Free Savage Lands by Clare Clark Page B

strength, forcing the nose of it into the rough seams. Her hair clung to her brow and dark circles spread beneath her arms as she moved between the pressing board and the fire, hardly able to wait for the iron to grow hot again. That evening, when dusk came and with it a little coolness, she placed her hand upon the pile of his clothes, and for the first time in days she felt him close to her. She knew then that he would come home.
    After that it became her habit to prepare daily for his return. She swept the hut fastidiously and scoured the table with sand. She turned the dried-moss mattress and spread the sea-green quilt. She gathered branches of the flowering plants that flourished on the perimeters of the settlement and arranged them in a savage jar decorated all over with loops and whorls. She begged, bought and bartered for cuttings and seeds and cultivated their garden, her knees dark with dirt as she plucked out the weeds and tucked the dampened soil carefully around the growing plants. She went early to the market, when it was hardly light, and in a clumsy pantomime of gestures she had the savage women show her how their beans might be crocked, their tough meat stewed until it was tender enough to be cut with a spoon. She traded a lace collar for baskets of peaches and plums and wild apples and the whortleberries that he loved, and she busied herself with canning and preserving, sealing the jars with wax from the candleberry tree.
    She made lamps with the wax too, boiling the berries with hot water in the kettle until the pale green wax rose to the surface and filled the cabin with its sweet smell. It was a kind of drudgery, but more than that it was a hex. Each bottle that she filled for him, each lamp that she set upon the shelf, was a link in the chain that joined her to him, and with each link the chain grew stronger, pulling him home.
    That expedition took Jean-Claude away for many weeks together. When at last he returned, thundering upon the door with both fists and calling out to her to show herself to him, she almost wept with relief and the shock of him. She had forgotten his face a little.
    Later she curled herself against him, her hands spread wide upon his chest, and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply to draw the smell of him into the depleted parts of her as he talked of the places he had visited, the strange savage customs he had witnessed. He told her of the Pasagoulas’s love of brandy and of the Tunicas, whose chief wore always a silver medal on a blue ribbon and carried a gold-topped cane that had been sent to him by the King of France. The Tunicas, he said, raised fowls aplenty but would not eat them, so that when he had proposed their purchase, he had been obliged to pretend to their chief that he wanted them as pets.
    ‘Perhaps, I should keep my word,’ he suggested, his lips so close to hers that she could hardly keep from licking them. ‘Bring them to live here. After all, I know how you love to be surrounded by chickens.’
    Elisabeth laughed, twining her arms about him.
    ‘Oh, I have missed you so,’ she murmured.
    ‘You sweet-tongued deceiver.’ He kissed her on the forehead, his beard tickling her nose. ‘I would wager you do not think of me once from the moment I leave until I am back here in your bed.’
    ‘True,’ Elisabeth conceded. ‘Thank heaven the wood store is not full. Where else could I have hidden old Grapalière and his discarded breeches when you came back so unexpectedly?’
    Jean-Claude laughed, and he pressed his face against her neck, shifting his weight so that she could feel him hardening against her. It amused and aroused him to be teased in such a way. Elisabeth was glad he did not tease her back. Somehow the fear was always with her, clinging to the soles of her feet like a shadow. She could not shake it. Sometimes she longed for him to be afraid too.
    Raising his head, he parted her lips with his tongue and kissed her. She closed her eyes, melting against