Free The Touch by Colleen McCullough Page A

expecting a query about the piano lessons.
    “It’s two and a half months since we married, but you’ve had no monthly courses. Are you with child, my dear?”
    Her hands clutched at him, she gasped. “Oh! Oh! Yes, I am with child, Alexander, but I haven’t known how to tell you.”
    He kissed her gently. “Elizabeth, I love you.”
    Had the interlude continued with Elizabeth cuddled on his lap and tenderness flowing in him—had he only confined what he said to the delight of a coming baby and the sweet fact that this girl, still half a child herself, was ripe for closer intimacies—who knows what might have happened to Elizabeth and Alexander?
    But suddenly he jerked her to her feet and stood before her with grim face and angry eyes that she took as evidence that she had in some way displeased him. Elizabeth began to shiver, to shrink away from his hands, which were squeezing hers convulsively.
    “Since you are to bear my child, it’s time that I told you about myself,” he said in a hard voice. “I am not a Drummond—no, be still, be quiet! Let me talk! I am not your first cousin, Elizabeth, just a distant cousin on the Murray side. My mother was a Murray, but I have no idea who my father was. Duncan Drummond knew my mother had been seeing some other man for the simplest of reasons—she had refused to sleep in his bed for over a year, yet grew heavy with a child he knew he hadn’t generated. When he taxed her, she wouldn’t say who the man was—only that she had fallen in love and couldn’t bring herself to be intimate with Duncan, whom she had never loved. She died giving birth to me, and carried her secret to her grave. Duncan was too proud to say that I was not his son.”
    She listened torn between relief that he wasn’t angry at her and horror at the story he told, but most of her was wondering why he had destroyed her lovely moment of feeling enfolded and enfolding. Someone older, more mature, might have asked why this news couldn’t have waited for another day, but all Elizabeth knew was that the devil in him was stronger than the lover. Her baby was less important than his secret illegitimacy.
    But she had to say something. “Oh, Alexander! The poor woman! Where was the man, if he let her die like that?”
    “I don’t know, though I’ve asked that question of myself many times,” he said, voice harder still. “All I can think is that he cared more for his own skin than for my mother or me.”
    “Perhaps he was dead,” she said, trying to help.
    “I don’t think so. Anyway,” he went on, “I spent my childhood suffering at the hands of a man I thought my father, wondering why I could never please him. From somewhere I had a mulish streak that wouldn’t let me cower or beg, no matter how hard or how often Duncan beat me, or what foul thing he put me to do. I simply hated him. Hated him!”
    And that hate still rules you, Alexander Kinross, she thought. “How did you find out?” she asked, feeling her heart slow a little from its frantic tattoo.
    “When Murray arrived to take over the kirk, Duncan found a soul mate. They huddled together from Murray’s first day, and the story of my parentage must have been told almost at once. Well, I was used to half living at the manse, studying with Dr. MacGregor—Duncan wouldn’t go against his minister—and was naïve enough to assume that Murray would continue. But Murray banished me, said he’d make sure I never went up to university. I saw red, and hit him. Broken jaw and all, he managed to spit out that I was a bastard, that my mother was a common whore, and that he would see me in hell for what I and my mother had done to Duncan.”
    “A terrible story,” she said. “So you ran away, I was told.”
    “That very night.”
    “Was your sister kind to you?”
    “Winifred? In her way, but she was five years older than I, and married by the time the truth came out. I doubt she knows to this day.” He released her hands. “But you