Turncoat (21 page)

Marc was already leading the animal into the stable yard.

“Hey, he's limpin' a bit,” Stebbins said.

Marc swore, then bent down to examine the animal's right front hoof. “He's picked up a nail or something already. I'll have to dig it out and then walk him home very slowly.”

Stebbins found a pair of pliers and handed Marc his jackknife. “Worst comes to worst, you could walk him across to McMaster,” he said. “Fancies himself a bit of a horse doctor, he does. Right now I gotta go. Got friends countin' on me.”

Marc, angry and suspicious, decided on a single, direct gambit. “Where are you off to?”

“Oh, a small gatherin' of associates who enjoy rollin' the dice once in a blue moon.” With that he left.

Marc waited for half a minute and then walked quickly out to the sideroad at the end of Stebbins's lane. From the tracks in the snow, Marc could make out that Azel had turned north and, when the road came to an end up beyond the Hislop place, had plunged into the bush on a line that would take him straight to Mad Annie's. Unless, of course, Stebbins was more subtle in his cunning than he had shown thus far. At any rate, Marc was without a mount and like a duck on ice when fitted out with snowshoes. All that
remained was for him to tend to the horse and then trudge home in front of it. At least the roads were well trodden and passable to a desperate man on foot.

He had just removed the nail from the animal's hoof and noted with satisfaction that the cut was not deep when a cry from the house brought him to rapt attention.

“Help! Somebody, help me!”

Lydia Stebbins was standing in her doorway—screaming into the darkness.

APPARENTLY A LIVE SPLINTER FROM THE
ebbing fire had been flung beyond the stone apron of the hearth and landed on a nearby pillow, setting it alight. By the time Marc arrived, rushing past a panicked Lydia, the pillow was merely smouldering. Oily ribbons of smoke snaked out of it, but under no circumstance would it have burst into flame or threatened the cabin. Marc picked it up gingerly, sprinted to the door, and tossed it into a snowbank.

Lydia was seated at the table, rocking her youngest in a bunting bag. The two-year-old remained unruffled in the loft. Lydia had made a remarkable recovery.

“Get me a drink of that rum, would you, Marc?”

Marc obliged, eyeing her intently.

“A lady don't drink alone,” she said. “It ain't polite.”

“I'll sit with you till you've gotten over your fright,” Marc said as she sucked impolitely at her cupful of imported
rum, courtesy no doubt of Messieurs Connors and O'Hurley. “Then I really must go. My horse has thrown a shoe and I've got to walk it home.”

“That won't take you more'n an hour.” She pouted prettily. “And don't tell me a big grown-up gentleman like yerself has got to be in bed afore ten o'clock.”

“A gentleman doesn't remain alone with another gentleman's wife without his knowledge or permission,” Marc countered.

“Now that would depend on the nature of the gentleman, wouldn't it? And the lady.” She drained her cup.

“I think it safe to assume your husband would not approve.”

“Then he shouldn't go runnin' off and leavin' me to fend fer myself three nights a week. Who am I supposed to talk to? Little Azel Junior?”

“Surely you exaggerate. Where would Azel go three nights a week in this township?”

She smiled and refilled her own cup. “So now you're interested. What's so goddamned attractive about my husband that you gotta give him so much attention? I'm a damn sight prettier'n he is!”

“All I'm saying, Mrs. Stebbins—”

“Lydia.”

“Lydia, is that I can't give credence to your statement.”

“Christ, what a lingo! Where'n hell'd ya learn that? I bet you wouldn't say shit if ya had a mouthful.”

“Azel told me he was going off to gamble,” Marc said. He poured himself a cup of the contraband rum.

“And hooerin', fer all I know. He just goes off, I'm tellin' ya, and leaves me here to talk to the walls.”

“Well, you may talk to me—for an hour. I've been told I'm a good listener.”

M
ORE THAN AN HOUR
L
ATER
, L
YDIA
Stebbins was still talking. Her dark curls billowed and fluttered as she grew more animated, and the round, black eyes took in less and less of the room and more and more of what they wanted to see.

“I grew up in my daddy's hotel. It had the grandest ballroom in Buffalo, in the whole western half of the state. We had dances and card games that never ended. Two presidents stayed there. Dolley Madison was given my mother's bed fer the night. She sent us a china figurine. Every general and admiral in America passed through Buffalo and not one of 'em but didn't stop to converse with my daddy, the colonel. And he weren't no country colonel neither. When I was eighteen he let me read parts of his war diary. You mayn't believe it, lookin' at me now, with these udders and my bum bulgin' out, that my daddy sent me off to finishin' school in Rochester.” She raised her rum cup like a proper lady, took a sip, and batted her black eyelashes. “I can even read French.”

She surveyed the cabin skeptically, as if to emphasize the unlikelihood of ever finding a use for French in these quarters.

“In the year before Azel come ridin' up to sweep me away, my daddy was made president of the Loco Foco party in the Buffalo region, and I got to hear some of the most melodious speeches on local democracy ever given, and that includes Tom Paine and Mr. Jefferson himself.”

Marc leaned forward. “What I don't understand is how you could give all that splendour up for a man who was already a farmer in a British colony opposed to democracy and who was likely to be more interested in yields per acre than the lofty sentiments of the preamble to the American Constitution?”

She stared across the table at him. “My word, you can talk just like them,” she breathed.

“But Azel can't?”

“I don't need remindin' about Azel's foul mouth,” she said irritably. Her expression changed as she added, “But the man was a stallion. And when you're a girl of twenty and of a mind to disobey and spite yer daddy, that's all that matters.”

Marc flushed, and began to doubt the wisdom of having steered the tête-à-tête into this particular groove. But it seemed too late to turn back now. “Azel kept his nose to the plough, then? Stayed away from speeches and politicking?”

“Oh, he got himself in thick with the Reformers up here
when they tried to take the farm from us just because we come from the States. But he soon got tired of all that.”

“Still and all, he's a good farmer,” Marc said, aiming for some respectable closure to a strange evening. “You're fortunate to have him.” He started to get up.

“Enough of this palaver,” Lydia said, a licentious sparkle in her eyes. “Take me to bed.”

Marc dropped the jacket he was about to put on.

“You can't go plyin' me with wine and sweet talk and then just march out that door and leave a lady in distress, now can you?”

“But your husband—”

“What he don't know or can't guess can't hurt him, can it?” She hunched nicely over until the rim of her dress slipped perilously close to the outer extremities of her breasts.

Marc realized, far too late, that he had drunk too much—here and earlier at Durfee's—than discretion or common sense or self-interest warranted. And it had been far too long since that brief, passionate encounter with Marianne Dodds in far-off Kent. The room was overpoweringly warm and oddly reassuring, and the heady appeal of this wanton, bright, motherly, vulnerable vixen was not to be resisted.

She reached out for his hand, but it was he who led her towards the bed.

M
ARC WAS CASTING ABOUT FOR HIS
other boot in the dark when Lydia rose up behind him and said, “I told ya, he never comes home before daylight, and he's so stinkin' drunk he'd think you were Father Christmas or the bogeyman.” She threw her arms about his neck. They were both stark naked, having performed their feat of lovemaking in that pristine state beneath an engulfing comforter while the fire expired and the air cooled above them. Lydia's engorged nipples pressed into his back and mingling odours floated up from the warmth of their cocoon.

Marc had been prepared for some wanton, wild, or uncoordinated coupling, with pent passions unleashed on either side. It was not so. It was measured and tender and playful. Which of them had initiated this mode and kept it going he could not say, nor did he want to. When she sighed against him, he was not sure whether she had climaxed or was simply expressing her pleasure in advance of the event. They rolled then side by side, still connected. She pressed his head between her swollen breasts in what was undoubtedly a maternal gesture, or so he interpreted it. He thought fleetingly of the mother he had never really known.

Just as Marc found his second boot and lined it up with the first one on the cold floor, the baby let out a hungry howl.

“Damn,” Lydia said, releasing him and flinging herself naked from the bed into the shadows of the big room, illumined only by the full flood of moonlight through its narrow
west windows. “Don't you move now,” she sang sweetly, and seconds later the babe's cries gurgled out.

For a long time Marc lay back under the quilt, savouring his own nakedness and the sensation alive in every inch of his skin, and listening to the suckling sounds of the child. Finally Lydia crawled back in beside him. She shivered deliciously against him.

“I didn't let the little bugger have all of it,” she laughed. “I saved a bit for you.”

Hours later, it seemed, he fell into a blissful, dreamless sleep.

M
ARC WAS WAKENED EITHER BY THE
sensation of falling or the crack of both elbows on the floor. Whatever the cause, he was certainly awake and unmistakably sitting on his haunches in the dark beside an unfamiliar bed. Lydia, delectably nude, was rubbing the glass of one of the windows at the front of the cabin and squinting out into the moonlight.

“Jesus, it's Azel!” she cried. “He'll shoot us both!”

Marc leapt into action like a recruit caught napping at reveille. He pulled his trousers halfway up, jammed a foot into each boot, and then, flailing at the bed and the floor beside it, snatched at linens, socks, belt, shirt, and frock coat.

“He's puttin' the horse away,” Lydia called to him encouragingly. “He'll be a minute yet.” She trotted across to the bedroom window and jerked back the gingham curtains. Moonlight poured innocently over their love nest.

“He'll see my horse in there!” Marc gasped as he stepped into the chamber pot and heard it crack once—like a gunshot.

The voice of little Azel Junior drifted down from the loft: “Da-da home?”

“He's too damn drunk,” Lydia said. “It'll be okay, once we get you outta here.” She was helping him bundle up the clothes he had had no time to put on. “Just pull yer big coat on when you get outside.” She tossed it to him, then set about working her shift over the tousled mane of her hair.

“How the hell am I supposed to get out the front door without bumping straight into him?” Marc said as he rolled his uniform into his greatcoat.

Lydia grinned. “We got an emergency exit.” Then she leaned over and kissed him gently on the forehead, like a mother sending her tot off to his first day at school. Taking his free hand, she led him across to the southwest corner of the cabin to the big woodbox beside the fireplace. “There's a hatch at the back so's Azel can stuff his chopped logs in without usin' the door.”

“But it's half full of wood!”

She began yanking some of the split logs apart, and he soon joined her. In a minute or so they had managed to clear a wedge of space through which he had no choice but to wriggle fundament-first.

“You better hurry, I hear him shuttin' the barn door.”

“Da-da home, Mummy?”

The ensign's rear parts had reached the hatch in the wall.
As his legs were pinned underneath him, the only way he could think to open it was to butt it severely. On the third butt the hatch fell. An icy wind took instant advantage. Marc heaved and squirmed and, with a clatter of wood, followed the hatch out into the snow.

Lydia reached down and thrust his bundled clothes after him. “I gotta hop right inta bed,” she whispered. “He'll be expectin' to find me warm and ready.”

In more congenial circumstances, Marc might have appreciated the irony of her remark, but the first shock of arctic air numbed everything but his brain. Sheer panic kept it functioning. Marc jammed the hatch back into place and leaned against the cabin wall to get his bearings. The moon had risen, and he could see that he was at the rear of the house. Twenty yards to the side lay the barn and outbuildings. Halfway between, the staggering figure of Azel Stebbins aimed itself at hearth and home—towards the front door, a route that would take him mercifully out of sight and allow Marc to sprint unseen to the barn. Even if he made the barn undetected, Marc would still have to pass dangerously close to the cabin to leave by the lane and through the opening onto the sideroad. The impossible alternative was to take his chances on the drifts in the field, where, in the morning, the tracks of his departure would be stamped for all to see and interpret. He took a deep breath and jerked his unsuspendered trousers up to his waist. Stifling a cry with one hand, he reached down with the other and drew a splinter, agonizingly, out of his left buttock.