The Soldier's Forbidden Lover by Jackie Barbosa

Author:Jackie Barbosa [Barbosa, Jackie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648262425
Publisher: Circe Press

18

Plattsburgh, New York – February 27, 1815

Nothing in his experience had prepared Geoffrey for an upstate New York winter. Lancashire was considered by many of his countrymen to be a cold and snowy wasteland in the winter, fit for neither man nor beast, but even the most severe winter he could recall from childhood could not hold an icicle to Plattsburgh.

It wasn’t merely that it was cold. That, he thought he could have soldiered through without much difficulty. Nor was it that it was damp, although there was certainly a surfeit of precipitation. It was just that said precipitation came not primarily as rain or sleet or even light snowfall, but in torrents of bitter shards of ice. The locals called this snow, but it was more akin to frozen bits of buckshot. No, it was that despite all the iced liquid that fell from the sky, the air was dry as salt crystal and sucked every ounce of moisture from his skin, to the point that his lips cracked and his face felt like sandpaper.

And every bit of the discomfort was worth it. He would suffer a thousand winters just like this and account himself the most fortunate of men as long as Laura was with him.

Of course, the intemperate weather was also not without its rewards. One of them was that, when the snow fell in sheets for days on end—as it had for almost the entirety of the previous week—there was not much to do once the livestock had been tended but to huddle indoors. Together. Often in bed, whiling away the hours in learning new ways to pleasure one another, some of which turned out to be new even to him. Perhaps tedium, not necessity, was the true mother of invention.

This was not to say the typically female tasks of cooking and cleaning were any less onerous in the winter, but there were more hands to pitch in. Relieved of most of the day-to-day tasks of tending crops and mending machinery, both Daniel and Joseph took on more work around the house, helping with both meal preparation and the washing up, and Geoffrey followed their lead. He wasn’t sure if this was typical for households in the Americas during the winter months or whether this one, having been headed by a woman for a decade, had become more egalitarian in its division of labor.

Which was how it came to pass that he was nearly up to his elbows in kneading a loaf of bread when someone knocked on the front door. It was the second reasonably fair day in a row after nearly a week of snow, sleet, and everything in between. The skies had cleared to a pale gray-blue, and the temperature was above freezing, which meant some of the snow blocking the roads had melted.

Still, the sound came as a surprise. Unexpected visitors were rare in the summer months; to have one in the middle of winter was quite astonishing. And a trifle worrying,

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