Columbine (27 page)

flopped on his side with his arms outstretched across the bloodstained leaves. Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she reached down and pried the tomahawk from his stiffening fingers and pulled the powder horn and bag of bullets and patches from around his neck. She did the same to Quahaug, shivering as she tried not to touch him more than she had to, and then, her arms full of all she’d gathered, she ran as fast as she could back to the house where Kit lay.

He had not moved, and Dianna wondered if that meant good or ill. She filled the brass pot with water in the stream and tore the last of her petticoats into strips for bandages. Nothing was as clean as it should have been—what she would have given for a cup of strong soap!—but she marina small fire in the center of the hut beneath the roof hole and balanced the pot of water over it to boil. linally she knelt beside Kit and as gently as she could, pulled off his blood-soaked shirt.

One cut ran diagonally from his collar-bone, and another crossed his forearm. Neither was serious, and the bleeding had almost stopped. Her hands grazed the dark hair on his chest as she washed the cuts.

She’d forgotten how powerfully muscled he Was, and how, too, his body was already crisscrossed with old scars. Lightly she rested her fingers over his heart.

The beat was steady and regular, as was his breathing, and satisfied, she turned to the cut on his head. This was the one that worried her and the one that bled the longest, each cloth that she pressed to it soon becoming soaked. Finally, by sunset, she was able to wrap her makeshift bandages around his head, had covered him with one of the blankets, and then sat back to wait. In the morning she would try to find the wild herbs to make a poultice to draw out the wound’s poison.

She loaded all three guns and kept guard herself, wrapped in the second blanket with a musket in her hands. The night seemed very black to her, and very lonely, even with Kit lying beside her, unconscious or asleep she did not know.

She was far more frightened than she wanted to admit. Strong as he was, Kit’s wound was still dangerous.

She didn’t know how long it would be before he could travel or how far they were from any English settlement. The Indians who’d abandoned this village could return. The Frenchmen Mattasoit had avoided might be searching for them, perhaps even Robillard himself. And Mercy, poor, innocent Mercy, could be a hundred miles closer to Montreal by now:

Dianna placed another branch on the fire and huddled into her blanket. Last year in the fall she and her father had been in Paris, and she’d sung in the white-and-gold music room of the Vicomte de Thavenet… It was mid-morning before Dianna awoke, with Kit muttering restlessly beside her. She followed Hester’s receipt for the poultice, but by nightfall he was feverish and the head wound had become angry and swollen. He never seemed to know her, speaking disjointedly about his mother and father and other names she did not recognize. She cooled his fever with cloths soaked in the icy stream water, and tried to get him to sip the broth she’d made. She sang to him, too, for the sound of her voice seemed to calm him as gently she pillowed his head in her lap and stroked her fingertips across his forehead. No grand queen’s laments this time, but old lullabies and wistful Scottish tales of forgotten lovers.

There was little more she could do, and she needed no great physician’s skill to tell her that each hour he was drifting a little farther away from her and from life, nor did she need to be told what would become of her if the infection finally claimed him.

No matter where the dream began, it always ended in the same place, and in the same way.

He was on the old bay gelding, the autumn sun warm on his back. He had travelled this road to Wickhamton so many times that he and the horse could have done it blindfolded. As he rode he was thinking about a copper-haired tavern-keep’s daughter in New London, and wtering if he could talk his father into letting him rturn downriver on business to see her again next week. He couldn’t quite remember her name—Neff or Nan, he’d recall it soon enough when he saw her again—but she’d been quite generous in her affections, and at twenty-two, that was what mattered to him most.

Right before the bend in the road, low by the river, the horse had shied skittishly, and he had swatted its rump and called it a cowardly old noddy as they’d pushed on. And that was when he saw the body of his mother first, her skirts snarled against the red-and-gold berries of a bittersweet vine, and then his father, face up and staring, surprised, at the cloudless sky, and finally Tamsin, who’d run the farthest before they’d shot her, too. There was a thin red line around her throat where they’d yanked away her coral beads, and she still clutched the arm of her calico doll, Sukey.

He should have been there to save them. That never changed. Nothing he ever did could make it different.

He should have saved them… “You saved me!” said Dianna hoarsely.

“Without you I would have died, and now, God forgive me, I cannot do the same for you!”

Confused, Kit realized it was her tears that were falling on his face. His mouth felt dry as a desert, but he forced himself to form the words, to make her understand.

“I—I should have been with them,” he said, half the words no more than breath without sound.

“If I couldn’t have saved them, I should have died, too.”

“Nay, don’t speak so!” she cried, her face close above his, and he saw how her mouth twisted to keep from weeping more.

“You have been ill, and I thought—I was afraid—but you’ve come back to me now, and you’ll live. You will live!”

Cadnally his thoughts began to untangle, and his eyes began to make sense again. And Dianna: he’d never seen anything dearer than her face, her dark brows drawn together with concern as she watched him. But she looked too fired, bluish circles ringing her silver eyes, her face thinner than he remembered, and on her jaw, the last yellow patch of a fading bruise. She was the one who needed coddling, not him.

Gently she slid her hand beneath the back of his head and tried to raise him so he could drink from the little horn cup she held to his lips. He scowled, irritated by his own weakness, and too quickly tried to raise himself. The rush-mat walls of the wigwam spun wildly, and he feared his stomach would rebel and shame him. Desperately he clung to his bent knees, willing his own body to behave, until at last,

covered with sweat from the effort, he could take the cup from her hand himself.

“How long have I been ill?”

She held one hand up, the fingers spread.

“Five days.”

Damnation, he said softly. He touched his face and felt the rough beard that confirmed what she’d said, and then the bandage that swathed his head. He remembered everything now, how he’d let that damned Abenaki take him down neat as a babe in leading-strings. Unbelievably, unforgivably careless he’d been, and his head throbbed as though it still had the tomahawk in it.

“Sweet, holy, bell fire damnation” ,?

She shushed him gently “Don’t vex yourself, Kit, you’re still weak.”

“You don’t need to remind me.” He spoke too sharply and saw the surprise and hurt in her eyes. He should be thanking her, not swearing at her. But he couldn’t bear to see her face go soft with love again.

He didn’t deserve her or her love, not the way he’d failed again.

“In fact you don’t really need me at all, do you? I came to rescue you and ended up half-brained instead. You’d have done better to stay with the French.”

“The French didn’t want me, nor did the Indians.

They only took me to g You.” She ducked her head, feeling like a f0o! for veanting to cry again.

Hadn’t she wept enough for this man She told herself that he was still in pain, that this wasn’t really Kit talking to her like this, but his surliness stung, and so did the way he would not meet her eyes.

“I told them you wouldn’t come after me, but it seems they knew you better than I do.”

“Aye, that’s true enough,” he said bluntly. If she knew what an incompetent coward he really was, she wouldn’t have stayed with him a minute, let alone five days. He wondered why she hadn’t realized the truth yet, when even the French were mocking his weakness: a man who could not protect the ones he loved most.

He saw Tamsin’s plump little hand, never quite as clean as their mother wished, clutching at the chickweed where she’d fallen …. “Where’s Mercy?” he demanded abruptly.

“A French priest took her away when we were in the village. I tried to keep her with me, I swear, but—” “Asa was wrong to give the child to your safekeeping.

Now that he’s dead, she is my responsibility entirely, not yours.” He paused, and Dianna noticed how he clasped one hand so tightly over the other that his knuckles showed white.

“You knew they killed him, didn’t you?”

She nodded, but Kit’s eyes were closed, his head bowed.

The still, small figure lying in the grass seemed more angular, was dressed more simply, and in place of the doll was a small, white cat named Lily.

The image was so vivid, Kit sucked in his breath ashe fought it back shaking his head fiercely with denial. Not Mercy, nay, not Mercy, too.

Fearful that the fever had returned, Dianna reached out to calm him.

“Nay, don’t even think it,” he growled as he shook her hand away, his eyes still tightly shut.

“Don’t even think it!”

Swiftly Dianna drew back and stared down at her hands in her lap. He was right. She didn’t know him, not when he was like this. When two days before she had found in his haversack all the torn red rosettes she’d left along the trail, she’d seen it as proof of his devotion. But now she wasn’t so sure. Like too many other things he did, maybe rescuing her was simply one more test of himself, another chance to prove how invaluable Colonel Sparhawk was to the people who depended on him.

And not once in his feverish ramblings had he mentioned her name.

“Who is Tamsin?” she asked softly.

“You called for her often.”

He started so visibly at fthe name that Dianna’s heart sank.

“Someone very dear and special to me,” he answered unevenly, j He’d grown pale again, his forehead glistening with sweat, and she worried that he’d faint. But she couldn’t stop. She had to know.

“You love her very much, don’t you?”

“How could I not?” His voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper.

“From the day she was born she seemed like another part of me. And then to lose her like that-God, Dianna, she was but seven years old!”

Dianna stared uncertainly, her own doubts forgotten before his obvious misery.

“Tamsin?”

He had not meant to tell her, for he didn’t think he could bear her scorn when she learned the troth.

But to hear Tamsin’s name on Dianna’s lips seemed to shatter the last boundary within him and he could not have kept back the truth had his life depended on it.

“They came after the last war, after the treaties, only three of them, Mohegans. They—they murdered my mother and my father and my sister Tamsin and took their scalps, and when I found them, it was too late.” He was shaking, his eyes red-rimmed and staring as he saw it all again.

“If I had been there, I would have saved them. But I wasn’t, and they died.

They died because of me.”

In horrified silence Dianna listened, and one by one, all the half-explained conversations and mysteries began to make sense. Asa and Hester and all the others had known. Only she, the one who loved him most, was left unaware of his suffering.

“Oh, Kit, my poor love,” she murmured.

“You should have told me before.”

He dropped his head to his chest.

“I know, Dianna. God forgive me, I should have told you long ago. But I was so afraid I’d lose you, and now look what it’s come to. I’ve failed you and Mercy, too, just like I did my parents and Tamsin, sweet, silly Tamsin.”

His voice broke, and Dianna realized that tears were running down his cheeks to tangle in his half-grown beard. She threw her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close, and he fell against her like a weary child.

“Never say you failed me, Kit,” she said as she rocked him gently against her, his face pressed against her shoulder as’ she drew her fingers through the snarls of his hair.

“Never say it and never believe it. You came and you found me, and if you hadn’t, I would have perished. And what of my uncle? If you had not come to his house that night, he would have killed me in his anger. I didn’t think you were real, you know. You were too perfect, like a magic prince in an old story. But you saved me, and together, somehow, we’ll save Mercy, too.”

Kit listened without hearing what she said. The words didn’t matter. Only the peace that came with her voice was real, and he didn’t want it ever to end.

She did not doubt him, did not scorn him. She still believed in him. His arms went around her waist and he clung to her in desperation.

“But think of what I am, Dianna,” he mumbled against her. He had forgotten how soft her skin was.

“A sorry, foolish creature who couldn’t even protect his own family.”

“Oh, Kit, I do not belie?e it,” she, said softly.

“You always put others before yourself. Twill likely be the death of you, you low. To be the man you are, your parents must havb loved you very much. I don’t think they would have wanted you to blame yourself all this time.”

He wanted so much to believe her. He had lived with the pain for so long that it was part of him, and there was no way he could simply let it go because she said so. But she was offering a way to ease it, and maybe, given time, she could help him ‘forget.

Why was it she was half his size, and yet had twice the strength?

“Don’t leave me, Dianna. God knows I’ve no right to ask you anything, but you can’t know how I felt when I thought I’d lost you, too.”

“Hush now, love,” she said as she feathered akiss on the top of his head.

“I swear I’ll not be going anywhere without you.”

But he was already fast asleep.

“Your woman tried to kill me, Sparhawk,” declared Attawan indignantly as Dianna followed him to where Kit sat by the stream, her musket leveled evenly at the Indian’s back.