Page 6 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)
On his first day at the building site, Theo set out to destroy the south wall of the chapel.
With more joy than he’d put into any labor for years, he swung an iron-headed mallet until the impact of the hammer on the mortared stone shuddered up his arms and sent chips flying.
As he pulled the mallet back, the mason who faced him swung at the same wall even harder.
One of the erupting shards struck Theo just below the rolled-up sleeve of his mason’s smock, scoring his forearm.
Theo ignored the twinge and hurled the mallet around for another blow.
Yes, he’d picked the right angry laborer to help him destroy this section of the wall.
The redheaded mason—by the name of Jules—was the man Theo had argued with nearly a fortnight ago, when the mason had risked Etienne’s life with his negligence.
So, when Theo had arrived this morning to announce himself as the new overseer, Theo wasn’t surprised that the news set the mason seething.
Jules might have hoped to get the overseer’s position himself.
When another flying shard scored Theo’s arm, Theo raised his gaze to meet the mason’s blood-red glare.
One flying shard was an accident. Two were a coincidence.
If Theo got hit again, he’d have no choice but to toss down the mallet and make a lunge at Jules.
First day on the job, Theo had to establish his skill and authority, but he’d rather not do either by violence.
He needed every last worker if he were to raise the walls of this chapel, and he especially needed strong and experienced ones like this angry bull.
Today, the two of them were either going to take this wall down together—or end up brawling amid half-shattered rock.
Fifty-fifty chance of the latter, Theo figured, pulling back for another swing.
“What are you doing?”
At the sound of the shout, Theo struck the wall with a wallop and then let the weight of the mallet bring down his arms. Standing just outside the radius of flying chips stood the fair-haired goddess he’d never expected to see again, glowing like a sunburst.
What the hell was she doing here? The only women supposed to be on these grounds were the nuns.
“Monsieur Martin.” Her nostrils flared. “Mother Superior hired you to build a chapel.”
“And that is—” he gripped the mallet with two hands, ready to swing anew “—what I’m doing.”
“You are standing in a pile of rubble.”
“You shouldn’t be here, woman.” Jules wiped an arm across his forehead as he squinted beneath it. “Haven’t you learned—”
“Jules is right,” Theo interrupted in a voice fierce enough to shut the mason up. “This is a dangerous place. And we’ve got work to do.”
“I admire your industriousness,” she said in a way that didn’t at all sound like admiration, “but the Reverend Mother has made it my responsibility to keep an eye on the progress of the building.”
Like hell she did.
He didn’t say the words out loud but she twitched and took a halting step back as if she’d heard them.
“She hired me as the overseer.” Theo planted the mallet head on the ground and gripped the tip of the handle. “I’ll be the one telling the Reverend Mother what she needs to know.”
Movement out of the corner of his eye proved to be Etienne, striding toward his mother from where Theo had assigned him to tend the fires of the lime ricks. The half-grown boy stopped a few feet away from his mother, shooting Theo a frown like a warning.
The boy muttered, “What are you doing here, Mother?”
“I’m not here to bother you, Etienne.” She looked over the boy’s smock, dusted with ash. “I’ve already agreed to let you work here, so long as you remember your promise. After you’re done laboring, you must study for the monastery exam.”
“I will,” Etienne said, throwing out his arms to take in the building site and all the men watching. “But you shouldn’t be here.”
His mother tilted her head, face softening, giving the boy a look that pulsed with affection. Behind Theo’s sternum, something yanked. He’d lived over two and a half decades, yet his years of indentured service had stolen away all memory of such gentleness.
I will get it back.
All of it.
“My business is with Monsieur Martin,” she said softly. “You mustn’t worry. It won’t take long.”
“Well, if it’s about the wall, the overseer is right.” Etienne eyed every man within sight and didn’t skip over Theo. “There were too many stones mortared against the grain.”
“That may be true,” she said, turning her attention back to Theo. “But before the Reverend Mother left this morning, she didn’t say a thing to me about destroying a wall.”
“Because the Reverend Mother deferred all construction decisions to me.” Theo resisted the urge to drink in the beauty of her, in her yellow dress, battered leather boots peeking out from the frothy hem.
By the look darkening her son’s face, Theo was failing.
“And,” he added, “when she left this morning, the Reverend Mother didn’t mention your involvement. ”
A sigh lifted her chest in a way he shouldn’t be noticing.
Etienne hadn’t budged from her side. Realizing—as Etienne had—that all the workers had paused in their labors to watch the drama unfolding, Theo handed his mallet to the nearest mason and directed the woman toward a table under a canopy away from the dust and building debris.
“Let’s talk privately.” He nodded briefly at her son, admiring the boy’s protectiveness even if it was against him. “You, Etienne, get back to work.”
Madame Tremblay swiveled on a heel to walk toward a canvas canopy beneath which he kept the chapel plans and supply lists, pinned to a table by rocks.
To the sound of Jules’s deep-throated laughter, Theo followed her, watching how her blonde hair, gathered in a roll at her nape, brushed her neck as she wove around piles of fieldstone.
With every step, her skirts shifted across her nicely rounded backside in a way that made every man’s attention sharpen—until his glare joined Etienne’s, and they all turned back to work.
When she reached the table, she headed straight to the far side. He ducked his head under the shelter to join her, stopping inside the cool shade. Crossing his arms, he braced himself for…for what? She was a slip of a girl.
She held no power over him.
“I spoke to the Reverend Mother this morning,” he began, “as she was climbing into the canoe to go to Quebec. She agreed to the terms of my employment and told me to start today as overseer.”
The lady lifted her pretty chin. “I spoke to her, too, before she left the convent with her satchel. She made no mention of me at all?”
“Not a word.”
She tented her fingertips on the table and leaned into them. “It is becoming clear that though Sister Martha is a holy woman capable of persuading bishops and kings to bend to her will, when it comes to smaller matters, she relies on blind faith and grand assumptions.”
He couldn’t make any sense out of that muttering, so he stood and breathed in the scent of cut grass and violets coming off her. The fragrance muddled his senses in a way that it shouldn’t, for a man who’d be on his way home to France in ten weeks and one day.
“Why,” he said, harsher than he meant to, “are you still here at the congregation and not with your husband?”
Her head swept up, brown eyes flashing, but her attention rested on him for only a moment—like a bird alighting upon a branch—before darting away.
Her flitting unease brought to his attention the fact that he was head-and-shoulders taller than her, sweaty, breathing hard, covered in stone dust, and bursting with frustration at this delay.
He uncrossed his arms in an effort to look less intimidating.
“Sister Martha—the Reverend Mother,” she said, keeping her gaze low, “has agreed to take me into the convent as a laywoman, until she gets back from Quebec. As for my husband…he has disappeared into the wilderness. I’m…I have reason to believe I’m widowed.”
A rush of something went through him, blowing away the phantom husband he’d imagined at her back. To think this lovely woman might be unclaimed by any man.
“Sister Martha,” she forged on, “has taken me in on a provisional basis, in the same way she has hired you. She has tasked me with two duties—first, to reconcile the convent accounts that have been neglected in her two-year absence, and two, to keep a daily journal of the work accomplished, and expenses spent, on the building until she returns.”
He dragged hot air deep into his lungs, the acrid ash of the nearby lime ricks searing the lining of his windpipe. This utter lack of respect…. He should be used to it by now. “The Reverend Mother,” he said, “doesn’t trust me.”
“She doesn’t know you. Or me, for that matter. We’re both strangers she took in on faith.” She crossed her arms. “But I’m here as a volunteer, paid only with meals and a pallet. Her expectations for you are higher, since your wages are costing the congregation dearly.”
Theo suppressed a flinch. Only his master benefited from those outrageous wages.
Making the congregation pay was the only way the bastard would give up his favorite slab of muscle.
Theo would have worked on this building site for free, after so many years of hauling out stumps.
But an indentured servant had no control over his world.
Suddenly, he couldn’t bear to stand here any longer like a servant in her ladylike presence.
“If we’re done”—he took a step into the sun—“I’ve got work to do.”
“Not yet.” She stopped him with a tense but quivering voice.
“I admit I am completely ignorant of building matters. Yet I find myself tasked with the responsibility of making sense of such matters in a journal that will be read by Sister Martha when she returns. To that end… Would you explain to me, in a way that I can understand, why you must destroy that wall?”