“I promise you,” she whispered when she could speak. “Your face will break his heart.”

He patted her back, very gently, and stepped back.

“You’re very kind,” he said. “You should sleep now.”

97

An Excellent Question

JOHN CINNAMON TACTFULLY LEFT William and Brianna soon after they had made their way back through the debris of the abatis line into the city, saying that he had business at the riverfront and would see William later at Lord John’s house.

“I like your friend a lot,” Brianna said, watching Cinnamon’s broad back disappear into the dappled sunlight of a square whose name she didn’t know.

“So do I. I only hope—” William checked himself, but his sister turned to him, a sympathetic expression on her face.

“Me, too,” she said. “You mean London, and this Matthew Stubbs?”

“Malcolm, but yes.”

“What sort of man is he?” she asked curiously. “Have you met him?”

“Yes, twice that I recall. Once at Ascot and once at one of my f—one of Lord John’s clubs.” He glanced at her to see whether she’d noticed, but of course she had.

“It’s okay—all right, I mean—to call Lord John your father,” she said, the expression of sympathy transferring itself to him. “Da wouldn’t mind.”

Blood rose in his cheeks, but he was saved from saying what he thought about Jamie Fraser’s preferences in the matter by Brianna’s instantly returning to the subject of Malcolm Stubbs.

“So, what’s he like, this Stubbs?”

He couldn’t help a smile at the suspicious tone of “this Stubbs.”

“To look at, very aptly named. Short and thick—with hair just like Cinnamon’s, though it’s a sort of a sandy blond. It may be gray by now, though,” he added. “He always wears a wig in public.”

She lifted her brows at him—thick brows, for a woman, and red to boot, but very expressive.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, in response to the brows’ question. “There’s the one thing that might help. Pa—Papa, I mean,” he said, giving her a brief glare that dared her to comment, “told me that he has a black wife. Stubbs has, I mean,” he amended. “Not Papa.”

She blinked.

“In London?”

She sounded so shocked that he laughed.

“Why should the place make a difference? I imagine she’d be just as surprising here”—he waved a hand at the stately, shattered houses surrounding St. James Square—“if not more so.”

“Hm!” she said. Then, curiously, “Did he free her from slavery, and then marry her?”

“She wasn’t a slave,” William said, somewhat surprised. “My father said that he—he and Stubbs both, he meant—had met her in Cuba. Stubbs’s first wife had just died of some sort of fever, and he brought this woman—Inocencia, that’s her name, I knew it was some sort of Spanish virtue—brought her back to London with him and married her. Anyway,” he said, bringing the conversation back to its point, “I’m sure that Papa said Stubbs had children by this woman.”