Lori Benton Page 6

“ ’Tis more than that needs protecting, I’m thinking.”

  The flash of amusement in her eyes was more than faint now, and mildly insulting. Reining in a twist of a smile, she nodded her chin toward Cap. “I do not need protecting, but if that dog can go on filling my kettle as he did today, you may stay as well.”

  She didn’t need to add “for now” for him to hear it.

  A worn quilt was folded around a slender kitchen knife and a long-handled spoon. Beside it lay a felling ax, a hefty sack of beans and another of cornmeal, and a pouch containing precious salt. The items were arranged with precision, with barely a wrinkle in quilt or sacking. It was the third such offering to appear on the cabin porch since Anni’s visit. Evidencing no surprise at the first—a skillet, a bushel of potatoes, a serviceable shift, stays, and gown wrapped in a linen sheet—Willa had explained Anni’s promise to share what provisions could be spared.

  She’d studied the goods while the collie sniffed them with interest, and a faint smile touched her lips. It had seemed strange to Neil that Anni had come and gone without even Cap noticing. Quiet did not seem to be Anni Keppler’s way. He’d said as much.

  “It will have been Francis.”

  “The one they lock in the smokehouse?” He’d wished he held his tongue when Willa’s face darkened. Though there’d been no further sign of Richard Waring in the two days since their meeting, the specter of the man lingered like a bitter taste on the tongue. Or the sense of watching eyes.

  Willa took her spade and musket to the field, leaving Neil to store the newest provisions, curious about this youngest Waring as he dragged in the beans and cornmeal to the corner of the front room he’d designated as their pantry. The quilt he put in the loft where Willa slept. He left the ax on the porch.

  Around midmorning, with the breakfast cleared, the goat put to graze in its brush pen, and Cap off roaming, Neil took his sketchbook to the edge of the woods, to the ax-marked stump of an immense hickory likely felled when the yard was first cleared. He sat with his back to the cabin, conscious once again of being watched. The sensation unnerved him, but he had himself a theory about it and meant to put it to the test.

  Balancing the sketchbook on his knee, he turned to a fresh page, fixed the lead stick between thumb and forefinger of his splinted hand, and made a cursory doodle on the paper’s margin. It hurt. A lot. But not quite enough to thwart him.

  He sketched a trillium, bright against the dark forest soil, then a caterpillar inching up a beech sapling. Between sketches he rested his throbbing wrist till the pain eased off, taking the time to perform his daily exercise of rehearsing the lengthy field notes that went with the drawings in his satchel, the ones that bore no description as yet.

  His patience—and endurance—paid off twofold. First was a fox that stepped through the leafing grapevine draping a stand of maples. It paused in a band of sunlight, its pelt a flash of brazen fire. Moving naught but hand and eye, he began a likeness of the creature, which sat on its haunches a biscuit’s toss away and nonchalantly eyed him back. It was a clumsy effort, compared to what he was capable of days ago, but leastwise it resembled a fox.

  His second audience, every bit as stealthy, drew quite near before the fox alerted him with a flick of black-tipped ears. Neil finished the sketch seconds before Vulpes vulpes melded back into the grapevine shadows. Then Neil turned his head.

  The lad stood a few paces away, watching him.

  Neil’s first surprise was how unlike his brother he was in stature—middling tall, whip thin, shirt and breeches slack on his undernourished frame. He went shoeless, and the mop of pale hair brushing his shoulders sported bits of leaf. His age was hard to fix, though the bony hands that clutched an empty sack between them were a man’s.

  “You were canny,” Neil said. “And verra quiet. I appreciate that.”

  The eyes in the thin face were the pale blue of his siblings’ but flinchingly shy, where his sister’s had been amiable and unreserved, his brother’s cold, aggressive. Inquisitive, too, but in the way of the fox—as a creature apart, having its own realm of preoccupations, which Neil could never fully comprehend.

  “You’ll be Francis, then?”

  The blue eyes flicked to Neil’s arm, nestled in its sling, then to the sketchbook on his knee.

  Neil shifted the drawing so the lad could better see. The scrawny neck craned, but the long bare feet came no closer. It was like coaxing a bird to the hand, a thing Neil had done time enough to recognize the blade-thin balance between fear and curiosity. He took a small penknife from his coat and carefully trimmed the page from the book. When he rose, the boy stepped back.

  “ ’Tis yours, if ye like.” Leaving the drawing on the stump, he strode back to the cabin, pausing at the porch to inspect the items the lad had brought this time. Once again, each was aligned with the porch edge, even with the seams between the floor planks. Had he a means of measuring, Neil was certain he’d find the space between them exact to a hair.

  “I am F-Francis. You’re Willa’s f-friend.”

  He hadn’t heard a grass blade rustle beneath those dirty feet. He turned. Anni’s brother had tucked the sack into his waistband and now held Neil’s drawing between his hands.

  “Aye, for my part, I am. She’s shown me great kindness. As have ye, bringing us these things.”

  Francis Waring broke into a smile of the same startling charm as his brother’s, with one difference—it was also blindingly sincere. Neil caught his breath but wasn’t quick enough to speak before the lad was making for the woods, the drawing of the fox clutched like a prize.

  He told Willa about his encounter with Francis while they sat on the floor and ate boiled potatoes salted to perfection, no longer needing to eat by turns, thanks to Anni’s generosity.

  Willa gazed through the open door to the yard and the falling dusk, hair still damp from her wash at the spring. “I never knew Francis to take to a stranger so easily.” Across the bench that served as a table, Roman style, her glance was almost shy. “He showed me your likeness of the fox. It was …”

  He leaned forward, anticipating her opinion, though he kent the effort undeserving of favor, but drew back as if from a slap. Half her face had abruptly disappeared behind a bank of flashing lights and shadows. It struck with no more warning, as the black spells always did.

  Willa exclaimed when he lurched to his feet, toppling the bench between them and sending their plates to the floor. He barely made it to the porch before the pain burst through his skull, and the vomiting began.

  “Sorry,” he gasped between violent bouts as his belly emptied onto the trodden yard. “It will pass …”

  When the retching stopped, leaving him spent and humiliated, he felt cool hands on his brow. She urged him to his feet and led him, half-blinded by the flickering occlusions in his vision and the pain building to a scream behind his eyes, back into the cabin. Firelight stabbed his brain like spear points. Then he stumbled into darkness, felt the scratch of wool against his cheek, kent he was in the back room Willa had permitted him to use.

  A spoon touched his mouth. The taste and smell of laudanum made his lip curl, but he swallowed. She’d found the powder among his things, and the small flask of sherry he kept for its mixing. A cup rim pressed against his teeth. Water slipped cool down his throat, washing back bitterness.

  He choked, coughed, tried to sit up. “The supper … I made a mess.”

  “Do not think of it.”

  She pushed him back, and he went down like a fevered child, lost to half-waking dreams of being hunted through fire and smoke and misted woods, a path through a chaos of screaming. He began to think he might make it through without being seen or scalped or murdered, when an Indian stepped across his path, painted and pierced, tomahawk raised. Musket fire cracked … near, distant, near again. Lead balls thwacked the trees, spitting bark and leaves. The Indian fell. So did he.

  He woke, flailing, banged his injured arm, then froze in a clench of agony till the tide
of pain receded. A cloth, damp with water from the spring, had slipped from over his eyes. Somewhere, Cap was barking, the noise stabbing his skull.

  Was it an attack? Or did he yet dream?

  Willa’s voice rose, hushing the dog. He pushed to his knees, still uncertain whether he dreamed, and crawled toward the front room. His head throbbed. His eyes throbbed. His wrist, raised like a wounded dog’s, throbbed. He reached the opening between the rooms and poked his head around the doorway.

  Cap had fallen to growling, nose pointed at the cabin door. Willa held her musket pointed in the same direction, at a man who filled the night-black opening. A big man. Waring?

  No. The face was wrong. Brown, not white. Framed in black hair, not yellow. An Indian, one as tall as Waring. Biggest Indian he’d ever seen.

  Then he understood. They’d found her, the Mohawks.

  Willa lowered the musket, said a word he didn’t understand, her voice low with shock. He watched her set the weapon aside. She was moving toward the big Indian, surrendering without a fight.

  He pulled himself upright against the door frame. Willa heard his scrabbling and turned, face drawn with surprise. The Indian looked startled, too, as Neil staggered from the dark—startled but immovable, planted in the doorway like a great oak tree.

  He would fell him, then. Crash him over. Topple him out of the cabin.

  He lunged, but before he could make contact, the Indian tree uprooted itself, stepped nimbly aside, and Neil went through the door instead. Darkness and the porch floor rushed to meet him.

  SEVEN

  Concern for Neil MacGregor, fallen across the threshold of her cabin, urged her to move, but she could not move. She could not look away from the other man in her doorway.

  “Tames-His-Horse,” she said, as though speaking his name would render him more substantial than a tall, deep-chested ghost that might vanish with her next exhalation. She breathed, and still he stood there, rifle slung at his shoulder, solid and real as her beating heart. His face, bronzed in the cabin’s firelight, was leaner than she remembered—a warrior’s face, chiseled and stern.

  “Sekoh, my sister,” he said. “But in this place, better to call me Joseph.”

  His voice washed over her, deep like the beating of drums at the fire, summoning a thousand memories to make war in her heart. He’d taken the name of Joseph in the lands south and west of the Mohawk River, where he’d gone as a youth to acquaint himself with his father’s people, the Onyota’a:ka—Oneida—only to return to his mother’s Mohawk kin in Canada with the white man’s writing words in his head and the Christian God’s Son, Jesus, in his heart.

  Words crowded now behind Willa’s teeth, but they could not speak like this, with Neil MacGregor lying prostrate between them. She knelt to touch his face. He moaned but did not rouse. She raised her face to Joseph. “Will you help me? He is ill. We will have to carry him.”

  Joseph set down his rifle and squatted in the doorway, hair spilling shiny black over his shoulders. He was dressed much as she last saw him—many seasons ago, when he rode away to fight for the British in their war—in blue linen shirt and deerskin breechcloth, leggings tied with beaded cloth strips, tomahawk and knife thrust through a sash. The difference was his hair. Last time she saw him, it had been plucked into a warrior’s scalp-lock, tied with hawk feathers. Now his hair fell long and full, though there were still feathers tied in back. She reached across Neil MacGregor and gently grasped a lock.

  “This is good to see.”

  His face lifted. Firelight reflected off the jutting planes of his cheekbones and jaw. His eyes locked with hers. Though she knew it was to neither of their good, she could not help searching them for that secret fire he’d carried for her, despite its impossibility, despite her efforts to quench it, certain it must have turned to ash like the rest of her Mohawk past.

  But no. There on the cabin porch, Joseph Tames-His-Horse opened his soul to her. He still burned.

  She let go of his hair.

  “It is two years since I left the warpath,” he said.

  What, she wanted to ask, had he done in that time? Where had he been doing it? Why had he not returned to their village?

  She said none of these things as he pulled Neil MacGregor upright, got a shoulder into his chest and, hoisting him like a grain sack, carried him into the cabin.

  Kneeling in the dark beside Neil’s pallet—Joseph smelling of balsam fir and the smoke of fires, and the clean musky scent that was his own—she wanted to lean into Joseph’s chest, feel his arms enfold her, but resisted the need.

  Her words were barely audible. “How did you find me?”

  He spoke softly too. “I saw the trail sign you left. It was not hard to guess where you were bound. Not Niagara.”

  Niagara, the fort in the west by the Great Falling Water, where so many had fled to shelter under the clipped wings of the British who led them to ruin in the war that shattered the Longhouse people—Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscaroras, Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas—and scattered the Great Council Fire that had burned for centuries. Where the beleaguered remnant of her northern village had gone as well, being too few to sustain themselves. Where she might be, had the man beside her now been a few weeks quicker in returning.

  Crouched in the dark beside a sick white man in a cabin far from the life they’d known together, Joseph Tames-His-Horse still read her soul. “Why did you come here? The Kanien’kehá:ka washed this life from your blood.”

  “Not from my memory.” Not from her heart. Not Papa, Mama …

  “It is not good. This is not the place for you.”

  Because it was dark, because she did not look at him, she found she could speak with truth. “I think there is no place for me.”

  “Burning Sky.” Joseph hesitated, but she knew what he longed to say. That wherever he was, she would always have a place. The words hovered between them, unspoken.

  “Here I am called Willa Obenchain.” She took Joseph’s hand, urging him up. “Let us leave him to rest.”

  Joseph had a white mare, cinnamon-spotted and tall. In the cabin yard he relieved it of its burdens, and his bow and quiver, and hobbled it to forage, while Willa put wood on the fire. They sat on the covered porch, in the light from the doorway, breathing in the night and the smell of waking earth.

  She looked at him, to find him looking back at her. He had changed, yes, but there was still the scar above his left eyebrow where a child’s stray arrow had nicked him, a year after her adoption. It had bled profusely, that small gash. She’d staunched it with a pad of rabbit skin, while his dark eyes teased her through a mask of scarlet, as if the fuss she made was worth the wound’s sting.

  She wanted to drink in his face, craved its familiarity, its strength, but in it as well lived memories that swelled the grief in her chest. She raised her chin and stared at the stars gathered thick above the ridges to the north.

  “The man who was your husband made a good death. This was told to me. I did not see it.”

  Willa glanced aside to see Joseph staring not at the stars, but still at her. She’d known of Kingfisher’s passing for a year and more. As best she could reckon it, having pieced together the accounts that made their way back to their remote village, he’d died the spring their second child was born, in a raid against the Long Knives, somewhere in Pennsylvania.

  “He never saw his youngest daughter. In this world.”

  A sound caught in Joseph’s throat—of sorrow, not surprise. He’d been to the village. He’d seen the ashes. “Then they are together?”

  “Both of my daughters are with him.” She-Goes-Singing, her firstborn. Sweet Rain, her tiny one … Willa clenched her teeth to control the swift scald of tears. “It was the spotting sickness. Smallpox.”

  Joseph raised a hand to her cheek, knuckles brushing her unblemished skin. “But it did not touch you. Who was left to mourn with you? To make condolence?”

  The words were like arms seeking to hold her. Grief clawed her throat tig
ht. He waited while she made her voice strong. “The others all left for Niagara—Bear Clan, Turtle, the few left of Wolf. I bid them go. Enough had sickened. I stayed to care for my children and the others too sick to travel. When it was over, I mourned alone, then I burned the lodges to thaw the ground, and put them in the earth.”

  Joseph groaned, leaning into her until their shoulders pressed together, but it was too much to contain. She heaved herself off the porch and faced him.

  By clan tradition, he was the one who should provide the condolence she had not received. He was Wolf Clan, her brother, though they did not share a drop of blood. Should she ask it, he was obligated to bring her captives to replace those she’d lost—as she had once replaced another for the Mohawk woman who became her mother. But all was changed now. It was no longer reasonable to expect such a thing, even if her heart cried out for it. She’d left the Kanien’kehá:ka. Yet she had not found her white parents. She was adrift between two lives, unable to grieve. Unable to hope.

  “Why did you wait so long to come back?” They’d been speaking in the language of her adopted people, but now she spoke in English, and it made the question jarring. Joseph flinched but remained as he was, powerful body folded on the cabin step, watching her with pain in his eyes.

  “For many moons, I did not know your husband was no longer with you.”

  She understood. When Thayendanegea came among them, recruiting warriors to help the British fight the colonists, Joseph had gone with him in no small part because she had accepted Kingfisher as her husband. Thinking Kingfisher still living, Joseph would not have returned.

  “After the fighting ended,” he went on, “I was given other work to do, and I did it.”

  “What work?”

  “Hunting deserters for the British Army,” he said, falling back into the language of the People.

  She stared at him. “Deserters?”

  “The forts around the lakes are undermanned. The redcoat officers send trackers to bring back those who desert. So now I hunt men I once fought beside.”

  He said it without pride.