The Space Between (Outlander, #7.5)(27)

He’d hoped that walking would give him time to come up at least with a point d’appui, if not an entire statement of principle, but instead he found himself obsessively counting the flagstones of the market as he crossed it, counting the bongs of the public horologe as it struck the hour of three, and—for lack of anything else—counting his own footsteps as he approached her door. Six hundred and thirty-seven, six hundred and thirty-eight …

As he turned into the street, though, he abruptly stopped counting. He stopped walking, too, for an instant—then began to run. Something was wrong at the house of Madame Galantine.

He pushed his way through the crowd of neighbors and vendors clustered near the steps and seized the butler, whom he knew, by a sleeve.

“What?” he barked. “What’s happened?” The butler, a tall, cadaverous man named Hubert, was plainly agitated but settled a bit on seeing Michael.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said, though a sideways slide of his eyes made it clear that he did. “Mademoiselle Léonie … she’s ill. The doctor …”

He could smell the blood. Not waiting for more, he pushed Hubert aside and sprinted up the stairs, calling for Madame Eugenie, Léonie’s aunt.

Madame Eugenie popped out of a bedroom, her cap and wrapper neat in spite of the uproar.

“Monsieur Michel!” she said, blocking him from entering the room. “It’s all right, but you must not go in.”

“Yes, I must.” His heart was thundering in his ears, and his hands felt cold.

“You may not,” she said firmly. “She’s ill. It isn’t proper.”

“Proper? A young woman tries to make away with herself and you tell me it isn’t proper?”

A maid appeared in the doorway, a basket piled with bloodstained linen in her arms, but the look of shock on Madame Eugenie’s broad face was more striking.

“Make away with herself?” The old lady’s mouth hung open for a moment, then snapped shut like a turtle’s. “Why would you think such a thing?” She was regarding him with considerable suspicion. “And what are you doing here, for that matter? Who told you she was ill?”

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.