Seven Stones to Stand or Fall (Outlander)

With him gone, her stunned senses began to awaken. She could hear music and voices, laughter. A strong smell of hot punch and wine; she’d drunk nothing save that first glass of champagne but now felt very drunk indeed. She opened and closed her fingers slowly, still feeling the grasp of his hand, hard and chilled.

Suddenly he was there again, and she felt his presence like a blow to her chest. He had her cape in his hand and swung it open, round her, enveloping her. As though it was part of the same movement, he took her in his arms and kissed her fiercely. Let go, panting, then did it again.

“You—” she said, but then stopped, having no idea what to say.

“I know,” he said, as though he did, and with a hand under her elbow led her somewhere—she wasn’t noticing anything anymore—and then there was a whoosh of cold, rainy night air and he was helping her up the step of a hansom cab.

“Where do you live?” he said, in an almost normal voice.

“Southwark,” she said, sheer instinct preventing her from giving him her real address. “Bertram Street, Number Twenty-two,” she added, inventing wildly.

He nodded. His face was white, his eyes dark in the night. The place between her legs burned and felt slippery. He swallowed and she saw his throat move, slick with rain and gleaming in the light from the lantern; he hadn’t put on his neckcloth or his waistcoat, and his shirt was open under his scarlet coat.

He took her hand.

“I will call upon you tomorrow,” he said. “To inquire after your welfare.”

She didn’t answer. He turned her hand over and kissed her palm. Then the door was shut and she was rattling alone over wet cobbles, her hand closed tight on the warmth of his breath.

She couldn’t think. She felt wetness seep into her petticoats, with the slightly sticky feel of blood. The only thing floating through her mind was a remark of her father’s. “The English are notorious bores about virginity.”





16





SIC TRANSIT


IT WASN’T THAT HARD to disappear. The O’Higgins brothers were masters of the art, as they assured her.

“Leave it to us, sweetheart,” Rafe said, taking the purse she handed him. “To a Londoner, the world beyond the end of his street is as furrin as the pope. All ye need do is keep away from the places folk are used to seein’ ye.”

She hadn’t had much choice. She wasn’t going anywhere near the Duke of Pardloe or his friend Quarry or the Twelvetrees brothers. But there was still business to be done before she could go back to Paris—books to be both sold and bought, shipments made and received—and a few bits of more-private business, as well.

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.