Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone (145 page)

A week later

IT WAS QUIET, BAR
the usual shipboard noises and shouted orders from the deck of the
Pallas,
echoed faintly across the water from other anchored ships.

Grey had quite recovered from the effects of his abduction and was somewhat prepared when two deckhands came to fetch him from his small cabin. They bound his hands loosely in front of him—a bit of thoroughness that he appreciated as professional caution, though he deplored its immediate effects—and propelled him forcibly up a ladder and across the deck to the captain’s cabin, where Ezekiel Richardson was waiting for him.

“Sit, please.” Richardson gestured him to a seat and stood looking down at him.

“I have as yet had no word from Pardloe,” he said.

“It may be some time before you can reach my brother,” Grey remarked, as casually as possible in the circumstances.
And where the devil
are
you, Hal?

“Oh, I can wait,” Richardson assured him. “I’ve been waiting for years; a few weeks doesn’t signify. Though it would, of course, be desirable for you to tell me where you believe him to be.”

“Waiting years?” Grey said, surprised. “For what?”

Richardson didn’t answer at once, but looked at him thoughtfully, then shook his head.

“Mrs. Fraser,” he said abruptly. “Did you really marry her simply to oblige a dead friend? Given your natural inclinations, I mean. Was it a desire for children? Or was someone getting too close to the truth about you, and you married a woman to disguise that truth?”

“I have no need to justify my actions to you, sir,” Grey said politely.

Richardson seemed to find that amusing.

“No,” he agreed. “You don’t. But you do, I suppose, wonder why I propose to kill you.”

“Not really.” This was in fact true, and the disinterest in Grey’s voice needed no dissimulation. If Richardson truly meant to kill him, he’d already be dead. The fact that he wasn’t meant that Richardson had some use for him.
That,
he wondered about, but chose not to say so.

Richardson drew a slow breath, looking him over, then shook his head and chose a new tack.

“One of my great-grandmothers was a slave,” he said abruptly.

Grey shrugged. “Two of my great-grandfathers were Scotch,” he said. “A man can’t be responsible for his ancestry.”

“So you don’t think the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children?”

Grey sighed, pressing his shoulders against the chair to ease the stiffness in his back.

“If they were, I should think humanity would have ceased to exist by now, pressed back into the earth by the accumulated weight of inherited evil.”

Richardson shrugged slightly, whether in acknowledgment or dismissal of the point, Grey couldn’t tell. Richardson turned to the wall of glass panes and looked out, presumably to give himself time to think up a new conversational gambit.

The sun was sinking and the light from the big stern window glittered from a million tiny wavelets, coruscating across the glass, the ceiling—did you call it a ceiling, in a ship?—and across the table at which Grey sat. It flickered over his hands, which were still rather the worse for wear. He flexed them, slowly, considering various nearby objects in terms of their effectiveness as weapons. There was a rather solid-looking clock and the bottle of brandy, but both were some distance away, on the far side of the cabin…God damn it, that was
his
bottle of brandy! He recognized the handwritten label, even at this distance. The bastard had been burgling his house!

“I beg your pardon?” he said, suddenly aware that Richardson had asked him something.

“I said,” Richardson said, with a pretense of patience, “how do you feel about slavery?” Not getting an immediate response, he said, much less patiently, “You were governor of Jamaica, for God’s sake—surely you’re well acquainted with the institution?”

“I assume that’s a rhetorical question,” Grey said, gingerly touching the healing but still-swollen laceration on his scalp. “But if you insist…yes. I’m reasonably sure I know a great deal more about it than you do. As to my feelings regarding slavery, I deplore it on both philosophical and compassionate grounds. Why? Did you expect me to declare myself in favor of it?”

“You might have.” Richardson looked at him intently for a moment, and then seemed to come to some decision, for he sat down across the table from Grey, meeting his eyes on the level. “But I’m glad you didn’t. Now…” He leaned forward, intent. “Your wife. Or your ex-wife, if you prefer…”

“If you mean Mrs. Fraser,” Grey said politely, “she was in fact never my wife, the marriage between us having been arranged under the false impression that her husband was dead. He’s not.”

“I’m well aware of it.” There was a note of grimness in
that
remark, and it gave Grey an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The clock on the distant table uttered a clear
ting!,
then did it four more times, just to make its point. Richardson looked over his shoulder at it and made a displeased noise.

“I’ll have to go soon. What I want to know, sir, is whether you know what Mrs. Fraser is.”

Grey stared at him.

“I realize that being struck over the head has somewhat impaired my thought processes…
sir
…but I have the strong impression that it’s not I who am suffering from incoherence. What the devil do you mean by that?”

The man flushed, a strange, patchy sort of flush that left his face mottled like a frost-bitten tomato. Still, the look of displeasure on his face had eased, which alarmed Grey.

“I think you have a good idea what I mean, Colonel. She told you, didn’t she? She’s the most intemperate woman I’ve ever met, in this century or any other.”

Grey started involuntarily at that, and cursed himself as he saw the look of satisfaction in Richardson’s eyes.

What the devil did I just tell him?

“Ah, yes. Well, then—” Richardson leaned forward. “I am also—what Mrs. Fraser, and her daughter and grandchildren, are.”

“What?” Grey was honestly gobsmacked at this. “What the devil do you think they are, may I ask?”

“People capable of moving from one period of time to another.”

Grey shut his eyes and waited a moment, sighed deeply, and opened them.

“I’d hoped I was dreaming, but you’re still there, I see,” he said. “Is that my brandy? If so, give me some. I’m not listening to this sort of thing sober.”

Richardson shrugged and poured him a glass, which Grey drank like water. He sipped the second, and Richardson, who had been watching him patiently, nodded.

“All right. Listen, then. There is an abolitionist movement in England—do you know about that?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well, it will take root, and in the year 1807, the King will sign the first Act of Abolition, outlawing the slave trade in the British Empire.”

“Oh? Well…good.” He’d been covertly looking for an avenue of escape ever since he’d awakened on deck and realized that he was on a ship. Now he realized that he was looking at it. The windows in the lowest row of that great wall of glass were hinged; two of them were in fact open, allowing a cool breeze to come in from the distant sea.

“And in 1833, the House of Commons will pass the Slavery Abolition Act, which will outlaw slavery itself and free the slaves in most of Britain’s colonies—some eight hundred thousand of them.”

Grey was a slender man, and not tall. He
thought
he might be able to squeeze through one of the panes. And if he could drop into the river, he was fairly sure he could swim ashore, though he’d seen the river’s currents…

“Eight hundred thousand,” he said politely, as Richardson had paused, evidently expecting a response. “Very impressive.” He was managing the glass of brandy well enough with his wrists bound, but swimming was another matter…He glanced briefly at the rope. Chew one of the knots loose, perhaps…Ought he to wait until he was out in the water, in case someone came in and caught him gnawing, though?

“Yes,” Richardson agreed. “But not nearly as impressive as the number of people in America who will
not
be freed, and who will continue to be enslaved, and then to suffer…”

Grey ceased listening, recognizing that the tone of Richardson’s speech had shifted from conversation to lecture. He dropped his hands to his lap, pulling inconspicuously to test the stretch of the rope….

“I’m sorry?” he said, noticing that Richardson had stopped talking for a moment and was glaring at him. “My apologies; I must have dozed off again.”

Richardson leaned over, took the brandy glass from the table, and dashed the dregs in his face. Taken unaware, Grey inhaled some of the liquid and coughed and spluttered, eyes burning.

“
My
apologies,” Richardson said, politely. “No doubt you’ll need a bit of water with that.” There was a pitcher of water on the desk; he picked that up and poured it over Grey’s head.

This was actually helpful in washing the stinging brandy mostly out of his eyes, though it did nothing for the coughing and wheezing, which went on for some minutes. When this at last eased, he sat back and wiped his eyes on the backs of his tied hands, then shook his head, sending droplets across the desk. Some of them struck Richardson, who inhaled strongly through his nose, but then apparently regained control of himself.

“As I was saying,” he said, giving Grey a glare, “it’s the Revolution in America that will allow slavery to flourish unchecked here—and then lead, in part, at least, to another bloody war and more cruelty…”

“Yes. Fine.” Grey held up both hands, perforce, palms out. “And you propose to do something about this by moving through time. I understand perfectly.”

“I doubt that,” Richardson said dryly. “But you will, in time. It’s very simple: if the patriots don’t succeed, the American colonies remain under British law. They won’t engage in slave trading, and their existing slaves will all be freed in the next fifty years. They won’t become a slaveholding nation, and the Civil War—that’s going to happen in roughly a hundred years from now, if we don’t manage to put a stop to the present war—won’t happen, thus saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and the long-term consequences of slavery will not…Are you trying to feign sleep again, Lord John? I might be obliged to slap you awake, as the pitcher is empty.”

“No.” Grey shook his head and straightened up a little. “Just thinking. I gather that you’re telling me that you mean to cause the current rebellion to fail so that the Americans remain British subjects, is that right? Yes. All right. How do you mean to do that?” Plainly the man wasn’t going to shut up until he’d got his entire theory laid out—such people never did. He groaned inwardly—his head was aching again, from the coughing—but did his best to look attentive.

Richardson looked at him narrowly, but then nodded.

“As I said—if you remember—my associates and I have pinpointed several key persons whose actions will affect the trajectory of this war. Your brother is one of them. If we do not prevent him, he’ll go to England and deliver a speech to the House of Lords, describing his own experience and observation of the American war, and insisting that while the war might eventually be won, the expense of doing so will be disproportionate to any benefit from retaining the colonies.”

Jesus. If Hal does do that, he’d be doing it for Ben. If the war stops and the Americans are allowed to win, Ben won’t be captured and hanged as a traitor. He won’t
be
a traitor, as long as he stays in America. Oh, God, Hal…
His eyes were watering again, but not from brandy fumes.

“He’s not the only person in a public position to hold that opinion,” Richardson added, “but he’ll be one of the people who, by virtue of chance or destiny, is in the right place at the right time. He’ll give Lord North the excuse he’s been looking for to abandon the war and devote England’s resources to more important ventures. It won’t be only Pardloe, of course—we have a list—”

“Yes, you said that.” Grey was beginning to have an unpleasant feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You said
‘we.’
How the devil many of you are there?”

“You don’t need to know that,” Richardson snapped, and Grey felt a small pulse of satisfaction. The answer was likely either “very few” or “no one but me,” he thought.

Richardson leveled a finger at him.

“All you need to know, my lord, is that your brother must not give that speech. With luck, his concern for your health will be sufficient to stop him. If not, we will be compelled to reveal your character and activities in the most public manner and make the scandal as sensational as possible by having you executed for the crime of sodomy. That should be enough to discredit your brother and anything he says.” He paused dramatically, but Grey said nothing. Richardson stared at him, then gave a short laugh.

“But you will have the comfort of knowing that your death will mean something. You will have saved millions of lives—and, incidentally, prevented the British empire from making the greatest economic blunder in history by abandoning America. That’s more than most soldiers get, isn’t it?”