Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(160)

“And my father learned about this?”

Her aunt shrugged. “It’s no secret. The order’s books are well known, as are their skills. I imagine Raphael had dealt with the convent before. He—”

“He’s never dealt with them, so far as I know, or I would have heard of them.”

“Do you think he would risk your finding out?” her aunt said bluntly. “Whatever his defects of character, I will say the man knows how to keep a secret. He severed all connection with the order, after…” Her mouth pressed tight and she made a flicking gesture with one hand that had nothing to do with the wasp.

Minnie’s teeth were clenched, but she managed to get a few words out.

“Bloody tell me what happened!”

Her aunt looked at her searchingly, the frills on her cap trembling with the vibration of the coach, then shrugged.

“Bon,” she said.

What had happened (“in brief,” said Mrs. Simpson) was that Raphael Wattiswade had acquired a very rare Book of Hours, made more than a century before. It was beautiful but in poor condition. The cover could be repaired, its missing jewels replaced—but some of the illustrations had suffered badly from the effects of time and use.

“And so Raphael came to the abbess of the order—a woman he knew well, in the course of business—and asked whether one of their more talented scribes might be able to restore the illustrations. For a price, of course.”

Normally the book would simply be taken away to the scriptorium for examination and work, but in this case, some pages had been completely obliterated. Raphael, however, had discovered several letters from the original owner, rhapsodizing to a friend about his new acquisition and giving detailed descriptions of the more important illustrations.

“And he couldn’t just give the letters to the abbess?” Minnie asked skeptically. Not that she could think why her father would purposely set out to seduce a nun he’d never heard of or set eyes on…

Mrs. Simpson shook her head.

“I said the book was from a previous age? The letters were written in German, and a very archaic form of that barbarous language. No one in the order was able to translate it.”

Given that and the fragile state of the book, Soeur Emmanuelle was allowed to travel to Raphael’s workshop—“With a proper chaperon, to be sure,” Mrs. Simpson added, with a fresh pressing of the lips.

“To be sure.”

Her aunt gave a very Gallic shrug. “But things happen, don’t they?”

“Evidently they do.” She eyed Mrs. Simpson, who, she thought, seemed tolerably free with her father’s Christian name.

“C’est vrai. And what happened, of course, was you.”

There was no good response to that, and Minnie didn’t try to find one.

“She was only nineteen,” her aunt finally said, looking down at her clasped hands, and speaking in a voice so soft that Minnie hardly heard it over the rumble of the coach. And how old had her father been? she wondered. He was forty-five now…twenty-eight. Maybe twenty-seven, allowing for the length of a pregnancy.

“Bloody old enough to know better,” Minnie muttered, but under her breath. “I suppose she—my mother”—she forced herself to say the words, which now felt shocking in her mouth— “was obliged to leave the order? I mean, you can’t be pregnant in a convent, surely.”

“You might be surprised,” her aunt observed cynically. “But in this case, you’re right. They sent her away, to a sort of asylum in Rouen—a terrible place.” A flush had begun to burn on Mrs. Simpson’s high cheekbones. “I heard nothing of it until Raphael appeared at my door one night, very distraught, to tell me she was gone.”

“What did you do?”

“We went and got her,” her aunt said simply. “What else?”

“You said ‘we.’ Do you mean you and…my father?”

Her aunt blinked, shocked.

“No, of course not. My husband and myself.” She breathed deep, clearly trying to calm herself. “It—she—it was most distressing.”

Soeur Emmanuelle, torn from the community that had been her home since she entered the convent as a twelve-year-old novice, treated as an object of shame, having no knowledge or experience of pregnancy, without friend or family, and locked up in an establishment that sounded very like a prison, had been first hysterical, then had gradually withdrawn into a state of despair and finally of stone-like silence, sitting and staring all day at the blank wall, taking no notice even of food.

“She was skin and bones when I found her,” Mrs. Simpson said, her voice shaking with remembered fury. “She didn’t even know me!”

Soeur Emmanuelle had very gradually been brought back to a cognizance of the world—but not the world she had left.

“I don’t know whether it was leaving her order—they were her family!—or the shock of being with child, but…” She shook her head, desolation draining the color from her face. “She lost her reason entirely. Took no notice of her state and believed herself to be back in the convent, going about her usual work.”

They had humored her, given her a habit, provided her with paint and brushes, vellum and parchment, and she had shown some signs of being aware of her surroundings—would talk sometimes and knew her sister. But then the birth had come, inexorable.