“It’s a girl, then.” She shook her head, trying to imagine Obadiah Wilson raising a motherless daughter. “Poor Wilson.”
“Everyone said he’ll have to marry again soon. She was lying there dead in the room and some of those women were talking about his second wife!”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Jeannette yawned. “I think I’m almost tired. Thank you, Thérèse,” she whispered. “I don’t mind sleeping by the hearth most nights, but tonight...I’m afraid I might see her ghost.”
Thérèse left unspoken every wise motherly saying she might have conjured up and patted her sister’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Family keeps away ghosts.”
Chapter Thirteen
Obadiah Wilson spent the first few days after his wife’s death and his daughter’s birth thoroughly drunk, which Henry supposed was as good a way of managing grief as any. He shared a few drinks with the widower, but Cutler devoted more time to his old friend.
“I told him he ought to write Sophia’s parents,” he told Henry late on the second afternoon as they sat on the Cutler cabin porch after a long day’s work. “They have a right to know that their daughter died, and they might be willing to take the baby in. They could bring her up better than he could.”
“I can understand him not wanting to give up his daughter,” Henry allowed. “Would you?”
“No. But I also wouldn’t seduce an eighteen-year-old girl with no idea how to live in a place like this and ruin her for everything she knows. It’s too late to change that now, but he should think of what’s best for the child, since he couldn’t manage to do that for her mother.”
Henry blinked. He didn’t disagree with anything Cutler had said, but nor had he heard him speak so harshly of Wilson before—or of anyone else. “I thought he was your closest friend,” he said.
“He was when we were boys. He was the only one close to my age, so we couldn’t help but be friends. But now that we’re grown, it doesn’t seem strange to have friends five or ten years older or younger anymore, and...he changed. But I’m his friend because someone needs to be. How’s he to do better if we all abandon him?”
“He has other friends,” Henry said. “He’s drinking with Sim Taggart now.”
“Yes, and now that he’s not tied down here fearing for his wife, you’ll see him going to Bear Creek Hollow again.” When Henry blinked bafflement, he added, “The nearest settlement to ours. They’re a wilder lot—my mother would say because they didn’t come to the camp meetings five years back. And likely she’s right.”
Henry nodded without comment. He wasn’t quite comfortable with the fervent, revivalist Methodism practiced at Cutler’s Creek, and he could tell that Catholic Thérèse and Jeannette were even more baffled by it, but they all politely attended the Sunday meetings each week in the Cutler cabin and tried to avoid debates on the meaning of various passages of Scripture.
“And speaking of—” Cutler stood and peered down the path leading into the valley, where a single rider on a gray horse approached them. “I do believe that’s Reverend Ford himself! We’ll have a proper service tomorrow with a real preacher. And he can preach at Sophia’s burying, too. I think Obadiah will be glad of that.”
Reverend Ford, Henry knew from all those theological discussions at the Cutler table, was the local Methodist circuit rider. Tiny settlements like this one couldn’t support their own clergyman, so the church appointed ministers to travel on horseback from one place to another, preaching at each stop. Cutler’s Creek only saw Reverend Ford about once a month, and his schedule wasn’t entirely predictable.
Henry watched the minister’s approach with eager curiosity himself. If the man had been in a town recently, he might have news of the war. While he, Thérèse and Jeannette meant to leave for Canada within a week or two regardless, it would be useful to know whether his nation and this one were at war or peace before they approached the border.
Reverend Ford proved to be a spare, hardy-looking man of middle years who greeted the throng who came out to meet him with cheerfulness despite his evident weariness. Henry hung back with Thérèse and Jeannette, but he was close enough to hear the elder Mr. Cutler ask Ford about the war.
The minister smiled and pitched his voice to carry over the crowd. “It’s over at last. I had the news of it in Knoxville a few days ago. The treaty was signed on Christmas Eve, and Congress ratified it last month.”
The news generated applause and cheering, but Henry found he couldn’t rejoice. “What a waste,” he murmured to Thérèse in French. “The war was over when we fought the battle.”
She squeezed his arm in sympathy but said, “If nations will fight wars an ocean away from home, such tragedies cannot be avoided.”
“I know.” And then Mrs. Cutler turned toward them, and it was time to pretend to share in the general enthusiasm.
A little later, Reverend Ford joined the Cutler family, Henry, Thérèse and Jeannette around their table. “I can always be assured of a good meal here,” he said, happily tucking in. “You make the best cornbread in my riding, Mrs. Cutler.”
She simpered. “Thank you. But while you’re here, we should have Mrs. Langevin here cook for you, too. She uses more pepper than anyone I’ve ever seen, but her sauces are delicious.”
The reverend smiled at them. “I’d be delighted to taste them. In a life such as mine, a man learns to embrace new experiences—though a Frenchman and a New Orleans lady are beyond what one normally encounters in this part of Tennessee. But you don’t mean to stay here, I understand?”
“No, monsieur,” Henry said. “We will go to my friends in New Jersey, and perhaps from there to France.”
Ford then asked several questions about that nation, and Henry blessed his occasionally homesick mother for having talked about her native land often enough that he could answer in tolerable detail despite having seen only a small portion of the country himself, and that while marching with the British army.
Thérèse answered a similar set of inquiries about New Orleans, and then Reverend Ford turned the subject to the few days he would be staying in the settlement. The next morning he would speak at Sophia Wilson’s funeral, and that afternoon would be a full church service with the sacraments.
“I’ll baptize the Wilson baby, of course,” Ford said. “Are there any other new infants? And I don’t suppose you’ve any weddings for me to perform. I’m sure Nell Morrison would’ve told me before I’d so much as dismounted if her daughter had settled which of her suitors she means to have.”
“She needs to make up her mind before all three get tired of her,” Mrs. Cutler said. “No weddings. Unless—” her eyes twinkled at Henry and Thérèse, “—you two did manage to get to the wedding part of your elopement, didn’t you?”
Henry was readying his best lie, but Thérèse shook her head. “We’ll go to a priest once we get to New Jersey.”
At that, calm, cheerful Mrs. Cutler turned on her in red-faced indignation. “A priest in New Jersey? If the two of you intend to go on carrying on in my spare room, you’ll be married here, by this good minister.”
Thérèse turned pale, but she lifted her chin. “I’m Catholic. I will be married in a church, by a priest.”
“If you wait much longer you’ll be pregnant and out to here—” Mrs. Cutler waved a hand half a foot in front of her own flat stomach, “—and what will your priest have to say about that?”
Now Thérèse blushed, but Henry couldn’t tell if it was shame or fury. She stood, pushed back her chair with a clatter and rushed from the cabin.
Henry found himself confronted by a table full of accusing stares. Somehow Jeannette’s was the worst of the lot. He stood, too. “I’ll—I will just go to her,” he said, barely remembering to keep his French accent in place.
He hurried out into the spri
ng twilight and caught up with Thérèse at the door to the Cutlers’ barn. “Thérèse,” he called.
She turned toward him. Her eyes were huge and dark in her pale, set face. “I’m a fool,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
“I should’ve had the sense to lie better. But she caught me by surprise.”
“It’s all right. In fact, I’m glad it happened.”
“What, so you could be called out for carrying on at the dinner table?”
“I didn’t care for that. Especially not hearing it directed at you. But, you see, lately I’ve been thinking...” He hesitated, looking for the words to shape an intention that had been slowly forming in his mind since their first night on the Natchez Trace. “I meant to wait till Canada to speak, in case they take me for a deserter...but I’ve been thinking these past few weeks about whether it’s ever right to break a promise.”
Thérèse blinked at Henry, trying to concentrate despite her humiliation and anger at herself. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but that wasn’t it. “And did you come to any conclusions?” she asked.
“In almost every case, I think it wrong. But there are occasions—rare ones, to be sure—where the spirit of a promise is more important than the letter.” He took both of her hands in his. She swallowed and took a deep breath, planting her feet more squarely in the muddy earth.
“For years I promised myself I’d never marry,” he said. “I thought my only choices were to keep my struggles a secret from my wife and live a lie in my most intimate relationship, or else see her reject me when she learned the truth. And, even more, I didn’t think I could be a good husband. How could I be, when I wasn’t fit for any profession but that of a soldier? What could I offer a wife? But out here...” He released one of her hands to sweep out in an arc that took in the woods, the mountains and the sky and by extension all this half-wild country. “I might not make the kind of English gentleman my brothers are, but I’m coming to see that England isn’t the only place, and theirs isn’t the only way to be a worthy man.”
“But we can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.” Jeannette could never be truly free here, and they would always be haunted by the possibility that Jean-Baptiste Bondurant might hunt them down.
“I know. But we could stay in Canada. It has frontiers, too.”
She captured his hand again. She needed his strength to hold herself up. “Is this a proposal of marriage?”
He lifted her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss over her knuckles. “It’s trying to be.”
She wanted so badly to say yes. But how could she? “I made a promise, too,” she reminded him. “Not a private vow, like yours—you could break that with no guilt. I even think you should. But I made a promise to my mother on her deathbed. That...isn’t so easily broken.”
“No. It isn’t. But I’d never ask it of you if I didn’t think you could honor your mother’s intention—the spirit if not the letter of the promise—with me.”
“Oh? You’re not of my kind.”
“But we are free to marry—by the laws of my nation. I think...she was your mother, so tell me if I’m wrong, but from what you’ve said of her, I think she wanted to see you married, above all.”
“Yes. She wanted me to have what she never had. To stand as a wife, respected by all. An honest name for myself and my children. No doubts about their status and inheritance.”
“Which, in New Orleans, in her world, could’ve only happened with a man of your own kind—a man of color.”
“Yes.” She saw where he was leading now. But could she go with him?
“But in England or Canada, that wouldn’t matter. There’s no law against it. You could have what your mother wanted—with me.”
“Yet if you’re asking me now...we’d be marrying here and now. Where it isn’t legal.”
“But we know that law is wrong, and it doesn’t apply where we’re bound. Cutler and Wilson won’t say anything. As for the rest—what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
Gently she pulled her hands free.
“Thérèse, don’t say no. I love you. I never want to be parted from you.”
“Please. I must think.”
He drew back a step, and she closed her eyes. Her mother would have accepted Henry as a son-in-law, had she known that such a possibility existed for her daughter. Back in the good days when Father had been rich and full of hope, talking of taking her to France where she could pass for a white Creole woman and marry well, Mama had encouraged his wildest dreams. She’d wanted to see Thérèse rise as high as possible in the world. If she could have foreseen the son of an English baron and grandson of a French duc asking for her hand, she would have told her to seize him and take her place in his world with pride. It was only at the end, as she lay dying with all her dreams crushed out of her, that she’d told her daughter to make her peace with her world as it was and settle on the best realistic life it could offer her. Marriage had been what mattered to Mama, not the race of the bridegroom.
But even as a child, Thérèse had been uneasy about lying to that future husband in France, pretending for the rest of her life to be something she wasn’t. She wasn’t ashamed of her African blood—if she had a parent to be ashamed of, it was her father, feckless and more than halfway to criminal. Her mother and grandmother had been honest and hardworking, making the best of a difficult world. It would have been a privilege to honor their memory, to marry into a family like the Roches and show a doubting world what their kind could do.
She opened her eyes and met Henry’s earnest blue gaze. “I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not. Not for the rest of my life,” she said.
“Of course not. I wouldn’t want you to.”
“It’s one thing to pass for white here and now, when all of us are telling lies. But I don’t want to—to whitewash my mother and grandmother into Spanish ladies.”
“I’m not asking you to do that. I’m only asking you, as you are, to marry me, as I am. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“What will your family think?”
“Does it matter, if we’re staying in Canada?”
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Whether he admitted it to himself or not, Thérèse could tell he longed for his home. He missed his hills and lakes, and he spoke too fondly of his mother and siblings to be happy never seeing them again. As long as his army forgave his accidental desertion, he’d go back.
“Yes. I’m better at life on a frontier. Canada has one. England doesn’t.”
What he was better suited for was a life of action rather than scholarship. His native country might be a settled land, but Thérèse could imagine him happily managing a farm there or breeding and training horses. Still, maybe he was right and he could do all that better in Canada than in England, where he was known and people had expectations based on his position in life. “But you don’t intend to break off all contact with your family, do you? You’ll write them when it’s safe, and perhaps even go home for a long visit someday, won’t you?”
He blinked. “Of course. I’d love to show you where I grew up, and Felicity and Jeannette should meet.”
“Then are you ready to tell your family who and what I really am?”
He took her hands again. “Is that what you want?”
She tugged free of his grip. “Weren’t you listening? I don’t want to live a lie.”
“We wouldn’t be lying to each other. And you don’t mind letting people think you’re white now.”
She’d thought he understood, but he didn’t, not really. “To someone I’ll know for a day and a night, or a few weeks at most? Of course I’m not going to tell them everything, especially when it helps protect us not to. I’m sure they all have their own secrets and scandals. But this is your family. Your mother would be my children’s grandmother
. And you really think it would be acceptable to lie to them? Are you sure you’re not ashamed of what I am?”
“Never that.” His voice was low and husky, and he tipped up her chin and kissed her lips. “I love you. I want you. If anything, you’re too good for me—too beautiful, too clever.”
She rested her palm on his chest, neither pushing him away nor drawing him nearer. “I will marry you on two conditions.”
He caught her hand and held it, interweaving his fingers with hers. “Name them.”
“You’ll tell your family the truth about me. Or let me tell it.”
“Done.”
“Are you sure? What if they cast you out?”
“They won’t,” he said sturdily, though a faint narrowing of his eyes belied his confident voice. “And if they do—you’ll be my wife. I love my family. I miss them now, and I’d hate to think of never seeing them again. But I’d hate it more if I could never see you again.”
Despite herself, Thérèse’s heart beat faster. He loved her. He meant it. It wouldn’t be easy, this pairing of English aristocrat and New Orleans cuarterona, but if they loved each other enough, surely they could build their own life, somewhere far from the homes that had bred them both. “My second condition,” she said, “is that we will have children.”
“That’s never a certain thing,” he pointed out.
“I know,” she said. “But if we’re never so blessed, it won’t be through lack of effort on our part. When we’re married, it won’t be like it is for us now. We’ll consummate it properly. And I won’t take any of those potions women use when they find themselves with child and unhappy.”
“I certainly intend to consummate the marriage,” he assured her. “I’m looking forward to it with great eagerness.”
So was she. “But I remember what you said, that first night. You’ve always been careful not to get a woman with child because the baby might be born with your troubles.”
Freedom to Love Page 20
