Page 33 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)

“I’m not saying I’ll confess.” She wasn’t sure she could bear this discussion much longer. “I do value my life…but I’m not as strong as you think I am.” She raised a hand. “Please, let’s not argue. Let’s talk of other things. Tell me about Etienne.”

Theo frowned at the change in topic, concern still writ large upon his face. “He is safe. Sister Martha broke the rules to keep him inside the convent.”

“Did soldiers come for him, too?”

“For interrogation, yes. But the Reverend Mother refused to let the soldiers into the convent, or bring Etienne out to them.”

Her relieved sigh emptied her lungs to the dregs.

“You should have seen her, Ceci.” Theo’s chest rose and fell, the line between his brows narrowing.

“Sister Martha fought like a general. She never denied that Etienne was inside the schoolhouse. He was shouting, everyone could hear him. ‘He’s but a child,’ she told the soldiers.

‘A child terrified for his mother.’ She warned the soldiers that they’d have to knock her down, breach the sanctuary of a holy house, and be accountable to the bishop himself if they dared to take the boy by force. ”

She gripped a bar to stay upright. She owed Sister Martha a thousand Hail Marys and a million Our Fathers.

Etienne has sanctuary.

At least one of Cecile’s foolish plans had won out. “Did you speak with my son?”

“Not yet. Sister Martha had to lock him in a closet to keep him from coming to the fort in a rage. That’s what the screaming was about. He’s furious at your arrest.”

“Promise me you’ll protect him.” Outside, the sonorous chime of the first terce bell rang from the fort’s chapel, signaling their time was up. “Most importantly, keep him away from the court, and the investigators, and the law.”

“You don’t want him to testify.”

“Of course not. Self-defense is no defense at all in this situation. We both know that. Also… there’s another matter. A secret I still haven’t told you.”

Theo’s face darkened. “Tell me. I need to know everything.”

She breathed in deep, gathering courage to say what must be said so that Theo could protect Etienne long after she was gone.

“Two weapons were fired that terrible day, Theo. Only one of them was mine.” She swallowed a lump speared with a thousand sharp pins. “But I have sworn—on all the angels and saints—that I will be the only one to hang for this crime.”

Though the sun shone brightly overhead, Theo trudged back to the convent lost in a mental fog, parsing out what a shivering, exhausted, too-thin Cecile had just confessed from her jail cell.

He should have recognized the truth earlier.

Now he understood why she’d been so stubbornly determined to find Etienne a seat in a monastery school, though the boy had the aptitude, skill, and desire to work with stone.

Etienne needed sanctuary that a building site couldn’t provide but a monastery school could.

Such was a mother’s love.

“Monsieur Martin!”

Theo raised his head to find the Reverend Mother huffing and puffing as she surged full steam across the chapel building site.

He took a few jogging steps to meet her halfway. “What is it?”

“He’s gone.”

No need to ask who she was talking about. He looked all around him, up and down the road, toward the banks of the Saint Lawrence River and then farther past the road to the edge of the woods and a gristmill. No sign of a slim boy, or flapping fringe, or flowing dark hair.

He said, “How did he get out?”

“I was a fool.” She gripped her hips while gasping for breath.

“He was crying, the poor thing, when I took him food. We talked as he ate. He asked for some work, said the idleness was driving him mad.” She shook her head, the cross hanging from her neck swinging. “I sent him to chop wood just outside—”

“How long ago?”

“No more than a few minutes. I went in to get his coat. He seemed so subdued.” She ran a hand over her brow.

“When I came out, it was like the Good Lord Himself had snatched him up to the heavens. I saw his footprints in the grass, heading toward this road. That’s what I was just following.

Heaven save us, where did he go?” The nun glanced beyond Theo, along the road to Montreal, and grasped her cross.

“If Etienne went to confront the magistrate—”

“He didn’t pass me on the road. He couldn’t have gone far.”

Theo followed the nun to where she’d seen footprints, then he trailed them to some scuffs across the rutted road. On the opposite verge, Theo discovered a fresh, wet outline of a muddy boot pressed into the frost-glazed grass and farther up the slope.

“Reverend Mother,” he said, turning toward her. “Jules is still at the building site, stacking fieldstone. Tell him to head toward the fort, just in case Etienne slipped by us. Tell him he must bring the boy back, even if he has to knock him out and haul him over his shoulder.”

The sister nodded and set off to find Jules.

Theo followed the path of the footprints. Some ways up the slope, he passed a matted-down place in a swale of longer grass, where the boy must have burrowed to avoid detection after the nun came out to find him gone.

Theo came upon Etienne around the back of the gristmill, slumped against the mossy wall.

Making scuffing noises as he approached, Theo waited for the boy to notice his arrival.

Etienne didn’t lift his head. Only by the tightening of shoulders did Theo realize the boy was aware that he was no longer alone.

Shifting his gaze toward a fringe of thick woods, Theo leaned against the gristmill wall.

He was the wrong person to be talking to Etienne about his mother.

Theo had saved the boy’s life the first day they met, but gratitude had long been replaced with a sullen hostility.

The boy had sensed the growing relationship between Theo and his mother long before either one of them had admitted it.

Considering the violence in the boy’s upbringing, Etienne’s protectiveness of his mother was something to admire. Now, seeing him slumped in despair. Theo felt as if a lead weight hung on his own heart.

Theo lowered himself to a crouch, the wall of the gristmill at his back.

The boy, chin on his knees, yanked hunks of grass from the ground and tossed them away. The boy’s mind seemed to be spinning with the same heaving force as the arms of the windmill above their heads.

A dozen full rotations passed before Etienne ventured a word.

“I am going to testify.” He threw a chunk of sod farther away than the others. “My mother can’t stop me. Neither can you.”

The boy was talking big, but there was no mistaking the iron determination in his words. Theo wondered if it would be better to treat the boy less like a runaway and more like the man he was becoming—the man he would need to be, to survive all of this.

Theo said, “I just spoke to your mother.”

His head jerked up. “Is she all right?”

“She’s tired. Cold. Worried about you.” Theo laid his head back against the wall. His heart squeezed at the memory of Cecile’s icy fingers and the violet shadows under her eyes. “She’s determined to protect you at all costs.”

“She’s the one who needs protecting.” The boy tossed a tuft of grass and folded his arms around his upraised knees. “She’s the one who’s going to be hanged.”

“She won’t hang. I swear it—”

“You can’t swear it.” A vein throbbed at the boy’s temple. “She told me about you, you know. The night before she went to the Girards’. She told me why you’re an indentured servant and what happened back in Paris. She said that while she was gone, I needed to respect you in all things.”

Sounds like her order didn’t stick.

“That’s why you can’t swear she won’t hang.” Etienne’s nostrils flared. “You know my mother won’t get a fair trial.”

“I’ll set her free anyway.”

“Impossible. She’s in a cage in the fort. There’s no escaping a place so well guarded.”

“If she’s convicted, they will have to take her to Quebec. Worst case, I’ll rescue her from the tumbrel.”

“And then what?” Etienne turned angry black eyes on him. “You’ll both be hunted down.”

“The wilderness”—Theo gestured toward the fringe of trees at the height of the slope as he remembered Cecile’s own words—“is wide and deep.”

“She would hate living in the wilderness. She would hate always running from the law.” Etienne turned his face away. “Mom should be living in a palace with servants and lots of food. She should have nothing harder to do than embroider all day.”

Those words were a kick in the gut, for Theo wanted to give her exactly all that. But first, she needed her freedom.

“Only I can free her,” Etienne insisted. “By going to the magistrate and telling the truth.”

Theo swallowed a scoff. “She told you what happened to me, and you still believe the truth will matter here?”

“You don’t know what happened that day.” Etienne flung his words. “If you did, you’d march me to the magistrate yourself.”

“I do know everything.”

That got a twitch out of the boy—and then a stony stillness, the whir of the windmill blades loud above them.

“Your mother trusts me, Etienne.” Having this conversation was like creeping through sand flats with hidden sinkholes. “After everything she’s gone through, think of how difficult that must have been. I will not break that trust, not to her and not to you either.”

The boy swiveled his head, hiding his face, clearly grappling with the dilemma of whether to trust him or not. Theo waited, sensing nothing he said would make a difference. The boy was turning into a man—he must make his own decision.

“If she told you everything,” Etienne said in a low, shaking voice, “then you know it was self-defense. That bastard had nearly killed Mom a hundred times—sometimes sober or, like that day, in a murderous drunk…”

The story tumbled out. Etienne told of how he’d heard her cry out in the woods, how he’d come running, how he’d stepped between them.

He’d nearly lost consciousness at the first blow.

He’d come to with his father looming over him, spitting hate.

He’d crawled back from him, thrown his arms wide, and felt against his palm the bore of his own already-loaded weapon.

He’d raised it only to find himself staring down the bore of his father’s weapon.

Two blasts had echoed through the woods.

Etienne finished on a strangled sob. Theo gave the boy a few moments to gather himself.

Only then did Theo speak the same words he’d said to Cecile. “You did what had to be done, Etienne.”

Etienne’s Adam’s apple bobbed.

“If you go to the magistrates and confess what you just told me, they’ll call you both guilty.” Theo’s jaw tightened at the thought. “Have you considered your mother’s agony if she had to watch you die on the scaffold beside her?”

“This isn’t fair.” The boy’s lips thinned. “It’s not right.”

“I agree.” Theo pulled a piece of grass from the ground, as the boy had been doing, peeling it apart as he spoke.

“Someday, there may come a better system of justice that will be blind to money and power. A system that won’t use torture to elicit confessions.

One that will take into account the greater circumstances when determining guilt or innocence.

Like for the father who steals bread for the sole purpose of feeding his starving family, or the scapegoat convicted of arson because she has no influential friends to help in her defense, or the young man who shoots a violent killer so he—and his mother—won’t be murdered in turn.

Until that time, Etienne, we have to work with the system that exists. ”

The boy’s chest heaved as he focused on something a thousand miles beyond the crest of the hill. “What you said before, about rescuing her from the tumbrel. Would you…would you really do that?”

“Yes.”

The boy shot to his feet and paced away a few steps only to swivel on a heel to stand directly in front of Theo. Etienne looked as prickly and alert as a wary porcupine.

A full-grown one.

“If it comes to that, to rescuing her…” Etienne tilted his chin. “I go with you.”

Theo spoke without hesitation. “Agreed.”

Ceci wouldn’t like the deal, but Theo could tell there’d be no locking Etienne away this time. The boy needed to protect his mother, and Theo would not squash the young man’s fiercest and most honorable quality.

Ceci would have to forgive them both later.

And there would be a later. For, looking at this young man, an idea had come to Theo—a better, less criminal plan for a chance at a happy future.

“Come with me.” Theo slapped a hand on Etienne’s shoulder. “Let’s set your mother free.”