Lori Benton (35 page)

She fetched water for the corn, lingering at the spring to cool her sweating face and neck, hoping to see the children coming along the path home. Save for the hum of insects, the wood was quiet. The air lay heavy as soaked muslin, sticking her shift to her flesh as she toted the bucket back to the cabin.

Not until the high sun began to slip westward in the milk-blue sky did she acknowledge her fear. With the musket primed and loaded, she pinned up her braid and, despite the heat, started down the path at a run.

The old foot log still spanned Black Kettle Creek at the narrow point where the path crossed it. It was another short stretch to the miller’s cabin. Willa’s breathless appearance, bursting from the woods, made Anni squeak in
surprise and half-rise from her porch chair, thrusting aside the baby quilt she was stitching.

A glance told Willa no one else was present. She halted at the steps, streaming sweat, to say in breathless snatches, “Anni … don’t get up. You are meant … to be resting.”

Anni grimaced as she ran a hand across her belly. Tired half moons still hung beneath her eyes. “Willa, is everything all right?”

“Where is Goodenough? Where are the children?”

Anni’s expression brightened. “They went down to the mill, though by now they’ve likely gone into town.”

“Town?” Cold alarm gripped Willa. It wasn’t safe for the children to be in town, even with Goodenough looking after them. What if Richard saw them? Or Aram Crane?

“Why did you let them go?” Leaving Anni on the porch, Willa hurried across the yard, long strides eating up the ground.

“Willa! There’s no cause for worry. I was about to tell you—”

Anni’s words were lost beneath the swell of the mill falls as Willa reached the descending path. A glance across the creek showed no sign of the children or Francis or Goodenough. The mill itself was silent, the great stones still. As she stepped inside, Willa heard voices in the yard beyond the far door, which had been blocked from her view at the top of the path by the mill itself. Even with the rush of water beneath the floor echoing off the high walls, one of the voices sounded very much like …

It couldn’t be. But it was.

She halted just inside the mill as Neil MacGregor strode through the opposite door. He moved at the center of a knot of chattering children. His shirt sleeves were turned up, showing sun-browned forearms. Those arms encircled Maggie Kershaw, who rode his hip, skinny legs wrapped around his waist. Matthew walked beside him, clutching his sleeve as though Neil might vanish if he let go. Anni’s twins and Lem bobbed around him like little moons, and the collie frisked like a shooting star at their edges.

There was an instant when his focus was on the children, when he was unaware of her, an instant when her heart jumped as if it meant to leap out of her chest and rush across the mill to him. Then he tilted back his head to laugh at something one of the children said and caught sight of her. He came to a halt. Lem bumped into his back.

Goodenough and Francis came into the mill. Goodenough said something Willa didn’t hear above the muffled rush of the falls—or was it the rushing in her own head?

Neil MacGregor didn’t seem to hear either. Bodies flowed around him like floodwaters past a rooted tree. His face had lit at the sight of her, as if he felt the same startled joy racing through her now.

“Willa,” he said, and this she heard, for everyone else had fallen silent and was looking at her, smiling in expectation, and her mouth wanted to smile too because of the blazing joy, then a spark shot out of the blaze, a spark of bewildered anger. Its small heat jolted her to her senses. Neil MacGregor was
here
.

“Why are you here?” Her voice was a sharp-edged thing, though she hadn’t meant it to be. His smile faltered at it. He slid Maggie to her feet. Goodenough and Francis came toward her, then passed on with Anni’s children and Lem to climb the path to the cabin. Matthew and Maggie lingered.

“Mr. MacGregor came back,” Maggie said, her smile undimmed by the tension searing the air above her head. Matthew, more wary of it, looked uneasily between them.

“Run on up to Miss Anni’s cabin,” Neil told the children, never taking his gaze from her. “I need to speak with Willa. Go on and dinna fash,” he added when they made to protest. “Ye’ll see me again, I promise.”

Reluctantly they crept past her, two dark, sleek heads. The collie slipped out on their heels.

Neil came toward her across the dusty mill, creaking the aging boards beneath their feet. She watched him come, sweating now from more than
running, each lungful of air filling her senses with the smells of creek water and corn chaff and old wet wood, until he stood in the sunlight that spilled through the door over her shoulders, hot on the back of her head. He didn’t seem the least perturbed as silence stretched between them, a silence too heavy for her to bear.

“You have come back because you are unwell? More headaches?” Even as she asked, she knew it wasn’t so. He looked in better health than she had ever seen. The sun had browned his face and arms, making his eyes more vivid, his complexion more robust. But there was something else changed about him. She couldn’t put a name to it, but she’d never seen him look so whole, so strong, so assured in himself.

His teeth shone white against his skin when he smiled, and her heart made the little eager jump again.

“No headaches. I think this cracked head of mine has finally made its peace with the frontier. ’Tis awfully good to see you, Willa.”

This time when he said her name, her belly turned over as well as her heart, as his eyes threatened to pull her straight into his arms, all good sense abandoned. It was like wrenching a knife from a wound, but she took a step back from him, nearly exiting the mill.

“Why are you here?”

He closed the space between them. “I should never have left.”

She frowned at that. “You have your work to do.”

“Willa—” His smile fell lopsided. He rubbed the back of his neck. “At least it didna take a talking donkey to turn me from my folly, just a canny horse and a bear. I have that over Balaam.”

Willa shook her head. Absent or present, silent or talking, men were a complete exasperation. “I do not understand.”

“You dinna need to just now,” Neil said with maddening calm. “Listen, I dinna mean to intrude upon you. I willna come to the cabin if ye dinna wish me to. I’m staying with the blacksmith.”

“With Gavan and Leda?”

“Aye. And I did get a bit of work done while I was away. Gavan’s helping me with the annotation now.”

“He is?” She sounded like a simpleton, questioning his every utterance, but none of it was making sense.

Voices interrupted as Charles and a customer entered the mill.

Neil put a hand to her arm. She jerked away. Disappointment flickered in his eyes but didn’t dim his smile.

“I ken you’ll be anxious, being away from the farm. Shall we go on up so you can collect the children and head back?”

It was an offer of escape, and she took it, turning her back on him to hurry up the path.

He followed in silence, yet she sensed it wasn’t the silence of defeat. She suspected she’d find him smiling at her still, did she dare look back.

From the moment they left Anni’s cabin, all the children could talk about was Neil. Across the creek on the foot log, through the long stretch of muggy woods, they strung their questions like beads on a thread with barely a breath between: “Why did he come back?” “Why isn’t he living in your cabin?” “Why didn’t he come to see us first?” “What does he mean to do?”

Glancing over field and yard to assure herself all was as she’d left it, Willa opened the cabin door. She tried to push aside the crowding collie with her knee, lost that battle, and turned on the children as the dog rushed in ahead of her.

“As I said the first time you asked, I do not know. How can I know? I have seen him for less time than you have.”

She set about boiling the corn for their late dinner. The children hung back, stomachs growling. She could feel them casting glances at each other behind her back.

Matthew ventured, “He spoke to you in the mill. Did he say—”

“He told me nothing.” That wasn’t true, but what he had told her made her wonder if he’d lied about not having the headaches, the ones that could scramble his brains. Talking donkeys?

“He is staying with the smith,” she added, hoping it would satisfy.

“We know,” the children said in unison.

“Then you know as much as I know.” Reaching for a chunk of wood, she turned her mind from the memory of Neil’s gaze spilling over her, naked with the answer to all the children’s questions. And her own.

She built up the fire, swung the kettle over it, and set about husking the corn. The children had gone out to the porch, where they went on
asking each other questions in lowered voices. She dropped the corn into the water and sat down to watch for the first curls of steam to rise.

Her hands were shaking.

Despairing of sleep, Willa descended the loft ladder and stood over the boy and his sister to be sure they slept undisturbed. Even the collie lay curled and slumbering, barely cracking an eye at her when she lifted the bar from the door and slipped outside.

The heat had broken at sunset with a rain that rumbled through, intense and brief, then passed across the hills as twilight fell. A freshening breeze blew in its wake. The air felt scrubbed clean.

Having no real aim in mind, she crossed the yard barefoot under a moon so bright she could see her shadow. When she spotted a stray branch strewn by the storm, she picked it up. A few paces on, she bent for another. Making a circuit of the clearing, she gathered windblown limbs for kindling.

She stopped to feel the breeze on her skin, sensing in it a distant hint of autumn. And on the other side of autumn … where would she be? She had no more than caught that haunting worry from the corner of her mind before a well-worn memory slipped in to distract her:
’Tis the color of winter oak leaves, your hair …

Kingfisher had never said such a thing to her. How could a man saying such a thing delight and terrify her in equal measure? She wasn’t like Neil MacGregor, lacking a sense of self-preservation. From the day he stood up to Richard and was brought to his knees for it, she had seen this. Everything she’d learned of him since confirmed it. He didn’t fear bodily pain. Nor the more terrible pain the heart could feel. He was unafraid to risk its breaking.

She’d left the cabin to stop thinking of Neil. Better to fix her mind on the land auction and the letter from her mother’s cousin that had yet to
come. Her hope in it had frayed to a desperate thread. The only thing that had changed since she stood at the edge of the cornfield, facing her three stark choices, was that Neil had come back.

Did that mean there was a fourth choice?

No. She dared not let there be. But since he
was
back, maybe he would agree to look after the children while she went to Albany to find Tilda Fruehauf. If he would not, and Joseph did not return in time, she saw little left for her here. It came hard to admit it, but probably it was already too late to make such a journey.

All her work. All her struggle. It had been for nothing. What else was left but to give up and go back to the People? At least that would make Joseph happy, for a time. But what about a year from now? five years from now? How would he feel then? Did he mean to live his life as no woman’s husband, no child’s father, because he couldn’t have her in that way?

He deserved more.

Hugging the bundle of storm-cast limbs to her chest, she moved along the corral, weeds wetting her feet and the hem of her shift. Wind rattled the trees at the clearing’s edge and ran cool fingers through her unbraided hair. Somewhere a night bird called, and she thought:
Neil could name it
.

With a sigh she turned back toward the cabin. As she reached the empty horse shed, the breeze kicked up again. It covered the small sounds that might have warned her before a horse nickered from the other side of the shed wall. Which wasn’t empty.