A Wild Yearning (17 page)

She tensed, but she didn't turn to look at him, not even when she felt her cloak land heavily over her shoulders. His hands lingered at her neck, then fell away.

"I thought you might be cold," he said.

When she said nothing, he came to stand in front of her, heedless of the salt water that now lapped around his boots. He tucked a sprig of sea lavender into her hair and gave her a boyish, lopsided smile. "You aren't angry with me, Delia. Not really. So quit pretending that you are."

Oh, but he was an engaging rascal. He could charm the clothes off a bishop's wife, and probably had.

The thought made her smile, but she said, "I suppose ye think all this bein' nice to me now will make me forgive ye."

He laughed, shrugged. "Hell, so far I haven't done anything to be forgiven for."

"Hunh," she protested. Still, she reached up and touched the flowers he had put in her hair. It was too dark to read the expression on his face, but she could feel the intensity of his eyes boring into her.

It only took one step to bring his body right up against hers and he took it. She did not back away. As if from a far distance, she could hear the sea lapping and sucking at his boots.

So slowly it seemed an eternity, his lips descended. But his mouth hovered provocatively over hers and his breath, warm and moist, bathed her cheek as he spoke.

"You want me, Delia."

The word barely made it out of her constricted throat. "No."

"Yes."

"Yes. I can make you want me."

His mouth crushed down on hers, forcing her lips apart in a fierce, hungry kiss. Her protest had dissolved with the first touch of his lips on hers.

He pressed his palm against the back of her head so that he could hold her mouth in place while he thrust his tongue in and out of it rhythmically. Then his tongue slowed, stayed, filled her mouth, and he turned his head back and forth, slanting his lips across hers.

She made a tiny whimpering noise in the back of her throat. It seemed the only thing keeping her upright was his hand on the back of her head. She reached up and clung to his arms, her fingers digging into the tense, rigid muscles.

He broke the kiss, pulling away from her. She saw the flash of his teeth as he smiled at her. "You want me, Delia-girl. But I think maybe next time I'll make
you
do the asking."

He left her there, standing on the beach, wanting him. Just as he had said he would.

The tiny settlement on Falmouth Neck smelled steamily of soft soap.

It came from the front yard of an old fortified log house that stood directly across from the Neck's main pier where it hooked out into Casco Bay. A woman and a small boy were stirring a boiling mixture of grease and wood ash lye in a fat iron kettle that hung from a lug pole over a big fire.

The woman paused in her work to look up as Ty rode in, the others following. She wiped the stringing wisps of hair from her sweating face and then her mouth broke into a huge smile.

"Ty!" she cried and, dropping the stick, started to run. Ty slid off his pacer and met her halfway. They threw their arms around each other and Ty lifted her off the ground, kissing her long and hard on the mouth.

Delia sat on the horse Ty had given her and watched them with a sick little smile on her face. This one was like all of Ty's other women, fair and delicate and, since she was in the middle of boiling up a big pot of soap, probably clean as a saint on Sabbath day as well.

The woman clasped Ty's arms and stepped back, studying him up and down. "Oh my, but you're lookin' fine." Her hands fluttered up to her hair, then she wiped them on the skirt of her faded Holland frock. "Darn you, Tyler Savitch, why do you always manage to catch
me
looking such a mess?"

"You look beautiful, Suz," Ty said.

The Hookers had gotten off the ox cart, so Delia dismounted as well, but she hung back while the introductions were made.

The woman's name was Susannah Marsten and she was a widow who ran the trading post in Falmouth. She had a five-year-old son called Tobias. He stood with Ty's hand resting lightly on his head. Susannah Marsten leaned close enough to Ty that their shoulders rubbed and she was smiling so happily. Delia thought the three of them already looked like a family and she felt almost nauseated with a hot, burning jealousy.

"You sure are a welcome sight in these parts, Reverend," Susannah said to Caleb as they were introduced. "You too, Mrs. Hooker."

Caleb's wide, charming smile revealed his overlapping teeth. "To hear Ty talk, I only got hired so that Merrymeeting could call itself a proper town."

"Oh, you mustn't take Ty seriously. He loves to tease." Susannah laughed and looked up at Ty, her eyes shining. They were as bright a blue as cornflowers, Delia thought enviously.

"And this is Delia. The girl I've brought for Nat," Ty said. He motioned at Delia. "Come over here, brat. Since when have you turned shy as an old maiden aunt?"

Delia lifted her head and stepped forward. "I thought I was bein' polite. Giving two old
friends
a chance t' get reacquainted an' all."

This brought on one of Ty's scowls. Susannah looked Delia over carefully and then her eyes went back to Ty. Delia was glad to see a worried frown crease the woman's fair, smooth brow.

"You folks thirsty?" Susannah asked after a long awkward moment, while Ty glared at Delia and she glared back at him.

Ty jerked his eyes away from Delia. Slipping his arm around Susannah's waist, he gave it a familiar squeeze. "I'm dry enough to make a hen quack."

Susannah laughed. "Then come on in. All of you. I'll broach a hogshead. There's someone inside you need to look at, Ty." Moving with an unconscious grace, she led them across the yard to the front door of the large, hewn-log building. "That old timber beast, Increase Spoon, came down to trade some peltry. He brought his squaw with him. She's powerful sick."

They entered a long room with a fireplace at one end around which were grouped a settle and a couple of chairs. In one far
corner stood a table and opposite it a maple cupboard, displaying a set of blue glassware. Beside the cupboard, a musket hung muzzle-down by its trigger guard from a pair of deer-horns. Four copper-bottomed pots swung over the mantel tree above the hearth.

The commercial part of the room was separated from the living area by a hip-high partition with a swinging door in the middle. Along one wall of the store ran a counter, behind which were shelves filled with everything imaginable—from buttons to stockings, ax helves to lamp oil.

The floor was covered with larger items such as rum kegs and crocks of applejack. Bales of beaver and bear fur and blankets and beads for the Indian trade were all arranged in neat rows. A path about two feet wide had been cleared through the stacks of trade goods, running from the front door along the counter to the living quarters in the rear.

Two figures huddled before the fire. One, a man, stood up as they came in. He was dressed head to toe in buckskins that were stained with grease and stiff in spots with dried blood. His graying hair hung long about his face, becoming entangled with his beard where it grew past his neck. He watched them come toward him with eyes that were as small and dark as olive pits.

Someone lay on a pallet at his feet. As they got closer, the reek of blood and feces emanating from the blankets was so strong Elizabeth made a small gagging sound in the back of her throat.

"Lizzie, perhaps you should wait outside." Caleb said.

To Delia's surprise, Elizabeth almost snapped at her husband. "Nonsense, Caleb. The poor girl might need our help."

Delia thought it was Ty's help the poor girl needed most. As he knelt beside her, the girl gazed up at him with sunken eyes that were huge in her thin, sallow face. She had black straight hair and a small pointed face, and she couldn't have been older than fourteen.

Susannah Marsten shoved aside a jar of bear grease and a pot of bean seeds to clear a space on the counter. "Here, put her up on this, Increase. Where the doc can get a better look at her." Then she came back to stir up the fire, raking the glowing embers to one side to put a kettle on to boil. Elizabeth hurried over to help her.

Ty picked the girl up off the filthy pallet and laid her carefully on the countertop. He said something to her in her own language. It startled Delia, hearing the guttural syllables coming so naturally out of Ty's mouth.

He unlaced the front of the girl's deerskin dress and slipped his hand onto her chest, then moving down to her stomach. The girl smiled; she had lost a good part of her teeth and her gums were bloody. But her smile was bright and Delia could almost see the pain visibly leave her face.

He has magic hands, she thought, and felt a jumbled mixture of pride and admiration and possessiveness as she looked at Tyler Savitch's sharp profile. He was smiling at the Indian girl, with gentleness and hope, and Delia loved him more in that one moment than she would have ever thought possible.

The old trapper shuffled over. "What's she got, Doc?"

"She has a disease that comes from improper diet, Increase. You two have to eat more than salt meat and biscuits for months on end." He said something else to the girl in Abenaki and she nodded seriously. "Boil her up a mess of fiddleheads this afternoon and make her eat every bite. And then get her to drink a couple of tankards of spruce beer. Can you do that?"

"Aye. She gonna live?"

"If you start feeding her right. Spruce beer, greens and vegetables, almost every day, Increase. Berries and apples when they come into season, and preserve them so you'll have them to eat come winter. Right now I've got something in my pack for you to brew into a tea for her. It'll help stop the purging."

The old trapper nodded. He picked the girl up and followed Ty back outside into the yard without another word.

Susannah looked after them, sighing and shaking her head. "He's crazy as a backhouse rat, is Increase. Poor girl. Although I think deep down he really is quite fond of her." She sighed again and then turned to give the Hookers, who were standing side by side in front of the hearth, a bright smile. "Well, I've got to get dinner started. You all are stayin' at least the day and the night, I hope?"

"I sure hope so," Caleb said, with a sigh. They had endured two weeks of hard traveling since leaving Wells and they were all exhausted. "Ty mentioned something about having to get us a ride on a schooner going the rest of the way to Merrymeeting. I guess there isn't a road."

"The road ends right here in Falmouth. There's a deer trail that runs around the bay, but that's too rough even for a horse let alone an ox cart. That old pirate Cap'n Abbott has a schooner anchored out in the stream. He'll take you over tomorrow. He owes Ty because he got the chest consumption winter before last and Ty pulled him through it."

"How far away is Merrymeeting from here?" Delia asked, even though Susannah was studiously ignoring her.

"Not far. If the tide is right, about a day going by ship, which is the way most folks do it..." She stroked the tow-head of her son, who had been hovering at her skirts looking shyly at the activity around him with wide-open blue eyes. "Toby, why don't you run up to the attic and bring down a bunch of corn ears. We'll pop some corn before dinner and drink a flip or two. It's one of Ty's favorite things."

She laughed almost girlishly and glanced back down the length of the room, and Delia saw that Ty had come back inside, ducking his head to avoid banging it on the low door. "The flip, I'm talkin' about. Not the popped corn," Susannah added and laughed again, for Ty had flashed his slanted smile.

A day's ride by ship, Delia thought. That meant by tomorrow they would be in Merrymeeting and Ty would deliver her to Nathaniel Parkes. She would be married to a man whose face she had yet to look upon. She would live in the same place as Ty. She would see him from time to time at bees and raisin' parties, and maybe on the Sabbath day if he bothered to come to the Meeting. When she got sick he would come and smile at her and touch her with his magic hands. And if she had babies...

Susannah Marsten mixed a batch of buttermilk biscuits, whipping the spoon so vigorously it thudded against the side of the wooden bowl. Delia sat across the table from her, perched on a grindstone, her legs spread wide, while she snapped beans in her lap. The pop of the beans and the thud of the spoon were the only sounds to disturb the heavy silence.

Except for the boy Tobias, who turned the spit where a haunch of venison roasted over the fire, Delia and Susannah were the only ones in the room and Delia thought the other woman was feeling uncomfortable because of it. Delia had to admit she was a bit unnerved herself.

After munching on the popped corn and drinking a couple of flips—a potent concoction of beer sweetened with molasses, thickened with an egg, and strengthened with rum—Ty and Caleb had felt about as relaxed as cats stretched out napping in the sun. It was only with considerable difficulty that Ty was able to force himself up and out of the house to try to track down Cap'n Abbott to see about getting passage tomorrow or the next day. Caleb went with him, wobbling a bit on his long, thin legs.

From time to time Susannah would glance at the closed door of the inner room where she and her son slept at night, and where Elizabeth Hooker had retired an hour ago, claiming the need to rest before dinner.

"Is Mrs. Hooker ill?" Susannah finally asked, when the uncomfortable silence had dragged on too long.

Delia shrugged. "I don't think so. She's just a bit weary from ridin' in the ox cart. She's used t' an easier life, ye see, her da bein' minister t' Brattle Street Church back in Boston."

Susannah sniffed disdainfully and Delia realized she had, without intending to, put Elizabeth in a bad light. Guiltily, she tried to make up for it by adding, "Mrs. Hooker's always been real nice t' me," which only caused Susannah to sniff harder.

Susannah set the biscuit dough down on the hearthstone to rise while the oven got hot. She touched her son's shoulder. "Toby, go out to the spring house, please, and fetch me that jug of milk."

Delia watched the little boy scurry to obey. "Your boy sure is good, but he don't say much."

"He's shy at first. By tonight he'll be chewing your ear off."

Susannah straightened, wiping her hands on her apron. Since Ty had left she had taken the time to change her clothes, putting on a linsey-woolsey petticoat and calamanco short gown that showed off her uptilted breasts. She had covered her head with a long, checked kerchief that fell over her shoulders and was tucked into her apron. With her hair pulled back off her face, her delicate features of tiny, bow-shaped mouth, upturned nose, and small, pointed chin stood out in classical relief.

She's beautiful, Delia thought, dismayed. And Susannah couldn't look more different than herself.

As Susannah turned from the hearth, Delia glanced quickly down at the beans in her lap. She could feel the woman's eyes on her questioning and evaluating just as she had been doing, and unconsciously Delia's spine stiffened. She drew her feet up, pressing them against the side of the grindstone as if to give herself support.

"Those are pretty moccasins," Susannah said, forcing a smile.

Delia's head came up and triumph flashed in her eyes. "Ty gave 'em t' me. They were his mother's."

A shadow crossed Susannah's face and Delia's moment of triumph grew. "Oh... how nice of him," Susannah said.

Delia decided she would have no peace if she didn't know the truth, and the only way to get at the truth was to ask for it outright.