"I didn't love you then—and I don't love you now! Enough, Lisette," he exclaimed.
She had been at Mansion House when he returned from the dock, half-blind with grief over Mary's departure, his fear for her, the uncertainty of their future and he hadn't paid any attention to the talk of the visiting artist. But she had been there in the morning, looking nearly the same as when he had left her in Paris six years ago, before he'd married Eliza, and she had been there each time he turned around in the days since, sitting across from a boy with her sketchbook, conversing with the nuns, curled up in an armchair in the officers' parlor, nudging her cup of chicory towards him. She wore the same fragrance, jasmine and orris root, and it seemed it filled the corners of the hospital, keeping company with shadows and memory. Finally, she had found him alone today, and begun upon her true purpose—a reunion with him which his surly temper and indifference had not dissuaded her from. Nothing had put her off. She had coaxed and cajoled, still as artful with her words as her pencil, as her dark lashes and her eyes like agates. He could not even say he had chosen to be cruel to be kind, only that he couldn't bear it any more.
"I'm in love with someone, she's all I think about," he added. "She knows who I am now as you can't, you don't."
"Your wife?" Lisette said but he heard the imminent retreat in her voice, the curiosity about the woman he loved.
"No. That's—that's over. Someone else," Jed replied. Mary with her dark eyes, her gentle, sure hands, her grace, her determined Yankee virtue; he felt her beside him every day and how he missed her, his soul's companion.
"She is here, cette incomparable?" she asked, her earrings swinging slightly as she tossed her head.
"No. Not anymore. She was…sent away," he said. He wrote to her but he spoke of her little except to Samuel, who knew her so well and understood the choices she made even better than he did himself.
"Oh! The nurse, the sick nurse, who wept so bitterly? She meant you, maintenant, je comprends," she cried. He did not understand how Lisette knew Mary, what encounter they had shared.
"What do you mean, she meant me? What did she say?" he snapped.
"She said, oh, not very much but I understood. She loves you—she broke her heart over leaving you," Lisette explained and it was the sharpest pain to hear it, the greatest joy.
"Shall you go to her? Or is she well enough to return? She was very sick, pauvre."
"She is recovering…slowly. She cannot travel and I am needed here, she would not have me abandon the men, she won't let me," he said. She had written that, that he must treat the soldiers and she would come when she could, when Dr. Harris permitted her. He only managed it by knowing Jonathan Harris would make sure she healed; they had met at Harvard and in Paris and Jed had arranged for him to supervise Mary's care in Boston. Jonathan sent less frequent, briefer updates than Mary but Jed could hear his friend's voice, his dry humor, his confidence in Mary's gradual return to health when he read them and they were a different kind of comfort but entirely necessary.
"I liked her, even so ill, so much passion! Such spirit!" Lisette said, smiling a little. He remembered this about her—she was not a jealous woman, not selfish as he was both.
"And you, cheri, without her? What do you need?" she added, a question he had posed to himself so many times.
"A friend. We were that once, weren't we?" he said and she laughed, that laugh he had never quite loved but always been charmed by.
"Oui, certainment. And that is even more rare, n'est-ce pas? For me, I would say it was," she replied, laying her hand on his forearm. It was finally what he wanted and he would give her something in return.
"Yes. Rare and precious."