Drums of Autumn (118 page)

“I have a proposal to make to you,” she said.

“I am sure any notion of yours must necessarily be delightful, my dear,” he said, smiling slightly.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” she said, and took a deep breath. “But here goes. I want you to marry me.”

He kept smiling, evidently waiting for the punch line.

“I mean it,” she said.

The smile didn’t altogether go away, but it altered. She wasn’t sure whether he was dismayed at her gaucherie or just trying not to laugh, but she suspected the latter.

“I don’t want any of your money,” she assured him. “I’ll sign a paper saying so. And you don’t need to live with me, either, though it’s probably a good idea for me to go to Virginia with you, at least for a little while. As for what I could do for you…” She hesitated, knowing that hers was the weaker side of the bargain. “I’m strong, but that doesn’t mean much to you, since you have servants. I’m a good manager, though—I can keep accounts, and I think I know how to run a farm. I
do
know how to build things. I could manage your property in Virginia while you were in England. And…you have a young son, don’t you? I’ll look after him; I’d be a good mother to him.”

Lord John had stopped dead in the path during this speech. Now he leaned slowly back against the brick wall, casting his eyes up in a silent prayer for understanding.

“Dear God in heaven,” he said. “That I should live to hear an offer like that!” Then he lowered his head and gave her a direct and piercing look.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No,” she said, with an attempt at keeping her own composure. “It’s a perfectly reasonable suggestion.”

“I have heard,” he said, rather cautiously, with an eye to her belly, “that women in an expectant condition are somewhat…excitable, in consequence of their state. I confess, though, that my experience is distressingly limited with respect to…that is—perhaps I should send for Dr. Fentiman?”

She drew herself up to her full height, put a hand on the wall and leaned toward him, deliberately looking down on him, menacing him with her size.

“No, you should not,” she said, in measured tones. “Listen to me, Lord John. I’m not crazy, I’m not frivolous, and I don’t mean it to be an inconvenience to you in any way—but I’m dead serious.”

The cold had reddened his fair skin, and there was a drop of moisture glistening on the tip of his nose. He wiped it on a fold of his cloak, eyeing her with something between interest and horror. At least he’d stopped laughing.

She felt mildly sick, but she’d have to do it. She’d hoped it could be avoided, but there seemed no other way.

“If you don’t agree to marry me,” she said, “I’ll expose you.”

“You’ll do what?” His usual mask of urbanity had disappeared, leaving puzzlement and the beginnings of wariness in its stead.

She was wearing woolen mittens, but her fingers felt frozen. So did everything else, except the warm lump of her slumbering child.

“I know what you were doing—the other night, at the slave quarters. I’ll tell everyone; my aunt, Mr. Campbell, the sheriff. I’ll write letters,” she said, her lips feeling numb even as she uttered the ridiculous threat. “To the Governor, and the Governor of Virginia. They put p-pederasts in the pillory here; Mr. Campbell told me so.”

A frown drew his brows together; they were so fair that they scarcely showed against his skin when he stood in strong light. They reminded her of Lizzie’s.

“Stop looming over me, if you please.”

He took hold of her wrist and pulled it down with a force that surprised her. He was small but much stronger than she had supposed, and for the first time, she was slightly afraid of what she was doing.

He took her firmly by the elbow and propelled her into motion, away from the house. The thought struck her that perhaps he meant to take her down to the river, out of sight, and try to drown her. She thought it unlikely, but still resisted the direction of his urging, and turned back into the square-laid paths of the kitchen garden instead.

He made no demur, but went with her, though it meant walking head-on into the wind. He didn’t speak until they had turned once more, and reached a sheltered corner by the onion bed.

“I am halfway tempted to submit to your outrageous proposal,” he said at last, the corner of his mouth twitching—whether with fury or amusement, she couldn’t tell.

“It would certainly please your aunt. It would outrage your mother. And it would teach
you
to play with fire, I do assure you.” She caught a gleam in his eye that gave her a sudden surge of doubt about her conclusions as to his preferences. She drew back from him a bit.

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that—that you might…men and women both, I mean.”

“I
was
married,” he pointed out, with some sarcasm.

“Yes, but I thought that was probably the same kind of thing I’m suggesting now—just a formal arrangement, I mean. That’s what made me think of it in the first place, once I realized that you—” She broke off with an impatient gesture. “Are you telling me that you
do
like to go to bed with women?”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Would that make a substantial difference to your plans?”

“Well…” she said uncertainly. “Yes. Yes, it would. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have suggested it.”

“ ‘Suggested,’ she says,” he muttered. “Public denunciation? The pillory?
Suggested?
”

The blood burned so hotly in her cheeks, she was surprised not to see the cold air turn to steam around her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wouldn’t have done it. You have to believe me, I really wouldn’t have said a word to anybody. It’s only when you laughed, I thought—anyway, it doesn’t matter. If you did want to sleep with me, I couldn’t marry you—it wouldn’t be right.”

He closed his eyes very tight and held them squinched shut for a minute. Then he opened one light blue eye and looked at her.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because of Roger,” she said, and was infuriated to hear her voice break on the name. Still more infuriated to feel a hot tear escape to run down her cheek.

“Damn it!” she said. “Damn it to hell! I wasn’t even going to
think
about him!”

She swiped the tear angrily away, and clenched her teeth.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe it is being pregnant. I cry all the time, over nothing.”

“I rather doubt it is nothing,” he said dryly.

She took a deep breath, the cold air hollowing her chest. There was one last card to play, then.

“If you do like women…I couldn’t—I mean, I don’t want to sleep with you regularly. And I wouldn’t mind your sleeping with anybody else—male or female—”

“Thank you for that,” he muttered, but she ignored him, bent only on the need to get it all out.

“But I can see that you might want a child of your own. It wouldn’t be right for me to keep you from having one. I can give you that, I think.” She glanced down at herself, arms clasped across the round of her belly. “Everyone says I’m made for childbearing,” she went on steadily, eyes on her feet. “I’d—just until I got pregnant again, though. You’d have to put that in the contract, too—Mr. Campbell could draw it up.”

Lord John massaged his forehead, evidently suffering the onslaught of a massive headache. Then he dropped his hand and took her by the arm.

“Come and sit down, child,” he said quietly. “You’d best tell me what the devil you’re up to.”

She took a deep, savage breath to steady her voice.

“I am not a child,” she said. He glanced up at her and seemed to change his mind about something.

“No, you’re not—God help us both. But before you startle Farquard Campbell into an apoplexy with your notion of a suitable marriage contract, I beg you to sit with me for a moment and share the processes of your most remarkable brain.” He motioned her through the archway into the ornamental garden, where they would be invisible from the house.

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 his outraged eye, suddenly dissolved into laughter, in which he helplessly joined.

“Well, I’m sorry, but
you
said it,” she gasped at last, sitting up and wiping her streaming eyes with the hem of her cloak.

“Oh, Christ. Yes, I did.” Distracted, he thumbed a strand of hair out of his mouth, and wiped his running nose on his sleeve again. “Damn, why haven’t I a handkerchief? I said it because it’s true. As for your father finding out, he’s well aware of the fact.”

“He is?” She seemed disproportionately surprised. “But I thought he’d never—”

A flash of yellow apron interrupted her; one of the kitchen maids was in the adjoining garden. Without comment, Lord John stood up and gave her a hand; she got ponderously to her feet and they sailed out onto the dry brown scurf of the dead lawn, cloaks billowing like sails around them.

The stone bench under the willow tree was devoid of its usual charm at this time of year, but it was at least sheltered from the icy blasts off the river. Lord John saw her seated, sat down himself, and sneezed explosively. She opened her cloak and dug in the bosom of her dress, finally coming out with a crumpled handkerchief, which she handed to him with apologies.

It was warm and smelled of her—a disconcerting odor of girl-flesh, spiced with cloves and lavender.

“What you said about teaching me to play with fire,” she said. “Just what did you mean by that?”

“Nothing,” he said, but now it was his turn to flush.

“Nothing, hm?” she said, and gave him the ghost of an ironic smile. “That was a threat if I ever heard one.”

He sighed, and wiped his face once more with her handkerchief.

“You have been frank with me,” he said. “To the point of embarrassment and well beyond. So yes, I suppose I—no, it
was
a threat.” He made a small gesture of surrender. “You look like your father, don’t you see?”

She frowned at him, his words obviously meaning nothing. Then realization flickered, sprang to full life. She sat bolt upright, staring down at him.

“Not you—not Da! He wouldn’t!”

“No,” Lord John said, very dryly. “He wouldn’t. Though your shock is scarcely flattering. And for what the statement is worth, I would under no circumstances take advantage of your likeness to him—that was as much an idle threat as was your menacing me with exposure.”