Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [172]
She gulped the rest of her cup, choked slightly, and got her breath. She fixed Roger with a dark blue glare, as though he were to blame for the situation.
“So I want to find out, all right? I want to find her—find them. See if she’s all right. But I keep thinking maybe I don’t want to find out, because what if I find out she’s not all right, what if I find out something horrible? What if I find out she’s dead, or he is—well, that wouldn’t matter so much, maybe, because he already is dead anyway, or he was, or—but I have to, I know I have to!”
She banged her cup down on the table in front of him.
“More.”
He opened his mouth to say that she’d had a good bit more than she needed already, but a glance at her face changed his mind. He shut his mouth and poured.
She didn’t wait for him to add tea, but raised the cup to her mouth and took a large swallow, and another. She coughed, sputtered, and set the cup down, eyes watering.
“So I’m looking. Or I was. When I saw Daddy’s books, and his handwriting, though … it all seemed wrong, then. Do you think I’m wrong?” she asked, peering woefully at him through tear-clogged lashes.
“No, hen,” he said gently. “It’s not wrong. You’re right, you’ve got to know. I’ll help you.” He stood up and, taking her under the arms, hoisted her to her feet. “But right now, I think you should maybe have a bit of a lie-down, hm?”
He got her up the stairs and halfway down the hall, when she suddenly broke free and darted into the bathroom. He leaned against the wall outside, waiting patiently until she staggered out again, her face the color of the aged plaster above the wainscoting.
“Waste of Glen Morangie, that,” he said, taking her by the shoulders and steering her into the bedroom. “If I’d known I was dealing with a sot, I’d have given you the cheap stuff.”
She collapsed on the bed, and allowed him to take off her shoes and socks. She rolled onto her stomach, Uncle Angus cradled in the crook of her arm.
“I told you I didn’t like tea,” she mumbled, and was asleep in seconds.
Roger worked for an hour or two by himself, sorting books and tying cartons. It was a quiet, dark afternoon, with no sound but a soft patter of rain and the occasional whoosh of a car’s tires on the street outside. When the light began to fail, he turned on the lamps and went down the hall to the kitchen, to wash the book grime from his hands.
A huge pot of milky cock-a-leekie soup was burbling on the back of the cooker. What had Fiona said to do about that? Turn it up? Turn it off? Throw things into it? He peered dubiously into the pot and decided to leave well enough alone.
He tidied up the remains of their impromptu tea—rinsed the cups and dried them, hung them carefully from their hooks in the cupboard. They were remnants of the old willow pattern set the Reverend had had for as long as Roger could remember, the blue-and-white Chinese trees and pagodas augmented by odd bits of ill-assorted crockery acquired from jumble sales.
Fiona would have all new, of course. She’d forced them to look at magazine pictures of china and crystal and flatware. Brianna had made suitable admiring noises; Roger’s eyes had gone glassy from boredom. He supposed the old stuff would all end up at the jumble sale—at least it might still be useful to someone.
On impulse, he took down the two cups he’d washed, wrapped them in a clean tea towel, and took them to the study, where he tucked them into the box he’d set aside for himself. He felt thoroughly foolish, but at the same time, somewhat better.
He looked around the echoing study, quite bare now save for the single sheet of paper on the cork-lined wall.
So your home’s gone for good. Well, he’d left home some time ago, hadn’t he?
Yeah, it bothered him. A lot more than he’d let on to Brianna, in fact. That was why it had taken so bloody long to finish clearing out the manse, if he was honest about it. True, it was a monster task, true, he had his own job to do at Oxford, and true, the thousands of books had had to be sorted with care—but he could have done it faster. If he’d wanted.