Page 52 of The Winter Husband
She spoke softly. “So your men came here?”
He nodded. “The only thing we all knew how to do was soldier, so we sought another company. I heard of a new regiment, a Piedmont commander looking for men to come here, to Quebec.” A new start in the new world, so he’d thought. No more marching in formation into a hail of lead on European fields. No more spilling blood to shift a border that would make one king richer than another. “We were told we’d guard trading posts in frontier forts.”
They did, for a while, he told Marie. But within two years, he and his men were pulled from their posts and mustered into battalions to fight alongside the Huron against the Mohawk. A cursed campaign. He still could hear the mosquitoes swarming, buzzing their high whine, biting welts on his neck and ears as he and his men dragged cannons for miles into the wilderness, in search of a fight that never came. His ass of a commander suspected the Huron guide of warning the Mohawk about their movements, too ignorant to know no Huron warrior would aid his most bitter enemy. And the fleet-of-foot Mohawk would always move faster than regiments hauling cannons through swamps.
Lucas had had enough of it. The Mohawk weren’t looking for a fight. They wanted to be left alone south of the boundaries others had mapped, wherever the hell those borders were. Every copse of trees looked just like the next. When the commander ordered him to send men to search for the enemy, Lucas handpicked his friends and directed them north, away from conflict. Henri had dropped a wink and led the crew of his brothers-in-war, who’d swaggered off like they were on the way to a tavern. Lucas was sure they’d be safe.
Senseless, all of it.
New world or old, there had to be a better way to resolve conflicts among men.
Marie listened, as patient and calm as a windless day. He let the rest tumble out of him. When the campaign ended and he’d return to Montreal, he’d gone half-mad when he found out his men had never made it back. He’d defied orders to return to his post and set out to find them. He’d stumbled upon them here, weeks later, dead by violence or exposure or sickness or wolves, he didn’t know. No clues remained as to the source.
The wilderness had swallowed them up.
“I’m so sorry, Lucas.” Marie laid her cheek on his sleeve. “What a terrible loss.”
His ribs squeezed with remorse, guilt, blame.
She whispered, “The nightmares aren’t just about Flanders, then. They’re about what happened here, too.”
“Yes.”
He never should have sent them away.
He should have died with him.
“But think, Lucas.” She ran a glove hand up his sleeve. “If you were among them, buried here, and one of your men—Henri, say, or Jacques—had survived…would you want him to stand over these graves and be tormented? To suffer as you do?”
He flinched at the thought. She spoke a truth he didn’t want to hear. He and his men had been soldiers to the core. They honored their fallen comrades together. They’d always known death waited in the shadows. But none of them could imagine what it was like to be the last man standing.
He slid an arm around her. Her hair smelled of rosewater. Her body molded warm against his. He kept forgetting she was a soldier’s daughter. He didn’t deserve this woman and her understanding of things that should be beyond her knowing. Every day, another truth became clearer: He wanted her to stay with him. Long after spring came. Long after the river ran free. He wanted her by his side through summer and fall and into another winter. He wanted her to keep reading from the books in the bedroom and reminding him his grief didn’t belong to him alone. She was a balm that soothed his churning mind.
She made him feel half-human again.
“There’s something else you need to know, Marie.” Every instinct roared for him to shut his mouth, but a man shouldn’t keep secrets from the woman he loves. “Something I didn’t tell you before we married.”
“Oh?”
“There’s more than one reason why I chose to live on this land.”
“I can guess at least one reason I didn’t know before.” She ran a hand across the snow. “For you, this is hallowed ground.”
“It’s cursed, too.” He squinted south, avoiding her eyes, seeing nothing. “It stands between the Huron territory to the north and that of the Mohawks and their brother tribes to the south. The French are aligned with the Huron, the Mohawks are allies of the English. It boils down to this: we’re on a border.” He reached into the hole and tapped the top of Jacques’s cross. “Wherever there’s a border…there will be blood.”
A breeze sifted through the pines, raining a glittery veil of snow all around them. Marie’s brows drew together. He’d probably terrified her, but she deserved to know the truth, his little porcupine.
“Before we married,” she said, “you warned me that life in the wilderness would be hard. Moose and bears and deep winter and all that.”
“Not war. I didn’t talk of war.”
“But I read about those dangers, too.” She brushed a little more snow away from the hole that marked Henri’s grave. “How long ago did you bury these soldiers, Lucas?”
It felt like yesterday, the ache bit so deep. “Six years, three months.” He calculated. “Fourteen days.”
“So the war is long over.”
But the danger wouldneverpass. He’d been a soldier since the age of seventeen. He’d never known the world without conflict. He was always guarding, always looking for rising trouble, always expecting the worst.
