Lori Benton (26 page)

Joseph leaned his head back to look up at her, rounding his eyes in mock surprise. “Sit first. If you topple onto me, it will do my wound no good, big as you are.”

He reached up a muscular arm and grasped her greasy hand. Though she wanted to give him a smarting remark, she sank down beside him and leaned her head against his bare shoulder, too lead weighted to pull her hand from his. He smelled of buckskin and blood, though it was hardly detectable beneath her own stink.

“Now you can tell me what I was doing.”

She ignored his teasing tone. “You went near Shiloh and got yourself spotted.”

“Why would I do that foolish thing?”

Joseph passed his thumb across the back of her hand. She closed her eyes, turning her palm over in his. He pressed the pad of his thumb deep into tired muscles, making her want to groan.

“Because you think your deserter is in Shiloh. Or nearby.” The cabin floor made her backside hurt. She shifted, finding no comfort. “Is he?”

Joseph’s thumb stilled. “I have seen him, coming and going from the place where he lives and works.”

That could be many a man. “Is he the one who shot you?”

“That was another, but they live in the same place. A big man—bigger than me, maybe. Pale hair.”

A spurt of alarm roused her. She sat up straight but was too surprised to speak Richard’s name before Joseph added, “It is for that man the deserter is working. Tending horses.”

“Aram Crane,” Willa said, not bothering to clarify that it was for Richard’s father he worked, for she saw recognition of the name in Joseph’s face.

“How do you know this?”

“Neil told me—only he does not know that he did so. He does not know you are hunting a man.”

“Then how is it he told you?”

“I am getting to that part,” she said, cross and sounding it because she was so tired and worried. About so many things. “It was that place I keep hearing so much about: Cherry Valley. Neil was there when it was attacked, right before he was hurt by that Oneida. Crane said that he was there too, but he said things about the British attacking that made Neil think he might have been on their side of it, though he seems to be pretending otherwise.”

“And so you guessed he was the man I sought.” Joseph had begun kneading her hand again. She blinked and settled back against him, unable to resist relaxing despite the importance of what they were speaking about.

“It is true,” he went on. “Crane was there as a soldier with the troops attacking the settlement. He is English born. Is that not apparent by his speech?”

“No,” she murmured, then remembered the trace of an accent she’d thought was likely British. “Not so much. He must work to sound not English. How long has he been gone from his place at Niagara?”

“Since the autumn. I spent some time then looking and found some
Oneidas—good ones—who told me of a red-haired Englishman in German Flats, but they also said this man had left that place with settlers and gone north up the West Canada. It was coming on for winter, and I thought if he went to a settlement, he might well keep there. It was a chance I took, but there were other things I needed to do.”

“Look for me?” She’d closed her eyes but could hear the smile in his voice.

“Yes. And bring in meat for my family.”

With what remained to her of thought, she considered that it would be a good thing—for her—if Joseph removed Aram Crane from Shiloh. Though it might not prove an easy task. Crane was a killer of Indians, a dangerous man. And now that Richard had seen Joseph lurking …

“Will you tell the Scotsman?” Joseph asked, interrupting her bleary thoughts.

“Do you think he would try to stop you if he knew?”

“I do not know enough of him to say. But what he does not know, he cannot tell.”

Willa’s eyelids fluttered. The cabin swam in her vision. “I am learning to know him. He would do what is right. He has a good heart.”

But she didn’t want to think about Neil MacGregor’s qualities or the warmth that filled her when she thought how he hadn’t hesitated to help another Indian, perhaps saving his life. Had he taken her words about looking past a man’s skin to heart, or had she misjudged him? Had she looked at his white skin and made her own presumptions?

She didn’t know, but she felt ashamed of those words spoken on the road to Shiloh now.

“I will not tell him if you do not wish it,” she hurried to say, but it was too late. She had said too much about Neil, and Joseph had noticed.

“It is different between you, from when I first found you here.”

Willa lifted her head from his shoulder, feeling it sway on her neck. “What is different?”

“He grows to care for you.” The weight of bullet lead was in Joseph’s voice. In her chest too, of a sudden.

“He has helped me. As have you.” Evading his gaze, she rested her head on his shoulder again. “I do not care about the British or what they want with the men who flee their forts. I would be happy to see Crane gone. But, Joseph, you have already been shot. Is there no other way to provide for your family?”

She felt his chest heave, then his wince as the sighing hurt his wound. She’d nearly drifted asleep against him before his voice roused her again. “There is one thing that would turn me from this path. If you leave this place and come west with me, I will let that man alone and never again be a dog to fetch for the British.”

Protest rose in Willa’s mind, but before she could decide how to again refuse him, she remembered something else she needed to tell him. “Anni said a thing to me that I think you will want to hear.”

“What is that, my sister?”

She tried not to hear the sadness in his voice—sadness that she had not given him the answer he had long sought. “There is to be a council, some sort of peace talk, between the Longhouse nations and the Americans, at Fort Stanwix. It is about their lands here, I think.”

“What else?” Joseph murmured. Her cheek rose and fell with the deep breath he drew. “When is it to be?”

“At the end of summer … I do not know exactly.”

“Did she say whether Thayendanegea would be there?”

“Thayendanegea?” Willa said, or tried to say. She could not remember whether Anni had mentioned Brant by name or not, and she was too weary to make more words.

She felt herself sinking down and down, with Joseph’s hand warm and heavy on her head.

That was how Neil found them, coming in to retrieve the bark containers Willa meant to store the jerked meat in. He’d hoped she’d be asleep, just not in the lap of Joseph Tames-His-Horse, who looked at him with a faint smugness in the set of his mouth.

“I tried to lift her.”

Neil crossed the cabin. “Dinna try it again. You’ll undo all my work to patch ye up last night.” He squatted to get his arms under Willa, grunting as he got his knees under him and pushed to his feet. Her long body sprawled across his sagging arms.

“Not exactly dainty, is she?”

Joseph grinned at that, rubbing his legs as though they’d lost feeling.

Neil eyed the ladder on the far side of the hearth. There was no hope of his climbing to the loft. “I’ll put her in my bed.”

Not till he’d wedged them both through the doorway to the back room did it strike him how Joseph might interpret that intention. He was the one grinning as Willa’s head lolled and her eyelids fluttered open. Her voice slurred with fatigue. “Wha …?”

Neil grunted again with the strain as he lowered her to his blanket roll. “You’re going to sleep if I have to tie ye hand and foot, that’s what. Hush now, and do as I bid.”

Amazingly she did, going limp even as he drew his blanket over her. He knelt, looking at her by the light from the papered window. After days in the fields, the sun had lightened her hair. It flowed like bright hanks of silken thread—brown, copper, and gold all spilled and tangled.

He lifted a strand and brushed it against his lips, before hurrying a little guiltily from the room.

A few days after the meat was jerked, Neil MacGregor braved the black flies to ride into Shiloh and see the letter Willa had penned to her mother’s cousin added to the post bound for Albany. He returned with a smoked ham, a gift from the MacNabs. As Willa squatted at the hearth to slice enough to feed them supper, she dared to let herself feel hopeful about the land for the first time since Richard rode into her yard and made his threats, and she learned about the land auction.

Hope was tempered a few mornings later when she spotted Francis skulking near the cabin. He came to her with a lip split open and an eye swollen shut.

Later in the day, Richard came to call.

The children burst from between the cornstalks, panting from running, and found her crouched low, inspecting the squash plants. At their breathless announcement of a rider on the track, she stood to look, and there was Richard sitting on his blazed horse at the field’s edge, looking back across the distance at her.

“Go to the cabin,” she told the children. When they didn’t move, she sharpened her voice. “Owl, take your sister inside.”

The boy’s eyes flicked to the motionless horseman. “Do I tell them?”

“Tell Neil you are hungry, that I sent you in. I am sure it’s true.”

“He’s always hungry.” Pine Bird gave her brother’s arm a shove. Ignoring her, Owl looked doubtfully at Willa but took his sister’s hand and did as she bid.

She watched until they were well away through the rustling stalks, then bent for her musket and began the long walk out to meet Richard, waiting where the field met the woods’ edge and the track to Shiloh. He dismounted as she neared, his face impassive.

It wasn’t his expression Willa sought to read, but his hand. The right one, holding his horse’s reins. She expected the knuckles to be broken—by the bones of his brother’s face.

“I wasn’t m-meant to tell.” It was all she’d coaxed from Francis to explain his injuries, while Neil raided her garden to make a salve to treat them.

It was enough. The graves. What else could it be that Francis wasn’t meant to tell? This was her fault. Her fault for telling Anni about the graves, for mentioning Francis. Anni must not have considered the graves a secret she was meant to keep from Charles, who must have let it slip to Richard. Or had Anni been the one to let it slip?

Oh, Anni
. Willa felt sick in the pit of her stomach as she reached Richard, who wore riding gloves against the black flies and hadn’t removed them when he dismounted. A kerchief covered his neck, and high boots protected his legs. She was dressed in leggings and her deerskin skirt, her long stroud tunic. Bear grease smeared her face and hands. Richard’s nostrils flared when she stopped.