Chapter 53
fifty-three
Why can I not fight for my country too?
Deborah Samson
Rising early the next morning, Mae made her way downstairs to the kitchen to find a fire already kindled. The sight stopped her cold. With a glance back across the hall to the parlor’s open door, she saw another hearth snapping and leaping merrily, a most welcome sight.
Rhys’s doing?
A beat of hope stirred her into action. As she prepared a breakfast tray in the kitchen, her culinary mishaps fewer and fewer, she prayed for their day. Toast, eggs, and bacon soon crowded the pewter plate, though she doubted he’d eat half of it. Sometimes she finished whatever remained.
Taking a steadying breath, she traded the warm kitchen for the parlor, expecting to find him sleeping as she so often did. Instead, he was leaning back against the headboard, his fingers trellised behind his head.
“Morning, Mae.”
She tried to smile as she served him, unable to meet his gaze for fear of what she’d find there. “Thank you for tending the fire.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
Breakfast served, she started to leave the room, as addled as when she’d first met him, but his voice stopped her at the threshold.
“You’re angry with me.”
Was she? She turned toward him, all her fears gathering like storm clouds.
Would he relapse and die right here? Or return to the fight and fall on some distant battlefield, shattering her heart all over again?
Leaving her with countless regrets? The feeling between them was strained, anything but amicable.
“And you’re still angry with me.” Her voice wavered when she said it, all the pent-up emotion of the last months without him weighting her words.
He didn’t deny it. He simply looked at the tray and made no move to eat. She sensed how much he hated being off his feet, an invalid, waited on hand and foot and unsure of the future.
“I’m angry with myself . . . our circumstances.” She tried to express what tore at her. Failed. “But I cannot undo anything about all that happened no matter how much I want to. I live with the regret of it day and night.”
He set the tray aside. Though far from agile, he reached for his crutches and began to get up. “I’ll eat in the kitchen. There’s no cause to be bedrid.”
She followed him with the tray, his breakfast no longer hot.
The house was big enough that the hearth’s warmth failed to reach farther into the room than a few feet.
She glanced at the kitchen windows in dismay.
A light snow was falling, which might well lock her in with him and his smoldering fury and her own haunting regrets.
Jerkily, he sat down at the head of the table and leaned his crutches against a cupboard.
She busied herself at the hearth, beginning the soup for their noon meal and wishing Bronwyn or Father Harlow would walk in.
Rhys was often brusque with them too, saying little, mostly listening and protesting any attempts by them to turn him into a slabbering milksop, so he said. She vowed to not be one of them.
When the silence turned taut as a fiddle string, she murmured, “You miss your Rifle Corps.”
“Aye.” He continued his breakfast as she busied herself grating corn into meal for bread. “I miss being on my feet, hale and hearty.”
A twist of resentment needled her. “You’re married to the army . . . not me.”
“You knew that the day I wed you.”
His matter-of-factness made her want to throw the bowl of corn at him. As it was, she grated her knuckle and blood stained her clean apron. She took a handkerchief from her pocket, wrapped it around her finger, and kept grating. “You’re sorry you wed me.”
“Nay, Mae.” He set down his fork. “I’m sorry you did what you did, but I’m not sorry you’re my wife.”
She felt the intensity of his gaze but couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “Do you forgive me?”
“I do,” he said with feeling, reminding her of the hallowed vows they’d spoken at Jon’s farm. “Why won’t you look at me?”
“Because I still see anger in your eyes.” Her voice shook as she met his gaze. “You’re regarding me as you did at Fort Montgomery that dark day, only you’re no longer shouting.”
“I’m sorry it came to that.” His voice held telling regret. “Do you forgive me?”
Did she? The hurt she’d carried ever since had festered into a bone-deep rankling. Their blissful beginning had soured that day, tainting her every thought of him since. The words that could never be taken back or undone played in her mind like a broken melody.
“You chose your sister over me . . . I should turn you out of this fort . . . I trusted you once, and I can trust you no longer.”
She couldn’t answer with any truthfulness, at least not the answer he wanted. Nor did she believe he’d truly forgiven her. She’d never felt less like a wife since he’d come home. This didn’t feel like her home. She felt like an intruder despite the ring on her finger.
Something pulsed between them in this kitchen that was anything but harmonious. Lest she add more shards to the brokenness, she abandoned her task and fled out the back door.
Rhys pushed away from the table and his unfinished breakfast and reached for his crutches.
By the time he’d hobbled to the back door, Mae had disappeared, well beyond reach.
Snow was coming down again on a raw December wind, blowing into the kitchen.
He leaned into the doorframe and looked past the plot of frozen ground meant for the kitchen garden to the wall of woods behind the house.
Where had she gone?
“Mae!” His aggrieved shout brought Bronwyn, which aggravated him as much as Mae’s absence.
“Mercy, Rhys!” His sister hurried into the kitchen. “Shut the door before we all freeze to our roosts like chickens.”
“Mae just left,” he told her, refusing to shut it as if somehow Mae might take that as him shutting her out.
“Left?” She stood to one side of the hearth, her back to the dwindling flames. “What means you?”
“We had . . . words.” He bent to a stack of wood near the door and heaved a piece of oak onto the fire from where he stood. “A misunderstanding.”
“Oh? I don’t want to get in the middle of it, but I am concerned.” She looked to the cornmeal Mae had been grinding. “Father and I have tried to leave you be, let you both come to terms with being together again.”
“Obliged,” he said, sitting back down at the head of the table, appetite gone.
She looked toward the open door. “Do you want me to go after her in your stead? She may be in the pasture where the sheep are kept. I’ve noticed she likes to walk there.”
“Let her return in her own time,” he said, resigned. Still, she’d worn no cape or coat, and he was always mindful of the baby. “She won’t be out long in this weather.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Stir the soup and finish grinding the meal.”
She gave the pot a stir, then resumed Mae’s work at the table. “The miller, bless him, has decided to dress the millstones, so we’ve not had any corn ground lately. Being so aged he’s quite slow—and quite stubborn. He refuses any help.”
The miller had a rebel son who’d been cut down at Brandywine Creek. How Rhys ached to ride to the mill and insist on dressing the stones himself. Taking a drink of lukewarm coffee, he felt the thunder return to his head. Fevered again?
Looking at him warily, Bronwyn made short work of the rest of the corn and took a seat. “Have you told her about how you came to be injured? What brought you home?”
“Nay.”
“Why not?” Her forthright questions were always broached gently, which made them more agreeable. “I’m sure she wants to know. I sense she’s trying not to rush you but letting you recover first.”
“I’m still mulling the wisdom of saying anything at all.”
“The truth is always better than secrecy, especially between husband and wife.”
How would she know? Though she’d been denied the wedding she wanted, she was wise to the ways of marriage.
She should be in her own kitchen and not his, with children around her skirts, their small hands keeping her from her work or trying to help her as children liked to do.
And yet here he sat, in a tangle of turmoil, with a wife and child, and had it all instead. Guilt nicked him like a wayward knife.
“She’s a good woman, Rhys.” Bronwyn’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “She means to be a good wife. And whatever is wrong between you can be righted.”
He got up, made his way to the back door again, and stared into pines and leafless oaks and maples bedecked white. What he’d give to go in search of her. If she stayed out much longer . . .
He heard the front door open and close quietly.
Bronwyn brightened and his heart gave a leap.
Footsteps sounded lightly on the stair, and he finally shut the back door, wanting to follow her yet realizing she wanted to be out of his reach.
He might have mastered the front steps, but he hadn’t attempted the second floor yet.
Perhaps the time had come to do just that.