way. Whereas I endeavor to change my feelings because my feelings are always wrong. For instance, when approaching a woman you lust after, the foolish man acts out his feelings and clutches at an inviting breast or makes some fell invitation that gets him slapped and keeps him from the best parties for the rest of the year. But the wise man looks the woman in the eye and serenades her about her astonishing beauty and her great wisdom and his own inadequacy to explain to her how much she deserves her place in the exact center of the universe. No woman can resist this, Calvin, or if she can, she's not worth having."
The carriage came to a stop.
Honor‚ flung open the door. "Smell the air!"
"Rotting fish," said Calvin.
"The coast! I wonder if I shall throw up, and if I do, whether the sea air will have affected the color and consistency of my vomitus."
Calvin ignored his deliberately crude banter as he reached up for their bags. He well know that Honor‚ was only crude when he didn't much respect his company; when with aristocrats, Honor‚ never uttered anything but bon mots and epigrams. For the young novelist to speak that way to Calvin was a sign, not so much of intimacy, but of disrespect.
When they found an appropriate ship bound for Canada, Calvin showed the captain the letter Napoleon had given him. Contrary to his worst fears, after seeing a production of a newly revised and prettied-up script of Hamlet in London, the letter did not instruct the captain to kill Calvin and Honor‚ at once - though there was no guarantee that the fellow didn't have orders to strangle them and pitch them into the sea when they were out of sight of land.
Why am I so afraid?
"So the Emperor's treasurer will reimburse me for all expenses out of the treasury when I come back?"
"That's the plan," said Honor‚. "But here, my friend, I know how ungenerous these imperial officials can be. Take this."
He handed the captain a sheaf of franc notes. Calvin was astonished. "All these weeks you've pretended to be poor and up to your ears in debt."
"I am poor! I am in debt. If I didn't owe money, why would ever steel myself to write? No, I simply borrowed the price of my passage from my mother and my father - they never talk, so they'll never find out - and from two of my publishers, promising each of them a completely exclusive book about my travels in America."
"You borrowed to pay our passage, knowing all along that the Emperor would pay it?"
"A man has to have spending money, or he's not a man," said Honor‚. "I have a wad of it, with which I have every intention of being generous with you, so I hope you won't condemn my methods."
"You're not terribly honest, are you?" said Calvin, half appalled, half admiring.
"You shock me, you hurt me, you offend me, I challenge you to a duel and then take sick with pneumonia so that I can't meet you, but I urge you to go ahead without me. Keep in mind that because I had that money, the captain will now invite us into his cabin for dinner every night of the voyage. And in answer to your question, I am perfectly honest when I am creating something, but otherwise words are mere tools designed to extract what I need from the pockets or bank accounts of those who currently but temporarily possess it. Calvin, you've been too long among the Puritans. And I have been too long among the Hypocrites."
* * *
It was Peggy who found the turnoff to Chapman Valley, found it easily though there was no sign and she was coming this time from the other direction. She and Alvin left the others with the carriage under the now-leafless oak out in front of the weavers' house. For Peggy, coming to this place now was both thrilling and embarrassing. What would they think of the way things had turned out since they set her on this present road?
Then, just as she raised her hand to knock on the door, she remembered something.
"Alvin," she said. "It slipped my mind, but something Becca said when I was here a few months ago."
"If it slipped your mind, then it was supposed to slip your mind."
"You and Calvin. You need to reclaim Calvin, find him and reclaim him before he turns completely against the