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Charles Stuart. Drunk as usual, amiable as always, the prince reeled down a dark street somewhere at Jamie’s side, poking him now and then, blethering of this and that, grabbing his arm and giggling as he pointed out a row of heads mounted on spikes along a wall.
    “Coimhead,”
the man kept saying.
“A Dhia coimhead am fear ud’ seall an dealbh a th’air aodann!”
Look at that one, God, the look on its face.
    “What are ye about?” Jamie demanded irritably. “Ye ken ye havena got the
Gàidhlig
.”
    “Bheil e gu diofair,”
replied Prince
Tearlach
. Does it matter?
    Quinn, who had suddenly appeared from somewhere, seized Jamie’s arm with great strength, compelling him to stop.
    “Coimhead nach ann oirre tha a ghruag aluinn?”
Look—does she not have lovely hair?
    Jamie had been trying not to look but did now and, surprised, saw that all the heads were women’s. He was holding a torch and raised it to see Geneva Dunsany’s face looking back at him, pale and composed, with black and empty eye sockets. From the corner of his eye, he could see that the next head had a wealth of curling light-brown hair; he dashed the torch onto the wet cobbles at his feet in order not to see and woke, heart pounding, to the sound of Charles’s drunken laughter.
    It wasn’t, though. It was Hanks, laughing in his sleep, the sharp smell of beer and urine hanging in a cloud over his pallet; he’d pissed himself again. The moon was up, and the mice who lived in the loft were stirring; moonlight always made them venturesome. Hanks subsided into heavy breathing and Jamie could hear the tiny scratch of nails on the floor, the rustle of straw.
    He threw back his blanket, determined not to go to sleep again until the dream had faded. But it had been a long day, and in spite of the cold, he dozed again.
    Sleeping cold always gave him bad dreams. The new one had to do with Betty, and he woke from that in a cold sweat. Fumbling in the box that held his possessions, he found his rosary and sank back into the matted straw of his pallet, clinging to the wooden beads as though to a raft that might keep him afloat.

4
Not Good
Regimental Offices of the 46th Foot
London
    MR. BEASLEY WAS DISTURBED ABOUT SOMETHING. THE AGE of Hal’s regimental clerk was an unknowable secret; he had looked just the same—ancient—ever since John Grey had first set eyes on him, a quarter century before. But those who knew him well could detect small fluctuations in his gray, peering countenance in times of stress, and Grey was seeing more and more of these subtle tremors of the jaw, the subterranean quiverings of eyelid, as Mr. Beasley turned over the pages of Charles Carruthers’s combustible packet with tidy, ink-stained fingers.
    The elderly clerk was supposed to be making a list of the men indicted in the documents, those men whom Carruthers had known or suspected to have had dealings, financial or otherwise, with Major Gerald Siverly. Grey was supposed to be joining Hal and Harry Quarry—one of the regimental colonels and Hal’s oldest friend—for a discussion of strategy, but neither one had arrived yet, and Grey had wandered into Mr. Beasley’s clerk’shole to borrow a book; the old man had a remarkable collection of French novels squirreled discreetly away in one of his cabinets.
    Grey took down a copy of Abbé Prévost’s
Manon Lescaut
, and thumbed casually through the pages, watching Beasley covertly as he did so. He knew better than to ask; Mr. Beasley was the soul of discretion, that being only one of the attributes that made him invaluable to Hal, as he had been to the first earl of Melton, their father and the founder of the regiment.
    The disturbance was growing worse. Mr. Beasley made to dip his pen but instead allowed it to hover above the ink-stand and then slowly set it down. He had turned over a page; now he turned it back and studied something upon it, thin lips compressed almost into invisibility.
    “Lord John,” he said at last,