The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [85]
And did not hate him for it.
He clutched her to him so tightly that after a moment he was afraid he might break her. He held her that way for a long time.
Finally, the terrible thing in his chest subsided, ebbed enough to be put back in its bottle and to be stoppered tightly. He released her gently.
“Come,” he murmured. “There is still time to make amends. What's done is done. We have a new problem to solve.”
“Can we be friends, Benjamin? Can you ever forgive me, and be my friend again?” She stroked his cheek.
“I think so,” he replied, his voice unsteady. “I think I can do that.”
They worked the rest of the day on various proofs, seeking the repulsion for niveum. Swedenborg had described the material in some detail, which gave them a good starting point, but it was still no easy task.
Vasilisa fell asleep, slumped over her notes; and Franklin, rubbing his eyes, noticed it was sundown. He stood and stretched, then went to find a servant to conduct Vasilisa to her room.
He went out into the cooling air and walked into the briny wind from the sea, following the mud-puddled road to Fort Condé. What remained of the thunderheads rolled over, painted gold and flame by the retiring sun, and once he was out of New Paris, the salty air mingled with the heavy perfume of flowers and the lingering scent of the rain. A whippoorwill started to sing, the cicadas chirped, and he almost felt he might have been walking along the edge of Roxbury Flats on a particularly hot summer night in his native Boston.
Very ordinary. Very pleasant.
As a boy ordinary and pleasant had bored him to tears. His real life always lay around some approaching bend, when he would go to college, or take to the whale roads like his brother, or run off to apprentice in the new sciences.
Well, his road had taken a number of bends, hadn't it? And always, somehow, even with everything that had happened to him, he still imagined that his real life was just about to start. That he would soon find his real position in life, his real home, his real—
He stopped, watched the sky ebb darker. His real wife.
That was the trouble, wasn't it? It had nothing to do with any defect in Lenka. It was his flaw, his …
Up ahead, at the fort, a bell suddenly began to ring. He stood for a second, wondering what it could mean, then began to run as quickly as he could in the near darkness.
Fort Condé loomed ahead, a brick and timber structure some three hundred feet square. At the moment it was aglow with lanthorn light, and a lot of the lanthorns were in motion.
The soldier on duty at the gate challenged him and recognized him at about the same moment, but Franklin gave the password anyway as he hurried past, through the yard, and into the command post, breathing heavily.
Nairne was there, along with a French lieutenant, one Regis Du Roullet.
“What's the noise?” Franklin asked.
Nairne was grimacing at one of the three opticons Franklin had built the previous week.
“Four airships have just come up to the northwestern perimeter,” he said. “The debt for the time we borrowed is come due.”
Franklin felt his heart go chunk-a-chunk, like the water-filled drums some of the Indians used. “Did the depneumifier prove effective?”
“I don't know. The ships stopped short and infantry debarked. Then the ships flew off, still out of range.”
“Oh.”
“I was afraid of this,” Nairne went on. “They used the same trick against us in Carolina. They can't use the airships direct, for our devil guns, but the ships are still terrible weapons. Moving troops without having to march them is an incredible advantage.”
“They're hastening the war,” Franklin noticed. “Even with their ships—and I'm told they have only a few—they can move only small numbers of their total host. Why rush them in here in numbers we might be able to account for, rather