Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [448]
As I leaned against the wall, trembling in the shadows, the door to the Governor’s quarters opened, and the Governor came out, returning to his party. His face was flushed and his eyes shone. I could at that moment easily have murdered him, had I anything more lethal than a hairpin to hand.
The door opened again a few minutes later, and Jamie emerged, no more than six feet away. His mask of cool reserve was in place, but I knew him well enough to see the marks of a strong emotion under it. But while I could see it, I couldn’t interpret it. Excitement? Apprehension? Fear and joy mingled? Something else? I had simply never seen him look that way before.
He didn’t seek conversation or refreshments, but instead began to stroll about the room, obviously looking for someone. For me.
I swallowed heavily. I couldn’t face him—not in front of a crowd. I stayed where I was, watching him, until he finally went out onto the terrace. Then I left my hiding place, and crossed the room as quickly as I could, heading for the refuge of the retiring room. At least there I would be able to sit down for a moment.
I pushed open the heavy door and stepped inside, relaxing at once as the warm, comforting scents of women’s perfume and powder surrounded me. Then the other smell struck me. It too was a familiar scent—one of the smells of my profession. But not expected here.
The retiring room was still quiet; the loud rumble from the salon had dropped abruptly to a faint murmur, like a far-off thunderstorm. It was, however, no longer a place of refuge.
Mina Alcott lay sprawled across the red velvet chaise, her head hanging backward over the edge, her skirts in disarray about her neck. Her eyes were open, fixed in upside-down surprise. The blood from her severed throat had turned the velvet black beneath her, and dripped down into a large pool beneath her head. Her light brown hair had come loose from its dressing, the matted ends of her ringlets dangling in the puddle.
I stood frozen, too paralyzed even to call for help. Then I heard the sound of gay voices in the hallway outside, and the door pushed open. There was a moment’s silence as the women behind me saw it too.
Light from the corridor spilled through the door and across the floor, and in the moment before the screaming began, I saw the footprints leading toward the window—the small neat prints of a felt-soled foot, outlined in blood.
59
IN WHICH MUCH IS REVEALED
They had taken Jamie somewhere. I, shaking and incoherent, had been put—with a certain amount of irony—in the Governor’s private office with Marsali, who insisted on trying to bathe my face with a damp towel, in spite of my resistance.
“They canna think Da had anything to do with it!” she said, for the fifth time.
“They don’t.” I finally pulled myself together enough to talk to her. “But they think Mr. Willoughby did—and Jamie brought him here.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed with horror.
“Mr. Willoughby? But he couldn’t!”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.” I felt as though someone had been beating me with a club; everything ached. I sat slumped on a small velvet love seat, aimlessly twirling a glass of brandy between my hands, unable to drink it.
I couldn’t even decide what I ought to feel, let alone sort out the conflicting events and emotions of the evening. My mind kept jumping between the grisly scene in the retiring room, and the tableau I had seen a half-hour earlier, in this very room.
I sat looking at the Governor’s big desk. I could still see the two of them, Jamie and Lord John, as though they had been painted on the wall before me.
“I just don’t believe it,” I said out loud, and felt slightly better for the saying.
“Neither do I,” said Marsali. She was pacing the floor, her footsteps changing from the click of heels on parquet to a muffled thump as she hit the flowered carpet. “He can’t have! I ken he’s a heathen, but we’ve lived wi’ the man! We know him!”
Did we? Did I know Jamie? I would have sworn I did, and yet…I kept remembering what he had said to me at the brothel,