that I don't know anything about?"
"None. Not a one." Victor lied without hesitation or compunction.
Meg laughed at him-not the sort of laugh she'd given him before they were alone. "Do you suppose I hatched out of a honker's egg? You just happened to lie down with this one bitch, and she just happened to get up with child."
"That is what happened." Having begun to lie, Victor had to go on. Except for what had happened with Louise, Meg couldn't prove anything, anyhow. What she suspected… she had a right to suspect. But she couldn't prove it.
"Ha!" It wasn't a laugh-it was a sound she threw in his face.
"Meg…"
She wasn't going to listen to him yet. Maybe eventually- maybe not, too. Certainly not yet. "So tell me," she said, "have you got yourself a nigger son now, or a daughter?" She wouldn't have used that word if Blaise or Stella might have heard it. But she seized any weapon she could get her hands on to hurl at her husband.
"A son," Victor answered dully. "How is it you don't know that?"
"Because I had only one letter from dear Monsieur Freycinet," she snapped. "It was addressed to you, of course, but I opened it because I thought it might be important. And so it was, but not the way I looked for. He had to inform you that sweet Louise was having your baby."
Damn Monsieur Freycinet, Victor thought. The planter had been much too thorough. He'd sent one letter to where he guessed Victor was, and another to the place where Victor was bound to get it sooner or later. And Victor was indeed getting it, though not in the way Marcel Freycinet would have had in mind.
"A son." Meg breathed out hard through her nose.
"Yes, a son. A son who is dear Monsieur Freycinef's property. A son who is a slave, and likely will be all his days," Victor said. "If you think I haven't flayed myself about this, you are much mistaken."
"You fool, you're flaying yourself because you made her belly swell," Meg snarled. "I want to flay you because you bedded her in the first place. The hero of the Atlantean War for Liberty! Huzzah!"
Victor hung his head. "I deserve all your reproaches."
"And more besides," Meg agreed. "Why, Victor? Why?" But before he could answer she held up a hand. "Spare me any more falsehoods. I know why. I know too well-because you are a man, and she was there, and I was not. Heaven help me, though, I did not think you were that kind of man. Which only goes to show how little I knew, eh?"
"What can I say?" Victor asked miserably.
"I know not. What can you say? What would you have done if you could? Not just leave Louise in her present situation, I gather?"
"No," Victor said. "I offered to buy her and set her free here north of the Stour, where slavery is as near dead as makes no difference. I offered a price for… for the boy, as well. Freycinet declined to sell her or the boy."
"God is merciful!" his wife exclaimed. "That would have blown a hole in our accounts, not so? Did you Think I would not notice?"
"No. I thought you would," Victor said.
"And…?" The word hung in the air.
"What difference does it make now? I might have been able to explain it. Or if not, that would have been no worse than this."
"There!" his wife said in something like triumph. "That's the first truth you've told since you came home, unless I'm much mistaken."
She wasn't, and Victor didn't have the nerve to claim she was. "I'm sorry," he muttered under his breath.
"You're sorry you got caught. You're sorry your hussy caught. Are you sorry you went in unto her, as the Good Book says? Not likely!"
"What would you have me do?" Victor asked.
He thought she would say something like Cut it off and throw it in the fire. By the look in her eye, she wasn't far from that But what she did answer was, "I never dreamt in all my born days that I would say such a thing as this, but right now I wish with all my heart you were more like Blaise. He would never mistreat Stella so-never!"
Victor didn't remember Blaise declining to swive Roxane, the slave girl who was so nearly white. The only difference between general and factotum-between one man and another-was that the factotum's companion hadn't conceived.
The general had no intention of betraying the factotum. One man, one friend, did not do that to another. But Meg's words caught him by surprise. Some of what went through his mind must have shown on his face.
Blood drained from Meg's cheeks. "No," she whispered. "He didn't! He couldn't! He wouldn't have!" Victor didn't claim that Blaise did or could or would have. He also didn't leap to his factotum's defense-not that Meg would have believed him if he had. He just stood there. That was bad enough, or worse than bad enough, all by itself. If Cornwallis had been able to blast holes in his defenses so easily, the Atlantean cause would have foundered in short order. Meg shook her head in what had to be horror. "God save me! You truly are all alike!"
"Don't tell Stella," Victor said.
"I have not the heart to do any such cruel thing," Meg said. "The truth will come out, though. Sooner or later, it will." She paused. "Did he get a byblow on his harlot?"
"Not so far as I know," Victor answered. "And, so far as I know, he has no notion that I did."
"I wish I had no notion that you did!" Meg exclaimed. Then she hesitated. "Or do I? Is it not better that the truth has come forth?"
"I know not," Victor said, "but I do know how much I wish Monsieur Freycinet had never told me I have a colored son."
"And, surely, you wish even more that he had never told me you were to have a colored child," Meg said. "The one thing you have not said is that you wish you had never used this Louise for your bedstraw. Am I to gather that the reason you have not said it is because it is not true?"
Victor had no idea how to answer that. What man ever regretted doing that which made him a man? He might-he would!- regret discovery. He might-he would!-regret unexpected offspring. But regret lying down with a pretty woman and getting up afterwards with a smile? No, not likely. And yet…
"I wish I had not hurt you by doing what I did," he said-and he meant it all the way down to his toes.
Not that it helped. "You would do better to wish me made of stone, then," his wife said. "I trusted you, Victor. Fool that I was, I did. Now I see I must have been a fool indeed. If you took this Louise on that journey, then you must have taken a Nell or a Joanna or a Sue or an Anne or a Bess or a Kate on all your others. And then you would come home and say how much you missed me!"
He'd feared he was wasting his breath when he insisted he'd fallen from virtue, fallen from fidelity, with Louise alone. How hideously right he'd been! "I always did miss you," he said, and he meant that, too.
"Not enough!" Meg retorted. "Besides, why would you. What did you have from me you could not get for a few shillings from any tavern wench with a hot cleft?"
That shot, like so many of hers, came too close to the center of the target. Unlike some of the others, it wasn't quite a bull's-eye. "What did I have from you? Yourself. With Louise"-Victor still wouldn't admit to any others, no matter how right about them Meg was-"it was a matter of a moment, forgotten as soon as it was over. With you, I always knew we were in harness together so long as we both should live, and I never wanted it any other way. I love you, Meg."
"Forgotten as soon as it was over? She left you something to remember her by, though, didn't she? And nothing but luck she didn't give you the pox to remember her by, too, and for you to bring home to me," Meg said. "You love me, you say? You love me till you ride off far enough so you can see me no more, and then you go your merry way!"
"That is not so," Victor said, painfully aware how likely it was to seem so to a woman who discovered herself scorned.
But Meg was shooting bigger guns. "What is not so? That you love me whilst I am within sight? For beyond doubt you cease to do so once I sink below the horizon. Then the whores rise!"
"I have been away since the beginning of the war," Victor said.
"So you have. And how would you have liked it had I
entertained gentlemen callers the way that black bitch entertained you?
Do you suppose I have not been lonely of nights?"
He winced. "I should have liked that not one bit, as you must know. But… it is different for a man, as you also must know."
"Much too well!" Meg said. "Which makes me believe God is truly a man, for were He She we should operate under some other, more equitable, dispensation."
"Whatever you would have me do to show my contrition…"
"Ride south and shoot them both, and that brothel keeper Freycinet with them, and sink all the bodies in the swamp?" his wife suggested.
"I doubt I could escape uncaught," Victor said, which was putting it mildly. "And it is not the baby's fault."
"No. It isn't." Meg started to cry then. "Not his fault he lives and cries and makes messes in his drawers, while all of mine lie in the cold ground. Not his fault at all." The tears ran down her cheeks. "Damn you!"
Victor had wondered if she might let him buy Nicholas and bring the colored boy north for some free colored couple in these parts to raise. He didn't bring it up now-the answer seemed much too obvious. Maybe she would change her mind once her temper, like any tempest, at last receded.
On the other hand, maybe she wouldn't.
When they went upstairs to bed, she said, "If you lay so much as a finger on me, I will scream the house down."
"Meg-"
"I will," she insisted. "Better than you deserve, too." She started crying again. "And if I don't yield myself to you, what will you do? Go out and scatter your seed among more strange women." She eyed him on the stairs. "I could win a bill of divorcement against you. Not much plainer proof of adultery than a child, is there?"
"No," he said, the cold wind of fear blowing in his ears. She could win a divorce. And if she did, he would never be able to hold up his head in polite society again. Wherever he went, he would always be the man who… And, behind his back, he would always be the man with the nigger bastard. Conversation would stop whenever he walked into a room, then pick up again on a different note. How could you go on like that? "I… hope you don't." He forced the words out through stiff lips.
"I don't want to," she answered. "Not only for the scandal's sake, either. I want to love you, Victor. I want you to love me. I want to be able to believe you love me."
"Whatever I can do to bring that about, I will." After a moment, Victor added, "It will be harder if I may not touch you."
"One day, maybe. One night, maybe. Not today. Not tonight," Meg said. "As things are right now, I could not stand it."
"All right," Victor said-he could hardly say anything else. They went up the rest of the stairs together and a million miles apart.
Victor stood by the edge of the pond, eyeing the ducks and geese. They swam toward him, gabbling eagerly-they hoped he would throw them grain. And he did, and smiled to see how eagerly they fed. There were more of them than he'd thought there might be. The farm as a whole was in better shape than he'd expected. Meg had done a splendid job.
And he'd repaid her with a bastard boy. Worse-much worse-she knew it, too.
Blaise ambled up alongside of him. The Negro looked less happy with the world than he had when he was riding up to the farmhouse with Victor a few days before. Victor understood that down to the ground. He was none too happy himself.
Blaise eyed a goose as if he wanted to wring its neck. "Women." he said-a one-word sentence as old as men.
"What's wrong?" Victor asked. Maybe someone else's troubles would help take his mind off his own.
"Some kind of way, Stella done found out about that girl I had, that Roxane, when I went down with you to meet de la Fayette," Blaise answered. "My life's been a misery ever since."
"Oh, dear," Victor said. Even if Blaise didn't, he had a good idea about how that might have happened. His wife might have told him she wouldn't say anything to Stella, but____________________
"Had Meg got wind of you and Louise?" Blaise asked. "Is that why you were biting people's heads off while we besieged Croydon?"
"Was I?" Victor said. "I tried not to."
"You did pretty well most of the time," Blaise said, by which he had to mean Victor hadn't done well enough often enough. He went on, "No wonder you didn't care to talk about it, though. A woman who finds out her man's put it where it don't belong…" He shook his head. "She's trouble."
"I found that out," Victor said. The part of the truth his factotum had grasped was the part that wouldn't get in the way between the two of them. It was also the part that Victor didn't much mind getting out. Meg might say what she would, but only the most censorious condemned a man who slept with other women when he was away from home for years at a stretch. A white man who sired a little black bastard on one of them, though, was much easier to scorn.
"Expect Meg was the one who tattled to Stella, then," Blaise said resignedly. "Women are like that, dammit. I suppose I should be grateful she waited till after we got back-Stella wasn't waiting for me with a hatchet, anyhow."
"That's something," Victor agreed.
"How do you go and sweeten up your wife after she finds out about something like this?" Blaise asked. "Back in Africa, I never had to worry about it."
Did he mean he'd never strayed or he'd never got caught? If he wanted to explain further, he would. If he didn't care to, it didn't much matter. The question did. "If you find a way, I hope you'll be kind enough to pass it on to me," Victor answered. "So far, I am still seeking one myself. 'Seek, and ye shall find,' the Bible says, but it tells me nothing of where or when, worse luck."
"I try to make her happy as I can, every way I know how," Blaise said. "But it's harder when she won't let me lie down with her. If she did, maybe I could horn it out of her. Now-" He shook his head and spread his hands, lighter palms uppermost.
"If misery truly loves company, you should know you aren't the only one in the same predicament," Victor told him.
"Damned if I know whether misery loves company or not. It's still misery, isn't it?" Without waiting for an answer, Blaise pulled a metal flask out of his back pocket. "Here's to misery," he said, and swigged. Then he handed Victor the flask. "Takes the edge off your troubles, you might say."
"To misery," Victor echoed. Barrel-tree rum ran fiery down his throat. If you drank enough, the potent stuff would do more than take the edge off your troubles. Of course, it would give you new troubles, and worse ones, in short order, but plenty of people didn't worry about that. Their calculation was that, if they drank enough, they could forget the new troubles, too. If you didn't care that you lay stuporous in a muddy, filth-filled gutter, it wasn't a trouble for you… was it?
"My children are angry at me, too," Blaise went on in sorrowful tones as Victor gave back the flask. "They don't hardly know why, but they are. Long as their mama is, that's good enough for them." He took another nip, a smaller one this time.
Victor didn't answer. Blaise wasn't tactless enough to say he was lucky because he had no children of his own; the Negro knew how Victor and Meg had kept trying and failing to start a family. He didn't know, and with luck would never find out, how Victor had succeeded at last, if not in a way he either expected or wanted.
Something else occurred to Victor, something he hadn't thought of before. He wondered if the rum had knocked it loose.
If tiny Nicholas-would he be styled Nicholas Radcliff? entitled to a family name?-grew to be a man, what would he think of his father? I hope he doesn't hate me, Victor thought. A moment later, he added too much to himself. He didn't see how a slave could help hating his father some if the man who'd begotten him was free himself.
"Sooner or later, things will work out," Blaise said: an assertion that, to Victor's mind, would have been all the better for proof. His factotum went on, "We'll have to watch ourselves from here on out, though. You get caught once, that's bad. You get caught twice…" He slashed the edge of his palm across his throat.
"I fear you have the right of it," Victor said
with a sigh.
A goose waddled up to him, stretched itself up to its full height, and honked imperiously. It was a barnyard bird, of stock brought over from Europe, but the call still reminded him of the deeper ones that came from honkers. Plainly, the enormous flightless birds had some kinship with geese. Why geese lived all over the world, why the rapidly fading honkers dwelt only on this land in the midst of the sea, Victor had no more idea than did the most learned European natural philosopher. But then, honkers were far from God's sole strange creations here.
He fed the goose grain. Before lowering its head to peck up the barley, it sent back a black, beady-eyed stare, as if to say, Well you took long enough. A mallard came over to try to filch some of the treat. The goose honked again, furiously, and flapped its wings. The mallard scuttled away.
"Any rum left in that flask?" Victor said suddenly.
Blaise shook it. It sloshed. Blaise handed it to him. He drank. After he swallowed, he coughed. "You all right?" Blaise asked.
"On account of the rum? Yes," Victor said. "Everything else? Everything else-is pretty rum." He wondered if the Negro knew that turn of phrase.
By the look on Blaise's face-half grin, half grimace-he did, and wished he didn't. But he nodded. "Can't live without women," he said, "and can't live with 'em, neither." To celebrate the pro-pounding of that great and profound truth, he and Victor made sure the flask didn't slosh any more.
A month went by, and then another week. Victor did not lay a hand on Meg in all that time. He did lay a hand on himself, several times. Doctors and preachers unanimously inveighed against the practice. Preachers called it the sin of Onan. Doctors said it sapped the body's vital energies. Victor didn't care. It kept him from wanting to haul off and clout Meg. It also might have kept him from jumping out a top-floor window and hoping he landed on his head.
He and his wife stayed polite to each other where anyone else could see or hear them. So did Blaise and Stella. If Blaise hadn't told him, Victor wouldn't have known anything was wrong between them. He hoped he and Meg showed an equally good facade.
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