Days of Gold (31 page)

Edilean turned back around. “I haven’t thought about this, so I don’t know the details, but some man died a few days ago, and I think his farm is going to be for sale.”

“And you thought you’d ask
me
to run it?”

“Why not? Or would you rather keep on making your living stealing and doing vulgar things with men?”

“I’d rather—” Tabitha started to make a sarcastic remark but thought better of it. “Will you get men to run the place? I have trouble with men.”

“We all do,” Edilean said with a sigh. “I was happy until I met James, then my uncle. And Angus...” She waved her hand. “That’s over with. Harriet—she’s the woman I live with—thinks I’m useless. In fact, nearly everyone I’ve met in the last year thinks I’m useless. I’d like to prove them wrong.”

“You can’t run a farm with just women.”

“Why not?” Edilean asked.

“Because men have to... They have to lift heavy things.”

“We’ll get some big horses. I rode on a wagon pulled by Clydesdales, and they could have hauled mountains.” As she spoke, what had been just a flippant thought was forming in her mind in a solid way. Why couldn’t women run a farm business? They’d be known for having the best fruit at the market. It wouldn’t be bruised and
they’d display it beautifully. Edilean had a vision of green pears on yellow, watered silk.

She looked Tabitha up and down and remembered what she’d looked like when she was clean—and a picture began taking shape in her head. “Bound Girl,” she said.

“What?”

“I’ll form a business. ‘Bound Girl.’ That’s what I’ll name the company.”

“Company?”

“Yes,” Edilean said, then narrowed her eyes at Tabitha. “I know you’re a liar and that you love to tell people long, sad stories about your life, but I’ll tell you now that if you lie to
me
and if you ever so much as steal a hairpin from me, I’ll throw you out. No second chances. No amount of begging and pleading will make me forgive you, and you’ll be out on your own. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah,” Tabitha said insolently.

“I’m serious and I want you to be too. Do we have an agreement?”

Tabitha thought about what Edilean was saying, and she took the smirk off her face. “You get me off the streets and I won’t steal from you or lie to you. I won’t say the same about what I’ll do to others, but I’ll stay away from you.”

“You steal from men and you’ll find yourself in prison if not hanged, but that’s up to you,” Edilean said. “Now, come along. I have to tell Harriet.”

Ten minutes later, she’d made her way through the crowd to Harriet, who was haggling with a man about the price of beans. “He’s a thief,” she said when she saw Edilean. “And look at these things. They have bugs on them.”

“Take ’em or not, it don’t matter to me,” the man by the wagon said.

Muttering to herself, Harriet put them in her basket with the other produce she’d bought, and glanced at Edilean. “Why do you have that look on your face?” She leaned closer to her. “And why is that dreadful woman following you?”

“This is Tabitha.”

“The one you...” Harriet looked back at Tabitha with eyes of wonder. “She looks like a lady of the evening.”

“She is, and it’s my fault,” Edilean said as she took Harriet’s arm and pulled her to one side where they wouldn’t be heard. “I’m going to buy Mr. Sylvester’s farm.”

“Are you?” Harriet’s face showed new amusement. “And what will you do with it? Plant roses?”

“That’s a good idea. I can see white roses with dark red plums.”

Harriet put her hand to Edilean’s forehead. “You’ve had too much sun.”

“I’ve had too much of everything and not enough of anything.”

“When we get home I’m going to give you some laudanum and you can sleep.”

“You and your brother and that blasted laudanum!” Edilean said.

“What about my brother?” Harriet asked stiffly.

“Nothing about your brother! Harriet! Will you stop acting as though you’re my mother and
listen
to me? I’m going to buy a farm, and you and I are going to run it. You’re going to handle the money, because you’re so good at pinching every penny until it screams, and I’m going to handle...” Edilean wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she’d never been more sure in her life that she was going to do
this
.

“You can’t buy a farm. You know nothing about farming,” Harriet said. “You can’t—”

“This morning you were complaining that I’d never done anything
in my life, and now all you can say is that I can’t do what I want to. No!” Edilean said when Harriet started to defend herself. “You stay here with Tabitha while I go talk to Mr. Sylvester’s widow.”

“You cannot think to leave me here with that... that woman!”

“Yes, I can,” Edilean said as she pried Harriet’s fingers off her arm. “And you’ll be perfectly safe because believe me when I tell you that I know from experience that she’s not very good in a fight.”

Harriet looked as though she was going to faint.

Edilean turned to Tabitha. “Don’t do anything to scare her or I’ll not let you in on this.”

Tabitha nodded but she looked at Harriet with a wicked gleam in her eye.

“Do buck up, Harriet,” Edilean said. “After you give her a bath and clean clothes, you’ll see that she’s fairly presentable.”

“Me?” Harriet said. “
I
am to bathe her? Are you mad?”

“Probably,” Edilean said over her shoulder as she hurried toward the Sylvester wagon. “I am probably totally insane.”

T
HE
A
MERICAN
F
RONTIER
1770
F
OUR
Y
EARS
L
ATER

H
ARCOURT
,” C
OLONEL
W
ELLMAN
said, “I want you to find my daughter’s... I hate to say it, her fiancé. The damned fool got himself kidnapped by the Indians.”

“Which ones?” Angus asked.

“Which ones what?” the colonel snapped.

“Which tribe of Indians?”

“How the hell would
I
know? The savages are your job, not mine. All I know is that the idiot boy has disappeared, and my daughter is crying herself to sleep every night. Tell me, Harcourt, do
you
understand women?”

“Not in the least,” Angus said honestly.

“I offered my daughter a
man
, but she’d rather have a worthless boy like Matthew Aldredge. When I heard that the coach he was on had been attacked, I was tempted to tell her the boy was dead. But she was there when I heard, so she knew the truth.”

Angus didn’t reply to what the colonel was saying. He’d learned
early on that it was better to never give his opinion to anyone in the army, and especially not to an arrogant blowhard like Colonel Wellman. But since Angus wasn’t in the army, Wellman felt he could talk to him freely. This consisted of hours of Angus having to listen to Wellman’s lectures on everything from food to horse care to how everyone should run his own life.

Wellman’s only weakness was his pretty young daughter, Betsy. According to him, she was virtuous, demure, and needed constant protection. The truth was that she was a self-centered little hussy who used her father’s rank to threaten any man who tried to say no to her. Twice she’d come on to Angus. The first time he was polite, but the second time he said he’d take her to the captain and tell him the truth. After that, she left him alone.

The men who took her up on her offers lived in fear of being found out by her father. In the three years that Angus had been at the fort, Betsy had tearfully accused two young men of having made inappropriate advances to her. The truth was that she’d made the men’s lives hell. At first, they’d loved the insatiable desires of the girl, but when she began to make them late for drills, when she would crawl into the barrack’s window at 3
A.M
. and cry that he didn’t love her anymore, the men tried to break it off. The girl then told her father a pack of lies, and the young men were sent off on some dangerous mission. Neither of them had returned alive.

But that was all before Captain Austin came to the fort. He was short, stocky, ugly, and mean, and he didn’t believe in mercy or leniency. He was fresh from England, descended from generations of soldiers, and to him there was only one way to do things:
his
way. But after Austin caught Betsy slipping about the post in the wee hours of the night, he put a stop to it. He told her father that his daughter was so beautiful he feared that she’d have her virtue taken by one of the Americans. Iron bars were put over her bedroom window.
When Betsy started making eyes at a handsome young soldier newly arrived from North Carolina, Austin saw to it that the man was transferred.

The whole escapade greatly amused both the soldiers and the Watchers, as the four men who served as guides for the fort were called.

But it was a shock to all of them when Colonel Wellman told someone that he wanted his daughter to
marry
Captain Austin. As for Betsy, she told anyone who’d stand still that she’d rather marry the devil.

Now, Angus was hearing that young Betsy had an English fiancé. Angus’s first thought was “poor man.”

“He’s worthless!” Colonel Wellman said. “Utterly without value. He’s the youngest son of a rich man, but he’ll receive nothing. Not a dime. And, he plans to become a clergyman. Can you imagine
my
daughter as the wife of a minister?”

Angus thought it was better not to answer that question. As always, Wellman had on his full uniform, red jacket and all. It was joked that the uniform was his skin. “Like a tattoo” was the consensus.

As for Angus, he was wearing the gear of a frontiersman. It was all deerskin, light, supple, and it protected him from the elements, as he spent most of his time out of doors. His job as a Watcher was to see that the borders were respected. The greedy American settlers weren’t to encroach on the territory the government said belonged to the Indians, and the Indians weren’t to destroy the property or the lives of the settlers. And too, there were a few angry Frenchmen still hanging around. The French and Indian War had ended eight years before, but there were still Frenchmen who believed that the land west of the Allegheny Mountains belonged to them.

“You want me to find her fiancé?” Angus asked.

“Yes. No. She wants him, but I don’t. Why would a spunky girl like my Betsy want an effeminate, worthless, cowardly—?” He waved his hand. “Captain Austin said he’d been taken west of here, so find the boy. Or, better yet, bring back his body. Take some men and go get whatever you can find that’s left of him. Men like him don’t survive long out here.”

“Mac, Connor, and Welsch,” Angus said quickly. Most of the soldiers were English, but Mac was from the Highlands of Scotland, while Connor and Welsch had been born in America. Mac—Alexander McDowell—at thirty-six, was the oldest enlisted man. He’d been promoted for valor many times, but he’d been demoted for insolence an equal number of times. Right now he was down to corporal, and from the way Austin had been eyeing him, he’d soon be a private. T. C. Connor and Naphtali Welsch were young, new, and handsome. And they were already being targeted by Betsy, which meant that, without help, their lives wouldn’t last long.

At the names, Wellman gave Angus a sharp look. “Sure you don’t want to take some more experienced men than those last two?”

“Sure of it,” Angus said but didn’t explain further.

Wellman gave Angus a hard look, as though trying to figure out what was in his mind, but then he turned away. Angus wasn’t a soldier and he wasn’t English so, to Wellman’s mind, there was no possibility of understanding him.

Angus waited patiently for the man to say he was dismissed. He well knew that the colonel was a stickler for obeying orders, and Angus did the best he could to stay out of trouble. Most of the time, taking orders stuck in his throat, but he didn’t want to cause anyone to look into his background and find out about an Angus McTern who was wanted for kidnapping and theft.

“What are you waiting for?” Wellman said, as though Angus were standing around from idleness.

Angus grit his teeth and turned away before the man could see the anger that flashed across his face. He knew he’d have to put up with this man and this job for another year or two, then George Mercer, a representative of the Ohio Company, would return from England with a grant from the king, and Angus would be one of the men who was given a thousand acres in the new territory. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut and obey the rules the English made and he’d be set for life. It wasn’t what he truly wanted—nothing without Edilean was—but it was the best he could do under the circumstances.

He left the colonel’s office to step into the warm spring sunshine and saw that Mac, with young Connor and Welsch, was waiting for him. Angus looked into the shadows near the barracks and saw Captain Austin give a little smile before he disappeared inside the building. The man had known what the colonel was giving Angus to do, and he knew who Angus would choose to go with him. Damn him! Angus thought. He hated being known. If Jackknife Austin knew that much about Angus, then he probably knew he was hiding from someone.

“You want us?” Mac asked. Everyone complained that Mac’s accent was so thick that they couldn’t understand him, but to Angus’s ear it sounded good. It reminded him of the cool hills of Scotland, and of his family. He’d never asked, but Angus had an idea that Mac also had a lot of secrets.

“I’ll tell you everything on the way there,” Angus said to Mac.

Welsch and Connor were so new at being soldiers that they looked to Mac to tell them what to do. He gestured with his head that they were to get their horses and ride out.

An hour later, the four of them were heading deep into the forest of what was basically uncharted land. All of it had been traveled by people for centuries, but little of it had been mapped.
To Angus and Mac, used to the wild hills of Scotland, it was glorious country, but Connor and Welsch kept looking about them apprehensively.

“What’s Wellman up to now?” Mac asked as he glanced back at the young men close behind them. They looked as though they expected a war party of Indians to jump out at any moment, or maybe a grizzly bear would attack. They’d all heard the trappers who came to the fort to sell their furs tell exciting stories about their encounters with wild animals and wilder people.