Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [427]
Brianna would come back before suppertime. Ian was away, hunting with Rollo. Jamie … without being told, I knew that Jamie would not be back for some time. We would have a little while alone.
Would it be a suitable moment to ask her such a question, though—fresh from seeing Germaine’s cherubic face? Though on reflection, exposure to a two-year-old boy was probably the best possible object lesson in the dangers of motherhood, I thought wryly.
Vaguely lightened by the faint whiff of humor, I turned back, drawing my cloak around me against the increasing wind. As I came down the hill I saw Brianna’s horse in the penfold; she was home. My stomach clenched in dread, I went to lay the choice before her.
“I thought of it,” she said, with a deep breath. “As soon as I realized. I wondered if you could do—something like that, here.”
“It wouldn’t be easy. It would be dangerous—and it would hurt. I don’t even have any laudanum; only whisky. But yes, I can do it—if you want me to.” I forced myself to sit still, watching her pace slowly back and forth before the hearth, hands folded behind her in thought.
“It would have to be surgical,” I said, unable to keep quiet. “I don’t have the right herbs—and they aren’t always reliable, in any case. At least surgery is … certain.” I laid the scalpel on the table; she should not be under any illusions as to what I was suggesting. She nodded at my words, but didn’t stop her pacing. Like Jamie, she always thought better while moving.
A trickle of sweat ran down my back, and I shivered. The fire was warm enough, but my fingers were still cold as ice. Christ, if she wanted it, would I even be able to do it? My hands had begun to tremble, with the strain of waiting.
She turned at last to look at me, eyes clear and appraising under thick, ruddy brows.
“Would you have done it? If you could?”
“If I could—?”
“You said once that you hated me, when you were pregnant. If you could have not been—”
“God, not you!” I blurted, horror-stricken. “Not you, ever. It—” I knotted my hands together, to still their trembling. “No,” I said, as positively as I could. “Never.”
“You did say so,” she said, looking at me intently. “When you told me about Da.”
I rubbed a hand across my face, trying to focus my thoughts. Yes, I had told her that. Idiot.
“It was a horrible time. Terrible. We were starving, it was war—the world was coming apart at the seams.” Wasn’t hers? “At the time, it seemed as though there was no hope; I had to leave Jamie, and the thought drove almost everything else out of my mind. But there was one other thing,” I said.
“What was that?”
“It wasn’t rape,” I said softly, meeting her eyes. “I loved your father.”
She nodded, her face a little pale.
“Yes. But it might be Roger’s. You did say that, didn’t you?”
“Yes. It might. Is the possibility enough for you?”
She laid a hand over her stomach, long fingers gently curved.
“Yeah. Well. It isn’t an it, to me. I don’t know who it is, but—” She stopped suddenly and glanced at me, looking suddenly shy.
“I don’t know if this sounds—well …” She shrugged abruptly, dismissing doubt. “I had this sharp pain that woke me up in the middle of the night, a few days … after. Quick, like somebody had stabbed me with a hatpin, but deep.” Her fingers curled inward, her fist pressing just above her pubic bone, on the right side.
“Implantation,” I said softly. “When the zygote takes root in the womb.” When that first, eternal link is formed between mother and child. When the small blind entity, unique in its union of egg and sperm, comes to anchor from the perilous voyage of beginning, home from its brief, free-floating existence in the body, and settles to its busy work of division, drawing sustenance from the flesh in which it embeds itself, in a connection that belongs to neither side, but to both. That link, which cannot be severed, either by birth or by death.
She nodded. “It was the strangest feeling. I was still half asleep, but I … well, I just knew all of a sudden that