Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)(55)

A glimpse of a man in a dark robe, who must be the doctor, decided Michael that little was to be gained by engaging further with Madame Eugenie. He took her gently but firmly by the elbows, picked her up—she uttered a small shriek of surprise—and set her aside.

He went in and shut the bedroom door behind him.

“Who are you?” The doctor looked up, surprised. He was wiping out a freshly used bleeding-bowl, and his case lay open on the boudoir’s settee. Léonie’s bedroom must lie beyond; the door was open, and Michael caught a glimpse of the foot of a bed but could not see the bed’s inhabitant.

“It doesn’t matter. How is she?”

The doctor eyed him narrowly, but after a moment nodded.

“She will live. As for the child…” He made an equivocal motion of the hand. “I’ve done my best. She took a great deal of the—”

“The child?” The floor shifted under his feet, and the dream of the night before flooded him, that queer sense of something half wrong, half familiar. It was the feeling of a small, hard swelling pressed against his bum; that’s what it was. Lillie had not been far gone with child when she died, but he remembered all too well the feeling of a woman’s body in early pregnancy.

“It’s yours? I beg your pardon, I shouldn’t ask.” The doctor put away his bowl and fleam and shook out his black velvet turban.

“I want—I need to talk to her. Now.”

The doctor opened his mouth in automatic protest but then glanced thoughtfully over his shoulder.

“Well…you must be careful not to—” But Michael was already inside the bedroom, standing by the bed.

She was pale. They had always been pale, Lillie and Léonie, with the soft glow of cream and marble. This was the paleness of a frog’s belly, of a rotting fish, blanched on the shore.

Her eyes were ringed with black, sunk in her head. They rested on his face, flat, expressionless, as still as the ringless hands that lay limp on the coverlet.

“Who?” he said quietly. “Charles?”

“Yes.” Her voice was as dull as her eyes, and he wondered whether the doctor had drugged her.

“Was it his idea—to try to foist the child off on me? Or yours?”

She did look away then, and her throat moved.

“His.” The eyes came back to him. “I didn’t want to, Michel. Not—not that I find you disgusting, not that…”

“Merci,” he muttered, but she went on, disregarding him.

“You were Lillie’s husband. I didn’t envy her you,” she said frankly, “but I envied what you had together. It couldn’t be like that between you and me, and I didn’t like betraying her. But”—her lips, already pale, compressed to invisibility—“I didn’t have much choice.”

He was obliged to admit that she hadn’t. Charles couldn’t marry her; he had a wife. Bearing an illegitimate child was not a fatal scandal in high court circles, but the Galantines were of the emerging bourgeoisie, where respectability counted for almost as much as money. Finding herself pregnant, she would have had two alternatives: find a complaisant husband quickly, or…He tried not to see that one of her hands rested lightly across the slight swell of her stomach.

The child…He wondered what he would have done had she come to him and told him the truth, asked him to marry her for the sake of the child. But she hadn’t. And she wasn’t asking now.

It would be best—or at least easiest—were she to lose the child. And she might yet.

“I couldn’t wait, you see,” she said, as though continuing a conversation. “I would have tried to find someone else, but I thought she knew. She’d tell you as soon as she could manage to see you. So I had to, you see, before you found out.”

“She? Who? Tell me what?”

“The nun,” Léonie said, and sighed deeply, as though losing interest. “She saw me in the market and rushed up to me. She said she had to talk to you—that she had something important to tell you. I saw her look into my basket, though, and her face…thought she must realize…”

Her eyelids were fluttering, whether from drugs or fatigue, he couldn’t tell. She smiled faintly, but not at him; she seemed to be looking at something a long way off.

“So funny,” she murmured. “Charles said it would solve everything—that the comte would pay him such a lot for her, it would solve everything. But how can you solve a baby?”

Michael jerked as though her words had stabbed him.

“What? Pay for whom?”

“The nun.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders.

“Sister Joan? What do you mean, pay for her? What did Charles tell you?”

She made a whiny sound of protest. Michael wanted to shake her hard enough to break her neck but forced himself to withdraw his hand. She settled into the pillow like a bladder losing air, flattening under the bedclothes. Her eyes were closed, but he bent down, speaking directly into her ear.

“The comte, Léonie. What is his name? Tell me his name.”

A faint frown rippled the flesh of her brow, then passed.

“St. Germain,” she murmured, scarcely loud enough to be heard. “The Comte St. Germain.”



HE WENT INSTANTLY to Rosenwald and, by dint of badgering and the promise of extra payment, got him to finish the engraving on the chalice at once. Michael waited impatiently while it was done and, scarcely pausing for the cup and paten to be wrapped in brown paper, flung money to the goldsmith and made for les Couvent des Anges, almost running.