Freedom to Love

by Susanna Fraser

  Gipson’s eyebrows climbed. “Indeed.”

  “And all three of them will be in a world of trouble if they aren’t away from here fast,” Cutler added.

  “Then we won’t waste time chatting,” Gipson said. With that, he took command and saw them kitted out with food and water, provided Henry with an ancient pistol, powder and shot and instructed Thérèse and Jeannette to exchange their thin dresses for plainer, heavier ones belonging to his wife, a slender, quiet woman Henry took to be a full-blooded Indian. When Henry tried to express regret that he couldn’t pay for any of it, Gipson fixed him with an icy glare. “I don’t do this for pay, son. If you make it safe to the north, do what you can to free others, and pay your debts accordingly.”

  In less than an hour they were ready to ride out again. Henry shook Cutler’s hand. “I can never thank you enough for all you’ve done,” he said.

  “You’re a friend,” Cutler replied. “As for the rest—I hold the same views on paying debts as Mark, here. And I pray God bless you on your journey.”

  “And you in your life.”

  Cutler bid quick farewells to Thérèse and Jeannette, too. He said something to Jeannette that made her laugh as he boosted her onto her horse, and he inclined his head to Thérèse with surprising courtliness. “As for you, Mrs. Farlow, I pray that every day of your marriage will be better than your wedding day.”

  She blinked, then laughed. “I daresay that wish has a better chance of coming true for me than for most brides.”

  He boosted her up behind Henry and waved as they rode away with Gipson. Henry waved back just before they rounded the first bend in the road. He’d never expected to call a Tennessee frontiersman who’d fought opposite him below New Orleans a friend and brother, but he would miss Ben Cutler.

  Chapter Fifteen

  They rode until late afternoon. Mark Gipson set a relentless pace. He asked them few questions and had little to say, which suited Henry. He’d never experienced such joy nor such misery in the same day—no, in the same hour—before, and he wasn’t ready to speak of it yet, especially not to a stranger.

  They halted at last at an isolated, tumbledown cabin in the woods. “You’ll stay here for the night,” Gipson said. “Don’t build a fire. You’ll be warm enough without it if you stay close together. We haven’t had trouble with bears or panthers here, nor with slave catchers neither, but you can take it in turns to watch with the pistol.”

  He followed with instructions for the next leg of the journey and how to identify, and identify themselves to, the guide who would show them where to go from there. With that, he brushed off their gratitude and left them alone.

  They fell into the routine of travel, seeing that the horses were cared for and securely picketed behind the cabin before cautiously making their way inside. The interior was in better condition than the exterior. Henry suspected some of its dilapidated quality was for show to keep anyone outside the abolitionist chain from investigating too closely. Though spare and unfurnished, it was clean and dry despite the day’s deluge, and a pile of blankets lay neatly folded in one corner. Thérèse opened a shuttered window to let in a thin beam of sunset light.

  They sat on the floor and shared out their provisions—cornbread and cold bacon. “If we make it to safety,” Henry said, “I’m never eating cornbread again.”

  “So, are the two of you married or not?” Jeannette asked.

  “Reverend Ford didn’t pronounce us man and wife,” Thérèse said, “so I suppose we aren’t.”

  “Still,” Henry said, “I meant all the vows I did say. And when I look at you, I see my wife.”

  Thérèse flushed, ducked her head and looked up at him out of shining eyes, just as joyous as they’d been before Wilson’s dreadful interruption.

  “And there’s one thing I can add.” He reached into a small pouch at his belt and pulled out a plain silver ring—a gift from the senior Cutlers. “If you’ll give me your hand?”

  She blinked and extended her left hand.

  He took it, lifted it to his lips and slid the ring onto the proper finger. Even though he’d never been good at committing verses to memory, he’d been to enough weddings to know what came next. “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  “Henry...”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you’re my wife,” he said. “If you’d like, in Canada we can go to a vicar and finish the ceremony. But as long as we live, I’m yours.”

  Jeannette sighed, in obvious youthful exasperation rather than any romantic sensibility. It broke the moment, and Henry volunteered to take first watch while the others got some sleep.

  * * *

  For the next several weeks, as they crept northward along with the advancing spring, Thérèse concentrated on surviving the next minute, the next hour, the next day. At first she was afraid as she’d been the day Bertrand was killed or that horrible morning in Natchez when they’d discovered that hateful handbill. But eventually she found herself beyond fear. They had made it this far. If their escape was to fall short, it was beyond her control.

  Every day or two, they found themselves under the protection of a new guide who led them, or at least pointed them, along the path and showed them safe places to rest. In more densely populated areas, they traveled by night and hid by day. They ate cornbread until Thérèse was as sick of it as Henry was, though it was preferable to the hardtack they subsisted upon for several days in Kentucky.

  They slept in barns and cellars and under the open stars. Their guides were men and women, black and white alike, and they asked few questions, though there were occasional raised eyebrows over the obviously white Henry, along with an apparently white woman like Thérèse, walking this path with Jeannette. And walk they did, starting on the third day, as they were forced to abandon the horses as too conspicuous and difficult to keep fed.

  Through it all, Thérèse simply did her best to keep up with Jeannette, who hadn’t complained once—which was sufficiently out of character that Thérèse didn’t dare speak of fatigue or whimper over a blistered heel herself—and Henry, whose years as a soldier had evidently made him all but indefatigable. She thought she must be slowing them down, but Henry praised her as tireless and brave.

  “But I feel exhausted and terrified,” she admitted one day after Jeannette had already fallen asleep as they spent the day huddled in a cellar.

  “But you don’t let that stop you. That’s what courage means.”

  He kissed her. Such was the extent of their intimacy. Even through her weariness, she wanted more—she wanted him—but she couldn’t imagine a time where such luxuries as privacy and warm soft beds existed. The Cutlers’ cabin seemed like another life, another world, and Canada still seemed as far away as the moon. “How far do we walk every day?” she asked him.

  “It depends. Twenty miles a good day, perhaps? At least we’re traveling almost due north. We should be in Canada by late May, I think. And then...we’ll see where we stand. Where I stand.”

  “They can’t think you’re a deserter. If you were...why would you bother going back? It would be the simplest thing in the world to melt into the frontier and disappear.”

  “I couldn’t do that. I promised to see you and Jeannette to safety. Besides, you’re right. That would make me a deserter, and I’m not. I only hope they’ll believe me.”

  “We’ll vouch for you. It will be all right,” Thérèse said, and prayed that it was true.

  * * *

  The weeks wore by. Thérèse kept track of time by asking each of their guides for the date. They passed through Kentucky and crossed into Ohio, where slavery was illegal. All of them had naively thought entering a free state would lessen their need for secrecy, but their gui
des quickly disabused them of that notion. For the most part the good citizens of the state didn’t want free black neighbors, nor to be overrun by runaway slaves, and there were plenty of men who’d be happy to turn Jeannette—and Thérèse, if they guessed at her ancestry—over to a slave catcher. So they continued to walk through the nights and sleep by day in an assortment of hiding places until they were almost to the border with Michigan Territory and, Henry thought, no more than a week from their long-sought Canadian refuge.

  On a warm and sunny morning, their latest guide, a free black man who’d introduced himself as George, led them to a large farmhouse set well away from the narrow country road. “You’ll be safe here,” he promised them. “Safe, and better fed than you’ve been in many a long day, I’ll warrant.”

  His prediction proved accurate, as the mistress of the farm welcomed them to her home like long-lost children. Her husband and sons were already working in the fields, but she plied them with a breakfast feast of pancakes, sausages, fried eggs and strawberries and managed by the end of the meal to tease out the fact that Henry and Thérèse were newlyweds, though they kept their history beyond that deliberately vague. Henry had even resumed his French accent now that they were closer to the border. There had been battles in the region during the war, and he didn’t wish to be seen as an enemy. Their hostess pronounced herself very interested in France and asked a great many questions about it, which he answered cheerfully.

  “If you mean to go home, I’m sure you’ll be able to get there from Canada, now that England and France are at peace,” she said as she cleared away their plates. “It’s a glad thing, to have the whole world at peace.”

  “Amen,” Thérèse said.

  “It’s good for this work, too,” the farmwife said with a significant nod. “It was so much harder to get runaways across the border with a war on.”

  “Thank you for all you do,” Thérèse said. “And for this breakfast. I’d almost forgotten food could taste so good.”

  Henry and Jeannette added their own grateful comments, which their hostess waved off. “Nonsense. It gives me pleasure to feed hungry people, and anyone who’s walked all the way from the South has worked up a good appetite by this point. I reckon you’ll be glad to sleep in real beds, too.”

  With that she whisked them upstairs, escorting Jeannette to a small chamber with a low, narrow bed and Thérèse and Henry to a slightly larger one across the hall. She left them alone, bidding them a good day’s sleep and promising a rich supper in the evening before sending them on their way.

  Just like that, Thérèse found herself alone with her husband for the first time since their ill-fated wedding. It was so abrupt she hardly knew what to do next. “Well,” she said lamely, “here we are.” She drew back the quilt covering the bed and looked an invitation at Henry.

  She expected him to pounce upon her with a kiss, but instead he stood at the corner of the bed, resting his hand on the bedpost and studying it as if it was the most fascinating object he’d ever beheld. “It isn’t too late, you know,” he said in a low voice.

  “What do you mean?” Surely he wasn’t going to abandon her, abandon their marriage, now.

  “We’ll be in Canada soon, and there should be a regiment or two, of militia at least, near where we cross. If after I explain myself, they say, ‘Of course we understand. Welcome back,’ then we’ll know all is well. We can finish our wedding ceremony in the local church, so there’ll be no doubt about—about anything.”

  “There’s no doubt now.” She edged closer and covered his hand with hers.

  He met her eyes. “Let me say this. But if I’m disgraced or worse—if we wait, you can still call yourself a single woman, since our wedding wasn’t finished, and you’ll still be a virgin. My disgrace won’t touch you. You can go on with your life.”

  “Henry.” She brandished her left finger, with his simple silver ring, in his face. “Our wedding was finished, at least in my heart, and I thought it was in yours.”

  He caught her hand in a fierce grip. “It was. It is.”

  “You promised me for better or for worse.”

  “I did.”

  “And I seem to recall I was about to promise you the same thing when our wedding was so rudely interrupted.”

  His lips quirked up in a brief smile.

  “So I promise it now.” She didn’t remember all the words, but she knew the ones that counted. “I take you to be my husband, for better or for worse, till death do us part.” She kissed him hard. “It’s done. I’m yours, you’re mine and I have no regrets. Now, are you coming to bed with me, or not?”

  He studied her for such a long moment she expected him to push her away or make another noble-sounding argument. But instead he tipped her chin up with his fingertips and kissed her deliberately, reverently.

  He kept kissing her as he drew her into a tight embrace and began unfastening the laces and hooks at the back of her dress with deft fingers. She joined in, pulling his heavy buckskin shirt over his head and reaching under his lighter linen shirt to feel the flat planes of his torso, the spring of hair on his chest. He’d grown thinner since they’d left Tennessee, but he still felt strong and solid.

  She knew she’d lost weight, too, from the way her dress hung on her body, and she’d always been lean and flat-chested. But when they were both naked and stretched out together on the bed, she knew Henry found nothing lacking. The look in his eyes, the quickening of his breath assured her of that.

  It felt familiar and entirely new at the same time to come together with nothing to hold back, with the full commitment of husband and wife. Some of their past romps had almost been play—of a particularly mature and intimate kind, but play nonetheless. Thérèse was sure that hadn’t changed entirely, that someday they’d be playful again, but this morning held a seriousness along with the intense and familiar pleasure of Henry’s skin against hers, of his cleverness with his mouth and hands and all the ways she’d learned to make him sigh and gasp in his turn.

  As much as their spoken vows and the ring on her finger, this was their marriage ceremony, and when he lay between her legs, his manhood poised to enter her, Thérèse couldn’t have been more ready. She arched up to meet him with a gasp as he penetrated her.

  He pressed his forehead to hers. “All right?”

  She nodded. It hurt, a little, with a stinging, stretching kind of pain, but it felt good and right even through that, and she tightened her grip on his shoulders and wound her legs about his. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, please.”

  He began to thrust, and Thérèse met his rhythm as their pleasure built together. When it was over and they lay breathless in each other’s arms, she smoothed his curly hair—it had grown too long for fashion, though it looked good to her eyes. “No more doubts and questions,” she said. “Whatever comes, we’ll meet it together.”

  He shifted until they lay curled together, spoon-fashion. “From this day forward, I swear it.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  At the farm that welcomed them after they crossed into Canada, Henry introduced himself as a British soldier, wounded and then separated from his unit by mischance. He’d been lost, but had found his way back with the help of his companions, and could their hosts tell him where to find the nearest regiment?

  The farmer and his wife blinked in bafflement—and why shouldn’t they, with the war over for months?—but they told him there was a garrison in Windsor and pointed them along a road that would take them there.

  The redcoat sentries who met them in the town were familiar, not just for their general look of home. Henry recognized the buff facings and insignia of the 27th the instant he saw them. He’d forgotten that they were one of the regiments posted to Canada after Napoleon’s abdication. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad for his chances, but on the whole he would’ve preferred expl
aining himself to strangers.

  “Don’t worry, there’s no question of sending you back,” the younger of the sentries, who still had the soft face of a lad in his teens, told Jeannette. “We get a few runaway slaves every year, though most of them aren’t as young as you, unless they’re traveling with their families.”

  “I am traveling with my family,” Jeannette said.

  “I’m her half sister,” Thérèse said when the young soldier frowned bewilderment at them. “I...needed to leave home, and I’d promised our father to see that she would be freed, so we came together.”

  “Oh,” he replied, not looking especially enlightened. “And what of you, sir? How did an Englishman come here?”

  This sentry wasn’t the one who could hear his confession. “That...is a long story.”

  “And none of it is my concern,” the soldier said airily. “Captain Hart will be glad to hear you tell it, and to help you all see where to go next. He’s a good ‘un.”

  Henry forced himself not to exclaim, nor even hiss an indrawn breath. He knew Arthur Hart well. Though the 27th and the 43rd had never been part of the same division, he and Hart had struck up an acquaintance based on their shared background as men of the Lakes, and they’d dined together on several occasions.

  “What is it?” Thérèse murmured in French.

  “I know him,” he replied in the same language.

  “Oh.” Her eyes went round with worry.

  The sentry led them to a low building built all of logs. “Here we are,” he said.

  Just then a tall, dark-haired man in a captain’s uniform stepped through the doorway, looked over the newcomers, then stared at Henry, openmouthed. “Good God,” he said. “Can that really be Henry Farlow?”

  Henry smiled, though his face felt wobbly and weak. “Arthur Hart,” he said. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

  “Well, I’m dashed glad to see you now, but what are you doing here? Wasn’t the 43rd at New Orleans? I thought they’d be home in England by now.”