Lori Benton (28 page)

But there would come a moment, if Joseph was patient, when the mind of the man was easy, his safety taken for granted. All he needed was to be watching when it came. But he must have his full strength when it did.

There was that peace council Burning Sky had told him about, the one to be held at Fort Stanwix at summer’s end. An idea about that council was forming in his mind. An idea that had to do with Thayendanegea and the deserter.

For now he would head toward that fort, posing as one of his father’s Oneida people—at least to any whites he could not avoid. He would see if he could gather news of who was coming to this meeting. The journey there and back would give him time to heal. And when his full strength returned, he would do his work for the British. One last time.

They would be, Neil MacGregor had informed her, “two laddies gone a’ plant hunting.”

Owl appeared as taken with the notion of spending the following day traipsing the hills in search of likely flora to put in Neil’s book as was the naturalist himself. Willa didn’t voice her misgivings about the time he was spending with the boy as the pair poured over each item to accompany them: plant press, specimen tin, the paints, brushes, quills, clamshells, pencils, and paper nested inside the field desk.

Next they gathered provisions—a sack of elk jerky and a batch of dubious-looking cornmeal cakes Neil was minding on the hearth.

Pine Bird, crestfallen that it was to be a males-only excursion, hung by Neil’s side, gazing at the things laid out on the table. Her wistfulness cut straight to Willa’s heart, but no one was more surprised than she to hear herself say, “Let these
laddies
get themselves scratched and bug bitten hunting plants in the hills. You and I will visit Anni tomorrow. She has children. Twins.”

Pine Bird raised melting dark eyes to her. “Two born together?”

“Yes. A boy and a girl. Would you like to see them?”

“Are they babies?”

“They are five summers.”

Owl shot his sister a smugly superior look. “Even you are older than that.”

Pine Bird raised her chin. “I want to see them.”

“I want to see a bear,” Owl said. “Or a wolf. No—a panther!”

Neil looked up from the hearth, brows raised. “Whoa, young man. I dinna recall
Felis concolor
being on the list of things
I
aim to see.”

“Yes,” Willa said, catching his look across the children’s heads. “We have enough to contend with without inviting panthers into it.”

The two laddies and the dog were away into the hills before Willa finished tidying breakfast next morning. From the porch, she saw Pine Bird out by the shed, feeding the goat grass cut from the old horse pasture. The girl had taken over the animal’s care and in the process made a pet of it.

“Time to go!” At her summons the child dumped her last armful over the slatted fence. Grass cascaded over the chewing goat, leaving it sprinkled in green. Willa had replaced the falling-to-rags garment the girl came to them wearing. As Pine Bird reached the porch, she saw the child’s new petticoat was stained at the knees.

The sight brought a lump to her throat. It was all too easy, as the days passed and the children stayed, to fall into mothering them. Far too easy. She must guard her heart.

“Let me do something with your hair,” she said briskly. “Would you like a braid?”

Pine Bird nodded and presented the back of her head to Willa, who quickly sectioned and plaited the long strands. The child’s hair wasn’t a true black, like her brother’s. Sunlight revealed sparks of brown, like it did in Neil MacGregor’s hair, though the girl’s was as straight as if it had been ironed. Willa tied the braid with a leather whang threaded with two blue beads—beads the same rich shade as Neil’s eyes, she thought, as the girl swung her braid around to admire them.

What was all this thinking of the man and his looks? She must stop it. She was letting him as well as the children too close, letting herself become used to them.

That path to her heart was becoming dangerously clear.

She was silently berating her foolishness, reminding herself that all of them were meant to follow their own paths away from her—including
Joseph—and that their going was for the best, when Pine Bird turned her sweet smile up to her and said, “
Istah
put beads in my hair too.”

Istah
. It was the Mohawk word for
Mother
.

The ache took Willa in the center of her chest. For the time it needed to draw a ragged breath around it, the face of the girl raised to her changed, became a little browner, wider, the eyes a startling hazel green. Goes-Singing’s face.

Willa blinked, and it was a stranger’s child looking up at her again, brown eyes sparkling because someone had thought to put beads in her hair.
Because I thought of it
.

It was exactly the sort of thing to put her heart in greater peril. The sort of thing she should not be doing.

“Come.” Willa stepped off the porch. “It is a long walk.”

She wasn’t keen on leaving the cabin and fields unguarded, but there had been no cause for alarm in the days since Joseph left them. No unexpected visitations. No arrows shot from hiding. No sense even of being watched. Still she was more than half-regretting this decision; other threats existed, deer and rabbit foremost among them. She would probably spend the next few hours imagining voracious teeth chewing and chewing at her crops.

But there was another reason for going into Shiloh—a letter to mail, tucked inside her pocket. They’d received no reply to the first letter sent to Tilda Fruehauf in Albany. Neil had urged her to be patient with the vagaries of the post, but had agreed sending a second letter couldn’t hurt.

Such were the thoughts the girl interrupted as they strode along the shortcut to Anni’s.

“Where did Mister Joseph go, and when will he come back?”

It wasn’t the first time the girl had asked such questions. “He is away hunting or else tending to business of his own. I do not know how long he
will be about it. He will come for you when he can and take you and your brother to Niagara.”

She doubted such answers satisfied the child, but it was all the answer Willa could give. She’d found it hard to conceal her own distress and frustration the morning they woke to Joseph’s absence. For a week, they had seen nothing of him, then twice in the past few days, a fresh kill had appeared on the islet.

She’d begun to think Joseph didn’t mean to come back to them, or not before he regained his strength and fetched his deserter back to the British, now that he knew where the man was hiding.

When Neil had asked why Joseph left so abruptly, before he was fully healed, she’d had nothing to say. She had only her suspicion, one it would be unwise to share.

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

Still, he might have bothered to tell her what he planned to do, how long he thought it would take him to do it. She couldn’t hope to feed herself and the children through the winter, even if she still had a roof over her head. Neil MacGregor would be gone by then at least. In fact, with Joseph no longer there to tend, and the girl’s leg healed, there was no reason for Neil to stay another day. But was he gathering provisions and making plans to be on his way? No. He was off prowling the hills with the boy.

Willa set her face in a frown as her strides devoured the path, thoughts fixed on the vexing whims of men.

“I hope Mister Joseph doesn’t come back.”

Pine Bird’s utterance was in such opposition to Willa’s thoughts, and the thoughts she’d assumed were behind the girl’s question, that she broke her stride to look at the child, who’d been trotting to keep up.

“Why wouldn’t you want Joseph to come back?”

Pine Bird lowered her eyes, too shy to answer, but as Willa started off along the path again, she felt small fingers curl around her own.

“My Lem’s taken with that girl,” said Goodenough, the dark skin of her face glistening as she lifted a pair of breeches from the boiling kettle.

It was wash day again at Anni’s. Goodenough and the smith’s wife, Leda MacNab, were already deep into the backbreaking chore by the time Willa and Pine Bird arrived, but now many hands were making light of the work.

Manning the rinsing bucket, Willa looked to the children playing an energetic game of battledore and shuttlecock, using a whittled cork adorned with a feathered topknot. They’d divided into pairs to bat the shuttlecock back and forth using wooden paddles. Willa had assumed Anni’s Samantha would have paired up with Pine Bird, but it was Lemuel who’d latched on to her, showing her how the game was played.

“One, two, three, four, Mary at the cottage door!”

Willa smiled at the rhyme. It was the same one she and Anni had used as girls, a line uttered each time the shuttlecock was batted, the goal to race through as many verses as possible before the shuttlecock fell to earth.

“Five, six, seven, eight, eating cherries off a plate!”

Pine Bird had proved agile, and quick to pick up the rhyming.

“She is used to boys,” Willa said to Goodenough. “Her brother is with Neil MacGregor, looking for plants to put in the book he’s making.”

“I heard Mr. MacGregor telling Gavan about his field guide.” Leda MacNab handed Willa a scrubbed frock, pausing to watch the scene of noisy play across the yard. “She’s a pretty child. What did you call her?”

“Margaret Kershaw.” Willa had thought better of introducing her as Pine Bird, but hadn’t expected the girl’s bright smile upon hearing her English name spoken.

“Had a white daddy,” Goodenough said. “Thought so, to look at her. How old she be?”

“Seven.” The age Goes-Singing would have been in a fortnight.

“On the puny side of seven. She need feeding up.”

“She does.” Anni returned from spreading pieces of wash on the hedges in time to catch Goodenough’s comment. “Did you see the size of her eyes, Leda? She’s half-starved, the little thing.”

“She is not a
thing
. She’s a child.”

Willa’s words hung in awkward silence.

“I didn’t mean—” Anni broke off with a wince, rubbing her belly.

Goodenough eyed her sternly, wet hands on hips. “Didn’t I tell you to rest whilst we’re here to give you the chance? I brought you out that chair. Sit, afore you bring on the pains again.”

“I think I will.” Anni lowered herself into the straight-backed chair set near the wash kettle. At six months along, the baby seemed healthy and vigorous, but already Anni had twice feared she was losing the child. Leda and Goodenough came to help with chores as they could. Willa thought she should do likewise, but it would mean leaving the fields untended far too often for
their
health. Unless Neil stayed a little longer …

No. She must not find excuses for that. It was time—past time—for him to go.

What if he had left before Joseph came to the cabin with a bullet in his side? she wondered. Even if she’d removed the ball herself, would he have taken a worse fever and died of it?

What if Anni’s baby was born too soon and needed a physician’s skill to help it live?