? ? ?
Mr. Ramírez was a quiet man of careful habits. His arrival scarcely made a ripple in the running of the house. When he had tried arranging payment for his room and board, her father had replied whatever help he gave them with the ship would be enough, since he had only filled the bed that had been filled before by Benjamin, and ate no more than had her brother.
Even Violet had remarked how little trouble he had given, and in truth he’d been a help to her, for in the mornings and the evenings when she did the milking he would walk with her and carry the filled pails to spare her shoulders. He would talk to her, and twice he’d made her laugh—a sound that Lydia had not heard often since the death of Violet’s mother, Phyllis.
Phyllis hadn’t laughed much, either, but she’d been a force to reckon with, and she and Violet had made a small circle all their own within the larger family—closed to all but them, and filled with warmth and love so fierce Lydia wasn’t sure how Violet had stayed standing after Phyllis had been taken by the fever. But she had.
She had her church meetings on Sundays and they seemed to give her strength, and she had all the family there for comfort—though of course while there was love there, too, they couldn’t fill the place of her true kinfolk, nor was Lydia convinced that they were properly her friends.
“There is a line between us,” Phyllis had once told her, on a day now long ago when she had wanted Violet to come play with her, and Violet hadn’t felt inclined to.
“Now, Miss Lydia, my Violet wasn’t put here for your plaything.” Phyllis, standing at the kitchen hearth, had not brooked any argument. “When we’ve done all our work the time beyond that is our own, and no one else has any right to it.” The poker in her hand, she’d drawn a line straight through the ashes of the hearthstone at her feet. “There is a line between us, just like this. You might not see it, might not feel it, but it’s there, and don’t forget it, ’cause there’s those of us that never get a chance to.”
Looking down at that hard line across the stone between them, Lydia had felt a sudden sadness she could not express. “Can nothing get across it?”
Phyllis seemed to weigh her answer, then she’d offered one word. “Freedom.”
And the truth of that had been one of the hardest lessons Lydia had learned.
She might think that Mr. Ramírez was too old for Violet, but she was still glad Violet was, for the moment, no longer alone.
Mr. de Sabran appeared to have found a new ally as well in French Peter. With the harvest finished in the orchard they’d been working with her father making cider, and their conversations drifted now and then across the clearing while she did her chores outside. She did not understand a word they said, but it seemed to be friendly.
And this morning while she’d harvested her beans for seed she’d glanced up from the garden and to her complete astonishment Mr. de Sabran had been smiling.
Not at her—he had been saying something to French Peter, his attention focused mainly on the cider press. But still, he had been smiling. And that simple act had made his face a thing she barely recognized.
His teeth were even. Very white and very straight although the smile itself was lopsided, so wide it carved deep lines in both his cheeks and made his eyes crease at their edges. He looked younger. He looked—
Then, as if he’d known that she was staring, he had turned his head and for the briefest, stomach-dropping instant, he had turned that smile on her. Her hand had itched to hold a pencil that would let her somehow capture it, but with one polite, quick nod he had looked away, returning to his conversation and his work.
Since that moment, she had found herself innumerable times now glancing up from her own work to see if she might catch him smiling in that way again. She hadn’t, but she noticed he looked more relaxed today than she had seen him; more at ease with both their company and his surroundings, as though he were there by choice and not by force of circumstance.
Which made what happened next the more regrettable.
It was, as always, Violet who first saw they had a visitor, and called out from the kitchen to tell Lydia, “That looks like Henry coming now.”
It was. Her cousin, Henry Ryder, was her father’s sister’s son, and like his mother had bright copper hair that made him easy to identify. He was her brother William’s age and had a wife and children, but the similarity between them ended exactly there. Henry was “straight as an arrow,” as William once called him in tones that implied it was more a defect in his character than a true compliment.
He kept an inn at Millbank and he ran the local post from there, which meant he always had the finest horses, like the dappled mare he rode today.
“She’s beautiful,” was Lydia’s first greeting from the garden fence as Henry drew alongside and dismounted.
“She is. And fast. I’m thinking I should let her run the Hampstead races in the spring.” He smiled and bent across to kiss her cheek. “But I was needing a fast horse to bring you the good news.”
They sorely were in need of some. “What news is that?”
“Quebec has fallen.”
Lydia’s reaction was not what she had expected it would be. It was good news, she reasoned. Joyous news. A blow against their enemy, a victory in the name of all those men who like her brother and like Moses had paid dearly for it. Yet her own emotions at that moment were like waves that struck the sand in crossing patterns, overlaying one another in a swell and surge and backwash until all that she could feel was deep confusion.
Henry held a newspaper towards her. “Here. It’s Monday’s Mercury. It came this morning by express.”
She took the paper numbly from his hands, and read. The news had come, it said, via a letter from a gentleman in Louisbourg, to someone in New York. There was a time when she’d have read the words with satisfaction. Now some phrases seemed to rise towards her in a darker ink and snagged her thoughts uncomfortably: A most bloody Engagement . . . pursued them to their Sally-ports . . . ravaging and destroying the country.
“A brilliant victory,” Henry called it, as he gave his mare’s grey neck a cheerful thump. “It is a shame that General Wolfe was killed, but as the correspondent says a death like that is glorious and almost to be envied more than pitied, and he’s won us a great prize. I knew you would be pleased to hear of it. As will my uncle.”
“Yes.” The word came flatly. “Let me take it to him.”
She could not recall a stretch of grass that had seemed half as long as that she had to cross to take the newspaper to where her father stood positioning a barrel at the cider press, while Mr. de Sabran attended the great wooden screw mechanism and French Peter scooped a new measure of freshly cut apples into the machine.
As she neared them they all stopped their work for a moment, and Mr. de Sabran gave one of his nods and surprised her by saying in accented English, “It’s nice how you’re wearing your hair today.”
“Thank you,” she said, automatically.
French Peter said something in his own language and Mr. de Sabran replied, and then smiled in the way she’d been waiting to see again.
She looked away. “Father, Henry brought this.” Without more explanation, she passed him the newspaper.
Wiping his hands on the rag he’d tucked into his belt, he frowned faintly and watching her face asked, “What is it?”
“News.” Lydia turned. Then she thought better of it and turning back, looked to French Peter and asked, “Will you tell him, please, I’m very sorry to hear of it? Tell him I hope that his family is well.”
Then she turned once again, so she’d not have to see that smile fade from the officer’s face.