The Touch (43 page)

“Yes, Jade has the calamine. Take off all your clothes for me, dear, please. We have to look for the tick.”

“No want! Anna no bleed.”

“Yes, I know that. For the tick, Anna, please.”

“No!” said Anna, looking mutinous.

“Then let’s see if we can find the tick where you don’t have any clothes. If we don’t find it, we’ll play at taking off your clothes a bit at a time until we do find it. All right?”

And so it went until even Anna’s drawers came off, her clothes folded neatly in a pile as Jade had taught her over years of patient persistence.

The two women looked first at the naked Anna, then at each other. A beautiful body whose ordinarily flat belly was definitely starting to swell; full and perfect breasts whose nipples had turned dark brown, engorged.

“We should have continued to bathe her no matter how much she objected,” Elizabeth said dully. “But one doesn’t see into the future.” She kissed Anna on the forehead tenderly. “Thank you, dear. You were lucky. No nasty bitey tick. Put your clothes on, there’s a good girl.”

Clothes on again, Anna went back to her daisies.

“How far along do you think she is?” Elizabeth asked Jade outside in the hall.

“Closer to five than four months, Miss Lizzy.”

The tears were streaming down her face, but Elizabeth didn’t notice them. “Oh, my poor baby! Jade, Jade, what can we do?”

“Ask Miss Ruby,” said Jade, weeping too.

Anger came, so violent that Elizabeth shuddered. “I knew Alexander was wrong! I knew we had to replace Dragonfly! Oh, what fools men are! He actually thought that he could throw the mantle of his power over my beautiful, desirable, innocent child! Damn him to hell!”

Nell came down the hall in time to hear this, looking as if her temper had cooled enough to believe that her mother wasn’t the cause of her deprivation. “Mum, what is it? You’re not crying because I shouted at you, are you?”

“Anna is pregnant,” said Elizabeth, wiping her eyes.

Nell tottered, held herself up by leaning on the wall. “Oh, Mum, no! It can’t be! Who would do that to Anna?”

“Some filthy mongrel who deserves to have it cut off!” said Elizabeth savagely. She turned to Jade. “Stay with her, please. Nell, you’re reinforcements. She’s not to be let wander.”

“Maybe she ought to be let wander,” said Nell, white-faced. “Then we might catch the bastard.”

“I’d say he’s gone. If he didn’t abscond weeks ago, he’d certainly see her pregnancy for himself now and be off.”

“What are you going to do, Mum?”

“See Ruby. Perhaps we can get rid of the thing.”

“It’s too late!” Nell and Jade cried in unison to Elizabeth’s back. “It’s too late for that!”

WHICH WAS what Ruby said after a fierce bout of lurid cursing. “What on earth got into you and Jade?” she asked, fists clenched. “How did you let her miss so many times, for God’s sake?”

“In all honesty, I think because it’s such a nightmare when she has her courses—we dread them so much that we don’t want to think about them, let alone expect them. Besides, she does miss from time to time, she’s not regular,” said Elizabeth. “And who would—who would ever have dreamed of this? It’s rape, Ruby!”

“I would have dreamed of it!” Ruby snapped.

Somehow it mattered to have Ruby’s good opinion; Elizabeth battled on. “Things have been so hectic, and Alexander so hard to live with, between his arrogance, Lee’s defection, his wanting to get away, and the friction between him and you—”

“Oh, I see! It’s my fault, is it?”

“No, no, it’s my fault, entirely my fault! I’m her mother, she’s my responsibility!” Elizabeth cried. “I blame myself, no one else! Poor Jade is beside herself.”

“And so are you,” said Ruby, calming down enough to go to the sideboard and pour two large cognacs. “Brandy, Elizabeth, and no arguments. Drink.”

Elizabeth drank, felt a little stronger. “What do we do?”

“Put getting rid of it out of your mind, for one thing. If she’s closer to five months than to four, she could die. You get rid of them at six weeks—even ten weeks is risky. And thirteen is so young! Though Sir Edward Wyler’s son might be willing to operate. He did take over his father’s practice, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Simon Wyler.”

“I’ll telegram him, but don’t hold out any hopes. I doubt a medical practitioner in good standing would consent to do it, even given the circumstances.” Ruby drew in a breath. “And Alexander will have to be told, even if he decides not to come home for the birth of his first grandchild.”

“Dear God! He’ll be livid, Ruby.”

“Oh, yes, he’ll be livid.”

“What torments me most is what the baby might be like.”

“The baby might be quite normal, Elizabeth, if Anna is the way she is because of her birth.” Ruby gave a snort of hysterical laughter. “Jesus, what an irony! Alexander might get his male heir from his mental daughter and some filthy fucking shit-arsed mongrel who preys on defenseless children.” Her laughter grew wilder, she shrieked with it until the tears came and she bolted into Elizabeth’s arms to howl herself into heaving silence. “My dear, my so very dear Elizabeth,” she said then, “what else is left for you to go through? If I could, I’d take it all away from you and bear it myself. You’ve never harmed a fly, I’m a whore pushing fifty.”

“There’s one other thing, Ruby.”

“What?”

“Finding the man who did this.”

“Ah!” Ruby sat up, found her handkerchief and mopped at the remains of her grief. “I doubt we ever will, Elizabeth, because I’ve never heard so much as a whisper that anyone was interfering with Anna. This is a small town, and I sit at the heart of it. Between the public bar, the saloon bar and the dining room, I hear everything. I can’t credit that he’s a local—no local would dare, he’d be lynched. Everyone local knows her age! My guess is a commercial traveler—they come and go so often that it’s hard to keep track of them, never the same man for the same company twice in a row. Rifle salesmen, saddlers, hawkers and hustlers of everything from ointments and tonics to bottles of scent and gimcrack jewelry. Yes, a commercial traveler.”

“He should be found and prosecuted. Hanged!”

“That’s not sensible.” The green eyes grew severe. “Use your brains, Elizabeth! Your private sorrow would become everybody’s business and rags like Truth would have a field day with Sir Alexander Kinross’s dirty washing.”

“I see,” Elizabeth whispered. “Yes, I see.”

“Go home. I’ll send a telegram to Dr. Simon Wyler and get out the code book to send a cable to Alexander. This is one item of news he won’t want spelled in English. Go, dear, please go! Anna needs you.”

ELIZABETH WENT, still shattered, but feeling that she could now cope with this disaster. The brandy had helped, but not as much as Ruby had. Practical, immensely experienced, down to earth. Though Ruby hadn’t seen this coming either; if she had she would have spoken up. That’s a comfort. We trust too much, we think that all the world will pity and protect these poor unfortunates as we do. It is no fault of theirs that they are what they are. But what a world is this, that it holds monsters who care only for their carnal satisfaction, who can think of a female human being as no more than a vessel. My darling child, a mere thirteen years old! My darling child, who won’t even know what has happened to her, nor understand when we try to tell her. We must get her through this—how, I do not know. Do cows and cats have any comprehension of what is happening to them when they conceive? But Anna isn’t a cow or a cat, she’s a damaged thirteen-year-old, so I can’t hope that she will deal with her labor the way cows and cats do. The pregnancy, perhaps. Knowing Anna, she’ll simply think she’s getting fat—or does she even know what getting fat is?

“We will treat it as if it’s natural and nothing to worry about,” Elizabeth said to Jade and Nell when she returned. “If she complains about finding it hard to move around, we’ll tell her that it will pass. She’s had no vomiting, Jade?”

“None, Miss Lizzy. If she had, I might have wondered sooner.”

“Then she’s carrying very easily. We’ll see what Dr. Simon Wyler says, but I doubt she’s pre-eclamptic like me.”

“I will find out who did it,” said Jade grimly.

“Miss Ruby says that’s not possible, Jade, and she’s right. It was some commercial traveler who’s long gone. No local man would interfere with Anna.”

“I will find out.”

“None of us is going to have the time for that. Our job is caring for Anna,” said Elizabeth.

Nell found it hardest to accept Anna’s plight; for all of her conscious life Anna had been there, no sisterly companion, yet in her way something more. A helpless creature harder to train than a pet animal, utterly lovable because all of her that was, was gentle, sweet, smiling. Anna never had moods, and the only thing that upset her was bleeding. Kiss Anna, and she would kiss you back. Laugh, and she would laugh.

Perhaps it was Anna had inspired Nell to concentrate on the brain in her reading; so many mysteries to plumb! But there had been discoveries, and there would be many more. Maybe one day there would be a cure for people like Anna. How wonderful if she, Nell, could be a part of that cure! Which didn’t stop Nell going to her room and weeping desolately. Anna’s loss of innocence was the loss of her own.

DR. SIMON WYLER was rather different from his father; less suave, more abrupt. But clever enough to know instinctively how to deal with Anna. First he did what Elizabeth, Jade and Nell had avoided doing: question her about what had happened.

“Did you meet someone when you ran away, Anna?”

A frown, a look of bewilderment.

“Walking, Anna, in the bush. You like to walk in the bush?”

“Yes!”

“What do you do in the bush?”

“Pick flowers. See kangaroos—jump, jump!”

“Just flowers and kangaroos? See anyone else?”

“Nice man.”

“Does he have a name, the nice man?”

“Nice man.”

“Bob? Bill? Wally?”

“Nice man, nice man.”

“Did you play with the nice man?”

“Best play! Cuddles. Best cuddles.”

“Is the nice man still there, Anna?”

She grimaced, looked unhappy. “Nice man gone. No cuddles.”

“How long?”

But that, Anna couldn’t say. Just that the nice man was gone.

Dr. Wyler then proceeded to persuade Anna to show him how she and the nice man had cuddled; to her mother’s horror she lay on her bed and let Dr. Wyler remove her drawers, spreading her legs apart without his encouragement.

“Pretend I’m the nice man, Anna. He did this—and this—and this, didn’t he?”

The examination was gentle and kept as much as possible to Anna’s definition of cuddles; if Elizabeth had thought that her appalled mortification could grow no worse, she was mistaken as she watched her thirteen-year-old daughter begin to writhe with pleasure and moan.

“All done, Anna,” the obstetrician said. “Sit up and put on your drawers.”

His eyes encountered Jade, and he shivered as if touched by a dead and icy hand. Then Jade rushed to the bed, helped Anna to put on her drawers.

“She’s about five months, Lady Kinross,” Dr. Wyler said as he sipped gratefully at his cup of tea in the conservatory.

“You won’t get rid of it?” Elizabeth asked, face flinty.

“No, I can’t do that,” he said gently. Who could blame the poor woman for asking?

“She—enjoyed it, didn’t she?”

“It would seem so. The fellow must have been an adept at seducing young virgins, and had some intelligence.” He put the cup down and leaned forward, grey eyes compassionate. “Anna is a complete contradiction. Her mind is that of a toddler, but her bodily responses are those of a maturing young woman. He taught her to like what he did, even if perhaps the first time wasn’t all that pleasant for her. Though that may not have been. Anna knows nothing of what women fear, so may not have experienced any pain. Especially if the man was an adept.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth, throat tight. “Are you trying to tell me that, once this business is over, Anna will seek it?”

“I honestly don’t know, Lady Kinross. I wish I did.”

“How do we deal with her labor when it comes?”

“I think I have to be here. Luckily my father is still very capable of practicing, and I don’t think any of my patients will object to his attending them in my stead.”

“And what of the baby? Will it be like Anna?”

“Probably not,” said Simon Wyler with the air of someone who has already considered the question carefully. “If Anna delivers fairly easily, the baby ought to fare well. Everything is quite as it should be at this stage, certainly. Were I a betting man, I’d take a punt on a healthy baby with an intact brain.”

Elizabeth refilled his cup and pressed a petit-four on him. “If indeed Anna should seek—pleasure—in time to come, is there any way to prevent her falling pregnant again?”

“Sterilization, you mean?”

“Do I? It’s not a word I know.”

“To sterilize Anna, Lady Kinross, I would have to perform very major surgery—open her abdomen and remove her ovaries. The risk is extremely high. We do Caesarean sections nowadays if no other alternative is available, and perhaps half the women live. Sterilization would be done well after childbirth, but it isn’t as easy as removing a baby from a womb. The ovaries lie deep. Anna is young and strong, but I would advise against sterilization, madam.”

“The alternative is a kind of imprisonment.”

“Yes, I know. You will have to make absolutely sure that Anna is accompanied on all her excursions. In my view, vigilance will be as effective as sterilization.”

And with that, Elizabeth had to be content. Dr. Wyler was right, she couldn’t subject Anna to such a surgical risk, nor put her behind genuine bars. We must be vigilant, always vigilant, and I will have Dragonfly back no matter what Alexander says about economizing. Oh, Alexander, come home! How can I explain all of this in a coded cable at one shilling per word?

Ruby greeted her with Alexander’s response to the earlier cable when Elizabeth reached the hotel. “He says we’re to handle it. He can’t leave whatever it is he’s doing. Fucking bastard!”