The Fiery Cross - Diana Gabaldon [596]
He gave me a small, wry smile in response, then dropped his eyes, studying the charts.
“Can you tell, then?” he asked finally, not looking up. “For sure?”
“No,” I said, and dropped the cloth into the laundry basket with a small sigh. “Or rather—I can’t tell for sure whether Jemmy is yours. I might be able to tell for sure if he’s not.”
The flush had faded from his skin.
“How’s that?”
“Bree is type B, but I’m type A. That means she’ll have a gene for B and my gene for O, either of which she might have given Jemmy. You could only have given him a gene for type O, because that’s all you have.”
I nodded at a small rack of tubes near the window, the serum in them glowing brownish-gold in the late afternoon sun.
“So. If Bree gave him an O gene, and you—his father—gave him an O gene, he’d show up as type O—his blood won’t have any antibodies, and won’t react with serum from my blood or from Jamie’s or Bree’s. If Bree gave him her B gene, and you gave him an O, he’d show up as type B—his blood would react with my serum, but not Bree’s. In either case, you might be the father—but so might anyone with type-O blood. IF, however—”
I took a deep breath, and picked up the pencil from the spot where Roger had laid it down. I drew slowly as I talked, illustrating the possibilities.
“But”—I tapped the pencil on the paper—“if Jemmy were to show as type A or type AB—then his father was not homozygous for type O—homozygous means both genes are the same—and you are.” I wrote in the alternatives, to the left of my previous entry.
I saw Roger’s eyes flick toward that “X,” and wondered what had made me write it that way. It wasn’t as though the contender for Jemmy’s paternity could be just anyone, after all. Still, I could not bring myself to write “Bonnet”—perhaps it was simple superstition; perhaps just a desire to keep the thought of the man at a safe distance.
“Bear in mind,” I said, a little apologetically, “that type O is very common, in the population at large.”
Roger grunted, and sat regarding the chart, eyes hooded in thought.
“So,” he said at last. “If he’s type O or type B, he may be mine, but not for sure. If he’s type A or type AB, he’s not mine—for sure.”
One finger rubbed slowly back and forth over the fresh bandage on his hand.
“It’s a very crude test,” I said, swallowing. “I can’t—I mean, there’s always the possibility of a mistake in the test itself.”
He nodded, not looking up.
“You told Bree this?” he asked softly.
“Of course. She said she doesn’t want to know—but that if you did, I was to make the test.”
I saw him swallow, once, and his hand lifted momentarily to the scar across his throat. His eyes were fixed on the scrubbed planks of the floor, hardly blinking.
I turned away, to give him a moment’s privacy, and bent over the microscope. I would have to make a grid, I thought—a counting grid that I could lay across a slide, to help me estimate the relative density of the Plasmodium-infected cells. For the moment, though, a crude eyeball count would have to do.
It occurred to me that now that I had a workable stain, I ought to test the blood of others on the Ridge—those in the household, for starters. Mosquitoes were much rarer in the mountains than near the coast, but there were still plenty, and while Lizzie might be well herself, she was still a sink of potential infection.
“. . . four, five, six . . .” I was counting infected cells under my breath, trying to ignore both Roger on his stool behind me, and the sudden memory that had popped up, unbidden, when I told him Brianna’s blood type.
She had had her tonsils removed at the age of seven. I still recalled the sight of the doctor, frowning at the chart he held—the chart that listed her blood type, and those of both her parents. Frank had been type A, like me. And two type-A parents could not, under any circumstances, produce a type B child.
The doctor had looked up, glancing from me to Frank and back, his face twisted with embarrassment—and his eyes filled with a kind of cold speculation as he looked at me. I might as well have worn a