Lori Benton (10 page)

“Sister,” said the Indian. “I am called Joseph Tames-His-Horse, and I have come far to say a thing to you. In my dream of you, I was saying it. Will you let me say it now?”

For the first time, she didn’t recoil at a Mohawk calling her
sister
. She would listen to anything this Indian had to say, as long as he said it in English. But what he said was one of the very last things she’d expected. A verse of Holy Scripture.

“ ‘A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.’ Believe this, my sister, because He who said it is both great and good, and cannot lie.”

Sitting now on her cabin porch, Joseph told her his new dream of her,
the dream that had brought him back to her at last. “You were walking a path alone, but at every bend in this path, you would stop and look behind you. You were looking for me to be following you. In the dream I knew this. Yet you were also laying branches across that path, as if part of you wished to hinder me too.”

“Joseph …” She said his name both to comfort and to plead. That path he saw led to her heart, and he would remove every branch in his way if he could.
You cannot, brother. Please … do not try
.

“God still speaks to you in dreams,” she managed to say. “I’m glad some things do not change.”

Inside the cabin the fire had died to embers. Still, Willa could see the gleam of Joseph’s teeth when he smiled. “He did not mention that white man in there, who I think would have killed me, had he the strength.”

“Him?” she said, startled by the reminder. “He is called Neil MacGregor, and he is no warrior. His dog is the better hunter, I think. But he is injured and sick, so I may do him discredit.”

Joseph stood. Behind them in the doorway, Neil’s collie leaped to its feet from where it had been lying, watching them. Ignoring it, Joseph went to his saddlebags. He returned with a leather pouch. It clinked when he placed it in her lap.

“That is part of what the British paid for the last man I returned to them. There’s every type of coin under the sun there. It is not much, but … it is something.”

Willa felt the weight of the coins against her thighs. “I cannot take this. Your mother and sister—”

Joseph knelt, silencing her with his fingertips. With his thumb he traced her jaw, then ran it along the line of her collarbone, sharp beneath her skin. “You are starving, my sister. Take it, or I am dishonored. And since you cannot eat coins, I will hunt for you … while I can.”

She shook her head. “We will manage.”

“You and the crippled one in there, whose dog is a better hunter? I saw
you are planting the fields, but who will tend them while you hunt? Or does this dog have other skills uncommon to its kind?” He reached to ruffle the collie’s ear. The dog stiffened, but Joseph made a soothing noise, and it wagged its tail.

Willa said, “It would please this dog to be put in charge of the goat.”

Joseph smiled at that, then looked at her, sobering. “I do not doubt your strength. But what sort of man would not provide meat for his widowed sister if he could?”

“And your deserter?”

“Will keep,” Joseph said, enigmatically. “You are my more sacred duty.”

Willa searched his determined face, then sighed and gave in to what felt a great weariness. She leaned against his chest. He spread a hand over her head and held her against his beating heart.

“You asked what sort of man would fail to provide for his sister. Not the man I know you to be.” She drew a breath of resignation, which did not altogether conceal from her the relief flooding her limbs. “
Nia:wen
, Joseph,” she added, thanking him.

Then she straightened, relief all too quickly replaced by fear. “But it is not safe for you to be here.”

“I know.”

“Did your dream tell you this too?”

Joseph held her gaze unblinking. “Your eyes are telling me now.”

“Then hear these words of mine,” she said. “Because my hungry belly will not be your death.” Though Joseph listened—with the respect men of the Kanien’kehá:ka were raised to show their clan sisters—while she told him about her parents, the land auction, and Richard Waring, she could not sway his resolution to stay and provide meat for her.

“And something on which to eat it.”

Those were his last words on the subject early the next morning, before he strode into the woods with the felling ax, bent on hewing boards to make a table.

Neil MacGregor awoke on his pallet, in his nose the scent of stewing meat, in his mouth the lingering taste of laudanum. Muzzy headed, he lay there trying to recall taking the laudanum, but couldn’t. He did recall an Indian, tall and brown as an autumn oak, filling the cabin doorway. Or had that been a dream where Richard Waring turned into an Indian, come to take Willa away?

Willa
. Hearing the muffled rise and fall of conversation, he raised himself to listen and felt relief at recognizing her voice. Until he heard the man’s. He tensed, his first thought again of Waring, come to cause more trouble. But the voice was different, too deep for Waring. He strained to catch their words.

“… neighbors near enough to hear your rifle fire,” Willa was saying. “I have not forgotten how to use my bow,” the man said. “You say it is dangerous for me to be here, but is it not for you? This Waring you spoke of … I can protect you from him but not in a way that will help you win friends among these people.”

“I am not concerned with winning friends.” A pot lid clanged, punctuating the statement.

“You will need them if you mean to stay.”

Willa made no answer to that. Instead, she picked up what must have been an earlier thread of conversation. “If my parents were not Loyalists, I will find a way to prove it.”

“And if they were?”

But to this, she said nothing at all.

“Thayendanegea told me how it was with the people here—here and down along the Mohawk River,” the man said into the silence, “after
William Johnson’s death. The whites, who took sides in secret, declared themselves openly, Whig and Tory. Did not your parents obtain this land from Johnson?”

Neil recognized the name of Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs among the northern tribes until his death just prior to the outbreak of war. Trusted by the Mohawks like no other white man, Johnson had remained loyal to the British, a legacy that led in no small part to most of the Iroquois fighting against the colonials.

“They did,” Willa said. “But that was long ago. And it does not make them Loyalists.”

The man’s voice lowered. “Does it really matter, when this life for you is past?”

Neil rose from the pallet and waded through waves of dizziness to the doorway. Peering around the frame, he could see only a portion of the room. That portion contained what he’d assumed he’d dreamed—an Indian, seated on a block chair, black hair tied with hawk feathers hanging long down his blue-shirted back. His legs were folded under a table, a tin cup engulfed in one large hand.

When had Willa Obenchain acquired a table?

“Where would you have me go, Joseph?”

Neil couldn’t see Willa, but he saw the Indian’s shoulders tense beneath the pull of his shirt. “Come back to Niagara with me. Thayendanegea means to speak with the governor there about a settlement on Grand River. The Canadians promise mills and a school, ministers, teachers. There will be land for us. I will build a house for you there.”

“A man goes to the house of his wife, not the other way.”

That drew from the Indian a surprising response. His head tilted and his voice warmed to teasing. “Is this you asking me to do so?”

“Do not even make a jest of it,” Willa replied sharply. “We could never be together like that. Not among the People. You know this.”

“As my sister, then.” The teasing was gone from the Indian’s voice. “Still, you would be with me.”

Fear prickled the scar at Neil’s hairline. Did this Indian, wherever he’d come from, intend to coerce Willa back into captivity, or
woo
her back? Alarmed by either prospect, he stepped into the front room.

Willa stood at the hearth, bent over a steaming pot with a spoon poised to stir its contents, her face raised to the Indian with a look of naked emotion—affection, exasperation, and, unbelievably, indecision.

“Could it be enough for you if …,” she began, but clamped her lips tight when she saw Neil. The Indian turned on the block chair to look at him.

Neil cleared his throat. “Willa. Everything all right here?”

Neil had misgivings about leaving the Indian alone at the cabin the next morning while he and Willa made the trek into Shiloh—she hoped to find there the provisions and necessities Anni’s charity hadn’t provided and was determined to do so now, before the planting demanded her attention—but decided to keep those misgivings to himself. The Indian had spent the night on the porch, despite Willa’s protests—apparently he’d spent the previous night beside the hearth—and now was out in the yard splitting cordwood.

Willa had explained their relationship succinctly the previous evening. “I was adopted by his clan—Wolf Clan, of the Seven Nations Mohawk in Canada—near kin to the Mohawks of the Longhouse people. Joseph is my brother.”

’Twas maybe a shadow thrown by the fire, but Neil could have sworn at the word
brother
a wave of deeper color darkened the Indian’s face, before he’d left them and gone out to the yard.

Now Neil sat at the table the Indian had built, a rough puncheon
affair but sturdily made, waiting for Willa to descend from the loft. He heard the splash of water, a mutter of discontent. Not best pleased with the results of her toilette, he supposed.

As for himself … he ran his hand over his sprouting beard, resisting the urge to scratch. If in the settlement ’twas a razor to be had, it would be his by day’s end. He’d found a neck cloth at the bottom of his satchel and done his best to brush clean his frock coat with its wide, turned-down collar. The brown broadcloth seemed permanently creased, but at least it covered his filthy shirt.

When at last Willa made her descent, Neil stood. And stared.

She wore her quilled moccasins—the only footwear she possessed—but had dressed herself in the gown Anni Keppler sent, a faded blue linen trimmed in yellowed lace. The cut would have been woefully out of fashion on the streets of Philadelphia, and the elbow-length sleeves and the hemline were more than a tad short for its present wearer, who was blushing brighter than the braid she’d coiled around her head like a crown. Yet even in a borrowed gown, outrageously tall and painfully thin, Willa Obenchain appeared not only respectable but regal as a queen.

A straight-backed warrior queen, braced for battle.

“Boudicca in the flesh.”

She raised a brow, and he realized he’d spoken the name of the ancient Celtic queen aloud.

“Anni chose well,” he said quickly. “That color suits you, if ye dinna mind my saying.”

Her expression softened minutely. “It must do.”

To the gown she added the bone-handled knife, attached to its corded sheath passed around her neck so it hung between her breasts, distracting from respectability, but adding to the overall martial effect. Neil watched as she hoisted her capacious basket and secured its tumpline across her brow.

He kent he was gaping at her—in admiration, though his staring was
discomfiting her. Forcing himself to look away, he clapped his hat on his head and took up his satchel. “Ready?”

She took up her musket and headed for the porch. Neil followed her out to the yard, where the air held the tang of fresh-cut wood.

Cap sprang from the porch and circled his knees while Willa paused to speak with the Indian, who heaved the ax into the chopping block to listen. With his shirt sleeves turned up over corded forearms and an indecent amount of thigh bared by breechcloth and leggings, he took in Willa’s words with a grave face. They spoke too low to overhear, though once the Indian cast him a narrowed glance, then cupped a hand on Willa’s shoulder and bent to speak into her ear. It was so nigh an embrace Neil looked away.

“Hen’en,” he heard Willa say—a tad sharpish—then she was striding past him toward the track, gripping the musket that rode her shoulder. Cap trotted after her.

The Indian’s gaze followed as well, black eyes above the shelf of his cheekbones intense, inscrutable. The eyes turned on Neil, who’d hesitated in the yard. The Indian closed the space between them in a few strides.

“They will not look kindly on her in that place. But she will go. See no one touches her.”

Neil took an involuntary step back. “Aye, I mean to do so.”

The Indian drilled him with a look, then turned his back and went to take up the ax.

From down the track, Cap barked, impatient with Neil’s dawdling.

He had to trot to catch Willa, striding on as though she cared not whether he followed. “How far did ye say was this settlement?”

She glanced aside. “An hour’s walk when I was a girl.”

“An hour’s walk at this pace? I’d make it a dozen miles then.”

She huffed through her nose and said, “More like three,” but didn’t slow her stride. At least he felt well enough to match it. That was something, after another headache the night before.