When he rolled from beneath her, Cassie lay on her belly and he pushed slowly into her from behind. She could barely feel him inside her after she came, but she liked the weight of him across her back, the blind heat of his body drawn to her like a plant pitched towards sunlight. She liked not being able to see his face when he finally went rigid and pressed his open mouth into her neck. It made their connection seem both more impersonal and more intimate somehow.
He fell asleep there while his cock went flaccid and slipped from her almost imperceptibly. She reached a hand behind herself, touching his face with the tips of her fingers until the sensation woke him and they shifted their bodies to lay side by side. They allowed themselves to kiss then, with the shyness of a fugitive affection they couldn’t acknowledge or entirely expel from their time together.
Before he left her bed, Cassie would ask Buchan to tell her something about Marie, where she had grown up, how she wore her hair the first time he saw her, if she read or attended concerts. She could see his resistance to talking about her. His answers were hesitant, defensive, apologetic. But Cassie insisted on hearing the details of their courtship, the wedding, the first years of their marriage, and he wasn’t able to refuse, seeing that she took some strange comfort from it. He told her about Marie’s habit of scenting her letters with rosewater, the colours she chose for their apartment (light green damask in the parlour, distemper fine blue for the bedchamber), her oddly accented pronunciation of his name which the years in England hadn’t changed, Da-veed. Cassie kept her forehead against his chest, nodding at each new detail, as if she was making a list in her head. He spoke of Marie’s shyness about her body, how even after years of marriage she wouldn’t allow herself to be naked in his presence except in darkness. He had never spoken so intimately about her to anyone.
“How did you propose to her?” Cassie asked him.
“Not very romantic, I’m afraid. I met her by chance to begin with. She and her aunt were on a French vessel forced into Portsmouth by the Royal Navy and they spent a year waiting for an opportunity to return to France. She was just fifteen years old at the time. Marie and her aunt were invited to social events held by officers of the navy, as a show of hospitality. She didn’t like England much, the weather or the food or the people. The first time we spoke, she had just learned that among the vulgar classes some men auction their wives at market like chattel if they wish to be rid of them. With a halter about their necks. I’ve not seen her so furious since. She said, ‘Explain please, this, this English way.’”
“And how did you explain it?”
“I told her, ‘I am not English.’ Perhaps that is what endeared me to her.”
Cassie shifted against him. “And the proposal?”
“Yes. That was during the Peace of Lunéville, in 1801. It was the first opportunity for the two women to return to France. By then Marie and I had spent some time in each other’s company. She made it clear to me that she did not wish to leave.”
“So she proposed to you.”
“A proposal was implied. There was nothing else about England she would have been sorry to leave behind.”
“Her parents allowed this?”
“The aunt returned without her. The peace lasted only a few months, which meant her parents couldn’t leave the continent to retrieve her even if they objected.”
“There was no dowry.”
“No,” he said. “There was not. After we married Marie renounced her allegiance to France.”
Cassie said, “She gave up everything for you.”
“A great deal,” Buchan allowed. “I suppose so, yes. Why do you want to know these things?” he asked her.
She raised her head to look at him. She said, “It’s time you should go to your room, Lieutenant.”
After each encounter with Buchan, a shifting current of emotion coursed through Cassie as she lay alone in her bed, the force of it like a winter river capped under ice. She turned on her side with a hand pressed firmly between her thighs until she came a second time, a muted, nebulous climax that somehow made it possible for her to cry. Only then was she able to begin a slow descent into sleep.
In the morning she cooked breakfast for John Senior and his guest. She called him Lieutenant. He referred to her as Miss Jure. The old man slathered his gandies with molasses and recounted the pleasure of yet another night of uninterrupted slumber.
The last time they slept together was in January of 1811, just weeks after her trip to see Annie on the River Exploits when the child had been bled from her belly like a lanced boil, three days before Buchan’s expedition was due to leave Ship Cove for the Red Indian’s lake.