Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [484]
The garden was bleak, but orderly; all the dead stalks of the year before had been pulled out, the dry stems chopped and scattered as mulch over the beds. Only in the circular bed around the dry fountain were there signs of life; green crocus spikes poked up like tiny battering rams, vivid and intransigent.
They sat, but she couldn’t sit. Not and face him. He got up with her, and walked beside her, not touching her but keeping pace, the wind whipping strands of blond hair across his face, not saying a word, but listening, listening as she told him almost everything.
“So I’ve been thinking, and thinking,” she ended wretchedly. “And I never get anywhere. Do you see? Mother and—and Da, they’re out there somewhere—” She waved an arm toward the distant mountains. “Anything could happen to them—anything might have happened to Roger already. And here I sit, getting bigger and bigger, and there’s nothing I can do!”
She glanced down at him and drew the back of a mittened hand under her dripping nose.
“I’m not crying,” she assured him, though she was.
“Of course not,” he said. He took her hand and drew it through his arm.
“Round and round,” he murmured, eyes on the path of crazy paving as they circled the fountain.
“Yes, round and round the mulberry bush,” she agreed. “And it’ll be Pop! goes the weasel in three months or so. I have to do something,” she ended, miserably.
“Believe it or not, in your case waiting is doing something, though I admit it may not seem so,” he answered dryly. “Why is it that you will not wait to see whether your father’s quest is successful? Is it that your sense of honor will not allow you to bear a fatherless child? Or—”
“It’s not my honor,” she said. “It’s his. Roger’s. He’s—he followed me. He gave up—everything—and came after me, when I came here to find my father. I knew he would, and he did.
“When he finds out about this—” She grimaced, cupping a hand to the swell of her stomach. “He’ll marry me; he’ll feel as though he has to. And I can’t let him do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I love him. I don’t want him to marry me out of obligation. And I—” She clamped her lips tight on the rest of it. “I won’t,” she ended firmly. “I’ve made up my mind, and I won’t.”
Lord John pulled his cloak tighter as a fresh blast of wind came rocketing in off the river. It smelled of ice and dead leaves, but there was a hint of freshness in it; spring was coming.
“I see,” he said. “Well, I quite agree with your aunt that you require a husband. Why me, though?” He raised one pale brow. “Is it my title or my wealth?”
“Neither one. It was because I was sure that you didn’t like women,” she said, giving him one of those candid blue looks.
“I do like women,” he said, exasperated. “I admire and honor them, and for several of the sex I feel considerable affection—your mother among them, though I doubt the sentiment is reciprocated. I do not, however, seek pleasure in their beds. Do I speak plainly enough?”
“Yes,” she said, the small lines between her eyes vanishing like magic. “That’s what I thought. See, it wouldn’t be right for me to marry Mr. MacNeill or Barton McLachlan or any of those men, because I’d be promising something I couldn’t give them. But you don’t want that anyway, so there isn’t any reason why I can’t marry you.”
He repressed a strong urge to bang his head against the wall.
“There most assuredly is.”
“What?”
“To name only the most obvious, your father would undoubtedly break my neck!”
“What for?” she demanded, frowning. “He likes you; he says you’re one of his best friends.”
“I am honored to be the recipient of his esteem,” he said shortly. “However, that esteem would very shortly cease to exist, upon Jamie Fraser’s discovering that his daughter was serving as consort and brood mare to a degenerate sodomite.”
“And how would he discover that?” she demanded. “I wouldn’t tell him.” Then she flushed and, meeting