Damn Monsieur Freycinet, Victor thought. The planter had been much too thorough. He'd sent one letter to where he guessed Victor was, and another to the place where Victor was bound to get it sooner or later. And Victor was indeed getting it, though not in the way Marcel Freycinet would have had in mind.

"A son." Meg breathed out hard through her nose.

"Yes, a son. A son who is dear Monsieur Freycinef's property. A son who is a slave, and likely will be all his days," Victor said. "If you think I haven't flayed myself about this, you are much mistaken."

"You fool, you're flaying yourself because you made her belly swell," Meg snarled. "I want to flay you because you bedded her in the first place. The hero of the Atlantean War for Liberty! Huzzah!"

Victor hung his head. "I deserve all your reproaches."

"And more besides," Meg agreed. "Why, Victor? Why?" But before he could answer she held up a hand. "Spare me any more falsehoods. I know why. I know too well-because you are a man, and she was there, and I was not. Heaven help me, though, I did not think you were that kind of man. Which only goes to show how little I knew, eh?"

"What can I say?" Victor asked miserably.

"I know not. What can you say? What would you have done if you could? Not just leave Louise in her present situation, I gather?"

"No," Victor said. "I offered to buy her and set her free here north of the Stour, where slavery is as near dead as makes no difference. I offered a price for… for the boy, as well. Freycinet declined to sell her or the boy."

"God is merciful!" his wife exclaimed. "That would have blown a hole in our accounts, not so? Did you Think I would not notice?"

"No. I thought you would," Victor said.

"And…?" The word hung in the air.

"What difference does it make now? I might have been able to explain it. Or if not, that would have been no worse than this."

"There!" his wife said in something like triumph. "That's the first truth you've told since you came home, unless I'm much mistaken."

She wasn't, and Victor didn't have the nerve to claim she was. "I'm sorry," he muttered under his breath.

"You're sorry you got caught. You're sorry your hussy caught. Are you sorry you went in unto her, as the Good Book says? Not likely!"

"What would you have me do?" Victor asked.

He thought she would say something like Cut it off and throw it in the fire. By the look in her eye, she wasn't far from that But what she did answer was, "I never dreamt in all my born days that I would say such a thing as this, but right now I wish with all my heart you were more like Blaise. He would never mistreat Stella so-never!"

Victor didn't remember Blaise declining to swive Roxane, the slave girl who was so nearly white. The only difference between general and factotum-between one man and another-was that the factotum's companion hadn't conceived.

The general had no intention of betraying the factotum. One man, one friend, did not do that to another. But Meg's words caught him by surprise. Some of what went through his mind must have shown on his face.

Blood drained from Meg's cheeks. "No," she whispered. "He didn't! He couldn't! He wouldn't have!" Victor didn't claim that Blaise did or could or would have. He also didn't leap to his factotum's defense-not that Meg would have believed him if he had. He just stood there. That was bad enough, or worse than bad enough, all by itself. If Cornwallis had been able to blast holes in his defenses so easily, the Atlantean cause would have foundered in short order. Meg shook her head in what had to be horror. "God save me! You truly are all alike!"

"Don't tell Stella," Victor said.

"I have not the heart to do any such cruel thing," Meg said. "The truth will come out, though. Sooner or later, it will." She paused. "Did he get a byblow on his harlot?"

"Not so far as I know," Victor answered. "And, so far as I know, he has no notion that I did."

"I wish I had no notion that you did!" Meg exclaimed. Then she hesitated. "Or do I? Is it not better that the truth has come forth?"

"I know not," Victor said, "but I do know how much I wish Monsieur Freycinet had never told me I have a colored son."

"And, surely, you wish even more that he had never told me you were to have a colored child," Meg said. "The one thing you have not said is that you wish you had never used this Louise for your bedstraw. Am I to gather that the reason you have not said it is because it is not true?"

Victor had no idea how to answer that. What man ever regretted doing that which made him a man? He might-he would!- regret discovery. He might-he would!-regret unexpected offspring. But regret lying down with a pretty woman and getting up afterwards with a smile? No, not likely. And yet…

"I wish I had not hurt you by doing what I did," he said-and he meant it all the way down to his toes.

Not that it helped. "You would do better to wish me made of stone, then," his wife said. "I trusted you, Victor. Fool that I was, I did. Now I see I must have been a fool indeed. If you took this Louise on that journey, then you must have taken a Nell or a Joanna or a Sue or an Anne or a Bess or a Kate on all your others. And then you would come home and say how much you missed me!"

He'd feared he was wasting his breath when he insisted he'd fallen from virtue, fallen from fidelity, with Louise alone. How hideously right he'd been! "I always did miss you," he said, and he meant that, too.

"Not enough!" Meg retorted. "Besides, why would you. What did you have from me you could not get for a few shillings from any tavern wench with a hot cleft?"

That shot, like so many of hers, came too close to the center of the target. Unlike some of the others, it wasn't quite a bull's-eye. "What did I have from you? Yourself. With Louise"-Victor still wouldn't admit to any others, no matter how right about them Meg was-"it was a matter of a moment, forgotten as soon as it was over. With you, I always knew we were in harness together so long as we both should live, and I never wanted it any other way. I love you, Meg."

"Forgotten as soon as it was over? She left you something to remember her by, though, didn't she? And nothing but luck she didn't give you the pox to remember her by, too, and for you to bring home to me," Meg said. "You love me, you say? You love me till you ride off far enough so you can see me no more, and then you go your merry way!"

"That is not so," Victor said, painfully aware how likely it was to seem so to a woman who discovered herself scorned.

But Meg was shooting bigger guns. "What is not so? That you love me whilst I am within sight? For beyond doubt you cease to do so once I sink below the horizon. Then the whores rise!"

"I have been away since the beginning of the war," Victor said.

"So you have. And how would you have liked it had I entertained gentlemen callers the way that black bitch entertained you?

Do you suppose I have not been lonely of nights?"

He winced. "I should have liked that not one bit, as you must know. But… it is different for a man, as you also must know."

"Much too well!" Meg said. "Which makes me believe God is truly a man, for were He She we should operate under some other, more equitable, dispensation."

"Whatever you would have me do to show my contrition…"

"Ride south and shoot them both, and that brothel keeper Freycinet with them, and sink all the bodies in the swamp?" his wife suggested.

"I doubt I could escape uncaught," Victor said, which was putting it mildly. "And it is not the baby's fault."

"No. It isn't." Meg started to cry then. "Not his fault he lives and cries and makes messes in his drawers, while all of mine lie in the cold ground. Not his fault at all." The tears ran down her cheeks. "Damn you!"