Jamie leaped forward to grasp him by an arm, anxiously smoothing back the sweat-drenched hair from his forehead.

“Are ye all right, man?” he asked. “God, Fergus, tell me you’re all right!”

The boy was white to the lips, and his eyes were the size of saucers, but he smiled at this evidence of goodwill on the part of his employer, buck teeth gleaming in the lamplight.

“Oh yes, milord,” he gasped. “Am I forgiven?”

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie muttered, and clasped the boy tightly against his chest. “Yes, of course ye are, fool.” He held the boy at arm’s length and shook him slightly. “I dinna want to do that ever again, d’ye hear me?”

Fergus nodded, eyes glowing, then broke away and fell to his knees before me.

“Do you forgive me also, Madame?” he asked, folding his hands formally in front of him, and looking trustfully up, like a chipmunk begging for nuts.

I thought I would expire on the spot of mortification, but mustered sufficient self-possession to reach down and raise the boy to his feet.

“There is nothing to forgive,” I told him firmly, my cheeks burning. “You’re a very courageous lad, Fergus. Why… er, why don’t you go and have some supper now?”

At this, the atmosphere of the kitchen relaxed, as though everyone had drawn a massive sigh of relief at once. The other servants pushed forward, babbling concern and congratulations, and Fergus was swept off to a hero’s reception, while Jamie and I beat a precipitous retreat back to our quarters abovestairs.

“Oh, God,” Jamie said, collapsing into his chair as though completely drained. “Sweet bleeding Jesus. Mary, Michael, and Bride. Lord, I need a drink. Don’t ring!” he exclaimed in alarm, though I hadn’t made a move toward the bell rope. “I couldna bear to face one of the servants just now.”

He got up and rummaged in the cupboard. “I think I’ve a bottle in here, though.”

He had indeed, a nice aged Scotch. Removing the cork unceremoniously with his teeth, he lowered the level of the spirit by an inch or so, then handed the bottle to me. I followed his example without hesitation.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, when I had recovered breath enough to speak.

“Yes,” he said, taking the bottle back and taking another gulp. Setting the bottle down, he clutched his head, running his fingers through his hair until it stood on end in wild disarray. He laughed weakly.

“I’ve never felt so foolish in my entire life. God, I felt a clot-heid!”

“So did I,” I said, taking my turn at the bottle. “Even more than you, I imagine. After all, it was all my fault. Jamie, I can’t tell you how sorry I am; I never imagined…”

“Ah, dinna worry yourself.” The tension of the last half-hour released, he squeezed my shoulder affectionately. “You couldna have any idea. Neither did I, for that matter,” he added reflectively. “I suppose he thought I’d dismiss him, and he’d be back in the streets… poor little bugger. No wonder he thought himself lucky to take a beating instead.”

I shuddered briefly, remembering the streets through which Monsieur Forez’s carriage had traveled. Beggars dressed in rags and sores clung stubbornly to their territories, sleeping on the ground even on the coldest nights, lest some rival steal a profitable corner from them. Children much smaller than Fergus darted through the market crowds like hungry mice, eyes always watching for the dropped crumb, the unguarded pocket. And for those too unhealthy to work, too unattractive to sell to the brothels, or simply too unlucky – it would be a short life indeed, and far from merry. Little wonder if the prospect of being thrust from the luxury of three meals a day and clean clothes back into that sordid stew had been sufficient to send Fergus into paroxysms of needless guilt.

“I suppose so,” I said. My manner of intake had declined from gulps to a more genteel sipping by this time. I sipped genteelly, then handed the bottle back, noting in a rather detached manner that it was more than half empty. “Still, I hope you didn’t hurt him.”

“Weel, nay doubt he’ll be a bit sore.” His Scots accent, usually faint, always grew more pronounced when he drank a lot. He shook his head, squinting through the bottle to judge the level of spirit remaining. “D’ye know, Sassenach, I never ’til tonight realized just how difficult it must ha’ been for my father to beat me? I always thought it was me had the hardest part of that particular transaction.” He tilted his head back and drank again, then set down the bottle and stared owl-eyed into the fire. “Being a father might be a bit more complicated than I’d thought. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Well, don’t think too hard,” I said. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“Och, don’t worry,” he said cheerfully. “There’s another bottle in the cupboard.”

We stayed up late with the second bottle, going over and over the latest of the abstracted letters from the Chevalier de St. George – otherwise known as His Majesty, James III – and the letters to Prince Charles from Jacobite supporters.

“Fergus got a large packet, bound for His Highness,” Jamie explained. “There was a lot of stuff in it, and we couldna copy it all quickly enough, so I kept some to go back the next time.”

“See,” he said, extracting one sheet from the pile and laying it on my knee, “the majority of the letters are in code, like this one – ‘I hear that the prospects for grouse seem most favorable this year in the hills above Salerno; hunters in that region should find themselves successful.’ That’s easy; it’s a reference to Manzetti, the Italian banker; he’s from Salerno. I found that Charles had been dining with him, and managed to borrow fifteen thousand livres – apparently James’s advice was good. But here-” He shuffled through the stack, pulling out another sheet.

“Look at this,” Jamie said, handing me a sheet covered with his lopsided scrawls.

I squinted obediently at the paper, from which I could pick out single letters, connected with a network of arrows and question marks.

“What language is that?” I asked, peering at it. “Polish?” Charles Stuart’s mother, the late Clementina Sobieski, had been Polish, after all.

“No, it’s in English,” Jamie said, grinning. “You canna read it?”

“You can?”

“Oh, aye,” he said smugly. “It’s a cipher, Sassenach, and no a verra complicated one. See, all ye must do is break the letters up into groups of five, to start – only ye don’t count the letters Q or X. The X’s are meant as breaks between sentences, and the Q’s are only stuck in here and there to make it more confusing.”

“If you say so,” I said, looking from the extremely confusing-looking letter, which began “Mrti ocruti dlopro qahstmin…” to the sheet in Jamie’s hand, with a series of five-letter groups written on one line, single letters printed in carefully above them, one at a time.

“So, one letter is only substituted for another, but in the same order,” Jamie was explaining, “so if you have a fair amount of text to work from, and you can guess a word here or there, then all ye need do is to translate from one alphabet to the other – see?” He waved a long strip of paper under my nose, with two alphabets printed one above the other, slightly offset.

“Well, more or less,” I said. “I gather you do, though, which is what’s important. What does it say?”

The expression of lively interest with which Jamie greeted all manner of puzzles faded a bit, and he let the sheet of paper fall to his knee. He looked at me, lower lip caught between his teeth in introspection.

“Well,” he said, “that’s what’s odd. And yet I dinna see how I can be mistaken. The tone of James’s letters overall tend one way, and this ciphered one spells it out clearly.”

Blue eyes met mine under thick, ruddy brows.

“James wants Charles to find favor with Louis,” he said slowly, “but he isna looking for support for an invasion of Scotland. James has no interest in seeking restoration to the throne.”