Five
I don’t know what I intended at the time. I just know that my original plan was to leave later. When things turned around. But there was a glimmer of hope, at least. It didn’t last long. It had always been a bad plan, but I hadn’t realized how quickly that it would turn around.
I don’t know how far it was precisely; I’d never heard of Patience on any map I’d ever seen. But the maps I had seen were only short in their range. After two days’ ride, we must have been more than fifty miles, and that would put us well off of any of the regional maps I had the luck to see.
So it was hard to say exactly how far it had been. That went double, because I had already started to lose my sense of time. There was food, of course, but I kept myself from eating too much of it. It seemed to me that Baron Euler did the same for himself; there wasn’t enough food to go around, I guessed.
But hunger made me delirious, made it hard to tell the passage of time exactly. Had it been two days? Or three? I was fairly certain it was two. It ought to have been easy enough to count. But what if I’d forgotten one, on the road? Five meals, all the same. Or perhaps more. A little bread, a few beans. It was hardly enough to keep a person fed.
It was the food that Euler had, though. It wasn’t my place to criticize; after all, I didn’t think that he had an intention of taking me with him. I don’t know what he did intend with me. But it was something that I didn’t want to find out.
When we rode into town, he was as silent as ever. He seemed to be thinking some private thought. I guessed that he was either planning to provision for the rest of the trip, or that he was planning on leaving me here, or that we’d already arrived at his home base.
Of the three, the first was the closest to the truth. But even in the years after, I have learned surprisingly little about Baron Euler before we met; he guards his youth too closely.
I leaned back against him, tired. He pushed me forward, not roughly, and slipped a leg around the horse’s back and let himself down. I pushed myself back using the pommel that was unpleasantly close to my pelvis, gave myself a moment to rest, and then did the same.
He tied off the horse to a hitching post, and I followed. Maybe I was supposed to stay outside. Maybe he had some kind of plan. But if that was what he’d intended then he ought to have said something. I couldn’t be expected to read his mind.
He spoke to a man behind the counter, who wear a purple brocade vest and kept his face smooth-shaved. If Jodie had grown up in a different town, as a city boy, then I guessed that he might have looked something like the man behind the counter.
He said something in response. I kept walking closer until I can hear.
“… with you?” The beginning of the sentence was lost to my ears. But the implication was clear from the pointed expression that the man gave me. He wanted to know how Euler and I fit together. I wanted to know that myself.
Euler turned and looked at me critically. Like he was annoyed that I had come up behind him like that and ruined some grand plan.
“Yessir,” he said finally, turning back. “That’s my wife, Marion.”
I was startled to think that he’d bothered to remember my name. He hadn’t called me by it in the days since we’d left. I’d given it once, the first day, and I hadn’t been asked again afterward. Every time since had been girl. It had been natural to assume he’d forgotten.
“I take it that you will be wanting to share quarters, then, sir?”
He looked back at me. I don’t know precisely what I looked like; it’s impossible for someone to see without a looking glass, and there wasn’t one. If there was, I would have avoided looking into it. Because I could feel my cheeks burning with embarrassment, either way. I faced toward the floor and stared at my feet and tried not to think about it.
Euler turned back. “I suppose that would be amenable,” he said. He was planning something, I knew. I had some very specific ideas about what I thought that it was. What I didn’t have was a solid grasp on what my thoughts were on those ideas.
Worse, I had a fairly specific idea what my thoughts were. And I had a feeling in my gut that I should have had different thoughts. After all, I thought, it was downright improper.
Whatever he told that clerk, he wasn’t my husband. I wasn’t his wife. But then, I thought… there were plenty of men in the Bible who fell in love at a glance toward their lovers. Jacob and Rachel. They barely knew each other an hour before he asked her father for her hand.
I had only known Baron Euler a little more than two days. And I should have known by that point that he was a bad fit with me. That he was the kind of man that I ought to avoid. He was nothing like Christ, for one. The one thing I knew about him was that he was a man who never turned the other cheek.
But the heart wanted what it wanted. And I was, in spite of myself, powerless to change that. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t try, though. I could at least pretend for a little while that I wasn’t interested. Eventually, I’d get myself sorted out, and then I wouldn’t have to sit there thinking that I’d done something wrong.
Because by that point, I’d have either talked myself out of it, or I’d have figured out why it wasn’t wrong. But in that moment, with Baron turned back to me and carrying a room key, I flushed with the thought of where things were going. And I shuddered because no matter how much I told myself that I ought to hate the whole idea, I couldn’t make myself feel anything but desire.