Marc swore, then bent down to examine the animal’s right front hoof. “He’s picked up a nail or something already. I’ll have to dig it out and then walk him home very slowly.”
Stebbins found a pair of pliers and handed Marc his jackknife. “Worst comes to worst, you could walk him across to McMaster,” he said. “Fancies himself a bit of a horse doctor, he does. Right now I gotta go. Got friends countin’ on me.”
Marc, angry and suspicious, decided on a single, direct gambit. “Where are you off to?”
“Oh, a small gatherin’ of associates who enjoy rollin’ the dice once in a blue moon.” With that he left.
Marc waited for half a minute and then walked quickly out to the sideroad at the end of Stebbins’s lane. From the tracks in the snow, Marc could make out that Azel had turned north and, when the road came to an end up beyond the Hislop place, had plunged into the bush on a line that would take him straight to Mad Annie’s. Unless, of course, Stebbins was more subtle in his cunning than he had shown thus far. At any rate, Marc was without a mount and like a duck on ice when fitted out with snowshoes. All that remained was for him to tend to the horse and then trudge home in front of it. At least the roads were well trodden and passable to a desperate man on foot.
He had just removed the nail from the animal’s hoof and noted with satisfaction that the cut was not deep when a cry from the house brought him to rapt attention.
“Help! Somebody, help me!”
Lydia Stebbins was standing in her doorway-screaming into the darkness.
Apparently a live splinter from the ebbing fire had been flung beyond the stone apron of the hearth and landed on a nearby pillow, setting it alight. By the time Marc arrived, rushing past a panicked Lydia, the pillow was merely smouldering. Oily ribbons of smoke snaked out of it, but under no circumstance would it have burst into flame or threatened the cabin. Marc picked it up gingerly, sprinted to the door, and tossed it into a snowbank.
Lydia was seated at the table, rocking her youngest in a bunting bag. The two-year-old remained unruffled in the loft. Lydia had made a remarkable recovery.
“Get me a drink of that rum, would you, Marc?”
Marc obliged, eyeing her intently.
“A lady don’t drink alone,” she said. “It ain’t polite.”
“I’ll sit with you till you’ve gotten over your fright,” Marc said as she sucked impolitely at her cupful of imported rum, courtesy no doubt of Messieurs Connors and O’Hurley. “Then I really must go. My horse has thrown a shoe and I’ve got to walk it home.”
“That won’t take you more’n an hour.” She pouted prettily. “And don’t tell me a big grown-up gentleman like yerself has got to be in bed afore ten o’clock.”
“A gentleman doesn’t remain alone with another gentleman’s wife without his knowledge or permission,” Marc countered.
“Now that would depend on the nature of the gentleman, wouldn’t it? And the lady.” She drained her cup.
“I think it safe to assume your husband would not approve.”
“Then he shouldn’t go runnin’ off and leavin’ me to fend fer myself three nights a week. Who am I supposed to talk to? Little Azel Junior?”
“Surely you exaggerate. Where would Azel go three nights a week in this township?”
She smiled and refilled her own cup. “So now you’re interested. What’s so goddamned attractive about my husband that you gotta give him so much attention? I’m a damn sight prettier’n he is!”
“All I’m saying, Mrs. Stebbins-”
“Lydia.”
“Lydia, is that I can’t give credence to your statement.”
“Christ, what a lingo! Where’n hell’d ya learn that? I bet you wouldn’t say shit if ya had a mouthful.”
“Azel told me he was going off to gamble,” Marc said. He poured himself a cup of the contraband rum.
“And hooerin’, fer all I know. He just goes off, I’m tellin’ ya, and leaves me here to talk to the walls.”
“Well, you may talk to me-for an hour. I’ve been told I’m a good listener.”
More than an hour later, Lydia Stebbins was still talking. Her dark curls billowed and fluttered as she grew more animated, and the round, black eyes took in less and less of the room and more and more of what they wanted to see.
“I grew up in my daddy’s hotel. It had the grandest ballroom in Buffalo, in the whole western half of the state. We had dances and card games that never ended. Two presidents stayed there. Dolley Madison was given my mother’s bed fer the night. She sent us a china figurine. Every general and admiral in America passed through Buffalo and not one of ’em but didn’t stop to converse with my daddy, the colonel. And he weren’t no country colonel neither. When I was eighteen he let me read parts of his war diary. You mayn’t believe it, lookin’ at me now, with these udders and my bum bulgin’ out, that my daddy sent me off to finishin’ school in Rochester.” She raised her rum cup like a proper lady, took a sip, and batted her black eyelashes. “I can even read French.”
She surveyed the cabin skeptically, as if to emphasize the unlikelihood of ever finding a use for French in these quarters.
“In the year before Azel come ridin’ up to sweep me away, my daddy was made president of the Loco Foco party in the Buffalo region, and I got to hear some of the most melodious speeches on local democracy ever given, and that includes Tom Paine and Mr. Jefferson himself.”
Marc leaned forward. “What I don’t understand is how you could give all that splendour up for a man who was already a farmer in a British colony opposed to democracy and who was likely to be more interested in yields per acre than the lofty sentiments of the preamble to the American Constitution?”
She stared across the table at him. “My word, you can talk just like them,” she breathed.
“But Azel can’t?”
“I don’t need remindin’ about Azel’s foul mouth,” she said irritably. Her expression changed as she added, “But the man was a stallion. And when you’re a girl of twenty and of a mind to disobey and spite yer daddy, that’s all that matters.”
Marc flushed, and began to doubt the wisdom of having steered the tête-à-tête into this particular groove. But it seemed too late to turn back now. “Azel kept his nose to the plough, then? Stayed away from speeches and politicking?”
“Oh, he got himself in thick with the Reformers up here when they tried to take the farm from us just because we come from the States. But he soon got tired of all that.”
“Still and all, he’s a good farmer,” Marc said, aiming for some respectable closure to a strange evening. “You’re fortunate to have him.” He started to get up.
“Enough of this palaver,” Lydia said, a licentious sparkle in her eyes. “Take me to bed.”
Marc dropped the jacket he was about to put on.
“You can’t go plyin’ me with wine and sweet talk and then just march out that door and leave a lady in distress, now can you?”
“But your husband-”
“What he don’t know or can’t guess can’t hurt him, can it?” She hunched nicely over until the rim of her dress slipped perilously close to the outer extremities of her breasts.
Marc realized, far too late, that he had drunk too much-here and earlier at Durfee’s-than discretion or common sense or self-interest warranted. And it had been far too long since that brief, passionate encounter with Marianne Dodds in far-off Kent. The room was overpoweringly warm and oddly reassuring, and the heady appeal of this wanton, bright, motherly, vulnerable vixen was not to be resisted.
She reached out for his hand, but it was he who led her towards the bed.
Marc was casting about for his other boot in the dark when Lydia rose up behind him and said, “I told ya, he never comes home before daylight, and he’s so stinkin’ drunk he’d think you were Father Christmas or the bogeyman.” She threw her arms about his neck. They were both stark naked, having performed their feat of lovemaking in that pristine state beneath an engulfing comforter while the fire expired and the air cooled above them. Lydia’s engorged nipples pressed into his back and mingling odours floated up from the warmth of their cocoon.