"On account of if I told you I was… friendly with a Confederate soldier back in them days I thought I'd lose you, and I didn't want to lose you," Edna answered. "I didn't want to lose you on account of I love you. I always have. I always will."
It was, Nellie thought, about the best answer her daughter could have given. But when her son-in-law said, "You lied to me," Nellie knew it was liable not to be good enough. "You lied to me," Merle Grimes repeated. It might have been the very worst thing he could think of to say. "I thought I knew you, and everything I thought I knew… I didn't know."
One of the customers got up and left. A moment later, more reluctantly, so did the other one. Nellie went to the door behind him. She closed it in the face of a woman who started to come in. "Sorry-we're closed," she told the startled woman. She flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED, too. That was going to cost her money, but it couldn't be helped.
When she walked back behind the counter, Edna was saying, "-so sorry. But that was before I knew you, Merle, remember. I've never done nothing to make you sorry since, so help me God I haven't."
"I'd have believed you yesterday, because I'd've been sure you were telling me the truth," her husband said. "Now… How do I know it's not just another lie?"
"Edna wouldn't do nothing like that, Merle," Nellie said. "You think about that, you'll know it's true." She liked Merle Grimes enough to want to do everything she could to keep him in the family. Even if she had her problems with Edna, her son-in-law was the kind of man who tempted her to forget her low opinion of half the human race.
She didn't mollify him, though. The look he gave her was colder than the weather outside. "You must have known about this Kincaid fellow, Mother Jacobs-you couldn't very well not have. And you never said a word about him to me. So why should I believe you, either?"
"We said Edna had a fiance during the war, and that he got killed," Nellie said. "Is that the truth or isn't it?"
"It's less than half the truth," Merle Grimes said stubbornly. "That's the best way I know how to lie-tell the part of the truth that goes your way, and leave out everything else."
He was right, of course. That was the best way Nellie knew how to lie, too. She said, "The man's dead, Merle. He's more than ten years dead now. You can just forget about him. Everybody else has."
Grimes shook his head. "That's not the point. What's more, you know it's not the point, Mother Jacobs. The point is that he was a.. . darned Confederate, and that Edna never told me about that. I've tried to take care of her and Armstrong. I've saved money. I've bought stocks. If she had told me, I don't know what I'd've done. Washington was occupied, after all. Those things happened. But trying to sweep 'em under the rug afterwards…" He shook his head again. "No."
Nellie didn't like the grim finality in his voice. Tears trickled down Edna's face. Sweet Jesus, she really thinks she's going to lose him right here and now, Nellie thought, fighting against panic of her own. She may be right, too.
Before she or Edna could say anything, the bell over the door chimed again. In came Hal Jacobs. "I saw you put out the CLOSED sign from across the street," Nellie's husband said. "Why so early?"
"We're having a-a family discussion, that's why," Nellie answered.
"I've found out about Nicholas Kincaid, Father Jacobs," Merle Grimes said, sounding even harder than he had before. "I've found out all about him."
"Have you?" Hal whuffled out air through his gray mustache-almost entirely white now, in fact. "I doubt that. Yes, sir, I doubt it very much."
"What do you mean?" Grimes demanded. "I know he was a Confederate officer. I know he was going to marry Edna till he got killed. And I know she never told me what he was. What else do I need to know?"
As far as Nellie could see, that was plenty. But Hal Jacobs said, "The other thing you need to know is what Teddy Roosevelt knew, God rest his soul-Edna and Nellie were both spies during the war, working with me and Bill Reach, God rest his soul, too, for I'm sure he's dead." Nellie was even surer, but her secrets, unlike Edna's, were unlikely to come out. Her husband went on, "Whatever Edna told you-and whatever she didn't, too-she asked me about first, because of what we were doing. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Behind his spectacles, Grimes' eyes widened. "I… think I may, sir," he answered. Unconsciously, he straightened towards, if not quite to, attention. But then his gaze swung back to Edna. "Don't you think almost marrying a Confederate went too far?"
Oh, she went further than that, Nellie thought. Wild horses wouldn't have dragged the words from her, though. And Edna did a splendid job of picking up the cue Hal had given her. "I didn't almost marry him on account of I was a spy," she replied. "But Washington was occupied, like you said yourself. And Hal asked me not to talk about anything that went on that had to do with the coffeehouse and spying even a little bit, just to be on the safe side. So I didn't."
Hal had never asked her to do any such thing. He knew that, and so did Nellie, and so did Edna herself. But Merle Grimes didn't know it, and he was the one who counted here. "All right," he said after a long, long pause. "We'll let it go, then. God knows I do love you, Edna, and I want to be able to love you and trust you the rest of my days."
Edna did the smartest thing she could have: instead of saying even a word, she threw herself into Merle's arms. As the two of them embraced, Nellie caught Hal's eye. Thank you, she mouthed silently. Her husband gave a tiny nod and an even tinier shrug, as if to say it wasn't worth getting excited about. They'd been married for almost ten years. Till that moment, Nellie had never been sure she loved him. She was now.
H ad Lucien Galtier not cut himself, he might not have found out for some little while that his life was about to change. It wasn't a bad wound, like the time when he'd laid his leg open with an axe. But he was sharpening a stake that would support some green beans when spring came, and the knife slipped, and he gashed himself between thumb and forefinger.
" 'Osti," he hissed. "Calisse de tabernac." He put down the knife and the stake, pinched the lips of the wound shut, and went to the house to get a clean bandage. He hoped that would do the job, and that he wouldn't need stitches. If he did, though, he was reasonably sure he could get them for nothing. There were advantages to having a doctor for a son-in-law, even if Leonard O'Doull would tease him for being a clumsy old fool even as he sewed him up. Lucien hurried up the stairs, quietly wiped his boots on the thick, soft mat in front of the kitchen door, and went inside.
Marie was sitting at the kitchen table, one hand on her belly, tears running down her face.
"Marie?" Galtier whispered, his own cut forgotten. His right hand dropped to his side. Blood started dripping on the floor. "Qu'est-ce que tu as?"
"It's nothing," she said, springing to her feet with as much dismay and guilt as if he'd caught her in the arms of another man. "Nothing, I tell you. What have you done to yourself? You're bleeding!"
He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his left hand. "This is truly nothing," he said. "A slip of the knife, that's all. But you.. ."
Marie might pause during her day's work for a cup of tea. Never, in all the years he'd known her, had she paused because she was in pain. That was literally true; she'd gone on working till ridiculously short stretches of time before she bore her children, and she'd got back to work after each birth much sooner than the midwife said she should. For her to hold herself like that and weep was… The end of the world was the first thing that occurred to him.
An instant later, he wished he'd thought of a different comparison.