Dragonfly in Amber - Diana Gabaldon [439]
“Daddy…Daddy loved me—he couldn’t have, if I weren’t his! Why are you trying to make me believe he wasn’t my father? Were you jealous of me? Is that it? Did you mind so much that he loved me? He didn’t love you, I know that!” The blue eyes narrowed, cat-like, blazing in a face gone dead-white.
Roger felt a strong desire to ease behind the door before she noticed his presence and turned that molten wrath on him. But beyond his own discomfort he was conscious of a sense of growing awe. The girl that stood on the hearthrug, hissing and spitting in defense of her paternity, flamed with the wild strength that had brought the Highland warriors down on their enemies like shrieking banshees. Her long, straight nose lengthened still further by the shadows, eyes slitted like a snarling cat’s, she was the image of her father—and her father was patently not the dark, quiet scholar whose photo adorned the jacket of the book on the table.
Claire opened her mouth once, but then closed it again, watching her daughter with absorbed fascination. That powerful tension of the body, the flexing arch of the broad, flat cheekbones; Roger thought that she had seen that many times before—but not in Brianna.
With a suddenness that made them both flinch, Brianna spun on her heel, grabbed the yellowed news-clippings from the desk, and thrust them into the fire. She snatched the poker and jabbed it viciously into the tindery mass, heedless of the shower of sparks that flew from the hearth and hissed about her booted feet.
Whirling from the rapidly blackening mass of glowing paper, she stamped one foot on the hearth.
“Bitch!” she shouted at her mother. “You hated me? Well, I hate you!” She drew back the arm with the poker, and Roger’s muscles tensed instinctively, ready to lunge for her. But she turned, arm drawn back like a javelin thrower, and hurled the poker through the full-length window, where the panes of night-dark glass reflected the image of a burning woman for one last instant before the crash and shiver into empty black.
* * *
The silence in the study was shattering. Roger, who had leaped to his feet in pursuit of Brianna, was left standing in the middle of the room, awkwardly frozen. He looked down at his hands as if not quite sure what to do with them, then at Claire. She sat perfectly still in the sanctuary of the wing chair, like an animal frozen by the passing shadow of a raptor.
After several moments, Roger moved across to the desk and leaned against it.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said.
Claire’s mouth twitched faintly. “Neither do I.”
They sat in silence for several minutes. The old house creaked, settling around them, and a faint noise of banging pots came down the hallway from the kitchen, where Fiona was doing something about dinner. Roger’s feeling of shock and constrained embarrassment gradually gave way to something else, he wasn’t sure what. His hands felt icy, and he rubbed them on his legs, feeling the warm rasp of the corduroy on his palms.
“I…” He started to speak, then stopped and shook his head.
Claire drew a deep breath, and he realized that it was the first movement he had seen her make since Brianna had left. Her gaze was clear and direct.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
Roger looked thoughtfully at her. “I’ll be damned if I know,” he said at last.
That provoked a slightly wavering smile. “That’s what Jamie said,” she said, “when I asked him at the first where he thought I’d come from.”
“I can’t say I blame him.” Roger hesitated, then, making up his mind, got off the desk and came across the room to her. “May I?” He knelt and took her unresisting hand in his, turning it to the light. You can tell real ivory from the synthetic, he remembered suddenly, because the real kind feels warm to the touch. The palm of her hand was a soft pink, but the faint line of the “J” at the base of her thumb was white as bone.
“It doesn’t prove anything,” she said, watching his face. “It could have been an accident; I could