Drums of Autumn (116 page)

“We began to know that he had an evil spirit in him; perhaps it was Atatarho, from whose head Hiawatha combed the snakes; perhaps the snakes had come to this man, looking for a home. Finally, my brother the war chief said that it must stop; he must leave or we would kill him.”

Tewaktenyonh paused. Her fingers, which had stroked the wampum continuously, as though she drew strength from it for her story, were now still.

“He was a stranger,” she said softly. “But he didn’t know he was a stranger. I think he never understood.”

At the other end of the longhouse the drinking party was growing riotous; all the men were laughing, rocking to and fro with mirth. I could hear the girl Emily’s voice, higher, laughing with them. Tewaktenyonh glanced that way, frowning slightly.

Mice were creeping briskly up and down my spine. A stranger. An Indian, by his face, by his speech; his slightly strange speech. An Indian—with silver fillings in his teeth. No, he hadn’t understood. He had thought they were his people, after all. Knowing what their future held, he had come to try to save them. How could he believe that they meant to do him harm?

But they
had
meant it. They stripped him, said Tewaktenyonh, her face remote. They tied him to a pole in the center of the village, and painted his face with an ink made from soot and oak galls.

“Black is for death; prisoners who are to be killed are always painted so,” the girl said. One eyebrow lifted slightly. “You knew this when you met the man on the mountain?”

I shook my head, mute. The opal had grown warm in my palm, slick with sweat.

They had tortured him for a time; prodding his naked body with sharpened sticks, and then with hot embers, so that blisters rose up and burst, and his skin hung in tatters. He stood this well, not crying out, and this pleased them. He seemed still strong, so they left him overnight, still tied to the pole.

“In the morning, he was gone.” The old woman’s face was smooth with secrets. If she had been pleased, or relieved, or distressed by the escape, no one would ever have known.

“I said that they should not follow him, but my brother said it was no good; he would only come back again, if we did not finish the matter.”

So a party of warriors left the village, on Otter-Tooth’s track. Bloody as he was, it was not difficult to follow.

“They chased him to the south. They thought to catch him, time after time, but he was strong. He ran on. For four days, they followed him, and finally they caught him, in a grove of aspens, leafless in the snow and their branches white as finger bones.”

She saw the question in my eyes at this, and nodded.

“My brother the war chief was there. He told me, afterward.

“He was alone, and unarmed. He had no chance, and knew it. But he faced them nonetheless—and he talked. Even after one of the men had struck him in the mouth with a war club, he talked through the blood, spitting out words with his broken teeth.

“He was a brave man,” she said, reflectively. “He didn’t beg. He told them the same things he had said before, but my brother said this time it was different. Before, he had been hot as fire; dying, he was cold as snow—and because they were so cold, his words terrified the warriors.

“Even when the stranger lay dead in the snow, his words seemed to go on ringing in the warriors’ ears. They lay down to sleep, but his voice talked to them in their dreams, and kept them from sleeping.
You will be forgotten,
he said.
The Nations of the Iroquois will be no more. No one will tell your stories. Everything you are and have been will be lost
.

“They turned toward home, but his voice followed them. At night, they could not sleep for the evil words in their ears. In the day, they heard cries and whispers from the trees along their trail. Some of them said it was only ravens calling, but others said no, they heard him plainly.

“At last, my brother said it was clear this man was a sorcerer.”

The old lady glanced sharply at me.
Je suis une sorciere,
I’d said. I swallowed, and my hand went to the amulet at my neck.

“The thing to do, my brother said, was to cut off his head, and then he would talk no more. So they went back, and they cut off his head, and tied it in the branches of a spruce. But when they slept that night, they still heard his voice, and they woke with shriveled hearts. The ravens had picked out his eyes, but the head still spoke.

“One man, very brave, said he would take the head, and bury it far away.” She smiled briefly. “This brave man was my husband. He wrapped the head in a piece of deerskin, and he ran with it, far to the south, and the head still talking under his arm all the time, so he had to put plugs of beeswax in his ears. At last he saw a very big red cedar tree, and he knew this was the place, because the red cedar has a strong spirit for healing.

“So he buried the head under the tree’s roots, and when he took the beeswax from his ears, he could hear nothing but the wind and water. So he came home, and no one has spoken the name of Otter-Tooth in this village, from that day until this one.”

The girl finished this, eyes on her grandmother. Evidently this was true; she had never heard this story.

I swallowed, and tried to get a clear breath. The smoke had ceased to rise as she talked; it had gathered instead in a low cloud overhead, and the air was thick with narcotic perfume.

The hilarity from the drinking circle had lessened. One of the men got up and, stumbling, went outside. Two more lay on their sides by the fire, half asleep.

“And this?” I said, holding out the opal. “You’ve seen it? It was his?”

Tewaktenyonh reached out as though to touch the stone, but then drew back.

“There is a legend,” the girl said softly, not taking her eyes from the opal. “Magic snakes carry stones in their heads. If you kill such a snake and take the stone, it will give you great power.” She shifted uneasily, and I had no trouble imagining with her the size of the snake that might have carried a stone like this.

The old lady spoke suddenly, nodding at the stone. The girl jumped, but repeated the words obediently.

“It was his,” she said. “He called it his
tika-ba
.”

I looked at the interpreter, but she shook her head. “
Tika-ba,
” she said, enunciating clearly. “This is not an English word?”

I shook my head.

Her story finished, the old woman sat back in her furs, watching me with deep speculation. Her eyes rested on the amulet around my neck.

“Why did he speak to you? Why has he given you that?” She nodded at my hand, and my fingers closed over the opal’s curve in reflex.

“I don’t know,” I said—but she had taken me unaware; I had had no time to prepare my face.

She fixed me with a piercing look. She knew I was lying, all right—and yet how could I tell her the truth? Tell her what Otter-Tooth—whatever his real name—had been? Much less that his prophecies were true.

“I think perhaps he was a part of my…family,” I said at last, thinking of what Pollyanne had told me about the ghosts of one’s ancestors. There was no telling from where—or when—he had come; he must, I supposed, be an ancestor or a descendant. If not of me, then of someone like me.

Tewaktenyonh sat up very straight at that, and looked at me in astonishment. Slowly the look faded, and she nodded.

“He has sent you to me to hear this. He was wrong,” she declared, with confidence. “My brother said that we must not speak of him; we must let him be forgotten. But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it. So.”

She reached out and touched my hand, careful not to touch the stone. The glitter of moisture in her black eyes might have been from the tobacco smoke.

“I am one. You are the other. He is not forgotten.”

She motioned to the girl, who rose silently and brought us food and drink.

When I rose finally to go back to the longhouse where we were lodged, I glanced toward the drinking party. The ground was littered with snoring bodies, and the keg lay empty on its side. Two Spears lay peacefully on his back, a beatific smile creasing the wrinkles of his face. The girl, Ian, and Jamie were gone.

Jamie was outside, waiting for me. His breath rose white in the night air, and the scents of whisky and tobacco wafted from his plaid.

“You seemed to be having fun,” I said, taking his arm. “Any progress, do you think?”

“I think so.” We walked side by side across the big central clearing to the longhouse where we were lodged. “It went well. Ian was right, bless him; now they’ve seen this wee
ceilidh
did no harm, I think they’ll maybe be disposed to make the bargain.”

I glanced at the row of longhouses with their floating clouds of smoke, and the glow of firelight from smokeholes and doorways. Was Roger in one of them now? I counted automatically, as I did every day—seven months. The ground was thawing; if we traveled partway by river, we could perhaps make the trip in a month—six weeks at the most. Yes, if we left soon, we would be in time.

“And you, Sassenach? Ye seemed to be having a most earnest discussion wi’ the auld lady. Did she ken aught of that stone?”

“Yes. Come inside and I’ll tell you about it.”

He lifted the skin over the doorway, and I walked inside, the opal a solid weight in my hand. They hadn’t known what he had called it, but I did. The man called Otter-Tooth, who had come to raise a war, to save a nation—with silver fillings in his teeth. Yes, I knew what it was, the
tika-ba
.

His unused ticket back. My legacy.

58

LORD JOHN RETURNS

River Run, March 1770

P
haedre had brought a dress, one of Jocasta’s, yellow silk, very full in the skirt.

“We got better company tonight than ol’ Mr. Cooper or Lawyer Forbes,” Phaedre said with satisfaction. “We got us a real live
lord,
how ’bout
that?
”

She let down a huge armload of fabric on the bed and began to pull bits and pieces from the frothing billows, issuing instructions like a drill sergeant.

“Here, you strip off and put on these yere stays. You need somethin’ strong, keep that belly pushed down. Ain’t nobody but backcountry trash goes ’thout stays. Your auntie wasn’t blind as a bat, she’d ’a had you fitted out proper long since—
long
since. Then put on the stockins and garters—ain’t those pretty? I always did like that pair with the little bitty leaves on ’em—then we’ll tie on the petticoats, and then—”

“What lord?” Brianna took the proferred stays and frowned at them. “My God, what’s this made of, whalebones?”

“Uh-huh. Ain’t no cheap tin or iron for Miss Jo, surely not.” Phaedre burrowed like a terrier, frowning and muttering to herself. “Where that garter gone to?”

“I don’t need these. And what lord is it that’s coming?”

Phaedre straightened up, staring at Brianna over the folds of yellow silk.

“Don’t need ’em?” she said censoriously. “And you with a six-month belly? What you thinking of, girl, come into dinner all pooched out, and a lordship sittin’ by the soup a-gogglin’ at you through his eyeglass?”

Brianna couldn’t help smiling at this description, but replied with considerable dryness nonetheless.

“What difference would it make? The whole county knows by now that I’m having a baby. I wouldn’t be surprised if that circuit rider—Mr. Urmstone, is it? didn’t preach a sermon about me up on the Buttes.”

Phaedre uttered a short laugh.

“He did,” she said. “Two Sundays back. Mickey and Drusus was there—they thought it was right funny, but your auntie didn’t. She set Lawyer Forbes on to law him for the slander, but ol’ Reverend Urmstone, he said ’twasn’t slander if it was the truth.”

Brianna stared back at the maid.

“And just what did he say about me?”

Phaedre shook her head and resumed her rummaging.

“You don’ want to know,” she said darkly. “But be that as it might, whether the county knows ain’t the same thing as you flauntin’ your belly through the dining room and leavin’ his lordship in no doubt, so you put on them stays.”

Her authoritative tone left no room for argument. Brianna struggled resentfully into the stiff garment, and suffered Phaedre to lace it tight. Her waist was still slender, and the remaining bulge in front would be easily disguised by the full skirt and petticoats.

She stared at herself in the mirror, Phaedre’s dark head bobbing near her thighs as the maid adjusted the green silk stockings to her own satisfaction. She couldn’t breathe, and being squeezed like that
couldn’t
be good for the baby. The stays laced in front; as soon as Phaedre left, she’d undo them. The hell with his Lordship, whoever he was.

“And who
is
this lord we’re having for dinner?” she asked for the third time, stepping obediently into the billow of starched white linen the maid held for her.

“This be Lord John William Grey, of Mount Josiah plantation in Virginia.” Phaedre rolled out the syllables with great ceremony, though seeming rather disappointed by the unfortunately brief and simple names of the lord. She would, Brianna knew, have preferred a Lord FitzGerald Vanlandingham Walthamstead if she could have got one.

“He a friend of your daddy’s, or so Miss Jo says,” the maid added, more prosaically. “There, that’s good. Lucky you got nice bosoms, this dress is made for ’em.”

Brianna hoped this didn’t mean the dress wasn’t going to cover her breasts; the stays ended just beneath, pushing them up so that they swelled startlingly high, like something bubbling over the rim of a pot. Her nipples stared at her in the mirror, gone a rich dark color, like raspberry wine.

It wasn’t worry over which bulges she was exposing that made her oblivious to the rest of Phaedre’s brisk ministrations, though; it was the maid’s casual
He a friend of your daddy’s
.

It was not a crowd; Jocasta seldom had crowds. Dependent on her ears for the nuances of social byplay, she would not risk commotion. Still, there were more people here in the drawing room than was usual; Lawyer Forbes, of course, with his spinster sister; Mr. MacNeill and his son, Judge Alderdyce and his mother, a couple of Farquard Campbell’s unmarried sons. No one, though, resembling Phaedre’s lordship.

Brianna smiled sourly to herself. “Let ’em look, then,” she murmured, straightening her back so that her bulge swelled proudly before her, glistening under the silk. She gave it an encouraging pat. “Come on, Osbert, let’s be social.”

Her entrance was greeted by a general outcry of cordiality that made her mildly ashamed of her cynicism. They were kind men and women, including Jocasta; and the situation, after all, was none of
their
doing.

Still, she did enjoy the expression of mild shock that the Judge tried to hide, and the too-sweet smile on his mother’s face, as her beady little parrot eyes registered the blatant fact of Osbert’s unbound presence. Jocasta might propose, but the Judge’s mother would dispose, no doubt of that. Brianna met Mrs. Alderdyce’s eye with a sweet smile of her own.

Mr. MacNeill’s weatherbeaten face twitched slightly with amusement, but he bowed gravely and asked after her health with no sign of embarrassment. As for Lawyer Forbes, if he noticed anything amiss in her appearance, he drew the veil of his professional discretion over it and greeted her with his customary suavity.

“Ah, Miss Fraser!” he said. “Precisely whom we were wanting. Mrs. Alderdyce and myself have just been engaged in amiable dispute concerning a question of aesthetics. You, with your instinct for loveliness, would have a most valuable opinion, should you be willing to oblige me by giving it.” Taking her arm, he drew her smoothly to his side—away from MacNeill, who twitched a bushy brow at her but made no move to interfere.

He led her to the hearthside, where four small wooden boxes sat on the table. Ceremoniously removing the lids of these, the lawyer displayed in turn four jewels, each the size of a marrow-fat pea, each nestled in a pad of dark blue velvet, the better to set off its brilliance.

“I think of purchasing one of these stones,” Forbes explained. “To have made into a ring. I had them sent from Boston.” He smirked at Brianna, plainly feeling that he had stolen a march on the competition—and judging from the faint glower on MacNeill’s face, he had.

“Tell me, my dear—which do you prefer? The sapphire, the emerald, the topaz or the diamond?” He rocked back on his heels, waistcoat swelling with his own cleverness.

For the first time in her pregnancy, Brianna felt a sudden qualm of nausea. Her head felt light and giddy, and her fingertips tingled with numbness.

Sapphire, emerald, topaz, diamond. And her father’s ring held a ruby. Five stones of power, the points of a traveler’s pentagram, the guarantors of safe passage. For how many? Without thinking, she spread a hand protectively over her belly.

She realized the trap Forbes thought he was luring her toward. Let her make a choice and he would present her with the unmounted stone on the spot, a public proposal that would—he thought—force her either to accept him at once, or cause an unpleasant scene by rejecting him outright. Gerald Forbes really knew nothing about women, she thought.

“I—ah—I should not like to venture my own opinion without first hearing Mrs. Alderdyce’s choice,” she said, forcing a cordial smile and a nod toward the Judge’s mother, who looked both surprised and gratified by being so deferred to.

Brianna’s stomach clenched, and she surreptitiously wiped sweaty hands on her skirt. There they were, all together and in one place—the four stones she had thought it would take a lifetime to find.

Mrs. Alderdyce was jabbing an arthritic finger at the emerald, explaining the virtues of her choice, but Brianna paid no attention to what the woman said. She glanced at Lawyer Forbes, his round face still reflecting smugness. A sudden wild impulse filled her.

If she said yes, now, tonight, while he still had all four stones…could she bring herself to that? Inveigle him, kiss him, lull him into complacency—and then steal the stones?

Yes, she could—and then what? Run off into the mountains with them? Leave Jocasta disgraced and the county in an uproar, run and hide like a common thief? And how would she get to the Indies before the baby came? She counted in her head, knowing it was insanity, but still—it could be done.

The stones glittered and winked, temptation and salvation. Everyone had come to look, heads bent over the table, murmuring their admiration, herself temporarily overlooked.

She could hide, she thought, the steps of the plan unfolding inevitably before her mind’s eye, quite without her willing it. Steal a horse, head up the Yadkin valley into the backcountry. Despite the nearness of the fire, she shivered, feeling cold at the thought of flight through the winter snows. But her mind ran on.

She could hide in the mountains, at her parents’ cabin, and wait for them to come back with Roger. If they came back. If Roger was with them. Yes, and what if the baby came first, and she was there on the mountain, all alone with no one at hand, and nothing to help but a handful of stolen brightness?

Or should she ride at once for Wilmington and find a ship to the Indies? If Jocasta was right, Roger was never coming back. Was she sacrificing her only chance at return to wait for a man who was dead—or who, if not dead, might reject her and her child?

“Miss Fraser?”

Lawyer Forbes was waiting, swollen with expectation.

She took a deep breath, feeling sweat trickle down between her breasts, beneath the loosened stays.

“They’re all very lovely,” she said, surprised at how coolly she was able to speak. “I could not possibly choose among them—but then, I have no particular liking for gems. I have very simple tastes, I’m afraid.”

She caught the flicker of a smile on Mr. MacNeill’s face, and the deep flush of Forbes’s round cheeks, but turned her back on the stones with a polite word.

“I think we will not wait dinner,” Jocasta murmured in her ear. “If his Lordship should be delayed…”

On cue, Ulysses appeared in the doorway, elegant in full livery, to announce dinner. Instead, in a mellifluous voice that carried easily over the chatter, he said, “Lord John Grey, ma’am,” and stepped aside.

Jocasta breathed a sigh of satisfaction, and urged Brianna forward, toward the slight figure that stood in the doorway.

“Good. You shall be his partner at dinner, my dear.”

Brianna glanced back at the table by the hearth, but the stones were gone.

Lord John Grey was a surprise a surprise. She had heard her mother speak of John Grey—soldier, diplomat, nobleman—and expected someone tall and imposing. Instead, he was six inches shorter than she was, fine-boned and slight, with large, beautiful eyes, and a fair-skinned handsomeness that was saved from girlishness only by the firm set of mouth and jaw.

He had looked startled upon seeing her; many people did, taken aback by her size—but then had set himself to exercise his considerable charm, telling her amusing anecdotes of his travel, admiring the two paintings that Jocasta had hung upon the wall, and regaling the table at large with news of the political situation in Virginia.

What he did not mention was her father, and for that she was grateful.

Brianna listened to Miss Forbes’s descriptions of her brother’s importance with an absent smile. She felt more and more as though she were drowning in a sea of kind intentions. Could they not leave her alone? Could Jocasta not even have the decency to wait a few months?

“…and then there’s the wee sawmill he’s just bought, up to Averasboro. Heavens, how the man manages, I couldna tell you!”

No, they couldn’t, she thought, with a kind of despair. They couldn’t leave her alone. They were Scots, kindly but practical, and with an iron conviction of their own rightness—the same conviction that had got half of them killed or exiled after Culloden.

Jocasta was fond of her, but clearly had made up her mind that it would be foolish to wait. Why sacrifice the chance of a good, solid, respectable marriage, to a will-o’-the-wisp hope of love?

The horrible thing was that she knew herself it was foolish to wait. Of all the things she had been trying not to think of for weeks, this was the worst—and here it was, rising up in her mind like the shadow of a dead tree, stark against snow.

If. If they came back—if, if,
IF
. If her parents came back at all, Roger would not be with them. She knew it. They wouldn’t find the Indians who had taken him—how could they, in a trackless wilderness of snow and mud? Or they would find the Indians, only to learn that Roger was dead—of injuries, disease, torture.

Or he would be found, alive, and refuse to come back, not wanting to see her ever again. Or he would come back, with that maddening sense of Scottish honor, determined to take her, but hating her for it. Or he would come back, see the baby, and…

Or none of them would come back at all.
I will bring him home to you—or I will not come home myself
. And she would live here alone forever, drowned in the waves of her own guilt, her body bobbing in the swirl of good intentions, anchored by a rotting umbilical cord to the child whose dead weight had pulled her under.

“Miss Fraser! Miss Fraser, are ye quite weel, then?”

“Not very, no,” she said. “I think I’m going to faint.” And did, shaking the table with a crash as she fell forward into a whirling sea of china and white linen.

The tide had turned again, she thought. She was buoyed up on a flood of kindness as people bustled to and fro, fetching warm drinks and a brick to her feet, seeing her tucked up warmly on the sofa in the little parlor, with a pillow to her head and salts to her nose, a thick shawl round her knees.