Chapter Thirteen

Genevieve drifted on a warm cloud of sleep. As if from a great distance she heard the voices of the canoemen as they argued, the wind soughing in the trees, and something flapping, like the billowing sails of a ship. The scents of pine fires and sweet tobacco floated around her. She heard rustling nearby and felt gentle hands massaging the arches of her feet.

It was this languorous sensation that tempted her from slumber. She blinked her eyes open and found herself inside a tent, a tent whose sides collapsed and extended with the battering of the wind. In the corner, a collection of stones radiated heat. A deerskin blanket smothered her from the chin down. And at her feet was André, cross–legged, bare–chested. His beaded bag swung against the hollow of his chest.

“Awake, Taouistaouisse?”

He was kneading her left foot, first rubbing the hollow behind her anklebone with his thumb, and then digging his fingers into her arches. It felt good, the slow, soothing caresses, and she was reluctant to distract him from his work. Beneath the veil of her lashes she watched the way his hair fell over his face, the way his fingers found all the tense points between her toes and pressed them, distracting her from the fact that he sat shirtless in her tent.

The two of them, alone.

“It was my fault.” He put her left foot down and picked up the right, warming her toes between his palms, knowing by some instinct that she was awake. “I wasn't paying attention to the river. My mind was on other things.”

He bent further over her feet, showing a long, strong clavicle and the deep hollow behind it. She was still groggy, but she saw the lines etched on his forehead, and sensed an anxiety in him she couldn’t read. She eased up on her elbows.

He said, “Lay still, little bird.”

She winced at the aches in her joints, the bruises on her side, the sting of a hundred scratches, but she rested on her elbows nonetheless. He looked up and his hand tightened over her foot like a vise. She followed his gaze and realized that the blanket had fallen to her waist.

Beneath it, she was naked.

The pink tips of her breasts tightened into buds beneath his perusal. She fumbled to lift the sagging deerskin.

“You were asleep when we stopped to make camp,” he said. “I carried you to the tent as soon as it went up, and you kept sleeping. I stripped off your clothes and hung them up to dry so I could check your injuries.”

She wondered why he hadn’t called for one of the native women. After they’d left Allumette Island, a number of small canoes had joined their flotilla. Many of them were manned by native wives.

He said, “You have freckles on your thighs.”

She drew in a sharp breath.

“I kissed them.” His voice flowed over her like trickles of sand. “I was supposed to be letting you sleep, tending your wounds. Instead, I followed the trail of those freckles up your inner thigh. You moaned.”

Her heart pounded, scattering all vestiges of weariness. She probably had moaned. She probably had opened her legs wider, inviting him to explore. Since the day on Calumet Island when she’d confessed her half–truths, she’d tried not to think about the magic he’d performed on her body. She’d held her silence as a wall between them, just as he’d kept his own stony counsel. But her body stubbornly refused to listen to the dictates of her mind.

“What kind of man does that make me?” His fingernails dug into her calf. “A man who wants to make love to his sleeping wife only hours after he nearly kills her.”

She remembered the ride. She remembered seeing him standing at the stern of the canoe, the white swath of the falls roaring behind him, his teeth bared in a reckless smile, his deerskin clinging to him like a second skin. She’d known how he’d felt at that moment.

She’d wanted the thrill as much as he.

She said, “It was an accident, André.”

“Do you believe that?”

“You’ve warned me about the dangers of this journey.”

“Sending you to the Great Hunting Grounds would be an easy way to get rid of a wife.” His eyes flickered up at her. “No one in Montreal would question your death.”

The Great Hunting Grounds was The Duke's version of Heaven—the place beyond the sea where all departed spirits thrived, living on the souls of the animals they had killed during their lifetimes.

She met the hollow depths of his gaze. “I know you would not do that to me.”

“Are you so sure, wife?”

His voice sounded cavernous. His eyes were full of shadows. His whole body spoke of a grief she couldn’t understand.

The words rose to her lips before she could stop them.

“This is about Rose–Marie, isn’t it?”

His nostrils flared. She saw his whole body tighten, the ripples of his abdomen standing stark in shadow and light. “Tiny told you.”

“Just her name.”

“I killed her,” he blurted. “As surely as if I had taken her pretty neck between my hands and squeezed.”

She didn’t believe that, not for a moment. He looked away to the fire smoking in the middle of the tent. His grip tightened on her feet. She waited for him to speak the words she could see him trying to work through his throat.

“It was madness for me to roam these woods in those days,” he said. “The Iroquois were on the warpath. They'd hunted the beaver on their own lands until there were no more to hunt, and were fighting for control of different rivers. There were bloody clashes between them and the settlers all the time. But I was eighteen years old, I didn’t think.”

Eighteen. She tried to imagine André at Julien's age—wide–eyed, eager, brimming with excitement, reckless.

“But my trips into the wilderness made me a rich man in Quebec, and that pleased Rose–Marie. She'd come from a family just like mine. We both had escaped France after the wars of the Fronde. Our families had been rich, and then, suddenly, we had nothing. As we grew up, it was assumed I would marry her. Being a good son, I did.”

She willed her face still, disliking the surge of jealousy at hearing he’d had another wife. Of course she wasn’t the first woman her husband had looked upon with passion, but the dark feeling still lingered. What a silly, stupid thing for her to feel—a woman who’d sold her body for a few months' rations of bread.

Then she wondered if he’d felt the same ugly twist of emotion when he’d discovered that she was not a virgin.

“Rose–Marie,” he continued, “refused to live in my parent’s house while I was gone, so I built a log home for her on the edge of my father’s property. It was small, but she filled it with baubles from France. To keep it filled I went willingly into the woods—because it was profitable, so she thought. The first summer after we married, I came home after a trading voyage to find our house burnt to the ground. Only a week earlier, the Iroquois had raided.”

She winced. She didn't need to know the rest. She'd heard enough from him about Iroquois torture. She had seen Wapishka’s scars. Her heart reached out to him for what he'd lost, even as one small part of her wondered how close to his heart he still held this ghost.

“She'd been taken prisoner with some others from the area,” he said, his mouth grim. “I set off to track them, and succeeded. I watched from the woods as they canoed upriver. I waited for them to camp. There were six of them, drinking stolen brandy. If I were patient, I could strike just before dawn, when they were dead asleep. I could set free my wife and get her in my canoe and be far from there before they even knew she was gone.”

Genevieve felt a hollow ache in her chest. For all his easy telling of the tale, for all his feigned distraction as he rubbed her feet, his voice had grown husky. With his hair falling over his brow, he looked like a boy. She wanted to reach for him, touch his arm, tell him it was not his fault, none of this was his fault.

“As I watched, one of the natives on the canoe grabbed my wife.” A muscle moved in his cheek. “She fought him hard, like she knew what was coming. He was so drunk, she actually got free. She stumbled over prisoners, kegs, rope, to get to the stern, as if she could get away from him. But the others were laughing, and he still followed her, and then I saw her look into the deep water of the river.” His jaw clenched. “She looked at the water and she looked at him and she looked back at the water again, and I saw it happen. I watched her hurl herself over the side of the canoe, her hands still bound by rope. I ran, damn, I ran down that hill, but I was too far away, and when I made it to the shore the canoe was gone and my wife’s body was floating face down in the river.”

She closed her eyes and covered her mouth. She could picture his wife in her mind’s eye: sweet, lovely, full of grace and purity, sacrificing herself.

“I would rather the bastard had finished what he’d started to do.” He bit the words out. “I’d have killed him, yes, cut his throat in the night—but I didn’t care about that. She should have stayed in that damn canoe. She should have suffered anything, just to stay alive.”

She blinked, realizing that he was speaking of more than just the death of his wife. Realizing that he was speaking of a woman’s lost honor. She went hot and cold at the same time, felt shame and pride and something else—appreciation, maybe. A sense that this was his way of saying that he understood what she’d done in Paris, in a way that did not beg forgiveness.

“I didn’t give a damn about her honor,” he continued. “All I cared about was saving her life. Her life, and the life of the child growing inside her.”

A child.

“Genevieve.” He dropped her feet and raked his hands through his hair. “So much can go wrong out here. So many accidents. And if you and I were to—” he stopped himself, searched for words. “If you became pregnant, it would make the voyage impossible.”

His child. The thought filled her up in a strange way she didn’t completely understand.

In a strangled voice, he said, “I don’t want to kill another wife.”

They looked at each other. She saw emotions flooding across his face, and felt them flood through her. A yearning rose in her like a wave, a yearning that went beyond the desire to feel him against her body, to feel his thighs pushing hers open, to feel his lips on her throat, the sound of her name in her hair. In the rapids she’d been dragged under water that sent her tumbling head over heel until she didn’t know up from down, and that was how she felt right now, carried along by an emotion she couldn’t name.

Some secret part of her whispered, Love him. Know what it is to love a man. Know what it feels like to be made love to.

She stared at him, breathing heavily, afraid to speak. The silence stretched between him—aching, tense.

She said, “You’re worried about me growing big with child.”

“I’m worried about you.”

But there must be a way,” she said, leaning forward, “that we can be husband and wife without … complications.”

 

***

 

He’d meant to take it slow. He’d intended to kiss his wife and prove that he wanted so much more than just her body—he wanted to bottle her laughter, to kiss her wit, and cradle her determination in his arms. But he’d ached for her for so long that he just clutched the deerskin blanket and yanked it clear off her.

There she lay, all rosy flesh on a pelt of fur, naked as the day she was born, her thighs pressed together and her knees raised, her arms crossing over her full breasts. His mind conjured up a thousand images of how he could love that body, how he could caress and kiss and suck her flesh into ecstasy, imagining how she would feel and taste.

He dropped to one knee, pried open her thighs and touched her cleft. She bucked and gasped in surprise, then fell back. He took her sex into his palm and felt her grow hot and moist and swollen.

His breechcloth tightened.

He slipped up between her legs, and then hooked his hands under her knees. He lifted them up, wide so her sex lay open, and pressed his loincloth against her. He groaned as he felt her heat through the thin barrier of deerskin. With his shaft lodged against her cleft, he leaned forward, grabbed her hand and dragged it above her head. Then he shifted his weight to bring her other arm up. He seized both wrists tight in one hand so she lay taut, her back arched, so she couldn’t move.

Her neck tasted of salt and musky woman. With his tongue he felt the vibrations of a moan in her throat. Sweet, foolish, reckless, dangerous woman … look what you've done to me. She yielded so sweetly beneath him, soft and small and trembling. He turned her chin and kissed her hard, sinking his tongue deep into her mouth, then he pressed against one breast, moving just above her, just enough to bead her nipple.

She ground her hips up, bucking against his restraint. He moved to her wishes, sliding himself, making sure she felt him fore and aft. The friction eased as her dampness seeped through to his cock.

Closer.

He released her wrists long enough to tug free the ties of his breechcloth. He shoved the leather out of the way, and then seized her hands again.

The shock of her wet heat. The sound of her rumbling moan. Her cleft licked him from tip to root. She quivered beneath him and he felt every throb. She struggled to free her hands from his grip, but he wouldn’t let her go. If he did, he'd lose every last bit of restraint, that fraying leash on his control that kept him from changing his angle each time he drew back and felt her center suck the tip of him. That's where he wanted to be, that's where he belonged. That’s where he couldn’t go.

Her body tensed and she growled a tight cry. He dragged his hand under the hollow of her back, and then wedged his fingers beneath her buttocks, lifting her hips against him even as she cried out reaching her climax, as eager for him as he’d been for her.

As her cries eased he squeezed his eyes shut and buried his face in her neck. He dug his fingers into the soft flesh of her bottom as the same swelling tightened his cock to the edge of bursting. He felt himself about to come in that mindless moment when he pulled back and his cock lodged in that slippery entry—still throbbing like lips around the tip—and for one crazed second he bucked, felt the give between those lips, and in a shout of frustration he yanked away and ground his shaft on her belly, throwing his head back as he came, and came, until the strain ebbed away.

He eased himself off her. His heart hammered against his rib cage as he stared up at the bellowing tarpaulin of the tent. The air was full of the sound of their harsh breathing. Outside the men went about their day, laughing, joking, and then he looked down at his woman, her belly wet with his seed. She blinked up at him with surprise on her face, and that slow smile he’d wanted from her since he’d first carried her into a canoe outside of Montreal.

“Maybe,” she said, between pants, “we can have a wonderful winter after all.”

He stretched out by her side, drew her against him, and then kissed her forehead to hide the truth.

It wasn't going to be enough, this half–loving.

Before the winter was over, he would have all of her.

 

***

 

“It's right over this ridge.”

Genevieve curled her fingers around his. It seemed as if they had been climbing this steep slope for hours, though she knew the campsite lay just below them, nestled in a cove against the hill. “This better be worth it,” she teased, “or I vow you're carrying me all the way back down.”

He smiled and pulled her over the slick, moss–covered boulder, holding tight until she found firm footing. She followed him, watching him beneath lowered lashes. Things had changed since he’d begun sleeping with her in the tent—well, she thought with a flush of heat, there hadn’t been a lot of sleeping going on. But for all their intimacy, she still felt as if she were following him on a portage and no matter how hard she tried to reach him, he was always three paces ahead.

Then the wind blew up over the side of the cliff and lifted her braid from her shoulders. They stood on the highest point on Manitoulin Island. An amber glow bathed the wrinkled granite as the sun sank in the west. From this elevation, she could see the entire length of the isle, the random scattering of other rocky outcroppings in the bay, and the whole sparkling extent of the Lake of the Hurons, which spread like an inland sea to the southern horizon.

“The Duke told me they would be here.” He pointed down into the valley below. “He said for centuries they've been coming.”

She noticed a large shadow hovering in the valley. She gasped when she realized the shadow was moving.

He said, “They're called wapiti—elk.”

Hundreds of them chewed on what remained of the grass that carpeted the valley. They were large and buff–coated, some with many–branched antlers. Smaller ones frolicked along the edge, scampering across the meadow and raising their snouts. Others stood partially submerged in a ribbon of a stream that wound its way into the waters of the Lake of the Hurons.

“How did they get here?” Even from the height of the ridge, she could see the whitecaps on the choppy bay waters. “Did they swim that bay from the mainland? We nearly tipped a dozen times on those same waters.”

“The Duke says every winter a herd of wapiti walk to this island upon the ice of the frozen bay and become trapped here when the ice breaks. They fatten on the grasses over the summer, and in the fall his people come and hunt them.” He shrugged and straightened. “At least they used to, before the Iroquois scattered the Hurons westward.”

She had never seen so many animals—wapiti—in one place. In France, even in the densest forests, the deer did not run so thick. Here, the beasts ate unmolested, enough to feed a dozen Indian villages for the winter, fighting and bumping each other for space across the grassy meadow.

Genevieve hugged her blanket around her shoulders, listening to the reedy sound of the elk mewling. It was as if this place had not changed since the beginning of time. It was as if the world was new and fresh, as if it were the eighth day of creation, and she and André stood high atop the earth, watching it all.

“It's beautiful here,” she said. “It's like Eden must have been.”

“Most people think of it as barren and merciless.”

“There are aristocrats in France who would take great risks for the opportunity to hunt such beasts.”

“But this isn't a gentle place. There are bears and wolves. Wildcats. Don't you find it savage?”

“Paris was savage.” She squinted down at the herd, ashamed to bring up her past. “But a person could live here, grow fat on the land, and never want for anything.”

“Not even a soft feather mattress? Or lace or jewels?”

She hesitated. Those were things an aristocrat would want, that Marie Duplessis might want, but those were things that Genevieve Lalande had learned to live without. She shrugged as nonchalantly as she could. “Well, of course, those things could be imported.”

He showed a flash of white teeth. He'd been so unpredictable since the incident in the rapids. One moment he was warning her of the danger she was in, and the next he was burning his hands bringing heated stones into the tent, or brushing her hair out of her face when he thought she was sleeping, or sliding down her body to do things with his mouth ….

She wished she could reconcile the two men. The first one she didn't fully understand, but this one, the one who laughed beside her, well, she found it hard to take her eyes off him.

“We must talk, Taouistaouisse.”

She looked up toward the sky as it faded from sapphire to indigo. “So there is more to this than a lesson on the fauna of the Huron country.”

“Since the accident, my men have been acting like mother hens around a wounded chick. I dragged you up here to get you away from them.”

She’d hoped he’d dragged her up here to enjoy one of their lovely half–measures where she could shout out in pleasure without alerting the men to exactly what they were doing. But now there was a seriousness in his voice and she didn’t like it.

He said, “The Indians at Lake Nipissing told me that the Black Robes—the Jesuits—have settled in a place a day's ride from here.” He crouched down, picked up an egg–shaped rock, and ran his fingers over the surface. “They've built a mission near the river that flows out of Lake Superior into this lake. They've called it Sault Sainte Marie. We'll be there tomorrow.”

Tension spiraled along the back of her neck. She knew men treated frolicking in the dark like another function, like coughing and sneezing, but she didn’t believe he’d bored of her so soon.

“You’ll be safe at the mission.” He palmed the rock from one hand to the other, digging his nails into the grain. “The Jesuits will treat you well.”

“André, I thought we had an arrangement.”

“It’s not working.” Shooting to his feet, André vaulted the rock into the darkness. “We—you and I—we can't live in the same house. Not over an entire winter. Not without me getting you pregnant.”

A hot flush bathed her cheeks. “I believe we’ve already had this conversation.”

“You know me, Genny.”

Her heart leapt, as it always did when he called her by that name.

“You know I won’t stay in Montreal and take up farming. I am who I am. I’ll abandon you for eight months out of the year.” A muscle moved in his cheek. “Go to the Jesuits, or else resign yourself to that kind of life.”

Her first instinct was to sigh and shake her head. She’d come to Quebec looking for a home, for security, for a place where she didn’t have to pick pockets or sell her body to put bread in her mouth. She’d have that as André’s wife, whether or not he left her in an isolated home in the Montreal wilderness eight months out of the year.

Surely it didn’t matter that she’d be left behind.

Then she felt an electricity on her skin, as if a storm had blown into the valley. She took a step back from him, but it wasn’t him she was trying to get away from. Why should she care that he would abandon her for eight months out of the year? Why, at the thought of being apart from him, should a great, gaping hollowness spread from her toes to her throat and threaten to consume her? The back of her knees went soft, her throat went dry. She couldn’t feel this way—no, she mustn’t.

“Genny.” His voice like a caress. “I want what is best for you. That’s why this decision is yours to make.”

His words burrowed deep inside her, words she wished she didn’t ache so much to hear. Feelings like this are what forced her mother into the life of a courtesan. Feelings like this led to her mother’s death.

Feelings like this couldn’t be trusted.

Then she looked up at him, standing three paces away, his fists clenched. His eyes were shadowed, his jaw stony. She could tell by looking at him that it was taking all his will not to cross the space that separated them. She could tell, just gazing upon him, that he didn’t really want her to go.

Again she felt herself drowning in a rush of feelings, too damn strong to tamp down. Now, suddenly, she understood what led her mother to Armand’s side. Now she understood that her mother had had no choice but to take every risk to be with the man she loved. Somewhere in the moments it took for her to cross the three paces that separated her from her husband, Genevieve finally forgave her mother.

He caught her up in his arms. “I warned you. God help me, I warned you.”

His body and his kisses and his hands spoke of passion, and it was these she listened to, not his incoherent murmurings. He buried his hand in her hair and eased her head back. His other arm wound around her, crushing her body against his.

She slid her hand up the front of his shirt to seize the edges. She wished she could rip the deerskin in two so there would be nothing more between them. She tugged on the skin as his beard razed her cheek, prickly enough to leave a burn.

They tumbled to the ground, landing partly on her deerskin blanket, partly on the granite. The butt of his pistol and the handle of his knife dug into her hip as his weight fell upon her. He kissed a trail down to her collarbone, ripped apart the laces of her bodice, and then closed his hand over her breast. His anxious fingers centered on the nub poking through the threadbare chemise. She groaned at the sensations shooting from his touch to her cleft and she bucked off the ground as his lips closed over her distended nipple, chemise and all.

Her hands, lost in his hair, curled into fists. Impatiently, he yanked the edge of her chemise down, exposing her naked breast to his gaze, taking the throbbing peak into his hungry mouth.

André… She didn't know if she had spoken his name or if it just lingered in her mind. She felt him tug up her skirts. She loosened her grip on his hair and spread her fingers over the muscles of his back. His fingers skimming her deerskin–bound legs, hesitating on the flesh just above her garter. Genevieve arched in his arms, wanting him to touch her as he had before, and he did—he did.

She didn’t feel the cold, though their breaths misted between them. He warmed her with the roll of his fingers. She found herself gasping with her eyes open to the sky. The stars seemed to swell and come closer as he slid his fingers inside her and began a rapid stroke.

She wanted more than this now. She reached down between their bodies, felt his heart pounding like a blacksmith's hammer in his chest. His tumescence throbbed against her hip—she found him and curled her hand around the shaft like he’d taught her, squeezing, tugging.

She heard herself whisper, “Make love to me.”

He pulled himself out of her grasp and shifted off her. Frigid air washed over her as he went up on his knees, all eyes on her as he stripped. His pistol and knife clattered to the ground. He ripped off his sash and fumbled beneath the hem of his shirt to toss his breechcloth aside. Then he dropped down upon her again, his elbows on either side of her face. He nudged her knees apart with his but she needed no prodding. She arched against his hips, seeking him, feeling the hardness press against her inner thigh.

Later, she would realize she hadn’t had a single passing thought about that other time, that brutal butcher and his painful fumbling, the press of bricks against her back, the stink of his breath. That was another woman, another life, and it bore no resemblance to what was now happening with André.

She and André had been in this position before, but this moment was different, and he marked it so. He paused to brush the hair away from her face. His fingers lingered on the curve of her jaw. He looked down at her with such intensity that she lifted her hand to brush his beard. He kissed her hand, one finger at a time. Then he shifted his hips and pressed against the warm entrance in her cleft.

With one swift stroke, he filled her up.

It was a sensation more exquisite than a cool bath in the still, humid heat of summer, more shocking than the tingle of the wine of Champagne on her tongue, more explosive than the fireworks she had seen the day Louis XIV had married the Spanish Infanta. His shaft throbbed deep, deep inside her, tight and slick. She wiggled her hips higher, wanting him closer, wanting him deep.

This is what she'd missed all those times in the tent before. His hips lay flat against her inner thighs and he murmured something unintelligible in the hair above her temple. Her hands found their way beneath the hem of his fringed shirt, tracing the tense muscles of his back, feeling the heat of his skin.

He stroked again. Deeper.

All that hard, hot flesh, sliding inside her.

He stroked again.

Oh.

Then she became the fireworks, exploding in a frenzy of color, showering like a thousand glowing sparks across the great open sky.