“Me!” I cried. “I would have as soon informed upon my father. And who was there to inform?”
Kilbride looked at me curiously as if he half doubted my innocence. “It is seldom I have found the man Buhot in a lie of the sort,” said he, “but he led me to understand that what information he had of the movements of the priest came from yourself.”
I jumped to my feet, and almost choked in denying it.
“Oh, very well, very well!” said Kilbride coolly. “There is no need to make a fracas about the matter. I am just telling you what Buhot told me. And troth! it was a circumstantial story he had of it; for he said that the Marshal Duke de Bellisle, and Monsieur Florentin, and Monsieur Berrier, and all the others of the Cabinet, had Fleuriau's name and direction from yourself, and found the plot had some connection with the affair of Damiens. George Kelly, the Prince's secretary, was another man that told me.” He gazed along the deck of the scow we sat in, as if thinking hard, and then turned to me with a hesitating suggestion. “Perhaps,” said he, “you are forgetting. Perhaps you wrote the woman and told her innocently enough, and that would come to the same thing.”
I was overwhelmed with confusion at the idea, though the possibility of my letters being used had once before occurred to me.
“Well, if you must know, it is true I wrote some letters to Miss Walkinshaw,” I confessed shamefacedly. “But they were very carefully transmitted by Bernard the Swiss to her, for I got her answers back.”
He burst out laughing.
“For simplicity you beat all!” cried he. “You sent your news through the Swiss, that was in Buhot's pay, and took the charge from Hamilton's pistols, and did his part in helping you to escape from jyle with a great degree of humour as those of us who knew what was afoot had to agree, and you think the man would swither about peeping into a letter you entrusted to him, particularly if it was directed to hersel'! The sleep-bag was under your head sure enough, as the other man said.”
“And I was the unconscious wretch that betrayed our hiding in the Hôtel Dieu!” I cried with much chagrin, seeing at a flash what all this meant. “If I had Bernard here I could thraw his neck.”
“Indeed,” said he, “and what for should it be Bernard? The man but did what he was told, and there, by my troth! when I think of it, I'm no' so sure that he was any different from yourself.”