Free Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade by Diana Gabaldon Page A

pardon my asking?”
    Percy blinked at that, but smiled.
    “Twenty-six. Why?”
    “Ah. You may be old enough, then, to recall the atmosphere of suspicion and hysteria regarding Jacobites during the ’45?”
    Percy shook his head.
    “No,” he said ruefully. “My father was a clergyman, who viewed the world and its affairs as nothing more than a threat to the souls of the godly. We heard little news, and would have taken no heed of political rumors in any case—the only king of any importance being the Lord, so far as my father was concerned. But that’s of no consequence,” he added hastily. “Go on, please.”
    “I was going to say that that hysteria, great as it was, was no more than an echo of what happened earlier. Are you content to walk, by the way? We could easily take a carriage.” The weather had grown sharply colder, and a bone-cutting breeze swept through the alleyways. Percy was lightly dressed for the temperature, but he shook his head.
    “No, I prefer to walk. It’s much easier to talk—if you wish to do that,” he added, a little shyly.
    Grey wasn’t at all sure that he wished to do that—his offer of a carriage had been based as much on a sudden desire to abandon the conversation for the moment as on a desire to save Mr. Wainwright from a chilled liver. But he’d meant it; Wainwright had a right to know, and might better hear the details from him than from someone who held the late duke in less esteem.
    “Well. You will know, I suppose, that raising, equipping, and maintaining a regiment is an expensive business. My father had money, as I said, but in order to expand the regiment when the Jacobite threat recurred in 1719, he sold his South Sea shares—quite against the advice of Great-Uncle Nicodemus, I might add.”
    Within the previous five years, the price of South Sea shares had risen, from ten pounds to a hundred, then dizzyingly, from a hundred to a thousand within a year, driven up by rumor, greed—and not a little calculated chicanery on the part of the company’s directors. The duke sold his shares at this pinnacle.
    “And a week—one week—later, the slide began.” It had taken most of a year for the full devastation of the great crash to become evident. Several great families had been ruined; many lesser folk all but obliterated. And the public outcry toward those seen to be responsible…
    “I can imagine.” Percy glanced at him. He wore no hat, and the tips of his ears were red with cold. “But your father was
not
responsible, was he?”
    Grey shook his head.
    “He was seen to profit immensely, while others went bankrupt,” he said simply. “Nothing else was needed to convict him in the popular mind.” And the House of Commons, that voice of the popular mind, had been vociferous in their denunciations.
    “But he was a duke.” Grey watched the words purl out, his breath like smoke. “He could not be tried, save by his peers. And the House of Lords declined to proceed.” Not from any sense of justice—many noble families had suffered in the crash and were quite as irrationally bloodthirsty as the commoners. But the Duke of Pardloe chose his friends carefully, and the ravenings of the mob moved on to easier prey.
    “Such things leave a mark, though. Enemies were made, enmities lingered. And it was the more unfortunate that my father should have been a good friend of Francis Atterbury’s. The Bishop of Rochester,” he added, seeing Percy’s puzzled look. “Convicted of being the focus of a Jacobite plot to exploit public feeling about the South Sea Bubble by staging a Stuart invasion and dethroning the king, in ’22. Banished, though, not executed.”
    Their path had led them to Hyde Park, for the most direct way to Lady Jonas’s house lay straight across it. They were now well within the park, and Grey gestured to the wide spaces all around them, empty and desolate.
    “When word got out of the plot in ’22, His Majesty in panic ordered ten thousand troops