Galore - Michael Crummey [80]
It was the consensus on the shore that the Devine men were destined to live in the shadow of their women. And Bride Freke was too much woman for Henley Devine, even so he was twice her age.
Henley was born with the air of someone mistreated by the world and he was pampered and protected and coddled all his young life. His grandmother devoted her every waking moment to sussing out and meeting the boy’s needs. It gave Henley the idea his safety and comfort were the sole purpose of a woman’s love and this notion ensured he remained a single man through his twenties.
Bride was exactly the sort Henley wanted no part of in a wife, hard-edged and reckless and spoiling for a fight. He’d no more thought of love and marriage when he bedded her than Bride herself. He was drunk and she fucked him as a kind of revenge, to humiliate the helpless stutterer who held her down while his mother stole away her brin bag of dirt. She led him by his cock like a puppet on a string, left him on his back in the moss with his pants around his ankles. She had him twice more, to reef the knot tighter, before she turned her back. Ignored him or mocked his stutter and considered herself done with the man. Four months later she came to Mary Tryphena’s house with all her teeth gone and the pregnancy just beginning to show.
—You know that child is Henley’s, Bride?
—I do, Missus.
—She don’t know that for a f-f-fact, Henley said quietly.
Mary Tryphena turned to look at her son. He was rubbing his knuckles against the little chin he was blessed with, as was his habit during difficult conversations. It gave the impression he was hedging when he spoke, that his actual thoughts were different from the ones he expressed. —If you made your bed, Mary Tryphena said to him, you will bloody well lie in it.
—He lay in his bed, Bride corrected her, and now he’ll fucken well make it.
Mary Tryphena removed Bride’s stitches two weeks after the baby’s delivery. She made no effort to be gentle, jigging the thread clear to make the girl’s breath catch. She had no idea what circumstances conspired to bring a child into the world through the unlikely couple, but she had little sympathy for the girl or her own son.
The night Henley was conceived, Mary Tryphena told herself it was surrender to fate, to the stars. That threadbare little lie. Absalom pushing the lamp to the back of the table, darkness settling on them like the shade of the inevitable. Never mind he was married and father to five children, the youngest only hours old and asleep beside his wife in an upstairs room. Absalom’s hands under her breasts as he kissed her and she’d never been kissed like that before, not once. She could feel his cock when he pulled her close and they shuffled awkwardly to Virtue’s bed in the servant’s quarters, struggling with clasps and buttons.
—Go easy, Bride hissed but Mary Tryphena gripped and tugged the stitches clear, furious at the memory. She said, It’s time you and Henley got married, my maid.
Bride moved into the house the day she announced the pregnancy, but Mary Tryphena wouldn’t allow the couple to share a room until they were wed. The girl was raised Catholic and refused to convert simply to satisfy the self-righteous Reverend Dodge, so they kept to their separate beds. They disliked one another but still managed to screw on the sly when they found themselves alone, taking the sex as consolation for their predicament. Bride straddling Henley’s lap while she slapped his chinless face or pushed her fist into his mouth. —You long sonofab-b-bitch, she taunted him and he roared through the gag of her hand, nearly bucking her onto the floor. Their only other interactions were arguments about conversion and marriage. Henley threatened to throw her and the baby out if she wouldn’t listen to reason. Bride threw shoes and junks of wood in return, forks and knives,