Elijah left, executing a polite bow. She curtsied him out the door. She would not fall into her chair. She would not stare wistfully as the sketch John had been working on throughout the past week. They'd moved from shading to a basic landscape. She would not look over there and imagine his lean, stable body fixed like a statue contemplating his next stroke. She would not be a woman who got tender hearted over a man that didn't want her. She was rational. She didn’t want this either.
At least, she hadn't.
She waited until full dark fell and the lights in John's cottage came on. He wasn't coming. So she gathered up the dress she wore on her signing day and delivered it over to the neighbors. Lydie was delighted, the mother insisted Fleur stay for some cold tea, and Elijah stood up so that Fleur could take his spot. He motioned her into the chair with a smile and a wink. Fleur returned the friendliness although her mind kept returning to where it should not.
The next morning, John was gone. His quarters stood empty, dark and closed, as if he'd never been there. He hadn't said goodbye. He hadn't said anything. Fleur was confused and hurt. She'd thought there had been something there, a growing friendship, an ever present current that kept drawing them closer. She'd wanted that kiss, had fallen into with enthusiasm. It turned out she was the only one. Her doubts felt like swallowing stones. Each breath reminded her of an aching sore just below the surface, just lingering in her chest.
John was gone, and it didn't look like he would ever be coming back.
It'd been two weeks since he'd last seen Fleur, and never had he known a longer stretch of time. He'd kissed her, and for that he was ashamed. He'd built himself up, promised himself he'd be nothing like Pa, nothing like the planters who dictated people's lives with their every action. He was a damned hypocrite. The minute that girl had seemed to not hate him from the inside out he'd pulled her into his arms and kissed her.
He didn't regret the sensations, those had all been right. He didn't regret hearing her moan her pleasures, and a more sensual sound had never been heard by his ears. He'd wanted to keep going, keep exploring what made her sigh and smile and scream. He wanted to bury himself in her until there was nothing else.
He'd left her cottage in a rage, not at her, but with himself. She couldn't refuse him. He'd burst through the door of his new home, slammed it shut, and turned his frustrations into more pacing.
Two weeks they'd been together, laughing and reading and painting, and in just those few days his self control had wound down to nothing. She'd pervaded his every sense. Time without her dragged, made him listless. Time with her was its own sweet torture, knowing she was there and not being able to judge if she was receptive to him, if, in a world where she had dictated the course of her life from the get go, she'd ever find him appealing.
He wasn't sure, but he was dead set on finding out.
That night he'd packed up his things, left as soon as he was able to hail a hackney, and taken a room in the city, closer to the docks. For the last few days he'd bartered, bid, and boasted his way through the sailing vessels making their way to France. It would cost him everything he had to go through with his plan. He had not a shadow of a doubt it was worth it.
The last thing he did was hire fare back to Pa's plantation to collect the rest of his bequest. If everything went as he expected, however, he'd be using the money neither to buy his own small boarding school in the south, a clandestine way to help spread the word and assemble the able bodies needed for abolition, nor to set up his home. He wouldn't tell Pa his intentions, but he needn't have to. There were some things, some people, worth bending the rules for.
He was let into the house by Henry, who had questions behind his eyes. John wondered if he looked at worked up as he felt. He needed the money. He needed to get back to her. For some reason, it all felt like a race.
Would she think he'd gone forever, left her once it seemed his money was in hand? If so, would she look for other ways, maybe even another person to help secure a future? He couldn't think about that, couldn't worry over what might bes. He couldn't go back to her until he had something concrete, something of real value to give her.
Pa, however, was in no rush to grant his inheritance and insisted the two men sit together over a brandy. Knowing it was the definition of rudeness to demand his sum and be on his way, John soon found himself in Pa’s study reminding himself to drink slow but think fast. Pa’s questioning took a direct line quicker than he expected.
“Do you really want to open a school around here, son? You know who will be enrolled? You’ll become the nursemaid to men who are either too cheap to send their sons to France for their education or too indebted to hire a comprehensive private tutor. Doesn’t sound like good business to me,” Pa began.
“I don’t think of it like that, sir. I won’t be nursemaid since I’ll hire a school master. Also, I don’t think of it as people lacking in funds. I think I’ll be serving the families who want to prepare their children for college here, without sending them overseas. It’ll be a start, a head start if you will, at boarding. Some families don’t feel comfortable having their children so far from home or want to teach them the planting seasons by their own hand. In this model, those will be options,” John answered respectfully, keeping his plans to hire and house other members of the abolitionist movement to himself. He imagined Pa wouldn’t want to know that he’d intended this.
Pa gave him a shrug, “If that’s what’ll please you I’ll call it a respectable living. Will it provide for Fleur, as promised?”
“Yes, I think so. She seems to be a very unwasteful woman, sir,” John stuck as close to the truth as possible.
“An unwasteful woman! Such a creature never existed! You may have traded your good sense in for attachment,” Pa warned.
At John’s casual shrug, a cool façade to the raging anger that filled him at Pa’s easy dismissal of his own daughter, Pa leaned forward a bit.
“You two do suit then?” Pa asked, and John knew he was walking a tightrope. He knew he had to come off as interested but detached, a man fulfilling the conservative expectations just as he’d told Fleur.
“Yes, I think we’ll get along just fine,” John answered with another sip of the liquor.
“I’m glad, son, I am. Just remember that it’s your job to take care of her. In a few years’ time, it’ll also be your job to marry a woman of your own standing, to have children that can be heirs to your boarding school fortune. Those children need to be blue eyed and blonde haired and have not a doubt over the legitimacy of their birth. You may want to set Fleur and her children aside at that time. Some men do. They give the placee the house and an endowment to live off of so they can break ties. You’ll be keeping that in mind?” Pa prodded, and John had never wanted to strike a person as he did in that moment.
“Yes, I’ve thought it all out,” John said, fighting with every breath to keep the hardness out of his voice. He needed to show Pa it didn’t bother him, this disgusting system. He needed the money then, God willing, he’d be leaving all of this behind him.
The money was handed over, a handshake was exchanged, and John was traveling back to his cottage next to Fleur’s. It was officially the last day of the first month of their arrangement. It was the last day the legal and financial ties needed to bind them together.
The hackney rattled and rolled. The driver stopped to relieve himself. What should have been a fairly direct trip felt like a journey across the Alps. John watched the sun start to sink, the urge to set everything right making the minutes drag. There was something, something strong, telling him to get back to her before it was too late. John had never believed in premonitions or intuitions, but he didn’t doubt this.
When her cottage was finally in sight John stepped down from the hackney before it rolled to a complete stop. He spied Fleur’s door open, a man standing in its threshold, and felt a lump rise to his throat. He tipped the driver with an added request. Stay for a moment. John had a suspicion he would have to tu
rn around.
John approached quietly, from the side. Although the two should have spied him and the hack, they seemed too wrapped up in their conversation to notice. At first, the voices were indistinct, their words mere mutterings to John’s ears. Then, their words turned into to arrows, each one hitting it’s mark, the center of John’s chest, with ease.
The young man, a handsome quadroon himself from the look of his bronze skin, leaned toward Fleur.
“Do you have your answer yet? I’ve waited the past week, like you asked, but a man starts to worry,” and though he couldn’t see it John could hear the hopeful grin in the man’s voice.
“I have,” Fleur said as she reached out to take his hand with a small smile on her face, “you can’t know how much of an honor it was to get your proposal, to hear you say that you wanted to make sure I was properly taken care of, that I could have children that were properly taken care of.”
The two were looking at each other so candidly. John could see them together, a flash of them in the future a sudden pain. She’d present him with a beautiful quadroon baby, all wrapped up in soft blankets. He’d teach the child to toddle, to work, all while being surrounded by his loving, accepting family. Their kids would be raised knowing exactly who they were, exactly where they came from, having a support group of aunts and uncles and friends they could relate to. John could offer her none of this. What he’d come to say seemed like ashes when this man was offering her a blazing hearth fire.
John turned around, a sudden emptiness filling him up where just moments before there had been anxious anticipation. He had always known it, even if he’d allowed himself to dream. She was not for him.
He turned, glad at least the hackney hadn’t deserted him. He needed to leave before he was spotted.
It seemed, however, that his luck was shot entirely. Before he reached his escape he heard footsteps approach from behind him, from the direction of Fleur’s house. He stopped, expecting to see her, to see her look of apology for his witnessing her accept another man. He was surprised when it was the other man himself who bore down on him.
“John Goodsome?” the man asked, his face steely.
“Yes?” John asked, feeling as if a challenge were being issued.
“I am Elijah and Fleur’s neighbor on the left. Did you happen to hear me ask her to be my wife, my legitimate wife?” Elijah said, his words daggers.
“I did, which is why I am leaving. I have no issue with you,” John stated, although he wanted to have issue. He wanted to tear down this man who could so easily give Fleur the life he couldn’t, a life better than what he’d come here to offer her.
“Well, I have issue with you. That woman back there, who’s spent the last two weeks pretending not to be pining after you, told me no. No! She said she wants to continue learning to read, maybe start selling her paintings to make ends meet since she thinks you’ll be gone. She never said it, not once, but I know she has been just waiting for you to come back here and love her. You damn well better be back here to love her,” John saw how angry this Elijah was and how brave. It must be a matter of life or death importance to him since threatening a white man was punishable by execution. John couldn’t help but admire his grit.
“I am back here to love her. I’m back here to offer her liberty, real liberty, in France. I want to take her there to propose to her, to ask her to marry me on soil she has every right to say no on. This that we have now is no true marriage, but I will give her one if she’ll have me,” John explained, seeing Fleur had enchanted this man too, probably not even knowing how.
The man, his expression surprised, just nodded.
John made it to the door, knocked, and had to restrain himself muscle by muscle when her slim form answered. She was more beautiful than he’d remembered, her hair pulled back and paint underneath her nails. He wanted to kiss her again, lay his lips on her neck, on the collarbones he could see just below, on the swell of her breast that he noticed when she drew breath in in sharp surprise.
“John?” she asked.
“May I come in?” he asked, though he’d propose in the door if he had to.
She gestured him in, he took two steps, and then he grabbed her hands in his. Even that small contact, the touching of their hands, calmed something in him. She didn’t shake him off. It wasn’t the kissing, the lovemaking he so craved, but it was a start.
“I have spent the last two weeks searching for a way to be nothing but honest with you,” he started.
“And I’ve spent them wondering if the idea of wanting me, kissing me, made you sick,” she met his frankness with her own.
“What? Never! I never meant to fall in love with you but I have. I have. I can’t live like this, in a setup where you’re available property and I’m the consumer. You are a person. You deserve so much more. I can’t offer you what Elijah did, but I can offer you this- passage with me to France,” he blurted, though he wondered if it made any sense to her.
His answer came in the form of her, “Whatever for?”
“Because there I can propose a real future together, there you can tell me to go to hell without fear of reproach. There, should you choose to reject me, you can go on to be whatever you want. I can’t ask you to be mine here, but I can there. Will you come with me?” he did his best to explain.
“Are you…have you abolitionist leanings, John?” she asked.
He’d wondered if he’d put the final nail in his coffin, “Yes. It was to them I was planning to give much of my bequest, for them I was going to use the rest of the money to open a school.”
She bent down, placed her soft lips on his forehead, on his eyelids. She didn’t move to his mouth, as if she now knew that she couldn’t ask that of him, to betray his closely held ideals.
Instead she said, “I will go with you.”
“There’s one more thing you have to know,” he told her, “I’ve spent all my money on decent passage over and a short stay in an inn. If we go there together and marry, we both may have to work hard for our living. It won’t be the well-appointed life I want to give you.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she answered, burying her face against his neck.
Fleur leaned back on her elbows as John, her newlywed husband, placed a hand on her shoe. In slow moves, controlled to the last degree, John took off one and then the other. His hands, warm and shaking, caressed their way up her legs underneath the frock that had served as her wedding dress. She was surprised at the heat of his hands, at the awareness of his touch. Everywhere he lingered felt tingly, and she couldn’t wait until those ministrations moved to her suddenly heavy breasts.
John pulled at her stockings, lifted her dress, until she lay naked before him. He made a noise deep in his throat, the same one he’d made during their first kiss. She recognized it now as hunger, and she felt it as strongly as he.
“John,” she said, reaching for him.
“Give me a moment to look, darling. I’ve waited so long for this,” and his eyes roved her every inch.
She would have thought this perusal a violation, would have thought it would humiliate her. Instead she felt empowered, felt sultrier than ever before. She moved for him, creeping up to her knees on the bed to hold herself an inch away from his chest. With a deep breath her breasts brushed the front of his shirt. He groaned again, and she could feel the rise of his member against her soft stomach.
“John,” she said again, a whisper in his ear.
“Will you call me husband?” he asked, no longer able to keep his hands away from her. He cupped a breast in his hand, and it felt as wonderful as she’d hoped.
“Husband,” she murmured, “will you lay me down and make me your wife in body as well as name?”
And, with soft strokes and hard thrusts, he did. He did until she called his name, panting it in a rhythm that matched their sweat beaded bodies in his ear. A second later he lowered his head to her chest, kissed away the dampness there with a flick of his tongue, and stilled. Her o
wn name had never sounded so good.
After some time of lying together in the quiet, their rented room a haven of bridal bliss, Fleur stirred. John’s arm at her waist tightened for a moment, his protest that she was breaking their idyll.
“I have something to show you,” she told him.
“Something else? I’m not sure I recover so quickly,” John said, although from the press at her leg she knew that was untrue.
“Not something of that nature, rogue. Think of it as a surprise,” she said as she rolled until she could reach under their bed.
“I am no rogue. I waited until I was well and married before sampling you,” he answered.
“I am rather hoping you’ll sample me again after I show you this,” she answered, vixen to his rogue.
“Then show me quickly so we can get back to our better pursuits,” he laughed.
She pulled out a bag, which she tossed his way. John opened it to see a large amount of money, all carefully held together.
“Wife?” he asked, his eyes counting the French currency.
“That painting of St. Louis Cathedral? I brought it with us. I sold it to one of the other patrons of our fair inn, a Chevalier, I believe,” she told him, relieved to divest of her secret.
“Fleur, there’s enough here to buy our own small farm,” he said with amazement.
“Enough for some land, yes, for more paints, and for a small donation to your abolitionist friends, I believe,” she answered.
At this he kissed her deeply, passionately, with all the wanting he’d guarded for so long. She returned it with equal fervor. This time, unlike the last just minutes before, John put her back against the wall. She was shocked for a moment at the contrasting perceptions. In front of her, naked and built like young Greek statue, was John’s burning body. Behind her the wall was cold and pressed against her back and rump.
“Give me your leg, sweetheart,” John instructed, reached down for her left leg.
“I…what now?” Fleur asked, wading through her erotic distraction at John’s body, so close.
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