“You had no midwife?”
“In a village like Much Wemby, midwives don’t help women like me. But Hodge helped me. Helped me labor, helped me dig, took my baby and me to the D’Oylys in the cart.”
He hugged her to him. Yes, for her comfort but also for his. She was warm, alive, breathing. She could have so easily died while giving birth to twins in a ruined church with no one to tend to her but her brother.
“I wish your brother were still alive so I could thank him.”
“Hodge? I hope, I don’t know, but I hope he’s still alive.”
He pulled back, held her shoulders, looked in her face.Somewhere, sometime, he had misunderstood her. “You said your brothers were gone.”
She shook her head. “Gone from here. Simon is dead. He was always sickly, like Mother. Jory was in the Navy and died in the Battle of the Nile. But Hodge and Nolly . . . they had to leave. Nolly stole a watch from a traveler at The Swan and had to run from the magistrate. And two years before that, Hodge . . . Hodge, he was caught with his sweetheart and had to run away, too. He always told me he wanted to go to foreign lands, so I try to imagine him there.”
“Who was his sweetheart? Someone’s wife or . . . ?”
“His sweetheart was another man.”
No wonder her brother had run. Buggery had been a death sentence in England for almost three hundred years.
She turned fierce. “Hodge is not wicked like the man you killed. Hodge loves men. Not children, not boys! Loving a man—I understand it.”
He loved her fierceness, her defense of her brother.
“I understand your brother is not the same as the man who hurt my son,” he said, not to put out her fire but to make sure she understood him.
“Good,” she said. “Hodge is good.”
“Yes, he is. He must be. He helped you, Susannah, and I am forever in his debt for all he did for you.”
The rainwater fell down her face, dripped off her little, perfect nose. One drop hung, suspended, and he flicked it away.
“Even though I don’t understand why anyone could love a man. We’re sweaty, surly, and think we know best. Give me women.” He ticked his fingers. “Pretty, breasts, and so capable.”
She laughed, and he was happy he had managed at least that.
“Is that your recipe for a perfect woman?” she asked.
“My perfect woman is sitting with me in a ruin. And she has all those things, but even if she didn’t, I would still love her.” He paused. “And I would still ask her to marry me.”
He waited.
She said nothing.
He realized. “Will you marry me, Susannah?”
Very slowly, she said, “I love you, Henry. I love you very much.”
Oh. He thought she had been waiting for a question, but she had only been sorting out how to saynoto him.
He hid his disappointment. He had years of hiding to shore him up.
“You won’t marry me.”
“I’m not saying never. I’m just saying . . . we have all the time in the world.”
He understood her. They had all of their time left in this world, and they’d spend it together, married or no.
That wouldn’t stop him from wooing her. He’d never stop wooing her. It would be part of his cure, and it might heal some part of her, too.
