“As for the lad,” he continued blithely, “Fergus is now in my employ.”

“To do what?” I asked. “We already have a boy who cleans the knives and boots, and a stable-lad.”

Jamie nodded. “Aye, that’s true. We havena got a pickpocket, though. Or rather, we hadn’t; we have, now.”

I drew in my breath and blew it out again slowly.

“I see. I suppose it would be dense of me to ask exactly why we need to add a pickpocket to the household?”

“To steal letters, Sassenach,” Jamie said calmly.

“Oh,” I said, light beginning to dawn.

“I canna get anything sensible out of His Highness; when he’s with me, he wilna do anything but moan about Louise de La Tour, or grind his teeth and curse because they’ve been quarreling again. In either case, all he wants to do is to get drunk as quickly as possible. Mar is losing all patience with him, for he’s haughty and sullen by turns. And I canna get anything out of Sheridan.”

The Earl of Mar was the most respected of the exiled Scottish Jacobites in Paris. A man whose long and illustrious prime was only now beginning to edge into elderliness, he had been the primary supporter of King James at the abortive Rising in 1715, and had followed his king into exile after the defeat at Sheriffsmuir. I had met the Earl and liked him; an elderly, courtly man with a personality as straight as his backbone. He was now doing his best – with little reward, it seemed – for his lord’s son. I had met Thomas Sheridan, too; the Prince’s tutor – an elderly man who handled His Highness’s correspondence, translating impatience and illiteracy into courtly French and English.

I sat down and pulled my stocking back up. Fergus, apparently hardened to the sight of female limbs, ignored me altogether, concentrating grimly on the bilboquet.

“Letters, Sassenach,” he said. “I need the letters. Letters from Rome, sealed with the Stuart crest. Letters from France, letters from England, letters from Spain. We can get them either from the Prince’s house – Fergus can go with me, as a page – or possibly from the papal messenger who brings them; that would be a bit better, as we’d have the information in advance.”

“So, we’ve made the bargain,” Jamie said, nodding at his new servant. “Fergus will do his best to get what I need, and I will provide him with clothes and lodging and thirty écus a year. If he’s caught while doing my service, I’ll do my best to buy him off. If it canna be done, and he loses a hand or an ear, then I maintain him for the rest of his life, as he wilna be able to pursue his profession. And if he’s hanged, then I guarantee to have Masses said for his soul for the space of a year. I think that’s fair, no?”

I felt a cold hand pass down my spine.

“Jesus Christ, Jamie” was all I could find to say.

He shook his head, and reached out a hand for the bilboquet. “Not our Lord, Sassenach. Pray to St. Dismas. The patron saint of thieves and traitors.”

Jamie reached over and took the bilboquet from the boy. He flicked his wrist sharply and the ivory ball rose in a perfect parabola, to descend into its cup with an inevitable plop.

“I see,” I said. I eyed the new employee with interest as he took the toy Jamie offered him and started in on it once more, dark eyes gleaming with concentration. “Where did you get him?” I asked curiously.

“I found him in a brothel.”

“Oh, of course,” I said. “To be sure.” I eyed the dirt and smears on his clothes. “Which you were visiting for some really excellent reason, I expect?”

“Oh, aye,” he said. He sat back, arms wrapped about his knees, grinning as he watched me make repairs to my garter. “I thought you’d prefer me to be found in such an establishment, to the alternative of bein’ found in a dark alleyway, wi’ my head bashed in.”

I saw the boy Fergus’s eyes focus at a spot somewhat past the bilboquet, where a tray of iced cakes stood on a table near the wall. A small, pointed pink tongue darted out across his lower lip.

“I think your protégé is hungry,” I said. “Why don’t you feed him, and then you can tell me just what in bloody hell happened this afternoon.”

“Well, I was on my way to the docks,” he began, obediently rising to his feet, “and just past the Rue Eglantine, I began to have a queer feeling up the back of my neck.”

Jamie Fraser had spent two years in the army of France, fought and stolen with a gang of Scottish “broken men,” and been hunted as an outlaw through the moors and mountains of his native land. All of which had left him with an extreme sensitivity to the sensation of being followed.

He couldn’t have said whether it was the sound of a footfall, too close behind, or the sight of a shadow that shouldn’t be there, or something less tangible – the scent of evil on the air, perhaps – but he had learned that the prickle of warning among the short hairs of his neck was something to be ignored at his peril.

Promptly obeying the dictates of his cervical vertebrae, he turned left instead of right at the next corner, ducked around a whelk-seller’s stall, cut between a barrow filled with steamed puddings and another of fresh vegetable marrows, and into a small charcuterie.

Pressed against the wall near the doorway, he peered out through a screen of hanging duck carcasses. Two men entered the street no more than a second later, walking close together, glancing quickly from side to side.

Every workingman in Paris carried the marks of his trade upon his person, and it didn’t take much of a nose to detect the whiff of sea-salt on these two. If the small gold hoop in the shorter man’s ear had not been a dead giveaway, the deep reddish-brown of their faces would have made it clear they were deep-water sailors.

Accustomed to the cramped quarters of shipboard and quay taverns, seamen seldom walked in a straight line. These two slid through the crowded alley like eels through rocks, eyes flicking past beggars, servingmaids, housewives, merchants; sea wolves assessing potential prey.

“I let them get well past the shop,” Jamie explained, “and I was just about to step out and go back the other way, when I saw another of them at the mouth of the alley.”

This man wore the same uniform as the other two; sidelocks heavily coated with grease, a fish knife at his side and a marlinspike the length of a man’s forearm thrust through his belt. Short and thickset, the man stood still at the end of the alley, holding his ground against the buffeting waves of commerce that ebbed and flowed through the narrow passage. Clearly he had been left on guard, while his fellows quested ahead.

“So I was left wondering what best to do,” Jamie said, rubbing his nose. “I was safe enough where I was, but there was no back way from the shop, and the moment I stepped from the doorway, I’d be seen.” He glanced down reflectively, smoothing the crimson fabric of his kilt across his thigh. An enormous red barbarian was going to be conspicuous, no matter how thick the crowd.

“So what did you do?” I asked. Fergus, ignoring the conversation, was stuffing his pockets methodically with cakes, pausing for a hasty bite every so often in the process. Jamie caught my glance at the boy and shrugged.

“He’ll not have been in the habit of eating regularly,” he said. “Let him be.”

“All right,” I said. “But go on – what did you do?”

“Bought a sausage,” he said promptly.

A Dunedin, to be exact. Made of spiced duck, ham and venison, boiled, stuffed and sun-dried, a Dunedin sausage measured eighteen inches from end to end and was as hard as seasoned oakwood.

“I couldna step out wi’ my sword drawn,” Jamie explained, “but I didna like the idea of stepping past the fellow in the alleyway wi’ no one at my back, and empty hands.”

Bearing the Dunedin at port arms, and keeping a weather eye on the passing crowd, Jamie had stepped boldly down the alley, toward the watcher at its mouth.