The Immortal American (The Immortal American Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

hear the humming of the cold water flowing by, but too far to actually see the Concord River. The sky was thick with heavy gray clouds, yet it was warm enough for both Monsieur Beaumont and I to be without our coats. He wasn’t even wearing his waistcoat, which was provocatively intimate. The air enveloping us buzzed with the alarming silence of a coming storm.
    Monsieur Beaumont caught the dried fruit in his teeth a second before impact and chewed it with relish. “I don’t like math. Calculus, it is a math invented by men who had too much time on their hands. So I’m distracting you from the subject by putting words in your mouth. But I’ll be fair now. What would you like to discuss? We can talk about anything except math.”
    “Coward.”
    “ Oui . ”
    “All right.” I tried to hide my smile. “Locke’s Two Treaties .”
    “ Bien. You begin, hmm?”
    I understood now why the French would use words usually associated with sword fighting when debating. Whenever I’d converse with my father, we would almost always have the same mind on all discussions. When talking to Mathew about the law I was intrigued, but never ventured to address any concern I had—although, I don’t know why. But with Monsieur Beaumont I met my match. Touché , parry, thust —we’d argue, discuss, and ponder until the sky peaked midnight blue with streaks of scarlet and orange, then slowly separate from each other, saying our farewells until the sky blackened. How I began to hate the night. It would mean I’d have to be away from Monsieur Beaumont yet again.
    I tapped my bottom lip, thinking of Locke, thinking of a conversation that would last for hours. “Locke’s views regarding men’s rights versus a government’s.”
    “Ah, well, don’t start with anything controversial, Miss Buccleuch.”
    I giggled at his jest, but continued anyway. “Do you believe, like Locke, that a man can and sometimes must stand up for his God-given rights, especially when faced with noxious brutes within a government?”
    Monsier Beaumont cocked his head side to side then narrowed his eyes. “Locke was referring to your Civil War when he wrote that. You English had that civil war a couple years ago, oui ?”
    I smiled, not sure if he was horrid at history or just English history, which being French was forgivable. “More like a century ago. Actually more than a century. It was in the middle of the seventeenth century. ”
    His brows furrowed. “ Oui ? Ah, where does the time go? I remember it like it was yesterday.”
    I threw another peach ring at him, shaking my head. “You were there?”
    He caught the fruit again in his teeth and chewed with a wide grin. “Of course I wasn’t in England.” He snorted and shook his own head, as if I were the silly one. “But I remember it well.”
    “Of course you do.” I nodded, then gave him an incredulous look, almost rolling my eyes.
    He quietly snickered. “We are off subject yet again. I was asking, is your civil war what you are thinking about or the current riots in Boston, with regard to Locke’s Two Treaties ?”
    I sobered instantly. Indeed I had been thinking of all the jobless men at Boston’s wharf, men who had tarred and feathered a duty collector, making the newspaper headlines with that vicious attack. I thought too of other men who had been too cowardly to dress as themselves, but as Mohawks for the Tea Party just a couple years ago, and just three years before that there were the six dead in what the newspapers now called the Boston Massacre. The mobbing seemed to be escalating, and since Salem, and I’d heard Portsmouth too, had been marched on by the redcoats, looking for militias’ caches of arms to destroy. I was fearful that the Massachusetts issues with her mother country was like a bone that had become old and brittle and was about to snap at any moment.
    But so apprehensive was I that I dared not talk about the reality of my explosive colony. As if my silence bought my