Free The Tale-Teller by Susan Glickman

gilt-framed mirror hanging over an equally rococo sideboard. He pulled down his tight-fitting green velvet jacket and adjusted his beaver hat to a jauntier angle. When he spoke again, all the gentleness had gone from his voice.
    â€œI doubt it. We all know why girls run away from home. If you weren’t so skinny, I would suspect you of being pregnant.”
    ***
    SHE COULD ONLY HOPE that, armed with the few scraps of information he had, Varin would not be able to learn anything about her. No one back home knew where she was. All she had to do was continue to be “no one” herself, and they never would. Moreover, even if her so-called family somehow discovered that she’d managed to sail all the way to New France she doubted they would care. On the contrary, they would probably be happy. They could stop pretending she was one of them and stop looking for someone poor or old or disgraced enough to marry her. They’d done their duty, however unwillingly, and now they were as free of obligation to her as she was of affection for them.
    And, despite the danger he represented, she had to admit that she too enjoyed Varin’s visits. Sometimes he played the solemn officer of the law, sometimes the dashing young captain wooing the shy lass. And then he was the kindly older brother trying to comfort and protect his baby sister. With his confident masculinity on display, all broad shoulders, long legs, and seductive smiles, he was a welcome change from stout, self-conscious Hocquart and pious, subservient Marie-Thérèse.
    Marie-Thérèse herself declared that Varin de La Marre was her favourite of all the young officers in Quebec. He had a gallant way about him that made her dream, sometimes, that one day she might find such a sweetheart for herself. They would marry, and Monsieur Hocquart, grateful for her years of faithful service, would give them a nice piece of land with good soil, and fruit trees, and a neat
allée
of oaks. On this land, they would build a house with a fine stone chimney, and she would hang lace curtains in each window and paint the front door a bright French blue, and they would buy a cow and a calf and a few geese and a flock of plump chickens and have three boys and three girls.
    Once she’d confided this fantasy, Esther at first shook her head, then took the older woman’s chapped red hands in hers and asked if that was really what would make her happy. When Marie-Thérèse said yes, the girl replied that she would pray that Marie-Thérèse got her wish, although she could think of no fate worse than spending the rest of her life cooking and cleaning and taking care of children. The world was so big, yet women’s lives were so confined, declared Esther.
    Such audacity astonished the housekeeper. How could any girl believe it possible for her to travel around the world as freely as a man? Esther’s apparent conviction that she ought to be allowed to do whatever she wanted and go wherever she pleased inclined both Marie-Thérèse and Hocquart to believe her tales. That, and her horror of consuming animal flesh. (She said that, having been fostered by apes, she could not bring herself to devour any creature that nursed its young and therefore limited her diet to fish and fowl.) Why, she claimed to have visited Africa and Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, and all sorts of exotic places Marie-Thérèse hadn’t heard of, some with heathen names she couldn’t hope to remember.
    They were islands, mostly. Who would have thought there were so many of them everywhere? Before visiting the Île d’Orléans, the only island Marie-Thérèse had ever seen was Mont Saint Michel, which was only an island at high tide. So she had assumed that such clumps of land scattered around the water must be typical of a younger country than France. Those pieces would surely grow larger in time and join up
    with the mainland, like biscuits in the oven