PART VI

British North America, 1786

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"Outward hence Spring hatches bright

From the frozen egg of Winter's blight,

The grasses weep, once capped in snow

Now quench the crocus keen to grow."

Mathieu heaved a sigh and set down his pencil. His father had sent him an expensive writing case with crisp paper, several inkwells, and a dozen quills for Christmas, a gift inspired by the latest letter (I've decided to try my hand at poetry). He wasn't happy with anything he'd written. Then again, he'd been short on inspiration through the winter; he couldn't believe how much snow fell here. North. That was what the Americans called it. As a child, he'd pictured "North" as a place of constant snow, blizzards, and possibly great ice monsters pushing through the cold. As it turned out, BNA—it wasn't a very homey initialism, he had to admit—was only ice-locked for a portion of the year. In the summer, it was hotter than England; in the fall, it was brighter; in the winter, it was colder; and in the spring . . . well, it was difficult to be wetter than England, but it had its fair share of showers. Some folk complained—particularly the Loyalists who'd been shunted northward when the Americans declared independence—but Mathieu appreciated the variety in the seasons. He didn't even mind how bitterly cold Christmas Eve was; indoors, with a fire burning, you felt safe from the dangers of the wilderness. Not that Mathieu ever felt truly afraid. He respected the forces of nature. Like anything else, they weren't frightening if you knew how to live alongside them. I don't know how you can abide the weather there, his father had remarked once in a letter. Do tell me if you ever wish for a break from it. You are always welcome here. One of many hints that Arthur missed his middle son dearly. Mathieu occasionally felt bad about his departure from England, but there was a time for putting oneself first, and he had come upon it.

He had been invited to the Edwards's home for Christmas dinner. He'd written that they were neighbors to his father, whom he suspected would be shocked to find out that it took an hour to trudge to their house in the snow. It was worth the journey, even if he had to make the return trip by himself. Foamy eggnog, pork sweetened with brown sugar, mashed potatoes, he even ate the carrots despite his distaste for them. Truth be told, he could have been served a plate of withered apples and chicken bones and he would still have dined as if it were royal fare, because it was not the food that filled him, but the happy faces and laughter around the table that left a warm feeling in his stomach. There were four in the Edwards family, two daughters, one twelve and one fourteen. Both were clearly taken with Mathieu; their giggly blushes embarrassed him more than them. He was twenty-three now, something he could almost believe if he put his mind to it. Where had the time gone? Everyone was always saying that. It seemed to Mathieu that they were focusing on the wrong part of the equation. Of course the time was gone; everything left sooner or later. What was more important was what had happened while it was there.

The Edwards father had helped Mathieu build his cottage. Small, just a box of logs, really. But it was a brutally human affair, as everything was out here; striving for survival, everything rough and wild. Mathieu sometimes imagined his father here, spirited from the London cobbles and dropped headlong into the snowfields. His father was nearly fifty now, but that hardly mattered in this hypothetical. Out of his prime or in, Arthur Kirkland would flounder and sink in this unforgiving land. Mathieu had grown rather rugged in his year here. Home. The word fit comfortably. Just a shame it was so far from his family.

Mathieu glanced at the open book propped at the other end of his small table. A collection of English verse, another gift from his father. Richard Lovelace, on this particular page. With a name like that, it seemed to Mathieu, a man couldn't be much other than a poet. He rather liked this one. ("Why should you swear I am forsworn/since thine I vowed to be?") They were all about loving women, of course. Even if a man had the courage to write about loving another, it would never be allowed to be read. Mathieu sighed again. It wasn't heartbreak, not anymore. His heart had been broken, set, and healed. Now it was just a dull ache, worse in the cold. That would make a good poem.

Despite the melt of spring outside, Mathieu's thoughts lingered in the cold. Not this winter, but one eight years ago, in London. He'd left the house in the country the same week Kuma died. His companion, lost to the merciless race of time. He hoped the dog was happy in heaven. (Marianne and Arthur both assured him, as a child, that dogs went to heaven. Digging bones all day long, Marianne said. The bones of dead people? Mathieu asked, more surprised than anything. Marianne looked at Arthur in startled disgust, but the Englishman had just laughed, appreciating the dark humor of it. Mathieu joined him in this appreciation now, belated and from a poetic standpoint. Could he bring himself to write a verse about his old friend digging for death? No, no, far too macabre.) Marianne, Antonio, and Peter had been disappointed to lose Mathieu to the city. It had been nearly a year since the incident—as they had taken to calling it, no one willing to voice the offending name—and Mathieu's voice had come back only slightly, but enough to make his wishes known: I'm going to live with Father. No one protested, not even Marianne. He'd heard Antonio talking to her about, later. Can you blame him? This is where it happened. He's always reminded of it. Which was true, but not in the way the Spaniard was thinking.

A pleasant surprise, lad, Arthur had said when Mathieu showed up on the mansion's doorstep. No one made the slightest reference to what had happened. Some may have been offended by the lack of coddling after such hardship, but to Mathieu it was refreshing. Everyone in the country house danced around him as if afraid to acknowledge his existence and, by extension, the terrible thing they believed had happened. That, combined with all the words trapped inside him, made him feel completely invisible. No such issue at the Kirkland Mansion. His grandmother was her usual self—an aging puppet in nice dresses—and his uncles were semi-present jokesters, always welcome for their ridiculous stories if nothing else. And Amelia, of course, was delighted to have Mathieu living there. She filled the role Kuma had left open, following Mathieu and providing assistance where needed—in her case, the assistance came as sensing what he wanted to say and speaking for him, as well as frightening tall men off if they came too close. (Mathieu did appreciate men keeping their distance, but, again, not for the reason Amelia was thinking.)

But the words inside him were jagged stones. He thought time trapped within would smooth them, like a rushing river, but instead they sliced the vulnerable things within him, and he found himself waking up to a pillow wet with tears each morning. The pain grew worse each day, until it reached its agonizing peak—rather fittingly—at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Sitting beside his father, watching holy candles flicker as the choir sang, he felt his eyes overflow with tears. Arthur must have heard his snuffling as he tried desperately to hide his outpouring of misery, because he turned his head and regarded his son with those vibrant green eyes. Father and son were both exhausted, but that did nothing to lessen the bright beauty of their eyes. Mathieu expected harsh judgement—a man could not cry in public, obviously—but Arthur simply reached into his coat and produced a finely knitted handkerchief, which Mathieu took gratefully and wiped his face dry as quickly as he could. He handed it back without considering how unsanitary it might seem, but Arthur just gave a crooked, amused smile and tucked it back into his pocket.

When they got home, the ladies went off to bed, but Mathieu lingered downstairs. He saw his father go into the parlor and followed slowly, watching him from the doorway. Arthur eased himself down on the rolled-arm sofa, sighing softly, and leant forward to do some delicate preparations on the table (the candlelight was too weak for Mathieu to make them out) before sitting back and placing a tobacco pipe between his lips.

"I didn't know you smoked," Mathieu said, voice raspy with disuse.

Normally, it may have given Arthur a fright, but his fatigue gave him composure. He simply raised an unreadable gaze to Mathieu and lowered the pipe, exhaling an opaque cloud that seemed to crawl under the table. "Yes, well, I suspect there is quite a stock of information kept unknown between us."

Normally, it may have given Mathieu a fright. He simply asked, "May I come in?"

The secret came out in a gush, bled from his mouth as though he'd stuck in a dagger. For some—for most—it would have been accepted about as well as such self-mutilation. He fully expected to be tossed out into the cold night (such was his ignorance, to think England cold). But Arthur didn't falter. He didn't look away from his son. His face didn't change. He simply drew from his pipe, breathed the smoke away, and said, "I knew I would pass it on to at least one of my children."

Secrets, it turned out, were like rabbits. They multiplied before you even realized it was possible. "But—" Mathieu struggled to find proper words. He didn't want to waste any. "But you loved Mother."

"I still do." Arthur's eyes were dark, weary. He looked older than he ever had, an elderly ghoul in the candlelight, a smokey statue of a man. "I always will. But there is more than one sort of love in this world. I dare say every relationship has its own version of love."

Mathieu wanted desperately to ask about the intimate side of the marriage—did his father feel precisely as he did, the hunger for a man's touch? But there was no way to discuss such things, simply no way. It was enough of a miracle for Arthur to admit the secret at all; Mathieu felt weak under the weight of the admission. From his father, it was far more than it seemed. He felt as though he knew Arthur closely, closer than he'd ever thought possible. And, proof more than anything that he was his father's son, he said next, "I think I'll go with Amelia when she crosses the Atlantic."

A younger Arthur would have protested. But the years of Marianne and the silent ridicule of the lords surrounding the divorce had taken the fight from him. His life seemed designed to defeat him in the end. (His small size, his mocking brothers, his indifferent mother, his cheating wife, his dead father, his long-ago boarding school companion, a boy he had not let himself think about for decades . . .) But he couldn't hold it against his children. It wasn't their fault his life was miserable, and he couldn't ruin theirs as some convoluted attempt at recompense. He could only let them go and hope that they would lead happy lives elsewhere and maybe, just maybe, come back to see him before he dropped dead.

So Arthur set his pipe down on the table, wrapped his arms around his son, and embraced him tightly. He pressed a light kiss to his son's temple and murmured, "Stay long enough to finish an English education. Times are changing, lad. Education protects men like us from the brutes of the world."

Amelia had agreed to wait for Mathieu to finish his studies. He'd been uncertain what route to take, and had settled with focusing on literature. Perhaps that was his motivation for being a poet. But he had always appreciated beautiful things, and, as a listener, he was skilled with the subtleties words. Eight years later, Arthur had seen his son and daughter off, embracing them both with misty eyes. Amelia had wept, as well. I'll visit, I promise, she told him. He just smiled, light and melancholy as a wilting blossom. I look forward to it, my silly goose.

They said no goodbyes to Marianne, Antonio, or Peter. Mathieu couldn't stand to face them again. He was a coward, the worst coward. He didn't deserve the mercy of his father, but he was grateful for it. A hateful man in Arthur's position would not have rested until the man who had raped his son was put to the gallows. But Arthur understood in a way no one else could. He sent men to search for the Prussian, of course; people would spread hideous rumors if he didn't. But it was only the bare minimum. He spared Mathieu the nightmare of watching a loved one die (though no one had spared him from Kuma). Mathieu never wrote to his mother, despite his father's notes that She's been asking about you. He kept telling himself that the next time he wrote to his father, he would put in a letter to be sent to the house in the country. But he never brought himself to do it. He couldn't, because every draft he began started the same way: You ruined everything. You took him from me. You tore out my heart.

Amelia quickly found a strong American man to court. He could pick her up with one arm and their two boys with the other, or so she claimed in her letters. (Very bearish, I think Father would hate him, but that's rather the appeal, isn't it?) Mathieu had ventured north before Amelia was wed, or he would have been there for the celebrations. A shame they were so scattered, and yet it felt right somehow. Like they had been meant to be so far apart, all along.

Mathieu got up from his table and botched poetry attempts. He needed a break from the blank pages and the unwanted thoughts they manifested. Outside, the air was cleaner, so incredibly pristine. The reek of London gaslights was a half-forgotten nightmare; this was reality, a biting sort of heaven. He so loved it here. Home. But if only . . . if only . . .

A clattering whistle; then the dark flutter of a bird landing on his woodpile. His automatic smile at the wonder of nature faltered as he recognized this particular part for what it was. Dark feathers that glinted a hidden, secret green in the sunlight. The very bird he'd been watching the day Antonio and Gilbert came. His Prussian lion, sent from on high. Mathieu choked on his tears and brought both hands to his face, heaving ugly sobs. The starling tilted its head, regarding him as if he was a very strange creature indeed, then spread its small wings and fluttered away, still singing. Its song was so loud, in fact, that Mathieu almost didn't hear the voice.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk. What did I tell you about crying?"

Mathieu went so still it seemed even his heart stopped. The feeling, the most desperate, agonizing hope, set his chest afire. Then, an action he would question forever, he peeked between his fingers as though he was a little boy again, faced with a monster spawned by his imagination.

Gilbert Beilschmidt stood before him, ashen hair gleaming white in the sun, crimson eyes warmed by a smile that, for once, held no mockery. He looked as he was: a man completely in love.

"You found me," Mathieu whispered. He was afraid to move. He was afraid to acknowledge that this was happening. What if it was a dream? He never wanted to wake.

The Prussian nodded, amused. "You didn't make it easy for me. What's this Matthew Williams business?"

"I . . . it's the name I use here. I didn't want anyone to know who Father was, and treat me . . . differently because of it." What were they talking about? How could they just be standing here, chatting as though it had only been a month since they had last seen each other, as if they had parted on friendly terms? As if this was not an impossibility—a miracle, a bloomin' miracle—that they were even having this conversation?

Mathieu couldn't take it, had no reason to take it. He threw himself at Gilbert with the same desperate need of a man afire diving into water. The Prussian staggered a little under his weight—he was not a petite fifteen-year-old anymore, and Gilbert wasn't exactly getting younger, either—but he stayed upright, and the pair of them wrapped their arms around each other tight enough to hurt. Mathieu soaked happy tears into the collar of Gilbert's coat, and Gilbert kissed Mathieu's golden curls, and Mathieu could say only, "You found me. You found me."

"Don't sound surprised." Gilbert cupped his lightly bristled cheek—both of them needed a shave—and leaned down so their noses brushed. "I promised to keep you safe, didn't I?" His lips spread in a cutting smile, the kind only Mathieu was immune to. "I'm a man of my word."

Their kiss did not let the negative truths affect it. It didn't matter to them, while they kissed, that they would never be able to have children. It didn't matter that they could not grow old together. It didn't matter that Mathieu could never bring Gilbert home to his family.

All that mattered was the warmth of the sun, the song of the starlings, and the soft but firm union of their lips as they kissed, and kissed some more, then embraced each other again, both of them sighing in relieved contentment. Their hearts had been broken in the past, and fractures still remained, and would always be there. Still, they had found happiness. Against all odds, the stars had allowed them a joy that, though it would not last forever, would echo onward, past their bodies' inevitable expiration, through the generations, at times forgotten, stowed away among the relics, then lifted back into knowledge one fateful decade, a serendipity.

. . .

It ended, as it tended to do, with a boy and a girl.

She was sitting on a bench in a beautiful park called Jardin des Champs-Élysées, none of which she could even begin to pronounce. Her face was severe—sharp green eyes, blond hair ironed into straight submission, lips pressed into a stern pink line—with an expression made all the more serious by the black frames of her glasses. She wore the plaid skirt, white blouse, and kneesocks of a schoolgirl. Her leather bag sat on the bench beside her, stuffed with dictionaries and textbooks and homework. She was an excellent student—excellent enough to secure a position studying abroad, in any case—but her French needed work. Still, she knew enough to understand when a man sat down beside her and said, "Bonjour, belle femme."

She looked up, bristling, and spoke in a snappish tone that was sure to cross any language barrier that existed. "I'm not interested in any ridiculous French flirting or—"

She stopped, because something about him looked familiar. Not the handsome jaw, furred with just the right amount of stubble. Not the seductive smirk that fit so well on those kissable lips. Certainly not the waves of blond hair that were nearly as long as hers (until now, she had not considered that long hair could be attractive on a man). No, it was those eyes that made her falter. The blue of the ocean, sparkling just for her.

"Are you . . ." She let that question trail off into nothing, then began again, enunciating slowly, "Do I know you?"

The Frenchman leant his elbow on the back of the bench, cheek resting against his hand, eyelids lowering halfway in a look of weary amusement. With exaggerated slowness and less of an accent than she expected, he replied, "Not . . . yet."

She narrowed her eyes, glaring at him for mocking her, but the feeling of familiarity lingered insistently enough that she hazarded another question. "What's your name?"

"Francis." He lifted his leg up so his ankle rested on his opposite knee. He could not look more comfortable in his own skin unless he was lounging here naked. (The thought made a blush rise from under her collar.) "Et tu?"

"Alice." She didn't offer a hand, because she knew full well that he would try to kiss it. The French were always kissing each other; she wondered how they prevented an epidemic of cold sores.

Francis nodded to the open book on her lap. "What are you reading?"

Alice glanced down at the yellowed pages. She'd taken as much care of the book as possible, and had been reluctant to take it along on her journey across the Channel. But it was her security blanket. Her grandmother had read the poems to her as a child, and had passed down the book when she died. It had been old back then; it was ancient now. The publication information on the first page claimed it had been printed in 1932, but the words themselves had been written decades—centuries—before. Sometimes Alice appreciated the texture of history more than the words themselves.

"Poetry," Alice replied, as if it could ever be as simple as that. "By Matthew Williams. The Mouse and The Lion."

Francis regarded her thoughtfully. "Read some."

"Why?" she asked, ever suspicious.

"So I can decide if I should kiss you."

She glared at him for the second time in ten minutes. "You won't be kissing anything if you carry on like that. Do you think you sound charming? You sound sleazy."

He simply laughed as though she was delightful entertainment and waved a hand toward the pages. "Read."

She could have gotten up and walked away. But those eyes had her lifting the book closer to her face and reading in her crisp cut-glass accent,

To others, they may seem destined

To end in blood and loss

But the mouse and the lion know 'tis not so.

For those with such differences

Know which lines to cross

And thus they allow their love to grow.

Francis feigned a yawn, and grinned when she shoved his shoulder. "So stiff. Is all English poetry like this? No romance, no sex?"

Her cheeks burned at the word. "It's from the eighteenth century. Of course there's no sex."

"Hm. Too bad." He leaned closer, so close she could smell the honey of his breath. "I'd still like to kiss you."

She went to push him away, but then she tripped and fell into the pools of his blue, blue gaze. She was drowning. Oh, no. I can't fall in love. I can't—

Green met blue. Time itself almost trembled, but caught itself. It had done this before.

"Let's start with tea first," she found herself saying.

He stood up, face even more handsome when it was lit with that triumphant smile. "Oui. Let's." He offered her his hand.

Alice closed the book without a second thought for the Kirklands, the Bonnefoys, the pirates, the dog, the words, nor even the all-knowing stars.

Then the girl twined her fingers with the boy's, and they started it all over again.

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The End.