Lori Benton (16 page)

“I’ll leave you with a detailing of my assessment.” Stoltz pushed a sheet
of foolscap across the table. “An estimate. The final price will be fixed before the auction and will no doubt increase with the bidding.”

Beside her, Neil MacGregor shifted in his chair. “When is it to be, the auction?”

“Also yet to be fixed, but Miss Obenchain may look to the autumn.”

Stoltz rolled the map as Willa read the value set on her land, the ransom she must pay to redeem what she considered hers, a sum slightly nearer two hundred pounds than three hundred. It might as well have been ten thousand, for all she could imagine ever paying it.

“If present company holds me pardoned, there’s a final property along Black Kettle to assess.” Stoltz hesitated, gazing at her apologetically. “Miss Obenchain, there are times when my duties as assessor bring me no joy. And should you disprove what is commonly held against your father, that he never declared himself for the Patriot cause because he was, in fact, a Loyalist, then rest assured I shall do what I can to bring that proof before the commissioners of confiscation, to forestall these proceedings. But it must be unmitigated proof.”

Though she wanted to, Willa could not dislike the man. “I will find that proof.” Her assertion hung in the air, feeble words with nothing behind them but determination.

Goodenough followed the assessor out, leaving Willa and Neil alone with the Colonel.

The parlor had changed in the years since Willa last stepped foot inside it. Small reminder remained of Anni’s mother, Sarah Waring. The room smelled of tobacco now. The furnishings were sparser, the tables unadorned. An oak-wood fire burned in the hearth, and a clock ticked on the wide-molded mantel. She remembered the clock. It and the fire were the only sounds in the room, until the Colonel spoke.

“You’ve begun planting, Richard tells me.”

“I am still breaking ground, but I will plant soon.”

The Colonel reached for a pipe, which he’d smoked earlier but had let go out. He tapped the bowl gently against the table, scattering dottle over the polished surface. “I’d ask you to consider leaving the land at rest for the present and coming here to live.”

Willa opened her mouth, but the Colonel raised his pipe against a hasty response. “Dieter Obenchain, whatever his politics, was a good neighbor, an honest man. In his place—as a father, if you will—I offer you shelter, while you consider what you may wish to do …”

Willa stiffened in her chair. “You would see me admit defeat without trying to prove my parents’ innocence?”

Elias Waring sighed, as if with a great weariness. “
Innocence
is a word I’ve learned to ascribe in strictest moderation, Wilhelmina. After the war we’ve come through, we are none of us innocent.”

Neil MacGregor cleared his throat. “Respectfully, sir, are ye saying her parents deserved what happened to them?”

Willa caught the guarded look that crossed the Colonel’s face.

“Anni has said she does not know what happened to them,” she said. “Perhaps it is that you know?”

Abandoning the pipe, Anni’s father rose from the table and crossed to the hearth, his limp more pronounced without the aid of his walking stick. He took up a poker and pushed at the logs in the grate, raising a spurt of flame.

“Has Anni told you about Oriskany, where we lost Sam and Nick?” he asked, instead of answering her question. “It was in that battle,” he went on when Willa nodded, “that I took a ball through the thigh. The wound was slow healing. I was here abed from August until November of that year, 1777. Sarah and Edward died the spring after Oriskany. Afterward, and until the war ended, I spent little time in Shiloh.”

The Colonel leaned against the mantel, watching the flames, firelight showing plain the deep-etched lines of his face. “Richard and I rode with the militia up and down West Canada Creek and between the forts on the
Mohawk, that last summer your parents were seen. There were countless raids on settlements from here down into Pennsylvania. Impossible to know who was responsible for them all.”

“Was there reason to think Indians were involved?” Neil asked. “In her parents’ case.”

The Colonel’s gaze lifted. “If an arrow found embedded in the cabin door counts as such. But as our worthy assessor would say, that cannot be counted as
unmitigated
proof of who was behind that raid. Some of the Iroquois fought on our side.”

It was the Oneida who had sided with the Long Knives against the British and the rest of the Longhouse nations, in large part due to their beloved missionary, Samuel Kirkland—the man she had to thank for Joseph’s faith. And her own.

Yet Willa felt herself deflate in disappointment. How could she ever learn what had happened to her parents, what they might have thought or said or did, when the world she’d left them in so long ago had been scattered to the winds, just like the Great Council Fire of the Longhouse people? If anyone knew the truth of what happened to the Obenchains, surely they would have come forward about it by now.

“I know about the Oneida.” At her words, the air seemed to crackle like the fire in the hearth. The Colonel studied her, curious, questioning. “What is it you wish to ask me, Colonel?”

Elias Waring’s eyes were sober. “I would be lying if I say the question hasn’t preyed on my mind—and been the subject of many a prayer. If I may ask, were you treated kindly during your captivity?”

Captivity
. How long since she had thought of her life with the Kanien’kehá:ka in such a way?

“Except for the journey north after I was taken,” she said, aware of Neil MacGregor beside her, listening, “when I was pressed to travel swiftly, I was treated well enough. It was longer before I learned to appreciate it, but from the beginning, I was valued, though white.”

Anni’s father looked at her sharply, as though trying to discern a slight in her words. “Did you never attempt escape?”

The Colonel’s question jarred. “How should I have? For weeks I was closely guarded, moved from place to place. By the time I was settled …” By then, she’d been adopted, named, and she had met Joseph Tames-His-Horse.

She couldn’t say when it happened, but sometime during the months after that meeting in the cornfield, as she allowed herself to be drawn into the life of the Kanien’kehá:ka, into the family who patiently taught her their ways and words, a day had dawned when her first thought had not been suffused with longing for the family and the life from which she’d been torn.

The Colonel abandoned the mantel for the chair across the table, grimacing as he sat. “Far be it from me to judge a situation I have not, by God’s grace, been forced to endure. You were young and alone and did what needs must to survive. You chose to return to us in the end. We will leave it there.”

Willa did not wish to leave it there. “I returned because the mother who adopted me died. And the man who was my husband fell in battle. And then when the smallpox took—”

“Wilhelmina. I’m aware the Mohawks have suffered—those in Canada as well as here. The British tossed them aside like a spent weapon on the field as they fled.” The Colonel must have seen her flinch at his words, for he made an effort to soften his voice. “I wonder if Anni told you one other thing. Did she tell you Richard spent weeks searching for you, as far afield as Montreal? He was barely more than a boy, but he made that journey. For you.”

“She told me.”

When she said no more, he asked, “Does that soften your opinion of him?”

Neil drew breath to speak, but Willa forestalled him with a look. She
did not know what to make of Richard’s painful attempt at apology, or the news that he had tried to find her so long ago, before giving up. But one thing had not been retracted or erased.

“Richard made it plain he will take my land from me. I have made it plain I will stop him—and anyone else who tries—if I can. The land is all I have, Colonel.” Knowing she risked making an enemy of the one man in Shiloh who could be of help to her, she said, “That is why I cannot accept your invitation, as generous as it is. Not as long as Richard dwells under your roof.”

A sharp light flared in the Colonel’s eyes. “I have forbidden him to harass you, but it would help to keep the peace if you don’t provoke him.”

“Provoke him?” Neil replied, but again Willa’s look forestalled his saying more. She’d glimpsed a truth in the Colonel’s eyes when the sharpness came into them. Elias Waring did not see—or would not admit to seeing—what the war had done to his eldest son. Perhaps in all fairness he could not see it clearly, having witnessed a change that must have happened in stages. Perhaps, too, Richard had grown adept at hiding from his father the darkness in his heart. A darkness she’d seen staring from his eyes when he first rode into her cabin yard. She wanted to believe Richard was sincere in his repentance, but the knot of dread she’d carried in her chest since that meeting had not been dispelled by any words he or his father had said since.

They took their leave of the Colonel on the front steps, but had not gone a dozen paces toward the track that would take them back to Shiloh before Richard came striding around the house from the direction of the stables, face set with a determination to match his pace. Aram Crane trailed behind him but stopped at sight of Willa and Neil.

Richard hesitated, then squared his shoulders and came toward her. Willa halted.

Colonel Waring, standing in the doorway, blurted his son’s name. “Richard!”

Perhaps it was only surprise at his appearance, but it sounded like a warning in Willa’s ears. Richard’s expression worked itself into something perceptibly softer. His breeches and long work frock were stained. He’d clearly come straight from his fields. He wore no hat, and his bound hair was streaked from sun and sweat.

“Willa,” he said. “I heard you brought the mule back.”

Aram Crane had obviously run to fetch him. Of his own accord, or had Richard requested he do so?

She was conscious of Neil MacGregor rooted at her side. They both looked to where they had seen Crane, but the man had retreated behind the big stone house.

“I hoped for a chance to talk to you. Alone.” Richard made something less than rudeness of the word by bending his head to acknowledge Neil MacGregor.

“Ye dinna need speak to him,” Neil said to her, low near her ear.

“He will do nothing untoward,” Willa replied. “Not in front of his father.” She nodded at Richard and crossed the yard, stopping to face him when they were out of earshot of the others. He stood too close for her comfort—she could smell the earth and sweat clinging to his clothes and skin—but she did not step back. “What do you wish to say to me?”

As they had in the rain outside her cabin, his words came with struggle. “Did the Colonel … Did he tell you … Did he offer the invitation?”

“To come and live here with you? He did.”

Richard’s brow furrowed. “And?”

“I mean to live on my land, to plant and tend it.”

The muscles in Richard’s jaw stiffened. “It gave me grief to see you grubbing in the dirt yesterday, to see the drudge those savages have made of you.”

She had thought she’d slipped away before he saw her. Then his words penetrated. Grubbing? Drudge? For a woman to bring forth sustenance
from the land was a sacred thing, not shameful. Willa contained the urge to rake her nails down the front of his work-stained chest.

“You have nothing to say to me that I wish to hear.” She made to step past him, but he put a hand to her arm.

“Willa. That came out all wrong. Just … listen. Why won’t you let us help you?”

For an instant she glimpsed a shadow of the younger Richard looking at her from this damaged mask—or imagined that she did—and she wanted to believe the person she’d known and admired still existed. Then she glanced past him to Neil MacGregor. He wasn’t liking this. She could tell by the set of his jaw, the dark line of his brows. Even the Colonel had come down the steps of his stone house, watching them with worried eyes.

Tension thrummed in the air and through her very flesh. It was coming from the hand still gripping her arm, as though some immense tide of feeling inside Richard were building and building and it needed all his strength to contain it.

She pulled her arm free to hide the shudder she couldn’t suppress. “I am going now. Do not hinder me.”

Moving past him, she strode to where Neil waited, and he fell in beside her. But Richard was not finished. Across the distance widening between them, he called, “Has anyone told you that I came for you?”

She did not look back.

“I tried to find you—did you know?” Frustration, anger, maybe even loss, clogged the words. The sound of it touched a place in Willa’s soul that she did not want anyone, least of all Richard Waring, to touch. She quickened her stride.

“Willa! No, Pa, let me—”

Neil glanced back, but Willa did not. She knew what she would see. Colonel Waring had stepped in front of Richard, perhaps taken hold of him, to prevent his coming after her.

Neil muttered something low that might have been a prayer. It did not drown the Colonel’s voice, the last to reach them as they started down the track to Shiloh.

“There’ll be another time, Richard. Let her go.”