~*~
“No! That is appallingly not true.” I laughed. Monsieur Beaumont and I had been meeting everyday for a full week now. “I did not state that I agree with Locke about tabula rasa. How did we get sidetracked on this subject? We were discussing math.” I threw a peach ring at Monsieur Beaumont’s perfect long nose.
How had we gotten that comfortable with each other so quickly, to jest and have me throwing food at him? I’ll never know.
It all happened so swiftly.
We were sitting beside the heart-shaped walnut tree, just north of my family’s farm and the North Bridge as we had done every day in the past seven days. Although daily I made a new oath to stop seeing him, especially so clandestinely, yet each day I couldn’t turn away from Monsieur Beaumont.
On the moist black earth that held littered brown leaves of years gone past and a few sprigs of feral grass and fewer still multicolored wild flowers, we perched with books and wine and shy smiles. We were close enough to the waterway to hear the humming of the cold water flowing by, but too far to actually see the Concord River. The sky was thick with heavy gray clouds, yet it was warm enough for both Monsieur Beaumont and I to be without our coats. He wasn’t even wearing his waistcoat, which was provocatively intimate. The air enveloping us buzzed with the alarming silence of a coming storm.
Monsieur Beaumont caught the dried fruit in his teeth a second before impact and chewed it with relish. “I don’t like math. Calculus, it is a math invented by men who had too much time on their hands. So I’m distracting you from the subject by putting words in your mouth. But I’ll be fair now. What would you like to discuss? We can talk about anything except math.”
“Coward.”
“Oui.”
“All right.” I tried to hide my smile. “Locke’s Two Treaties.”
“Bien. You begin, hmm?”
I understood now why the French would use words usually associated with sword fighting when debating. Whenever I’d converse with my father, we would almost always have the same mind on all discussions. When talking to Mathew about the law I was intrigued, but never ventured to address any concern I had—although, I don’t know why. But with Monsieur Beaumont I met my match. Touché, parry, thust—we’d argue, discuss, and ponder until the sky peaked midnight blue with streaks of scarlet and orange, then slowly separate from each other, saying our farewells until the sky blackened. How I began to hate the night. It would mean I’d have to be away from Monsieur Beaumont yet again.
I tapped my bottom lip, thinking of Locke, thinking of a conversation that would last for hours. “Locke’s views regarding men’s rights versus a government’s.”
“Ah, well, don’t start with anything controversial, Miss Buccleuch.”
I giggled at his jest, but continued anyway. “Do you believe, like Locke, that a man can and sometimes must stand up for his God-given rights, especially when faced with noxious brutes within a government?”
Monsier Beaumont cocked his head side to side then narrowed his eyes. “Locke was referring to your Civil War when he wrote that. You English had that civil war a couple years ago, oui?”
I smiled, not sure if he was horrid at history or just English history, which being French was forgivable. “More like a century ago. Actually more than a century. It was in the middle of the seventeenth century. ”
His brows furrowed. “Oui? Ah, where does the time go? I remember it like it was yesterday.”
I threw another peach ring at him, shaking my head. “You were there?”
He caught the fruit again in his teeth and chewed with a wide grin. “Of course I wasn’t in England.” He snorted and shook his own head, as if I were the silly one. “But I remember it well.”
“Of course you do.” I nodded, then gave him an incredulous look, almost rolling my eyes.
He quietly snickered. “We are off subject yet again. I was asking, is your civil war what you are thinking about or the current riots in Boston, with regard to Locke’s Two Treaties?”
I sobered instantly. Indeed I had been thinking of all the jobless men at Boston’s wharf, men who had tarred and feathered a duty collector, making the newspaper headlines with that vicious attack. I thought too of other men who had been too cowardly to dress as themselves, but as Mohawks for the Tea Party just a couple years ago, and just three years before that there were the six dead in what the newspapers now called the Boston Massacre. The mobbing seemed to be escalating, and since Salem, and I’d heard the redcoats, looking for militias’ caches of arms to destroy, had marched to Portsmouth. I was fearful that the Massachusetts issues with her mother country was like a bone that had become old and brittle and was about to snap at any moment.
But so apprehensive was I that I dared not talk about the reality of my explosive colony. As if my silence bought my providence a little peace. “Neither. Just hypothetically speaking.”
“But of course.” Monsieur Beaumont nodded his head, but one of his black brows arched.
A tiny splash landed on my hand. I looked down at the droplet of rain. The moisture on my skin was a welcome for its coolness. I was too hot when I neared Monsieur Beaumont. But I was beginning to like the heat. So I continued our conversation, rain or no, fevered skin or not. “When Locke was referring to men standing up for themselves against their own government, that isn’t just a civil war, but could turn into a . . . revolution.”
“Oui. During your civil war, you English inserted a new government, and if that had lasted then would not your civil war have turned into a revolution?”
“Aye. A revolution. But do you believe ‘tis right for men to have a war against their own government?”
He sighed. “As my old age knows, it has been done before. It could be done again.”
I snorted and this time couldn’t resist an eye roll. From the very first meeting at our heart tree, he’d jested that his perhaps thirty year-old frame was close to two hundred years instead. Perhaps he felt too old to associate with me. As two more fat drops landed on my hatless head, I pushed that nagging thought away. “Are you near a millennium now?”
He chuckled. “Not quite. But two centuries of life feels like a thousand years lived.”
I nudged his iron-like arm. “Just hypothetically speaking, of course.”
He softly laughed again, but then looked up at the sky. “We are getting rained upon.”
When he met my eyes again, I nodded. I didn’t want to say our goodbyes just yet. I didn’t want to go back to the farm to either pace about our parlor or try to find some odd job, of which there were many, to do. I didn’t want to leave him. Monsieur Beaumont was becoming closer to me than any friend had before. Just a friend, I reminded myself daily.
He suddenly clasped my arms. “Are you willing to sit through a science experiment?”
I smiled and nodded as the rain started in earnest to flush us from the forest.
He grabbed his overcoat, which he shook out. Free from rocks and small sticks, Monsieur Beaumont flicked his coat over two branches that stretched out over my head. He used some extra twine I had that I’d used for picking some wild mint to dry. He tied the ends of his coat to the branches, and within just a minute’s time I had shelter over my head.
He knelt in front of me, still getting pelted with rain. I scooted to the very edge of the makeshift refuge and waved for him to enter, sit close to me. He hesitated for just a moment, swallowing hard. When he unceremoniously plopped next to me he was wet yet warm. He chuckled, but I noticed his laugh sounded strained. We both tucked our legs to our chests and wrapped our arms around our shins. My shoulder fit under his and my hip, arm, and leg met his. I knew exactly when he was taking a breath.
We looked at each other and chortled again.
“Where were we in our conversation, Miss Buccleuch?”
My brain wouldn’t function, and for a moment I thought I just might have the audacity to touch his face, so close to mine. I blinked as I watched a small rivulet run from hi
s dark hair down the side of his countenance. His eyes searched my features, and I was glad for the lack of sunlight to hide my fiery cheeks. My behavior was appalling. What was running through my mind was much worse, and making it impossible was the fact that I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
But somehow, through brute force really, I clenched my hands to be still and cleared my throat. “You were saying you were a million years old.”
He chuckled yet again, something that came so easy to the both of us when we were together. “We were talking about men overthrowing their governments. Well, that was our targeted conversation, oui?”
“Aye.” I nodded and tried to hide my smile. Wanting nothing more than to make the moment last I did something I was terribly uncomfortable to do, but knew it would make him stay. “What if, like Locke instructed, the government proved to be tyrannical, brutal, like declaring martial law?”
He took in a deep breath, tickling my ribs against his. “Like your colony now?”
I slowly nodded. “Because of the, as Parliament calls it the Coercive Acts—”
“Your colony calls it, you call it the Intolerable Acts.”
“Yes, yes I do. Because of the Intolerable Acts, which were declared because some men had themselves a massive Tea Party and dunked thousands of pounds worth of tea in the Boston Harbor, the Massachusetts General Courts are no more; we cannot have town meetings, except on Sabbath; our governor does not exist, but we have in his place a general who runs my colony, a military general; Boston Harbor is closed for commerce unless it suits that general governor; we have many, countless many men without a job because of this; and—and we Massachusetts people are no longer chartered with Britain. Do you know what all of that means? We no longer have English liberty. Does that make us English anymore? Or are we orphans?”
Monsieur Beaumont blinked a few times and swallowed. I loved the way his Adam’s apple dipped as he swallowed—to me it seemed exotically masculine. “You should be a politician. I was so moved by your speech. Gladly, I will adopt you.”
I smiled. “Did you not notice that I’m a woman and as such, apparently, have no place in politics, save for being a politician’s wife? Besides, I can only give these little speeches to groups of our numbers. If there were even three of us, I might find myself too shy to make any comments.”
Monsieur Beaumont shook his head. “Ah, I have faith in you. You will change that.”
I chuckled, not knowing if he was referring to a woman being a politician or my shyness in public.
“So then the question is, Miss Buccleuch, whether or not the Massachusetts’ people will further rebel against her mother country, hmm? To, ah, perhaps have the rebellion be something more—what’s the word?—destructive, eh?”
To have the burning question spoken out loud was enough to make me want to crawl into a silent pause. I shrugged against his body. “We are just speaking hypothetically, sir.”
He chuckled softly, letting the bouncing reverberations of his laughter enter my body, tuck itself deep into my heart.
“Mais bien sûr. You wouldn’t happen to have read Voltaire?”
“I love Voltaire and Descartes.”
He placed his hand over his heart and swayed. “I know that as a man I’m never to ask this from a woman, but—”
I held my breath, waiting for the question.
“You speak so knowledgeably and learned. How old are you?”
I snorted out a laugh—very unladylike. But in breathless anticipation, I had—oh, goodness—I had thought he was going to ask me something improper or indecent, and he merely asked for my age.
“Two and twenty. Now you. You have to tell me your real age.”
He squinted and pretended to do arithmetic tables in the air. “One hundred ninety-one years, at least.”
I chuckled once more and shook my head.
“Are you laughing at an ancient, infirmed man? And doubting him?”
“Aye, that I am, old man.”
At that he pushed me over while I was giggling too hard to straighten. Even with the rain, dousing my on-fire skin, I couldn’t impel myself back up. In so many ways I couldn’t right myself.
Chapter Four: The Darkness of Honesty