Lori Benton (8 page)

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.

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.