A Flight of Arrows (18 page)

“I tried to go with him! He turned me back. He said starting our marriage by betraying your trust was unworthy of us. Are those the words of a shameful man?”

Like an ebbing tide, there went the color draining from Reginald's face. “Your
marriage
? What consent have I given to such a thing?”

“None, of course. But here is a thing you should know, Papa. William tried to convince me to go with him to Canada. He was willing to take me from you—but not Two Hawks. Now tell me, which of them has behaved with more honor?”

Reginald looked to Lydia, rooted in the dining room doorway. “Did you know of this as well?”

Anna took a step, putting herself squarely in his sights. “Don't accuse Lydia. This is between us. And I want your answer. If William and I never knew the truth of his blood, would you have gone on treating him like a son, an heir?”

It was a trap, of course. Yet nothing for Reginald to do now but walk straight into it. “I would have, yes.”

Anna hovered on the verge of tears, then pressed them back and said in a voice flat with pain, “Why then do you close your heart to his twin? Why drive him away when he tried so hard to please you? What makes him different from William? Besides the color of his skin.”

Reginald snatched up his hat from the chair on which he'd left it, then hurled it down again. “ 'Tis what you wish me to admit? That the color of his skin matters? Well, Anna, I'm sorry for it, but it matters and 'tis unrealistic to pretend otherwise. It matters in how he will be treated. How
you
will be treated, did you marry him. But that is not the only difference. There is the raising they both have had, see. Jonathan is Oneida. He'll have different expectations of a wife than someone raised among us, all else aside.”

“True, Papa. But those expectations aren't the evil you seem to think them to be. Women of the Haudenosaunee have rights that I, or Lydia, could never have. Oneida women aren't property. They
own
property. Fields, crops, homes—all of it is theirs. They have a voice in who leads them and whether their warriors make war or peace. It seems to me I'd have a better life as a woman if I went and begged them to make me Oneida—which is what I tried to do.”

Lydia judged it the worst thing Anna could have possibly said. Reginald had seen Indian women aplenty, back in the days when he made his trading trips upriver. He'd know how they were respected…until the warriors got a taste of liquor. Then would come the howling savagery, the brutality, and woe betide any woman who didn't hide herself then.

The appalling thought of Anna living in such conditions had rendered him speechless. Into that suspended moment came an urgent rapping at the door.

Anna wouldn't hear of Lydia answering the untimely call for a midwife. She gathered her case and all but hurtled out the door on the heels of
the worried young father who had come knocking. Reginald didn't go after her. Perhaps, Lydia reasoned, collapsing into a parlor chair, stunned by the utter failure of her plan, it was best he let her go this time.

A scalpel. That was what was needed. A scalpel that could excise the bitter infection of Reginald's soul, a purulence that had spread now to Anna. She'd saved him once—in body—but clearly that wasn't to be her role again. She simply hadn't the necessary tool to hand.

When she could speak, she raised her gaze to Reginald, standing where Anna had left him.

“I am done with it, Reginald. I remove my hands. I will pray for you, for Anna. She is welcome to remain with me—indeed I hope she will. But I shall do nothing to prevent her making her own choices now. I am done.”

Until, or unless, the Almighty gave her an indisputable sign that there was something more she could do. Until, or unless, He put the scalpel in her hand. She looked away from Reginald, unable to bear the breaking in his face.

“Do you think she's in earnest, about going to…them?”

“
Them?
Can you not even say their names?” She was bruised. Battered. She'd dashed herself one too many times against the fortress he'd built around his heart. “I've done the very thing of which I accused you, forced my will upon what God was doing and made a snarl of it.
Mea culpa
.”

She waited, knowing that if Reginald stood there and said nothing now she was going to weep. And maybe never stop.

“Lydia.” His voice was graveled. “I'm sorry—”

“Don't.” Wanting his apology less than his silence, she held up her hand. “Please. Leave my house. Now.”

Reginald did so. Most willingly, it seemed.

“I feel no shame in loving you…”
Anna could hear Two Hawks speaking, clear as if he stood beside her in the low-ceilinged, soot-smudged bedroom, while she encouraged the laboring woman in the bed, checked the progress of the babe's passage, prepared the twine and the shears and the soft swaddling ready to receive the infant.
“But in defying your father would be much shame…”

She had defied Papa, addressed him in a manner she never would have dreamed herself capable of weeks ago. She didn't know what she felt about it. Aggrieved. Shaken. Yet at the same time filled with a sense of triumph she shied from examining for fear it was rooted in anger, pride, bitterness.

“Aubrey did not start you in the womb of your mother, but he gave you life, risking his own for yours…”
That was indisputable. If not for Papa, she would never have had a life. Never known all these many years with their blessings. And their travails.

“Soon now,” she said, comforting the sweating, suffering young woman by rote, lost inside her own writhing soul, where a different battle waged.

“Even if Creator did not bid us honor our parents, for that alone I would honor him in my heart…”
Two Hawks would honor Papa for that one heroic act, saving her life that Two Hawks might know her, love her. But how could she honor Papa when he was wrong about so many things? Unfair. Unyielding. Unforgiving. He who had been forgiven so much.

“Taking you from him without his blessing is not the path I am to walk.”

She should have left with Two Hawks. If she was going to be the wife of an Oneida man, why couldn't she also be Oneida? She'd been taken in once by those not of her blood. Why not again?

“You are not meant for that world.”

But it was only his tradition preventing her from trying. He was willing to break other traditions for her. Why not that one?

The babe was coming, the young mother straining, tendons standing like ropes in her neck, face suffused with red. Anna reached to cradle the emerging head. “One more push. Good…good.”

Was this rebellion in her heart, or might it be God's leading?

Her soul was a welter of confusion, a careening of emotions that sprayed like sparks from a smith's anvil. Blow after blow. She'd hurt Papa and Lydia with her words, yet she couldn't shake the notion that going after Two Hawks was what she needed to do. Instead of diminishing, it had been building in her over the weeks since the chill spring morning he'd left her. There was only one glaring problem. She didn't know the path to Kanowalohale.

The newborn—a girl—was out of her mother now, alive and perfect. Anna cut the cord and placed the squalling baby into the woman's reaching hands, smiling, saying words she'd heard Lydia speak over and again…meanwhile scouring her mind for a face, a name, anyone who'd be able and willing to help her.

She had to find Two Hawks. Or Good Voice, who would know where he was. But who would be her guide?

Green Bean Moon

Fort Stanwix

D
uring the past moon, Two Hawks had helped his father hunt for meat and deerskins, but they made sure their hunting took them often to the fort at the Carrying Place. With midsummer past, they were come to Stanwix again to learn what the scouts ranging north and west and winging back home like crows to the nest had to say. They hoped to find Ahnyero. Two Hawks hadn't seen him since their parting on the trail where Strikes-The-Water found them and ruined everything.

He'd never been nearer to losing his self-possession than when he'd been forced to watch Ahnyero continue north with the rebel spy, Sam Reagan, knowing he'd lost his best chance of finding his brother before the redcoats began their campaign.

“And just who is William Aubrey to you?” Reagan had asked him, the marks of torture angry on his flesh.

“He is my brother, born with me at Fort William Henry, as I think you have already guessed. And you are the one who led him away just when he learned of me and our parents.”

“His twin!” Reagan had said, no longer questioning what his eyes confirmed. “But you have it wrong. He was determined to leave Schenectady—doubt he cared for where, he was so furious. I said I was going over to the British and he was welcome to come.”

Two Hawks had narrowed his eyes, trying to stitch the man's words together with what Anna Catherine and Lydia and Aubrey had said of that
terrible night his brother learned the truth. “As a spy for the Americans, you have said—to us. But does my brother know you are a spy?”

Reagan shook his matted head. “He's been in no frame of mind to hear it. This—you—the truth coming out…he's still reeling from it. Took me months to get it out of him.”

Two Hawks wanted to believe he was hearing a true thing about his brother's heart, hard as it was to accept. Reeling still, after so much time? How could that be?

Because he ran from every hand that might have steadied him
.

As the thought sank like a stone into Two Hawks's heart, Ahnyero and Strikes-The-Water standing by silent, their prisoner's wary hazel eyes flicked between them. He wet his cracked lips. “Listen…Help me return to my regiment—with a story that'll prevent my being flogged for desertion—and I'll speak to William. Before this expedition gets too far underway, I mean to break from it, come over to my rightful place. I'll bring William with me…if he'll come.”

Switching to Oneida, Two Hawks and Ahnyero had discussed the matter. Ahnyero proposed guiding Reagan north, pretending to be an Indian sympathetic to the British who'd rescued a hapless spy from his tormenters. If it proved safe enough and chance provided, Ahnyero would speak to William himself. Meanwhile, Two Hawks would return to the fort with Strikes-The-Water.

Two Hawks had seen the wisdom in it. That didn't mean he'd liked it.

Now, as he and his father entered the fort through the main gateway, they passed soldiers with saws and hammers, barrows and shovels, busy strengthening the walls and buildings within. New chimneys smoked in the day's early cool. They'd heard Ahnyero had returned from Lachine and been sent out on other missions, but neither Two Hawks nor Stone Thrower knew whether he'd spoken to William or even set eyes on him.

“Look.” With his chin, Stone Thrower pointed toward the commander's
headquarters, a log building across the open parade ground. Men were issuing from its door. Among them was Ahnyero, deep in talk with an officer Two Hawks recognized as Gansevoort's second-in-command, Marinus Willett. The scout saw them coming and ended his talk with Willett as they reached him.

“It is good at last to see you both,” Ahnyero said as Willett strode away. “I know you will want to hear what happened with me and that one who found us on the trail.” This he said to Two Hawks, gripping his arm in greeting.

“Did you see my brother?” Two Hawks interjected, impatience getting the better of his manners. “Did you speak to him?”

Stone Thrower thinned his lips to show he noticed his son's rudeness but also lifted a hand to the leather bag strung around his neck. His father had made the little bag; his mother stitched it with white beads. It held the painted face of their firstborn.

Ahnyero's gaze followed the gesture. “I never saw him. It is a long tale, and I would not make you wait to hear that part.”

Two Hawks's hope, taken wing at sight of the scout, plummeted back to earth.

“I went with that spy all the way to his post at Lachine,” Ahnyero said. “I saw the regiment—Johnson's Greens. I spoke to one who is captain over the one you seek. That man, Watts, took the spy back and accepted the story we gave. But the one you seek had been sent away on an errand to Montreal. I found a place to wait, but before he returned, I was seen by an Indian who knew me. A Mohawk from the Seven Nations who lived for a time at Kanowalohale—a tall one, his father's people are Oneida.”

“Tames-His-Horse?” Two Hawks turned to his father. “He was at the river that day you returned from the Senecas. He went under the water as well and took the name of Joseph.”

“That one is not easy to forget,” Stone Thrower said. “What did he say to you, up there in Lachine?” he asked Ahnyero.

“He wanted to know what I was doing there. He tried to get me to come with him and speak to other warriors who are hanging about, waiting to fight. I knew then I could not stay, so I spoke to our spy and told him to remember his promise to give your lost one word of you. Then I left to return.”

Two Hawks saw his disappointment and frustration mirrored in his father's face. “Does even Creator wish to keep him from us?”

Stone Thrower's face cleared. “I do not know. I pray not, but Creator is working this out in His way and time. Do not lose hope.”

Ahnyero cleared his throat. “Listen—I do not know if this will be of help to you, but I have just spoken with Gansevoort and Willett. I am sent to Oswego.”

“Oswego?” Two Hawks said. “Where we hear the British will gather?”

“It is so. I am to go among them, talk to the Indians there—present myself as one whose sympathies have changed if I am again known. But here is a thing that will make you glad, brother. I need runners to go with me, to carry news back to this fort. Yours was the face that came first into my mind when these plans were told to me, and here I step into the sunlight and who do I see?”

The scout smiled at the eagerness Two Hawks knew his face must show. “I will be a runner for you. Do you think Johnson's regiment has already come to Oswego?”

“It will be soon, in any case. I must find other warriors to be runners,” Ahnyero said. “Once that is done, we can make ready to leave. Do you wish to be one along with your son?” he asked Stone Thrower.

“I will be needed for the hunting, now that this one flies from me again like an arrow.” Stone Thrower turned to Two Hawks, half his mouth pulling into a smile, somehow proud, sad, amused, all at once.

With reluctance Two Hawks said, “If you need me…”

Stone Thrower put a hand to his son's shoulder. “No. Do this thing for our people and theirs,” he added, with a nod toward Gansevoort and
other officers ducking out through the headquarters entry. “And may Creator at last give you word or even sight of your brother. I will tell your mother what it is you do. We will send our prayers up for you.”

Turning, he gave Ahnyero a look, steady and speaking. Two Hawks in his eagerness caught only its tail but knew his father was asking the scout to guard the son he had always had with him, as well as to find the one in the portrait he carried against his heart.