The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (955 page)

“I do. It means whatever ye’re talking about can dissolve something. Why?”

“Ah. Perhaps that’s why applying laudanum to the sutures of the skull is a bad idea.”

He gave me a baffled look.

“Why would ye do that?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” I returned to the pamphlets, fascinated. One of them, titled “The Womb,” had some very good engravings of a dissected female pelvis and internal organs, done from varying angles, as well as depictions of the fetus in various stages of development. If this was Mr. Bell’s work, I thought, he was both a superb craftsman and a very diligent observer.

“Have you got a penny? I’d like to buy this.”

Jamie dug into his sporran and laid a penny on the counter, glanced at the pamphlet in my hand, and recoiled.

“Mother of God,” he said, crossing himself.

“Well, probably not,” I said mildly. “Certainly
a
mother, though.” Before he could reply to this, Richard Bell came out of the back room, red-eyed but composed, and seized Jamie by the hand.

“You cannot know what you have done for me, Mr. Fraser,” he said earnestly. “If you can indeed help me to return to my family, I—I—well, in fact, I do not know what I could possibly do to show my gratitude, but be assured that I will bless your soul forever!”

“I’m much obliged to ye for the thought, sir,” Jamie said to him, smiling. “It may be that ye can do me a small service, but if not, I shall still be most thankful for your blessings.”

“If there is anything I can do, sir, anything at all!” Bell assured him fervently. Then a faint hesitation came over his face—possibly a recollection of whatever his wife had had to say about Jamie in her letter. “Anything short of … of treason, I should say.”

“Och, no. Well short of treason,” Jamie assured him, and we took our leave.

I took a spoonful of the oyster stew and closed my eyes in ecstasy. We had come a little early, in order to get a seat by the window overlooking the street, but Mowbray’s had filled up fast, and the clishmaclaver of cutlery and conversation was almost deafening.

“You’re sure he’s not here?” I said, leaning across the table to make myself heard. Jamie shook his head, rolling a sip of the cold Moselle around his mouth with an expression of bliss.

“Ye’ll ken well enough when he is,” he said, swallowing it.

“All right. What sort of not-quite-treasonous thing are you planning to make poor Mr. Bell do in return for passage home?”

“I mean to send him home in charge of my printing press,” he replied.

“What, entrust your precious darling to a virtual stranger?” I asked, amused. He gave me a mildly dirty look in return, but finished his bite of buttered roll before answering.

“I dinna expect him to be abusing her. He’s no going to print a thousand-run of
Clarissa
on her aboard ship, after all.”

“Oh, it’s a her, is it?” I said, vastly entertained. “And what, may I ask, is her name?”

He flushed a little and looked away, taking particular care to coax a specially succulent oyster into his spoon, but finally muttered, “Bonnie,” before gulping it.

I laughed, but before I could make further inquiries, a new noise intruded on the racket, and people began to put down their spoons and stand up, craning to see out of the windows.

“That w
ill be Andy,” Jamie told me.

I looked down into the street and saw a small knot of boys and idlers, clapping and cheering. Looking up the street to see what was coming, I beheld one of the biggest horses I had ever seen. It wasn’t a draft horse but an enormously tall gelding, close to seventeen hands, so far as my inexpert eye could judge.

On top of it was a very small man, sitting up straight and regally ignoring the cheers of the crowd. He came to a stop directly below us and, turning round, removed a wooden square from the saddle behind him. He shook this out, revealing it to be a folding wooden ladder, and one of the street children ran forward to hold the foot of it while Mr. Bell—for it couldn’t be anyone else—descended to the plaudits of passersby. He tossed a coin to the child who’d held the ladder, another to a lad who’d taken his horse’s head, and disappeared from view.

A few moments later, he came through the door into the main dining room, taking off his cocked hat and bowing graciously to the calls of greeting from the diners. Jamie raised a hand, calling “Andy Bell!” in a resonant voice that cut through the thrum of talk, and the little man’s head jerked in our direction, surprised. I watched with fascination as he came toward us, a slow grin spreading over his face.

I couldn’t tell whether he had some form of dwarfism or had merely suffered badly from malnutrition and scoliosis in his youth, but his legs were short in proportion to his upper body, and his shoulders crooked; he barely topped four feet, and only the crown of his head—this covered by a very fashionable wig—showed as he passed between the tables.

These aspects of appearance faded into insignificance, though, as he drew close and I perceived his most striking attribute. Andrew Bell had the biggest nose I had ever seen, and in the course of an eventful life, I had seen a number of prize specimens. It began between his eyebrows, curved gently down for a short distance as though nature had intended him to have the profile of a Roman emperor. Something had gone amiss in the execution, though, and to this promising beginning, something that looked like a small potato had been affixed. Knobbly and red, it took the eye.

It took quite a few eyes; as he drew close to our table, a young lady nearby saw him, gasped audibly, and then clapped a hand over her mouth, this precaution being quite insufficient to quell her giggles.

Mr. Bell heard her, and without breaking his stride, he reached into his pocket, withdrew an immense papier-mâché nose decorated with purple stars, which he clapped over his own, and, fixing the young woman with an icy stare, passed by.

“My dear,” Jamie said to me, grinning as he rose to his feet and extending a hand to the little engraver, “may I name my friend, Mr. Andrew Bell? My wife, Andy. Claire is her name.”

“Charmed, madam,” he said, removing the false nose and bowing low over my hand. “When did you acquire this rare creature, Jamie? And whatever would such a lovely lass want with a great, vulgar lout such as you, I wonder?”

“I lured her into marriage wi’ descriptions of the beauties of my printing press,” Jamie said dryly, sitting down and motioning to Andy Bell to join us.

“Ah,” said Andy, with a sharp look at Jamie, who raised his brows and
widened his eyes. “Hmm. I see ye’ve been by the shop, then.” He nodded at my reticule, from which the top of the pamphlet I’d bought was protruding.

“We have,” I said hastily, pulling out the pamphlet. I didn’t
think
Jamie proposed to squash Andy Bell like a bug for having made free with his printing press, but his relationship with “Bonnie” was news to me, and I wasn’t sure quite how deep his sense of affronted proprietorship went.

“This is remarkably fine work,” I said to Mr. Bell, with complete sincerity. “Tell me, how many different specimens did you use?”

He blinked a little but answered readily, and we had a pleasant—if rather gruesome—conversation regarding the difficulties of dissection in warm weather and the effect of saline solution versus alcohol for preservation. This caused the people at the next table to end their meal rather hurriedly, casting veiled looks of horror as they left. Jamie leaned back in his chair, looking pleasant but fixing Andy Bell with an unwavering gaze.

The little engraver betrayed no particular discomfort under this basilisk stare and went on telling me about the response when he had published the bound edition of the
Encyclopedia—-
the King had somehow happened to see the plates of the “Womb” section and had ordered those pages to be torn out of the book, the ignorant German blatherskite!—but when the waiter came to take his order, he ordered both a very expensive wine and a large bottle of good whisky.

“What, whisky wi’ the stew?” blurted the waiter, astonished.

“No,” he said with a sigh, pushing back his wig. “Concubinage. If that’s what ye call it when ye rent the services of a man’s beloved.”

The waiter shifted his look of astonishment to me, then went bright red and, choking slightly, backed away.

Jamie fixed a narrow eye on his friend, now buttering a roll with aplomb.

“It’ll take more than whisky, Andy.”

Andy Bell sighed and scratched his nose.

“Aye, then,” he said. “Say on.”

We found Ian waiting at the small hotel, chatting with a couple of draymen in the street. Seeing us, he took his leave—and a small package, thrust surreptitiously under his coat—and came in with us. It was teatime, and Jamie ordered it to be brought up to our rooms, for the sake of discretion.

We had lashed out, rather, in the matter of accommodations, and had taken a suite of rooms. The tea was now laid out in the parlor, an appetizing array of grilled finnan haddie, Scotch eggs, toast with marmalade, and scones with jam and clotted cream, accompanying an enormous pot of strong black tea. I inhaled the fragrant steam from the table and sighed with pleasure.

“It’s going to be rather a wrench, going back to no tea,” I observed, pouring out for everyone. “I don’t suppose we’ll get any in America for another, what—three or four years?”

“Oh, I wouldna say that,” Jamie said judiciously. “Depends where we go back to, aye? Ye can get tea fine in places like Philadelphia or Charleston. Ye
only need to ken a good smuggler or two, and if Captain Hickman’s no been sunk or hanged by the time we go back …”

I put down my cup and stared at him.

“You don’t mean you aren’t planning to go ho—to go back to the Ridge?” I had a sudden empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, remembering our plans for the New House, the smell of balsam fir, and the quiet of the mountains. Did he really mean to move to Boston or Philadelphia?

“No,” he said, surprised. “Of course we shall go back there. But if I mean to be in the printing trade, Sassenach, we shall need to be in a city for a time, no? Only ’til the war is over,” he said, encouraging.

“Oh,” I said in a small voice. “Yes. Of course.” I drank tea, not tasting it. How could I have been so stupid? I had never once thought that, of course, a printing press would be pointless on Fraser’s Ridge. In part, I supposed, I simply hadn’t really believed he
would
get his press back, let alone thought ahead to the logical conclusion if he did.

But now he had his Bonnie back, and the future had suddenly acquired a disagreeable solidity. Not that cities didn’t have considerable advantages, I told myself stoutly. I could finally acquire a decent set of medical instruments, replenish my medicines—why, I could even make penicillin and ether again! With a little better appetite, I took a Scotch egg.

“Speaking of smugglers,” Jamie was saying to Ian, “what is it ye have in your coat? A present for one of the ladies at Madame Jeanne’s?”

Ian gave his uncle a cold look and removed the small package from his pocket.

“A wee bit o’ French lace. For my mam.”

“Good lad,” Jamie said with approval.

“What a sweet thought, Ian,” I said. “Did you—I mean, was Madame Jeanne still
in situ?
”

He nodded, putting the package back into his coat.

“She is. And verra eager to renew her acquaintance wi’
you
, Uncle,” he added, with a slightly malicious grin. “She asked would ye care to come round this evening for a bit of entertainment.”

Jamie’s nose twitched as he glanced at me.

“Oh, I think not, Ian. I’ll send a note saying we shall wait upon her tomorrow morning at eleven. Though ye’re free to take up her invitation yourself, of course.” It was clear that he was only teasing, but Ian shook his head.

“Nay, I wouldna go wi’ a whore. Not ’til it’s settled between Rachel and me,” he said seriously. “One way or the other. But I shallna take another woman to my bed until she tells me that I must.”

We both looked at him in some surprise across the teacups.

“You
do
mean it, then,” I said. “You feel … er … betrothed to her?”