Lori Benton (27 page)

Being so near him unnerved her. There was about him that barely contained animal energy, as if something feral lurked just beneath his skin. Something that longed to break free and—

“The crop looks well,” he said.

He didn’t say she looked well, yet he hadn’t taken his eyes off her since she stood into his view. They bore into her now.

“It is a good crop. The land is rested.”

Silence hummed with the chitter of cicadas, the scold of a jay, some other bird’s more melodious call. She watched Richard’s eyes, thinking them pale and cold, accustomed now to Neil MacGregor’s warm, drenching blue.

Richard flicked a look along the track, though the cabin could barely be seen from that distance with the trees in full leaf. “Those children I saw with you … They’re Mohawks?”

“Yes.”

His gaze snapped back. “Yours?”

At least Anni had not related everything she’d shared.

“They are in my care for now.”

Richard waited, but she had no more to say. It wasn’t a warm day, but the air was thick and moist. Sweat made rivulets down the sides of his face. His throat moved as he swallowed. He had something to say to her. She wished he would say it. “The crop looks well, and the children look like they could be mine. Did you ride all this way to tell me things I know?”

That earned her a grimace, which he quickly wiped from his face. “I’m told you’ve found graves in the woods, that you think they’re your parents’.”

She tilted her head. “Who told you this?”

Richard raised a gloved hand as if to brush away the question. “I didn’t come here to make trouble for you, Willa. I came to say I’m sorry about your parents.”

She looked at him hard, wondering if she could trust this show of sympathy at all.

“I wish they’d fled to Canada.”

“Rather than be murdered?”

Richard’s jaw clenched, but he simply nodded.

“On that at least,” Willa allowed, “we can agree.”

He took a step toward her, but a cloud of black flies chose that moment to descend upon his horse. The animal tossed its head. Richard whipped off his hat and swatted at them, which did not please his horse any more than had the flies.

Willa watched him, trying to puzzle him out. She half-wished for the Richard who’d thundered into her cabin yard, the one who threatened and lashed out with his fist. This Richard was harder to read. Had he known her parents were dead? Had he anything to do with their deaths? Or concealing those deaths?

“You should go,” she said. “Your horse is unhappy here.”

Seeming to concur, Richard clapped his hat on his head and swung into the saddle, which creaked beneath his weight. “I also came here with a proposal for you—for how things might carry on between us after the auction, provided mine is the highest bid, of course.”

Bristling at the idea of
things
carrying on between them, she bit down on the impulse to tell him about the cousin in Albany, or the letters that might have been saved. About unmitigated proof.

“What proposal?”

“I’m willing to let you go on living here. You can farm the land or plant an orchard—keep bees, if it suits you. I’ll only ask a percentage of whatever you raise.”

“As your tenant?”

“If that’s as you want it.” Richard stared at her with a look of speculation that made her queasy, as if he were envisioning her worth in the amount of milled corn and strings of beans he could expect to gain. But his next words banished that queasiness in a flush of fear.

“I saw an Indian in the woods, a few days back. On the Colonel’s land, very near the house. I shot at him to drive him off. Don’t know for sure whether I hit him, but I think so.”

Willa watched his eyes, keeping her face still as stone. “Why do you tell me this? I have seen no Indians in the woods.”

Richard held her in his scrutiny overlong, as if he took leave to doubt her, but finally he looked past her again toward the trees that hid the cabin. His mouth firmed in a harder line. “Is he there still?”

Fear washed over her again. Her thoughts were still dizzied with alarm over Joseph and whether Richard suspected her of sheltering him. “Who?”

Richard’s mouth twisted. “The exalted member of the American Philosophical Society. Who did you think I meant?”

Before Willa could speak, from the trees behind Richard came the
snick
of a rifle being cocked.

“Aye. He’s still here.”

Willa stepped back, startled, and nearly raised her musket to the ready, though she knew the voice at once.

Richard swung his horse to face Neil MacGregor, standing beside an alder tree, Joseph’s rifle held across his chest, pointing off into the woods. He must have circled around from the cabin, keeping all the while in cover, with such stealth even Willa hadn’t sensed his approach. For a moment, she was irrationally furious that Owl had disobeyed her. Then she was as deeply relieved.

Neil didn’t release the rifle’s hammer. “Why are you here?”

“With a truer purpose than I reckon you can claim.” The words were kept from belligerence by a wry edge. “I had a proposal to make. I’ve made it. I expect you’ll hear all about it.” Sparing her a last unreadable look, Richard touched his hat. “Think on it, Willa.”

Richard kicked his horse into a canter, headed back to Shiloh. Leaving Willa staring at Neil.

He lowered the rifle’s hammer, then propped it over his shoulder at rest, arching one thick brow at her. “A proposal?”

Willa shook her head. “Later. Where is Joseph?”

She looked around, expecting him to step from the trees as well—and
ready to scold him for being on his feet when he did. When he didn’t, she turned back in time to see the play of emotion cross Neil’s face—hurt and embarrassment resolving into reluctant amusement—and she realized she’d wounded his pride in assuming him incapable of such woodcraft on his own.

“That is Joseph’s rifle,” she said. “That is why I asked.”

He came out of the trees. “Aye. No doubt he’d have come here with it in my stead, if he could.”

“Better that he didn’t. He mustn’t let himself be seen.”

Neil stopped close beside her and touched her arm. “True, but that isna why he didna leave the cabin. He’s taken a fever, Willa. You’d best come back with me now.”

Sometimes he saw their faces or felt their hands on his burning flesh, turning him, bathing him, prodding his side where the ball had torn through him. More often their voices were all that reached him through the fiery veil.

“It is three days. Is there nothing more to do? Tell me what to do.”

“You can go up to the loft and sleep.”

“No.”

“Ye canna help him by making yourself ill.”

He took the sound of their words deep into his heat-ravaged flesh. Not only the words, but what lay beneath, emotion vivid enough to flay him. Her fear and helplessness. The Scotsman’s frustration and tenderness. Both of their stubborn resolve.

“I willna close my eyes till you’ve opened yours again. The children are by to help, if I need it.”

“You will call me if he wakes?”

“I promise.”

He did not wake. His body was not through waging war with the flames, though every parched and aching fiber of him cried for water. His mouth must have made the word. A cup rim pressed against his lips. A strong hand supported his head. Cool relief on his tongue. He swallowed. Blue eyes swam in his vision.

The voices again. They troubled him, tethered him. The small frightened voice of the girl. The boy, masking worry with anger. The voice of the Scotsman.
Her
voice, scratched with weariness, speaking of a letter on which all her hope seemed to rest—someone in the east who might yet live, who could claim her as kin, who might hold her fast to
this place where he knew now he could never be with her, even if he threw aside all that made him one of the People and his soul survived such a scouring. The Long Knives would not let him be with her. Never in peace.

“Do you think it has reached Albany? Do you think she has seen it?”

“Aye, maybe. Far too soon yet to expect a reply, though.”

“There will be one. I have been thinking … It is like a miracle that Oma’s name is still in Maeve Keegan’s mind, when so much else is gone.”

“Aye, it may be the Almighty kept it there. But we dinna ken what’s to come of it yet.”

“I wish we knew. The waiting—it is hard.”

“ ’Tis dashed hard. But here’s what I ken—the Almighty Lord has a path for ye to walk, and a place in mind for ye to be. But whether or not that place is here, d’ye trust Him to lead you into whatever is best?”

It was a good question. Joseph longed to know her answer, yearned for it as his tongue again craved water. He wanted her to say she would be at peace wherever the Great Good God chose to lead her. But the fire in his bones leaped high and crackling, writhing between them. If she answered, he did not hear it.

Time lost meaning again, day and night an inseparable blur.

Another time when the fire was not so high, he almost woke—or maybe did. He sensed them all around him. The children, asleep on their pallet. The dog lying by the hearth where another fire burned. The Scotsman seated at the table, head cradled on folded arms; Burning Sky coming up behind him in her English clothes, standing silent, taking in his weariness. Burning Sky putting a hand to his shoulder. The Scotsman’s head rearing up, his hand groping for hers, pressing it to his cheek where the beard had come in like a shadow.

She pulled away, but not quick enough. “Now it is you who must sleep.”

Her eyes followed the Scotsman as he half-staggered to his room, and there was so much behind the green and the brown of them, so much she was trying not to feel. Was afraid of feeling.

Joseph let his eyes close, but the images festered, deeper than the wound in his side.

Day. Night. Voices.

“She was not well when last I saw her. She is tired with this baby.”

“Go to her. Help her. He’s been like this nigh a week.”

“I cannot leave him. I will go to Anni when I can.”

Later …

“Wake up, Mister Joseph. Please, wake up.”

He woke up. Pine Bird’s small hand lay soft against his face, and the touch was no longer cool. The fire in him had burned itself out. The Master of Life meant him to live yet a while.

Though he was of two minds about that, he smiled at the girl, whose face lit like a candlewick dipped to flame. In her pipe-song voice, she called to the others to come and see.

Everyone slept the sleep of the exhausted, except for Joseph Tames-His-Horse. He lay wakeful until the darkest hour, then tied on the new leggings Burning Sky had made for him and let himself quietly out of the cabin. The Scotsman’s dog, used to him now, barely raised its head as he passed it on the porch. He found his bags and saddled the mare and led her to the clearing’s edge, where he paused to catch his breath—he was weak—and let his gaze rest on the cabin where she slept beneath its roof silvered in starlight. The night air was clammy against his skin.

It was hard to leave her, but he did so in hope. That was the fever in him now. Hope. It seemed impossible to quench. And though he knew it was a risk, what he hoped was that if he went away, there would be no
reason for the Scotsman to stay. No one he need heal with the medicines in his box. Maybe Burning Sky would see this; maybe she would heed that fear he had seen in her and tell the Scotsman to go his way, take his paints and his plant press and be about the business that had brought him here.

Maybe that Albany letter would never come.

Maybe in the end she and the children would return with him to Niagara, to the People. There she would be his sister. Never more than that. But with him always. He could swallow back the love that must not be. He could spend the rest of his life swallowing it back, to be near her.

That is what he told himself.

Even such frayed hope had the power to tether him to this dangerous place. He would wait a little longer to do the other thing he had come here to do, to see if this was how it would be with Burning Sky.

Ohiari:ha
, the time of ripening, had come while he lay fevered. Leaf cover lay thick on the ridges now, good for the hiding and watching he must do. The deserter was careful, well surrounded by those for whom he worked, rarely alone on the stretch of road between the big stone house and the village, and always mounted. He might be wary now, fearing the Indian the big Yellow Hair had shot at but not killed. He would know that the British Army sent warriors of the People to bring back their deserters.