Wild Rose (36 page)

“You wouldn’t be any further ahead then,” he said. “I think that, maybe, this might work. But I’d need to get back my house when spring comes.” He was smiling; she smiled back.

“Of course, Monsieur,” she said. “I would keep my eyes open for other houses, or a better idea, or …” She spread her hands out widely. “It is all so uncertain.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “You rent my house for the winter. I won’t ask for any payment in advance, but when I come back in the spring to seed my crop, I’ll ask for payment then.”

“What if I have made no money?” she said, and the thought caused her to lift one hand to her face.

“Then you won’t owe me anything.” He wasn’t looking at her. She was overcome with gratitude and then, suddenly, she was flooded with heat and desire, shame and…”

“I don’t know – I can’t…”

“Careful,” he whispered. “People could be watching.” She looked up, blinking, could feel that he was restraining himself from stepping closer to her, or touching her, or both. She forced herself to slow her breathing.

“Thank you with all my heart,” she told him. And then, more softly, “I wish – I yearn…” She put out her hands as if in supplication, then quickly drew them back.

“Me too,” he said as softly, looking off down the street as if he were speaking to someone else. Silence, then, “There may be a way.”

“You leave soon.”

“I leave when I want to,” he answered her brusquely, as if annoyed that she would think he had to answer to anyone. “Bring Mrs. Emery with you. Tell her you want her advice about the house. When she says she has to go, you stay on, maybe, to clean a little. We can leave the door open.”

“You’ll be here tomorrow?” she asked.

“If you can come tomorrow, I’ll stay.”

Their eyes met, an instant or less, then Sophie left him standing by his horses in the near dark, stepped off the boardwalk, and walked away across the patch of grass struggling upward through the dried mud, now dead from cold, toward Mrs. Emery’s. She forced herself not to look back, could feel the jerkiness of her steps, but couldn’t make her body relax, as if it belonged to someone else. All the short distance she felt his eyes were on her, his hands resting on her body.

Afterward, as she undressed and got into bed beside Charles, she thought not about Harry, but about Pierre. It occurred to her for the first time that maybe it was her failure to listen, to think about the meaning of his outbursts that had brought her to her present situation. She had, she realized a streak of – she couldn’t think what to call it – stubbornness? Pierre had said that:
When you want something, Sophie…
In her desire to fulfill her homesteader’s dream, in her great love of her new, free life on the Western prairie, she had blinded herself to Pierre’s needs and wishes. What he had done to her and Charles in the end was unforgivable, but she had, to some degree, brought it on herself. It was true, she saw now, that she had loved herself and her own desires more than she had loved him.

Still, shocked as she was by this understanding, filled with dismay at what she had done that she now couldn’t alter, she found that under her shame and sorrow she also felt something that might be strength: If she was in part to blame for Pierre’s turning away from her, then it would be easier to accept this outcome, and not keep on wasting all her energy on this nebulous cloud of misery because he had spurned her, and in futile anger at Pierre and God for what had happened.

Chapter Eleven

Saecula Saeculorum

for ever and ever

W
hat time was it?
Eleven only? How would she endure to wait another hour, when she had already waited days for this moment? And how would she get out of the house without being caught? There could be no way but to go very slowly with long pauses between steps on the outer edges of the stairs where no one walked and thus, they didn’t creak. The door into the garden was through the kitchen, and Antoinette’s room was off the kitchen. If Antoinette caught her, she wouldn’t tell her grandmother, Sophie didn’t think, but she would bar the door and not let her out. Therefore, Antoinette must not hear her.

She had avoided thinking about what would happen when she and Pierre met, but now a fine perspiration broke out over her body, her cheeks felt hot, she seemed to be breathing from a spot higher in her chest than she normally did. He would kiss her. She would be kissed. He would clasp her to him. Would she allow it? What if they were caught? The very thought halted her in her pacing and her hand went up to cover her mouth. There was a footfall outside her door: grandfather on his way to the bedroom. Thank heaven she hadn’t lit a candle; he might have seen its light and wondered why at nearly midnight she was not asleep. She held perfectly still until she heard the handle turn on her grandparents’ bedroom door, and the click of the latch as it closed.

After a moment, while she waited for silence to descend again, she went to her bed and disarranged the bedcovers so that anyone thinking to look in on her would guess that she had perhaps gone downstairs for milk or some other reason she wasn’t able to think of, this because once she had gone into her bedroom for the night she had never left it that she could recall in all her years in this house. A bad dream? Yes, that would do. She had often had bad dreams as a child and would scream and wake Antoinette or grandmother who would come to her. With grandfather gone to his bedroom it would be safe to light the candle, if only briefly, just to look at the clock.

At last it was only a few minutes to midnight, Sophie left her room, taking infinite care to make not a sound, taking forever to go down the stairs avoiding every creaky floorboard, moving like a ghost through the hall and the kitchen, and going as silently as possible through the door from the kitchen into the garden where she paused, breathing in the warm, heavy night air, waiting for her eyes to adjust. The moon was at half, giving off a good light, but the garden was shaded by tall old trees along its borders and impenetrable darkness bloomed below them like the wide skirts of women. No matter, she could find her way out here blindfolded. She paused again, listening intently. In the night’s clear silence, any sounds seemed to her sharpened and precise. Holding herself motionless, alert and tuned to every tiny click, or ping, or whisper, it came to her that perhaps it was not the sounds that were different, but that somehow she herself was different.

Her senses turned inward for an instant, probing, assessing. Yes: That tense unease, that steady irritation that had begun to plague her some months ago, growing worse every day so that it took all her resources just to spend an evening sitting across from grandmother doing needlework, not to run away screaming, was now not to be found, had vanished in the intensity of this enterprise. Grandfather’s plan to marry her off to anyone but Pierre hung always in the back of her mind; she knew only that she would not acquiesce, they would have to force her–but she knew too how easily that would be done. For her there would be no escape short of running away–to go where? She would have thought immediately to go to Guillaume and Claire’s but felt sure that as much as her brother loved her, he would send her back. Or if she became very ill so that no one would want her – or – the thought caused her to catch her breath: If I were already married. She steadied herself, taking a deep breath, tuning herself again to the night, to the resting flowers and trees, to the air. Was Pierre already waiting in the shadows and she so silent he didn’t know she had come?

Then came the softest of whistles from somewhere near the centre of the garden, but off to her right. A wide thrill swept through her, a current, a tidal wave, and she almost called, “Pierre! I am here!” restraining herself just in time. She started down the flagstone path that ran from the kitchen door to its wooden gate at the end, no longer trying to quiet her footfalls or to silence the whisper of her gown. When she was abreast from where she thought the whistle had come, she called in a whisper, “Pierre!” Before the sound was fully out of her mouth his arms encircled her, he was pressing his face against hers, his mouth on hers, then on her cheek, her forehead, in her hair, then on her mouth again.

So this was what she had come for. She was stunned at how overcome he was by his own desire, and how powerful he was, not just physically from his hard labour on the farm, but also in this maleness she had never before in her life seen or known even existed. It left him no room for thoughts of ruination, or of hellfire, no room even for thoughts of what would become of her. She pressed her hands against his chest as hard as she could but without struggling, only to remind him that he had to regain control of himself, that he was frightening her, that whatever she might want, this was too soon. His breathing began to come less quickly, his stance relaxed, and she felt safe to put her arms down. He knows, she thought, goose bumps breaking out all over her body, my arms are not strong enough to stop him if he couldn’t govern himself. She couldn’t stop him. He came closer to her again, but this time when he kissed her it was more as she had imagined such a kiss would be: tender, an expression of his love without the demand that had been his first response to finally being alone with her. He was saying her name over and over again, softly, “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.”

They made their way to the bench under the fruit trees and sat side by side, pressed against each other, his arm around her, her near hand spread flat on his knee, Sophie thrilled by and welcoming the warmth of his very body seeping into her palm through the rough weave of his trousers. They talked freely for the first time in all the years they had known each other. She said, “Pierre, I cannot…I am filled with…” trying to tell him how it was as if something inside her swelled and grew larger every day, beating in rebellious waves against the thin boundary of her skin.

“Don’t go to Montréal, Sophie,” he said. “If you go, I think I will lose you. You will never come back.” Feeling the heat of his body, the weight of his arm around her, remembering the kisses with which he had greeted her, Montréal seemed pale and far away. And yet, she
would
go. She whispered to him, “I
will
come back. I
will
come back to you.” Then more kisses, Pierre handling her sweetly, tenderly, her waist, her neck, her forehead, lifting his hands to her torso and resting them just below her breasts. She knew she ought to object, but she did not. Were they not now promised to each other?

“Chouinard has come, eh?” he whispered. She froze. But in this village everyone knew everything, nothing escaped the town’s eyes. He had come with his parents and they and Sophie and her grandparents had sat in the
salon
drinking tea and making halting, boring conversation while Sophie ignored André as if he were more than merely invisible, an absence in the room. From the corner of her eye she had seen him more than once glancing at her quickly before he lowered his eyes. She would never marry André Chouinard. Never.

“They will make me marry one of those men,” she warned him. “I will get only to help choose which one.”

“Who?” She named them.

“I hear that Mathieu Grandmaison has taken ill.”

“What? How ill?”

“Very ill, they say. They say he grows thin.” He shrugged.

She hoped it was true, then felt ashamed. And anyway, one less suitor made no difference to the outcome.

“You want me to ask too?” Pierre inquired angrily. “You know they will send me away.” For the first time he pulled his hands back from her.

“We could run away,” she dared to say. He turned back to her, spoke angrily.

“No one would marry us, or if we found someone, they would only have it annulled.”

“We could live somewhere else, not come back here.”

“Merde!”
he said. She could feel her cheeks heat at the careless expletive. “I want to live here. I don’t want to leave everything behind!” That sudden rise to rage: how it both startled and excited her. She thought, what? Are we talking about marriage already? We have only just… But, she thought, we have always known this, and she thought of that orange yolk of the duck’s egg oozing down her skirt. It seemed a thousand, no ten thousand years ago.

“I must go soon,” he whispered. “Come to
l
a fête de la St.-Jean-Baptiste
, will you?”

“I can go with grandfather,” she whispered, a flicker of fear or puzzlement at what had happened to her the first time she had been allowed to stay for the bonfire struck her and involuntarily she shivered.

“I’ll see you there.” It was only two days away.

They kissed, and kissed again, and then again, while something rose in her that both frightened and thrilled her. It was only his pulling away from her that stopped her from – from what? She knew only she had given over her entire being to be close to him, closer even than this. “Enough,” he whispered. He murmured to her, much of it so softly she couldn’t hear, but didn’t need to ask. Then he stood, moved backward, and disappeared soundlessly into the dark shadows of foliage. She waited. A slight sound, a muted creak, and he was gone.

Safely back in her bed, she lay in the darkness and went over and over again in her mind every move, touch, caress, kiss, each word each had spoken. Now she thought,
He will marry me.
The word evoked nothing, instead, a wall, a darkness that she dared not probe. Her mind raced hither and thither, searching. What came to her then was his passion when he came out of the darkness and seized her, when he encompassed her with more than just his body. What else did she need or desire? His protection of her from the world. Their becoming one person.