Harry Turtledove - United States of Atlantis

"Expect Meg was the one who tattled to Stella, then," Blaise said resignedly. "Women are like that, dammit. I suppose I should be grateful she waited till after we got back-Stella wasn't waiting for me with a hatchet, anyhow."

"That's something," Victor agreed.

"How do you go and sweeten up your wife after she finds out about something like this?" Blaise asked. "Back in Africa, I never had to worry about it."

Did he mean he'd never strayed or he'd never got caught? If he wanted to explain further, he would. If he didn't care to, it didn't much matter. The question did. "If you find a way, I hope you'll be kind enough to pass it on to me," Victor answered. "So far, I am still seeking one myself. 'Seek, and ye shall find,' the Bible says, but it tells me nothing of where or when, worse luck."

"I try to make her happy as I can, every way I know how," Blaise said. "But it's harder when she won't let me lie down with her. If she did, maybe I could horn it out of her. Now-" He shook his head and spread his hands, lighter palms uppermost.

"If misery truly loves company, you should know you aren't the only one in the same predicament," Victor told him.

"Damned if I know whether misery loves company or not. It's still misery, isn't it?" Without waiting for an answer, Blaise pulled a metal flask out of his back pocket. "Here's to misery," he said, and swigged. Then he handed Victor the flask. "Takes the edge off your troubles, you might say."

"To misery," Victor echoed. Barrel-tree rum ran fiery down his throat. If you drank enough, the potent stuff would do more than take the edge off your troubles. Of course, it would give you new troubles, and worse ones, in short order, but plenty of people didn't worry about that. Their calculation was that, if they drank enough, they could forget the new troubles, too. If you didn't care that you lay stuporous in a muddy, filth-filled gutter, it wasn't a trouble for you… was it?

"My children are angry at me, too," Blaise went on in sorrowful tones as Victor gave back the flask. "They don't hardly know why, but they are. Long as their mama is, that's good enough for them." He took another nip, a smaller one this time.

Victor didn't answer. Blaise wasn't tactless enough to say he was lucky because he had no children of his own; the Negro knew how Victor and Meg had kept trying and failing to start a family. He didn't know, and with luck would never find out, how Victor had succeeded at last, if not in a way he either expected or wanted.

Something else occurred to Victor, something he hadn't thought of before. He wondered if the rum had knocked it loose.

If tiny Nicholas-would he be styled Nicholas Radcliff? entitled to a family name?-grew to be a man, what would he think of his father? I hope he doesn't hate me, Victor thought. A moment later, he added too much to himself. He didn't see how a slave could help hating his father some if the man who'd begotten him was free himself.

"Sooner or later, things will work out," Blaise said: an assertion that, to Victor's mind, would have been all the better for proof. His factotum went on, "We'll have to watch ourselves from here on out, though. You get caught once, that's bad. You get caught twice…" He slashed the edge of his palm across his throat.

"I fear you have the right of it," Victor said with a sigh.

A goose waddled up to him, stretched itself up to its full height, and honked imperiously. It was a barnyard bird, of stock brought over from Europe, but the call still reminded him of the deeper ones that came from honkers. Plainly, the enormous flightless birds had some kinship with geese. Why geese lived all over the world, why the rapidly fading honkers dwelt only on this land in the midst of the sea, Victor had no more idea than did the most learned European natural philosopher. But then, honkers were far from God's sole strange creations here.

He fed the goose grain. Before lowering its head to peck up the barley, it sent back a black, beady-eyed stare, as if to say, Well you took long enough. A mallard came over to try to filch some of the treat. The goose honked again, furiously, and flapped its wings. The mallard scuttled away.

"Any rum left in that flask?" Victor said suddenly.

Blaise shook it. It sloshed. Blaise handed it to him. He drank. After he swallowed, he coughed. "You all right?" Blaise asked.

"On account of the rum? Yes," Victor said. "Everything else? Everything else-is pretty rum." He wondered if the Negro knew that turn of phrase.

By the look on Blaise's face-half grin, half grimace-he did, and wished he didn't. But he nodded. "Can't live without women," he said, "and can't live with 'em, neither." To celebrate the pro-pounding of that great and profound truth, he and Victor made sure the flask didn't slosh any more.

A month went by, and then another week. Victor did not lay a hand on Meg in all that time. He did lay a hand on himself, several times. Doctors and preachers unanimously inveighed against the practice. Preachers called it the sin of Onan. Doctors said it sapped the body's vital energies. Victor didn't care. It kept him from wanting to haul off and clout Meg. It also might have kept him from jumping out a top-floor window and hoping he landed on his head.

He and his wife stayed polite to each other where anyone else could see or hear them. So did Blaise and Stella. If Blaise hadn't told him, Victor wouldn't have known anything was wrong between them. He hoped he and Meg showed an equally good facade.

The two of them had an extra mug of flip apiece with supper before they went upstairs on a hot, muggy summer evening. Meg lit the candle on her nightstand. "I hope you sleep well," Victor said as he put on his thinnest, coolest nightshirt.

He waited for her to scorch him. These past five weeks, she'd done it more often when they were alone than he could count. She started to say something. Whatever it was, she swallowed it before it got out. After a moment, she brought out something that had to be different: "Victor?"

Only his name; nothing more. No, something more-a tone of voice he hadn't heard from her in private since he'd come back from Croydon. "What is it?" he asked cautiously.

She looked at the candle flame, not at him. "Would you care to try?" she asked in return, her voice very low.

"Would I care to try what?" For a moment, Victor honestly didn't know what she was talking about. Then realization smote, and he felt like a fool. "Try that?" He was very glad his own voice didn't-quite-break in surprise. "Are you sure?"

"As sure as I need to be," Meg answered, which was less sure than Victor wanted her to be. She went on, "If we are going to braze this back together, we should begin again, not so?"

She made it sound about as romantic as using a prescription

from an apothecary. Victor didn't care how it sounded. "Yes!" he

said eagerly, and then, "Pray blow out the candle."

Meg surprised him by shaking her head. "If you see me, if you cannot help but see me, you will have a harder time imagining I am… someone else… than you would in the dark" Her chin came up defiantly.

Victor started to tell her he wouldn't do anything like that This time, he was the one who reconsidered. She wouldn't believe him- and why should she? So all he said was, "However you please."

They lay down together. Meg didn't flinch when he began to caress her, but she didn't move toward him or embrace him, either, the way she would have before she learned about Louise. She'd enjoyed his lovemaking… up until then. He'd always enjoyed hers, too. He hadn't strayed when she was close by. How astonishing was it that that turned out not to be good enough?

He went slowly and carefully, literally feeling his way along After a while, she did begin to kiss and caress him in return. He didn't pride himself on warming her up, and not just because they both would have been sweating even if they'd lain apart. She did it with the attitude of someone remembering she was supposed to, not with a kindled woman's wanton enthusiasm.