A Different Flesh Read Free Page A

courted nonetheless.
    â€œOh, my dear, what would you have me do?” cried a roguish youngster named Caleb Lucas to a girl who, smiling, had turned her back on him. “Go off to the woods and marry a sim?” Laughter rose, hearty from the men who heard him, half-horrified squeals from the women.
    â€œAllan Cooper says the Spaniards do that, or anyway cohabit,” Wingfield told Anne. Spain held a string of outposts down to Magellan’s Strait and then up the western coast of South America, to serve her galleons plying the rich trade with the Indies.
    â€œHave they not read Deuteronomy?” Anne exclaimed, her lip curling in disgust. Then curiosity got the better of her and she whispered, “Can there be issue from such unions?”
    â€œIn truth, I don’t know. As Allan says, who’s to tell the difference betwixt the get of a Spanish sire and that of a sim?” Anne blinked, then burst into giggles at the bawdy slander against England’s longtime foe.
    Before long, both she and her husband were yawning. The unremitting labor of building the colony left scant energy for leisure or anything else. Still, Wingfield hesitated before he blew out the last lamp in the cabin. He glanced toward Anne, and saw an answering flush rise from her throat to her cheeks. She was recovered now from the ordeal of childbirth. Perhaps tonight they might start a son.…
    He was about to take Anne in his arms when Joanna let out a yowl. He stopped short. His wife started to laugh. She bared a breast. “Let me feed her quickly, and put her back to sleep. Then, why, we shall see what we shall see.”
    â€œIndeed we shall.” Wingfield lay down on the lumpy straw-stuffed bed to wait. He knew at once he had made a mistake, but fell asleep before he could do anything about it.
    Anne stuck out her tongue at him when the sun woke him the next morning. She skipped back when he reached for her. “This even,” she promised. “We have too much to do of the day to waste it lying abed.”
    He grimaced. “You have a hateful way of being right.” He scrambled into trousers and boots, set a plumed hat on his head to shield him from the sun. The plume was a bright pheasant’s feather from England, now sadly battered. Soon he would have to replace it with a duller turkey tail-feather.
    He was finishing a bowl of last night’s stew, strong but still eatable, when someone knocked on the cabin door. “There, you see?” Anne said.
    â€œHush.”
    He opened the door. Henry Dale came in. He was a short, fussy man whose ruddy complexion and tightly held jaw gave clues to his temper. After dipping his head to Anne, he said, “Edward, what say we set a few snares, today—mayhap, if fortune favors us, in spots where no knavish sims will come on them to go a-poaching.”
    â€œGood enough. Allan Cooper told me how you were robbed yesterday.”
    Anne’s presence plainly was the only thing keeping Dale from exploding with fury. He limited himself to a single strangled, “Aye.” After a few moments, he went on, “Shall we be about it, then?”
    Wingfield checked his pistols, tucked a bundle of crossbow bolts into his beltpouch, nodded. After a too-brief embrace with his wife, he followed Dale out into the bright morning.
    Colonists were already weeding, hoeing, watering in the fields. Caleb Lucas shooed a goat away from the fresh, green stalks of wheat, speeding it on with a kick that brought an indignant bleat from the beast. “And the very same to you,” Lucas called after it. “Damned impudent beast, you can find victuals anywhere, so why thieve your betters’ meals?”
    â€œBelike the foolish creature thinks itself a sim,” Dale grunted, watching the goat scurry for the edge of the woods, where it began browsing on shoots. “It lacks the accursed losels’ effrontery, though, for it will not turn on its natural