Buoyed by this thought, Marc was caught off guard when he reached for his horse’s reins and Stebbins said heartily, “Where’n hell do ya think you’re goin’? Don’t ya wanta stay fer supper and meet the missus?”
Marc was most pleased to say yes.
MARC PUT HIS HORSE IN AN empty stall beside Stebbins’s mare, removed its saddle, gave it a perfunctory rubdown, and threw a blanket over it. “Sorry, old chum, but that’s the best I can do.” He chipped the ice off the water bucket in the stall, noted the hay in the corner, and went off to meet the notorious child bride from Buffalo.
Lydia Stebbins was attired in a woollen housedress that hung loosely on her, laceless boots, and a maid’s bonnet askew on her brow. She stood before several steaming kettles and pots over a balky fire—ladling what appeared to be stew, intermittently stabbing at the fire logs with a twisted poker, and wiping the sooty sweat from her face like the beleaguered heroine in a melodrama. None of this blurred or diminished her beauty. A two-year-old clung shyly to her dress and stared up at Marc; a crib by the fire held her youngest child.
“Good gracious, Azel, you didn’t tell me we was expectin’ company,” she cried, and she swept the back of a hand across her forehead.
“You got enough stew there fer a herd of longhorns,” Stebbins said, shucking his clothes in sundry directions. “Put on a couple of extry dumplin’s and set a plate fer Ensign Edwards. Then hie yer pretty little rump over here and shake his hand, like a proper lady.”
A proper lady she might have made in other circumstances. Her hair was as black and shiny as ebony and fell in generous, wayward curls over her neck and shoulders and partway down her back. Her face was perfectly heart-shaped, her skin the milk-white hue of the Irish along the windy coasts of Kerry or Donegal. Her eyes were deep pools many a homesick sailor would happily have drowned in. The figure complementing them could only be guessed at, but as she gave her husband a warning glance and moved across the room towards Marc, a dancer’s grace and innate control intimated a slim waist and lissome limbs.
“Pleased ta meet ya.” When she smiled, her teeth were even, flawless. “You just call me Lydia like everybody else ’round here.”
“And I’m Marc,” he said, taking her hand and drawing it up towards his lips.
“Jesus!” she yelped. “He’s gonna kiss it!”
“That’s what they do to ladies over in England,” Stebbins said scornfully.
Marc pressed his lips to the back of her hand. Lydia giggled but did not pull away. “You all done?”
“That’s all there is to it, girl.” Her husband laughed. He was over at the fire now and sniffing at the stew.
“Christ, I been kissed better by a pet calf,” she said, her eyes dancing.
THE STEW WAS SURPRISINGLY TASTY AND the dumplings even better. Mr. and Mrs. Stebbins were on their best behaviour, though Marc expected that the elaborate politeness of their “Mrs. Stebbins, would you kindly pass the bread?” and “Certainly, Mr. Stebbins, but not before our guest’s been served” was a parody for his amusement or discomfiture—he was not certain which. In light of their performance, and the indignities of yesterday’s encounters, Marc began to doubt the possibility of creating in Upper Canada an alternative society to the rabid and reckless democracy south of it—a New World country where decorum, reverence for the law, and respect for one’s betters would be the accepted norms. It certainly seemed to be a moot question at best.
While Lydia washed the plates and spoons in a kettle at the fire, Stebbins and Marc sat at the deal table and drank several mugs of coffee tempered with dollops of Jamaican rum. Lydia began to sing, occasionally swivelling around to face them and catching Marc’s eye. Her cheeks were scarlet from the heat; tiny pendants of sweat beaded her forehead and trickled down into the hollow of her throat.
“I gotta stay sober tonight,” Stebbins said to Marc. Then he lowered his voice to a whisper, and added, “Gotta big meetin’ to attend.” He laughed out loud, apparently disturbing the baby in the crib. The two-year-old had fallen asleep halfway through his meal and had been tucked into bed in the loft above. Lydia went to the crying infant, clucked over it for a few seconds, then began to rock the cradle with one delicate, booted foot.
“Time for me to vamoose,” Stebbins said, and he seemed to shush himself by holding two fingers to his lips.
Marc rose and said quietly, “I’ll ride as far as the highway with you.”
Stebbins hesitated. “Okay by me. You’ve been damn good company so far.”
Marc bowed to Lydia (he thought he detected an amused exchange of glances between man and wife), and then the two men tiptoed out.
“Not so hard, ya little nipper,” he heard Lydia say as the door closed behind them.
Side by side they saddled their horses in the glow of a single lantern. The sky was clear, but the moon had not yet risen. It was a dark winter’s evening they would be riding into, along the tree-shrouded lanes they dignified here with the name of “road.”
“My God,” Marc said suddenly.
“What is it?”
“The horse has thrown a shoe.”
“It couldn’t have. You rode it in here okay.”
“Of course I did. The shoe has to be somewhere around here.”
The two men made what both knew would be a fruitless search through the straw inside and the drifts outside. No shoe was found.
“Well, you can walk him back to the mill without doin’ any harm,” Stebbins said cheerfully. “Shouldn’t take you an hour.”
Marc was already leading the animal into the stable yard.
“Hey, he’s limpin’ a bit,” Stebbins said.
Marc swore, then bent down to examine the animal’s right front hoof. “He’s picked up a nail or something already. I’ll have to dig it out and then walk him home very slowly.”
Stebbins found a pair of pliers and handed Marc his jackknife. “Worst comes to worst, you could walk him across to McMaster,” he said. “Fancies himself a bit of a horse doctor, he does. Right now I gotta go. Got friends countin’ on me.”
Marc, angry and suspicious, decided on a single, direct gambit. “Where are you off to?”
“Oh, a small gatherin’ of associates who enjoy rollin’ the dice once in a blue moon.” With that he left.
Marc waited for half a minute and then walked quickly out to the sideroad at the end of Stebbins’s lane. From the tracks in the snow, Marc could make out that Azel had turned north and, when the road came to an end up beyond the Hislop place, had plunged into the bush on a line that would take him straight to Mad Annie’s. Unless, of course, Stebbins was more subtle in his cunning than he had shown thus far. At any rate, Marc was without a mount and like a duck on ice when fitted out with snowshoes. All that remained was for him to tend to the horse and then trudge home in front of it. At least the roads were well trodden and passable to a desperate man on foot.
He had just removed the nail from the animal’s hoof and noted with satisfaction that the cut was not deep when a cry from the house brought him to rapt attention.
“Help! Somebody, help me!”
Lydia Stebbins was standing in her doorway—screaming into the darkness.
APPARENTLY A LIVE SPLINTER FROM THE ebbing fire had been flung beyond the stone apron of the hearth and landed on a nearby pillow, setting it alight. By the time Marc arrived, rushing past a panicked Lydia, the pillow was merely smouldering. Oily ribbons of smoke snaked out of it, but under no circumstance would it have burst into flame or threatened the cabin. Marc picked it up gingerly, sprinted to the door, and tossed it into a snowbank.
Lydia was seated at the table, rocking her youngest in a bunting bag. The two-year-old remained unruffled in the loft. Lydia had made a remarkable recovery.
“Get me a drink of that rum, would you, Marc?”
Marc obliged, eyeing her intently.
“A lady don’t drink alone,” she said. “It ain’t polite.”
“I’ll sit with you ti
ll you’ve gotten over your fright,” Marc said as she sucked impolitely at her cupful of imported rum, courtesy no doubt of Messieurs Connors and O’Hurley. “Then I really must go. My horse has thrown a shoe and I’ve got to walk it home.”
“That won’t take you more’n an hour.” She pouted prettily. “And don’t tell me a big grown-up gentleman like yerself has got to be in bed afore ten o’clock.”
“A gentleman doesn’t remain alone with another gentleman’s wife without his knowledge or permission,” Marc countered.
“Now that would depend on the nature of the gentleman, wouldn’t it? And the lady.” She drained her cup.
“I think it safe to assume your husband would not approve.”
“Then he shouldn’t go runnin’ off and leavin’ me to fend fer myself three nights a week. Who am I supposed to talk to? Little Azel Junior?”
“Surely you exaggerate. Where would Azel go three nights a week in this township?”
She smiled and refilled her own cup. “So now you’re interested. What’s so goddamned attractive about my husband that you gotta give him so much attention? I’m a damn sight prettier’n he is!”
“All I’m saying, Mrs. Stebbins—”
“Lydia.”
“Lydia, is that I can’t give credence to your statement.”
“Christ, what a lingo! Where’n hell’d ya learn that? I bet you wouldn’t say shit if ya had a mouthful.”
“Azel told me he was going off to gamble,” Marc said. He poured himself a cup of the contraband rum.
“And hooerin’, fer all I know. He just goes off, I’m tellin’ ya, and leaves me here to talk to the walls.”
“Well, you may talk to me—for an hour. I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”
MORE THAN AN HOUR LATER, LYDIA Stebbins was still talking. Her dark curls billowed and fluttered as she grew more animated, and the round, black eyes took in less and less of the room and more and more of what they wanted to see.
“I grew up in my daddy’s hotel. It had the grandest ballroom in Buffalo, in the whole western half of the state. We had dances and card games that never ended. Two presidents stayed there. Dolley Madison was given my mother’s bed fer the night. She sent us a china figurine. Every general and admiral in America passed through Buffalo and not one of ’em but didn’t stop to converse with my daddy, the colonel. And he weren’t no country colonel neither. When I was eighteen he let me read parts of his war diary. You mayn’t believe it, lookin’ at me now, with these udders and my bum bulgin’ out, that my daddy sent me off to finishin’ school in Rochester.” She raised her rum cup like a proper lady, took a sip, and batted her black eyelashes. “I can even read French.”
She surveyed the cabin skeptically, as if to emphasize the unlikelihood of ever finding a use for French in these quarters.
“In the year before Azel come ridin’ up to sweep me away, my daddy was made president of the Loco Foco party in the Buffalo region, and I got to hear some of the most melodious speeches on local democracy ever given, and that includes Tom Paine and Mr. Jefferson himself.”
Marc leaned forward. “What I don’t understand is how you could give all that splendour up for a man who was already a farmer in a British colony opposed to democracy and who was likely to be more interested in yields per acre than the lofty sentiments of the preamble to the American Constitution?”
She stared across the table at him. “My word, you can talk just like them,” she breathed.
“But Azel can’t?”
“I don’t need remindin’ about Azel’s foul mouth,” she said irritably. Her expression changed as she added, “But the man was a stallion. And when you’re a girl of twenty and of a mind to disobey and spite yer daddy, that’s all that matters.”
Marc flushed, and began to doubt the wisdom of having steered the tête-à-tête into this particular groove. But it seemed too late to turn back now. “Azel kept his nose to the plough, then? Stayed away from speeches and politicking?”
“Oh, he got himself in thick with the Reformers up here when they tried to take the farm from us just because we come from the States. But he soon got tired of all that.”
“Still and all, he’s a good farmer,” Marc said, aiming for some respectable closure to a strange evening. “You’re fortunate to have him.” He started to get up.
“Enough of this palaver,” Lydia said, a licentious sparkle in her eyes. “Take me to bed.”
Marc dropped the jacket he was about to put on.
“You can’t go plyin’ me with wine and sweet talk and then just march out that door and leave a lady in distress, now can you?”
“But your husband—”
“What he don’t know or can’t guess can’t hurt him, can it?” She hunched nicely over until the rim of her dress slipped perilously close to the outer extremities of her breasts.
Marc realized, far too late, that he had drunk too much—here and earlier at Durfee’s—than discretion or common sense or self-interest warranted. And it had been far too long since that brief, passionate encounter with Marianne Dodds in far-off Kent. The room was overpoweringly warm and oddly reassuring, and the heady appeal of this wanton, bright, motherly, vulnerable vixen was not to be resisted.
She reached out for his hand, but it was he who led her towards the bed.
MARC WAS CASTING ABOUT FOR HIS other boot in the dark when Lydia rose up behind him and said, “I told ya, he never comes home before daylight, and he’s so stinkin’ drunk he’d think you were Father Christmas or the bogeyman.” She threw her arms about his neck. They were both stark naked, having performed their feat of lovemaking in that pristine state beneath an engulfing comforter while the fire expired and the air cooled above them. Lydia’s engorged nipples pressed into his back and mingling odours floated up from the warmth of their cocoon.
Marc had been prepared for some wanton, wild, or uncoordinated coupling, with pent passions unleashed on either side. It was not so. It was measured and tender and playful. Which of them had initiated this mode and kept it going he could not say, nor did he want to. When she sighed against him, he was not sure whether she had climaxed or was simply expressing her pleasure in advance of the event. They rolled then side by side, still connected. She pressed his head between her swollen breasts in what was undoubtedly a maternal gesture, or so he interpreted it. He thought fleetingly of the mother he had never really known.
Just as Marc found his second boot and lined it up with the first one on the cold floor, the baby let out a hungry howl.
“Damn,” Lydia said, releasing him and flinging herself naked from the bed into the shadows of the big room, illumined only by the full flood of moonlight through its narrow west windows. “Don’t you move now,” she sang sweetly, and seconds later the babe’s cries gurgled out.
For a long time Marc lay back under the quilt, savouring his own nakedness and the sensation alive in every inch of his skin, and listening to the suckling sounds of the child. Finally Lydia crawled back in beside him. She shivered deliciously against him.
“I didn’t let the little bugger have all of it,” she laughed. “I saved a bit for you.”
Hours later, it seemed, he fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.
MARC WAS WAKENED EITHER BY THE sensation of falling or the crack of both elbows on the floor. Whatever the cause, he was certainly awake and unmistakably sitting on his haunches in the dark beside an unfamiliar bed. Lydia, delectably nude, was rubbing the glass of one of the windows at the front of the cabin and squinting out into the moonlight.
“Jesus, it’s Azel!” she cried. “He’ll shoot us both!”
Marc leapt into action like a recruit caught napping at reveille. He pulled his trousers halfway up, jammed a foot into each boot, and then, flailing at the bed and the floor beside it, snatched at linens, socks, belt, shirt, and frock coat.
“He’s puttin’ the horse away,” Lydia called to him encouragingly. “He’ll be a minute yet.” She trotted across to the bedr
oom window and jerked back the gingham curtains. Moonlight poured innocently over their love nest.
“He’ll see my horse in there!” Marc gasped as he stepped into the chamber pot and heard it crack once—like a gunshot.
The voice of little Azel Junior drifted down from the loft: “Da-da home?”
“He’s too damn drunk,” Lydia said. “It’ll be okay, once we get you outta here.” She was helping him bundle up the clothes he had had no time to put on. “Just pull yer big coat on when you get outside.” She tossed it to him, then set about working her shift over the tousled mane of her hair.
“How the hell am I supposed to get out the front door without bumping straight into him?” Marc said as he rolled his uniform into his greatcoat.
Lydia grinned. “We got an emergency exit.” Then she leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, like a mother sending her tot off to his first day at school. Taking his free hand, she led him across to the southwest corner of the cabin to the big woodbox beside the fireplace. “There’s a hatch at the back so’s Azel can stuff his chopped logs in without usin’ the door.”
“But it’s half full of wood!”
She began yanking some of the split logs apart, and he soon joined her. In a minute or so they had managed to clear a wedge of space through which he had no choice but to wriggle fundament-first.
“You better hurry, I hear him shuttin’ the barn door.”
“Da-da home, Mummy?”
The ensign’s rear parts had reached the hatch in the wall. As his legs were pinned underneath him, the only way he could think to open it was to butt it severely. On the third butt the hatch fell. An icy wind took instant advantage. Marc heaved and squirmed and, with a clatter of wood, followed the hatch out into the snow.
Lydia reached down and thrust his bundled clothes after him. “I gotta hop right inta bed,” she whispered. “He’ll be expectin’ to find me warm and ready.”
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