Page 1 of The Autumn Wife
CHAPTER ONE
Convent of Notre Dame
Montreal, July 29, 1673
Far across the grassy lawn, Cecile glimpsed her precious boy about to be crushed into a bloody pulp.
With a choking scream, she took off, skirts flying, bolting toward the construction site of a half-built chapel. She shouted a warning, but Etienne, ignorant of his approaching death, kept chattering with a cluster of young laborers nearby. Glaring at the stone block about to fall upon his head, panic in her throat, she tried to will the rock to slow down. Shiny bits in the surface winked at her, mocking her as it rotated in its tumble.
Look up! Etienne!
Etienne’s head shot up—she glimpsed the angry scratch across his chin from the fall he’d taken that very morning, when he’d pulled the canoe up to the riverbank of these convent grounds. She glimpsed the dark mole above his lip, and watched his eyes narrow in question as the shadow of the rock darkened his shoulder.
A word ripped up her throat.Mooooooooooove!
Then a blur swept past her field of vision. In one moment, Etienne’s face blazed in her sight, and in the next, the stone tumbling from the highest point of the unfinished façade slammed into the ground. Clods, shards, and dust billowed. With a sharp cry, she stopped as if she’d been struck herself. Teetering with her arms flung out, she gaped at the curtain of dirt that obscured the building site. From that cloud came a man’s shout, a boy’s squeal, but no voice that resonated in her bones like the pitch of Etienne’s cry.
Etienne.
How many times over the past years had she rushed to save him? How many times had she been too late to throw herself between his father’s whistling leather belt and the boy’s narrow back? Had she failed again? How could Etienne die like this, after all they’d been through, this boy, the light of her life?
The veil of dust dimmed and then she saw it—the flash of a knobby knee emerging from the torn, buff-colored breeches of a bending leg. Gasping, she hurled herself toward him, shouting his name.
Sprawled on the stone-strewn ground of the building site, Theo turned at the sound of a shriek. He glimpsed, coming through the haze, a froth of kicked-up skirts, white ruffles, a blur of yellow like the colza flowers that bloomed on the mountainsides of his hometown of Guéret. Those skirts drifted down as a young woman threw herself onto her knees beside the boy he’d just shoved out of mortal danger. On the breeze of her pace flowed a wildflower scent, cutting through the ashen stink of the lime ricks.
“Are you hurt?” The woman’s hands fluttered over the boy’s cheeks, shoulders, and arms like little white birds. She gasped at the sight of his bleeding forearm.
“Don’t fuss.” The boy eased himself up to a sitting position and cast a lowered glance toward the gaping apprentices. “It’s just a scrape.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.” The woman’s voice quivered like a taut-drawn violin string. “Did I not tell you to wait on the bench outside the convent while I met with Mother Superior?” She hauled in a frustrated breath. “The meeting hadn’t even begun. I was inside the building only a minute before I poked my head out to see you—tonotsee you—”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Theo took pity on the young man, mortified under the barrage of the publicscolding. “I was on the road; I saw it all happen. The mason on the ladder wasn’t wearing a leather bib—”
“Hey!”
Theo glanced toward the sound of the voice and saw the fool he’d just been talking about. The redheaded mason leaped down from the last rung of the rickety ladder and strode toward him, gesturing toward the boy. “He was standing where he wasn’t supposed to be.”
“He is alive, sir, only because of the efforts of this man.” The woman flung the words like javelins. “Alive,” she repeated, “with no thanks to you.”
Pushing himself up to his knees, Theo took a keener look at the beauty talking like a general. Seeing such a genteel lady in this frontier settlement was a rare thing, but this woman was of the kind who would seize the attention of any man anywhere in the world. A tiny nose, a rosy mouth, delicate features at war with her fierce expression. She wasn’t wearing the common gray habit of the novices, but rather, a well-tailored dress and fine linen scarf embroidered with green climbing vines. She might have leaped into his vision straight from a maypole ceremony outside his parish church.
There it was again, his past, sneaking up on him.
A life stolen.
Theo drove the thought away as he rose to his feet and held out a hand to help the lady up. She didn’t glance at his outstretched arm, or even turn her head to acknowledge his presence. Instead, shetugged her skirts from under her knees, canted back on her heels, and rose on her own power to a height not much taller than his shoulder.
She took a step closer to the redheaded mason, shards of rock crunching beneath her boots. “Have you nothing to say for yourself, sir?”
“Like I told you….” Nostrils flaring, the mason jutted his chin toward the still-sprawled boy. “He shouldn’t have been hanging around here. Neither should strangers coming off the road.”
Theo braced himself for a fight, but the woman spoke first.
“Those apprentices”—the woman gestured toward the younger laborers still mixing mortar in a trough—“work just as close to the wall as my boy was standing. Any laborer on this site could have been walking by that ladder.”
“Anyone withsense,” the mason corrected, “would have kept a proper distance.”
Theo stepped between them, diverting the man’s attention to someone his own size. Fighting would get Theo in a heap of trouble, but such insolence to the fairer sex begged a response. “That wall,” Theo began, thrusting his hand out toward the half-built façade of the chapel, “is, what, twenty feet high? So, where’s the scaffolding? The bucket-pulley? And where’s your overseer?”
