The Loves of Leopold Singer (28 page)

“My dear Marta—Mrs. Singer.” The loud voice was beside her and the large hand was on her arm. “Shall we go in for refreshments? The ladies have done their usual fine job.”

She heard the proprietary tone in his invitation, and it repelled her. She averted her eyes, but not before an exchange passed between them, a silent acknowledgment that the again-widowed Reverend Grim wanted the very married Marta Singer. All at once, shock and awareness and fury bombarded her.

Gwendolyn Goodson’s expression told all. This was why the other ladies avoided her. She had believed them childishly jealous of her so-called piety. But no. They all believed there was an illicit intimacy between her and Reverend Grim.

“My dear friend,” Grim said. “Are you unwell?”

She saw that he too assumed such intimacy possible.

“Yes,” she said. “I am unwell.”

“Then come with…”

“No. I do not believe I should ever come with you, sir.” She hurled the
sir
like a slap across his face. “I must go to my husband.”

“But Mrs.—Marta,” he said. “We could be happy together. You would be my perfect helpmeet in the Lord’s work.”

“My husband,” she said again. “I must go.”

Everything was clear. Life was unfair. That was just the way of the world. She had borne the wrong child who died. Harriet Goodson had killed her own child in mortal convulsions. Innocents were massacred by Bonaparte’s soldiers or American Indians, in the old world and in the new one. Marta was no worse off and no better off than anybody.

She had a right—no. She had a duty to recognize what was beautiful in life and to love it, love it all every moment she still had breath.

She remembered the bronze statue at the cathedral in the village, the image of the Madonna with her dead son draped in her arms. With new eyes she saw Mary’s beautiful agony and the enduring steadiness of the angel’s hand. In one mystical instant, Marta realized her pain was also her joy. It was this ability to feel that made her fully human, that made life precious and good.

“But I have children,” Grim broke into her thoughts, childlike.

“Are you mad?” If this weren’t so abominable, it would be comic. “Do you believe those ill-mannered brats would induce me to leave the most honorable husband, whom I love?”

“But—but Mr. Singer might die…”

“Oh!”

Charged by the thrill of self-awareness, she pulled away from George Grim’s massive grip. She flew up Taenarus Boulevard, joyous and new. Her feet didn’t touch the ground.

-oOo-

Leopold placed the dulcimer he’d brought on a table while Lightfeather’s opened the piano bench and pulled out a sheet of music.

“Here it is,” Lightfeather said. “Who would have guessed?”

“Excellent,” Leopold said. “I’ll have to find new strings for this. Perhaps go over to Boston for them.”

“It’s Amazing none are broken.”

“Amazing I had forgotten the instrument all this time. My father gave it to me a lifetime ago. I’m not trained, except by him, but there was a time I could lose myself making music with the thing.”

“What made you think to look for it?”

“I didn’t. This morning I came upon an unpacked crate, and it was there.” Leopold tuned the sclerotic strings and began to lightly pound out a song.

“Perhaps Mrs. Singer is like this instrument.” Lightfeather picked up their earlier conversation. “You must not look for her to come back to you.”

Leopold hit a wrong note and damped the strings with his hands. He was mostly satisfied with his life, even reconciled to the possibility he would not have children. But he couldn’t accept this living death that gripped Marta. He wanted her back.

Just yesterday he had finished a new saddle. The design had turned out better than he’d expected, and his first thought hadn’t been of his wife. Instead, he’d imagined showing his work to Susan Gray. How she would admire the piece. How she would have understood his pleasure in creating this useful and beautiful thing. Thinking of Susan only made Marta’s gloom more difficult to bear.

He’d come to Lightfeather for more than music. Leopold didn’t say as much, but he needed advice. This reverend was the opposite of his counterpart down the boulevard. He looked for the good in a situation rather than for its evil. It was gratifying to find an intelligent, enlightened man to talk to in this town, but this was not the advice he had expected.

“There must be something I can do. I am her husband.”

“For a man of action, the hardest thing is to remain still. But I believe Mrs. Singer has a soul sickness. She has to come up out of it of her own accord.”

“You’re telling me the only thing I can do is do nothing when her happiness is so necessary to my own.” Leopold played on, becoming one with the instrument, and the Mozart rondo danced into the air like an incantation.

“What is that?” Lightfeather said. “I don’t remember this piece.”

“Oh, something I heard once.” Leopold’s thoughts flowed with the rondo and eased until he felt released from his worries. “I will,” he said. “I will do nothing and wait.”

And then she was in the doorway, glowing. She looked as nervous and as happy as on their wedding day.

“How was the burial, my dear?” He didn’t forget the vow made only moments earlier, but she looked so alive, like a butterfly he would love to catch. He struggled against taking her hand.

“It was—grave!”

With that, he did take her hand and said, “My dear friend, are you unwell?”

“My dearest friend, I couldn’t be more well.”

On the way home clasped the reins in both hands. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she had been about to reach for his arm. Or was that wishful thinking? She did sit nearer to him than usual, and he was aware her thigh pressed against his.

No. He would not entertain those thoughts. Lightfeather’s advice was sound, and he was determined to follow it. He wouldn’t touch her. He wouldn’t look at her. She must be free to recover in her own time and manner.

Marta found Leopold’s new-found self-discipline most inconvenient. He wouldn’t look at her. She was about to slip her hand into the angle of his elbow, he moved away. She was too late. He’d lost patience with her at last.

She made a plan. She’d ask him to come to their room and help with her dress. But when they reached the carriage house, he jumped down and didn’t come around to hand her out. He grabbed the dulcimer and held it to his chest like a shield as he backed away.

“I have to check something with Zehetner,” he said. He bounded up the steps to the veranda and set down the instrument. Then he was off on foot to the fields.

She watched him go, not quite sure what to do, when she heard sweet little cries coming from the barn. She took her pitiful self to see the kittens. She’d find affection there. She climbed up into the hayloft where the mama cat had made a nest for her latest brood, seven weeks old, darling little pranksters.

One kitten, black but for his white toes and a white blaze on his chest, was in a loving mood. He batted at Marta’s cheek and licked her chin with his pink sandpaper tongue. “Ah, Twinkle-Toes, you are something.” The kitten yawned and stretched his tiny tongue out as far as possible. She laughed and nuzzled him.

Was life not wonderful? The barn smelled of fresh, newly laid hay. She heard the farm hands calling to one another, happy in their work. Even the animals, cackling and snorting, seemed conscious that they lived on a happy farm. Everything was good and as it should be.

She gave each kitten its full measure of pets and coos; and when the mama cat showed up, Marta assured her that she was a perfect cat with beautiful children. “I’ll leave you now,” she said. “You have all cheered me up.”

Two steps from the ladder, her foot went through a bad board. She lost balance, letting out an involuntary shriek. She fell forward, and all she could see was the pitchfork left on the ground below. Somehow she twisted and shifted her weight. She fell backward and merely landed on her bottom in the hay loft. The startled mama cat screamed, and the little ones added their
kitty
hisses to the commotion. Marta worked at the rotted board and pulled her foot free just as one of the men came in.

“Mrs. Singer, are you hurt?”

She quickly thrust her foot back into the hole. “I need my husband!” she called out. “He’s gone to find Mr. Zehetner.”

“I’ll get them both.”

“No. It isn’t necessary to bother Mr. Zehetner. I only want Mr. Singer.” Her throat burned; surely her subterfuge was obvious.

-oOo-

Leopold climbed up to Marta, frantic, but she appeared to be unhurt.

“It’s stuck.” She pointed to her foot. “Perhaps remove the boot?”

In silence, he undid the hooks and slid her soft foot free. She leaned back in the hay as he caressed her ankle to check for breaks. His was in agony.

“I don’t believe I’m injured, dear.” Her foot slipped out of his hands rested on his thigh.

“Oh, Marta.” he groaned.

“What is it?”

But he could say nothing. He was miserable.

She stood up and took his hand and led him away from the loft’s edge. He followed. His will was used up. He lay down, and she sat beside him and unbuttoned his shirt. She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his chin. She opened his shirt and kissed his chest. She loosened his trousers and stroked his inner thighs.

She was bold, and he was weak. She petted him, she tasted him. She traced his ear with her tongue, teased his belly with her mouth. He was engorged and dripping and powerless. She spread her skirts over him and slipped, swollen and wet, all around him and took him in. He moaned, and she rode him. He grabbed her backside and pulled her closer, and she swallowed him deeper. She closed her eyes and he felt her spasms clenching ever tighter until it seemed they were one being, all feeling.

When their frenzy had passed, he lay stunned and quiet, wondering at what had just happened between them. Leopold felt cherished in a way he had not thought possible, cared for instead of caring for. He had held their last night in London as an ideal of lovemaking, but this went beyond that. That night, there had been a greediness in Marta that was absent today.

Just now, she had wanted to give him pleasure, not take it. He felt a kind of peace that he had never even wanted because he’d never known it was possible. Marta had come home to him.

The next Sunday, all the Zehetners and both Singers attended Reverend Lightfeather’s services together, with one exception.

Josef had been missing nearly a week.

1776, Jamaica

Circe Asher Sande lived half the world away from Carleson Peak on the 12-gun sloop
Circe
, named when her husband still loved her. Aristaeus Sande was brutish and bow-legged, with wispy brown hair and weathered skin. He had no manners. He was short. His shoulders were too broad and his clothing out of fashion. Of course the Duke of Gohrum and Circe’s father, Lord Branch, had underestimated him.

He’d come to England and The Branch to seek help obtaining letters of marque against the French and Spanish. He added Circe to his prize. “I’m not the first sailor to fall under Circe’s spell,” Sande had said to her when he got her alone. “But I’ll be taking you from this island to mine, and damn the baron’s notions if they’re to the contrary.”

How glorious it had felt to lose everything to him. She came to hate the sea, but in the beginning she felt like a princess in a fairy story. Sande was her dashing pirate—privateer—and he would do anything to make her happy. He rechristened his favorite sloop after her and reduced its guns from fourteen to twelve to make space for her chamber.

“Besides,” he’d said, “twelve’s a luckier number, else why did our Savior have twelve apostles?”

He was wealthier than she’d suspected and poised to grow richer still now that the American colonies had declared their sovereignty and the British Navy had blockaded their ports. He had added American letters of marque to that box he kept locked in his cabin, and he planned to add more ships to the fleet of six he already owned.

Then he simply grew tired of her. He no longer swept her off to his cabin and made passionate love to her. Circe sometimes thought he’d forgotten he had a wife, but when their daughter was born he was ecstatic.