Lori Benton (13 page)

Colonel Elias Waring’s hair was still the dark gold she remembered, hardly touched by gray, though the years had lined his face with less mercy. He moved aside for the men to file out past him. When they were gone, he fixed her in his gaze.

“Wilhelmina. It seems you found your way back to us at last … God be thanked.” It was all he had time to say before he was nudged aside by
someone intent on wedging past him, someone not the least intimidated by his presence—a handsome woman on the cusp of middle age, wearing a calico turban, its yellow a striking contrast to the brown of her face.

With a leap of heart, Willa recognized the Warings’ longtime housemaid, the slave who went by the name of Goodenough.

“Never mind the endless work needs doing for these Waring men—weren’t nothin’ keeping me homebound, not after Mister Crane come blatting that you was in town—and the Colonel knew better than to tell me different.”

Though an intermittent clang from the smithy punctuated Goodenough’s words, Colonel Waring was within earshot of her voice, kneeling to talk to his twin grandchildren in the smithy yard. The look she slanted him was met with a glance that hinted at amusement rather than reproof.

Goodenough turned her gleaming smile back to Willa. “Never thought to see a woman standing taller than my spare bones, but look at you now, growed up to prove me wrong.”

Though she recalled Goodenough—undisputed mistress of the Warings’ kitchen—as a towering figure from her childhood, Willa now topped her by three fingers’ width. Goodenough had measured it.

Of greater surprise was the long-legged, barefoot boy that had danced around Goodenough’s skirts while they shifted their purchases from the trading store to the log-built smithy, where Gavan MacNab’s soft-spoken wife added two wicker cages with a laying hen in each to the pile.

“This here’s my boy, Lemuel.” Goodenough pulled the child’s head to her hip. His skin was the color of smoked deer hide, and his brown hair curled loose like a floppy cap. “Tell Miss Willa how old you be, Lem.”

“Six year old, ma’am,” the boy said.

“Lem! Speak true.”

“Almost six,” the boy amended, with a grin so appealing even his mama laughed.

“Old enough to do a favor for me.” The Colonel rose to his feet, aided
by his walking stick. “Think you can manage Cicero to the stable and back, Lem?”

The boy gazed up at his master, then at the big bay gelding hitched to a post outside the smithy, and nodded hard enough to bounce his curls.

“Then ride home and tell Mr. Crane we’ve need of the mule. You can lead it back, but be sure he puts the packsaddle on it first.”

“Yes sir, Colonel!”

Understanding dawned on Willa. “Do you mean the mule for me? Please … do not go to the trouble.”

“Actually,” Neil said, emerging from the smithy in time to hear her protest, “we’d be obliged by the loan. I dinna see how else we’ll be getting this lot back to the cabin,” he added, turning to her with a rueful glance at his injured arm.

Willa closed her lips over further protest. The Colonel swung Lemuel into the saddle. Small hands took up the reins, and heels far short of the stirrups kicked the bay into a jouncing trot along the track leading west from the village. Tiny on his high perch, the boy clung to the saddle with knees and dirty toes.

“He was on the back of a pony nigh afore he could walk,” Goodenough told her. “And it ain’t but a mile, you recall.”

The Colonel’s mouth pulled sideways. “He’s pestered me to ride that horse unaided since he was four. Tall as he is, I’ve suspected he could do it since he turned five.”

With a last glance at the boy disappearing over the wooded hill to the west, Willa realized she’d yet to hear his father named and opened her mouth to ask. Before she could, on the heels of that realization came another. She looked at the Colonel, then at Goodenough, but it was Anni, standing by uncharacteristically silent, who caught her eye. Willa sensed Anni had been watching her, following her glances—and the progression of her thoughts. Now she was staring at Willa with her
blue eyes wide, in them a look both acknowledging and beseeching silence.

Willa looked away, knowing her question need never be asked.

It was as well, for she’d lost heart for talk. Her soul felt pressed by all the faces she’d seen in a short space of time, most of them strangers, settlers come since the war’s ending. A few of Shiloh’s inhabitants who remembered her had approached her, though none made mention of her parents. More had kept their distance, peering out of cabin doors only to step inside when she returned their gazes. Some had greeted Neil MacGregor and pretended not to see her standing there. The thoughts of most were easy to read. The thoughts she could not guess at were those of the man now talking with Neil.

In daylight she could see how sharply Elias Waring had aged. The stick he leaned upon explained the lines of pain around his mouth. Anni’s news of their family’s losses explained those of grief.

If his physical presence had diminished, his authority had increased, for he was now a county magistrate as well as colonel of militia. The temptation was strong to blurt out her concerns to this man who’d called off her harassers in the store—but she could not forget he was also Richard’s father.

She let the talk swirl around her.

A breeze brushed her face. Rain clouds had risen above the trees in the west. From a distance a grumble of thunder sounded, all but muffled by the clanking and steamy hissing from the smithy.

She closed her eyes. The voices around her speaking rapid English, the half-forgotten smells and noises, seemed things from out of a dream, lacking substance to make them real. She did not feel real, standing in the middle of it all.
“You found your way back to us,”
Anni’s father had said. But had she? Was she trying to wrestle back to life a person dead and buried? Maybe Joseph was right. She thought of him with affection and gratitude
and not for the first time wondered at the inscrutable ways of the Almighty. Why had she not been adopted by a Bear Clan woman, or Turtle Clan? Why a woman from the same clan as Joseph Tames-His-Horse, who loved her with a devotion few women probably ever knew?

She could not help thinking of what he asked of her, to come back to the People. Was she meant to remain Burning Sky of the Wolf Clan? Should she have gone to Niagara? Should she still go?

Hearing the thud of approaching hooves, she opened her eyes. Lemuel had returned, proud and triumphant, leading the mule with its packsaddle.

With their purchases loaded and the chickens secured, Willa lifted the heavy carrying basket, settled the tumpline across her brow, and took hold of the mule’s lead rein.

The Colonel stopped her with a hand to her arm.

“Wilhelmina. There are matters you and I should discuss.” He searched her face. The look in his eyes … she could only call it cautious. “Let it be when you return the mule. I’ve explained to Richard—and will to anyone necessary—that until the auction, you’re to be allowed to remain where you are.”

Willa thought relief might buckle her knees. Neil was swiftly at her side, looking into her face. “Are you all right? Shall I take the mule?”

Willa shook her head. “I will lead it.”

The Colonel looked at Neil. “Mr. MacGregor, I’d be obliged if you’d accompany Wilhelmina when she returns the mule. If ’twould be no inconvenience to you.”

Willa saw the look of warning that passed between Neil and Elias Waring. She would not be made to leave her land, for the time being. The Colonel had said that. He had not said he could prevent all harm from touching her, out there on her isolated farm.

The daylight grayed as clouds rose above the ridges, covering the sun. They had not gone far past the mill when the drumming of thunder came again. That was what Willa thought it at first, but it did not stop when thunder should, but grew louder, coming on.

Halting, they turned to see two mud-spattered horsemen coming up the track. One of them was Richard on his blazed bay. He rode his horse past them and halted in the track, blocking the way.

“That’s our mule,” he said.

He was two days bearded, and Willa could smell his sweat from where she stood, yet he looked less worn than the middle-aged man who accompanied him.

“Your father loaned us the beast,” Neil MacGregor said. “He also means Willa to remain on her land—unmolested by you or anyone else—until the auction.”

“But the land will be assessed,” Richard replied. “Not even the Colonel can prevent that.”

“I assume that is your business here, sir?” Neil MacGregor asked, addressing the second rider, who’d kept his horse to the side of the track.

“Wendell Stoltz,” the man said, when Richard failed to introduce him. He opened a satchel at his side and removed a sheaf of papers, flipping through until he found the one he sought. “And this,” he added, nodding at Willa, “is the woman concerned with the property of the Loyalist Dieter Obenchain?”

“She’s his daughter, Willa Obenchain,” Neil said. “Have you proof he was a Loyalist?”

Stoltz held up the paper. “The burden of proof isn’t laid upon me. I’m merely authorized to assess the previously confiscated properties along West Canada Creek and its adjacent waters, for resale at auction.” Turning to Willa, he inquired, “Are you able to read, Miss Obenchain?”

Willa stepped forward and took the paper. A quick scan of it showed
her sentence after sentence composed of more words than needed to be there, words that writhed and turned upon themselves, twisting the language she’d been born to into knots. In desperation she thrust the paper at Neil, who would understand it and tell her whether it gave this man the authority he claimed.

Neil MacGregor took the paper in his uninjured hand, but though he looked at it, he seemed to make no more sense of it than she had. That made no sense to
her
.

The breeze picked up while they stood there, surrounded by massive trees creaking, their upper boughs swaying. Thunder muttered, nearer now.

Richard broke their baffled silence. “Enough of this. There’s nothing here to question.”

“If you are determined to see this done now,” Stoltz said to him, looking as if he’d rather do anything else, “I suggest we hasten to it.” He bent from the saddle to take the paper from Neil and returned it to the satchel.

“Miss Obenchain has reason to think her parents were falsely accused,” Neil said, but Willa barely heard for the new dread washing over her. Mounted as they were, Richard and the assessor would reach her cabin long before she could. There was no way to warn Joseph of their coming.

Thinking this, she turned to gaze down the track. When she looked back at Richard, he was looking at her, his blue eyes intense.

“Willa, you understand the confiscation isn’t my doing. This was put in motion years ago. But since we’re here, I’d as soon see this part of it done.”

Before she could speak, Richard wheeled his horse down the track toward her cabin. The assessor, with an audible sigh, turned his horse to follow. She watched them ride away, then looked at Neil.

Alarm swept his features; he had thought of Joseph too.

“I must hurry.” She thrust the mule’s lead at him and slipped her musket
from her shoulder. Richard and the assessor had disappeared where the track made a bend through the woods. She broke into a run, the basket heavy on her hips, the tumpline straining across her brow, pulling hard on her neck. Neil called her name as thunder rolled, but she pretended not to hear.

Let him be gone—gone to hunt for me as he said he would do
.

Willa came into the yard with the first drops of rain, side and back and shoulders aching, gasping in breath. Richard’s and the assessor’s mounts stood in the yard, cropping grass. A small distance from the cabin stood a new shed-stall made of undressed saplings, with a proper pen for the goat. Beneath the porch eaves, cordwood was stacked. There was no spotted mare in the yard, or telltale saddlebags. Or Joseph.

Hearing voices, she hurried around the cabin. Richard and the assessor were in the side yard, looking at the ground where Joseph’s mare had been hobbled.