Chasing the Sunset(39)

“Something has,” Maggie confided, and spilled the whole story to her friend. Kathleen hugged her again, gleefully, and they set to work with happy hearts, the morning flying by as they played as much as they worked.

At lunchtime, Nick’s hot eyes never left Maggie. He spilled his cup of coffee all over his trouser leg, burned his finger on the serving platter of roast chicken, knocked a bowl of mashed potatoes onto the man next to him, and buttered half of his linen napkin before he noticed, but still he did not take his eyes off of her. Maggie could not keep the fiery blush from swamping her whole body whenever she looked his way, and when the men began to nudge each other and chuckle, she took refuge in the kitchen until he was gone, before she was tempted to do something foolish, like haul him upstairs to the nearest bedroom.

“Good Lord, he has got it bad,” Kathleen said in awe. “You have got to tell me how you did that, Maggie. I might want to use it on some poor, unsuspecting male some day.”

Maggie blushed even harder, and Kathleen smirked. “Maybe I do know how you did it, after all,” she snickered, and Maggie snapped a wet towel at her, laughing.

Just before dinner, right after Kathleen had gone home, Maggie was walking out the back door to throw some vegetable scraps to the chickens when a hand reached out and snatched her. She gave a startled yelp, then wrapped her arms around Nick and purred.

“I have been thinking of you all day,” he whispered, pressing frantic kisses to her hair, her face, her neck, wherever he could touch.

“Me, too,” she admitted.

“Let’s go,” he said, tugging her away from the door. Maggie protested, laughing.

“What about dinner?”

“Kathleen packed us a basket,” he said smugly, presenting it. “And Tommy and Ned can fix their own plates.” With that, he began dragging her away again.

“Wait!” Maggie cried. “I have to take everything off the stove and put it on the table at least, or we will come back to a house on fire.”

He made a long-suffering noise. “I suppose you are right.”

Maggie quickly did what she had to do and grabbed an old woolen shawl that Kathleen kept by the back door on a hook.

“Where are we going?” she panted when Nick grabbed her by the hand and made her run alongside him. “My legs are shorter than yours. Slow down!”

“We cannot slow down now,” he cried. “We are chasing the sunset!”

Chasing the sunset ... it sounded lovely even if she did not know what it meant, so Maggie held tight to Nick’s hand and ran as fast as she could. They stopped in the little clearing by the river, the one where Nick had watched Maggie take her clothes off to go swimming, the place that had proved so climactic for them both. Nick sat the basket down and flopped onto his back on the cool grass.

“Come down here,” he said, staring up at her. She obliged him, laying her head on his shoulder.

“What is that you said we were doing?” she asked, her fingers idly playing with his hair.

“That is something my father always said,” he told her and brought her fingers to his

mouth.

Maggie felt rather than saw him smile. “Every once in a while, come evening time, we would fill up a picnic basket with food and run for the river as fast as we could, pulling Mother along with us and laughing like fools. Hurry up! he would say. We do not have time to waste, we are chasing the sunset! Then we would lie down upon the ground, our arms around each other, and watch the sun go down.” He reached over and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Just like we are doing now.”

He cleared his throat. “I have never done this with anyone else before.” He smoothed her hair, and kissed the tip of her nose while Maggie digested the significance of this remark. “But I cannot think of anyone else who I would rather chase the sunset with.” He whispered it, and to Maggie it sounded almost like a vow.

“Neither can I,” she whispered, and put her lips to his almost chastely.

“Careful,” he said, smiling into her face. “You will miss the best part.”

They lay cuddled together, wrapped tight around each other, and watched the dying sun sink below the horizon. A glowing ball of bright orange, it went down in a burst of glorious color, illuminating the sky for mere seconds with serrated bands of crimson, gold and cerulean. Strips of soft violet and pink floated by, then vanished, disappearing into the darkening of the sky.

Maggie thought that she had never seen a more beautiful sunset in her life; surely there had never been such a beauteous display of riotous hues?

“So beautiful,” she whispered. Nick agreed, but he was not looking at the sky. He was looking at her.

“Kathleen packed cold chicken sandwiches and some fruit. And some lemonade,” he told her. “Got to keep your strength up,” he told her wickedly. “You are going to need the stamina. I have a longing to know if we are just as good together in a bed as we are on a dirt floor.”

They sat in the growing darkness and ate their dinner, then holding hands, they sprinted back to the house . . . with all of its big beds.

Nick did think that the loving he and Maggie shared was just as good in his soft bed as on the dirt floor. Indeed, he thought that if it got any better, he would be a dead man.

The next few weeks took on a dreamlike quality for Maggie. Kathleen lost track of how many times she came upon Maggie when she was supposed to be immersed in some task, instead staring off into the rafters, a small, dreamy smile curving her lips, eyes aglow with some thought or memory she had no wish to share with anyone else. Kathleen would snap her fingers in front of Maggie’s eyes, forcing Maggie back to the present, but the dreamy cast never went completely away from her features. Kathleen had remarked acerbically that if this was what love did to you–turned you into an idiot–then she wanted no part of it. Maggie blushed, and laughed, and apologized. Kathleen put her hands on her ample hips and grinned.

“I am just jealous,” she had said good-naturedly. “To hear Ned tell it, Nick is just as bad as you are. He has his head so high up in the clouds, he cannot even walk across the stable yard without tripping over something. Ned says that he has to find a dozen reasons a day to send Nick up to the house just to get him out of their hair down to the stables.”

Nick had been spending a lot of time up at the house, more than he ever had before, and Kathleen had come upon them giggling together, hands entwined, eyes speaking volumes even when they said not a word. Maggie had also disappeared for long periods of time, then reappeared flushed and disordered, hair hastily re-pinned, and once with the back of her dress buttoned up wrong, and her apron on crooked. But even if her clothing had not been in disarray, the glow of satisfaction on her face was evidence enough in itself of what she had been doing.

“Kathleen?” Maggie questioned hesitantly one day while they were making the week’s supply of bread. “You . . . you do not think that I am terrible, do you? I mean,” she said, and looked down, twisting her hands together. “Because Nick and I are lovers.”

“Lord, no!” Kathleen said. She cocked her head to one side and wiped her floured hands on her apron. “Maggie, have you ever heard of Mary Wollstonecraft?”

“No,” Maggie said. “Who’s she?”

“She is an Englishwoman who wrote a book called The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She started out as a teacher; she co-owned a school for girls with her sister, and she was appalled at the low level of education most women aspire to, or are kept at by their families. Our preacher found a copy of it and put it idly with his purchases while he was perusing the stacks at a local bookseller’s establishment. When he got it home and actually read it, he was shocked beyond belief. He condemned her book from the pulpit, saying that it was an affront to decent women everywhere, that it should not be allowed into this country, that we needed to protect our innocent flowers of womanhood from this vile outrage and that any who found copies of this base literature should destroy them immediately .” She grinned then, winking at Maggie. “Of course, by the time he got finished talking about it, Mother and I had memorized the title and the author’s name, and we were just dying to have a copy of it. I wrote to Joanne, Nick’s cousin, in Boston and she sent a copy to us straight away.”

Maggie laughed and kneaded the pliant dough. “What does it say, this book?” she asked curiously.

“Mary Wollstonecraft says that women are treated little better than slaves in a marriage–that they are encouraged to look beautiful but to be empty-headed, to bow down to the opposite sex as if they were gods, to be submissive above all else. She says that women are kept all their lives in a state of ignorance and dependence, and that the institution of marriage as it stands now–with masters and servants–degrades both parties. She goes so far as to call marriage ‘legal prostitution’, because she says that women trade sex for security. She says that women should be allowed to vote in public elections, that they should have the same rights afforded to them that men have . . . and that includes the right to make love outside of marriage. And Maggie, guess what? The book was published in England in 1792. In more than sixty years, things have not changed much for women, have they? Joanne also sent us a copy of a book that she said sells out the minute that it is reprinted. It is written by Margaret Fuller and called Woman in the Nineteenth Century. It is a very frank discussion about marriage, property laws that relate to women, and increased freedom for women in all regards. ”