The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [54]
The question is hesitantly asked, but promptly answered. Despite his unanswered letters, Roger has been much on Brianna’s mind—yes, she wants very much to see him. Hanging up with a pounding heart, Brianna is unable to go back to sleep. Roger is her chief link with the past; a past she is at once unable to forget and unwilling to contemplate.
Roger shared with her the morning when her mother disappeared forever through the stone circle on Craigh na Dun; Roger, too, hears the stones. In the aftermath of that shocking bereavement, she found herself falling in love with Roger—and then tore away, both from necessity and from doubt. Her mother had confided her to Roger’s care; but Brianna would not bind him to her with the strands of obligation. If it were something more than that, though …
If there might be a future for them … and that was what she couldn’t write to him, because how could she say it without sounding both presumptuous and idiotic?
“Go away, so you can come back and do it right,” she murmured, and made a face at the words.
But now Roger is coming back—with luck, to do it right.
Their first sight of each other is enough to prove that the attraction still exists; a week spent in each other’s company merely reinforces the conviction, while still not solving their basic problem. Roger is a don at Oxford, Brianna still at university. Beyond the temporary separation imposed by their careers, Roger wonders whether they can find a way to be together, given the basic differences in their outlooks.
Might there be common ground for them, a historian and an engineer? He facing backward to the mysteries of the past, she to the future and its dazzling gleam?
Then the room relaxed in cheers and babbling, and she turned in his arms to kiss him hard and cling to him, and he thought perhaps it didn’t matter that they faced in opposite directions—so long as they faced each other.
IN 1767, CLAIRE AND JAMIE and their small party of companions have reached Wilmington, North Carolina. Given the choice of trudging inland for two hundred miles, or making the journey up the Cape Fear River by boat, Jamie opts reluctantly for the faster journey over water, leaving Duncan to follow with the wagon, under the guidance of John Quincy Myers, a mountain man and local guide whom Claire encounters in the street in Wilmington.
Myers informs Jamie that Jamie’s uncle by marriage, Hector Cameron, has died within the last year—but that his aunt Jocasta still lives at River Run, a plantation that lies north of Cross Creek. Deducing Claire’s expertise at healing, Myers’s attention then turns to his own difficulties.
“Big purple thing,” he explained to me, fumbling his loosened thong. “Almost as big as one o’ my balls. You don’t think it might could be as I’ve decided sudden-like to grow an extry, do you?”
“Well, no, I said, biting my lip. ”I really doubt it.“ He moved very slowly, but had almost got the knot in his thong undone; people in the street were beginning to pause, staring.
“Please don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I do believe I know what that is—it’s an inguinal hernia.”
Unable to deal adequately with Mr. Myers’s medical problems in Wilmington, Claire promises to see what she can do surgically at a later date, and escapes to keep a date for dinner with the Governor of the Colony. Taking advantage of a distant family connection, Jamie has wangled the invitation in the hope of finding a buyer for one of their gemstones; he has no desire to present himself at his aunt’s door in rags.
The dinner is successful in more ways than one; another of the guests, Baron Penzler, agrees to buy a ruby, thus providing the Frasers with much-needed capital—money both to supply their own needs, and to send back to Scotland, in partial payment of Jamie’s promise to Laoghaire, the woman he had (reluctantly) married, under the conviction