Page 11 of The Winter Husband
“Captain. I’ve seen nothing but monstrous forests since I sailed up the Saint Lawrence River on the boat from France, and I’ve heard nothing but bloody stories of vicious beasts and violence among men—”
An accurate enough description.
“—so it would be a kindness to your new wife to describe where we’re going. If only to ease my dread.”
He shoved a spoonful of stew in his mouth and took his time chewing. He wanted her to be full of dread. Fear kept a person alert to danger. It might stop her from doing something foolish, like whatever she’d done to merit a cell and shackles, the marks of which still scored her wrists.
“You say there’s a cabin,” she persisted. “Can I suppose, then, that there are the usual accompaniments of a homestead? Chickens, perhaps? Cattle? Orchards? Wheat?”
By the saints. Soon, she’d be asking about roses and lily ponds. “There is none of that. The land has to be cleared first.”Maybe.“This year, I’ll mark the trees, thin the ones I can before the big snows.”
He’d be spending most of the winter hunting, walking the grounds, waiting for trouble. He’d have to find creative reasons to get out of the cabin, if she persisted in wearing dresses cut that low.
“Will there really be no one around?” she ventured. “For the whole winter?”
“No Frenchmen or women.” He pulled his mind back to dinner, and abstinence of all kinds. “There are only a few thousand French settlers in the whole colony. There are ten times as many Huron in the region, but their longhouses are farther north and west.”
She blinked. “Huron?”
“Our allies. One of many large tribes who live on this land.” He hesitated to elaborate. She didn’t need to know the Huron thought him unwise to settle on the south bank of the river, a wooded vastness between the Huron settlements to the north and those of their blood-enemies to the south, the Mohawk tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy. “The Huron spend winter in their longhouses, but other tribes allied with the French follow the elk, moose, and deer. The land we’ll be living on is a crossroads. There’s a chance before the big snows come that a band of Abenaki or Montagnais will pass through on their way to winter hunting grounds.”
“I see.” She returned her attention to her soup. “Perhaps that’s enough detail for now.”
Fire flickered on her dark hair. He imagined pulling those ribbons free and watching the curls tumble down. Leaning forward, he hunkered over his bowl and shoveled into his mouth a dinner that tasted of nothing. The silence was a void he wouldn’t normally mind, if it didn’t keep filling up with thoughts of the bedroom upstairs.
She startled when her spoon scraped the bottom of her bowl. She stared into the emptiness, as if surprised to have eaten it all.
Cedric’s steps sounded from the hallway. “Shall I clear the plates?” the servant asked, already reaching for their bowls.
***
Marie imagined this was how the condemned felt when they climbed the scaffolding to the hangman’s noose.
At the top of the stairs, she saw two rooms on the gabled floor, but only one had light seeping from beneath the door. She entered without waiting for him, in some foolish hope she could grab an advantage, somehow dodge a man who towered over her. She stopped short at the sight of an enormous bed with a rough-hewn wooden headboard, the linens folded down like a dare.
Lucas stepped in behind her, floorboards groaning. The tiny hairs on her arm prickled as he brushed by.
“It’s late.” From the taper in his hand, Lucas lit two candles on either side of a washstand. The light reflected in the mirror and the water in the bowl. “You must be tired.”
She wished he wouldn’t pitch his voice so low when he spoke to her. It was confusing, to hear a rumble rising out of his broad chest, rough but soft, like brushed wool that still held flecks of hay.
“Marietta had your things sent over.” He gestured to a satchel by a folded screen. “You should change into your…” He glanced toward the screen, where a waterfall of lace and cambric frothed over the top.
A muscle tightened in her throat. “And where are you going to sleep, Lucas?”
He gestured to the bed.
“No.” She crossed her arms. “Absolutely not.”
“Cedric may knock. To check on…us.”
“We’re not sharing that bed. You’re too big for me to fight.”
“You’re doing a fine job proving that wrong, woman.”
She swallowed hard. She knew she shouldn’t provoke him. But she’d been in a room like this before. The scent of beeswax candles. The linens turned back. Her pulse fluttered. Her blood ran both cold and disturbingly hot.
“We won’t let Cedric inside this bedroom,” she insisted. “You can sleep somewhere other than the bed.”
