The youth paused, his eyes on Pemberton's blood-soaked sleeve.
"You wanting me to get Doctor Cheney?"
"No," Serena said. "I'll dress it for him."
After Vaughn left, Serena stepped closer to the bedroom window and peered out at the stringhouses.
"Do the workers have electricity?"
"Just in the dining hall."
"It's best that way," Serena said, stepping back into the room's center. "Not just the money saved but for the men. They'll work harder if they live like Spartans."
Pemberton raised an open palm toward the room's bare rough-board walls.
"This is rather Spartan as well."
"Money freed to buy more timber tracts," Serena said. "If we'd wished our wealth spent otherwise we'd have stayed in Boston."
"True enough."
"Who lives next door?"
" Campbell. He's as valuable as any man in this camp. He can book keep, repair anything, and uses a Gunter's chain as well as any of the surveyors."
"And the last house?"
"Doctor Cheney."
"The wag from Wild Hog Gap."
"The only doctor we could get to live out here. Even to get him we had to offer a house and an automobile."
Serena opened the room's chifforobe and looked inside, perused the closet as well.
"And what of my wedding present, Pemberton?"
"In the stable."
"I've never seen a white Arabian."
"It's an impressive horse," Pemberton said.
"I'll take him for a ride first thing tomorrow."
When Vaughn had delivered the iodine and gauze, Serena sat on the bed and unbuttoned Pemberton's shirt, removed the weapon wedged behind his belt. She took the knife from the sheath, examined the dried blood on the blade before placing it on the bedside table. Serena opened the bottle of iodine.
"How does it feel, fighting a man like that? With a knife I mean. Is it like fencing or…more intimate."
Pemberton tried to think of how what he'd felt could be put in words.
"I don't know," he finally said, "except it feels utterly real and utterly unreal at the same time."
Serena gripped his arm harder but her voice softened.
"This will sting," she said, and slowly poured the auburn-colored liquid into the wound. "The cause of your notoriety in Boston, did that knife fight feel the same as the one today?"
"Actually, it was a beer stein in Boston," Pemberton replied. "More of an accident during a bar room brawl."
"The story that I heard involved a knife," Serena said, "and made the victim's demise sound anything but accidental."
As Serena paused to dab iodine leaking from the wound, Pemberton wondered if he detected a slight disappointment in Serena's tone or only imagined it.
"But this one, hardly an accident," Serena noted. "Myself will grip the sword-yea, though I die."
"I'm afraid I don't recognize the quote," Pemberton said. "I'm not the scholar you are."
"No matter. It's a maxim best learned the way you did, not from a book."
As Serena loosed gauze from its wooden spool, Pemberton smiled.
"Who knows?" he said lightly. "In a place this primitive I suspect knife-wielding is not the purview of one sex. You may do battle with some snuff-breathed harridan and learn the same way I have."
"I would do it," Serena said, her voice measured as she spoke, "if for no other reason than to share what you felt today. That's what I want, everything a part of you also a part of me."
Pemberton watched the cloth thicken as Serena wrapped it around his forearm, iodine soaking through the first layers, then blotted by the dressing. He remembered the Back Bay dinner party of a month ago when Mrs. Lowell, the hostess, came up to him. There's a woman here who wishes to be introduced to you, Mr. Pemberton, the matron had said. I should caution you, though. She has frightened off every other bachelor in Boston. Pemberton recalled how he'd assured the matron he was not a man easily frightened, that perhaps the woman in question might need to be cautioned about him as well. Mrs. Lowell had noted the justness of Pemberton's comment, matching his smile as she took his forearm. Let us go meet her then. Just remember you were warned, just as I've warned her.
"There," Serena said when she'd finished. "Three days and it should be healed."
Serena picked up the knife and took it into the kitchen, cleaned the blade with water and a cloth. She dried the knife and returned to the back room.
"I'll take a whetstone to the blade tomorrow," Serena said, setting the knife on the bedside table. "It's a weapon worthy of a man like you, and built to last a lifetime."
"To extend a lifetime as well," Pemberton noted, "as it has so fortuitously shown."
"Perhaps it shall again, so keep it close."
"I'll keep it in the office," Pemberton promised.
Serena sat down in a ladderback chair opposite the bed and pulled off her jodhpurs. She undressed, not looking at what she unfastened and let fall to the floor. All the while her eyes were fixed upon Pemberton. She took off her underclothing and stood before him. The women he'd known before Serena had been shy with their bodies, waiting for a room to darken or sheets to be pulled up, but that wasn't Serena's way.
Except for her eyes and hair, she was not conventionally beautiful, her breasts and hips small and legs long for her torso. Serena's narrow shoulders, thin nose and high cheekbones honed her body to a severe keenness. Her feet were small, and considering all other aspects of her features, oddly delicate, vulnerable looking. Their bodies were well matched, Serena's lithe form fitting his larger frame and more muscular build. Sometimes at night they cleaved so fiercely the bed buckled and leaped beneath them. Pemberton would hear their quick breaths and not know which were Serena's and which his. A kind of annihilation, that was what Serena called their coupling, and though Pemberton would never have thought to describe it that way, he knew her words had named the thing exactly.
Serena did not come to him immediately, and a sensual languor settled over Pemberton. He gazed at her body, into the eyes that had entranced him the first time he'd met her, irises the color of burnished pewter. Hard and dense like pewter too, the gold flecks not so much within the gray as floating motelike on the surface. Eyes that did not close when their flesh came together, pulling him inside her with her gaze as much as her body.
Serena opened the curtains so the moon spread its light across the bed. She turned from the window and looked around the room, as if for a few moments she'd forgotten where she was.