Saint was tired to his bones, but it was a comforting physical weariness that he appreciated. At least he wouldn’t have to endure those damned draining erotic dreams for a while. As for Jane Branigan, she’d behaved with great understanding when he’d visited her the day before. It was almost as if she’d expected it, he realized, thinking back to her words.
‘She isn’t all that much a child then, I gather,’ she’d said, pouring him a cup of coffee in her small kitchen.
‘She’s nineteen,’ Saint had said. ‘Not a child, no.’ Had he given her the idea that Jules was still in puberty?
‘And I don’t suppose, you being as you are, that we’ll be seeing much of you anymore.’ ‘Of course you’ll be seeing me. I’m fond of
the boys, Jane. It’s just that – ‘
‘I know, Saint,’ she’d said quietly, ‘I know. Honor, fidelity, and all that.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said. He remembered that dream he’d had aboard ship, and clenched his fists at his sides.
His thoughts veered again to his young wife. Jules had withdrawn from him after that
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last damned fracas aboard the Oregon, and he supposed he couldn’t blame her. Lord, how should she have reacted when he’d very nearly forced her and called out another woman’s name? Later, when he’d found Lydia unpacking Jules’s clothes in his bedroom, he hadn’t known what to say. He didn’t want to sleep in the spare room – the damned bed was too short for him.
And he couldn’t sleep with her. It was simply too much.
To his surprise and silent relief, Jules had taken the matter out of his hands. He’d been called away to treat a broken hand – the result of a fistfight, of course – and when he returned that evening, he saw that she’d moved all her things down the hall to the spare bedroom.
He didn’t know what to say to her. Thank you, wife, for not forcing me to sleep with you. It was odd, he thought, frowning slightly. He’d never in his life been so damned obsessed with sex. Sex was just something that went along naturally with everything. I guess not having it makes my mind weird, he concluded, hoping it would go away.
And there was Jules, smiling, chattering gaily, primarily with Lydia, until his – no, their – housekeeper had left for the night.
n/l/I
Then she’d become quiet and withdrawn again.
He’d settled quickly back into his routine. As for Jules, he wasn’t certain exactly what it was she did when he wasn’t there.
‘Spartan, what about Jameson Wilkes?’ he said aloud to his horse. Spartan nickered, but at their entry into the city, and not in response to Saint’s profound question. Already, men were up and about. He returned greetings and continued toward Hobson’s Stables on Market Street.
‘The bastard,’ he continued to his horse after a moment, ‘is bound to discover that Jules is married to me. What the hell will he do?’ He won’t believe she’s a virgin anymore. She won’t have any more value to him. ‘True enough,’ he said in response to his silent observation.
He left Spartan at the stable in the capable hands of John Smith, an unlikely name for an unlikely gnomelike individual, and walked the short ten minutes to Clay Street and his house.
He suddenly thought of Jules pregnant with his child, of Jules giving birth, and he felt a knot of fear. He hadn’t exaggerated his birth size to her. He’d been enormous, but his mother, bless her humorous soul, had been a large-boned woman, capable of carrying him
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and birthing him without too much danger to herself. Jules wasn’t large-boned.1 and he realized he didn’t know how wide her pelvis was. He closed his eyes a moment, tripped over a discarded piece of pipe in the street, and cursed roundly. He let himself in quietly, and eased into his bed.
‘You have some visitors, Jules,’ Lydia Mullens said to her young mistress the following afternoon.
Jules quickly bounded to her feet, her book dropping to the floor beside her chair in their small parlor. ‘Visitors?’
A bright feminine voice said behind Lydia, ‘Please forgive us for just barging in like this, but we couldn’t wait for an invitation from Saint! Married! Agatha and I had to meet the new Mrs. Morris.’