SONS OF THE NEW WORLD BOOK IV
Available on Amazon March 31, 2023
THE SULIOTE MAIDEN
NATHAN’S STORY
When Nathan first met the Suliote maiden, Malina, he wasn’t certain she wouldn’t kill him. Neither was she.
His odyssey began when the British invaded the Chesapeake in the War of 1812. Dreaming of heroic deeds, thirteen-year-old Nathan ran away to join the American forces. He did not imagine that in the confusion of the shameful American defeat at the Battle of Bladensburg, he would make a mistake he couldn’t live down.
Scorned by his neighbors, Nathan had little choice but to leave home in the company of a British colonel. Their ultimate destination was the Greek-Ottoman city of Salonika.
Nathan earned the friendship of Ahmet, the son of a powerful janissary. Known as the ‘young stallions,’ Nathan and Ahmet hunted and hawked in the wilds of Greece and feasted into the long evenings. It was a life beyond anything Nathan had ever imagined. Malina, who knew not the meaning of moderation in love or hate, completed this perfect life.
Yet discord simmered just underneath the surface. Brigands infested the roads. Greeks milled gunpowder for revolution. Muslims and Christians damned each other to their respective hells. All detested the arrogant janissaries. With a Greek mother and a powerful janissary father, Ahmet was torn by these controversies.
As the Greek-Ottoman world splintered into warring factions, Nathan, Malina, and Ahmet must decide whether love, devotion, and friendship were a means to survival or a barrier to survival.
Therein hangs this tale.
AVAILABLE MARCH 31, 2023
SAMPLE
Chapter One
Nathan helped his mother carry his sister, Thomasina, down the stairs on a cot and then transfer her gently to the settee next to the fireplace. His mother returned upstairs to see to one of the hundred chores she hadn’t had time to do, leaving Nathan and Thomasina alone. He jabbed the log with a poker, sending up a storm of sparks that he knew always gave his sister pleasure, and after seeing her smile in the orange light, retreated to a stool in a dark corner. He disliked the heat as much as Thomasina loved it. He felt Thomasina’s eyes on him and heard her sigh. She beckoned to him to come closer.
“What is weighing you down, Mister Nate?” She asked as he settled himself in a chair beside her. Mister Nate was her pet name for him.
“Nothing, Tommy,” he replied. Tommy being his special name for her which she enjoyed immensely.
“I’ve had nothing to do in my life except be sick and observe you, and I’m very good at both of those enterprises, Mister Nate. Don’t turn away so I can’t see your face. What is eating you.”
Nathan knelt on the hearth and poked the fire again sending up more sparks although he knew it was futile to hide from her. “The British landed in the Chesapeake,” he said glumly.
“Does that make you angry?” He heard a smile in her voice.
“I want to go to war,” he declared. There he had said it. He wasn’t surprised by her reaction.
Thomasina laughed, screwing up her face. Everybody said her face was beautiful. He couldn’t judge. She was just his sister. After she finished laughing, she said, “I may not know much, but I know a twelve-year-old boy can’t go to war.”
“Why not? They do all the time,” Nathan argued. “I could be a drummer boy or even a powder monkey in the navy.”
“And get yourself killed and leave your poor sick sister without her entertainment. How heartless of you!” Thomasina had an irritating habit of finding something wrong in whatever he said.
“You like making fun of me.” She was also aggravating because the more seriously he took himself, the less she did so.
“I do for I love you, and I feel I done you great harm by being sick and taking up all of mother’s attention.” Thomasina had become serious.
Nathan protested. “They can’t think of anything to say to me except correct what I’m doing wrong or remind me to do my chores.”
“Emma called you the forgotten child because between me and her ailments, mother hasn’t two minutes to spare for you. And father with this war and no trade with England, he has to figure out how to keep us housed, fed, and clothed.”
“Emma should keep her mind on her own children,” he replied unfairly. Emma and her brother Daniel had been taken in by their father during the War of Independence. She was thirty years older than Nathan, had a half-blind tailor as a husband and five well-behaved children of her own, and, much to his annoyance, alternately acted like a sister, mother, or aunt to him as it suited her.
“Emma is correct. And mama cried when she called you the forgotten child and said she would try to do better.”
“I want to be forgotten by them so I can live my life.” Nathan held the opinion that parents were inconvenient except for providing food, clothes, and lodging. That wasn’t to say he didn’t love them, but such sentiment rarely has room to be indulged in with somebody who is always telling you what to do.
“You don’t want to be bothered out of your daydreams,” Thomasina observed with painful accuracy. “That’s it. They discussed having one of our brothers take you in, then they said you were my best companion, and it would break my heart, which it would. So, you see I am selfish and want you all to myself.”
His parents had had five children, three sons—Alfred, Thomas, Jonathan—and two daughters—Beatrice and Alice—between the years 1785 and 91 and had possessed the energy to raise them well with love and discipline. Then five years later Thomasina came into the family and was ill from her first days. Four years later, Nathan arrived, a surprise because their mother had believed she was well past childbearing. Nathan’s appearance coincided with a change in the family’s fortune. They were still considered well-off, but his father seemed continually selling property to make ends meet.
“Well, I still want to go to war, then when I come back, I’ll have more interesting stories to tell you.” This seemed good reasoning until he articulated it.
“Unless you die. Wait for the next war. I might be in my grave by then, so I wouldn’t have to grieve you.” Nathan did not like it when his sister mentioned her terrible illness even in jest.
“Does it hurt, Tommy… Your illness?” He asked.
“Some days not much. Other days… I don’t want to think about those.”
He took her hand and gazed at the face that others said was beautiful. He could see that her eyes were special—soft brown pools of comfort and warmth. “Maybe if I become Catholic and light a candle for you that would help.”
Thomasina smiled. “You know I pray for you.”
“Why do I need prayers?” He asked defensively.
Thomasina stared at him as if she couldn’t believe he had just asked that question. “You wander about too shy and too proud to make friends. You come and go as you please as if you were a boarder here, not a son. I am the only one who mends your clothes, and I am very poor at it. You’re hardly given any chores. You hardly gone to school. The Trevelyan brothers won’t stop bullying you. I don’t think anybody really knows you except for me and maybe Emma.”
“Then, no one will miss me when I go to war.” That seemed to Nathan a happy coincidence.
“You think Emma and I are nobody?” Thomasina was unreasonably angry because he hadn’t expressed himself well.
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Don’t you understand how impossible going to war is for you?” She grimaced. A part of her was hurting.
Nathan didn’t.
After making sure Thomasina was comfortable and creeping upstairs to confirm what he had expected to find—his mother in an exhausted doze holding her swollen twisted hands in her lap, Nathan sneaked out the door. He planned to go down to the docks by Maiden Lane and play, which meant for him daydreaming. He loved the outdoors in all weathers. On this day, the late afternoon simmered in the summer sun, unfortunately with less warmth than Thomasina needed. The air smelled saltier than usual. Gulls squawked as they picked at the leavings near the docks. The taverns and the shops, the shouts of sailors getting underway or the teamsters loading, the carts, and wagons filled to the near tipping with casks and crates all became actors and props in his daydreams. Nathan felt a great adventure was in the offing, and instead of an anonymous boy, he became the hero. Life was best at these times.
He had not experienced war, of course, but he thought of it most every day. To go into battle seemed the greatest adventure a man could undertake, so he read every book he could find about it, dreamed about it, and in his hours of lonely play imagined himself a general or a colonel strategizing a brilliant victory or a cavalry officer constantly performing a heroic deed. His father had the good fortune to be in a war—the great Revolutionary War, but oddly hadn’t been a soldier, or at least that was what he said and little else. Daniel claimed his father had been a British soldier, but actually tricked everybody by being on Washington’s side. That seemed a little dishonest to Nathan, and he was not alone in that opinion, but most people admired his father. His mother, well, she hated war. She had lost a brother. She could not talk about war without getting angry at both sides involved, although she got angry about practically nothing else.
When the British landed, it was a dream come true. Nathan now began to immerse himself in a daydream about how he as a lowly drummer boy saved the life of a general. This pleasurable train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a rotten squash splatting on the back of his head. He looked around for which of the Trevelyan brothers had hurled it. A vendor of corn wouldn’t meet his eye. A mother hugged a young child close to her dress. As usual, nobody appeared although the rotten-fruit missile had come from the direction of a dirty alleyway.
He was sport for the Trevelyan brothers, although it could be said they were more afraid of him than he was of the six of them. So, they hurled their missiles, usually spoiled fruit, but occasionally stones or hunks of wet manure, and fled. A year ago, they had cornered Nathan behind an abandoned warehouse with the intention of doing him great harm, the four older ones—Sweden, Brogue, Sharon, and Tristan—who seemed like trunks of stout oaks cut off at six feet, the two younger—Kyle and Kinchin—resembling little rat terriers—swift and sharp-toothed. The six of them had first thrown him against the wall and slugged him a couple of times in the stomach making him vomit. Sweden and Brogue were dragging him across the muddy cobblestones pulling off his shoes while the rest held on to his queue joking that they wanted to see his head come off when Daniel appeared with his father. The six brothers turned to face the two adults and grinned. They liked the odds. Then eight teamsters who worked with his father also turned the corner.
“Care for a tussle?” His father said, lurching forward with the help of his cane.
“‘Tisn’t fair,” the eldest, who for some obscure reason was called Sweden, answered.
“And what you were doing was?” Daniel asked.
“We was just funning around,” Brogue insisted.
“Giving my son a black eye isn’t funning around. Tell you what. You seem the stoutest and strongest, Sweden, in the interests of fairness take me on, one on one.” Nathan’s father, Jonathan Asher, stood nose to nose with Sweden. Although used a cane to walk because of injuries in war, there wasn’t a teamster who could beat him in arm-wrestling.
“My father will break every bone in your body if you hurt me,” Sweden took a step back.
“Let’s go ask your father if he wants to participate,” Jonathan Asher suggested.
Mr. Trevelyan was drinking at a nearby tavern and had fame as a brawler, yet Sweden wavered, then shrugged his shoulders, “We were just funning around.”
“If you attack my son again, with the help of my men, I’ll publicly take down your britches on the Bowling Green and cane every single one of you. Any who doubts me, speak up, and I’ll prove I can do it now.”
The Trevelyan brothers sneered at Nathan from a distance for a month or so. Then, deciding his father’s threat was merely hot air, they ambushed him again, swarming from an alleyway with swinging cudgels and wet handfuls of manure. Father was away in Connecticut. By the time Daniel arrived with a bevy of teamsters, they had torn off Nathan’s pants and punched and kicked him black and blue. Teamsters drag, haul, lift all day, therefore are stronger than toughs and hit and kick harder than toughs and are familiar with all the dockside fighting tricks. Blood was shed, and at the end of the melee, four of the Trevelyan brothers were bound and dragged to the Bowling Green, the two rat terriers having escaped. Their father staggered out of the tavern from where he was rousted so he could watch the punishment of his sons. Bent over the pedestal where once stood the statue of George III, in front of him and all the passersby, Sweden, Brogue, Sharon, and Tristan each had his breeches taken down and was caned twenty-five times.
“Next time I’ll brand you on your bums,” Daniel declared to the crumpled whimpering Trevelyans afterward.
The brothers still stalked him and, with immeasurable glee, they would have killed him, but they were afraid.
Nathan wasn’t considered a promising scholar by the master of the school run by the Dutch Reformed Church and was caned almost weekly for his wandering thoughts. He was worse at church. His father threatened to nail his feet to the floor so he wouldn’t wriggle so much. He should have been good at games but managed not to be.
Nathan’s father did display fondness for his youngest son, which was moderated by a sense he was not doing right by him. When not overwhelmed by his affairs, Jonathan Asher would alternately threaten or promise to install him in the warehouse. He had done so with his brother Alfred, who was eighteen years older than Nathan. Alfred took naturally to being a merchant and had a prosperous business in his own right. He had even sailed to China in a ship he owned a sixteenth part in. Traveling to China seemed almost as good as going to war to Nathan. Before the present conflict, his father had taken him into his warehouse once to see whether he had any aptitude or interest in his trade. Nathan demonstrated neither. He did not like the stale salty air, the dark aisles, the oppressively tall stacks of merchandise, and given the choice between daydreaming and counting, the former always prevailed. Seeing bolts of silk from China, next to crates of tea from India, next to bags of coffee from Columbia did spark in Nathan a desire to take a berth on a ship that his father owned a portion of and see those places. That was scotched because after his father took him in a small boat out into the harbor on a day of light breezes, Nathan was violently ill for three days afterward.
On a rare free day, his father taught him how to use a fowling piece, a beautiful gun of polished maple, light enough that a boy could hold steady. Two months then passed and it seemed increasingly unlikely his father would have another free day, so Nathan sneaked the weapon outdoors late one night to play and accidentally shot out the window of a neighbor. Amends were made, and he was forbidden the use of the piece for the rest of his life, although he could swear his mother was trying not to laugh when the neighbor displayed the wig, which being blown off the wig stand, had a big hole in the center.
Chapter 2
The embattled chronically underfunded Federal government requested that the States call up their militia to help in the war effort. The States started to comply, but then the concerned officials decided it might be more judicious if their armed boys stayed nearby to defend local interests. A newly formed militia spent its time idling at the North and West Batteries guarding the harbor. The best the New York authorities could do for the national cause was to suggest to their populace that men not inspired by the responsibility of protecting hearth and home in the militia could volunteer and join the struggle in Maryland. The Federal Government also made an urgent request for supplies. Nathan’s father complained a merchant would go broke dealing with the government. Payment was slow, and if there were a change of parties in the meantime, the person who promised to pay might be replaced by an official who had no intention of wasting government money on the favorites of a defeated party. However, pricked by a patriotic guilty conscience, he purchased six hundred pairs of boots from Connecticut to deliver to the army facing the British, supposing he’d get his money eventually.
Nathan had spent weeks pondering the problem of how to join the National army. He attributed to the hand of God that the means arrived at this doorstep so to speak in the form of three wagons loaded with boots. He told Thomasina and his mother that he was traveling with his father who was leaving that afternoon for Connecticut to procure more boots. They believed him and didn’t bother to check with Nathan’s father who was departing from the warehouse. Six days would pass before the truth would be out. Meanwhile, Nathan hid in the wagon under a tarp with the boots. The smell of the blacking made his head swim, but he found a small rent in the tarp where he positioned his nose to get fresh air.
They joined a caravan of forty-five other wagons plus two hundred young men motivated by patriotism, lack of work, or boredom to join the national cause. Unfortunately, on the first day, Nathan heard walking beside his wagon the distinctive shrill voices of the four older Trevelyan brothers speculating openly how much plunder could be gotten off a dead British soldier and deciding that even a redcoat with a musket ball hole should be worth a pint of ale. Unless there was an anatomist nearby, they continued with their speculations, the body was useless, then again it could be fed to pigs, and that seemed a satisfactory way of disposing of the enemy. To his relief the voices drifted toward the rear of the wagon train.
WHAT THE RIVER OF THE CHEROKEE DID NOT TELL
Chapter 1
1765 Squatter Settlement near Fort Pitt
Throughout the warm misty night, Jonathan and his mother sat together before the fire in the hearth listening to Dermot’s parents calling for their son. Straining and tearful, the voices were echoed by the thin cries of their daughters. As Jonathan held his mother’s hand and watched the embers die, other neighbors joined the search, their shouts at first confident as if expecting a reply, then swallowed up by the great silence of the dark forest.
Inevitably, the knocks came on the door of the trading post. His mother, known as Madame Corinne because she was French, answered and said to the despairing searchers she had not seen Dermot today. She suggested they look by the pond. More than one child had gotten stuck in the swampy mud nearby. No, she couldn’t take them there because her youngest had a fever, and her husband Julian was away in the next valley making a delivery. She would, of course, question the Indians who came to the post whether they had seen Dermot. Jonathan realized his mother was directing the searchers away from the route Danton and father had taken with the wagon of goods that were the blood payment for his life.
CHAPTER MINUS ONE
(PART OF THE STORY BUT NOT PART OF THE NOVEL BRIDES OF THE GAUNTLET)
The Scholar on his Wedding Day
Squinting through the thick lenses of his spectacles, a scholar limped down the muddy way, holding a poesy of flowers in one hand and a small book tied with a ribbon in the other. He seemed to have so many difficulties navigating his course, from keeping his slipping wig on his head to controlling the sudden forward lurches when he stepped into a puddle of uncertain depth, that you wouldn’t have imagined his heart on fire with the passion of love, nor that he felt brave, capable, and possessing a character which the world would have to reckon with soon. The scholar saw himself striding, rather than tripping. He heard himself declaiming rather than mumbling. A great clarity in his mind had replaced the blurs and shadows that normally surrounded him.
These, of course, were thoughts appropriate to a young man on a wedding day. And he was in truth a man of courage, if casting away a sizable patrimony for the sake of love could be said to be courageous or courageously foolish. He was as wealthy as the four guineas in his purse and the twelve books in his library he supposed he could sell.
A maid turned up her nose as she shook out a rug as if to say she was above such vulgar beings. An amused feminine laugh came from a carriage’s curtained window as the wheels splattered mud over the scholar. This inspired two ragged tittering boys to hurl several fistfuls of compacted filth against the back of his frockcoat, which he didn’t appear to notice.
A moment later, his thoughts darkened, not because of the muddy assaults, but from an unpleasant recollection. What his father had said about Kate was difficult to forgive, words delivered with the same crushing certainty as his sermons about perspiring demons shoveling the naked souls of the damned into hell’s blazing furnaces.
Dressed in his sermonizing black frock coat and breeches, his reverend father, a man of intimidating height and strict doctrine, seemed to have increased in both when he interviewed him in his study. The towering preacher began, as was his custom in sermons, speaking quietly as if imparting an intimacy to a friend: “Stephen, I’ve made inquiries into the character of the young woman you claim has won your affection. You will no doubt note that I do not presume to say lady, and even to call her a woman does her sex great injustice. Had I been a man of weak constitution, the information presented to me would have deprived me of the power of speech.”
At this moment, Stephen realized he was in trouble because his father had never been at a loss for words. “It mystifies me how could you imagine that such a creature would be welcomed into intimate proximity with your dear mother and innocent sisters. This, this…” The reverend drew in a breath and exhaled like the first puff out of an erupting volcano, “strumpet, strumpet, I declare, this pernicious, lascivious, diseased hellcat harlot, this laced mutton, who cunningly lays traps for young men of virtue…” Thus he launched into his tirade.
Stephen hadn’t realized that his father could detail all the weaknesses of the flesh, all the varieties of sin—“the poisonous fruit of suppurating carnality,” “oozing black deceit and leprous guile,” “that single sinful act breaks four, nay, five of our Lord’s commandments and therefore is fivefold damning” —for three hours without repeating himself. Kate, in his father’s opinion, was the epitome and summation of them all. His two sisters, small, pale, childlike women were crying in the next room. The eldest was engaged to be married to the youngest son of a baronet, and this union of shame and depravity would throw that alliance into doubt.
Stephen had listened dutifully waiting for his opportunity to respond. “And if you persist in pursuing this shameful connection with the serpentine Jezebel, if you allow your wicked lust to dangle your mortal soul over the lake of burning brimstone, then I will disown you, nay, I will refuse to acknowledge you when you pass on the street, and I will exert my influence to ensure you’ll never will find a place in Oxford or any other college or as a tutor in any family of substance, nay, not even in a miserable master in a grammar school in some windblown forgotten corner of the world.”
Stephen lifted his bowed head and spoke his first words in three hours: “Sir, I accept the consequence of my decision and consider myself fully disowned, although you, my most gracious father, my saintly mother, and my lovely sisters will always have a dear place in my heart.”
His father seemed momentarily to choke with surprise. This great sermonizer had always taken great pride in directing the righteous paths of this children as God directed the righteous orbits of the planets.
Stephen should have been afraid for the future. He had no doubt his father would keep his word and even take pains to oust him from a position instructing half-wild children of the sheepherders and fishermen in the Outer Hebrides. An idea, however, had distracted him from his father’s harangue, an idea resonating with the force of vision and prophecy. As clearly as the fulminating figure before him, Stephen saw himself standing with his dear Kate on the prow of a ship bound for the colonies. Then he saw Kate smiling in the doorway of a small house on the edge of a vast forest in the new land. He heard inside the laughter of many children. The conviction settled on him that like Abraham, his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
From a distance Stephen could discern Kate by the colors of her clothing. She always dressed in a blue gown and yellow petticoat when she was to meet him, so he could with his poor eyesight more easily pick her out of a crowd. Kate was waiting for him in front of a church with several friends whom he knew could fairly be classified as harlots. He waved to her with the beribboned book, hurried his pace, and held out the poesy of flowers.
Kate waved back. She was a large warm soft girl, full of maternal cares. She had never denied to Stephen that she had been a whore more than half her eighteen years. In fact, Kate had made Stephen’s acquaintance when some other scholars had gotten him drunk and shoved him into her room, telling her that she would never find a young man so thoroughly ignorant of women. They then paid her to instruct him in the ways of the flesh with the provision that the next day she would give a full narrative of her lessons. Accordingly, she undressed the young wobbling scholar and began to caress him intimately. His innocence seemed impenetrable, perhaps because of the quantity of ale he had imbibed. Despite her earnest efforts at seduction, he fell asleep diagonally across the bed. She pushed the drunk naked young scholar over and curled up next to him, also resigning herself to sleep.
Kate had planned to make another attempt in the morning, but by the time she awoke, he was already hopping around with his shirttails flying and one foot in his breeches. Kate began to weep. She begged the blushing stumbling boy to allow her to invent a story. A particular scholar in on the jest had an unforgiving temper and would beat her if he didn’t receive a lurid narrative worth his coin.
“Madam, I will thrash the brute,” the ridiculous young scholar declared, spinning around trying to insert his other foot.
Kate laughed. “La, good sir, Master Paul Morgan is reputed to be as dangerous with his fists as he is deadly with sword or pistol. He is a violent and cruel man. He broke Patricia’s nose and gouged out the eye of a wainwright who trod on his toe without apologizing.”
“I promise on my honor that I’ll thrash the brute. Madam, your humble servant,” the scholar insisted.
She laughed again at this young harmless fool who even believed she deserved the courtesy of being called “madam.”
Stephen fulfilled his promised, his weapon of choice being his forehead. Having bumped and tripped throughout his life, he was oblivious to pain, and he butted Master Paul Morgan eight times successively breaking eight ribs of that formidable opponent and making him lose the contents of his stomach. When he related his victory to Kate, they had a long conversation during which she expressed the desire to learn how to read.
“Why, I will instruct you, madam,” Stephen exclaimed.
“La, good sir, please, call me Kate,” she said. “You make me dizzy when you madam me like I were a lady.’”
“Well, then, if we are to be on familiar terms, you must call me Stephen.”
“My means are too modest to afford a tutor, Stephen. Perhaps you might…”
Stephen was too dense to pick up the clue, so she let it drop.
“Nay, Mistress Kate, I will instruct you to read for the simple pleasure of the company of a graceful, intelligent, and beautiful lady.”
Stephen was unaware at that moment of how completely he had conquered Kate’s heart. She didn’t dare to believe that he would ever propose marriage, but she might be his mistress, or if he weren’t the type of man to keep mistresses, which seemed likely, a lowly maid in his household. Kate gave up her trade soon after meeting Stephen and lived on savings and by hiring herself out as a seamstress—a skill she had been cultivating to see her through old age. Every day, the young scholar would come and instruct her how to read.
The affair was far from one-sided. Stephen was a magnet for small disasters—torn stockings, stained shirts, little injuries—which were the results of his nearsightedness and his headlong rush towards a goal, and so needed care. Kate had always been adept at mending, body as well as fabric. She would often demand that he explain how something had happened like a black eye or the reason he had hobbled in without a shoe, and it often cost Stephen an effort to remember the incident. He was gentle and virtuous, even though there wasn’t any reason to be virtuous with her. He blushed like a thirteen-year-old maiden when he gathered up the courage to ask permission to kiss her, even though in their first meeting, she had given him ample view of the entirety of her naked body.
When Stephen asked her to become his betrothed, her heart leaped with gratitude, then dropped in cold despair. By then, she was enough acquainted with his character to understand that once he made a decision, he wouldn’t back down. He would lose everything—position, reputation, inheritance—by marrying her. Kate begged him to withdraw the offer. “Fie, sir. Do you know who I am? Fie! Fie! Fie! Do you know what I’ve been? Do you know how many men will laugh at you because they’ve bedded me and how many good ladies look through me when they pass me on the street?”
No matter how many times she refused, he was adamant. “I have claimed you as my betrothed and let the world be damned by its own ridicule.” Stephen was as myopic to the consequences as he was to the physical world. So Kate consented for he would butt his head against any obstacle as long as was needed to overcome it.
Despite the knowledge of his loss of fortune and family, Kate was happy that day. She brushed off his frock coat, decided not to question him why his left shoe was missing its buckle and kissed him on the brow as tenderly as any man had ever been kissed. Amidst hoots and insults from the crowd that had gathered to observe the novelty of a dozen harlots on the church steps, Kate and Stephen proceeded inside where a cleric in a very faint voice married them. Kate shivered while Stephen saw in his mind’s eye the house on the edge of the forest filled with the voices of their children.
