She was still weak and unsettled at the time, and her ability to stomach food and spirits was unpredictable. She fell into an exhausted sleep as soon as she left the men at the table and looked in on John Senior a last time for the night. Peyton had given his room to the lieutenant and slept in the hired men’s quarters with the surgeon. She would have missed Buchan’s trip to the kitchen altogether if the nausea hadn’t forced her awake. She climbed from her bed and knelt over the acidic stench of the honey bucket and heaved her supper into it.
Buchan knocked gently at her door and let himself in. He stood over her with a hand to her back. “This is a bit of a turnabout,” he said.
He helped her up and walked her into the kitchen where she sat on the daybed.
“I feel much better,” she told him.
He went back into her room to fetch her shawl and set about making tea. They sat side by side as she sipped at the sweet dark drink, Buchan with his arm across her back, rocking her gently side to side. He pushed her hair back across her ear and kissed the side of her face.
“Much better,” Cassie said. She placed her hand on his leg and squeezed.
They sat for a long time in that position. Buchan spoke to her about preparations for the expedition and the gear they would pack along, the inventory of presents for the Red Indians, the trials they could expect on the journey. There was something of the ten-year-old still in him, Cassie thought, in his perverse single-mindedness, in his fixation on lists as if enough of them could contain all that was important in the world, in his naked enthusiasm for peril. She was unsure why some men seemed never to outgrow these things or why in some it was so unaccountably attractive. She saw then that in this way he was just like her father. She rested her head on his shoulder as he spoke, regretting ever having sat alone with him in this room.
“Cassie,” he said. “Are you listening?”
She looked up at him and allowed his name to pass her lips for the first and last time. “David,” she said.
He was about to smile at her, but her expression spoke against it. “What is it?” he asked. “Cassie?”
She knelt on the cold of the wood floor in front of him. She reached for the waist of his breeches to open the spair and work them down his thighs.
“You’re in no condition,” Buchan said quietly, taking her arms and trying to lift her to her feet, but she pushed his hands away and set him back on the daybed, his head angled awkwardly against the wall. The legs of his pants turned inside out as she pulled them free of his feet and she leaned her face into him, kissing the bare skin of his thighs. She took the head of his cock into her mouth until it was wet with her saliva and then stroked him slowly, her fingers circled around the corona. She watched his face as she touched him, every movement of her hand causing muscles in his cheeks to twitch slightly, his head jerking from side to side. It looked to her as if she was rhythmically pricking him with a needle. His breath caught and caught again like a piece of cloth pulled through thorns. He was beautiful and ridiculous and watching his face filled her with a sadness that welled like the pleasure she’d discovered with him, and she had to bear down in the same way to hold in the roiling wail of it.
Buchan brought his hand to her shoulder. She dipped her head to catch the small flail of cum in her mouth and when he lay still she stood up from the floor to pass it into his. She kissed him hard and went on kissing him until there was nothing in their mouths but the sharp, stinging taste of him.
She held his head in both her hands. “We can never do this again,” she said.
He looked at her, waiting, as if he expected more than this simple declaration. Finally he said, “I understand.”
She smiled at him. “No,” Cassie said. “You do not.”
The taste of his cum was potent, medicinal, it made her tongue tingle like a numb hand coming to life and the sensation didn’t leave her before she fell asleep, alone in her bed, the stars through her window winking sharply in the moonless dark of the sky.
“How have they treated her?” Buchan asked.
“Captain?”
That tiny note of disappointment in her voice. Perhaps she thought it unfair of him to suggest the Peytons might have mistreated Mary. Maybe she was hurt that the first thing he said to her was so distant and impersonal. The light of the candle bowed and righted itself in the breeze through the open windows of the kitchen.
“Is she a servant here?”
“Your tone implies you think it demeaning to be a servant in this household.”
“Not at all,” he said. The flush hadn’t left his face and it deepened now, and he was glad for the near dark. “I am simply curious as to her circumstances —”
“John Peyton has already given you an account of her circumstances.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I just — I was hoping. I thought I would be able to trust your word over his, if that were necessary.”
“She has all she needs or wants. She sleeps twelve hours a night if she pleases and she often does. John Peyton dotes on her as he would a child and gives her little gifts of jewellery and whatnot. She is a help when it suits her, and if it suits her to sit and pout all day long, she is welcome to pout. She has visitors from all over the northeast shore, people coming to take a view of her, and I’d say she is partial to the attention.”
“You make it sound as if she wants to stay here.”