Page 22 of The Autumn Wife
“Several warehouses as well.” He offered her the bottle. “It’ll take a week for the wind to blow away the stink of burnt pelts.”
“The hospital was spared, at least.” She took the bottle but didn’t drink. She was already dangerously light-headed. “I heard a rumor that a woman started the fire, a servant—”
“A Mohawk captive,” he corrected. “Or so said the crowd shouting accusations in the street.”
She heard the suspicion curdling his words. “You think they’re wrong?”
“A fire could be started by anything.” He pulled a piece of grass out of the ground and shredded it. “A spark rising from a chimney. A torch fallen from a sconce. A badly stacked hearth fire spilling beyond the hearthstone onto a basket of wool.”
“Or arson,” she added. “How else would the rumor start? Maybe someone saw the woman set the fire and reported it.”
“Everyone wants a scapegoat.” He tossed the fragments of grass away and brushed the remnants off his breeches with more force than necessary. “And the authorities need somebody to hang.”
The question shot to her lips—were you a scapegoat?—but she stopped it behind her teeth. Until this past June, she had fervently believed that everyone who had been convicted of a crime was a wicked, unredeemable villain.AfterJune, she’d spent every day and every restless night trying to convince herself that some crimes could be justified…because if she was mistaken about that, thenshewas an unredeemable villain.
Etienne, too.
“Theo.” His name fell from lips on a breath, as did the question to which she now needed an answer. “What were you convicted of?”
“Theft,” he answered, as if he’d been expecting that query from her forever. “Theft and murderous assault.”
She flinched, remembering Theo grappling on the dusty ground with Jules. Dear heavens. A smarter woman would have stomped on her own curiosity and continued to avoid Theo in an excess of caution, but instead, here she was—reckless fool—tearing down the wall between them. She raised the bottle and took another hefty swig, then settled it on the grass.
His voice rumbled in the darkness. “You’re still here.”
“I am.” As foolish as it might be.
“Most people would run away.” His chest rose. “After all, you’re sitting alone with a violent criminal on the banks of the river under the cover of night, so far away from others that no one would hear you scream.”
Her throat tightened. “I know.”
“You’re a brave woman, Cecile. In so many ways.”
She didn’t feel brave. She felt confused, conflicted, and addled to the point of being unable to make sense of the storm of feelings the presence of this man set loose inside her. She couldn’t look at him right now, yet she was intimately attuned to his breathing, to the warm, muscular bulk of him shifting at her side. Though every tendon in her body vibrated, she couldn’t even tell if that trembling was due to fear.
“Thank you,” Theo murmured into the silence. “I almost forgot what trust feels like.”
Did she trust him? She knew better than to trustanyman. A new pressure rose up in her chest, the front wave of the old terrors. To hold it off, she blurted, “Are you guilty of those crimes, Theo?”
“Not of theft.” He leaned back on his hands, the muscles in his arms bulging under his weight. “But I am guilty of murderous assault.”
Such a casual confession of a brutal crime, the words ringing in her ears. “So…you murdered a man?”
“No.” His jaw tightened. “Though, in the moment, I wanted to, very much.”
His words kicked her, but not in a way that thickened the pressure in the back of her throat, or set her stomach dropping. Instead, those words jolted through her in bright recognition, for she knew how it felt to want someone dead with every fiber of her being.
“I’ll tell you the story,” he continued against the shush-shush of the lapping river. “I’ve got nothing to hide. Every spring, we—the stonemasons of Guéret—made a pilgrimage out of our village to find work in the bigger cities. That year, I led a crew toward Paris, where we had already been hired to raise a city building.”
She imagined Theo on the roads, trowel tucked into his belt, a linen bag slung across his body, men following in his wake. Easy to imagine, for she’d seenhow well he worked with others upon the scaffolding and, tonight, how men during a fire followed his lead without question.
“We weren’t far outside the gates of Paris,” he continued, “when I noticed a stopped carriage and the coachman sitting across the road with his back to it. I thought the coach needed repair for a broken axle or something. Then, on the ground by it, I noticed an overturned basket of posies. The kind of flowers poor girls gather in the fields outside the city, around that very road, and then head to Paris to sell on the streets for a trifle.”
She sensed how this story would unfold as an image of Theo hurling himself toward Etienne to save her son shot through her mind.
“The coach was shaking,” he said. “Noises came from inside, a girl’s muffled cry—”
“It’s hardly a crime to save a girl’s honor,” she interrupted to stave off the grim details.
