Snowbound and Eclipse Read Online Free Page B

husband and wife sharing a reunion.
    And from our joy that week, we would bring a son into the world. But the trial did not proceed as we intended; that wall of stiff-backed officers in blue and gold and white glared malevolently at John and even more acidly at my father. And in the end, they won: they found John guilty on all three of the charges: mutiny, disobeying the commands of superiors, and conduct prejudicial to military discipline. And President Polk betrayed us by largely accepting the verdict, though he commuted the sentence. John resigned.
    He has not held me in his arms since that hour. How often I held my arms open to him, invited him into the circle of my love, only to have him say in that polite, courteous way of his, that no, my illness forbade it; no, I was too tired and it would not be healthy or wise for me to surrender to my passions just then. How polite he always was, how much withdrawn from me, and how he had veneered it all with his innate courtesy. But the truth of it was that I yearned for my lover with all the hungers in my twenty-four-year-oldheart. Now, at Boone Creek, I yearned for one last embrace from my husband before he once again vanished from my presence.
    But he always had a courteous answer. At first it simply was too soon—too soon after Benton’s birth, too soon after Benton’s death. And so my beloved husband seemed to grow distant and not to need me or want me. But all this I set aside. It was more important to help him and the fourth expedition in any way I could.
    I was in the presence of my rivals. For I had come to understand that John enjoys the company of men, in wilderness, far more than the company of my sex, in cities. I had been slow to come to it, thinking only that his duties took him far afield and that soon he would return to the bosom of his family. But it has never happened in that fashion. No sooner is he back among us in Saint Louis or Washington City than he is restless, his gaze west, yearning for the campfires and wilds I could never share with him.
    He grew a beard after the court-martial; the clean-shaven handsome man I had married now hid behind sandy and luxuriant facial hair that made him all the more distant from me. To be sure, a beard is a utility in cold and cruel weather, but there is more to it. For the beard is yet another layer between Mr. Frémont and me; between Mr. Frémont and his company of adventurers.
    If I have been unwell, as has been my case ever since the trial, it has much to do with this deepening gulf between him and me. I sense at times I am losing him, only to enjoy other moments when his old warmth and love reappear, as if rising from some ocean bottom. I have not known how to cope with this. One moment I am desolate; the next I think I must do whatever I can to advance his life and career; and yet at other moments I feel I must pull a little free of him and return to the hearth of my own family. One thing Iknow: Frémont has changed, and I wonder whether I play a role in his life.
    But all these dark thoughts were only something to abolish from mind and heart and spirit as we settled in Boone Creek. I knew what I must do. I would help the colonel any way I could, and I would so master the nature of his company that I would make a good report of it to my father, and the colonel’s Saint Louis backers.
    I put Kitty to work settling us in the log cabin that the Indian agent, Major Richard Cummins, provided. She opened my trunks and set my clothing out to air, shook the brown bedclothes for bedbugs, and laid a small fire in the stone fireplace against the night’s chill. There was a marital-sized bed with an iron bedframe and a narrow bunk for her across the room. It would have been Benton’s, and Kitty would have made herself comfortable on the floor, but now it was hers.
    Major Cummins had shown us in, blandly inquired after our needs, and departed, along with the colonel, who headed at once to the