Lori Benton (47 page)

She halted in the center of the room, undone by the eyes of the man in the bed, suffering eyes sunken in a face so bloodless it was gray. What was there left to say between them?

The Colonel’s voice was weak but steady. “Does the Indian live?”

It wasn’t a thing she’d expected him to be thinking about. Her heart constricted with worry, even as it grasped at hope. “Those men who meant to hang him fled when Francis spoke against them. Joseph slipped away into the dark. That is what I saw and all I know.”

Let him fly from this place—even if I never see him again in this life—with the wings of a swift high hawk, let him fly
.

“Let him stay away,” the Colonel said from his bed, uncannily close to echoing her thoughts, “and he will live. At least his death will not be my doing.”

Another chair stood at the bed’s foot. Willa sank into it, her knees unable to support her any longer. The Colonel seemed to weaken as well, sinking back into the bedding with a soft groan. At once, Goodenough was there, tugging at a blanket, fussing that he needed his rest else something worse befall.

“Sally,” the Colonel said, “I’m tired and grief-sick but not about to pass. Leave off your fretting.”

The small remonstrance only served to further agitate Goodenough. “You ain’t dying tonight, that’s certain truth. There’s living to be done yet. I aim to see you do your share.”

Even as she fussed, her hand was stroking the Colonel’s face with a tenderness so intimate Willa felt she ought to look away. Had he called her
Sally
? Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps in another second, she would drop onto the carpet and lie there unconscious for a week.

“Mama?” Lem said from his bedside perch, worried by their talk of dying. Goodenough’s skirts didn’t conceal the hand that reached from beneath the bed covers and patted the boy’s knee.

“It’s all right, Lem.” Elias Waring shot Willa a look and drew his hand away. She could tell he had more to say to her, but he waited for Goodenough to cross to a table by the door, where a tray of tea things rested. “My stableman, Crane … He’s been a part of your troubles?”

“So it would seem.” If what Francis said was true, and she had no reason now not to believe him, it had been Aram Crane who’d watched her farm for Richard, who’d done the small things to vex and frighten them.

Francis
. Having unburdened himself of his secrets, he’d retreated back into his own world, happily lining pieces of kindling on the hearth bricks. It would need some thinking, but she would find some way of rewarding him for saving her children and Joseph. It would take a lifetime to reward Francis Waring.

“I understand why Francis kept that knowledge to himself,” the Colonel said after a heavy silence. “But why did you not come to me with it? I would have dealt with Crane.”

“I only had suspicions, Colonel. No proof of who was bothering us. But …” She hesitated, having second thoughts about telling him what else she knew about Aram Crane, who had once faced men like Colonel Waring across the line of battle. She studied the Colonel’s stricken face, debating
whether she should add one more thing to burden his mind. “Where is Aram Crane? Do you know?”

“That is a very good question. I haven’t seen the man for days.”

Willa looked at her hands in her lap.

“You said you didn’t know whether he was harassing you, but there’s something you know about—or against—the man.” When she didn’t raise her head, the Colonel added, “I am stronger than I must look, Wilhelmina. I can bear it. Tell me.”

She raised her head. “He is an army deserter. From the fort at Niagara.”

From across the room, Goodenough turned to stare at her. Lem looked from face to face, his expression puzzled, his little legs swinging.

Elias Waring’s face had fallen blank. “Fort Niagara? That’s still in British hands.” Understanding made ripples through the blankness, drawing lines ever deeper across his brow, beside his mouth.

“Joseph was sent from Niagara to find him,” she said, “and take him back to his regiment—the Eighth I think it is. That is what my brother does. He’s tracks deserters for the British.”

Anni’s father absorbed all this with remarkable composure, yet Willa could see what it cost him, could see the look of sickness in his eyes, knowing he’d sheltered the man for so many months. “Do you think he—your brother—has Crane in custody now?”

“That is what I thought, until I saw him trying to save my children while my fields and cabin burned. Now … I do not know.”

She hadn’t meant to further distress him, but at her words, the Colonel winced.

“Yesterday I questioned Richard—” His voice caught on the name; a glint of tears came into his eyes, and his chin quivered. “He claimed to have no knowledge of Crane’s whereabouts.” He drew a breath and clenched his jaw. “If ever I lay eyes on the man again, your Mohawk brother will have no further need of seeking him—unless it be to collect his scalp.”

Willa was beyond even shuddering at such words.
As long as Joseph is safe. And Neil is safe … somewhere. And the children …

Desire to see Matthew and Maggie Kershaw welled up, overwhelming all other needs. It pulled at her with such urgency she thought she might just make it as far as Anni’s before she collapsed to sleep on a rug by the hearth, with their small bodies curled warm against hers. Without a word she stood from the chair and started toward the parlor door.

“Willa. Bide a moment.” At the Colonel’s voice, she paused, finding it hard to focus her eyes on him, much less her mind on what he was saying. “I’ll have someone send to Anni and Charles, have the children brought here, if you’ll agree to stay.”

“Stay?”

“For as long as you need.”

Beside the bed, Lem kicked his feet. “Matthew and Maggie? They’re comin’ here?”

“If Miss Willa says,” his mother told him. “Now hush.”

But Lem jumped off the chair, bouncing with excitement. “Please, Miss Willa?”

“Miss Willa don’t need your help makin’ up her mind.” Goodenough grabbed her son as he tried to scoot past her. “Francis? Take this boy down to the kitchen and his bed.”

There were groans. There was pleading. Finally there was quiet as Francis led Lem from the parlor.

For an instant, before Francis’s blond head—combed into order now—passed from view, Willa thought it could have been Richard ushering out a younger sibling. The Richard of long ago, not yet twisted and hardened by the violence he’d seen and done, by hate and grief and greed.

Perhaps Richard hadn’t meant to kill her parents, only to raze their farm and drive them off, as others whose loyalties were suspect had been driven out along the frontier all the years of the war. Not an admirable thing, but something many men had done to one another, men who now
reaped in their fields or minded their shops and trades, no one thinking the worst of them. But he
had
meant to kill Matthew and Maggie. Could she spend even one night in that house, seeing the ghost of the boy, as well as the man, in every corner?

“I won’t insist, but I hope you’ll consider it.” Elias Waring’s face was grave as he turned to Goodenough. “In my desk, Sally … the papers?”

Goodenough sighed. “I’ll get ’em. But then you finish this and get some sleep.”

“Yes ma’am.” The Colonel’s mouth slanted with amusement. On any other night, it might have been a smile.

Goodenough crossed to a large, finely crafted desk and opened a drawer. “This the one you want, on top?”

At his nod she withdrew an official-looking paper with a broken seal and brought it to the bed. The Colonel beckoned Willa, who drew near to take it. “It came over a week ago, but I hadn’t the heart to bring it to you.”

The notice of her eviction and the time of the auction where her land was to be sold, to be held at German Flats in a matter of days. While it would never be Richard who owned it, someone, most likely a stranger, soon would.

She was almost too numb to feel defeat. Almost. “I see it would be wise to accept your offer of a roof.”

“It’s the very least I hope to do. Francis has related all he saw this night, including”—the Colonel’s lips clenched as his gaze went to her bruised cheek and temple—“including Richard’s attack upon your person. Wilhelmina, can you forgive the sins of my family against yours?”

Willa opened her mouth, on the verge of saying words born of the rawness of her grief, when something like light shot through her, giving understanding in the midst of weariness and shattering loss. This thing that was asked of her was not impossible, however much it felt so. Moreover, it was a thing she must do now, right now, while she was too numb for the tumult of emotion sure to come in the days ahead to cloud her mind and dim that sudden light. And that light was telling her that though
she had twice lost all that was dear to her by no choice of her own, to forgive or not was her choice to make.

“I can forgive them, Colonel,” she said. “And I do. Please send for the children to come to me here. For tonight at least, we will stay.”

Later, when they were all safe beneath one roof—even the collie—and she had touched them, seen the children’s dark heads side by side on a pallet in the room where she would sleep, and Goodenough had laid out one of her own clean shifts for her to wear, Willa caught the housemaid’s sleeve as she started to take her leave.

“Goodenough,” she said, low so as not to wake the children. “Did I hear the Colonel call you Sally?”

“You did.” Goodenough’s face bore the marks of weeping, but into it came a light undimmed by the heartbreak of the past hours, brighter than the candle she carried to light her way through the darkened house. “I made a gift of it to him—my name from before—the day Lem was born. Only thing I had to give was truly mine. I’m named Sarah, same as was my mistress.”

The crop wasn’t an utter loss, though it might as well have been. Half an acre stood, somehow spared by the flames. Not enough to feed one person through a winter, let alone three—one of them a boy who’d grown a hand’s breadth over the summer and was eating to make up for it. And it began to look as though there would be three of them, at least for a while.

It was two days since the fire, one since they buried Richard.

Willa walked among the cornstalks, bending now and then to brush her fingertips against a pumpkin’s cold rind. The acrid smell of burning suffused the damp autumn air. A smoke pall hung over the blackened field and clearing, awaiting a breeze to bear it away.

Another kind of pall hung over her spirit.

Neil MacGregor was lost to her, and she hadn’t seen Joseph since the night he was almost hanged. She wondered in her heart about the children and whether Joseph—if he was safe—would come for them, whether they would want to leave her now that she had nothing.

Weariness dragged at her as if stones had been sewn into the hem of the petticoat Goodenough had lent her. Though pieced from modest homespun, likely it was Goodenough’s best, and here she went trailing it through the sooty remains of her field.

They hadn’t wanted her to come there, Goodenough or the Colonel. But she’d had to come, had to see the devastation by the unforgiving light of day. She’d brought the children with her, unwilling to let them out of her sight again so soon. The horse borrowed from the Warings’ stable was tethered between the field and the cabin’s remains. The children’s voices and sometimes the collie’s carried across the blackened ground from the yard, where they poked about the rubble for anything that might be salvaged.

She doubted they would find anything. The cabin and all it held was lost. The drying beans. The rings of dried squash and pumpkins in the loft. Clothing, cooking pans, cups, plates. The small cherished things brought from the north to remind her of Goes-Singing and Sweet Rain and her years with the Kanien’kehá:ka. As if the Almighty had chosen to wipe away both her former lives with one searing stroke.

Leaving her with what? Not the solitary life she once thought to lead, free of the terrible pain of loving. But she couldn’t yet see the shape of a new life rising from these ashes, though she supposed there would be one, since she still drew breath and must live it.