Diana Gabaldon - Dragonfly In Amber

Dr. McEwan leaned back abruptly, looking startled. “It’s nothing very much, really,” he said. “It’s only… well, she’s such an intense young lady. Perhaps her interest seems at times a trifle… obsessive?” His voice went up questioningly. His eyes darted from Roger to Claire, like a trapped rat’s.

“Would the direction of this intense interest perhaps be focused on the standing stones? The stone circles?” Claire suggested gently.

“Oh, it showed up in her application materials, then?” The Director hauled a large, grubby handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face with it. “Yes, that’s it. Of course, a lot of people get quite carried away with them,” he offered. “The romance of it, the mystery. Look at those benighted souls out at Stonehenge on Midsummer’s Day, in hoods and robes. Chanting… all that nonsense. Not that I would compare Gillian Edgars to…”

There was quite a lot more of it, but Roger quit listening. It seemed stifling in the narrow office, and his collar was too tight; he could hear his heart beating, a slow, incessant thrumping in both ears that was very irritating.

It simply couldn’t be! he thought. Positively impossible . True, Claire Randall’s story was convincing – quite awfully convincing. But then, look at the effect she was having on this poor old dodderer, who wouldn’t know scholarship if it was served up on a plate with piccalilli relish. She could obviously talk a tinker out of his pans. Not that he, Roger, was as susceptible as Dr. McEwan surely, but…

Beset with doubt and dripping with sweat, Roger paid little attention as Dr. McEwan fetched a set of keys from his drawer and rose to lead them out through a second door into a long hallway studded with doors.

“Study carrels,” the Director explained. He opened one of the doors, revealing a cubicle some four feet on a side, barely big enough to contain a narrow table, a chair, and a small bookshelf. On the table, neatly stacked, were a series of folders in different colors. To the side, Roger saw a large notebook with gray covers, and a neat hand-lettered label on the front – MISCELLANEOUS. For some reason, the sight of the handwriting sent a shiver through him.

This was getting more personal by the moment. First photographs, now the woman’s writings. He was assailed by a moment’s panic at the thought of actually meeting Geillis Duncan. Gillian Edgars, he meant. Whoever the woman was.

The Director was opening various folders, pointing and explaining to Claire, who was putting on a good show of having some idea what he was talking about. Roger peered over her shoulder, nodding and saying, “Um-hm, very interesting,” at intervals, but the slanted lines and loops of the script were incomprehensible to him.

She wrote this , he kept thinking. She’s real. Flesh and blood and lips and long eyelashes . And if she goes back through the stone, she’ll burn – crackle and blacken, with her hair lit like a torch in the black dawn. And if she doesn’t, then… I don’t exist.

He shook his head violently.

“You disagree, Mr. Wakefield?” The Director of the Institute was peering at him in puzzlement.

He shook his head again, this time in embarrassment.

“No, no. I mean… it’s only… do you think I could have a drink of water?”

“Of course, of course! Come with me, there’s a fountain just round the corner, I’ll show you.” Dr. McEwan bustled him out of the carrel and down the hall, expressing voluble, disjointed concern for his state of health.

Once away from the claustrophobic confines of the carrel and the proximity of Gillian Edgars’s books and folders, Roger began to feel slightly better. Still, the thought of going back into that tiny room, where all Claire’s words about her past seemed to echo off the thin partitions… no. He made up his mind. Claire could finish with Dr. McEwan by herself. He passed the carrel quickly, not looking inside, and went through the door that led back to the receptionist’s desk.

Mrs. Andrews stared at him as he came in, her spectacles gleaming with concern and curiosity.

“Dear me, Mr. Wakefield. Are ye not feeling just right, then?” Roger rubbed a hand over his face; he must look really ghastly. He smiled weakly at the plump little secretary.

“No, thanks very much. I just got a bit hot back there; thought I’d step down for a little fresh air.”

“Oh, aye.” The secretary nodded understandingly. “The radiators.” She pronounced it “raddiators.” “They get stuck on, ye know, and won’t turn off. I’d best see about it.” She rose from her desk, where the picture of Gillian Edgars still rested. She glanced down at the picture, then up at Roger.

“Isn’t that odd?” she said conversationally. “I was just looking at this and wondering what it was about Mrs. Edgars’s face that struck me all of a sudden. And I couldn’t think what it was. But she’s quite a look of you , Mr. Wakefield – especially round the eyes. Isn’t that a coincidence? Mr. Wakefield?” Mrs. Andrews stared in the direction of the stair, where the thump of Roger’s footsteps echoed from the wooden risers.

“Taken a bit short, I expect,” she said kindly. “Poor lad.”

The sun was still above the horizon when Claire rejoined him on the street, but it was late in the day; people were going home to their tea, and there was a feeling of general relaxation in the air – a looking forward to leisured peace after the long day’s work.

Roger himself had no such feeling. He moved to open the car door for Claire, conscious of such a mix of emotions that he couldn’t decide what to say first. She got in, glancing up at him sympathetically.

“Rather a jar, isn’t it?” was all she said.

The fiendish maze of new one-way streets made getting through the town center a task that demanded all his attention. They were well on their way before he could take his eyes off the road long enough to ask, “What next?”

Claire was leaning back in her seat, eyes closed, the tendrils of her hair coming loose from their clip. She didn’t open her eyes at his question, but stretched slightly, easing herself in the seat.

“Why don’t you ask Brianna out for supper somewhere?” she said. Supper? Somehow it seemed subtly wrong to stop for supper in the midst of a life-or-death detective endeavor, but on the other hand, Roger was suddenly aware that the hollowness in his stomach wasn’t entirely due to the revelations of the last hour.

“Well, all right,” he said slowly. “But then tomorrow-”

“Why wait ’til tomorrow?” Claire broke in. She was sitting up now, combing out her hair. It was thick and unruly, and loosed swirling on her shoulders, Roger thought it made her look suddenly very young. “You can go talk to Greg Edgars again after supper, can’t you?”

“How do you know his name is Greg?” Roger asked curiously. “And if he wouldn’t talk to me this afternoon, why should he tonight?”

Claire looked at Roger as though suddenly doubting his basic intelligence.

“I know his name because I saw it on a letter in his mailbox,” she said. “As for why he’ll talk to you tonight, he’ll talk to you because you’re going to take along a bottle of whisky when you come this time.”

“And you think that will make him invite us in?”

She lifted one brow. “Did you see the collection of empty bottles in his waste bin? Of course he will. Like a shot.” She sat back, fists thrust into the pockets of her coat, and stared out at the passing street.

“You might see if Brianna will go with you,” she said casually.

“She said she isn’t having anything to do with this,” Roger objected.