The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [35]
He held her against his chest, not moving until her breathing slowed. He was conscious of an extraordinary mixture of feelings. He had never in his life taken a woman in his arms without some feeling of love, but there was nothing of love in this encounter, nor could there be, for her own sake. There was some tenderness for her youth, and pity at her situation. Rage at her manipulation of him, and fear at the magnitude of the crime he was about to commit. But overall there was a terrible lust, a need that clawed at his vitals and made him ashamed of his own manhood, even as he acknowledged its power. Hating himself, he lowered his head and cupped her face between his hands.
With the deed well past, and Geneva safely married, Jamie breathes easier; until word comes from Ellesmere that the new Countess is with child. Jamie counts backward, curses Geneva, and tries to dismiss the thought; he was with her only a few days before her marriage; it’s impossible to say.
However, six months later, word comes to Helwater; the Countess is delivered. Further word; the Countess’s life is in danger, and her father and sister are summoned—Jamie being called to accompany the coach. Upon arrival, all is in chaos. Geneva is dead, the baby—a son—is alive and healthy, and the Earl of Ellesmere is in his study, drunk and raging. The servants know the reason; the Earl has claimed from the first that the child is not his.
Jeffries, well along with his second glass, snorted in contemptuous amusement. “Old goat with a young gel? I should think it like enough, but how on earth would his Lordship know for sure whose the spawn was? Could be his as much as anyone’s, couldn’t it, with only her Ladyship’s word to go by, eh?”
The cook’s thin mouth stretched in a bright, malicious smile. “Oh, I don’t say as ’e’d know whose it was now—but there’s one sure way ’e’d know it wasn’t ’is, now isn’t there?”
Jeffries stared at the cook, tilting back on his chair. “What?” he said. “You mean to tell me his Lordship’s incapable?” A broad grin at this juicy thought split his weatherbeaten face. Jamie felt the omelet rising, and hastily gulped more brandy.
A crisis occurs; Jamie and the coachman, Jeffries, are summoned to the study at once, to lend aid to their employer. Dunsany is wrestling with the Earl of Ellesmere, who has been casting aspersions on Geneva’s purity and her fathers honesty. The inopportune arrival of Lady Dunsany with the child affords the maddened Ellesmere a chance to vent his rage; he seizes the child and threatens to drop him from the window to the stones of the courtyard, thirty feet below. Jeffries, who has arrived with his coachman’s pistols, hesitates, unsure what to do.
Past all conscious thought or any fear of consequence, Jamie Fraser acted on the instinct that had seen him through a dozen battles. He snatched one pistol from the transfixed Jeffries, turned on his heel, and fired in the same motion.
The roar of the shot struck everyone silent. Even the child ceased to scream. Ellesmere’s face went quite blank, thick eyebrows raised in question. Then he staggered, and Jamie leapt forward, noting with a sort of detached clarity the small round hole in the baby’s trailing drapery, where the pistol ball had passed through it.
He stood then rooted on the hearthrug, heedless of the fire scorching the backs of his legs, of the still-heaving body of Ellesmere at his feet, of the regular, hysterical shrieks of Lady Dunsany, piercing as a peacocks. He stood, eyes tight closed, shaking like a leaf, unable either to move or to think, arms wrapped tight about the shapeless, squirming squawking bundle that contained his son.
In gratitude for his saving her grandchild, Lady Dunsany offers to try to have Jamie pardoned. The thought of leaving the damp confinements of the Lake District for the free air of the Highlands is a temptation almost beyond bearing. But to leave would