River Thieves (31 page)

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.

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.

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.”