Page 55 of The Autumn Wife
“He didn’t pass me on the road. He couldn’t have gone far.”
Theo followed the nun to where she’d seen footprints, then he trailed them to some scuffs across the rutted road. On the opposite verge, Theo discovered a fresh, wet outline of a muddy boot pressed into the frost-glazed grass and farther up the slope.
“Reverend Mother,” he said, turning toward her. “Jules is still at the building site, stacking fieldstone. Tell him to head toward the fort, just in case Etienne slipped by us. Tell him he must bring the boy back, even if he has to knock him out and haul him over his shoulder.”
The sister nodded and set off to find Jules.
Theo followed the path of the footprints. Some ways up the slope, he passed a matted-down place in a swale of longer grass, where the boy must have burrowed to avoid detection after the nun came out to find him gone.
Theo came upon Etienne around the back of the gristmill, slumped against the mossy wall. Making scuffing noises as he approached, Theo waited for the boy to notice his arrival. Etienne didn’t lift his head. Only by the tightening of shoulders did Theo realize the boy was aware that he was no longer alone.
Shifting his gaze toward a fringe of thick woods, Theo leaned against the gristmill wall. He was the wrong person to be talking to Etienne about his mother. Theo had saved the boy’s life the first day they met, but gratitude had long been replaced with a sullen hostility. The boy had sensed the growing relationship between Theo and his mother long before either one of them had admitted it.
Considering the violence in the boy’s upbringing, Etienne’s protectiveness of his mother was something to admire. Now, seeing him slumped in despair. Theo felt as if a lead weight hung on his own heart.
Theo lowered himself to a crouch, the wall of the gristmill at his back.
The boy, chin on his knees, yanked hunks of grass from the ground and tossed them away. The boy’s mind seemed to be spinning with the same heaving force as the arms of the windmill above their heads.
A dozen full rotations passed before Etienne ventured a word.
“I am going to testify.” He threw a chunk of sod farther away than the others. “My mother can’t stop me. Neither can you.”
The boy was talking big, but there was no mistaking the iron determination in his words. Theo wondered if it would be better to treat the boy less like a runaway and more like the man he was becoming—the man he would need to be, to survive all of this.
Theo said, “I just spoke to your mother.”
His head jerked up. “Is she all right?”
“She’s tired. Cold. Worried about you.” Theo laid his head back against the wall. His heart squeezed at the memory of Cecile’s icy fingers and the violet shadows under her eyes. “She’s determined to protect you at all costs.”
“She’s the one who needs protecting.” The boy tossed a tuft of grass and folded his arms around his upraised knees. “She’s the one who’s going to be hanged.”
“She won’t hang. I swear it—”
“You can’t swear it.” A vein throbbed at the boy’s temple. “She told me about you, you know. The night before she went to the Girards’. She told me why you’re an indentured servant and what happened back in Paris. She said that while she was gone, I needed torespectyou in all things.”
Sounds like her order didn’t stick.
“That’s why you can’t swear she won’t hang.” Etienne’s nostrils flared. “You know my mother won’t get a fair trial.”
“I’ll set her free anyway.”
“Impossible. She’s in a cage in the fort. There’s no escaping a place so well guarded.”
“If she’s convicted, they will have to take her to Quebec. Worst case, I’ll rescue her from the tumbrel.”
“And then what?” Etienne turned angry black eyes on him. “You’ll both be hunted down.”
“The wilderness”—Theo gestured toward the fringe of trees at the height of the slope as he remembered Cecile’s own words—“is wide and deep.”
“She would hate living in the wilderness. She would hate always running from the law.” Etienne turned his face away. “Mom should be living in a palace with servants and lots of food. She should have nothing harder to do than embroider all day.”
Those words were a kick in the gut, for Theo wanted to give her exactly all that. But first, she needed her freedom.
“Only I can free her,” Etienne insisted. “By going to the magistrate and telling the truth.”
Theo swallowed a scoff. “She told you what happened to me, and you still believe the truth will matter here?”
