I drank a good deal of wine. Sarah lit the lamps and served the coffee. The room seemed smoky to me, airless. When Sarah went out, my husband got up and bolted the shutters on the casements, which made it seem like a prison. “I’d like a glass of port,” I said. My husband suggested that he had a good bottle in his office. I followed him there.
“Will you be joining the patrol?” I asked as he poured out a tablespoon of port.
“Not at first,” he said. “They’ll be starting near the Pass and pushing down this way.” He held the glass out to me.
“I’d like a little more than that, if you don’t mind,” I said.
He looked puzzled, then took my meaning. “I know these conspiracies must be torture to your nerves,” he said, filling the glass.
“On the contrary,” I said. “It gives me something to think about besides my sewing.”
He ignored this remark. “In truth, I’m reluctant to leave the house. I can’t trust anyone to stand guard. If the informant told the truth, this plot has infiltrated every quarter from Pointe Coupée to the city on both sides of the river.” He opened his cabinet and took down two pistols.
“With the militia called out, they can have no chance of success,” I observed. “What do they possibly hope to accomplish?”
“They just want to murder as many of us as they can,” he said. “They don’t think further than that.”
I sipped my port, thinking of them gathered around their fires of an evening, their rude passions inflamed by the wild talk of some preacher, planning how best to kill us all. And it wasn’t just the field hands. In New Orleans, I had heard of an American lady who discovered her maid attempting to poison the entire household by lacing the sugar with arsenic. What benefit would her mistress’s demise be to her, since she would only be sold again, perhaps to a more severe mistress? It puzzled me. “I suppose it is just the numbers,” I said.
My husband cast me a questioning look, distracted by the business of tamping powder into one of his pistols.
“It is because they outnumber us so,” I explained. “They don’t understand why they can’t do whatever they please.”
“It is because they are fiendish brutes,” my husband said.
I raised my eyebrows. “Perhaps you are right,” I said.
He laid the pistol down and gave me his attention. “There is another matter I wish to speak with you about, Manon. Will you hear me out?”
My inheritance, I thought. I was about to find out how he planned to squander my father’s money. “I’m at your convenience,” I said.
He raised one leg so that he was half-sitting on the end of his desk. “While you were away, I thought a greal deal of you. More than I do when you are here.”
“ ‘Absence makes . . .’ ” I waved my hand at the rest.
“It wasn’t that. It was that I knew, if you could have your own way, you would never return.”
This straightforward statement of the simple truth took me by surprise. I set my glass on the side table and drew in a breath. The opportunity for honest exchange between us was rare, and I determined to take advantage of it to advance a plan, a dream, really, that I had formulated on the long drive back from town. “No,” I said. “If it were not my obligation I would never return here.”
He narrowed his eyes as if my confession pained him, though it couldn’t have been unexpected, as he’d just remarked upon his certainty of my preference. “Isn’t there some way we can close this rift between us and live as husband and wife?” he pleaded.
Clearly he imagined there was something he could say that would persuade me to invite him into my bedroom, an idea that had no appeal to me at all. “No,” I said.
He studied me a moment, evidently mystified by my coldness. “It’s that simple, is it?” he said.
“It is, yes,” I said. “But as you’ve brought up this ‘rift,’ as you call it, I do have a proposition regarding it.”
“I am willing to hear it,” he said.
“What I propose is that we agree to spend more time apart. Now that I have my mother’s house, I could stay in town for the season. I will have to have a cook, as Peek is gone, and I would take Sarah with me, so you might do as Mother so often advised you and buy a proper butler.”
“I thought the loss of your mother might soften your heart toward me,” he said. “I see it has had the opposite effect.”
“I am orphaned,” I said. “Who will defend my interests if I don’t defend them myself?”