl.

Jamie hooked one foot over the other, like one prepared to pass the time of day indefinitely. The multicolored light from the window washed his face with blue, making him look like one of the chilly marble statues in the cathedral next door.

“Surely you’ve better things to do than harry innocent visitors?” he asked, conversationally. “I’ve heard of you—you’re the famous fellow that sniffs out sickness, no? Weel, then, why are they wastin’ ye on silly things like door-guarding, when ye might be makin’ yourself useful smelling gouty toes and pustulant arseholes? Answer me that, if ye will!”

A sharp bark in response to his uncrossing his feet was the only answer.

There was a stir of robes behind me as Mother Hildegarde entered from the inner office.

“What is it?” she asked, seeing me peering round the corner. “Have we visitors?”

“Bouton seems to be having a difference of opinion with my husband,” I said.

“I don’t have to put up wi’ this, ye ken,” Jamie was threatening. One hand was stealing toward the brooch that held his plaid at the shoulder. “One quick spring wi’ my plaid, and I’ll have ye trussed like a—oh, bonjour, Madame!” he said, changing swiftly to French at sight of Mother Hildegarde.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Fraser.” She inclined her veil gracefully, more to hide the broad smile on her face than in greeting, I thought. “I see you have made the acquaintance of Bouton. Are you perhaps in search of your wife?”

This seeming to be my cue, I sidled out of the office behind her. My devoted spouse glanced from Bouton to the office door, plainly drawing conclusions.

“And just how long have ye been standin’ there, Sassenach?” he asked dryly.

“Long enough,” I said, with the smug self-assurance of one in Bouton’s good books. “What would you have done with him, once you’d got him wrapped up in your plaid?”

“Thrown him out the window and run like hell,” he answered, with a brief glance of awe at Mother Hildegarde’s imposing form. “Does she by chance speak English?”

“No, luckily for you,” I answered. I switched to French for the introductions. “Ma mère, je vous présente mon mari, le seigneur de Broch Tuarach.”

“Milord.” Mother Hildegarde had by now mastered her sense of humor, and greeted him with her usual expression of formidable geniality. “We shall miss your wife, but if you require her, of course—”

“I didn’t come for my wife,” Jamie interrupted. “I came to see you, ma mère.”

Seated in Mother Hildegarde’s office, Jamie laid the bundle of papers he carried on the shining wood of her desk. Bouton, keeping a wary eye on the intruder, lay down at his mistress’s feet. He laid his nose upon his feet, but kept his ears cocked, lip raised over one eyetooth in case he should be called upon to rend the visitor limb from limb.

Jamie narrowed his eyes at Bouton, pointedly pulling his feet away from the twitching black nose. “Herr Gerstmann recommended that I consult you, Mother, about these documents,” he said, unrolling the thick sheaf and flattening it beneath his palms.

Mother Hildegarde regarded Jamie for a moment, one heavy brow raised quizzically. Then she turned her attention to the sheaf of papers, with that administrator’s trick of seeming to focus entirely on the matter at hand, while still keeping her sensitive antennae tuned to catch the faintest vibration of emergency from the far-off reaches of the Hôpital.

“Yes?” she said. One blunt finger ran lightly over the lines of scribbled music, one by one, as though she heard the notes by touching them. A flick of the finger, and the sheet slid aside, half-exposing the next.

“What is it that you wish to know, Monsieur Fraser?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Mother.” Jamie was leaning forward, intent. He touched the black lines himself, dabbing gently at the smear where the writer’s hand had carelessly brushed the staves before the ink had dried.

“There is something odd about this music, Mother.”

The nun’s wide mouth moved slightly in what might have been a smile.

“Really, Monsieur Fraser? And yet I understand—you will not be offended, I trust—that to you, music is…a lock to which you have no key?”

Jamie laughed, and a sister passing in the hallways turned, startled by such a sound in the confines of the Hôpital. It was a noisy place, but laughter was unusual.

“That is a very tactful description of my disability, Mother. And altogether true. Were you to sing one of these pieces”—his finger, longer and more slender, but nearly the same size as Mother Hildegarde’s, tapped the parchment with a soft rustling noise—“I could not tell it from the Kyrie Eleison or from ‘La Dame fait bien’—except by the words,” he added, with a grin.

Now it was Mother Hildegarde’s turn to laugh.

“Indeed, Monsieur Fraser,” she said. “Well, at least you listen to the words!” She took the sheaf of papers into her hands, riffling the tops. I could see the faint swelling of her throat above the tight band of her wimple as she read, as though she was singing silently to herself, and one large foot twitched slightly, keeping time.

Jamie sat very still upon his stool, good hand folded over the crooked one on his knee, watching her. The slanted blue eyes were intent, and he paid no attention to the ongoing noise from the depths of the Hôpital behind him. Patients cried out, orderlies and nuns shouted back and forth, family members shrieked in sorrow or dismay, and the muted clang of metal instruments echoed off the ancient stones of the building, but neither Jamie nor Mother Hildegarde moved.

At last she lowered the pages, peering at him over the tops. Her eyes were sparkling, and she looked suddenly like a young girl.

“I think you are right!” she said. “I cannot take time to think it over carefully just now”—she glanced toward the doorway, momentarily darkened by the form of an orderly dashing past with a large sack of lint—“but there is something odd here.” She tapped the pages on the desk, straightening them into an orderly stack.

“How extraordinary,” she said.

“Be that as it may, Mother—can you, with your gift, discern what this particular pattern is? It would be difficult; I have reason to suppose that it is a cipher, and that the language of the message is English, though the text of the songs is in German.”

Mother Hildegarde uttered a small grunt of surprise.

“English? You are sure?”

Jamie shook his head. “Not sure, no, but I think so. For one reason, there is the country of origin; the songs were sent from England.”

“Well, Monsieur,” she said, arching one eyebrow. “Your wife speaks English, does she not? And I imagine that you would be willing to sacrifice her company to assist me in performing this endeavor for you?”

Jamie eyed her, the half-smile on his face the mirror image of hers. He glanced down at his feet, where Bouton’s whiskers quivered with the ghost of a growl.

“I’ll make ye a bargain, Mother,” he said. “If your wee dog doesna bite me in the arse on the way out, you can have my wife.”

And so, that evening, instead of returning home to Jared’s house in the Rue Tremoulins, I took supper with the sisters of the Couvent des Anges at their long refectory table, and then retired for the evening’s work to Mother Hildegarde’s private rooms.

There were three rooms in the Superior’s suite. The outer one was furnished as a sitting room, with a fair degree of richness. This, after all, was where she must often receive official visitors. The second room was something of a shock, simply because I wasn’t expecting it. At first, I had the impression that there was nothing in the small room but a large harpsichord, made of gleaming, polished walnut, and decorated with small, hand-painted flowers sprouting from a twisting vine that ran along the sounding board above glowing ebony keys.

On second look, I saw a few other bits of furniture in the room, including a set of bookshelves that ran the length of one wall, stuffed with works on musicology and hand-stitched manuscripts much like the one Mother Hildegarde now laid on the harpsichord’s rack.

She motioned me to a chair placed before a small secretary against one wall.

“You will find blank paper and ink there, milady. Now, let us see what this little piece of music may tell us.”

The music was written on heavy parchment, the lines of the staves cleanly ruled across the page. The notes themselves, the clef signs, rests, and accidentals, were all drawn with considerable care; this was plainly a final clean copy, not a draft or a hastily scribbled tune. Across the top of the page was the title “Lied des Landes.” A Song of the Country.

“The title, you see, suggests something simple, like a volkslied,” Mother Hildegarde said, pointing one long, bony forefinger at the page. “And yet the form of the composition is something quite different. Can you read music at sight?” The big right hand, large-knuckled and short-nailed, descended on the keys with an impossibly delicate touch.

Leaning over Mother Hildegarde’s black-clad shoulder, I sang the first three lines of the piece, making the best I could of the German pronunciation. Then she stopped playing, and twisted to look up at me.

“That is the basic melody. It then repeats itself in variations—but such variations! You know, I have seen some things reminiscent of this. By a little old German named Bach; he sends me things now and again—” She waved carelessly at the shelf of manuscripts. “He calls them ‘Inventions,’ and they’re really quite clever; playing off the variations in two or three melodic lines simultaneously. This”—she pursed her lips at the ‘Lied’ before us—“is like a clumsy imitation of one of his things. In fact, I would swear that.…” Muttering to herself, she pushed back the walnut bench and went to the shelf, running a finger rapidly down the rows of manuscripts.

She found what she was looking for, and returned to the bench with three bound pieces of music.

“Here are the Bach pieces. They’re fairly old, I haven’t looked at them in several years. Still, I’m almost sure…” She lapsed into silence, flipping quickly through the pages of the Bach scripts on her knee, one at a time, glancing back now and then at the “Lied” on the rack.

“Ha!” she let out a cry of triumph, and held out one of the Bach pieces to me. “See there?”

The paper was titled “Goldberg Variations,” in a crabbed, smeared hand. I touched the paper with some awe, swallowed hard, and looked back at the “Lied.” It took only a moment’s comparison to see what she meant.

“You’re right, it’s the same!” I said. “A note different here and there, but basically it’s exactly the same as the original theme of the Bach piece. How very peculiar!”

“Isn’t it?” she said, in tones of deep satisfaction. “Now, why is this anonymous composer stealing melodies and treating them in such an odd fashion?”

This was clearly a rhetorical question, and I didn’t bother with an answer, but asked one of my own.

“Is Bach’s music much in vogue these days, Mother?” I certainly hadn’t heard any at the musical salons I attended.

“No,” she said, shaking her head as she peered at the music. “Herr Bach is not well known in France; I believe he had some small popularity in Germany and in Austria fifteen or twenty years ago, but even there his music is not performed much publicly. I am afraid his music is not the sort to endure; clever, but no heart. Hmph. Now, see here?” The blunt forefinger tapped here, and here, and here, turning pages rapidly.

“He has repeated the same melody—almost—but changed the key each time. I think this is perhaps what attracted your husband’s notice; it is obvious even to someone who doesn’t read music, because of the changing signatures—the note tonique.”

It was; each key change was marked by a double vertical line followed by a new treble clef sign and the signature of sharps or flats.

“Five key changes in such a short piece,” she said, tapping the last one again for emphasis. “And changes that make no sense at all, in terms of music. Look, the basic line is precisely the same, yet we move from the key of two flats, which is B-flat major, to A-major, with three sharps. Stranger yet, now he goes to a signature of two sharps, and yet he uses the G-sharp accidental!”

“How very peculiar,” I said. Adding a G-sharp accidental to the section in D-major had the effect of making the musical line identical with the A-major section. In other words, there was no reason whatsoever to have changed the key signature.

“I don’t know German,” I said. “Can you read the words, Mother?”

She nodded, the folds of her black veil rustling with the movement, small eyes intent on the manuscript.

“What truly execrable lyrics!” she murmured to herself. “Not that one expects great poetry from Germans in general, but really…still—” She broke off with a shake of her veil. “We must assume that if your husband is correct in assuming this to be a cipher of some sort, that the message lies embedded in these words. They may therefore not be of great import in themselves.”

“What does it say?” I asked.

“ ‘My shepherdess frolics with her lambs among the verdant hills,’ ” she read. “Horrible grammar, though of course liberties are often taken in writing songs, if the lyricist insists upon the lines rhyming, which they nearly always do if it is a love song.”

“You know a lot about love songs?” I asked curiously. Full of surprises tonight, was Mother Hildegarde.

“Any piece of good music is in essence a love song,” she replied matter-of-factly. “But as for what you mean—yes, I have seen a great many. When I was a young girl”—she flashed her large white teeth in a smile, acknowledging the difficulty of imagining her as a child—“I was something of a prodigy, you understand. I could play from memory anything I heard, and I wrote my first composition at the age of seven.” She gestured at the harpsichord, the rich veneer shining with polish.

“My family has wealth; had I been a man, no doubt I would have been a musician.” She spoke simply, with no trace of regret.

“Surely you could still have composed music, if you’d married?” I asked curiously.

Mother Hildegarde spread her hands, grotesque in the lamplight. I had seen those hands wrench loose a dagger embedded in bone, guide a displaced joint back into alignment, cup the blood-smeared head of a child emerging from between its mother’s thighs. And I had seen those fingers linger on the ebony keys with the delicacy of moths’ feet.

“Well,” she said, after a moment’s contemplation, “it is the fault of St. Anselm.”

“It is?”

She grinned at my expression, her ugly face quite transformed from its stern public facade.

“Oh, yes. My godfather—the Old Sun King,” she added casually, “gave to me a book of the Lives of the Saints for my own Saint’s Day when I was eight. It was a beautiful book,” she said reminiscently, “with gilded pages and a jeweled cover; intended more as a work of art than a work of literature. Still, I read it. And while I enjoyed all of the stories—particularly those of the martyrs—still there was one phrase in the story of St. Anselm that seemed to strike a response in my soul.”

She closed her eyes and tilted back her head, recalling.

“St. Anselm was a man of great wisdom and great learning, a Doctor of the Church. But also a bishop, a man who cared for the people of his flock, and looked after their temporal needs as well as those of the spirit. The story detailed all of his works, and then concluded in these words—‘And so he died, at the conclusion of an eminently useful life, and thus obtained his crown in Paradise.’ ” She paused, flexing her hands lightly on her knees.

“There was something about that that appealed most strongly to me. ‘An eminently useful life.’ ” She smiled at me. “I could think of many worse epitaphs than that, milady.” She spread her hands suddenly and shrugged, an oddly graceful gesture.

“I wished to be useful,” she said. Then, dismissing idle conversation, she turned abruptly back to the music on the rack.

“So,” she said. “Plainly the change in the key signatures— the note tonique—that is the oddity. Where can we go with that?”

My mouth dropped open with a small exclamation. Speaking in French as we had been, I hadn’t noticed before. But observing Mother Hildegarde as she told her story, I had been thinking in English, and when I glanced back at the music it hit me.

“What is it?” the nun asked. “You have thought of something?”

“The key!” I said, half-laughing. “In French, a musical key is the note tonique, but the word for an object that unlocks…” I pointed to the large bunch of keys—normally carried on her girdle—that Mother Hildegarde had laid aside on the bookshelf when we came in. “That is a passe-partout, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, watching me in puzzlement. She touched the skeleton key in turn. “Une passe-partout. That one,” she said, pointing to a key with barrel and wards, “is more likely called a clef.”

“A clef!” I exclaimed joyously. “Perfect!” I stabbed a finger at the sheet of music before us. “See, ma mère, in English, the words are the same. A ‘key’ gives the basis of a piece of music, and a ‘key’ unlocks. In French, the clef is a key, and in English, the ‘clef’ is also part of the musical signature. And the key of the music is also the key to the cipher. Jamie said he thought it was an English cipher! Made by an Englishman with a really diabolical sense of humor, too,” I added.

With that small insight, the cipher proved not too difficult to unravel. If the maker was English, the ciphered message likely was in English, too, which meant that the German words were provided only as a source of letters. And having seen Jamie’s earlier efforts with alphabets and shifting letters, it took only a few tries to determine the pattern of the cipher.

“Two flats means you must take every second letter, starting from the beginning of the section,” I said, frantically scribbling down the results. “And three sharps means to take every third letter, beginning at the end of the section. I suppose he used German both for concealment and because it’s so bloody wordy; it takes nearly twice as many words to say the same thing as it would in English.”

“You have got ink on your nose,” Mother Hildegarde observed. She peered over my shoulder. “Does it make sense?”

“Yes,” I said, my mouth gone suddenly dry. “Yes, it makes sense.”

Deciphered, the message was brief and simple. Also deeply disturbing.

“His Majesty’s loyal subjects of England await his lawful restoration. The sum of fifty thousand pounds is at your disposal. As an earnest of good faith, this will be paid only in person, upon His Highness’s arrival on the soil of England,” I read. “And there’s a letter left over, an ‘S.’ I don’t know if that’s a signature of sorts, or only something the maker needed to make the German word come out right.”

“Hmph.” Mother Hildegarde glanced curiously at the scribbled message, then at me. “You will know already, of course,” she said, with a nod, “but you may assure your husband that I will keep this in confidence.”

“He wouldn’t have asked your help if he didn’t trust you,” I protested.

The sketchy brows rose to the edge of her wimple, and she tapped the scribbled paper firmly.

“If this is the sort of endeavor in which your husband engages, he takes considerable risk in trusting anyone. Assure him that I am sensible of the honor,” she added dryly.

“I’ll do that,” I said, smiling.

“Why, chère Madame,” she said, catching sight of me, “you are looking quite pale! I myself often stay awake far into the night when I am working on a new piece, so I tend to pay little attention to the hour, but it must be late for you.” She glanced at the hour-candle burning on the little table near the door.

“Gracious! It is growing late. Shall I summon Sister Madeleine to take you to your chamber?” Jamie had agreed, reluctantly, with Mother Hildegarde’s suggestion that I spend the night at the Couvent des Anges, so that I need not return home through the dark streets late at night.

I shook my head. I was tired, and my back ached from sitting on the stool, but I didn’t want to go to bed. The implications of the musical message were too disturbing to permit me to sleep right away, in any case.

“Well, then, let us take a little refreshment, in celebration of your accomplishment.” Mother Hildegarde rose and went to the outer room, where I heard the ringing of a bell. Shortly one of the serving sisters came, bearing a tray of hot milk and small, iced cakes, and followed by Bouton. The serving sister placed a cake on a small china plate and set it on the floor before him as a matter of course, laying beside it a bowl of milk.

While I sipped my own hot milk, Mother Hildegarde set aside the source of our labors, laying it on the secretary, and instead placed a loose sheaf of music manuscript on the rack of the harpsichord.

“I shall play for you,” she announced. “It will help to compose your mind for sleep.”

The music was light and soothing, with a singing melody that wove back and forth from treble voice to bass in a pattern of pleasing complexity, but without the driving force of Bach.

“Is that yours?” I asked, choosing a pause as she lifted her hands at the conclusion of the piece.

She shook her head without turning around.

“No. A friend of mine, Jean Philippe Rameau. A good theorist, but he does not write with great passion.”

I must have dozed, the music lulling my senses, for I woke suddenly to the murmur of Sister Madeleine’s voice in my ear, and her warm, firm grip under my arm, lifting me to my feet and leading me away.

Looking back, I could see the broad span of Mother Hildegarde’s black-swathed back, and the flex of powerful shoulders beneath the drape of her veil as she played, oblivious now to the world beyond the sanctum of her chamber. On the boards near her feet lay Bouton, nose on his paws, small body laid straight as the needle of a compass.

“So,” Jamie said, “it’s gone a little further than talk—maybe.”

“Maybe?” I echoed. “An offer of fifty thousand pounds sounds fairly definite.” Fifty thousand pounds, by current standards, was the yearly income of a good-sized duchy.

He raised one eyebrow cynically at the musical manuscript I had brought back with me from the convent.

“Aye, well. An offer like that is fairly safe, it it’s contingent on either Charles or James setting foot in England. If Charles is in England, it means he’s gotten sufficient backing from other places to get him to Scotland, first. No,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “what’s interesting about this offer is that it’s the first definite sign we’ve seen that the Stuarts—or one of them, at least—are actually making an effort at mounting a restoration attempt.”

“One of them?” I caught the emphasis. “You mean you think James isn’t in on this?” I looked at the coded message with even more interest.

“The message came to Charles,” Jamie reminded me, “and it came from England—not through Rome. Fergus got it from a regular messenger, in a packet marked with English seals; not from a papal messenger. And everything I’ve seen in James’s letters—” He shook his head, frowning. He hadn’t yet shaved, and the morning light caught random sparks of copper among the auburn stubble of his beard.

“The packet had been opened; Charles has seen this manuscript. There was no date on it, so I dinna ken how long ago it came to him. And of course, we don’t have the letters Charles has sent to his father. But there’s no reference in any of James’s letters to anyone who could possibly be the composer, let alone to any definite promises of support from England.”

I could see the direction in which he was heading.

“And Louise de La Tour was babbling about how Charles meant to have her marriage annulled and claim her as his wife, once he was king. So you think perhaps Charles wasn’t just talking through his hat to impress her?”

“Maybe not,” he said. He poured water from the bedroom ewer into the basin and laved his face with water, preparatory to shaving.

“So it’s possible that Charles is acting on his own?” I said, horrified and intrigued by the possibility. “That James has set him up for a masquerade of pretending to start a restoration attempt, in order to keep Louis impressed with the Stuarts’ potential value, but—”

“But Charles isn’t pretending?” Jamie interrupted. “Aye, that’s how it seems. Is there a towel there, Sassenach?” Eyes screwed shut and face dripping, he was patting about on the surface of the table. I moved the manuscript to safety and found the towel, draped over the foot of the bed.

He examined his razor critically, decided it would do, and leaned over my dressing table to look in the mirror as he applied shaving soap to his cheeks.

“Why is it barbaric of me to take the hair off my legs and armpits, and it isn’t barbaric for you to take it off your face?” I asked, watching him draw his upper lip down over his teeth as he scraped under his nose with tiny, delicate strokes.

“It is,” he replied, squinting at himself in the mirror. “But it itches like a fiend if I don’t.”

“Have you ever grown a beard?” I asked curiously.

“Not on purpose,” he replied, half-smiling as he scraped one cheek, “but I’ve had one now and then when I couldna help it—when I lived as an outlaw in Scotland. When it came to a choice between shaving in a cold burn with a dull razor every morning or itching, I chose to itch.”

I laughed, watching him draw the razor along the edge of his jawbone with one long sweep.

“I can’t imagine what you’d look like with a full beard. I’ve only seen you in the stubbly stage.”

He smiled on one side of his mouth, drawing the other up as he scraped under the high, broad cheekbone on that side.

“Next time we’re invited to Versailles, Sassenach, I’ll ask if we may visit the Royal zoo. Louis has a creature there that one of his sea-captains brought him from Borneo, called an orang-utan. Ever seen one?”

“Yes,” I said, “the zoo in London had a pair before the war.”

“Then you’ll know what I look like in a beard,” he said, smiling at me as he finished his shave with a careful negotiation of the curve of his chin. “Scraggly and moth-eaten. Rather like the Vicomte Marigny,” he added, “only red.”

As though the name had reminded him, he returned to the main topic of discussion, wiping the remains of soap off his face with the linen towel.

“So I suppose what we must do now, Sassenach,” he said, “is to keep a sharp eye out for Englishmen in Paris.” He picked up the manuscript off the bed and riffled the pages thoughtfully. “If anyone is actually willing to contemplate support on this scale, I think they might be sending an envoy to Charles. If I were risking fifty thousand pounds, I might like to see what I was getting for my money, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would,” I answered. “And speaking of Englishmen—does His Highness patriotically buy his brandywine from you and Jared, or does he by chance patronize the services of Mr. Silas Hawkins?”

“Mr. Silas Hawkins, who is so eager to know what the political climate is like in the Scottish Highlands?” Jamie shook his head at me admiringly. “And here I thought I married you because ye had a fair face and a fine fat arse. To think you’ve a brain as well!” He neatly dodged the blow I aimed at his ear, and grinned at me.

“I don’t know, Sassenach, but I will before the day is out.”