Lori Benton (29 page)

“Willa, I meant no offense.” Anni’s voice held hurt.

Willa fished a small petticoat from the rinse bucket and began to squeeze out the excess water. “I did not mean to snap at you.”

“The heat has all our tempers on edge,” Leda ventured.

Though early in the day, it was already warm, the air muggy enough to mold shifts and gowns to sticky flesh. A heavy rain in the night hadn’t lifted the humidity. Thick clouds still overhung the sky.

“The Colonel stopped by the smithy yesterday,” Leda said, filling up the silence. “He’d news about that treaty with the Iroquois, over to Fort Stanwix. It’s going to happen around the first of September.”

“I pray God they don’t let the Mohawks come back,” Goodenough said. “I can’t see it coming to nothin’ but bad, after everything.”

Willa felt the women’s gazes, as if they’d each suddenly remembered where she’d spent the past twelve years. Her own heart constricted, not because of the awkward silence, but for thinking of the refugees gathered around the crowded British forts, among them Joseph’s family. Her own clan. Ought she to have abandoned them?

But what good would the presence of one more widow have done? Another mouth to feed, that was all she’d have been. At least here she could make shift to sustain herself, if she found a way to keep the land. But her heart ached for those who didn’t have even an acre of land to call their own now, whose choice of sides in the war had cost them everything—and pushed aside the thought that her parents’ choice might yet cost
her
everything.

In the absence of conversation, the children’s voices intruded, high spirited, carefree. Willa wrung the petticoat and took it to the hedge. She was smoothing out its wrinkles when she looked past the mill below to the tracks that converged just above the cluster of cabins around the trade store and smithy.

Coming down from the west, the direction of the Warings’ land, was a solitary rider, tall in the saddle. Richard. He saw her there on the ridge above the mill and reined his horse to a halt. Thrice the space of a stone’s throw lay between them, and a rushing creek tumbling over the mill falls, yet she felt the scorch of his stare as if they stood at arm’s length.

Richard touched his hat before turning his horse down the track. He didn’t look back at her.

“There he goes, my sweet boy.”

Willa started. Beside her Goodenough stood, holding a pair of little
Sam’s breeches. Her dark eyes, usually so snapping in her handsome face, had softened and saddened as she watched the Colonel’s eldest son riding into the village.

“Did you know Richard was there in Albany, that day the Colonel bought me for his missus?”

This was unexpected. Goodenough had never spoken of how she came to be the Warings’ slave. As a girl, Willa had never thought to ask.

“He weren’t much bigger than my Lem is now. Me, though, I was a strapping girl, long since taken off my mama. But when that wagon started rolling, taking me off to this wild place, I couldn’t help looking back to Albany and crying my eyes out.”

Goodenough pressed her lips tight, then made a noise through them that might have been laughter. “There we was, back of that wagon heaped with plenishings bound for the Colonel’s house, with that blue-eyed boy-child staring at me blubbing into a wad of my skirt. And what you think that little towhead up and do? He grab my hand and don’t let go till that wagon stop for the night.”

Willa blinked, reminded of a small hand clasping her own. The irrepressible sweetness. The pain.

Goodenough’s voice sank like a fire settling as she looked downslope. “ ‘It’ll be all right,’ he say to me. ‘You’ll see. You’ll be good enough to please my mama.’ ” Goodenough laughed, soft and low. “I didn’t give a jot then what might please his mama, but I never forgot ’twas out of kindness he said it.”

Richard had reached the smithy, was dismounting from his horse. Willa looked away from him, eying the woman beside her. “He said you would be
good enough
?”

Goodenough smiled. “Miz Sarah Waring see me climb down from the wagon in her yard and ask my name. I tell her, ‘Ma’am, yo’ boy say I’m good enough. Reckon, then, I am.’ ” She waved a hand, as if her name were of no matter. “All the Waring babies was good babies, even that Francis
with his odd ways. But Richard was the kindest to me. Nothing but sweet temper did I ever get from him.”

Goodenough turned her face to Willa, who still found it surprising to look another woman eye to eye. “Now Francis, Anni, and Richard be all that’s left us.”

“And Lem,” Willa said softly.

Goodenough met her look and smiled. “Mm-hmm.” She looked again toward the distant smithy, the smile fading.

“I know the war done things to him,” she said, and she wasn’t speaking of Lem. “I know he’s changed. But what he is now ain’t what I see when I look at him. I see that boy in the wagon taking hold of my hand.”

Willa couldn’t see that boy, or even the youth she’d known, in the hulking form of the man lingering in Jack Keegan’s store. Though she’d ignored him from the moment he stepped in behind her, she knew exactly where he was—over by the cloth bolts, fingering a length of calico. He was like a wolf, she thought, a hungry wolf skulking beyond the circle of her fire, menacing those who would help her, waiting for her vigilance to falter that he might rush in for a strike.

She tried to turn so he couldn’t see what she was doing, but her scalp prickled as Jack took the second letter to Tilda Fruehauf and put it with the small collection of sealed missives waiting for the post rider’s next visit.

She’d known Richard was in town. She’d seen him ride in. She should have waited for another day to do this. But she was already as far as Anni’s and couldn’t spare the time to come back again.

“I’ll make sure it goes out with the next batch,” Jack told her, casting a look behind her. Willa thanked him before turning on her heel for the door.

Richard stood behind her, blocking the way.

“Willa, are you sending that letter for your houseguest?”

She stiffened at the question. “It is my business. I do not have to tell you.”

His eyes flared at her sharpness, then narrowed. “True enough, only I didn’t think you had anyone to be writing to, after all this time.”

She’d done the last thing she meant to do—aroused his suspicion. Now he thought she was doing exactly what she was doing, hiding something from him.

“I’m sure you’ve been thinking about my offer,” he said, moving on to an even more grievous subject. “I was hoping you’d come to the house, that we might discuss it further—with the Colonel, of course.”

Her fraying patience snapped. “You think you know all that concerns me—my thoughts as well, apparently—but you do not know me, Richard.” She looked him in the eye, wishing she could drill her words straight through his skull. “I am not who I was when we were younger, and neither are you, and now I ask you to step aside so that I might leave this place.”

Richard held her stare long enough for heat to blaze in her face, long enough that she wondered if Jack would intervene, or if she would have to shove Richard out of her path. But he shifted, giving her room to pass.

“By all means,” he said with chilling courtesy.

She slipped past, trying not to touch him, and wasn’t sure over the banging of the door and that of her own heart whether she imagined the words he muttered after her. An echo of her own.

Leave this place
.

They’d stayed longer at Anni’s than Willa had intended. Watching Pine Bird with the other children, drawn out of her shyness into spirited play, she hadn’t had the heart to cut short their time together. But after returning from Keegan’s, she’d been almost terse in collecting the child and heading for home, so rattled she’d taken the road instead of the path.

She slowed her step now. Pine Bird had fallen behind while she trudged ahead, vexation over Richard driving her pace.

A more welcome image sprang to Willa’s mind as she paused to wait—one of Lemuel tagging after the girl, even when Samantha brought out her cornhusk dolls, turning to more feminine play, leaving Sam sitting on the porch glumly rolling his eyes. The memory made her smile.

Pine Bird raced to catch up. As she had that morning, the child reached for her hand. The fingers curled around Willa’s were grubby now. So was the child’s face.

“We must get you cleaned up and supper started. If you gather some eggs, I will …” Her words died as she caught a scent on the air, pungent, sharp in her nose.

Pine Bird looked up at her. “Smoke.”

“Hen’en,” Willa answered without thinking. She did smell smoke. Were Neil and Owl returned early from their roaming and getting their own supper?

The smell was too strong. They weren’t far from the place where the woods ended and the cornfield began, but still too far to scent smoke from the cabin’s chimney.

Up through the trees, a gray haze drifted, faint against the bits of sky visible. Something was burning that shouldn’t be.

Willa dropped Pine Bird’s hand to run.

The corn was burning, the northwest corner of the field, farthest from the cabin. Long green leaves whipped Willa’s face as she raced through the hillocks toward the crackle of flames.

Behind her Pine Bird cried out, and she whirled to see the child sprawled among the squash plants.

“Stay back from this! You cannot help!”

The words were barely out of her mouth when she heard her own name shouted. Neil MacGregor came plunging from the smoke, soot covered, clutching the hoe. He grasped her arm, coughing out breath in ragged spasms. “We’re cutting a break. I dinna think you’ll lose it all.”

As he spoke, he tugged her toward the thickest smoke. She saw what he was doing, digging up a swathe of the crop several yards out from where it burned. She yanked free.

“Where is the spade?”

Neil cupped a hand to his mouth and bellowed into the smoke, “Owl!”

Seconds later the boy came leaping over vines dragging the spade, face streaked with dirt, eyes round with excitement and fear.

Willa yanked the spade from his grasp. “Find your sister. Get her to the cabin. Wait—first get the buckets off the porch. Fill them at the spring.”

“I did that!”

“Good. Do it again!”

Two buckets, a hoe, a spade—against a burning crop. But a green crop still moist with rain. Did they have a chance?

“Show me where you left off digging!”

Neil showed her, then ran to where Owl had been working.

Through thickening smoke Willa saw the flames devouring her sustenance, her tenuous hope. She hacked at more of it, tearing down the beautiful stalks, ripping out the beans, shouting with the effort, raging against the need. There had been rain in the night but no lightning. It was no accident, this fire. Who had started it? Richard had been in town. And why would Richard wreak such havoc after making his offer to let her live there as his tenant?

The fire’s heat was scorching. Grasshoppers and beetles fleeing the flames struck her face and hands. Sweat stung her eyes. Her palms rubbed sore as with the spade she attacked the earth, severing cornstalks, hurling them away, bending and lunging between hillocks like a warrior in a maddened dance.

Owl’s slight figure rushed past. The boy hurled water against the creeping flames and made off again with the buckets.

It would not be enough.

Yet she kept tearing at the earth and its bounty, until her arms and shoulders screamed with the effort, until every breath was a searing in her lungs, a booming in her head. Until a warm, fat splash struck her face.

Willa staggered, caught herself … and listened.

The booming wasn’t in her head but above her in the darkened clouds. Relief so profound it buckled her knees washed over her.

She turned her face to the sky as the rain came sweeping in.