“Perhaps.” The frown had faded, but he still looked troubled. “In the town, at least. She could help him,” he added, in answer to my puzzled expression. “Food, medicine, blankets. He got a message out, aye?” He waved the paper.

Dottie could be in the prison, at that, I realized, though probably not as a prisoner herself. It wasn’t unknown for wives—and sometimes children—to go to live with an imprisoned husband, going out by day to beg for food or perhaps to find a little work. Prisoners were normally fed poorly and sometimes not fed at all, being forced to rely on help from families or friends, or from charitably inclined souls in the community, if they were imprisoned far from home. Likely wives wouldn’t be allowed in a military prison, though …

“Have you got any paper in your study?” I asked, sliding off the log.

“Aye. Why?” He folded the letter, raising a brow at me.

“I’m going to write to John Grey,” I said, trying to sound as though this were both a simple and an obvious thing to do. Well, it was obvious. Or so I thought.

“No, you’re not.” He said it calmly, though his answer had come so fast, I thought he’d said it from pure reflex. Then I looked at his eyes. I straightened my back, folded my arms, and fixed him with a stare of my own.

“Would you care to rephrase that?” I said politely.

One of the benefits of long marriage is that you can see quite clearly where some conversations are likely to lead—and occasionally you can sidestep the booby traps and choose another path by silent mutual assent. He pursed his lips a little, looking thoughtfully up at me. Then he took a deep breath and nodded.

“Dorothea will write to her father, if she hasna done it already,” he said reasonably. He tucked Judah’s letter into his sporran and stood up. “His Grace will do whatever can be done.”

“We don’t know that Dottie can write to her father. She may not be near Denzell—she may not even know that he’s in prison! For that matter, we don’t know where Hal—er, I mean the duke—is, either,” I added. Bloody hell, I shouldn’t have called Hal by his first name … “But he and John can both be found, at least. The British army certainly knows where they are.”

“By the time I sent a message to Savannah or New York, Denzell will likely have been released, or paroled. Or moved.”

“Or died.” I unfolded my arms. “For heaven’s sake, Jamie. If anybody knows what the conditions are like inside a British prison, it’s you!”

He’d turned to go, but at this, his head whipped round like a snake’s.

“Aye, I do.”

Aye, he did. Prison is where he met John …

“Besides,” I said, trying to scramble back onto safer ground, “I said I’d write to him. Denzell’s more my friend than yours. You needn’t be involved at all.”