Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(187)

So Minnie had written a note paying off Lady Buford and announcing her return to France and then stayed in Parson’s Green with Aunt Simpson and her family for a month. She allowed the O’Higginses to do the more straightforward things and—with some reluctance—entrusted the more delicate acquisitions to Mr. Simpson and her cousin Joshua. There’d been two or three clients who had declined to meet with anyone save her, and though the temptation was considerable, the risk was too great, and she had simply not replied to those.

She had gone once with Aunt Simpson to the farm, to take leave of her mother. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to go into Soeur Emmanuelle’s chamber, though, and had only laid her head and hands against the cool wood of the door and wept silently.

But now it was all done. And she stood alone in the rain on the deck of the Thunderbolt, bobbing like a cork over the waves of the channel toward France. And her father.



THE LAST THING she would ever do, she vowed to herself, was to tell her father who it had been.

He knew who Pardloe was, what his family background had been, just how fragile his family’s present grip on respectability. And thus Pardloe’s vulnerability to blackmail.

Perhaps not outright blackmail…at least, she didn’t want to believe her father engaged in that. He’d always told her to avoid it. Not on moral grounds—he had principles, her father, but not morals—but on the purely pragmatic grounds that it was dangerous.

“Most blackmailers are amateurs,” he’d told her, handing her a small stack of letters to read—an educational exchange between a blackmailer and his victim, written in the late fifteenth century. “They don’t know what it’s decent to ask for, and they don’t know how to quit, even if they wanted to. It doesn’t take a victim long to realize that, and then…it’s often death. For one or the other.

“In this instance”—he’d nodded at the crumbling brown-stained papers in her hand—“it was both of them. The woman being blackmailed invited the blackmailer to her home for dinner and poisoned him. But she used the wrong drug; it didn’t kill him outright, but it worked fast enough for him to realize what she’d done, and he strangled her over the dessert.”

No, he probably hadn’t had any intent of blackmailing Pardloe himself.

At the same time, she was certainly intelligent enough to realize that the letters and documents her father dealt in were very often commissioned by or sold to persons who intended to use them for blackmail. She thought of Edward Twelvetrees and his brother and felt colder than the icy blast of the wind off the English Channel.

Were her father to realize that it was Pardloe who had debauched his daughter…What on earth would he do? she wondered.

He wouldn’t scruple to kill Pardloe, if he could do it undetected, she was pretty sure of that. Though he was very pragmatic: he might just demand satisfaction of a financial nature as compensation for the loss of his daughter’s virginity. That was a salable commodity, after all.

Or—the worst possibility of all—he might try to force the Duke of Pardloe to marry her.

That’s what he’d wanted: to find her a rich English husband, preferably one well-placed in society.

“Over my dead body!” she said out loud, causing a passing deckhand to look at her strangely.



SHE’D REHEARSED IT on the journey back. How she’d tell her father—what she wouldn’t tell him—what he might say, think, do…She had a speech composed—firm, calm, definite. She was prepared for him to shout, to rebuke, disown her, show her the door. She wasn’t at all prepared for him to look at her standing in the doorway of the shop, gulp air, and burst into tears.

Flabbergasted, she said nothing and an instant later was being crushed in his arms.

“Are you all right?” He held her away from him, so he could look into her face, and swiped a sleeve across his own wet, anxious, gray-stubbled face. “Did the swine hurt you?”

She couldn’t decide whether to say “What swine?” or “What are you talking about?” and instead settled on a dubious-sounding “No…”

He let go then and stepped back, reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief, which he handed her. She realized belatedly that she was sniffling and her own eyes were welling.

“I’m sorry,” she said, all her speeches forgotten. “I didn’t mean to….to…” But you did, her heart reminded her. You did mean it. She swallowed that down with her tears and said instead, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Papa.”

She hadn’t called him that in years, and he made a sound as though someone had punched him in the belly.

“It’s me that’s sorry, girl,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I let you go by yourself. I should never…I knew…Christ, I’ll kill him!” Blood flooded his pale cheeks, and he slammed a fist on the counter.

“No, don’t,” she said, alarmed. “It was my fault. I—” I what?

He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, though not hard.

“Don’t ever say that. It—whatever—however it happened, it wasn’t your fault.” His hands dropped away from her shoulders and he drew breath, panting as though he’d been running. “I—I—” He stopped and ran a trembling hand down his face, closing his eyes.