Page 11 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)
Prison.
Sitting in the bow of a canoe now cutting a wake through the Saint Lawrence River, Cecile squeezed her eyes shut as the word prison clanged a sonorous bell in her head.
That alarm joined all the other discordant bells echoing through her mind since she’d marched away from Theo in the aftermath of the fistfight two days ago.
Unfortunately, shutting herself up in the convent to avoid interactions with Theo, and pressing a pillow over her ears, hadn’t helped her forget what she’d heard.
Or the violence she’d witnessed. Now, even the wobble of the canoe made those bells clang louder.
Theo Martin, criminal.
Up surged the old fear, the acid cold, the softening of tendons, the trip-flutter of her pulse.
Lifting her legs, she twisted on the bench to face Etienne, paddling in the stern.
Focusing on her stubble-chinned son always helped ease her tumbling panic—she never wanted Etienne to witness that.
Not for the first time today, she noticed that her son’s once boyishly narrow shoulders had begun to strain the seams of his linen shirt.
He’d been working hard on that building site, pushing wheelbarrows full of stone, stirring slowly hardening vats of mortar, building some muscle under the eyes of Theo—
Theo the fighter.
The spinning panic grew spikes. She sat straight up, wobbling the vessel.
Etienne shot her a glance. “Were you dozing, Mother?”
“No, no. I was… startled by a dragonfly.” It seemed a good enough excuse. Dozens of them hovered, iridescent wings vibrating, by the reeds near the riverbank.
Etienne laughed, a low, manly rumble that bore no resemblance to the childlike giggle she feared she would never hear again. “They don’t bite,” he said. “And we’re moving too fast for them to land on you anyway. We’re almost at the convent.”
So soon? She dug her teeth into her lower lip.
All morning, during a picnic excursion to the picturesque Lachine Rapids just upstream from Montreal, she’d been seeking a moment to broach the subject of Theo with Etienne, to see if he’d heard anything about Theo’s criminal history.
But two issues deterred her. First, Etienne was always bearish and moody when she spoke about Theo, and second, justice and punishment were fraught subjects between them because of all the measures she was taking to dodge their own entanglement with the law.
They’d shared a whole long morning together, and she’d never quite found her tongue.
“You’re wearing yourself out paddling,” she said, frustrated. “Can you slow down a little?”
And stop growing up?
“I couldn’t slow down even if I wanted to.” Etienne shrugged, the dappled sun dancing silver over his shiny black hair. “The current is running fast.”
Everything was running fast. The water, her warring thoughts…
and time. She peeled her hands from the gunwales and set them on the blanket folded on her lap.
This matter of Theo’s criminal past, maybe violent past, could affect Etienne, who worked closely with him every day.
If only she could make sense of it all. Yes, Theo had been convicted of a crime he’d hidden from her.
She was running away from her own crime, so who was she to judge?
Yet Theo was also capable of great violence—and the combination churned her stomach.
Etienne’s sudden laugh jerked her back to attention. Sunlight glanced over her eyes, blinding as the canoe rounded a jutting outcropping to come within sight of the congregations’ landing place.
“Mother,” Etienne said in a voice compressed with humor, “you may want to avert your eyes.”
“Whyever for—oh!”
She turned her head away so fast that the roll of hair at the nape of her neck swung to brush a shoulder.
She’d averted her eyes too late, though, to avoid seeing a group of naked men, splashing around knee-deep in the river.
How had she forgotten that every Sunday, in good weather, the laborers bathed on the banks of the Saint Lawrence?
Now behind her eyes was branded the picture of a great variety of hairy naked men’s bodies.
She could tell by the laughter and mocking hailing that they’d seen her, too. “Goodness,” she said. “I know the nuns shut themselves in the convent during their bathing time, but don’t the workers realize they’re only a long stone’s throw from the windows?”
“Yeah,” Etienne said, his voice cracking more from suppressed laughter than the ongoing changing of his voice. “They just don’t care.”
“Head farther downstream, Etienne, and fast.” Witnessing her son’s snickering and shaking shoulders reminded her that, yes, he was still a boy—if only in the way all men were boys. “We’ll disembark farther downstream.”
The current pulled hard on the keel, shooting them downriver.
Soon after, Etienne staked his paddle hard into the water to veer the bow of the canoe toward the bank at the far east edge of the landholding.
Pulling up to the steeper bank, Etienne jumped onto the water’s edge and yanked the canoe onto the hard-packed verge.
She folded the blanket over her arm and took Etienne’s hand as he helped her out.
Only when she reached the top of the bluff did she dare a brief glance toward the faraway bathers and was distracted by the sight of someone swimming deeper into the river.
The man’s head bobbed out of the water long enough for her to recognize with a jolt the dark-haired, clean-shaven man who’d taken unwelcome root in her thoughts.
“Etienne, why is Monsieur Martin out there?” She didn’t dare call him Theo in front of her son.
“I dunno.” He made a grunting noise. “Probably showing off by fighting the current.”
She squinted, ignoring Etienne’s scowl. “He’s taking something off that floating log.”
Etienne joined her at the top of the bluff as she watched Theo shift a small burden to his other arm, keeping whatever it was above the water level before slinging his free arm over the timber.
The floating log carried Theo and his burden downstream, and when the tree trunk started drifting farther from the shore and into a swifter midriver current, Theo released his grip and swam toward the riverbank.
Awkwardly, he labored toward where Etienne had pulled up their canoe.
As he entered the shallows, he found the river bottom and then rose to his full height.
She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until dizziness made her sway on her feet.
Theo wasn’t naked like the other bathing men, but his long linen shirt clung to his body from throat to just above his knees.
His sleeves were rolled up above carved forearms, and the moisture-translucent linen pasted to his shoulders, the planes of his chest, the ripples of his abdomen—and where he was wearing a low-slung loincloth beneath—where she shouldn’t be staring.
Forcing her spine into a rod, she swiveled away, pretending to find interest in the woods beyond.
Etienne raised his voice. “Is that what I think it is?”
“I saw it running up and down that timber.”
Theo made his way up the bluff, she heard his squelching footsteps.
He said, “Want to hold it, Etienne?”
“Hold it?” Etienne shook his head. “Why did you bother saving it? I’ve been stabbed by those needles more than once.”
“This one’s quills are barely hardened,” Theo said. By the length of his shadow, Cecile guessed that he’d reached the top of the berm. “You want to hold it, Cecile?”
She sensed, rather than saw, Etienne stiffen at Theo’s casual use of her given name.
Saints alive, didn’t Theo know any better than to talk to her that way within her son’s hearing?
And why did Theo decide to swim back to shore here, when she’d been avoiding him for the last few days?
This felt like an ambush and left her no choice—in spite of her swimming senses—but to pivot and face him.
She intended to focus on the black ball of a creature he held in the crook of his elbow, but the man holding it couldn’t be ignored.
He looked as comfortable standing before her in thin, soaking linen as he might look standing shirtless on the scaffolding of the building site.
All the rough men of this settlement, maybe due to the dearth of women, were easy with their nudity.
Yet the intimacy of seeing him in his body’s linen-plastered glory struck her in a thousand competing ways.
Her ears rang and her throat went bone-dry.
Clutching the blanket in her arms to get hold of herself, she forced her attention back to his bicep and the wet blob of black, spiky fur, saying, “It’s just a baby porcupine.”
Theo nodded. “I suspect it isn’t more than a few days weaned.”
Porcupine meat had been her husband’s favorite meal, she remembered all too well.
He would come back from hunting—during those terrible months when he was home—then toss a dead pair at her feet and demand she cook them for the evening’s supper.
She couldn’t count how many times she’d been jabbed by the spines she’d had to pluck—and hurt in other ways when she didn’t cook it fast enough or to his liking.
And here Theo was, cradling the wild, spiny thing.
She shifted her gaze from the pup to the man, keeping her eyes above his chin as best she could. “You risked your life in that current for a baby porcupine?”
“I’m a strong swimmer.” He grinned, his shirt finding new purchase clinging to a dark nipple, alert from the cold. “The little thing was falling off the timber.”
“It isn’t going to be grateful,” Etienne warned. “Look. It’s starting to raise its ruff.”
Theo bent at the knees and set the writhing thing on the grass. The pup rolled onto his taloned paws and shook himself, white-tipped quills alert. With its tiny front paws, it began wiping moisture off its snout.
Etienne. Orphans. And now he’d saved a porcupine. Saints alive, what was she supposed to think of this man?