Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [444]
She hadn’t spoken to Jamie Fraser since that night. Nor he to her. Not since the final moment, when in a fury of fear and outrage, she had screamed at him, “My father would never have said such a thing!”
She could still see what his face had looked like when she spoke her final words to him; she wished she could forget. He had turned without a word and left the cabin. Ian had risen, and quietly gone after him; neither of them had come back that night.
Her mother had stayed with her, comforting, petting, stroking her head and murmuring small soothing things as she alternately raged and sobbed. But even as her mother held Brianna’s head in her lap and wiped her face with cool cloths, Bree could feel a part of her yearning toward that man, wanting to follow him, wanting to comfort him. And she blamed him for that as well.
Her head throbbed with the effort of staying stone-faced. She didn’t dare relax the muscles of eyes and jaw until she was sure they had left; it would be too easy to break down.
She hadn’t; not since that night. Once she had pulled herself together, she had assured her mother that she was all right, insisted that Claire go to bed. She had herself sat up till dawn, eyes burning from rage and woodsmoke, with the drawing of Roger on the table before her.
He had come back at dawn, called her mother to him, not looking at Brianna. Murmured a bit in the dooryard, and sent her mother back, face hollow-eyed with worry, to pack her things.
He had brought her here, down the mountain to River Run. She had wanted to go with them, had wanted to go at once to find Roger, without a moment’s delay. But he had been obdurate, and so had her mother.
It was late December, and the winter snows lay thick on the mountainside. She was nearly four months gone; the taut curve of her belly was tightly rounded now. There was no telling how long the journey might take, and she was reluctantly compelled to admit that she didn’t want to give birth on a raw mountainside. She might have overridden her mother’s opinion, but not when it was buttressed by his stubbornness.
She leaned her forehead against the cool marble of the mausoleum; it was a cold day, spitting rain, but her face felt hot and swollen, as though she were coming down with a fever.
She couldn’t stop hearing him, seeing him. His face, congested with rage, sharp-edged as a devil’s mask. His voice, rough with fury and contempt, reproaching her—reproaching her!—for the loss of his bloody honor!
“Your honor?” she had said incredulously. “Your honor? Your fucking notion of honor is what’s caused all the trouble in the first place!”
“Ye willna use that sort of language to me! Though if it’s fucking we’re speaking of—”
“I’ll fucking well say anything I want!” she bellowed, and slammed a fist on the table, rattling the dishes.
She had, too. So had he. Her mother had tried once or twice to stop them—Brianna flinched at the belated memory of the distress in Claire’s deep golden eyes—but neither of them had paid a moment’s notice, too intent on the savagery of their mutual betrayal.
Her mother had told her once that she had a Scottish temper—slow-fused, but long-burning. Now she knew where it came from, but the knowing didn’t help.
She put her folded arms against the tomb and rested her face on them, breathing in the faint sheep-smell of the wool. It reminded her of the hand-knit sweaters her father—her real father, she thought, with a fresh burst of desolation—had liked to wear.
“Why did you have to die?” she whispered to the hollow of damp wool. “Oh, why?” If Frank Randall hadn’t died, none of this would have happened. He and Claire would still be there, in the house in Boston, her family and her life would be intact.
But her father was gone, replaced by a violent stranger; a man who had her face, but could not understand her heart, a man who had taken both family and home from her, and not satisfied with that, had