The Outlander Series 7-Book Bundle (242 page)

“Why now, all of a sudden? The latest one putting pressure on you, is she?”

The look of alarm that flashed into his eyes was so pronounced as to be comical. I laughed, with a noticeable lack of humor.

“You actually thought I didn’t know? God, Frank! You are the most … oblivious man!”

He sat up in bed, jaw tight.

“I thought I had been most discreet.”

“You may have been at that,” I said sardonically. “I counted six over the last ten years—if there were really a dozen or so, then you were quite the model of discretion.”

His face seldom showed great emotion, but a whitening beside his mouth told me that he was very angry indeed.

“This one must be something special,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the headboard in assumed casualness. “But still—why the rush to go to England now, and why take Bree?”

“She can go to boarding school for her last term,” he said shortly. “Be a new experience for her.”

“Not one I expect she wants,” I said. “She won’t want to leave her friends, especially not just before graduation. And certainly not to go to an English boarding school!” I shuddered at the thought. I had come within inches of being immured in just such a school as a child; the scent of the hospital cafeteria sometimes evoked memories of it, complete with the waves of terrified helplessness I had felt when Uncle Lamb had taken me to visit the place.

“A little discipline never hurt anyone,” Frank said. He had recovered his temper, but the lines of his face were still tight. “Might have done you some good.” He waved a hand, dismissing the topic. “Let that be. Still, I’ve decided to go back to England permanently. I’ve a good position offered at Cambridge, and I mean to take it up. You won’t leave the hospital, of course. But I don’t mean to leave my daughter behind.”

“Your daughter?” I felt momentarily incapable of speech. So he had a new job all set, and a new mistress to go along. He’d been planning this for some time, then. A whole new life—but not with Brianna.

“My daughter,” he said calmly. “You can come to visit whenever you like, of course …”

“You … bloody … bastard!” I said.

“Do be reasonable, Claire.” He looked down his nose, giving me Treatment A, long-suffering patience, reserved for students appealing failing grades. “You’re scarcely ever home. If I’m gone, there will be no one to look after Bree properly.”

“You talk as though she’s eight, not almost eighteen! For heaven’s sake, she’s nearly grown.”

“All the more reason she needs care and supervision,” he snapped. “If you’d seen what I’d seen at the university—the drinking, the drugging, the …”

“I do see it,” I said through my teeth. “At fairly close range in the emergency room. Bree is not likely to—”

“She damn well is! Girls have no sense at that age—she’ll be off with the first fellow who—”

“Don’t be idiotic! Bree’s very sensible. Besides, all young people experiment, that’s how they learn. You can’t keep her swaddled in cotton wool all her life.”

“Better swaddled than fucking a black man!” he shot back. A mottled red showed faintly over his cheekbones. “Like mother, like daughter, eh? But that’s not how it’s going to be, damn it, not if I’ve anything to say about it!”

I heaved out of bed and stood up, glaring down at him.

“You,” I said, “have not got one bloody, filthy, stinking thing to say, about Bree or anything else!” I was trembling with rage, and had to press my fists into the sides of my legs to keep from striking him. “You have the absolute, unmitigated gall to tell me that you are leaving me to live with the latest of a succession of mistresses, and then imply that I have been having an affair with Joe Abernathy? That is what you mean, isn’t it?”

He had the grace to lower his eyes slightly.

“Everyone thinks you have,” he muttered. “You spend all your time with the man. It’s the same thing, so far as Bree is concerned. Dragging her into … situations, where she’s exposed to danger, and … and to those sorts of people …”

“Black people, I suppose you mean?”

“I damn well do,” he said, looking up at me with eyes flashing. “It’s bad enough to have the Abernathys to parties all the time, though at least he’s educated. But that obese person I met at their house with the tribal tattoos and the mud in his hair? That repulsive lounge lizard with the oily voice? And young Abernathy’s taken to hanging round Bree day and night, taking her to marches and rallies and orgies in low dives …”

“I shouldn’t think there are any high dives,” I said, repressing an inappropriate urge to laugh at Frank’s unkind but accurate assessment of two of Leonard Abernathy’s more outré friends. “Did you know Lenny’s taken to calling himself Muhammad Ishmael Shabazz now?”

“Yes, he told me,” he said shortly, “and I am taking no risk of having my daughter become Mrs. Shabazz.”

“I don’t think Bree feels that way about Lenny,” I assured him, struggling to suppress my irritation.

“She isn’t going to, either. She’s going to England with me.”

“Not if she doesn’t want to,” I said, with great finality.

No doubt feeling that his position put him at a disadvantage, Frank climbed out of bed and began groping for his slippers.

“I don’t need your permission to take my daughter to England,” he said. “And Bree’s still a minor; she’ll go where I say. I’d appreciate it if you’d find her medical records; the new school will need them.”

“Your daughter?” I said again. I vaguely noticed the chill in the room, but was so angry that I felt hot all over. “Bree’s my daughter, and you’ll take her bloody nowhere!”

“You can’t stop me,” he pointed out, with aggravating calmness, picking up his dressing gown from the foot of the bed.

“The hell I can’t,” I said. “You want to divorce me? Fine. Use any grounds you like—with the exception of adultery, which you can’t prove, because it doesn’t exist. But if you try to take Bree away with you, I’ll have a thing or two to say about adultery. Do you want to know how many of your discarded mistresses have come to see me, to ask me to give you up?”

His mouth hung open in shock.

“I told them all that I’d give you up in a minute,” I said, “if you asked.” I folded my arms, tucking my hands into my armpits. I was beginning to feel the chilliness again. “I did wonder why you never asked—but I supposed it was because of Brianna.”

His face had gone quite bloodless now, and showed white as a skull in the dimness on the other side of the bed.

“Well,” he said, with a poor attempt at his usual self-possession, “I shouldn’t have thought you minded. It’s not as though you ever made a move to stop me.”

I stared at him, completely taken aback.

“Stop you?” I said. “What should I have done? Steamed open your mail and waved the letters under your nose? Made a scene at the faculty Christmas party? Complained to the Dean?”

His lips pressed tight together for a moment, then relaxed.

“You might have behaved as though it mattered to you,” he said quietly.

“It mattered.” My voice sounded strangled.

He shook his head, still staring at me, his eyes dark in the lamplight.

“Not enough.” He paused, face floating pale in the air above his dark dressing gown, then came round the bed to stand by me.

“Sometimes I wondered if I could rightfully blame you,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “He looked like Bree, didn’t he? He was like her?”

“Yes.”

He breathed heavily, almost a snort.

“I could see it in your face—when you’d look at her, I could see you thinking of him. Damn you, Claire Beauchamp,” he said, very softly. “Damn you and your face that can’t hide a thing you think or feel.”

There was a silence after this, of the sort that makes you hear all the tiny unbearable noises of creaking wood and breathing houses—only in an effort to pretend you haven’t heard what was just said.

“I did love you,” I said softly, at last. “Once.”

“Once,” he echoed. “Should I be grateful for that?”

The feeling was beginning to come back to my numb lips.

“I did tell you,” I said. “And then, when you wouldn’t go … Frank, I did try.”

Whatever he heard in my voice stopped him for a moment.

“I did,” I said, very softly.

He turned away and moved toward my dressing table, where he touched things restlessly, picking them up and putting them down at random.

“I couldn’t leave you at the first—pregnant, alone. Only a cad would have done that. And then … Bree.” He stared sightlessly at the lipstick he held in one hand, then set it gently back on the glassy tabletop. “I couldn’t give her up,” he said softly. He turned to look at me, eyes dark holes in a shadowed face.

“Did you know I couldn’t sire a child? I … had myself tested, a few years ago. I’m sterile. Did you know?”

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.

“Bree is mine, my daughter,” he said, as though to himself. “The only child I’ll ever have. I couldn’t give her up.” He gave a short laugh. “I couldn’t give her up, but you couldn’t see her without thinking of him, could you? Without that constant memory, I wonder—would you have forgotten him, in time?”

“No.” The whispered word seemed to go through him like an electric shock. He stood frozen for a moment, then whirled to the closet and began to jerk on his clothes over his pajamas. I stood, arms wrapped around my body, watching as he pulled on his overcoat and stamped out of the room, not looking at me. The collar of his blue silk pajamas stuck up over the astrakhan trim of his coat.

A moment later, I heard the closing of the front door—he had sufficient presence of mind not to slam it—and then the sound of a cold motor turning reluctantly over. The headlights swept across the bedroom ceiling as the car backed down the drive, and then were gone, leaving me shaking by the rumpled bed.

Frank didn’t come back. I tried to sleep, but found myself lying rigid in the cold bed, mentally reliving the argument, listening for the crunch of his tires in the drive. At last, I got up and dressed, left a note for Bree, and went out myself.

The hospital hadn’t called, but I might as well go and have a look at my patient; it was better than tossing and turning all night. And, to be honest, I would not have minded had Frank come home to find me gone.

The streets were slick as butter, black ice gleaming in the streetlights. The yellow phosphor glow lit whorls of falling snow; within an hour, the ice that lined the streets would be concealed beneath fresh powder, and twice as perilous to travel. The only consolation was that there was no one on the streets at 4:00
A.M
.
to be imperiled. No one but me, that is.

Inside the hospital, the usual warm, stuffy institutional smell wrapped itself round me like a blanket of familiarity, shutting out the snow-filled black night outside.

“He’s okay,” the nurse said to me softly, as though a raised voice might disturb the sleeping man. “All the vitals are stable, and the count’s okay. No bleeding.” I could see that it was true; the patient’s face was pale, but with a faint undertone of pink, like the veining in a white rose petal, and the pulse in the hollow of his throat was strong and regular.

I let out the deep breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “That’s good,” I said. “Very good.” The nurse smiled warmly at me, and I had to resist the impulse to lean against him and dissolve. The hospital surroundings suddenly seemed like my only refuge.

There was no point in going home. I checked briefly on my remaining patients, and went down to the cafeteria. It still smelled like a boarding school, but I sat down with a cup of coffee and sipped it slowly, wondering what I would tell Bree.

It might have been a half-hour later when one of the ER nurses hurried through the swinging doors and stopped dead at the sight of me. Then she came on, quite slowly.

I knew at once; I had seen doctors and nurses deliver the news of death too often to mistake the signs. Very calmly, feeling nothing whatever, I set down the almost full cup, realizing as I did so that for the rest of my life, I would remember that there was a chip in the rim, and that the “B” of the gold lettering on the side was almost worn away.

“ … said you were here. Identification in his wallet … police said … snow on black ice, a skid … DOA …” the nurse was talking, babbling, as I strode through the bright white halls, not looking at her, seeing the faces of the nurses at the station turn toward me in slow motion, not knowing, but seeing from a glance at me that something final had happened.

He was on a gurney in one of the emergency room cubicles; a spare, anonymous space. There was an ambulance parked outside—perhaps the one that had brought him here. The double doors at the end of the corridor were open to the icy dawn. The ambulance’s red light was pulsing like an artery, bathing the corridor in blood.

I touched him briefly. His flesh had the inert, plastic feel of the recently dead, so at odds with the lifelike appearance. There was no wound visible; any damage was hidden beneath the blanket that covered him. His throat was smooth and brown; no pulse moved in its hollow.

I stood there, my hand on the motionless curve of his chest, looking at him, as I had not looked for some time. A strong and delicate profile, sensitive lips, and a chiseled nose and jaw. A handsome man, despite the lines that cut deep beside his mouth, lines of disappointment and unspoken anger, lines that even the relaxation of death could not wipe away.

I stood quite still, listening. I could hear the wail of a new ambulance approaching, voices in the corridor. The squeak of gurney wheels, the crackle of a police radio, and the soft hum of a fluorescent light somewhere. I realized with a start that I was listening for Frank, expecting … what? That his ghost would be hovering still nearby, anxious to complete our unfinished business?

I closed my eyes, to shut out the disturbing sight of that motionless profile, going red and white and red in turn as the light throbbed through the open doors.

“Frank,” I said softly, to the unsettled, icy air, “if you’re still close enough to hear me—I did love you. Once. I did.”

Then Joe was there, pushing through the crowded corridor, face anxious over his green scrub suit. He had come straight from surgery; there was a small spray of blood across the lenses of his glasses, a smear of it on his chest.