It was an interesting enough project in its way, though probably a minor research job. But that wasn’t it. No, he thought, if he were being honest with himself, he wanted to tackle Claire Randall’s project because he wanted to go round to Mrs. Thomas’s guesthouse and lay his results at the feet of Brianna Randall, as knights were supposed to have done with the heads of dragons. Even if he didn’t get results on that scale, he urgently wanted some excuse to see her and talk with her again.
It was a Bronzino painting she reminded him of, he decided. She and her mother both gave that odd impression of having been outlined somehow, drawn with such vivid strokes and delicate detail that they stood out from their background as though they’d been engraved on it. But Brianna had that brilliant coloring, and that air of absolute physical presence that made Bronzino’s sitters seem to follow you with their eyes, to be about to speak from their frames. He’d never seen a Bronzino painting making faces at a glass of whisky, but if there had been one, he was sure it would have looked precisely like Brianna Randall.
“Well, bloody hell,” he said aloud. “It won’t take a lot of time just to look over the records at Culloden House tomorrow, will it? You,” he said, addressing the desk and its multiple burdens, “can wait for a day. So can you,” he said to the wall, and defiantly plucked a mystery novel from the shelf. He glanced around belligerently, as though daring any of the furnishings to object, but there was no sound but the whirring of the electric fire. He switched it off and, book under his arm, left the study, flicking off the light.
A minute later, he came back, crossing the room in the dark, and retrieved the list of names from the table.
“Well, bloody hell anyway!” he said, and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. “Don’t want to forget the damn thing in the morning.” He patted the pocket, feeling the soft crackle of the paper just over his heart, and went up to bed.
We had come back from Loch Ness blown with wind and chilled with rain, to the warm comfort of a hot supper and an open fire in the parlor. Brianna had begun to yawn over the scrambled eggs, and soon excused herself to go and take a hot bath. I stayed downstairs for a bit, chatting with Mrs. Thomas, the landlady, and it was nearly ten o’clock before I made my way up to my own bath and nightgown.
Brianna was an early riser and an early sleeper; her soft breathing greeted me as I pushed open the bedroom door. An early sleeper, she was also a sound one; I moved carefully around the room, hanging up my clothes and tidying things away, but there was little danger of waking her. The house grew quiet as I went about my work, so that the rustle of my own movements seemed loud in my ears.
I had brought several of Frank’s books with me, intending to donate them to the Inverness Library. They were laid neatly in the bottom of my suitcase, forming a foundation for the more squashable items above. I took them out one by one, laying them on the bed. Five hardbound volumes, glossy in bright dust covers. Nice, substantial things; five or six hundred pages each, not counting index and illustrations.
My late husband’s Collected Works, in the Fully Annotated editions. Inches of admiring reviews covered the jacket flaps, comments from every recognized expert in the historical field. Not bad for a Life’s Work, I thought. An accomplishment to be proud of. Compact, weighty, authoritative.
I stacked the books neatly on the table next to my bag, so as not to forget them in the morning. The titles on the spines were different, of course, but I stacked them so that the uniform “Frank W. Randall” ’s at the ends lined up, one above the other. They glowed jewel-bright in the small pool of light from the bedside lamp.
The bed-and-breakfast was quiet; it was early in the year for guests, and those there were had long since gone to sleep. In the other twin bed, Brianna made a small whuffling noise and rolled over in her sleep, leaving long strands of red hair draped across her dreaming face. One long, bare foot protruded from the bedclothes, and I pulled the blanket gently over it.
The impulse to touch a sleeping child never fades, no matter that the child is a good deal larger than her mother, and a woman—if a young one—in her own right. I smoothed the hair back from her face and stroked the crown of her head. She smiled in her sleep, a brief reflex of contentment, gone as soon as it appeared. My own smile lingered as I watched her, and whispered to her sleep-deaf ears, as I had so many times before, “God, you are so like him.”
I swallowed the faint thickening in my throat—it was nearly habit, by now—and took my dressing gown from the chair back. It was bloody cold at night in the Scottish Highlands in April, but I wasn’t yet ready to seek the warm sanctuary of my own twin bed.