The Endless Forest (49 page)

“No,” she said. “I’m on my way upstairs now.”

It was the most self-indulgent, decadent thing imaginable, but Martha did it. Wrapped in towels she went back to bed in the middle of the day, climbed up the steps to burrow under sheets and coverlets, soft and fragrant.

Daniel sat beside her on the edge of the bed. He looked very serious, but that wasn’t what she was hoping for from him, not just now.

“Won’t you come—rest?” Her voice cracked, and that made him grin.

When they were lying side by side with the storm still howling all around them, Daniel took her hand and folded their fingers together. It was a comforting thing, and Martha found herself on the brink of tears, for no good reason at all.

Daniel said, “This is nice.”

It was. It was wonderful, in fact.

“Nobody knows where we are,” Martha said. “We might as well be on Mr. Defoe’s island, cast away.”

“You like the idea?”

She lifted a shoulder. “I like the idea of a few days of quiet and rest.”

“Just the two of us.”

“Yes.”

“A wedding trip. A honeymoon, is that what it’s called?”

“Oh, no,” Martha said. “A honeymoon is hard work, for the bride most especially.”

He barked a surprised laugh.

Martha pressed her mouth hard and said, “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

“Fine,” Daniel said. “Tell me what you did mean.”

He would wait for her answer and so Martha began, a little grumpily. “In Manhattan when young people go off on a wedding trip, their time is hardly their own. They have to call on any and every relation within twenty miles all along the way, and sit in parlors and try not to look bored when all they want is—”

The corner of his mouth jerked.

“All they want is some quiet time together.”

“And how do you know this?”

She turned onto her side to look at him. “Girls talk to each other.”

“Of course you do. About kissing.”

Martha felt herself coloring but she was determined to hold on to her dignity. “Among other things.”

Now she had his interest.

“Such as?”

Her irritation was about to get the upper hand. She said, “You’re asking me to betray confidences.”

“I’m asking you to confide in me.”

She pushed herself up on one elbow. “Since we seem to have run aground on this topic, I should be able to ask you the same things.”

One brow arched. “What do you want to know?”

“Well,” Martha said slowly. She lay back down and concentrated on the canopy overhead. “Where did you learn all—that. The things you know. I can’t imagine you sitting around with Gabriel and Blue-Jay, talking about such things.”

“Oh, men talk,” Daniel said.

For some reason Martha was irritated by this. “You are saying that you know what you know—you learned what you know—from listening to other men talk about what they do with their wives?”

“Hell no,” Daniel said. “I don’t want to hear what Gabriel gets up to behind closed doors.”

“Well then, where—” she broke off. “Never mind. I don’t think I want to know.”

There was a long silence. A full minute, by Martha’s reckoning.

Daniel said, “You do want to know. Admit it.”

“Not every curiosity has to be satisfied.”

“Oh, but some do. Some curiosities beg to be satisfied.”

She put her face into the pillow and screamed.

When she came up for air he said, “I’ll tell you, you know. I don’t mind.”

Very calmly, with all the dignity she could muster, Martha said, “Your history is your business alone.”

“In great detail, if you care to hear.”

She glared at him and he raised one brow in response. It made him look disreputable, with his beard stubble and tousled hair. It made her want to slap him, or run away and hide, or laugh. She said, “There is something very unsettling about this side to your personality.”

“I understand,” he said. “But if you’ll let me explain—”

“Daniel!”

He was trying not to laugh. “Don’t ever play at cards, Martha. You’ll go bankrupt in a half hour.”

She said, “Let me be clear. I really don’t want to know about other women you’ve been with.” She thought: in Paradise? here in Johnstown? girls I know? And she bit down hard on her lip.

He was saying, “Why do you assume I’ve been with a lot of women?”

It was a reasonable question. She took a moment to think about it. “It would be better than hearing about one special person.”

He ran a finger down the length of her arm and she jerked. “There isn’t anybody like that. I’m not bound to anybody by affection or habit. I would have told you so.”

Martha let out a breath. “All right then.”

“But that still leaves your curiosity unanswered.”

She threw up her hands. “Go ahead and tell me. I want names and dates and details.”

“That I can’t give you,” Daniel said with mock seriousness. “But I could show you.”

She heard herself draw in a shocked breath. “I have no interest in meeting—whoever it is you’re talking about.”

Daniel rubbed a knuckle along his upper lip.

“I don’t know why you jump to the worst conclusions. There’s nobody to introduce you to. What I know I learned from a book.” And: “Martha, if you could see the look on your face.”

“I don’t believe you,” she stuttered. “I don’t believe such a book exists. Who would write such a thing? Who would read it? Why did
you
read it? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Do booksellers have such things available for anyone who asks?”

“Not every bookseller, no. I ordered it from a bookshop in London. It’s a novel, but of a particular sort.”

“A novel. Like Miss Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, or Mr. Scott’s
Ivanhoe
, or that novel that your mother dislikes so much, what was it called—”

“The Pioneers
. A work of fiction, a novel. Yes. That’s what I mean. Though I am fairly sure my mother has never read
Adventures of a French Lady of Leisure.”

He was neither embarrassed nor flustered, and moreover, it was clear he was not going to drop the subject. Nor could she really criticize him for that because she was having a difficult time convincing herself—much less him—that she had no interest in this book of his. If it existed.

He was saying, “It’s about a young Frenchwoman named Marie-Rose de la Force. She is very curious about the world.”

Martha bit her cheek but the question came out anyway. “A Frenchwoman?”

“Oui,”
Daniel said, and she heard herself giggle. It was time to take things in hand.

She said, “Don’t tell me any more.”

“As you wish,” Daniel said. “It would be easier to show you, anyway.”

She went still. “You have the book with you?”

“Your enthusiasm makes me cheerful. It bodes well for our marital happiness.”

She pinched him.

“Ow!” He laughed and pulled away. “Of course I don’t have it here. It’s at home. We could read it aloud in the evenings if you like.”

She knew she was sputtering, and she knew too that her outrage was not completely sincere; what she was feeling was more a tingling curiosity. A book. He had read about those things they had done in this very bed in a book. About a French lady.

Better to put it out of her mind.

He had moved closer, and now he whispered in her ear. “It’s a long book,” he said. “It will take us ages to work through it.”

A flush ran up Martha’s body from deep in her belly. Her breasts felt heavy and her nipples had hardened enough to make her chemise peak.

“If you are trying to seduce me,” Martha said, “you’re investing a great deal of effort for a foregone conclusion. And if I may say, I hope I’m at least as interesting as a book.”

“Darlin’,” he said. “You’ve got my undivided attention.”

This time there was something new between them. A playfulness, as rough as puppies but far more serious.

Daniel lifted his head to say, “Do you know what this is called?”

And she batted at him so that he laughed harder and pinned her wrist down, levered himself over her and kissed her breathless.

Oh, she was curious. She had to admit that to herself at least. There were so many questions she might have asked, but Daniel’s touch made them all go away. Once again standing over her, he lifted her up to him with his good hand, and she watched him, every nerve firing, as he fit himself to her and then settled exactly where she needed him to be.

“Oh,” she said.
“Ooh là là.”

P
aradise the rain came down in winding sheets and mist rose up from the ground and hovered over the town, like a lid on a boiling pot, rattling angrily and threatening to fly off. Not even noon, and two storms had already passed through. And more was coming, by the smell of the air.

Birdie tried to block out the conversation behind her, but without luck.

Adam was saying, “They might still be back today. And then school will start tomorrow.”

The little people could hardly wait for school to start. Even John, who was two years shy of being able to go himself. The only one of them who was unhappy about all this was Eliza. Her sister Amelie and her cousins Mariah and Isabel would be going to school, and she would have to stay behind with the babies. Her eyes swam with tears that she tried to blink away. Birdie felt protective of Eliza, who was just a little too young to fit in.

“Not tomorrow,” she said. “New-married people go off together to be alone.”

“Ooooh,” said Adam. “Can we go with them?”

“Then they wouldn’t be alone, would they?” Birdie wished she could take back her tone, but it was too late.

“You are grumpy,” said Mariah. “I thought you liked the idea of having Martha as a good-sister.”

“Of course she does,” said Henry, and she threw him a thankful glance.

“Then there’s no call to be so short,” Nathan said. “Especially now that you got your way about splitting the class in two.”

Unless Martha didn’t want to teach, now that she was married. Birdie kept that distressing idea to herself.

“Children!” called Curiosity from the kitchen. “Come on in here now. Food’s on the table.”

Things got a little better then. The little people liked to eat and they liked nothing better than to eat all together at one table. As long as someone was there to fill bowls and cups, they would all settle in and forget their arguments while they worked their way through soup and cornbread and dandelion greens stewed with bacon.

It was a relief, or at least Birdie expected to be relieved by the quiet, but to her own surprise she found she couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself.

To Curiosity she said, “Do you think they’ll be back today?” and all faces turned to her. Even Hannah looked up from spooning gruel into Simon’s open mouth.

“You know I ain’t never been good at telling weather,” Curiosity said. “Now Jennet, she the one can read the sky like a book. You think the rain going to stop anytime soon, Jennet?”

“Och, aye,” Jennet said, handing Isabel a piece of cornbread. “It won’t last the afternoon. But the roads will be a misery and I doubt we’ll see any of them before midday tomorrow.”

“And then school will start,” Adam said firmly.

“We’ll see,” Hannah said. “There are things they’ll need to attend to.”

By which she meant Jemima.

—

Birdie had spent much of Sunday trying to find a way to get a good look at Jemima Southern. She gave up finally and went home, and not an hour later Jemima had come to Uphill House, her husband beside her but no sign of the little boy, who interested Birdie just as much as his mother did.

If she was his mother. There was some debate about that possibility going on in corners in the village. If her ma and da were thinking the same thing, they weren’t talking about it where they might be overheard. She herself was trying to come up with a way to raise the subject to her ma when Jemima arrived.

Birdie thought right away it must be Jemima, because nobody else from Paradise would knock. A visitor opened the door and hallooed, and somebody hallooed back. You could tell who it was by the halloo itself. Birdie considered herself a pretty good mimic of other people’s halloos; she had once got in trouble for making Curiosity think Becca LeBlanc was at her front door.

That hour of Jemima’s visit was hard. First Ma wanted her to take the little people over to Curiosity, something Birdie most sincerely did not want to do but would have to; she had never directly disobeyed her ma, and knew that it would be a bad time to start. Ma was worried about too many things to count, and angry too, and so Birdie had walked with the little people over to Curiosity’s, listening the whole time to Nathan and Henry and Adam talking about the Fochts’ horses. Boys would get caught up in the least important thing, and then they called girls flighty.

Once she had delivered the little people—waving to Curiosity from the distance so as not to get caught up in having to tell everything—she flew back home as fast as she could, coming around the long way through the woods and in by way of the kitchen door so as not to disturb the grown-ups where they stood talking on the front porch.