“Yeah?” He looked at me with interest. “And the French guy? What was his name?”
“We don’t know that, yet. I’m trying to do some research, though, so maybe I’ll find out.”
I recognized the look that Rachel sent me as the same one that my brother always used when I said something idiotic. “You do know it’s just a story, right?”
“A lot of stories start from facts,” I pointed out.
“I highly doubt you’ve got a ghost.”
But Gianni begged to differ. “I’ve seen the soldier a bunch of times.”
Rachel, her tone unimpressed, asked him, “Really? And what was he wearing?”
“You don’t see the whole guy, you just see the light from his lantern. But trust me, it moves like a guy.”
“Trust you?”
“Yeah.” Gianni turned his head towards her and the angle of his chin was like a dare. “I’ll take you up there now, tonight, and you can see him for yourself.”
She faced him, too, and I was fairly sure that for the two of them, in that one moment, I’d become invisible.
“Nice pickup line you’ve got there,” Rachel said. “I’ll bet you get a lot of girls into the woods with you at night, with lines like that.”
“I’ll bet you scare a lot of guys away, with lines like that. Not me, though. I don’t scare so easy.” Gianni’s grin flashed briefly in the dimming light. “Do you?”
In all her life, I’d never seen my niece back down from any challenge. And she didn’t do it now. “I don’t get scared by things that don’t exist. You’re on.” She stood, remembered me, and turned to ask, “You want to come?”
“No, thanks.” I stayed exactly where I was, securely in my rocking chair with my iced tea, and watched them leave in Gianni’s car. I told myself I’d only stayed because I didn’t want to be the third wheel, interfering in whatever was developing between them. But the truth was, I didn’t feel nearly as certain as Rachel did that there’d be nothing to see. That they wouldn’t find someone—or something—up there by the Wilde House, still walking the shadowy paths through the woods.
Lydia
She wasn’t alone in the woods.
She had known it for some minutes now, since she’d left the bright afternoon sun of the clearing around the small cluster of headstones and stepped again onto the path through the trees, and had glimpsed his blue coat through the branches behind her.
Before, in the time she’d spent pulling the weeds from her mother’s grave, the clearing and woods had been empty and silent except for the trilling of birds and the buzzing of insects and now and again the swift rustling of some little creature across the thick carpet of mouldering leaves.
Now, though, those rustlings had taken a rhythm that, although yet faint, confirmed someone was following.
Even if she had not seen his blue coat she’d have known it was him, because no shoes or boots would make sounds like that—only the softer-soled Indian footwear that Mr. de Sabran had taken to wearing these days when he went for his walks. It had taken them all by surprise when he’d pulled those strange shoes from his pack one day. Fashioned from deerskin and stitched all around, they were tied to the foot and not buckled, with flat, supple soles that had no added heels.
Mr. de Brassart, when asked by her father if he also had such shoes, had smiled with a trace of disdain and replied the Canadians of the Marine wore all sorts of strange clothing that was, in his view, unbecoming to white men. To which her brother Benjamin had pointed out such footwear gave a soldier an advantage, in that what the wearer lost in height and fashion he would gain in practicality. “He wouldn’t leave much of a trail behind, no heavy footprints to follow,” her brother had reasoned. “And they’d make so little sound, you could sneak up on your enemies and not be heard.”
Mr. de Brassart had answered, as an officer and gentleman he had no wish to “sneak up” on his enemies. But with his words and tone he had implied Mr. de Sabran was no gentleman.
On that count, Lydia agreed.
That she heard him now behind her on the path, she guessed, was because he permitted it, and wasn’t taking pains to stay concealed.
To test this, she stopped for a moment herself, and the rustlings—as she had expected—continued their sure pace towards her, and Mr. de Sabran advanced from the shadows and into plain view.
He seemed to be preoccupied; had seemed that way, she’d noticed, since the visit of the English captain yesterday. And when he saw her, he offered a brief and surprisingly courtly nod, and would have carried on past her had she not surprised herself further by saying, “Good afternoon.”
That made him stop.
It was curious, Lydia thought, that she didn’t feel threatened when standing alone with him here in the dappled half-light of the forest, so far from the house. She disliked him. Distrusted him. Wanted him gone. But she could not, in honesty, say that she feared him.
Not even when he turned his head and looked at her, his dark gaze level and direct.
He said, “Bonjour,” which she had come to know meant “good day” in his language. Then he frowned all of a sudden and said something else she did not understand, and made a gesture to her arm, and took a swift step forward and, without her invitation or consent, reached out to take her hand within his own. She might have made a protest had the shock not held her motionless, and had his touch not been so unexpectedly impersonal.
He held her wrist the way a doctor might, and turned it carefully, examining the spattering of red stains on her skin. She didn’t understand at first why he should be concerned, until it dawned on her he thought she had been bleeding. He was looking for the wound.
He wouldn’t find one. All her true wounds were so deep within her nobody would ever see them, and the stains upon her wrist and inner arm had not been made by blood.
Her voice, when she could find it, sounded harsher than it should have. “It’s the rowan berries,” she said. “I was only drying rowan.”
She had spent two hours after dinner threading berries onto strings to be hung in the buttery to keep till they were needed. Messy work, it always was, and she had all but ruined her apron with the stainings of the juice, but then of course he would have had no way to know that. He’d been working with her father.
She could feel the callused hardness of his hand, sunbrowned and strong beneath her smaller one. She pulled her own away and broke the touch, and said, “It’s nothing.”
There was no need to step back for he was doing that already, his frown darkening his features as he nodded once again.
Then in slightly cautious English he remarked, “Forgive me.” Cleared his throat and added, “I meant no offence.”
And turning, carried on his way and left her standing in confusion.
Jean-Philippe
He hadn’t expected to meet her at all; he had thought she was still in the house, hadn’t noticed her leaving, but then his own thoughts had been elsewhere since yesterday. Learning his men were not only divided from him but most probably from one another, and scattered as prisoners over three provinces, had only stoked his dark sense of frustration, and most of today he’d been deep in that mood.
This second walk within the woods had been his own attempt to blunt the edges of that mood and lift its blackness.
Every forest had a different feel. The trees, the undergrowth, the fall of light between the leaves—these changed from place to place so that a man might know if he was in the north or south or west or east, and every forest had its own array of creatures, fierce and gentle, to contend with; but he always looked among them for the small familiar faces.
Like the little birds, the grives des bois, with their homely brown feathers and spotted white breasts and their quick black eyes, rustling along through the thick mat of leaves on the ground as they searched for the food to prepare them for winter.