Lydia
Her fingers rejoiced at the feel of the paper. This morning they’d been in the dirt, pulling turnips, and for these days past they’d been pricked with her mending and wearied with housework. They’d washed countless apples, pared apples, cut apples for sauce, done it over and over until they had ached, and had narrowly missed being scalded today on a potful of boiling chicken. They’d earned the right, she thought, to hold the portcrayon, as surely as she’d earned the right to steal this hour for herself.
She might have chosen anything to be her subject, chosen any corner of the property to sit and draw in solitude, but she’d come here, to sit upon the fallen log that marked the boundary of the beach, and draw the men at work upon the Bellewether.
They hadn’t noticed her. To guard against the cold wind from the bay she wore her grey wool hooded cape over her plain brown petticoat and jacket, so there would have been no flash of colour to attract their eyes as she’d approached. There on her log she would have blended with the hues of the late autumn woods behind her, and she’d had the perfect freedom to observe their interactions.
Mr. Ramírez was clearly in charge today. He and Joseph, bonded by their skills and their experience, worked well with one another, each man leading in his turn depending on which task most closely fitted with his expertise. This afternoon, Mr. Ramírez held the plans, and everybody looked to him.
She’d drawn him first. She’d tried to capture something of his presence in the thin, dynamic lines before she’d moved on to French Peter. He’d been easier to render, with his solid form and simpler clothes. But there’d been nothing simple about drawing Mr. de Sabran.
New York had altered things. It was as if she had been given spectacles with lenses of a new and different colour, and in looking through them now she found that everything was changed.
It had begun, she thought, that day at the de Joncourts’ when Mr. de Sabran had been upstairs with his sergeant, and Captain Bonneau had sought to charm her in the parlour. That he’d been unsuccessful had amused the eldest daughter of the family—Jeanne, her name in French was, though she’d introduced herself as Jane—who had remarked, “He thinks quite highly of himself, Miss Wilde. You’ll wound his pride.”
“My pride is unassailable,” Captain Bonneau had promised.
“Yes,” had been Jane’s smooth reply. “It is a failing common to your people.”
He had laughed. “I think it shocks Mademoiselle Wilde to hear you offer me such insults.”
Lydia had not intended anything to show upon her face, and she’d apologized. “It’s only . . . I assumed you were both French.”
“Ah. Yes, we are,” Captain Bonneau said, “but my hosts, regretfully, are Huguenots, and Protestant. A different faith.”
“A persecuted faith,” said Jane. “My father’s family fled from France, and lived in London for a time, then Ireland. And now here.”
“You want to watch them very carefully,” Captain Bonneau remarked to Lydia. He winked. “They will take over and control New York. Already one of them has been made governor.”
She had not given much thought to the heritage of Governor DeLancey, even with the war, for it was widely known that he’d been born here in New York, and there were none to doubt his loyalty. But she had always looked upon the French as being all one people, so to be confronted lately with all these divisions into neutral French, Canadian, and Huguenot was something very new.
Captain Bonneau appeared to understand her thoughts, because he said, “A common language does not make a common people, sadly. But it also is a truth the man who is your enemy today may be your friend tomorrow. Mademoiselle de Joncourt, here—her grandfather and mine would have been fighting one another.”
Jane de Joncourt nodded. “Very likely.”
“And today,” the captain said, “we sit here drinking coffee in this parlour, so they would be scandalized. But this, I think, is nicer. We move forward, yes? And so it will be, too, one day, with your side,” he told Lydia, “and mine. You are too young, perhaps, to see this now. You cannot have much more than eighteen years . . .”
“I’m twenty.”
“Twenty. Ah. Then you are maybe old enough. And you”—he turned to Jane de Joncourt—“may find you are sorry to be rid of me, when I have been exchanged.”
“You have been saying that for far too long for me to harbour hope,” said Jane.
He’d smiled in quick appreciation of her wit. “But this time it is sure to happen, now the English have Quebec, though how they mean to hold it is a mystery. Come the spring, when the supply ships come,” he said, “we’ll have it back again. And in the meantime, they will have the winter to endure.”
Lydia had asked him, “Are winters in Quebec so very dreadful?”
He had answered with a sidelong glance. “I’d tell you stories, but I fear it would alarm the children.”
The young boy whose name she had forgotten spoke up from his chair across the room. “I’m not a child.” There was no accent to his English, making Lydia suspect that the de Joncourt children, just like Governor DeLancey, had been born here, in New York.
Captain Bonneau, whose English, even with its accent, was impeccable, assured the boy, “The winters in Quebec would frighten grown men as well. Ask the lieutenant, he will tell you. He’ll have better stories anyway than mine.”
The youngest daughter, gazing at the captain with adoring eyes, spoke up. “Your stories are the very best I’ve heard.”
“You’re kind to say so. But Lieutenant de Sabran is of the Troupes de la Marine, he’ll have had many more adventures. He was probably,” he told them, “raised by Indians.”
The boy appeared excited by this prospect, and Bonneau advised, “You ask him, when he comes downstairs.”
The boy had watched the stairs and waited with anticipation. He had waited even after Captain Wheelock had arrived, when chairs were shifted round and conversation in the parlour turned to news the English captain had brought with him from the Jerseys and the gossip of events he’d missed in New York while he’d been away.
But when Mr. de Sabran rejoined them, he hadn’t looked to be in any mood for conversation. When he’d taken Captain Wheelock to the side and spoken privately, the tension of his stance betrayed a barely contained anger, and his face had stayed grim as he’d taken his seat. Lydia had silently been willing him to turn and see the boy who sat beside him, fairly squirming with impatience. And at last he had.
As always, she was struck by how that single act of smiling, even faintly, so transformed his face, and though the smile was for the boy and not for her, she felt its strong effect. It was an effort to refocus her attention on the captain, and she did not fully manage it. He, too, was watching Mr. de Sabran and the de Joncourt boy.
“He must have sons,” he commented, “or brothers, at the least, to have such patience with the child.”
It never had occurred to her that Mr. de Sabran might be a father. Have a wife. It gave her a peculiar sort of feeling to imagine it.
That feeling, these past days, had not diminished.
She pushed it aside now and focused on drawing his shoulders.
There was nothing simple about that task, either, because she remembered too well how those shoulders looked, filling the field of her vision, close up. She remembered the stone-solid feel of them under her hands when she’d suddenly found herself swept from the street’s edge and into a doorway while Mr. de Sabran, his back to the rioting crowd, made his body a shield for her. Keeping her safe.
Later on, when the mob and its pitiful victim had moved down the street and the danger had gone, she’d been able to reason through what had just happened; to realize the name of the man that the crowd had been calling down curses and shame upon—Spencer—matched that of the man William had mentioned only that morning. The man who’d informed against those involved in the illegal trade. The man William and his merchant friends had decided to make an exhibit of, so none would dare t
o do likewise. All these things had been clear to her later.
But during those terrible moments, caught up in a whirlwind of panic and fear, her whole world had been tightly reduced to the calm sound of Mr. de Sabran’s low voice speaking comfort, the feel of his body pressed warmly on hers, and the sheltering strength of those shoulders.
She could have drawn them now from memory. Could have closed her eyes and called to mind that same confusing swirl of feelings that were nothing she had felt before. When Moses held her close, it had been comfortable. But Moses had been Joseph’s friend from childhood, she had known him all her life, and when he’d asked her if she’d marry him it had seemed a continuation of the course that had been set for both their families—she would marry Moses, and his sister Sarah would be Joseph’s wife. It had seemed natural.
And Moses had been kind. He had laughed often, and worked hard, and he’d been honest, and she’d liked him.
Those who’d killed him at Oswego had not only stolen one of the strong pillars she had leaned on day to day, they’d also stolen what she might have built together with him in the years to come—a home, and children, and a life she knew would have been good.
But he had never smiled like Mr. de Sabran. He’d never made her feel off-balance just by looking in her eyes. And she had never trembled at his touch.
She’d fought those feelings all she could, while standing in that doorway. She had told herself the trembling was from fear, and nothing else. But it had been an unconvincing explanation, and her heart had not believed it.
Hearts were stubborn things, and often inconvenient.
Hers had traitorously softened when she’d seen the streaks of mud and filth across the back of his white coat, mute witness to the brutal blows he’d taken while protecting her. He’d done his best to clean it but the telling tracks remained, and she could faintly see them even now as she sketched the shape of the coat.
She was shading the lining when Violet’s voice said at her shoulder, “You’ve made him too tall.”
The pencil skipped across the paper before Lydia regained control. “You startled me.”
“I wasn’t trying to be quiet.” Violet held up one fold of her heavy skirts in evidence. “You need to pay more attention.” She sat on the same log. “And Mr. Ramírez is not that tall.”
Lydia studied her drawing and privately disagreed, but she knew Mr. Ramírez had done or said something of late that had made Violet angry—she’d seen the way Violet’s jaw set when he passed and how Violet avoided his eyes—and not wanting to fan those flames Lydia only said, “I’m out of practice.”
“You could make your living drawing, if you needed to. My mother said so.”
“I suspect she only said it to be kind.”
That drew a smile from Violet. “Mama never wasted time pretending kindness. Every word she spoke, she meant.”
And Lydia, remembering, smiled, too. “I miss your mother.”
“So do I. Though I suppose His Highness ought to count his blessings she’s not here. She would have slipped some poison in his food by now.”
Lydia realized how thoughtless she’d been to leave Violet with Mr. de Brassart alone. “Did he bother you?”
“He only has to be breathing to bother me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I should have stayed with you.”
Violet, although she was younger than Lydia, sent her a look that had lived lifetimes longer. “It isn’t your business,” she said, “to look after me. I can look after myself.”
The bay was beginning to freeze at its edges. The ice lay in thin clinging sheets on and over the rocks at the edge of the shoreline, veined with solid threads of white against the half-transparent surface, like the web of unseen spiders weaving frost.
Thoughts of Silas rose darkly in Lydia’s mind and she pushed them aside. “Did your mother really try to poison Uncle Reuben?”
“If she did, she didn’t get the dose right.” Violet looked to where the men were working. For a minute she was silent, then she said, “The Lord took her too soon, that’s what I tell Him every Sunday, but I feel her with me sometimes. Like He lets her come back down awhile and be with me. Do you ever feel your mother?”
Lydia’s pencil stilled. “Yes,” she said, quietly. “Sometimes I do.”
Later that evening, when supper was finished, she took up her mending and curled herself into her mother’s old chair with its leather seat slung in the low X-shaped frame like a welcoming lap. She could almost imagine her mother’s arms holding her, here in this room with the warmth of the fire and the light of the candles, the wind rising hard at the glass of the window.
The men were still sitting around the long table in cross conversations, her brother and Mr. Ramírez discussing the length of the Bellewether’s deck, while her father and Mr. de Brassart debated the merits of some play by Shakespeare, and Mr. de Sabran sat back and observed.
All the voices ran into and over each other and blended like billowy waves folding into the sea, and she struggled to stay on the surface while all of those waves with the troubles they carried went by. “Feel them passing?” her mother asked, rocking her gently.
Except they weren’t passing. They bore her relentlessly down like great weights on her shoulders until she was sinking.
And then in place of her mother’s arms she felt the strong ones of Mr. de Sabran, protecting her as they had done in New York, and it suddenly wasn’t so terrible, drowning. She held him and drifted down into the dark.
Jean-Philippe
They had forgotten her.
He’d had to rise and come into this room before he could believe it. In the faint light of the fading embers of the fire he could make out her sleeping figure in the chair close by the window, where she’d sat when they had finished with their evening meal.
She’d been there when her brother had excused himself and gone up to his room. She’d been there when her father and de Brassart had retreated to the parlour to—according to de Brassart—find some passage in a book. And she’d been there when Ramírez had removed himself as well to talk to Violet in the kitchen.
Jean-Philippe, at supper’s end, had stayed exactly where he was. He’d sat in silence, searching all the corners of his memory for a time when he’d last felt so deep a peace. It was unwise. No good would come of it. A belly full of homely food, a warm fire burning on the hearth, a woman he could share it with—such things were past his reach, just like the swirls of smoke in battle that lured soldiers to pursue them, wasting musketfire on phantoms that weren’t real.
And yet he’d sat and let that feeling settle in his mind, so he could carry it away with him when he had gone. An extra piece of armour.
Until she’d begun to dream, and stir, and since he had not wished for her to wake and find him sitting watching her, he’d risen very quietly and gone to his own chamber. That had been over two hours ago.
He knew the nightly rhythm of the household. Lying in his bed, he’d listened. First Ramírez, bidding Violet a good night, had gone upstairs. De Brassart, not long after, had come in and, having fussed for several minutes in his preparations, finally settled and began to snore. Next Violet, finished with her work, had run with lighter footsteps up the narrow back stairs. For the pattern to play out in perfect order, the next person to ascend should have been Lydia.
Except she hadn’t.
He’d heard Monsieur Wilde’s familiar firm and heavy footsteps climb the stairs, and then the house sank into slumber as though everything was in its place.
And Jean-Philippe had realized they’d forgotten her.
He didn’t know how that was even possible. If she were his, he’d never overlook her; never fail to notice everything she did. If she were his . . .
He killed the thought before it had a chance to fully form. They were divided by a war. Soon he’d be back on its front lines and she would carry on her life here and the world would turn as if they’d never met. That was reality, as was the fa
ct the room was growing cold. This was no place for her to spend the night.
He touched her shoulder. Shook it lightly. Said her name. She did not wake. And then, after considering his options, he reached down and gently lifted her and carried her upstairs.
Had he been able to stop time, he might have stopped it then. The weight of her within his arms, the warmth of her against his chest, the softness of her breath against his shirt—these were sensations that he wanted to remember. He climbed slowly, set his feet with care, and told himself it was because he did not wish to rouse the household, but he knew that was untrue, just as he knew he’d have to rouse at least one person.
Taking her into her room would risk her reputation and his own. He’d have to wake her father.
Monsieur Wilde, to his relief, slept lightly. Jean-Philippe had barely knocked upon his chamber door before it opened. Moonlight slanted through the window just behind and made the older man a silhouette in shadow while illuminating Lydia, and Jean-Philippe searched through the English words he’d learned to find the right ones to explain. “She sleeps,” he said, “downstairs.” And so there could be no misunderstanding, added, “In the chair.”
The pause that followed made him wonder if he’d been mistaken in his phrasing, but at last Monsieur Wilde nodded and stepped out and motioned Jean-Philippe to follow him across the landing to the other bedchamber. The moonlight here, though not as strong, was still enough to show him where to lay her on the bed. But as he lowered her, she wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him more closely. Forced to bend, he did not mind the time it took to set her down and cautiously extract himself from her possessive hold, but when he drew the blankets over her and straightened he was glad he could not see her father’s face, and that they neither of them knew the other’s thoughts.
• • •
Next morning after breakfast, Monsieur Wilde addressed him briefly, indicating that de Brassart should translate the words.