Lori Benton (23 page)

Anni’s thoughts had followed a different path. “You have to tell the Colonel, Willa. This could lead to proving your parents were murdered, that maybe they weren’t Loyalists—”

“No, Anni.” Whoever killed her parents might still be in Shiloh, near enough to cause more harm should he, or they, learn the graves had been discovered. “Say nothing of them. Not yet. I—”

From the corner of her eye, Willa caught sight of a figure below, beyond the creek. Old Maeve Keegan was hobbling up the road again.

“I’ll be back, Anni,” she said, and ran for the path to the mill.

The old woman had reached the dooryard by the time Willa exited the mill. “Mrs. Keegan!”

Maeve halted, swaying over her cane. Breathless from her trek, she greeted Willa with a grasping claw of a hand and bright blue eyes. Willa leaned in close to hear her creaky voice above the mill fall. “Wilhelmina. I was after comin’ t’ see … comin’ t’ tell …”

“Darn it, Ma!” a man’s voice called over the faltering words. “Just hold her there, Miss Obenchain!”

Jack was already on his way up from the store, threatening to cut short the moment with her grandmother’s friend.

“Mrs. Keegan, what is it you want to tell me? Something about Oma—your friend, Dagna?”

The old woman beamed. “Dagna Mehler.”

“Do you know what happened to my grandmother?”

Maeve’s brow puckered. Her voice thinned, quavering with uncertainty. “What … happened?”

Willa tightened her grasp on the frail hand. “Try to remember. Please.”

She’d startled Maeve with her urgency. Now she watched, helpless, as whatever memory about her grandmother that had surfaced slipped away, receding into the depths of the old woman’s failing mind. Maeve knew it too. She stamped her stick in frustration as Jack reached them.

“She’s done it again,” he said, puffing for breath. “Turned my back for an instant …”

Willa approved the man’s attentiveness to his mother, if not his timing. “She’s trying to tell me something about my grandmother.”

Jack looked embarrassed. “You oughtn’t to fret yourself over what she says. Gets the past jumbled with the here and now, she does. I’ll just be taking her home.” He nodded to Willa, then turned his mother back toward the store. “Now, Ma. Why must you bother Miss Obenchain so?”

Willa had the urge to stamp her foot too, watching the old woman being herded away. She started after them but stopped as Maeve uttered a bleat of protest loud enough to carry above the mill falls: “I
know
who I mean. Dagna Fruehauf Mehler!”

Willa halted, one of her own long-buried memories bursting to the surface at last.
Fruehauf
. That was her grandmother’s name before she married
and
the name of the Albany relation with whom her father once exchanged letters—letters that might, if they still existed, give evidence of her parents’ loyalties. And keep her lands from being auctioned.

Tilda Fruehauf
. Her mother’s spinster cousin.

Someone was yelling loud enough to raise the cabin roof. Willa slowed Neil’s horse to a halt in the yard and was halfway out of the saddle when Owl rushed from the cabin, face twisted in defiance.

“I didn’t do it—it wasn’t me!” The boy saw Willa as he leaped from the porch and shot off toward the sheds that sheltered their animals.

“Owl? Come back! It isn’t safe to—”

“I’m going to feed the chickens!”

But it was to the corral he ran, ducking behind the horse shed. Willa hitched the roan to a porch post and hurried into the cabin. Pine Bird huddled on the corner pallet, looking fearful. Neil MacGregor leaned over the table, hands planted flat. Between them were two of his drawings, completely defaced with ink splatters.

Raising his head, he looked at her with an expression she had never seen. There was anger in it, and bemusement, but more evident than either was a wrenching hurt.

And no wonder.
She
felt the wound of this violation like a hot twisting in her chest. “Did the boy do this?”

Not until she spoke did Neil appear to fully register her presence. His expression cleared. With surprising calm he said, “I expect so. Though ye’ll have heard him deny it.”

She came to his side and touched a fingertip to a ruined picture. The marring ink hadn’t dried. “Your beautiful drawings.”

“Aye, well …” A sudden smile crowded out the hurt in his eyes, warming their blue. “You thought them beautiful?”

“Of course.” Had she never said so?

His anger seemed to have fled; hers had not. Owl had been persuaded to help her in the field by driving off the birds that would steal the kernels
and seeds before they could sprout, shouting and whistling whenever one was bold enough to land among the hillocks. Though he maintained his prickly aloofness with her, Willa had thought he’d warmed to Neil. Not as the girl had done, but Owl had at least shown him civility. She’d misread the boy.

“You helped his sister, saved her leg and maybe her life, and this is how you are repaid? Now I wonder if it was not he who took the spade and your glass, after all.”

Neil’s mouth quirked. “D’ye think he shot that arrow at the door too, whilst he sat there moping in the corner?”

“Of course I do not think that, but if you didn’t despoil the drawings, it must have been one of the children.” Willa crossed to the corner and stood before Owl’s huddled sister. “Did your brother put ink on those drawings? Did you see him do it?”

Pine Bird stared up at her, brown eyes huge in her thin face.

Feeling like a she-bear looming over a kitten, Willa repeated the questions. The girl flung herself beneath the quilt and set to crying. Willa bent to yank the quilt aside, but Neil stopped her, taking her by the arm.

She pulled free. “You cannot let this go without—”

“I ken that,” Neil said with exasperating calm. “But ye’ll get naught by frightening the lass. Let me talk to her, aye?”

Willa stared down at the shaking mound of quilt, and into her heart came a gladness that this bad thing had come between Neil and the children.
Gladness
. Why should she feel …?

Because she was jealous. Because even as the bond she had seen growing between Neil and the children had troubled her, her treacherous heart had been longing for the same thing to happen with her.

How could she? Neil MacGregor might not understand the pain he was letting himself and the children in for, but
she
knew.

“Talk, then.” Barely aware of what she did, she took the kettle and went to fill it at the spring, not looking once toward the horse shed.

Neil and Pine Bird were still in the corner when she returned, but the girl had come out from under the quilt.

Willa hung the kettle on the crane. From an ember buried in ashes, she kindled a blaze. Putting her back to them, she knelt to rummage through their food stores, having no notion what she sought. She wasn’t hungry. How could she be when her children were dead?

Goes-Singing. Sweet Rain
. How could she have gone on eating, breathing, while they did neither? She put a hand to her mouth. Behind her, Neil MacGregor murmured, his voice drenched in kindness. It made her heart both swell and ache. Then came to her ears the sweetest sound she’d heard since the winter brought its bleak curtain over her world. A small girl’s giggle.

Her whole being clenched against the sound, even as her heart yearned toward it with a need so visceral she’d have moaned if grief hadn’t closed her throat.

When a hand touched her shoulder, she jumped, pressing her fingers hard against her mouth.

“ ’Twas Owl, right enough. Maggie saw him do it.”

Willa stood. When she neither spoke nor turned, Neil touched her again. “Willa, you could be kinder to them.”

The soft-spoken words burned like hornets’ stings. She shrugged off his hand.

“It is better this way.”

“Better, how? Willa, look at me. How is it better?” It was time to speak the truth, if he would not see it for himself. “It is good, this wrong that has come between you. It will wound them less when you go.” She turned to see his beautiful, uncomprehending eyes. “Listen. Your wrist is well enough. Your horse and all your things are returned to you. Why have you stayed?”

Surprise sparked in his eyes and something else he hid too quickly for her to read. Something that reminded her unwillingly of that morning, in the garden.

“D’ye think I’d leave Maggie, ’twas the slightest chance she needed my care?”

She forgot the garden in a rush of frustration. “Why do you call her that? They wish her to be called Pine Bird.”

“Owl wishes it.
She
asked me to call her Maggie.”

“When?”

“The day after Joseph brought them. You were in the field.” He shook his head. “Why does it trouble ye so?”

“It’s what her father called her. Do you mean to take his place? Or only win her heart with the kindness of a father, then crush it when you go?”

She had hurt him with her accusation. That was plain. She braced herself when he started to speak, but he checked, studying her far too closely for comfort.

“That isna why you’re angry. Is it?”

“No? Then tell me why I’m angry, if you know so much.”

“I’d rather you tell me,” he said, with something of the gentleness he’d used with the girl. It was a powerful thing. Little wonder the child had not withstood it. It took all her will to turn from it now. Even when she put her back to him, he waited, as if hoping she might yet speak. But would it bring her daughters back to speak of them now?

Silence stretched, as brittle and wounding as broken glass.

“I’m away to the yard,” Neil finally said. “I mean to have a talk with the lad, who, incidentally, you’ve more in common with than ye may think.”

Shirt sleeves rolled high, sweat streaming, Neil set the length of wood on the block and raised the ax. It split beneath his blow with a satisfying
chunk
. Less satisfying was the painful twinge that shot through his wrist.

The chore needed doing. In Joseph’s absence the task had fallen to
Willa. Watching her chop the wood that cooked his meals and lighted his work of an evening had done his pride little good, never mind till recently it had been a task beyond his managing. It wasn’t the wisest thing to be doing even now. Any second he expected Willa to appear and scold him for it.

It was Owl who came to him. From the corner of his eye, Neil spied the boy edging from behind the horse shed to creep along the corral fence. He went on cutting wood, flinging pieces into a haphazard pile, even when he knew Owl had circled the cabin and stood behind him. He sent up a prayer for the lad to muster whatever he meant to say, and quick. His wrist couldn’t endure much more.

“I’m big enough to use an ax.”

Neil heaved the ax into the block and turned, pushing back damp hair as he wiped his brow. Owl shot a startled look at his forehead, then stood scuffing one of the moccasins Willa had made for him in the chip-spattered grass.

“So you are. Help me sort this lot first. Then I mean to have a talk with ye.”

That sounded more ominous than he’d intended, but he let the impression of impending reprimand stand.

The boy moved with the alacrity of a slug, dragging out the stacking of wood beneath the porch, reminding Neil of himself as a lad, sent to fetch a switch from the hedgerow—to be used on his backside in punishment for some mischief. He couldn’t say the thought of tanning Owl in like manner hadn’t crossed his mind, but Willa was right. The lad wasn’t his son, and he sensed there was something besides mischief or ill will behind what the boy had done.

A breeze freshened the air as he took a seat on the end of the porch, looking out past the chopping block and the clearing that terminated in a wall of thickening green.

Inside the cabin, Willa spoke, too low for him to catch her words. She
was talking to the girl, at least. That was good. He heard the kettle lid clang and hoped, vexed though she was, she meant to make something for their dinner.

Her need to speak of her own children was a kind of wound, open and bleeding, one he longed to wash and anoint and bind. Joseph had said she would speak of it when she was ready. What if she didn’t recognize her need? So much had happened since her return—rescuing him, finding her parents dead, her home and livelihood threatened. Now she had these children, whom tragedy seemed to follow like a cloud of midges, to care for.