Freedom to Love

by Susanna Fraser

  “You really expect me to believe that this morning didn’t change your opinion of me?”

  She couldn’t admit that she pitied him. No man craved pity—no worthy man, at any rate. Her father had, sometimes, and it had made her think the less of him the past few years, though it hadn’t seemed to bother her mother. “It didn’t change my opinion of your intelligence,” she said carefully, “because I’ve seen too much evidence of that with my own eyes. I’ve never seen anything like the way you thought on your feet after—after you shot Bertrand. You’re observant and quick-thinking. You’re good with people. You understand them, you know how to befriend them. You’re clever with horses, too.”

  “My brother Charles was one of the best students of his year at Oxford,” he said. His face was hidden in shadow, so she could not read his expression. “My younger brother Edward just finished his studies there. He’s not quite as serious, but he still found time between larks and pranks to impress the dons with his Greek and Latin. My sister Felicity knows Italian and German as well as English and French, and she’s always busy organizing amateur theatricals.”

  “But you speak French like a native!”

  “Only because I learned it as a native would, at my mother’s knee as a little boy. I’ve never been able to learn more than a few words of any other language. I didn’t get much beyond amo, amas, amat in Latin, and I never learned enough Spanish or Portuguese to talk with any of the locals on the Peninsula. Granted, many officers didn’t, but they were the ones who didn’t try. Well, I didn’t try, either. But only because I knew I couldn’t learn.”

  “But you can read some,” she said, trying to comprehend his problem. It was as if his ability to learn languages had frozen when he was a little boy, but he had the full and fluent vocabulary of an adult, and a well-informed, sophisticated one, in both of his native tongues.

  “Yes. I don’t have much trouble with a few words at a time. Words and letters almost scramble themselves before my eyes, but with something like the title of a book or the name of a ship, I can usually tell what it should say. But the more there is, the harder it is for me to puzzle it out. I can manage almost anything if I have enough time, and no one is watching. When I got letters from home, I’d always take them into my tent where I could spend as much time as I needed. And since my family knows, they make their letters short and write larger and more neatly than they would to anyone else.”

  “Has it always been that way?”

  “Since our tutor first begin to teach me. It puzzled everyone, since until then they had thought I was almost as clever as Charles. When I explained about the words and letters, they had an eminent oculist examine me, but there’s nothing wrong with my vision. In the end, they just concluded I wasn’t that intelligent. I was tutored at home until I was old enough for a commission in the army, because sending me to Eton and then on to Oxford would’ve...exposed me.”

  “I still wouldn’t say you aren’t clever,” she insisted. “It sounds to me like...like a person who’s tone-deaf, or color-blind. So you have one part of your mind that doesn’t work as it should. That hardly makes you a fool.”

  “But it’s the most important part of my mind.”

  “The most important part of your mind! Is it more important than hearing, or sight, or memory?”

  “You don’t understand. Everyone in my family is so good with books and languages and arithmetic. Everyone but me. I suppose if I’d been born to people who weren’t so intelligent, it wouldn’t have mattered so much, or if I’d been born among some savage tribe, I never would’ve known the difference. But as it was, every day when I was a boy I knew what a failure I was compared to my brothers and Felicity.”

  “Did they make you feel a failure? Did they tease you?” That would go a long way toward explaining why he dwelled so much upon it.

  “Charles and Felicity never did. Edward did, a little. He’s only two years younger than I am, and he was proud to get so far ahead of me so quickly once he began his lessons. But when Charles caught him, he thrashed him, and he stopped.”

  Thérèse hadn’t had personal experience of a sibling until just a few months ago when she’d met Jeannette, but she’d heard tales of their quarrels from her mother and from friends like Océane, who had four sisters. But she could still imagine what hell it must have been to be young Henry Farlow, teased at the age of seven or eight for being eclipsed by his own younger brother.

  “What about your parents?” she asked. She hoped they hadn’t made him feel he was a disappointment. But perhaps they hadn’t been able to help themselves, if they’d been intelligent, bookish people who’d taken for granted that all their offspring would be like them. How would her mother have managed if she, Thérèse, had been born with no eye for color and cut or with Jeannette’s lack of patience for sitting still and sewing a straight seam?

  He was silent for a moment. “They loved me,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”

  If he was so sure, why had he hesitated to say it?

  “But I wasn’t what they’d hoped for,” he continued after another pause. “There were all sorts of conversations—not in front of me, but one can’t help become aware of what’s being said, in a house with gossiping servants, and sometimes a gossiping brother and sister. What had gone wrong, could either of them remember such a case in either of their families before, and so on. One of my mother’s younger brothers had been slow to read, but he died of a fever as a child, so there was no way of knowing if his case was like mine. And then, as it became clear I wasn’t going to outgrow it, the talk became what to do with me. Ordinarily Farlow second sons go into the church. Our parish is a rich one, as northern parishes go, so it’s a good living, and it keeps him close to the family. But there was no question of that for me. Can you imagine me trying to read a sermon?”

  She couldn’t, but she could imagine him as a very good priest in every other way—especially since Protestants didn’t expect their clergy to be celibate. But she doubted he’d be willing to hear her out. He seemed set in his opinion of his own inferiority. “So they decided on the army, then?” she prompted.

  “Yes. It’s a respectable younger son’s profession, so none of our friends and relations would think anything odd. And I was good at riding, shooting, fencing and that sort of thing, so they reckoned I could do the work of an officer.”

  She could hear so much that he wasn’t saying. No matter how much they’d loved him, they’d been ashamed of him, too, to be so desperate to hide his struggles from the world. And how could it have felt, in a family where a second son was expected to become a clergyman, stay close to the family home and preach sermons, to be obliged to go into the army, travel abroad and let other nations’ soldiers shoot at him? It seemed a bad bargain. But however he had come by his officer’s commission, he seemed proud and happy in it. “And you could, obviously.”

  He laughed with mild derision. “There’s more to it than riding around waving a sword and pointing your men at the enemy.”

  “I never imagined otherwise,” she hastened to assure him.

  “The most junior officers of a company, you see, have a great deal of reading, writing and arithmetic in their charge. I’d hardly arrived in the regiment before I was given charge of a great stack of books wherein I was expected to log each soldier’s pay, keep lists of the sick, injured, away without leave and dead, and a great many other things of that nature. I was more terrified of those log books than an entire corps of French infantry.”

  “How did you manage?” Clearly he had or he wouldn’t still be here, and still so much in the habit of keeping his struggles a secret that he’d hidden them from her.

  “I found a soldier who could read and write, swore him to secrecy and hired him. You’ve heard me speak of Elijah Cameron.”

  “He’s the son of the runaway slaves, isn’t he?”

  “Ye
s. He’s a clever man. His father was a clerk who taught him to read and write, and our colonel was something of a patron to the whole family, so he was aware of Elijah’s abilities. He—the colonel, that is—is a great abolitionist, and every so often he would argue with other officers over the abilities of the Negro, whether black men had the mental capacity to function as free men outside of Africa.”

  Thérèse sighed.

  “I never had any such doubts, I assure you. The Farlows have always been abolitionists.”

  “You don’t have to tell me not everyone agrees.”

  “I suppose not. Well, whenever the colonel got into such a debate, he would summon Elijah to demonstrate his abilities and education, and it so happened that I witnessed such a display my very first week in the regiment. He did mental arithmetic, he recited poetry...it quite silenced our doubting guest, since Elijah was so much above the common way, for a common soldier. So I took him aside the next day, swore him to secrecy and asked if he’d help me if I paid him suitably. And he did.”

  “But he wasn’t with you here, you said.”

  “No. But by the time he left, I wasn’t so junior, and I’d passed the logs down to the next callow lieutenant.”

  “So the army did work well for you, then.”

  “Very much so, in the end.” He sighed. “But now they’ll think I’m a deserter when I reappear.”

  Thérèse cursed inwardly. She shouldn’t have reminded him of that. “That handbill also said that you’re a murderer, and possessed of a deceptively mild and handsome countenance. I wouldn’t think myself a deserter just because a man who wants to see me hang for murder called me one.”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Yes, it is. You weren’t worried about it before.”

  “I didn’t see any reason to trouble you with my fears. And part of me simply didn’t want to admit the possibility. Henry Farlow, a deserter? Impossible! If anything, I had a reputation for being reckless in battle.”

  Thérèse could well believe it. “There. You see. Anyone who knows you will think it absurd.”

  “But what if they don’t? It’s happened before, after all. Soldiers who were always brave before sometimes lose their nerve and run away.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Didn’t I? I fled the battlefield.”

  “After the fighting was over. You were dazed and injured. You got lost, and then you were too hurt to go back. That isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “It would be one thing if I’d been able to return quickly.” He stirred restlessly. “But here I am, two weeks later, getting farther from my army at every step.”

  “That’s my fault.” If only he hadn’t gotten involved in their troubles, he surely would be back with his army now.

  “Nonsense. You and your sister saved my life.”

  “And you more than paid us back by rescuing Jeannette and everything you’ve done for us since. Surely your army won’t believe you’re a deserter when they know the whole.”

  “I hope not, but I’m not sure I’d believe my story, if I heard it from anyone else’s lips.”

  “We’ll speak for you. I don’t want you to suffer for helping us. Any more than you already have.”

  “Helping you is worth it.”

  His voice had gone rough and husky. Just how great of a risk was he running for their sake—beyond the ones she already knew about? “What’s the penalty for desertion?”

  “Death,” he said baldly.

  Dear God. “No!” she cried.

  “What else would it be? You can’t have men fleeing in the middle of battle.”

  “Do you really kill every man who runs away?”

  “No. Not necessarily, unless a man deserts to the enemy. But it would be a just penalty for such a man as me—an officer and seasoned in battle. If I truly thought I was a deserter, I wouldn’t wait for the court-martial. I’d shoot myself and have done.”

  “No. No. You must not. Where would Jeannette and I be if you killed yourself?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to leave you alone. I’ll see you safe. But—good God. What if they take me for one? What will I do?”

  Their two beds were so close together in the little room that she could touch him if she chose, and now she did, reaching out a hand to rest atop his, clasped on his knees. He looked at her in startlement. In the firelight she couldn’t make out the color of his eyes, but she could see their lightness, the pale irises nearly swallowed by the dark pupils. He took her hand between his and rubbed it.

  “You say yourself they don’t always carry out the full penalty.”

  He dropped her hand. “Do you think I fear death?”

  His voice had risen in anger, and she shushed him with a warning hand to her lips. “Why wouldn’t you?” she said. “I do. All the masses and prayers in the world aren’t enough to make me sure there’s life beyond the grave and that I’ll be judged worthy of heaven if there is. And I’m afraid of the dying itself. I just watched both my parents die. It was so very slow. I don’t want to die by inches like that.”

  “Well, that’s one benefit to execution. At least it’s quick.”

  Swept up in a fury she didn’t quite understand, she kicked off the covers, rolled to her feet and in almost the same motion pounced onto his bed, imprisoning his hands between hers. “Stop it,” she said. “Stop talking like this.”

  His breath quickened, his lips parted and he stared at her in utter silence. Her anger and exasperation mingled with something else, something breathless and hungry. His nearness heated her blood.

  “How,” she demanded, “can you go straight from talking of your own death as if you welcome it to looking at me like that?”

  He drew her hand to his mouth and kissed it—a light touch, his breath warm and soft against her knuckles. Thérèse gasped.

  “Because you’re beautiful,” he said. “And you did tell me to stop talking.”

  “I said to stop talking like that.”

  He unfolded her clenched fist, then kissed her palm and drew her first finger into his mouth, circling it with his tongue and biting it, ever so lightly.

  He was absurd and maddening. She didn’t understand him, and even if she had, he wasn’t the man for her. But none of that stopped her from rising up on her knees and leaning closer and closer to him until his hands slid around her waist and pulled her atop him, the patchwork quilt separating them but doing nothing to conceal the hard evidence of his desire.

  The last time they’d kissed had been dreamy, no more than half-awake until the very end when she’d realized what they were doing and put a stop to it. Even so, Thérèse had been turning it over in her mind ever since, reliving every moment. This was so much more, a shattering collision of lips and tongues, arms and legs twisting and twining together, the solid living feeling of his body beneath hers.

  He broke the kiss far too soon but didn’t let go, one hand at her waist, the other smoothing her hair. “What’s this?” he asked.

  “A kiss—isn’t it?”

  “A kiss indeed.” He smiled—his twisted half smile, not the wide, happy grin that looked so handsome but appeared far too rarely. “Is this all an attempt to lift my spirits?” He twitched his hips, as if to remind her it had certainly lifted something.

  She blinked at him. “Is it working?”

  “Only if it’s what you want. If this is nothing but pity...”

  “I’m a terrible actress. You know that.”

  Now his smile spread wider, and he laughed a laugh that made her want to melt. “That you are.”

  He drew her down over him and kissed her again, his hands busy at her hairpins. Some part of her dreaded the morning, when she’d be obliged to crawl over the floor to find them again—but no, she’d make him do that. She chuckle
d a little, against his mouth.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’ll retrieve all those pins in the morning.”

  “Gladly.” It came out half a growl. He finished freeing her hair and combed it out with his fingers until it fell past her shoulders and down over his chest. “Even more beautiful than I imagined.”

  So he’d been imagining, too. “Oh, God.” She felt lost, swept up in a river of sensation.

  He caught her hand. “Thérèse.”

  “What is it?”

  “Last time we shared a bed, you pushed me away and slapped me for my pains. And I deserved it. But—that wasn’t so long ago. What’s changed? Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your own bed?”

  This was different. She was choosing this. She was fully awake and alive to it, and stopping now would break her heart. “I should want to stop,” she admitted. “My mind says so. But my body is very foolish at the moment.”

  “Bodies are.” He ran his hand down her side, brushing over her breast and waist to settle at her hip. “I’m prepared to be a fool, as long as you’re sure you won’t turn wise and regretful and hate me in the morning—or in half an hour.”

  “I should go back to the other bed,” she said without budging. “I did promise my mother that I would never settle for anything less than marriage to a man of my own kind.”

  “Oh.” He looked as disappointed as she felt.

  “But, Captain—”

  “Please call me Henry,” he interrupted. “Anything else seems perfectly absurd, here.”

  “Henry,” she corrected. She liked the way his name felt on her tongue. “I know I should stop. But—I don’t know if I can. You—you set me afire.”

  He closed his eyes and dragged in a shuddering breath. Then he looked her straight in the eye, hungry and serious all at once. “What if I told you I can...release that fire, but leave you still a virgin for the day when you find that worthy man?”

  She let out the breath she’d been holding. “You can do that? Oh, God. Please. But—what’s in it for you?”