The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (225 page)

It made one wonder, he thought, as he went into the study. In the old days, when a man’s son usually followed his father’s profession, was that only a matter of convenience—wanting to keep the business in the family—or was there some sort of family predisposition for some kinds of work? Were some people actually born to be smiths, or merchants, or cooks—born to an inclination and an aptitude, as well as to the opportunity?

Clearly it didn’t apply to everyone; there were always the people who left their homes, went a-wandering, tried things hitherto unknown in their family circles. If that weren’t so, probably there would be no inventors, no explorers; still, there seemed to be a certain affinity for some careers in some families, even in these restless modern times of widespread education and easy travel.

What he was really wondering about, he thought to himself, was Brianna. He watched Claire, her curly gold-shot head bent over the desk, and found himself wondering how much Brianna would be like her, and how much like the shadowy Scot—warrior, farmer, courtier, laird—who had been her father?

His thoughts were still running on such lines a quarter-hour later, when Claire closed the last folder on her stack and sat back, sighing.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she asked, reaching for her drink.

“Not worth that much,” Roger replied with a smile, coming out of his reverie. “I was only wondering how people come to be what they are. How did you come to be a doctor, for instance?”

“How did I come to be a doctor?” Claire inhaled the steam from her cup of cocoa, decided it was too hot to drink, and set it back on the desk, among the litter of books and journals and pencil-scribbled sheets of paper. She gave Roger a half-smile and rubbed her hands together, dispersing the warmth of the cup.

“How did you come to be a historian?”

“More or less honestly,” he answered, leaning back in the Reverend’s chair and waving at the accumulation of papers and trivia all around them. He patted a small gilt traveling clock that sat on the desk, an elegant bit of eighteenth-century workmanship, with miniature chimes that struck the hour, the quarter, and the half.

“I grew up in the midst of it all; I was ferreting round the Highlands in search of artifacts with my father from the time I could read. I suppose it just seemed natural to keep doing it. But you?”

She nodded and stretched, easing her shoulders from the long hours of stooping over the desk. Brianna, unable to stay awake, had given up and gone to bed an hour before, but Claire and Roger had gone on with their search through the administrative records of British prisons.

“Well, it was something like that for me,” she said. “It wasn’t so much that I suddenly decided I must become a doctor—it was just that I suddenly realized one day that I’d
been
one for a long time—and then I wasn’t, and I missed it.”

She spread her hands out on the desk and flexed her fingers, long and supple, the nails buffed into neat, shiny ovals.

“There used to be an old song from the First World War,” she said reflectively. “I used to hear it sometimes when some of Uncle Lamb’s old army friends would come round and stay up late and get drunk. It went, ‘How You Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?’ ” She sang the first line, then broke off with a wry smile.

“I’d seen Paree,” she said softly. She looked up from her hands, alert and present, but with the traces of memory in her eyes, fixed on Roger with the clarity of a second sight. “And a lot of other things besides. Caen and Amiens, Preston, and Falkirk, the Hôpital des Anges and the so-called surgery at Leoch. I’d
been
a doctor, in every way there is—I’d delivered babies, set bones, stitched wounds, treated fevers …” She trailed off, and shrugged. “There was a terrible lot I didn’t know, of course. I knew how much I could learn—and that’s why I went to medical school. But it didn’t really make a difference, you know.” She dipped a finger into the whipped cream floating on her cocoa, and licked it off. “I have a diploma with an
M.D
. on it—but I was a doctor long before I set foot in medical school.”

“It can’t possibly have been as easy as you make it sound.” Roger blew on his own cocoa, studying Claire with open interest. “There weren’t many women in medicine then—there aren’t that many women doctors
now
, come to that—and you had a family, besides.”

“No, I can’t say it was easy at all.” Claire looked at him quizzically. “I waited until Brianna was in school, of course, and we had enough money to afford someone to come in to cook and clean—but …” She shrugged and smiled ironically. “I stopped sleeping for several years, there. That helped a bit. And oddly enough, Frank helped, too.”

Roger tested his own cup and found it almost cool enough to drink. He held it between his hands, enjoying the heat of the thick white porcelain seeping into his palms. Early June it might be, but the nights were cool enough to make the electric fire still a necessity.

“Really?” he said curiously. “Only from the things you’ve said about him, I shouldn’t have thought he’d have liked your wanting to go to medical school or be a doctor.”

“He didn’t.” Her lips pressed tight together; the motion told Roger more than words might, recalling arguments, conversations half-finished and abandoned, an opposition of stubbornness and devious obstruction rather than of open disapproval.

What a remarkably expressive face she had, he thought, watching her. He wondered quite suddenly whether his own were as easily readable. The thought was so unsettling that he dipped his face into his mug, gulping the cocoa, although it was still a bit too hot.

He emerged from the cup to find Claire watching him, slightly sardonic.

“Why?” he asked quickly, to distract her. “What made him change his mind?”

“Bree,” she said, and her face softened as it always did at the mention of her daughter. “Bree was the only thing really important to Frank.”

I had, as I’d said, waited until Brianna began school before beginning medical school myself. But even so, there was a large gap between her hours and my own, which we filled haphazardly with a series of more or less competent housekeepers and baby-sitters; some more, most of them less.

My mind went back to the frightful day when I had gotten a call at the hospital, telling me that Brianna was hurt. I had dashed out of the place, not pausing to change out of the green linen scrub-suit I was wearing, and raced for home, ignoring all speed limits, to find a police car and an ambulance lighting the night with blood-red pulses, and a knot of interested neighbors clustered on the street outside.

As we pieced the story together later, what had happened was that the latest temporary sitter, annoyed at my being late yet again, had simply put on her coat at quitting time and left, abandoning seven-year-old Brianna with instructions to “wait for Mommy.” This she had obediently done, for an hour or so. But as it began to get dark, she had become frightened in the house alone, and determined to go out and find me. Making her way across one of the busy streets near our house, she had been struck by a car turning into the street.

She wasn’t—thank God!—hurt badly; the car had been moving slowly, and she had only been shaken and bruised by the experience. Not nearly as shaken as I was, for that matter. Nor as bruised, when I came into the living room to find her lying on the sofa, and she looked at me, tears welling afresh on her stained cheeks and said, “Mommy! Where were you? I couldn’t find you!”

It had taken just about all my reserves of professional composure to comfort her, to check her over, re-tend her cuts and scrapes, thank her rescuers—who, to my fevered mind, all glared accusingly at me—and put her to bed with her teddy bear clutched securely in her arms. Then I sat down at the kitchen table and cried myself.

Frank patted me awkwardly, murmuring, but then gave it up, and with more practicality, went to make tea.

“I’ve decided,” I said, when he set the steaming cup in front of me. I spoke dully, my head feeling thick and clogged. “I’ll resign. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“Resign?” Frank’s voice was sharp with astonishment. “From the school? What for?”

“I can’t stand it anymore.” I never took cream or sugar in my tea. Now I added both, stirring and watching the milky tendrils swirl through the cup. “I can’t stand leaving Bree, and not knowing if she’s well cared for—and knowing she isn’t happy. You know she doesn’t really like any of the sitters we’ve tried.”

“I know that, yes.” He sat opposite me, stirring his own tea. After a long moment, he said, “But I don’t think you should resign.”

It was the last thing I had expected; I had thought he would greet my decision with relieved applause. I stared at him in astonishment, then blew my nose yet again on the wadded tissue from my pocket.

“You don’t?”

“Ah, Claire.” He spoke impatiently, but with a tinge of affection nonetheless. “You’ve known forever who you are. Do you realize at all how unusual it is to know that?”

“No.” I wiped my nose with the shredding tissue, dabbing carefully to keep it in one piece.

Frank leaned back in his chair, shaking his head as he looked at me.

“No, I suppose not,” he said. He was quiet for a minute, looking down at his folded hands. They were long-fingered, narrow; smooth and hairless as a girl’s. Elegant hands, made for casual gestures and the emphasis of speech.

He stretched them out on the table and looked at them as though he’d never seen them before.

“I haven’t got that,” he said quietly at last. “I’m good, all right. At what I do—the teaching, the writing. Bloody splendid sometimes, in fact. And I like it a good bit, enjoy what I do. But the thing is—” He hesitated, then looked at me straight on, hazel-eyed and earnest. “I could do something else, and be as good. Care as much, or as little. I haven’t got that absolute conviction that there’s something in life I’m meant to do—and you have.”

“Is that good?” The edges of my nostrils were sore, and my eyes puffed from crying.

He laughed shortly. “It’s damned inconvenient, Claire. To you and me and Bree, all three. But my God, I do envy you sometimes.”

He reached out for my hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, I let him have it.

“To have that passion for anything”—a small twitch tugged the corner of his mouth—“or anyone. That’s quite splendid, Claire, and quite terribly rare.” He squeezed my hand gently and let it go, turning to reach behind him for one of the books on the shelf beside the table.

It was one of his references, Woodhill’s
Patriots
, a series of profiles of the American Founding Fathers.

He laid his hand on the cover of the book, gently, as though reluctant to disturb the rest of the sleeping lives interred there.

“These were people like that. The ones who cared so terribly much—enough to risk everything, enough to change and do things. Most people aren’t like that, you know. It isn’t that they don’t care, but that they don’t care so greatly.” He took my hand again, this time turning it over. One finger traced the lines that webbed my palm, tickling as it went.

“Is it there, I wonder?” he said, smiling a little. “Are some people destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they’re born somehow with that great passion—and if they find themselves in the right circumstances, then things happen? It’s the sort of thing you wonder, studying history … but there’s no way of telling, really. All we know is what they accomplished.

“But Claire—” His eyes held a definite note of warning, as he tapped the cover of his book. “They paid for it,” he said.

“I know.” I felt very remote now, as though I were watching us from a distance; I could see it quite clearly in my mind’s eye; Frank, handsome, lean, and a little tired, going beautifully gray at the temples. Me, grubby in my surgical scrubs, my hair coming down, the front of my shirt crumpled and stained with Brianna’s tears.

We sat in silence for some time, my hand still resting in Frank’s. I could see the mysterious lines and valleys, clear as a road map—but a road to what unknown destination?

I had had my palm read once years before, by an old Scottish lady named Graham—Fiona’s grandmother, in fact. “The lines in your hand change as you change,” she had said. “It’s no so much what you’re born with, as what ye make of yourself.”

And what had I made of myself, what was I making? A mess, that was what. Neither a good mother, nor a good wife, nor a good doctor. A mess. Once I had thought I was whole—had seemed to be able to love a man, to bear a child, to heal the sick—and know that all these things were natural parts of me, not the difficult, troubled fragments into which my life had now disintegrated. But that had been in the past, the man I had loved was Jamie, and for a time, I had been part of something greater than myself.

“I’ll take Bree.”

I was so deep in miserable thought that for a moment, Frank’s words didn’t register, and I stared at him stupidly.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” he repeated patiently, “that I’ll take Bree. She can come from her school to the university, and play at my office until I’m ready to come home.”

I rubbed my nose. “I thought you didn’t think it appropriate for staff to bring their children to work.” He had been quite critical of Mrs. Clancy, one of the secretaries, who had brought her grandson to work for a month when his mother was sick.

He shrugged, looking uncomfortable.

“Well, circumstances alter cases. And Brianna’s not likely to be running up and down the halls shrieking and spilling ink like Bart Clancy.”

“I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” I said wryly. “But you’d do that?” A small feeling was growing in the pit of my clenched stomach; a cautious, unbelieving feeling of relief. I might not trust Frank to be faithful to me—I knew quite well he wasn’t—but I did trust him unequivocally to care for Bree.

Suddenly the worry was removed. I needn’t hurry home from the hospital, filled with dread because I was late, hating the thought of finding Brianna crouched in her room sulking because she didn’t like the current sitter. She loved Frank; I knew she would be ecstatic at the thought of going to his office every day.