Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [42]
“But I did heal him,” I said softly. “He came back to me.”
Brianna was shaking her head slowly back and forth, bewildered, but with a stubborn set to her head that I knew very well indeed. “Grahams are stupid, Campbells are deceitful, MacKenzies are charming but sly, and Frasers are stubborn,” Jamie had told me once, giving me his view of the general characteristics of the clans. He hadn’t been far wrong, either; Frasers were extremely stubborn, not least him. Nor Bree.
“I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. She sat up straighter, eyeing me closely. “I think maybe you’ve been thinking too much about those men at Culloden,” she said. “After all, you’ve been under a strain lately, and maybe Daddy’s death…”
“Frank wasn’t your father,” I said bluntly.
“He was!” She flashed back with it immediately, so fast that it startled both of us.
Frank had, in time, bowed to the doctors’ insistence that any attempt to “force me to accept reality,” as one of them put it, might be harmful to my pregnancy. There had been a lot of murmuring in corridors—and shouting, now and then—but he had given up asking me for the truth. And I, in frail health and sick at heart, had given up telling it to him.
I wasn’t going to give up, this time.
“I promised Frank,” I said. “Twenty years ago, when you were born. I tried to leave him, and he wouldn’t let me go. He loved you.” I felt my voice soften as I looked at Brianna. “He couldn’t believe the truth, but he knew—of course—that he wasn’t your father. He asked me not to tell you—to let him be your only father—as long as he lived. After that, he said, it was up to me.” I swallowed, licking dry lips.
“I owed him that,” I said. “Because he loved you. But now Frank’s dead—and you have a right to know who you are.”
“If you doubt it,” I said, “go to the National Portrait Gallery. They’ve a picture there of Ellen MacKenzie; Jamie’s mother. She’s wearing these.” I touched the pearl necklace at my throat. A string of baroque freshwater pearls from Scottish rivers, strung with roundels of pierced gold. “Jamie gave them to me on our wedding day.”
I looked at Brianna, sitting tall and stiff, the bones of her face stark in protest. “Take along a hand mirror,” I said. “Take a good look at the portrait and then in the mirror. It’s not an exact likeness, but you’re very like your grandmother.”
Roger stared at Brianna as though he’d never seen her before. He glanced back and forth between us, then, as though making up his mind, suddenly squared his shoulders and rose from the sofa where he had been sitting beside her.
“I’ve something I think you should see,” he said firmly. He crossed quickly to the Reverend’s old rolltop desk and pulled a rubber-banded bundle of yellowed newspaper clippings from one of the pigeonholes.
“When you’ve read them, look at the dates,” he told Brianna, handing them to her. Then, still standing, he turned to me and looked me over, with the long, dispassionate gaze that I recognized as a that of a scholar, schooled in objectivity. He didn’t yet believe, but he had the imagination to doubt.
“Seventeen forty-three,” he said, as though to himself. He shook his head, marveling. “And I thought it was a man you’d met here, in 1945. God, I would never have thought—well, Christ, who would?”
I was surprised. “You knew? About Brianna’s father?”
He nodded at the clippings in Brianna’s hands. She hadn’t yet looked at them, but was staring at Roger, half-bewildered, half-angry. I could see the storm gathering in her eyes, and so, I thought, could Roger. He looked hastily away from her, turning back to me in question.
“Then those men whose names you gave me, the ones who fought at Culloden—you knew them?”
I relaxed, ever so slightly. “Yes, I knew them.” There was a grumble of thunder to the east, and the rain broke in a spatter against the long windows that lined the study from floor to ceiling on one side. Brianna’s head was bent over the clippings, the wings of her hair hiding