Catherine Waits at the Farm

"You could ask me to stay," Pitou said, at the gate, already half turned toward the road to Paris.

"Could I? I don't recall you ever waiting for permission before doing anything you'd already decided to do."

He looked wounded by that, which hadn't been her intention, or hadn't been only her intention. "I'm going because it matters, Catherine. Not only because—"

"I know why you're going." She said it more gently than the words themselves managed. "Go. Be careful. Write when you can." She did not say the rest of it: that some part of her suspected this grand departure had exactly as much to do with proving himself to her as it did with any revolutionary conviction, and that she found she couldn't summon the encouragement his devotion probably deserved, not because she doubted him, but because she wasn't entirely certain, watching him go, what she wanted from either of them.

Her father found her use considerably faster than she'd expected, in the weeks that followed. "Billet," she'd overheard a neighbor call him once, not unkindly, "waiting to see which way the wind blows before he commits his own name to anything." It wasn't entirely fair, and it wasn't entirely wrong either. He had a farm to protect, and a farm gave a man real reasons to be cautious about revolutions, whatever his private sympathies for the people making one.

"What do you think?" he asked her one evening, laying out the sympathies of three neighboring farms he was trying to read correctly. "Should I speak plainly at the assembly, or wait to see how it goes for others first?"

She surprised herself by having an actual answer. "Speak plainly about the grain prices. Say nothing yet about the Assembly itself. Half the room agrees with you already on the grain and hasn't decided anything about the rest."

Her father looked at her for a long moment. "When did you start thinking about this so carefully?"

"About the same time you started asking me instead of deciding it yourself."

She found, across those weeks of being consulted rather than simply managed, that she liked the shape of a life where her judgment mattered to someone besides a devoted young man waiting for her to notice him properly. She did not examine that discovery too closely at the time. She only noticed, turning it over some nights, that Pitou's absence had made room for a version of herself she hadn't previously had much occasion to meet.

The news came eventually: Pitou, at the Bastille, truly brave, useful, exactly the man his devotion had always half-promised he might become given the right occasion. Catherine felt the pride land honestly, without complication. What she felt alongside it, watching the road he'd eventually return by, was something she couldn't yet name: an awareness that the woman waiting for him now had spent his absence becoming someone he hadn't left behind, and that whatever came next between them would have to reckon with two people considerably less simple than the two who'd stood at that gate.