Lori Benton (6 page)

“Mr. MacGregor, are you all right? I’m so sorry for what my brother did to you.”

Anni’s words jarred Willa from her thoughts in time to see Neil MacGregor shift on the porch, and wince. The man was clearly in pain, but if he regretted coming to her defense, he did not show it.

“Aye, Mrs. Keppler. It wasna your fault. But what he said there at the last—what did he mean by it? Why should he threaten Miss Obenchain?”

Anni wiped her cheeks. “It’s the land—your father’s land, Willa. I started to tell you he was suspected of being a Loyalist. This farm was confiscated as Tory property, years ago. Lots of farms were, and now they’re being sold off to the highest bidder. Richard has had his eye on this one since the war’s ending. He means to bid on it whenever the auction is held.”

A coldness formed in the pit of Willa’s stomach, as the news both chilled and confused her. Anni’s words swirled through her mind. Tory
property. Confiscated. Sold off. But all she could force past her lips was, “My parents were not Tories.”

Even as she spoke, a niggle of doubt wormed through her thoughts. The Kanien’kehá:ka had taken her in the autumn of 1772, nearly twelve years ago, long before the outbreak of war. But even then there had been talk of its brewing, on that very cabin porch. She remembered Papa reading aloud letters exchanged with some relation back east. In Albany, she thought. Taxes, government, the English King George … those had been the subjects of those letters. Had Dieter Obenchain been a king’s man? She could not remember. She’d been barely fourteen years old, with her nose buried in romantic novels, not letters about politics.

“ ’Tis a thing happening all over,” Neil said, nodding as though the situation was beginning to come clear to him. “The war was a staggering drain on the states, not just New York. Debts are owing. Selling off Tory land is a means of paying down those debts.”

“Now that there’s no fighting,” Anni said, “all Richard talks about are the committees of confiscation and which farms along Black Kettle Creek will be up for auction soon. I don’t know how soon, Willa, but there’s a man coming to assess the properties north of German Flats. Richard has made it no secret he expects to own this tract.”

Willa clenched the porch’s edge—planks Papa had hewn and set in place, planks her feet had helped to smooth. Her parents were gone. She wanted desperately to ask when, how, but could not in the face of this new shock find the words.

Neil MacGregor found them for her. “You were fixing to tell us what happened to Willa’s parents?”

Anni shook her head and looked with sympathy at Willa. “They disappeared six years ago. Your grandmother with them, we think.”

Six years. The coldness in Willa’s belly spread, encompassing her heart. “Killed?”

“Maybe not. Their—forgive me—their bodies were never found.”

“I do not understand, Anni. If the British or Long Knives did not kill them, where are they?”

“Long Knives? Is that what you—” Anni did not finish the question. But her voice hardened a tiny measure as she said, “Let me try to explain, Willa. There were so many raids during those years—a homestead burned by one side, then weeks later another by way of reprisal, sometimes many at once—but after such raids, the families who sympathized with the Tories, the ones that got spared, would pack up and flee, follow the raiders back to the British in Canada.”

Neil frowned, glancing between them. “You’re saying that’s what Willa’s parents did? They fled to Canada?”

Anni raised helpless hands. “They didn’t come to Fort Dayton, or Herkimer, with the rest of us. Some would say that’s proof enough where their loyalty lay.”

“But our barn … It is nothing but ashes.” Willa dragged the words past an aching throat. “If my parents fled during a British raid—fled with the redcoats to Canada—then why was our barn burned?”

There were no answers here, only endless questions. And now, Richard’s threat. And behind him, this threat of confiscation.

The shaking had stopped. Willa took up the spade and stood, planting its handle firm on the ground when she swayed. There was little cornmeal left. She’d made a cake for Neil in the dark while he slept but had not broken her own fast.

There were green things growing now. Fiddleheads, wild lettuce, milkweed, dock. She would gather them … soon.

The sense of too little time pressed hard on her. There would be an auction, Anni said. An assessor was coming. Well, let him come. He would find her hard at work. On
her
land.

“I cannot listen anymore. There is too much to do.” A distant barking drew her gaze to the hills. “There, your dog at least is come back,” Willa said to Neil, and set out for the field, armed with spade and musket.

The soil of the upper field, nearest the cabin, was hard and weed choked. She had not broken another square yard of it before Anni came marching out after her and stood in her path.

“Go ahead and dig, Willa, but whether you want to listen or not, I have more to say.”

Willa moved around Anni’s worn shoes. She stabbed the earth with the spade, while Anni’s voice stabbed her heart.

“You are very changed, and I can only imagine you suffered your own hell. But that’s exactly what the past years were for us here. Hell—or the nearest I ever expect to come to it. The British and that red fiend, Brant—”

Willa clenched her teeth at the name. Joseph Brant—Thayendanegea of the Mohawk, schooled by the Reverend Wheelock as a young man, a warrior who’d done his utmost to preserve the People’s land and independence—a
fiend
? She supposed Anni would see him so …

“And the militia being called up,” Anni was saying, a tremble in her voice. “The murders, massacres, loyalties questioned, families torn apart—”

“Like mine.”

“Like everyone’s.” Tears glistened in Anni’s eyes when Willa looked up, but there was a spark of something sharper too. “We lost Mama and Edward to raiding Indians, just before your parents disappeared. That very same spring—before everyone forted up. We’d lost Nicholas and Samuel at Oriskany the summer before. Richard and the Colonel never found their bodies—a blessing, maybe, considering what the Indians did to the fallen after that battle. But Mama was never right in her mind again after the news. And Francis. The day Mama and Edward were killed, Francis hid in the woods and saw them scalped in the dooryard.”

Willa clenched the spade’s smooth handle. “Anni,” she said, but there
were no words to touch such grief and horror. She knew there were no words.

Her mind latched onto the last member of the Waring clan Anni had mentioned, the youngest, who had hidden in the woods and survived. Francis Waring had been seven years old the last time Willa saw him, a child who spoke rarely, and then with a stutter that often rendered him unintelligible. A boy prone to wander, feral and unkempt, causing no end of worry. Other children had shunned him. He’d discomfited many an adult with his strange ways. Yet whenever she had visited the Warings’ home and found Francis mewed indoors, he’d followed her with timid, curious eyes.

Willa thought of the kettle, the wood, the flowers. She touched the spade with the toe of her moccasin. “Was it Francis who left this spade?”

“I can’t think who else it could have been. He comes here sometimes. It vexes Richard.” Anni drew a breath and released it with a sigh. “I didn’t mean what I said about braining Richard, for all he boils my blood. He’s still my brother, and I love him, but … he isn’t the boy you remember. All through the war he rode with the militia, as a scout for part of that time, and saw more death and butchery than anyone should in a dozen lifetimes, and maybe did too much of the same himself—I’ll never ask. But all that violence—it shattered something in him.”

A bruised reed
, Willa thought. So Richard was one too. But the pity that should have followed the thought found no purchase in her heart. Fear choked it out.

“He’s full of hate,” Anni said, “but he’s not past healing. I have to believe that.” Her eyes begged for understanding.

Willa looked away. “Hate for my people.”

“Indians, you mean?” Anni grasped her arm, forcing Willa to look at her. “How can you call them so? They took you from your people, your life. Of course Richard hates them. He’s the one who …” Anni bit her lip, searching Willa’s face.

Willa freed her arm. “The one who what?”

The indecision on Anni’s face dissolved. “He mightn’t want me telling you this, but you need to know. Richard tried to find you.”

Shock skittered up Willa’s spine. “Find me?”

“He set out after those savages who took you, found their trail and followed them over the mountains, all the way to Canada. He lost the trail, but still he spent months looking for you, offering to buy you back. No one would admit to knowing anything about you.”

“They hide the ones they mean to keep.” She knew she must sound indifferent to Anni. The truth was she was stunned. They
had
hidden her. She remembered the terror and confusion of those first weeks, how she’d been snatched from some task without warning or woken in the night—to be whisked away into the forest or downriver by canoe, before they settled her at last in a village near the Saint Lawrence River, where in time she accepted the life into which she’d been thrust. Became Burning Sky. All that time Richard had been trying to bring her home.

The Richard she remembered, not the man she’d met this day. That man had no intention of rescuing her, but of seeing her kicked aside like a stone in his path.

“It’s true what he said,” Anni went on. “He wanted to marry you. He was only waiting till you were both old enough. Did you know?”

Willa stared at the ridgeline to the north, trying in her mind to see Anni’s brother as he had been at sixteen, already big and strapping, his handsome face quick to light with a smile. Even at fourteen, with her girl’s body late to blossom, destined to grow much taller before it did, she had imagined herself as Wilhelmina Waring and more than once caught the same speculation in Richard’s eyes.

“I knew,” she said.

“Then do you understand, about Richard?” Anni’s question held an edge so faint it might have gone unnoticed.

But Willa did notice.

What was there to understand? Many warriors of the Longhouse people—the Iroquois—and her own northern Mohawk people, their close kin, had suffered as much as Richard, had seen horrors and committed them, had returned from the long campaign with bodies and hearts scarred. Some never returned in their souls, but became like wounded animals, lashing out at those who tried to tend them. Many had found their solace, and their shame, in traders’ rum.

“He is not the only one to have suffered.”

Anni grasped Willa’s hand. “I know that. Your parents—”

“Not only them.”

“And you, of course. But Richard is a man. He cannot understand that sometimes a woman has to do … what she’d rather not do, to survive.” Anni’s gaze was pained. “They forced you to do it, to be with one of their men. It’s something I tried not to think about, but of course I knew, if you’d survived …”

Willa pulled her hand from Anni’s. “The clan mothers made the match. I agreed to be the wife of the man they chose for me.”

“But you had to agree. Those women—they didn’t give you a choice.” When Willa did not reply, Anni stared in dawning comprehension, visibly appalled. “Willa … you didn’t
want
him, did you?”

“I wanted our children.” The ache, that deepest ache of all the many that never left Willa’s chest, swelled up tight and full, choking her. Making her want to beat at it again.

Anni made an attempt to rally after this new shock. “Children? Are they here … or did you have to leave them?”

“I would never have left them. But where they and their father have gone, I cannot follow.” Willa saw what was coming, the questions one would ask of any friend who admitted to the death of her entire family. She raised a hand to halt them. “That is all I have to say about them, Anni.”

After a silence that stretched taut between them, Willa glanced at Anni’s waistline and asked, “When is your new one to be born?”

She’d surprised Anni. “I didn’t think it showed yet, me still plump as a hen from the twins. I’m nigh four months along, so … early September.”

“I am glad for you.”

Anni’s eyes pooled, but she blinked back her tears. “What will you do, for now?”

Until your land is sold from under you
, Willa finished silently.

“I will stay.” Seeing doubt rise in Anni’s face, Willa took up the spade again and set to work.

Anni stepped out of the way. “How will you live?”

“I can plant enough to feed myself. Maybe a little more.” If there was time enough left to harvest it.

Anni bit back whatever she might have said to that and gazed toward the cabin. “Will he be staying? The Scotsman.”

“I do not see why he would.”

Especially after today.

“He mentioned Benjamin Franklin,” Anni persisted, still staring through the line of leafing trees between the field and cabin yard. “Something about a philosophical society … and
flora
, wasn’t it?”

Willa shrugged, not admitting to her curiosity about Neil MacGregor or the drawings in his satchel. He seemed a good man, though a different sort than any she had known. Which mattered not at all because she’d no means to feed him. Even if she had, it was unwise to let curiosity turn to liking. After his show of backbone on her behalf—despite its outcome—she was in danger of it.