War Path (23 page)

“You astound me, husband,” Molly said, keeping time with the music. “I daresay you move as nimbly to the fiddle as you do on the trail. What other secrets will you show me?”

“You will have to come to the cabin to find out,” said Stark.

“And what will people say?” Molly flirtatiously replied.

“They will say there goes the most fortunate man in Fort Edward.”

Molly blushed. His compliment touched her heart, spread through her like warm wine. The big man had a gift for words after all. With a tug and a turn of her wrist she led him from the dance and stepped in close for her words were for his ears alone. “Then take me there.”

“But what of the feast?” Stark asked.

“My hunger cannot be sated by food or drink. It requires a more intimate appeasement.” She looked at him, guarded, toying, the hint of a smile on her full lips. Stark felt the blood creep to his cheeks. He gulped, took her by the hand and as the reel ended, began to work his way through the well-wishers. Friends and neighbors clapped him on the back or embraced Molly, made for slow going. The circle seemed to tighten for a moment so Stark lowered his shoulder and had to make his own path, with Molly close behind.

Suddenly he burst through the throng, staggered forward and blundered into Major Ransom, very nearly bowling the officer over on his backside. Ransom's aide rushed to the major's defense.

“See here, Mister Stark,” snapped Lieutenant Allan Penmerry, the product of a life of privilege and over-indulgence. The lieutenant had taken the liberty of inviting himself to the festivities. The youthful officer was determined to make a place for himself as Ransom's second in command. He pretended not to be cowed by the Ranger looming over him.

“Sorry, Major,” Stark said as he reached out and steadied the major and kept him from falling backwards. He scowled at Penmerry, an officer he considered to be about as valuable as teats on a bull.

“There, there, Lieutenant,” Ransom exclaimed soothing his subordinate's
ruffled feathers
. “No harm done that a bit of straightening won't set to right.” The English officer readjusted his scarlet frock coat. Sunlight glinted off the brass buttons that adorned his wide lapel. He was wearing his best powdery white periwig. His features certainly re-reflected the responsibilities that fate had thrust upon him. His gaze was steady, his eyes reflected the beginnings of a resolute patience and wisdom only the frontier could bring.

Men learned, here. Or men died … here. And that was both chapter and verse.

Penmerry went his commander one better. Unlike Ransom's lived-in looking finery, the lieutenant had ventured out among the provincials in his best kept uniform, one he kept tucked away in a trunk at the foot of his bed. He sported a plumed tricorn hat in hopes of lending an air of dignity to the proceedings. But once the fiddle and fifes began to play and the colonials began to gambol about like a tribe of barbarians, he realized all sense of propriety was lost. However he was polite enough to bow in Molly's direction. After all he didn't want to offend a woman who frequently cavorted about in breeches and could outshoot any man in the Regiment.

“I wish you well, milady,” said Penmerry.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. And, Major Ransom, I am deeply grateful for your presence. As Reverend Strittmatter has yet to make his first spring foray across the mountains, John and I would have had to wait for several more weeks before proclaiming our vows and he might have turned tail and taken to the forest.”

“I am glad to have been of service.” The major bowed. He listened as the musicians started another tune, this one of local creation, a broadside ballad heralding the exploits of Johnny Stark. “You have both my blessings and my sympathies,” Ransom added, “for I suspect you have joined yourself to both man and legend.”

Stark shook his head, frowned at the suggestion. “Locksley Barlow is o'erfond of the hot-buttered rum Tess serves at the Kit Fox Tavern. His ballad has less to do with my exploits and more with the young man's intemperate dreams.”

“Hmm … so you say,” Ransom replied. “But remember, Stark, I was there at Bloody Meadow. You rallied your men and checked the savage advance and drove back the French.” Ransom indicated Sergeant Strode and a cluster of British soldiers garbed in green buckskin leggings and hunting shirts adorned with scarlet trim … me newly-formed King's Rangers. They were yet to be a match for the long hunters, but they would learn.

Stark noted their presence, with a mixture of pride and deep-seated misgivings. He wondered if the day might come when he would regret teaching these regimental volunteers the ways of the forest. A cloud passed across his spirit, but he willed it away, refusing to surrender to whatever portent it might hold. Major Lucien Barbarat and Atoan were real threats. They had no need of imagined dangers. Suddenly, Molly's hand was in his, leading him away with a fervent but hasty farewell.

Children darted past them, laughing, squealing, nibbling on roasted ears of corn, johnny-cakes, their faces and fingers smeared from the pies they had been assigned to protect. They called out to the big man who answered in kind, addressing each child by his or her name. His bride was impressed. Further up the riverbank and heading toward the cabin, Molly and John tried to avoid the banquet tables but Charity appeared in front of them with plates of food she had prepared just so for the happy couple. She insisted they take a meal because a man like Stark was going to need his strength this night.

“Aunt Charity!” Molly blurted out, aghast.

“Tut tut,” the older woman retorted. “I was a young bride just like you. Well younger really. I didn't have to wait on Ephraim like you did on this big 'un.”

“Then you will understand when I do this,” Stark said. He handed Molly both plates, then scooped her up in his arms, leaned over and kissed the older woman on her plump cheek and continued toward the cabin he had prepared for his new bride. Charity blushed, laughed aloud and waddled off, her round, ample frame all ajiggle the faster she moved.

Stark set Molly down before the front door and nudged it open with his strong right hand. Molly stood in the doorway, caught a glimpse of freshly-chinked log walls adorned with wildflowers and a four-poster bed with a festive-looking patchwork quilt upon a mound of feather bedding. There were curtains on the windows and a cheery fire in the hearth.

Molly sighed. “I had resigned myself to the inevitable, that we would never be alone.” She set the plates of food upon a sideboard just inside the door and walked across the room to the bedroom, and turned and looked back at her beloved. She unbound her hair, then started on the ribbons fastening her bodice. “Legend are you?” Her ruby lips slightly parted. “Show me.”

John Stark followed her inside and closed the door.

29

H
e dreamed of smooth flesh and soft supple curves, of warm and willing kisses, he dreamed of fire and storm, of yearning and sweet satiation. He saw yesterday and tomorrow and like any man in love, sensed how precarious and yet how wondrous it was, to be with the one who completed him.

Honey dreams and deep sleep, sunbeams gilded his heart, moon glow defined the room with luminous shafts of opalescent light. All doubts, all uncertainties were transformed, by the ebb and pitch of passion, roiling lust, spent strength, whispered endearments drifting into sleep and silver dreams.

“My beloved.…”

“… beloved mine.”

Stark bolted upright in bed, sweat beaded his lip, matted his hair, his muscles tensed, chest heaved, shoulders rose and fell; as he breathed, for a moment gasping, his ears straining to hear, in the silence, beyond the silence, his senses honed by the wilderness searched the nocturnal gloom without the cabin walls.

Molly's hand touched his forearm. Propped on her elbows, the covers fell away from her breasts, temples of desire capped by taut pink blooms, enticing any other time. But not when he had been pulled from sleep by a dire prescience. He glanced in her direction, his expression telling her all she needed to know, that stealth was called for, stealth and a loaded gun.

Stark swung his long legs over the edge of the bed and pulled on his breeches and reached for the double-barreled pistol he'd placed on the nightstand next to the bed. Molly pulled a nightshirt over her head as her husband rose from the bed and gingerly padded across the floor to stand in the doorway. He reached off to the side and slung a leather strap over his shoulder. Now a brass powder flask and shot pouch dangled at his side. He heard a familiar metallic click behind him and looking over his shoulder saw Molly held a horse pistol, primed and cocked in her steady hands. The Ranger nodded. She did the same. He continued across the room, paused at the door to catch up a tomahawk from where he'd left it on the table. He shoved the pistol in his waistband and took up his rifle. Old Abraham was a reassuring weight in his hands.

Now he eased over to the window and slowly, using the most torturous caution, shoved the shutters open with the muzzle of his rifle. With no interior light to distract him, his vision need no adjustment to the night. He glanced at the long-case clock on the far wall, a gift from the local artisans. His eyes drifted up the swaying pendulum and tried to focus on the face and the time. The London-made mechanical workings had been freighted over the mountains from Boston, but the case had been crafted out of rich cherrywood by one of the Barlows.

It had been a wedding gift for his bride and had a melodious way of tolling the hours, not that John Stark needed some English clocksmith to tell him the time, a man who could read the starlit night and approximate the hour by the sateen sailing moon above. A man's aim must be accurate; his reading of the trail and the dangers ahead, precise; for anything else an educated guess would suffice.

It was well after midnight, around three, give or take, and the wedding celebration had long disbanded with the revelers off to home and hearth. All that remained of the previous afternoon's festivities were the empty tables and the recessed, blackened circles where even now a few coals feebly pulsed, like miniature molten orange hearts beating fitfully among the blackened mounds of charred wood.

And there between the remains of day and eventide, delineated against a backdrop of moonlight glistening on the Hudson River behind him, stood a solitary figure, a man of average height, squat, with sloping shoulders, slightly bowed legs. A man alone, yet oddly menacing, standing still as a statue, watching the house.

One of the Fargos, Stark thought, eyes narrowing, jaw tightening. He walked to the front door and shoved it open and stalked outside, striding barefoot down the riverbank, gun in hand and his thoughts shifting from romance to murder. He would not be harried, if he had to send every one of the Fargos home in a basket.

The watcher retreated for a moment, a hesitant step, then wisely held his ground as if realizing in that one instant of weakness that to turn and run meant to die before he reached the water's edge. He held up his hands, palms upward. He recognized the big man advancing toward him, but then he had been watching throughout the day, biding his time, afraid to make his presence known for fear of just such a reaction. His patience, and the spyglass in his coat pocket, helped him locate Stark's cabin. And that was what he had needed to know most of all.

“Major Stark
, I come in peace,” he called out.

Stark stopped in his tracks, looming over the smaller man, pistol in hand leveled at the intruder who had disrupted his wedding night. A Frenchman? “What the devil is this?”

“The devil?
Oui
, my friend, I do bring news of the devil.”

“Do I know you?” Stark squinted, studying the man's thick homely features in the dim light.

“Certainement.”
The Frenchman nodded and removed his woolen cap. “You gave me a gift once.”

“This is nonsense?”

“Monsieur
, I am Benoit Turcotte.” The Frenchman continued, nervously crumpling the hat in his hands. “You gave me my life once. I have come to return the favor,
mon
ami
. I bring a
cadeau de mariage
of my own.”

Something in the way the Frenchman spoke, the flat, almost benumbed tone of his voice made Stark's flesh crawl. He readied the rifle, thumbed the hammer back. One false move … “What is the gift?”

“Butcher of Fort William Henry.
Oui
, I bring you the life of Colonel Lucien Barbarat … and how to end it!”

30

B
enoit Turcotte gratefully accepted the tankard of hard cider Molly Stark handed him. He remembered her from the ruse that had cost him his bateau and his livelihood as a
voyageur
. Yes, this pretty one had lured him ashore. Well, the fault was as much his own and besides, how could one hold a grudge against such a beautiful woman?

“Merci, Madame Stark,”
he said. If Molly remembered him there was nothing about her expression to reveal it.

The Frenchman glanced about at the men Stark had gathered to hear his story. It was obvious there was no love lost for the
voyageur
here. Turcotte was grateful he hadn't been marched to the gallows and hanged for a spy. That's the treatment Stark would have received in Fort Carillon. Major Lucien Barbarat favored a free hand with the hangman's noose, curse his black soul.

Benoit Turcotte glimpsed his reflection floating on the amber surface in his tankard as he raised the pewter vessel in salute to John Stark and his bride of one day, and then acknowledged the English major, Robert Rogers, and the Rangers who were congregated around the long, heavy table beneath the spreading branches of a mighty oak. Stark lifted his own cup in kind.

“Best while you have it, use your breath, there is no drinking after death,” said Johnny.

The
voyageur
chuckled softly and nodded in approval. He drained half the contents and slammed the tankard on the tabletop, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his river-man's shirt. He stared at the tankard as if it were both adversary and friend.