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Victor had wondered if she might let him buy Nicholas and bring the colored boy north for some free colored couple in these parts to raise. He didn't bring it up now-the answer seemed much too obvious. Maybe she would change her mind once her temper, like any tempest, at last receded.
On the other hand, maybe she wouldn't.
When they went upstairs to bed, she said, "If you lay so much as a finger on me, I will scream the house down."
"Meg-"
"I will," she insisted. "Better than you deserve, too." She started crying again. "And if I don't yield myself to you, what will you do? Go out and scatter your seed among more strange women." She eyed him on the stairs. "I could win a bill of divorcement against you. Not much plainer proof of adultery than a child, is there?"
"No," he said, the cold wind of fear blowing in his ears. She could win a divorce. And if she did, he would never be able to hold up his head in polite society again. Wherever he went, he would always be the man who… And, behind his back, he would always be the man with the nigger bastard. Conversation would stop whenever he walked into a room, then pick up again on a different note. How could you go on like that? "I… hope you don't." He forced the words out through stiff lips.
"I don't want to," she answered. "Not only for the scandal's sake, either. I want to love you, Victor. I want you to love me. I want to be able to believe you love me."
"Whatever I can do to bring that about, I will." After a moment, Victor added, "It will be harder if I may not touch you."
"One day, maybe. One night, maybe. Not today. Not tonight," Meg said. "As things are right now, I could not stand it."
"All right," Victor said-he could hardly say anything else. They went up the rest of the stairs together and a million miles apart.
Victor stood by the edge of the pond, eyeing the ducks and geese. They swam toward him, gabbling eagerly-they hoped he would throw them grain. And he did, and smiled to see how eagerly they fed. There were more of them than he'd thought there might be. The farm as a whole was in better shape than he'd expected. Meg had done a splendid job.
And he'd repaid her with a bastard boy. Worse-much worse-she knew it, too.
Blaise ambled up alongside of him. The Negro looked less happy with the world than he had when he was riding up to the farmhouse with Victor a few days before. Victor understood that down to the ground. He was none too happy himself.
Blaise eyed a goose as if he wanted to wring its neck. "Women." he said-a one-word sentence as old as men.
"What's wrong?" Victor asked. Maybe someone else's troubles would help take his mind off his own.
"Some kind of way, Stella done found out about that girl I had, that Roxane, when I went down with you to meet de la Fayette," Blaise answered. "My life's been a misery ever since."
"Oh, dear," Victor said. Even if Blaise didn't, he had a good idea about how that might have happened. His wife might have told him she wouldn't say anything to Stella, but____________________
"Had Meg got wind of you and Louise?" Blaise asked. "Is that why you were biting people's heads off while we besieged Croydon?"
"Was I?" Victor said. "I tried not to."
"You did pretty well most of the time," Blaise said, by which he had to mean Victor hadn't done well enough often enough. He went on, "No wonder you didn't care to talk about it, though. A woman who finds out her man's put it where it don't belong…" He shook his head. "She's trouble."
"I found that out," Victor said. The part of the truth his factotum had grasped was the part that wouldn't get in the way between the two of them. It was also the part that Victor didn't much mind getting out. Meg might say what she would, but only the most censorious condemned a man who slept with other women when he was away from home for years at a stretch. A white man who sired a little black bastard on one of them, though, was much easier to scorn.
"Expect Meg was the one who tattled to Stella, then," Blaise said resignedly. "Women are like that, dammit. I suppose I should be grateful she waited till after we got back-Stella wasn't waiting for me with a hatchet, anyhow."
"That's something," Victor agreed.
"How do you go and sweeten up your wife after she finds out about something like this?" Blaise asked. "Back in Africa, I never had to worry about it."
Did he mean he'd never strayed or he'd never got caught? If he wanted to explain further, he would. If he didn't care to, it didn't much matter. The question did. "If you find a way, I hope you'll be kind enough to pass it on to me," Victor answered. "So far, I am still seeking one myself. 'Seek, and ye shall find,' the Bible says, but it tells me nothing of where or when, worse luck."
"I try to make her happy as I can, every way I know how," Blaise said. "But it's harder when she won't let me lie down with her. If she did, maybe I could horn it out of her. Now-" He shook his head and spread his hands, lighter palms uppermost.
"If misery truly loves company, you should know you aren't the only one in the same predicament," Victor told him.
"Damned if I know whether misery loves company or not. It's still misery, isn't it?" Without waiting for an answer, Blaise pulled a metal flask out of his back pocket. "Here's to misery," he said, and swigged. Then he handed Victor the flask. "Takes the edge off your troubles, you might say."
"To misery," Victor echoed. Barrel-tree rum ran fiery down his throat. If you drank enough, the potent stuff would do more than take the edge off your troubles. Of course, it would give you new troubles, and worse ones, in short order, but plenty of people didn't worry about that. Their calculation was that, if they drank enough, they could forget the new troubles, too. If you didn't care that you lay stuporous in a muddy, filth-filled gutter, it wasn't a trouble for you… was it?
"My children are angry at me, too," Blaise went on in sorrowful tones as Victor gave back the flask. "They don't hardly know why, but they are. Long as their mama is, that's good enough for them." He took another nip, a smaller one this time.
Victor didn't answer. Blaise wasn't tactless enough to say he was lucky because he had no children of his own; the Negro knew how Victor and Meg had kept trying and failing to start a family. He didn't know, and with luck would never find out, how Victor had succeeded at last, if not in a way he either expected or wanted.
Something else occurred to Victor, something he hadn't thought of before. He wondered if the rum had knocked it loose.
If tiny Nicholas-would he be styled Nicholas Radcliff? entitled to a family name?-grew to be a man, what would he think of his father? I hope he doesn't hate me, Victor thought. A moment later, he added too much to himself. He didn't see how a slave could help hating his father some if the man who'd begotten him was free himself.
"Sooner or later, things will work out," Blaise said: an assertion that, to Victor's mind, would have been all the better for proof. His factotum went on, "We'll have to watch ourselves from here on out, though. You get caught once, that's bad. You get caught twice…" He slashed the edge of his palm across his throat.
"I fear you have the right of it," Victor said with a sigh.
A goose waddled up to him, stretched itself up to its full height, and honked imperiously. It was a barnyard bird, of stock brought over from Europe, but the call still reminded him of the deeper ones that came from honkers. Plainly, the enormous flightless birds had some kinship with geese. Why geese lived all over the world, why the rapidly fading honkers dwelt only on this land in the midst of the sea, Victor had no more idea than did the most learned European natural philosopher. But then, honkers were far from God's sole strange creations here.