“I’m sorry,” Buchan said. “I didn’t intend to upset you.”
She shook her head, her mouth set into a thin, furious line. “A fine story, Lieutenant. A story to move an audience to tears. I’m sure it’s a particularly fine tale to tell,” she said, “if you’re looking to weasel your way into a woman’s bed.”
The officer tapped a finger thoughtfully against the bridge of his nose. “It seems to be you who doesn’t think much of me, Miss Jure.”
She looked across at the man with a sorry expression. She said, “Perhaps we are alike in many ways.”
“And perhaps it would be best if I take to my bed.” He stood up from his seat. “I thank you for your company. And the tea.”
After he left she sat in the kitchen for a long time while the fire embered to coals and the gale endlessly tried the windows and the latch of the door. She drank the last cold mouthful of her tea and then carried her shawl out to her room in the dark.
Two weeks later Buchan returned to John Senior’s house to discuss plans for the expedition to the Red Indian’s lake. At some early hour of the morning she heard him make his way downstairs and pass by her room. She lay in her bed for a time and tried to talk herself into staying there.
He asked if she would care to join him in a drink rather than tea. She turned to fetch glasses and the bottle, and they sipped at the liquor in silence a while.
Buchan said, “You never did answer my first question to you.”
She creased her brow.
“Weeks ago,” he said, “I asked your view on this matter of the Red Indians.”
“Ah,” she said. There was the tiniest note of disappointment in her voice. “It’s a province of the menfolk more than myself.”
“It seems to me that would hardly prevent you from holding an opinion.”
She smiled. “To be honest I know next to nothing of them. They used to make quite a nuisance of themselves around here from the stories I’ve heard. But mostly they just seem lost.”
“Exactly,” Buchan said, pointing with the glass in his hand. “Exactly how they seem to me. They’re like children who’ve been abandoned by their parents.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. They just seem lost. As if they don’t recognize the country they live in any more.”
He stared, not understanding what she had said. He placed his glass on the floor between his feet and folded his arms across his chest. “Have you ever been in love, Miss Jure?”
Her eyebrows pursed, the lazy eye drawing down suspiciously. “It’s not something I’ve chosen for myself, no.”
Buchan offered a troubled look. “And you believe this is a matter in which we have a choice?”
“I do,” she said. “Yes. How long have you been married?” she asked him.
“Some years now.” He looked to the rafters, counting. “Nine years June past.”
“And how long have you been unhappily married?” Cassie asked him.
He said, “I am very much in love with Marie.”
“You confuse me, sir, I must say. Perhaps you need a little more practice pouring.”
Buchan sat forward and stared at the floor. He said, “Perhaps I too believe this is a matter in which we have some choice. Cassie.” He paused over her name. “Cassie, I promise I will never speak to you about love.” He looked up at her. “I will never talk about taking you away from this place.”
She turned her face away from him. “I have no reason to trust you.”
“Nor I you,” he said. “And yet here we are.”
She thought it was laughable how cautiously they approached one other. Like children testing the water on an unfamiliar shore. As if they both suspected a trap, the fatal rip of an undertow beneath the calm surface. It was a sad truth about the world, Cassie decided, that only a sense of mutual vulnerability promised any shelter at all.
Buchan and Cassie slept together on three separate occasions during his visits to John Senior’s household, without once being completely naked in each other’s presence. Her first orgasm was so unexpected and intense that she broke out into embarrassed laughter even as it shook through her. At all other times they fucked in a silence so complete and so charged with the effort of suppressing the sound of pleasure that they seemed to be moving under water. Cassie straddled Buchan’s naked thighs, gripping the fabric of his shirt. Her hair fell loose around her face, so that even her expression was hidden from him. She pressed the bone of her pubis into him and rocked until she fell across his body, breathing as if she had just surfaced for air.