That did not mean the missive bore good news. It also did not mean he failed to recognize the script in which it was addressed. He had his doubts about whether he wanted to hear from the Atlantean Assembly. If only he could forget he'd ever heard from Marcel Freycinet, he would have been the happiest man in the newly freed, ecstatically independent United States of Atlantis. So he told himself, anyhow.
Which didn't mean he hadn't heard from Freycinet. He flipped the seal off the letter with his thumb. It lay not far from his feet. As he unfolded the paper, a little brown sparrow hopped over and pecked at the wax. Finding it indigestible, the bird fluttered off.
Victor feared he would find the letter's contents just as indigestible. Freycinet wasted no time beating around the bush. I congratulate you, he wrote. You are the father of a large, squalling baby boy. Louise is also doing well. She has asked that he be named Nicholas, to which I am pleased to assent. I pray God will allow him to remain healthy, and mat he will continue to be an adornment for my household. I remain, sir, your most obedient servant in all regards… His scribbled signature followed.
"A son," Victor muttered, refolding the sheet of paper. A son somewhere between mulatto and quadroon, born into slavery! Not the offspring he'd had in mind, which was putting it mildly. And if Marcel Freycinet chose, or needed, to sell the boy (to sell Nicholas Radcliff, only surviving son of Victor Radcliff-hailed as Liberator of Atlantis but unable to liberate his own offspring)… well, he would be within his rights.
Suddenly and agonizingly, Victor understood the Seventh Commandment in a way he never had before. God knew what He was doing when He thundered against adultery, all right. And why? Not least, surely, because adultery complicated men's lives, and women's, in ways nothing else could.
A bird called. It was only one of the robins whose Atlantean name General Cornwallis and other Englishmen so disdained. All the same, to Victor's ear it might have been a cuckoo. He'd hatched an egg in a nest not his own, and now he had to hope other birds would feed and care for the fledgling as it deserved.
Someone's soles scuffed on the dirt beside him. He looked up. There stood Blaise. The Negro pointed at the letter. "Is it from the Assembly?"
"No." Victor quickly tucked the folded sheet of paper into a breeches pocket. "Merely an admirer."
Blaise raised an eyebrow. "An admirer, you say? Have you met her? Is she pretty?"
"Not that sort of admirer." At the moment-especially at this moment-that was the last sort Victor wanted.
"What other kind is worth having?" Blaise asked. When away from Stella, he could still think like that, since he hadn't got Roxanne with child-and since he didn't know Victor had impregnated Louise.
"I said nothing of whether this one was worth having," Victor answered, warming to his theme: "This is a fellow who, having read the reports of our final campaign in the papers in Hanover, is now convinced he could have taken charge of our army and the French and won more easily and quickly and with fewer casualties than we did. If only he wore gilded epaulets, he says, we should have gained our liberty year before last."
"Oh. One of those" Blaise said. The lie convinced him all the more readily because Victor had had several real letters in that vein. A startling number of men who'd never commanded soldiers-and who probably didn't know how to load a musket, much less clean one-were convinced the art of generalship suffered greatly because circumstance forced them to remain netmakers or potters or solicitors. Victor and Blaise were both convinced such men understood matters military in the same degree as a honker comprehended the calculus.
I'm afraid so," Victor said.
"Well, if you waste the time and ink on an answer, by all means tell him I think he's a damn fool, too," Blaise said, and took himself off.
"If I do, I shall," Victor answered-a promise that meant nothing. He reached into his pocket and touched the letter from Freycinet. However much grief he felt, it remained a private grief. And the last thing he wanted-the very last thing-was that it should ever become public.
Dickering with the English commissioners helped keep Victor from brooding too much over things in his own life he could not help. Richard Oswald was a plain-spoken Scotsman who served as chief negotiator for the English Secretary of State, the Earl of Shelburne. His colleague, David Hartley, was a member of Parliament. He had a high forehead, a dyspeptic expression, and a shoulder-length periwig of the sort that had gone out of fashion when Louis XTV died, more than half a century before.
Most of the negotiations were straightforward enough. The English duo conceded that King George recognized the United States of Atlantis, separately and collectively, as free, sovereign, and independent states. He abandoned all claims to govern them and to own property in them.
Settling the borders of the new land was similarly simple. The only land frontier it had was the old one with Spanish Atlantis in the far south, and that remained unchanged. One of these days, Victor suspected, his country would take Spanish Atlantis for its own, either by conquest or by purchase. But that time was not yet here, and did not enter into the present discussions.
"There'd be more of a to-do over who owned what and who claimed what were you part of the Terranovan mainland," Oswald remarked in a burr just thick enough to make Victor pay close attention to every word he said. The comment reminded Victor of his byplay with Cornwallis at the surrender ceremony. Oswald went on, "As things are, though, ocean all around keeps us from fashin' ourselves unduly."
"So it does," Victor said, hoping he grasped what fashin' meant.
They disposed without much trouble of fishing rights and of the due rights of creditors on both sides to get the full amount they had been owed. Then they came to the sticky part: the rights remaining to Atlanteans who had stayed loyal to King George. That particularly grated on Victor because Habakkuk Biddiscombe and a handful of his men remained at large.
At last, David Hartley said, "Let them be outlaws, then. But what of the plight of the thousands of Atlanteans who never bore arms against your government but still groan under expulsions and confiscations? I fear I see no parallel between the two cases."
That gave Victor pause. How could he say the Englishman's complaint held no justice? Slowly, he answered, "If these onetime loyalists are willing to live peacefully in the United States of Atlantis, and to accept the new nation's independence, something may perhaps be done for them."
"Why do you allow no more than that?" Hartley pressed. "Let your Atlantean Assembly pass the proper law, and proclaim it throughout the land, and all will be as it should."
"If only it were so simple," Victor said, not without regret.
"Wherefore is it not?" Hartley asked.
"The Assembly chooses war and peace for all Atlantis. It treats with foreign powers. It coins specie. It arranges for the dealings of the Atlantean settlements-ah, states-one with another," Victor said. "But each state, within its own boundaries, retains its sovereignty. The Assembly has not the authority to command the several states to treat the loyalists within 'em thus and so. Did it make the attempt, the states' Assemblies and Parliaments and Legislatures would surely rise against it, reckoning its impositions as tyrannous as all Atlantis reckoned King George's."
"This is not government," Richard Oswald said. "This is lunacy let loose upon the world."
Although inclined to agree with him, Victor knew better than to admit as much. He spread his hands. "It is what we have, sir. I do not intend to touch off a civil war on the heels of the foreign war just past."
"Lunacy," Oswald repeated. He seemed more inclined to wash his hands of the United States of Atlantis than to spread them.