The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) (4 page)

“Of course.” I nodded.

Mathew inhaled sharply and looked down at the plow’s handle. I clenched my jaw, getting ready for him to offer me money. As much as I needed his generosity, I hated accepting it. I wasn’t too sure why. Too much pride? He was going to be my husband one day. I just hadn’t decided on the day yet.

“Darling . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyes would have burned a hole in the wood with his fierce focus, if he had that ability. I braced myself for his charity. “Do you—do—do you really think—that’s a bad choice of words.” He sighed and nodded to himself, then finally said, “I do . . . very much . . . like your body as it is. You may not be fleshly, but you have all the . . . rounded areas in all the right spots.” His eyes rose and stayed on my chest for a couple seconds before ascending to my face.

I coughed a laugh, truly amazed Mathew was being so bold with me. These last few months he’d been asking to set the date of our marriage soon, and quite surprisingly had been forward enough to let me know that he did find me attractive and not just as his partner in mind and spirit, but in body too.

“Mathew!”

“Forgive my brashness, I—” He stopped himself.

My cheeks burned with embarrassment as did his, but I decided to say what needed to be said. “I like knowing that the one thing I can offer doesn’t disgust you.”

“Disgust me? You are . . .” He choked for a moment while his hands stroked the air, much like a sculptor would create breasts out of the heavens. “Violet, darling, you offering me your life to be my partner—well, I’m ever so grateful. You have no idea . . . how you affect me. Nor do I think you understand how you affect men in general. Randolph would literally murder me, if he thought you’d give him a chance, and before he became a lawyer he was in school to become a reverend. Clark couldn’t take his eyes off you until you made that shot, but I’m sure, even so, he’d gladly accept your hand. And even Jacque, he couldn’t meet my eyes after walking through the Common with you. Darling, you are and have been, since I was a boy of eight years of age, all I dream of.”

I reached up on my toes to kiss his cheek. “I’m so lucky to have you, Mathew. Truly, you are the kindest, most generous man, especially when complimenting me—making up preposterous stories–”

“I’m not inventing anything, Violet.” Mathew lightly caressed my cheek with one of his fingers. “Oh, darling, you have so much to learn about men.”

Three hours later, when the sun peeked through the metallic gray clouds and beamed dandelion rays down on the moist earth, I walked over the edge of a small hill in the copse that surrounded my family’s farm. The hardly beaten path I ventured was a game’s trail, and one I’d frequent while I would run. I began running, from what my mother told me, before I learned how to crawl. More than twenty years of running for no apparent reason other than to run, I’d learned the trails better than the best hunters.

But today I walked, even though my heart beat in my chest louder and faster than ever before.

I saw him exactly where I’d told him to meet me, by a walnut tree that had forked in the trunk when lightning had struck it, then tried to grow back together years later. The result was a tree with a heart for a trunk. Disastrous, but I was meeting him to inform him I couldn’t meet with him ever again.

He turned as he heard me approach. His glossy black hair absorbed all the light and bounced it back in a dark shade of blue.

“I wasn’t sure if you would come,” he said.

That was the moment I should have said it, should have told him no and run away. I had all my life mapped out for me, and it was going to be a good life with Mathew and my sister and mother, and I couldn’t, shouldn’t meet him.

Instead, I nodded. “I came.”

He finally smiled. “I brought Socrates and wine.”

I floated closer to Monsieur Beaumont, not at all aware of my feet or legs. I offered a basket holding fresh and dried fruit. “Blueberries and peach rings.” Then I opened my overcoat and extracted the beloved essay. “And Locke.”

  His eyes scanned the small booklet I held, then glanced at my men’s linen shirt where the
Letter of Toleration
had resided. He swallowed and looked into my eyes, then whispered, “
Parfait
.”

“No! That is appallingly not true.” I laughed. Monsieur Beaumont and I had been meeting everyday for a full week now. “I did not state that I agree with Locke about tabula rasa. How did we get sidetracked on this subject? We were discussing math.” I threw a peach ring at Monsieur Beaumont’s perfect long nose.

How had we gotten that comfortable with each other so quickly, to jest and have me throwing food at him? I’ll never know.

It all happened so swiftly.

We were sitting beside the heart-shaped walnut tree, just north of my family’s farm and the North Bridge as we had done every day in the past seven days. Although daily I made a new oath to stop seeing him, especially so clandestinely, yet each day I couldn’t turn away from Monsieur Beaumont.

On the moist black earth that held littered brown leaves of years gone past and a few sprigs of feral grass and fewer still multicolored wild flowers, we perched with books and wine and shy smiles. We were close enough to the waterway to hear the humming of the cold water flowing by, but too far to actually see the Concord River. The sky was thick with heavy gray clouds, yet it was warm enough for both Monsieur Beaumont and I to be without our coats. He wasn’t even wearing his waistcoat, which was provocatively intimate. The air enveloping us buzzed with the alarming silence of a coming storm.

Monsieur Beaumont caught the dried fruit in his teeth a second before impact and chewed it with relish. “I don’t like math. Calculus, it is a math invented by men who had too much time on their hands. So I’m distracting you from the subject by putting words in your mouth. But I’ll be fair now. What would you like to discuss? We can talk about anything except math.”

“Coward.”

“
Oui
.
”

“All right.” I tried to hide my smile. “Locke’s
Two Treaties
.”

“
Bien.
You begin, hmm?”

I understood now why the French would use words usually associated with sword fighting when debating. Whenever I’d converse with my father, we would almost always have the same mind on all discussions. When talking to Mathew about the law I was intrigued, but never ventured to address any concern I had—although, I don’t know why. But with Monsieur Beaumont I met my match.
Touché
,
parry, thust
—we’d argue, discuss, and ponder until the sky peaked midnight blue with streaks of scarlet and orange, then slowly separate from each other, saying our farewells until the sky blackened. How I began to hate the night. It would mean I’d have to be away from Monsieur Beaumont yet again.

I tapped my bottom lip, thinking of Locke, thinking of a conversation that would last for hours. “Locke’s views regarding men’s rights versus a government’s.”

“Ah, well, don’t start with anything controversial, Miss Buccleuch.”

I giggled at his jest, but continued anyway. “Do you believe, like Locke, that a man can and sometimes must stand up for his God-given rights, especially when faced with noxious brutes within a government?”

Monsier Beaumont cocked his head side to side then narrowed his eyes. “Locke was referring to your Civil War when he wrote that. You English had that civil war a couple years ago,
oui
?”

I smiled, not sure if he was horrid at history or just English history, which being French was forgivable. “More like a century ago. Actually
more
than a century. It was in the middle of the seventeenth century. ”

His brows furrowed. “
Oui
? Ah, where does the time go? I remember it like it was yesterday.”

I threw another peach ring at him, shaking my head. “You were there?”

He caught the fruit again in his teeth and chewed with a wide grin. “Of course I wasn’t in England.” He snorted and shook his own head, as if
I
were the silly one. “But I remember it well.”

“Of course you do.” I nodded, then gave him an incredulous look, almost rolling my eyes.

He quietly snickered. “We are off subject yet again. I was asking, is your civil war what you are thinking about or the current riots in Boston, with regard to Locke’s
Two Treaties
?”

I sobered instantly. Indeed I had been thinking of all the jobless men at Boston’s wharf, men who had tarred and feathered a duty collector, making the newspaper headlines with that vicious attack. I thought too of other men who had been too cowardly to dress as themselves, but as Mohawks for the Tea Party just a couple years ago, and just three years before that there were the six dead in what the newspapers now called the Boston Massacre. The mobbing seemed to be escalating, and since Salem, and I’d heard Portsmouth too, had been marched on by the redcoats, looking for militias’ caches of arms to destroy. I was fearful that the Massachusetts issues with her mother country was like a bone that had become old and brittle and was about to snap at any moment.

But so apprehensive was I that I dared not talk about the reality of my explosive colony. As if my silence bought my providence a little peace. “Neither. Just hypothetically speaking.”

“But of course.” Monsieur Beaumont nodded his head, but one of his black brows arched.

I felt a tiny splash land on my hand and looked down at the droplet of rain. The moisture on my skin was a welcome for its coolness. I was too hot when I neared Monsieur Beaumont. But I was beginning to like the heat. So I continued our conversation, rain or no, fevered skin or not. “When Locke was referring to men standing up for themselves against their own government, that isn’t just a civil war, but could turn into a . . . revolution.”

“
Oui
. During your civil war, you English inserted a new government, and if that had lasted then would not your civil war have turned into a revolution?”

“Aye. A revolution. But do you believe ‘tis right for men to have a war against their own government?”

He sighed. “As my old age knows, it has been done before. It could be done again.”

I snorted, and this time couldn’t resist an eye roll. From the very first meeting at our heart tree, he’d jested that his perhaps thirty year-old frame was close to two hundred years instead. Perhaps he felt too old to associate with me. As two more fat drops landed on my hatless head, I pushed that nagging thought away. “Are you near a millennium now?”

He chuckled. “Not quite. But two centuries of life feels like a thousand years lived.”

I nudged his iron-like arm. “Just hypothetically speaking, of course.”

He softly laughed again, but then looked up at the sky. “We are getting rained upon.”

When he met my eyes again, I nodded. I didn’t want to say our goodbyes just yet. I didn’t want to go back to the farm to either pace about our parlor or try to find some odd job, of which there were many, to do. I didn’t want to leave him. Monsieur Beaumont was becoming closer to me than any friend had before.
Just a friend
, I reminded myself daily.

He suddenly clasped my arms. “Are you willing to sit through a science experiment?”

I smiled and nodded as the rain started in earnest to flush us from the forest.

He grabbed his overcoat, which he shook out. Free from rocks and small sticks, Monsieur Beaumont flicked his coat over two branches that stretched out over my head. He used some extra twine I had that I’d used for picking some wild mint to dry. He tied the ends of his coat to the branches, and within just a minute’s time I had shelter over my head.

He knelt in front of me, still getting pelted with rain. I scooted to the very edge of the make-shift refuge and waved for him to enter, sit close to me. He hesitated for just a moment, swallowing hard. When he unceremoniously plopped next to me he was wet yet warm. He chuckled, but I noticed his laugh sounded strained. We both tucked our legs to our chests and wrapped our arms around our shins. My shoulder fit under his and my hip, arm, and leg met his. I knew exactly when he was taking a breath.

We looked at each other and chortled again.

“Where were we in our conversation, Miss Buccleuch?”

My brain wouldn’t function, and for a moment I thought I just might have the audacity to touch his face, so close to mine. I blinked as I watched a small rivulet run from his dark hair down the side of his countenance. His eyes searched my features, and I was glad for the lack of sunlight to hide my fiery cheeks. My behavior was appalling; what was running through my mind was much worse; and making it impossible was the fact that I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

But somehow, through brute force really, I clenched my hands to be still and cleared my throat. “You were saying you were a million years old.”

He chuckled yet again, something that came so easy to the both of us when we were together. “We were talking about men overthrowing their governments. Well, that was our targeted conversation,
oui
?”