Thus, I feared I was only dreaming when a candle illuminated my darkened boudoir. Somehow, he was here, whispering, “I am sorry to wake you, my dear heart. It is only that after all this time, I couldn’t wait to set eyes on you . . .”
Oh, his voice. To hear it again after two years undid me. I rose quickly from my pillow in the same moment he rushed to kneel at my bedside. “Forgive me, Adrienne. I beg you, forgive me!” I threw my arms around him in wordless emotion and he rasped, “I know you were too good to condemn me in letters spies might capture and publish for the world to see, but now that we are alone, I must know the truth. Have I broken everything between us?”
There had been a moment—more than one—where I wondered if he had. Those had been fleeting doubts, and now I had none. “Never. Of course I forgive you. With all my heart.”
He bowed his head. “Yet I can never forgive myself for Henriette. I was not here to ease our little girl in her final hours, to console your mother’s heart, to mingle my grief with yours. I was not here, but in some accursed frozen army camp . . .”
Would it have mattered? He might have helped ease her, he might have consoled me, but Henriette would still be gone, and all our hopes for a better world gone with her. Other fathers, I reminded myself, had been absent for lesser reasons. But in a fresh wave of grief for our first child, Gilbert and I both tried to speak, and faltered. There was so much we had to say, but holding each other seemed the only comfort.
His lips found my hair, my cheeks, my mouth, and we came together in forgiveness and grace. I imagined I felt the changes two years of soldiering had wrought. A new weight. Iron strength in his arms. A width and breadth to his back and shoulders. Only in the aftermath, tangled in linens and bedclothes, was I finally convinced I was neither dreaming him nor imagining the changes. My husband was not just a soldier, but now had experience commanding men, risking life and limb, and if the confidence and mastery of that experience could manifest in a person’s body, I felt that change in him too. War had burned away his boyishness, leaving his muscles lean and taut, his stomach flat and hard. A knot of still-angry red scar tissue marred his leg where he had been shot, but there were smaller scars too, and I yearned to know the story of each one.
With half-lidded eyes, the reddish lashes of which glowed in dawn light, he said, “Knowing you still love me, I will sleep easy for the first time in years . . .”
Yet I did not want to share him, even with sleep. “How are you here and not in Versailles?”
He nuzzled my neck with soft amusement. “I have already been to Versailles, interrogated, and judged. I am just now in disgrace with the king, forbidden to appear in public places where my conduct might be applauded. I have been sentenced to ten days of house arrest.” He grinned, having gotten away with it all. “You, my dear heart, are to be my jailer . . .”
Light reprimand indeed, if the king should send the hero home to his wife! I sighed happily to think of having him for ten days in my arms. “Whatever shall I do with you?”
He drew my palm up to kiss it. “I shall submit to whatever tortures you devise . . . only allow me the decency of a moment to catch my breath.”
I loved his playfulness, yet I felt I must say something earnestly, for this thought had seared my heart during our long separation, when I had desperately wanted him in my arms, all while helping him to flee. “I want your love only freely given, Gilbert.”
He sobered and took my face in his hands. “That, my dear heart, makes me love and want you all the more.”
* * *
—
After so long a separation, I wanted my husband to myself, but I was equally eager to introduce him to his daughter Anastasie—who, at nineteen months old, was a redheaded bundle of vivacity. She toddled straight into his arms without fear, and he held her tight, lavishing her with the love she deserved, and the extra measure owed to our dearly departed Henriette. I bade him tell us everything. Even the stories I already knew. I wanted to live each moment from which I’d been absent. His arrival in America. His first battle. His visits with the Iroquois—savages, some called them, but my husband said they were as noble as the old Romans and had forged true nations. I made him tell me how he had outsmarted the British to save the American army from defeat, but his favorite stories were of George Washington. The stately gentleman farmer was, in my husband’s estimation, the wisest and most honorable soldier in the world.
“He draws his sword only against tyrants,” Gilbert said. “He has taken me as an adoptive son, and when you meet him, you will love him.”