Page 8 of The Autumn Wife (King’s Girls #3)

Afortnight later, Cecile stood outdoors by the stable amid the violet gloaming of a fading day.

She slid her gaze from five potential laborers toward the vexing man who’d gathered them.

Her glare had no effect on the grinning overseer, who let his long, strong body fall back against the log wall.

He kicked the sole of one foot against it and crossed his stone-dusted arms in a way that made his muscles bulge.

Worst of all, he eyed her with the same expression of amusement as when she’d first announced to him that she intended to become a nun.

Annoyance rippled through her. That comment had been meant to put him off—not pique his curiosity or interest. And yet his eyes glinted in a way that unnerved her more than usual.

He couldn’t be serious about hiring these half-starved youths to work at the building site.

Had he just used them to lure her out of the convent and across a field to the old stable, where he could dismiss these so-called laborers and thus be alone in the dusk to tweak her terrors?

Saints alive, the world was full of wolves.

“Monsieur Martin.” She jerked her chin toward the ragged group gathered around an outdoor fire. “You must be joking, bringing this crew to me. These are not working men.”

“They are,” he said, his voice light. “They are too young to go trading and too skinny to pull tree stumps and clear land. But I’ve convinced them to give honest work on a building site a try.”

A more motley group of ragamuffins she’d never seen. “They’re barely out of childhood.”

“Francois”—He jerked his chin toward the gangly boy supervising the others around the cooking fire—“is seventeen.”

Thin as a bean, Francois looked years younger than Etienne, who was just fourteen. “I assume the other children are all younger?”

“In age, yes, but not in life experience.” He shrugged those massive shoulders, which she’d seen brazenly bare and gleaming as he worked shirtless in the hot August sun, damn him.

“These young men will strive harder than half the crew already laboring on that building site. I would wager my pay on it, if I could.”

She wished she could claw back some of the overseer’s outrageous wages.

The Reverend Mother—who preferred to be called Sister Martha—was extraordinarily good at soliciting donations, but she refused to bargain with vendors and was hopeless at keeping track of expenses.

While looking over the accounts, Cecile had already discovered that the butcher in Montreal regularly overcharged by an order of magnitude.

And all the hired masons were richly compensated, though none as much as this man.

A man she still couldn’t believe was an indentured servant.

He looked like the least likely kind of man to suffer an existence under another man’s thumb.

As her stomach started to churn, she tore her attention away from the fingers tapping against his swelling bicep and focused on the matter at hand, a tactic she’d used often since they’d started working together.

“I knew laborers would be scarce. But I expected, over the last few weeks, you would gather adults, maybe refugees in need of work.”

“There’s peace with the Iroquois, so there are not as many Huron refugees as in previous years.” That vexing smile widened, softening his hard-planed features. “If you prefer, I know some drunks I might be able to coax out of the tavern—”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“—or I could fetch prisoners from the fort. But I can’t vouch for their work ethic, or their physical condition, after spending time in that jail.”

A trickle slid down her spine. She’d once met a man—a friend of her husband’s—who’d spent some time in that Montreal jail.

He liked to plant a mangled leg on a chair and boast of how he’d survived the notorious “boot.” Prison guards had affixed two planks around his calf, from ankle to knee, and wedges had been pounded ever deeper between the planks and his leg until he confessed… or his leg snapped.

Thank heavens, she thought with a shiver, that she and Etienne had attained a measure of sanctuary from the law.

“Madame”—the overseer pushed away from the wall and stood on spread feet—“if I’d seen any hale and hearty men between the ages of twenty and fifty, I would have offered them the opportunity to work here.

But they would have cost you much more than this crew.

All these young workers need are room, food, and safety.

That’s a treasure beyond imagining for them. ”

She gave the children a keener assessment, shifting her attention to a boy whose coloring suggested he was a full-blooded Huron.

Against an ill-fitting shirt, ribs showed on the boy’s narrow chest. She glanced at a smaller boy, who stood next to the gangly Francois.

Bony-kneed, dirty-faced, wearing breeches too short for his legs and a shirt that looked like it hadn’t been laundered all season.

With a heart-pull, she was reminded of the first time she’d laid eyes upon her stepson, right down to the unkempt hair hanging in his eyes.

This wretched, unsettling overseer had done this on purpose.

He must have figured that she—a mother herself—would look upon this woebegone collection of unloved waifs and her heart would overrule all doubts.

The churning in her gut could just be the old fears rising, but it could also prove his tactics to appeal to her softer side were working.

But the mason hadn’t taken into account that every financial decision she made would be scrutinized by Sister Martha.

Cecile figured that employing the older boy, Francois, would be acceptable—after all, it had been the Reverend Mother’s suggestion to give Etienne a position among the workers to keep him out of trouble until she could make arrangements for his schooling.

But as for setting the smaller, half-starved children to labor for their bread…

Wouldn’t the nun be more inclined to see them settled in easier circumstances, somewhere other than laboring at a building site?

She gathered as much air as she could muster. “Monsieur Martin—”

“Theo,” he retorted.

She blinked, knocked back by his vehemence.

“Theo,” he repeated, hiking his hands on his hips, where the waistband of his breeches sagged. “I’m no ‘monsieur,’ not until I’m a free man again. Just like you’re not Sister Anything until you take vows.”

She stilled, her ribs tightening. She couldn’t possibly call him Theo.

There was intimacy in speaking someone’s first name, and intimacy with men was exactly what she’d come to the convent to avoid.

Bad enough that she had to see this disturbing mason every day.

He looked like a brute, stood like a soldier, and worked alongside the other laborers until he was just as drenched in sweat.

Whenever he loomed into her presence, her gut flexed between terror, resistance, and some other prickly feeling she feared examining too closely.

“Call me Theo,” he said more softly, before pointing at the misfits around the fire. “And call them Francois, Pierre, Michel, Jacques, and Jean—”

“Sister Martha,” she interrupted, as a breeze tossed the needle-heavy boughs of the pines nearby, “will accept Francois and perhaps Michel as workers. But as for the other children—”

“She wants the building done above all else, doesn’t she?”

Cecile huffed a breath. “Of course, but—”

“I’ll be teaching these boys a trade, and they’ll help me finish the building sooner. And isn’t caring for the poor the work of a nun, as well, Madame Tremblay, soon-to-be Sister…Sister what? Have you picked a saint’s name yet?”

Sometimes courage was foolhardy—but this man’s overbearing confidence prompted her to shoot him an angry gaze. Wasn’t he full of questions about things he had no business knowing and she didn’t dare divulge?

Stay focused on the children. She jerked a chin at the crowd. “Where did you find them?”

“On the streets of Montreal. Hungry, without a home or family. In physical danger.”

All five kids stood still, watching her and Theo—no, Monsieur Martin. Their eyes gleamed in the firelight and she fell into those gazes one by one, a soreness growing in her chest. Dear heavens.

Tearing her gaze away, she let her head fall back and blinked at the sky.

Dusk had turned to twilight, for the stars above winked.

The scented smoke of roasting meat wafted above her, rising from two skinned rabbits turning on a wooden spit.

In her mind was burned the sight of the group, especially the youngest, who didn’t look older than ten.

Cecile wasn’t even sure the waif wasn’t a girl, dressed as a boy for her own protection.

What would happen to a young girl left alone on the streets of Montreal?

“Before I started working here,” Theo began, his voice much gentler than it had been moments ago.

“I used to come to Montreal about once a month to fetch supplies and do an odd job or two when there was opportunity. One of those boys picked my pocket. I followed, got back what he stole, but Jacques slipped away. Every return trip, I noticed them more, skulking around corners, stealing food from carts, avoiding me. Francois had carved loaded dice to entice fools to gamble. He fed the rest of the group on those wages until he tried to trick the wrong man and was beaten bloody.” A muscle flexed in his cheek.

“What you’re looking at are powder boys escaped from French ships, the bastard children of deceased tavern women, and Métis still unsure where they belong in this world. ”