Lori Benton (45 page)

The cabin was still falling in, the blackened timbers crumbling onto themselves. Willa’s heart ached at the sight, but that which was truly irreplaceable wasn’t lost. Later she would make sense of the rest, especially Francis’s role in it all—Francis, who had lied to her and saved her children, then vanished like the smoke still curling thick into the night sky.

Right now it was Joseph who needed her.

She took up the tomahawk left in the yard and led the children by the path to Anni’s cabin, across the foot log over Black Kettle Creek. Struck mute by their sudden and bedraggled appearance, Charles and Goodenough, the only two still awake, listened in disbelief, then horror, as Willa told her tale of fire and blood.

“Richard’s taken hurt bad?” Goodenough, arrested in the act of lifting a kettle at their arrival, set it on the hearth and ran from the cabin without another word.

“Richard?” Charles echoed, standing from the chair he’d occupied in peace moments ago. “And who’s this Indian—Joseph? What’s he to do with …” His glance fell to Matthew and Maggie.

“He is not the father of these children,” Willa said. “He’s my brother. He’s come and gone this summer long, hunting for us.”

“Richard said he shot an Indian.” Charles sounded stunned. “Weeks ago. Over by—”

“That was Joseph. But there is no time to explain.” Willa gave Matthew and Maggie a gentle push forward. “Will you see to these children so I can go to him?”

“Of course, but—”

“I’ll go with you!” Matthew protested.

“You will not.” Willa turned on him with unassailable resolve. “Stay here where I know you will be safe.”

Lanterns burned around a log house near the smithy and farther on at Keegan’s store. Willa saw them from the crest of the path before she
plunged down the slope and crossed the footbridge used when the mill was shut for the night. As she raced down the track, she saw figures, silhouetted in the light, moving about both structures. One of those figures outside the log house was as tall as most of the men, but skirted—Goodenough, who had bolted from Anni’s cabin moments before Willa.

Goodenough paused to speak to someone outside, then pushed past to go within. That would be where they had taken Richard. Joseph must be at the trading store. A prisoner.

Someone would have ridden for the Colonel. Would Joseph be spared long enough for Elias Waring to hear the truth of how his son was injured—burning her out of her home, trying to kill her children?

But what was the truth of those last vital seconds? Only Joseph could tell her that.

Willa raced past the smithy to the store, ignored the shadowy faces of men loitering on the porch, pushed open the door, and collided with Jack Keegan standing just inside. Jack steadied her as she staggered.

“What have they done with him?” She craned to see past the stacked goods cluttering the store. Others were within but hidden from her sight. She could hear their voices. She could hear the thud of fists on flesh.

“Joseph!” She yanked free of Jack’s grasp.

Two men, bloodstained and disheveled, came from the back of the store and stood in front of Willa—two who had ridden with Richard. A third joined them. The fists of the third man were cracked and bleeding.

“They brought the Indian here for keeping,” Jack explained, “till the Colonel’s seen to Richard.”

“He’s done nothing wrong. It was Richard Waring and those three.” Willa flung an arm at the men blocking her way, her voice hoarse as she said, “They set fire to my cabin. They tried to burn my children inside it.”

“She’s lying,” the man with the bleeding knuckles growled. “That Mohawk did the burning. Like they always do.”

Willa had run from Anni’s cabin with Joseph’s tomahawk in hand,
hidden in the folds of her skirt. She raised it now, pulling back her teeth in a snarl. Only Jack Keegan’s long reach kept her from hurling its blade into the smirking face of the man with Joseph’s blood on his hands.

“Willa, calm yourself! Colonel Waring will—”

“Do not tell me to calm myself!” She wrenched loose from him a second time. “Ask Francis Waring. He saw everything. He knows. Richard forced him to help.”

This only amused the other men. One laughed. “Waring’s half-wit? Can that boy even talk?”

“Francis speaks! He was there. He will tell you …”

The words died on Willa’s tongue. Someone had entered the store behind her. She knew it by the looks of the men fronting her. By those looks, she knew who it was before he spoke.

“What will Francis tell us, Wilhelmina?”

Elias Waring looked as if he’d aged a decade in the months since Willa last saw him. In the glow of the store lanterns, his hair looked gray. His shoulders stooped as he leaned on his stick. Fresh grief scored his face.

“Richard?” she asked him.

“I left him living. Goodenough is with him.” The Colonel’s eyes, distant with the shock of his son’s injury, said what his words did not. Richard’s life hung by a thread.

Willa felt ready to collapse from the exhaustion of this terrible day, but her battle was far from over. Words she must say to this man clogged her mind like logs jammed in a mill race. While she scrambled for the right ones to begin, the Colonel’s gaze fell on the three men blocking the maze of trade goods. “The rope is ready. Where is he?”

A stunned second passed while Willa digested that.
Rope
. They were going to hang Joseph, without even hearing her side of the story. The blood rushed from her face.

“Colonel … no.” She stepped in front of him, raising soot-smeared palms. “Look at my face, my hands. These men burned my cabin and my
fields this night. They tried to burn my children. Richard was with them, leading them. Richard did these things!”

There was a flicker in the distant eyes, a flinch of the fixed mouth, but she could not be sure her words had penetrated what surely must be shock.

“Don’t listen to her nonsense,” one of the men behind her began, but Willa pressed on, desperate, fighting down panic.

“Joseph only fought with Richard to save my children and me. I don’t know if Joseph even gave him that wound, or if Richard fell on the knife he wielded. Do you hear me, Colonel? Joseph will tell the truth.”

The men had lingered to hear the outcome of this talk, but one of them snorted at that. “Get the Indian. Now.”

Colonel Waring, staring hard at Willa’s face, held up a hand. “Wait.”

For the first time, it seemed he took in her sooty clothes, her hair tangled down her back. He lifted a hand to turn her chin toward the light of the nearest lantern. His fingers brushed the throbbing place between her cheekbone and temple, where Richard struck her.

“My son did this?”

“That is the least of it, Colonel. While I was catching Anni’s babies, Richard was trying to kill my children.”

“Your children?” The Colonel’s face lost what little color it held. “Where are they now?”

Willa hadn’t known she was crying until she took a breath and heard in it a sob. “Francis got them out of the burning cabin where Richard left them bound. They’re with Charles and Anni.”

“She’s lying. Ain’t a word of that true.” Whichever man spoke behind her, his voice sounded less belligerent than desperate now.

The Colonel snapped a look past her. “Would you have me believe she burned her own crop, her own cabin?” He put a hand on her shoulder, where her gown was scorched through, the skin beneath showing raw and blistered. “That she did
this
to herself?”

“Naw, we ain’t—”

“Shut your gobs,” Jack Keegan snapped. “Let ’em get this straight between them.”

The Colonel’s eyes widened as more of what Willa had said sank in. “Anni’s delivered? You attended her?”

“Yes. Goodenough didn’t make it in time, but I was there. It is twins again. Boys.”

Instead of the joy this news should have brought, something like anguish broke over the Colonel’s face. His skin turned an alarming gray.

“Please, Colonel,” Willa pressed. “Let Joseph go. He will return to his people at Niagara, I promise you. He only tried to help me—he has always been kind to me. He was my strength and comfort all the years I lived with his people. He has harmed no one who didn’t harm me first.”

That brought an uproar of protest. “A buck like him? Think he wasn’t up against us at Oriskany?”

“He might’ve been the one to kill your boys, Colonel—or your wife and—”

“No!” Voices stilled at the Colonel’s thundering reply. It appeared to take a monumental effort, but Elias Waring, county magistrate and colonel of militia, surfaced fully from the visage of the devastated father, and focused his mind on the matter in question. “The Indian is accused of no crime but the one witnessed this night. And no, Wilhelmina, I will not release him. Not until Richard is able to speak for himself. But neither will I see him hanged outright. He stays where he is.”

Willa was at least permitted to see Joseph. She dodged to the rear of the store, but halted in astonishment at what she found behind the barrels and shelves. Joseph sat on the floor, knees drawn, head pillowed on his arms, black hair shining in the lantern light. Standing over him like a tiny guardian angel was Maeve Keegan, blue eyes snapping, lopsided mouth set in a lipless pucker, wisps of hair floating above her head like milkweed down.

“I’ll not be havin’ beatings in my store!” Maeve punctuated the pronouncement with a crack of her cane on the floorboards. “There’ll be no more hittin’. No more blood. Where’s that boy o’ mine that’s gone and let this happen?”

“Ma?” Jack came hurrying back, pushing past Willa. “Come away, Ma. This is no place for you to be.”

Maeve glowered up at her son. With startling speed her cane shot out and jabbed him in the gut. “I’ll not come away, Jacky. I’m after guardin’ this poor young man from harm. T’ree against one … ’tis cowardly!”

Maeve’s temper was up, though whether she understood what was happening, or exactly who she was defending, was anyone’s guess.

“Get back now.” She brandished her cane but spared Willa a nod. “She can stay for she’s a woman and may be of some use. The rest of ye—and ye, Jacky—back!”

Joseph’s tomahawk was plucked from Willa’s hands before they let her near him, still she had the absurd impulse to laugh as she knelt. Joseph had lifted his head at this unexpected championing of his person, and there was an answering flash of humor in the one eye not swollen shut. Pain doused it quickly. And sorrow.

“How badly are you hurt?” Willa looked him over. A battered face. Shallow gashes on his arms, his hands. That seemed to be all. Had he not been bound, he might have fought his way free without aid. “You will have a chance to speak in your defense. I will speak for you …”

She’d tried to keep her voice steady, strong, infused with a confidence she didn’t feel, but something in Joseph’s expression made her falter. He looked at her through the snakes of blood congealing on his skin, and she knew something was changed.

“I heard how you spoke to those men,” he said, “and to the one you call the Colonel. You spoke of the Kanien’kehá:ka, but you called them
his
people. ‘He will go back to his people at Niagara,’ you said.”

“Joseph …” The floorboards pressed hard against Willa’s knees, but she didn’t shift a muscle. The pain pressing her heart was far worse.

Joseph lifted his hand as if he would touch her face, but let it fall back. She knew then what was changed about him. It was the absence of something that had been there from the day they met, in that distant cornfield. He no longer hoped for a future with her. Even as his sister.

“Once,” he said, “they were
our
people.”

It was as if a curtain had swung between them, cutting them off from each other. He from her world. She from his. A pit of sorrow opened in her belly, deep enough to match that in his eyes.

She had long known in some part of her soul that this moment would come. She’d thought when it did there would be some measure of relief in it, for both of them. There was none. A grief and loss she’d never expected washed over her, while old Maeve Keegan stood by with her scowl and her cane.