“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 brothelkeeper 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 had
n’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 façade.
The two of them had an extra mug of flip apiece with supper before they went upstairs on a hot, muggy summer evening. Meg lit the candle on her nightstand. “I hope you sleep well,” Victor said as he put on his thinnest, coolest nightshirt.
He waited for her to scorch him. These past five weeks, she’d done it more often when they were alone than he could count. She started to say something. Whatever it was, she swallowed it before it got out. After a moment, she brought out something that had to be different: “Victor?”
Only his name; nothing more. No, something more—a tone of voice he hadn’t heard from her in private since he’d come back from Croydon. “What is it?” he asked cautiously.
She looked at the candle flame, not at him. “Would you care to try?” she asked in return, her voice very low.
“Would I care to try what?” For a moment, Victor honestly didn’t know what she was talking about. Then realization smote, and he felt like a fool. “Try that?” He was very glad his own voice didn’t—quite—break in surprise. “Are you sure?”
“As sure as I need to be,” Meg answered, which was less sure than Victor wanted her to be. She went on, “If we are going to braze this back together, we should begin again, not so?”
She made it sound about as romantic as using a prescription from an apothecary. Victor didn’t care how it sounded. “Yes!” he said eagerly, and then, “Pray blow out the candle.”
Meg surprised him by shaking her head. “If you see me, if you cannot help but see me, you will have a harder time imagining I am . . . someone else . . . than you would in the dark.” Her chin came up defiantly.
Victor started to tell her he wouldn’t do anything like that. This time, he was the one who reconsidered. She wouldn’t believe him—and why should she? So all he said was, “However you please.”
They lay down together. Meg didn’t flinch when he began to caress her, but she didn’t move toward him or embrace him, either, the way she would have before she learned about Louise. She’d enjoyed his lovemaking . . . up until then. He’d always enjoyed hers, too. He hadn’t strayed when she was close by. How astonishing was it that that turned out not to be good enough?
He went slowly and carefully, literally feeling his way along. After a while, she did begin to kiss and caress him in return. He didn’t pride himself on warming her up, and not just because they both would have been sweating even if they’d lain apart. She did it with the attitude of someone remembering she was supposed to, not with a kindled woman’s wanton enthusiasm.
Afterwards, Victor asked, “Was it all right?”
“It was.” Meg seemed surprised to admit even so much. “You . . . took considerable pains, and I noticed, and I thank you for it.”
“It seemed the least I could do,” Victor said.
“Yes, it did,” Meg agreed, which made him gnaw at the inside of his lower lip as she continued, “But how was I to know ahead of time whether you would do even so little?”
“I love you,” Victor said.
“I believe it—as long as I’m in sight. When I’m not, you think that what I don’t know won’t hurt me, and so you please yourself,” his wife said. “We’ve been over that ground before.”
“We have indeed,” said Victor, who didn’t want to go over it again.
Meg overrode him: “But what you forget is, sometimes I find out what I didn’t know, and then it does hurt. It hurts all the worse, in fact.” She’d been having her say much more often than usual since learning of Louise—and Nicholas. She talked of going over the same ground. As things were, she held the moral high ground, and used it as adroitly as a professional soldier would have used the literal kind.
“I am sorry for the pain I caused you,” Victor said. “I know not what more I can do to show you that. . . .”
She didn’t answer for a little while. Then, thoughtfully, she said, “After what just passed between us, I also know not what more you might do. You loved me as if you love me, if you take my meaning.”
“I think so,” Victor said, nodding. “Dare I ask if I be forgiven, then?”
“In part, surely—else you should not have touched me so,” Meg said. “Altogether? Not yet. Not for some time, I fear. I shall find myself wondering about you, worrying about you, whenever you go more than an hour’s ride from here. More than an hour’s ride from me, I should say.”
“Then I had better not go any farther than that, eh?” Victor said.
“An excellent notion.” His wife blew out the candle at last.
The messenger wore the green coat of an Atlantean cavalryman. With a flourish suggesting he’d played in an amateur theatrical or two in his time, he handed Victor Radcliff a letter sealed with the Atlantean Assembly’s red-crested eagle. “Congratulations, General!” he said in a loud, ringing voice that also made Victor guess he’d been on the stage.
“Er—thank you,” Victor answered. “But for what?”
Still in those ringing tones, the man said, “Why, for being chosen one of the first two Consuls who will lead the United States of Atlantis now that no one can doubt our freedom from King George’s w
icked rule.”
Ever since departing from Honker’s Mill and returning to the much larger (and more euphonious) New Hastings, the Atlantean Assembly had argued about how the new nation should be run. Victor had followed the often-acrimonious wrangling from what he’d thought was a safe distance.
Taking as their model the Roman Republic, the Assemblymen had decided to let executive authority rest in the hands of two Consuls, each with the power to veto the other’s actions. Roman Consuls served only one year at a time, though; their Atlantean counterparts would have two-year terms. The Assembly had also rechristened itself the Senate, even if hardly anyone used the new name yet. It would select the Consuls. Under the rules it had agreed upon, one man could serve up to three consecutive terms, and a total of five in his lifetime.
“Who shall my colleague be?” Victor asked. The letter was bound to tell him, but the messenger seemed well informed. And, if he didn’t care for the answer he got, he had every intention of declining the Assembly’s invitation (no, the Senate’s, he reminded himself).
“Why, Isaac Fenner, of course,” the messenger said, as if no one else was even imaginable. But Victor had imagined plenty of other possible candidates: anyone from Custis Cawthorne to Michel du Guesclin. Still, he could easily see how Fenner would have got the nod.
And he found himself nodding, too. “Isaac should be a good man to work with,” he said, hoping he would still feel that way two years hence.
He broke the seal. The letter was addressed in the fantastically neat script belonging to the Atlantean Assembly’s secretary—the Senate’s secretary now. That same worthy had indited the contents. In much more formal language, the letter told Victor what he’d already heard from the messenger.
He was still reading through it when Blaise walked over and Meg came out of the house to see what was going on. Victor told them. Blaise shook his hand. Meg hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. She went back inside, returning a moment later with a mug of rum punch, which she handed to the messenger.
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