Lori Benton (33 page)

When the children slept, she sat at the table, a candle lighting the boards, and reached for the Bible. She held it in her hands, feeling the weight and wear of it, the tiny cracks in the leather of the spine and edges. She opened the cover to the first page. Inscribed in faded ink were names. James, Angus, Dougal … all MacGregors and the wives they’d married, down to Liam MacGregor and Morag Murray MacGregor … and the last name, Neil William Murray MacGregor. He’d given the boy his family Bible, as a man would pass it to a son.

She set it on its worn spine and let it open where it would. It chose a place near the middle. The book of Isaiah. Halfway down the page, a passage was underscored: “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.”

Even had they been unmarked, the words would have leaped off the page like an arrow aimed at her soul.
A bruised reed
. She had thought of this tender promise, clung to it in fact, when she found Neil MacGregor lying in the laurels below the boundary stone. It had compelled her to look past her own pain and see him. Broken. Wounded. Like herself.

Swallowing past a thick pain in her throat, she let her fingertip wander across the words. Turning the thin pages at random for a while, careful they didn’t crinkle and disturb the children, she paused when she came to one of the papers tucked between. It wasn’t folded or sealed, but was filled edge to edge with the neat slanted script she recognized from Neil’s older drawings. His own writing. She turned the paper so she could read it.

Before she took in more than the first few words, she spread her hand across it, struck by the notion that she was intruding upon something not meant for her eyes. He’d given the Bible and all it contained to the boy. Not to her.

But might he have supposed she’d learn of the gift, be curious enough to open it for herself? Might he have hoped she would do so? This would have been her Bible, with her name beside his on that front page, if she’d given him what he asked of her.

Whatever you’ve been, whatever else ye will be, I want you to be my wife
.

The words had struck terror in her soul when he spoke them, yet they insisted on replaying through her mind, rife with bittersweet regret. Why could she not have been strong until his leaving? Kept him at arm’s length as she had meant to do. What did he think of her now? That she’d wanted to bed him there in the ferns, but not marry him? That she’d have let it get that far? She would not have. She hoped she would not have.

Did he despise her now?

She lifted her hand from the paper. The lines swam, then cleared before her eyes. Unaddressed, unsigned, the words began as a simple declaration.

Willa set the paper back into the pages of the Bible and shut the book, tasting the salt of tears on her lips. She stroked her fingertips across the cover, certain she’d never known a man with greater faith. Neil MacGregor saw things as they could be, not as they were. It was how he’d insisted on seeing her. And the children. Everyone except himself. He saw
himself
all wrong. He was neither foolish nor weak. She might have thought so once. She knew better now.

’Twas no coincidence, your finding me as ye did, no coincidence these children came to us. ’Tis the Almighty’s doing
.

She put her hands over her face, as if to hide from his impassioned words at the spring. Through her fingers, she looked at the children, dark forms sprawled in the abandon of sleep. Trusting her. Like they would a mother.

“No,” she whispered. “No.”

Neil MacGregor was gone. Soon the children would go. Joseph would return and take them west to find their mother’s kin or someone of the Wolf Clan willing to take them in. And with them would go the last terrible temptation to offer up her heart for breaking again.

Leaving the Bible for the boy to find come morning, she climbed the loft ladder, trying not to think of the empty room below where Neil MacGregor no longer slept.

A fortnight and a day after riding from Willa’s cabin yard, Neil MacGregor had begun drawing uneasy parallels between himself and the prophet Jonah, who’d gone down to Joppa in search of a ship to take him in the opposite direction of Nineveh, where the Almighty had instructed him to go.

It began with a tempest of a mountain storm breaking over his head and nearly drowning him. In short order he’d found himself swallowed whole—by a cave little drier than a fish’s belly. The air reeked of damp but was at least breathable. He had that over Jonah.

“In everything give thanks,” Neil muttered, hunkered back from the cave’s entrance at the close of this, his third day in the bowels of the earth. “For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you,” he added, finishing the verse from Thessalonians—and wished immediately he hadn’t. The will of God was a topic of thought he’d lately avoided pondering. Since leaving Willa and the children, in fact.

He never hoped to experience again such a heart-scouring as he’d endured that day. After that raw leave-taking in her cabin yard, he’d gone into Shiloh where, while purchasing provisions and checking a final time for a letter for Willa—there was none—he’d been forced to run a gauntlet of acquaintances, none happy to see him go. Jack Keegan, the MacNabs, the Kepplers.

It was near midday before he put the settlement behind him, taking a trail headed northward. Even then, he’d gone but a short way before Francis Waring stepped from the woods.

Neil had reined in Seamus to bid the lad farewell and request that he look in on Willa and the children from time to time—a thing Francis
would likely have done regardless, but the asking assuaged Neil’s guilt over leaving.

Like a scrap of linen over a disembowelment.

He gazed now at the cave’s stony confines, half of which his horse occupied. The floor was sandy toward the back. There he’d spread his saddle, bags, and their contents, in the hope of their keeping dry, most particularly the drawings bearing Willa’s rough but earnest penmanship. Wrapped in oilskin, they’d suffered no lasting damage from the rain. He thought of her bent over the table, ink-stained fingers clenched around a quill, mouth set in concentration as she took his dictation. And hastily pushed away the memory.

“Chamaedaphne calyculata.”
It was daily ritual again, reciting his mental field notes. “The shrub grows in open bog waters, forming dense colonies … doesna tolerate shade … leaves leathery, oblong, arranged alternately on stem … small remnant of bell-shaped blossoms, no fruit present in July.”

How much knowledge could his brain hold before vital bits began slipping away and he ended with a set of pretty drawings bereft of annotation? In his university days, he’d met a fellow in a public house in Edinburgh who claimed to have the entire canon of Scripture put to memory. For hours, Neil had tested the assertion, flipping through his Bible for the most obscure verses he could find. The fellow never once misquoted a passage.

He’d given that Bible to the lad, a scene he couldn’t recall without a hollowness opening under his ribs. He missed the children. He missed his Bible too—its presence had long been a comfort even if he couldn’t read it—but he was glad to know Owl had it in his possession and, Neil hoped, would cherish it as he grew to manhood.

Not Owl
, he reminded himself.

“Matthew Kershaw,” he murmured, still blessed by the parting gift. Leaning his head against damp stone, he prayed.
Guard and keep them. Be a father to the fatherless. A husband to the widow …

His thoughts had circled back to Willa. Neither in mind nor in heart had he truly left her. But he must. He would. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he would stop thinking of her incessantly.

Beyond the cave the rain had slackened at long last. Because the clouds lay low and the land sloping from the cave was thickly wooded, it was hard to judge the time of day. He reckoned it getting on to dusk. Too late for traveling. Besides, there was likely no drier place to camp for a hundred miles around than where he was, stuck in the belly of the earth.

He plucked at the sleeve of his shirt, which clung like a second skin, and wrinkled his nose. He stank. His horse stank. The cave stank. The whole world stank.

Finished with his litany of field notes, he fed and watered Seamus, then glanced toward the cave entrance and automatically called, “Cap,” then laid himself down in the cave’s chill, missing his stinking dog.

Sometime later, sleep elusive and thoughts of Willa grown unbearable, he rose and sat on a damp lip of rock outside the cave. It was full dark now. The croaking of contented frogs had replaced the patter of rain.

He’d had little sense of the topography beyond the slope he’d been crossing when the storm broke. Now he could see a fair distance to the north and west, where a ragged line of peaks rose in silhouette against ever-broadening patches of stars. The air had cooled on the heels of the storm and held an autumnal freshness now, though it was yet high summer. He drew it in and breathed out prayer. For Willa. For the children. For Anni and her unborn baby. He even prayed for Joseph, knowing the Indian shared his pain, his longing, and had carried it longer.

The one he didn’t pray for was himself, wary of what the Almighty might have to say about his recent actions. It was all well and good to be told “Stay.” Neil wished it had been explained how he was meant to do so given Willa’s resolve to the contrary.

“Ye might’ve consulted with her before telling me such a thing.” He watched a shooting star arc a path across the heavens, two others hot on its tail. “Or maybe You did, and she simply wasna having it. Or me.”

What, after all, did he have about his person to recommend him to a woman like Willa? He’d no great worldly goods to ease the burden of her poverty. He wasn’t a farmer, though he supposed he could learn to be. He was certainly no warrior. In short, he wasn’t the kind of man a woman like Willa Obenchain needed. Better suited was a man like Richard Waring, had he been less a brute. Or Joseph, had he not been her clan brother, which seemed to be how Willa still viewed him.

Neil hoped it was how she still viewed him.

But why should he hope such a thing? Capable as she was, he wanted to see her covered, shielded from those who would burn her crops and kill her livestock and shoot arrows into her cabin door. If Joseph could be that for her …

In everything give thanks
.

He put his head in his hands and asked for the strength to expunge Willa from his heart. He asked for a revival of the passion that had called him to the frontier in the first place. The challenge and thrill of scientific discovery; the creative drive to render those discoveries on paper. It had once been all-consuming, sharp and clear in his mind, leaving no room for vague notions of wife, or family.

Such notions wore faces now. Beloved faces …

A sense of light and movement at the edge of his vision jerked his head up. He thought it must have been another shooting star, till a moment later, a curtain of greenish light materialized across the northern horizon.

Aurora borealis
. He’d seen it before, but never heard of it happening so many weeks out from the equinox. The glowing, rippling curtain vanished, then reappeared. At its lowest edge, above the black undulation of the mountains, flowed a ribbon of scarlet. It gave him a queer sense of
displacement, like seeing the sun rise from the wrong direction. He caught his breath at the savage beauty of the sight. And understanding struck.

“Burning Sky.”

It wasn’t the sunset for which the Mohawks had given Willa her name. Surely it had been for these fleeting, arresting, enchanting northern lights. A burning sky.