“Drat! Damn! Bloody-damn-hell-shit!!” Stringing together a stream of the foulest curse words she could utter, Anne yearned for a light as she untangled her shawl from the bramble’s clutches. It was hard to see, but she was certain she’d torn at least three holes in the only summer-weight shawl she’d brought on campaign, assuring a long evening spent in the company of her darning needle.
Resisting the urge to hurry, Anne narrowed her focus to the immediate path, and moved in a more deliberate wend through the monochromatic world of shifting shadows.
Where is he? The uneasy twist carried in her chest was wrung tight and tighter with every step forward. Wrestling with the wisps of spider silk sliding over her face and arms, she kept her eyes on the path, maneuvering under jutting limbs, around grasping brush, and over tangles of deadfall—trying to avoid bumping her noggin, snagging her clothes, or tripping flat on her face.
“Goddamn it!” Anne stopped dead in her tracks, and, throwing her head back, she stomped her foot and railed at the dark. “I forgot to keep count.”
Spinning around, she gazed back into the black hole from whence she’d come, unable to see anything to help gauge the progress made since the encounter with the thornbush. She turned back, and her breath caught in her throat.
“Hohh…”
Ten paces ahead, haloed by a ghostly blue-green light, a monstrous hand rose up from the forest floor, pointing straight up to the heavens.
“What in the… ?” Anne leaned in, blinking and squinting. A few cautious steps forward provided eyes and brain with the information required to override wild imagination, and she heaved the answer in relief.
“A tree.”
The jagged, broken remains of a huge old tree—a maple? She moved closer.
Hard to tell. Definitely one of the grandfathers of the forest by the great girth it had attained before being snapped in two by rot and wind. The frightening apparition being in actuality a tree in no way explained where the curious blue-green light was coming from.
Just your eyes playing tricks…
Anne closed her eyes and counted to ten before blinking them open. The otherworldly light had not dissipated and she resisted the urge to run.
Jack is nearby. He’ll come and find me, and we’ll…
Anne unhunched her shoulders and smiled. She tucked her bedroll under the crook of her left arm, and took a few steps toward the glowing tree, calling in a loud voice, “I know that’s you, Jack Hampton.”
No reply.
Anne tried once again. “This isn’t funny, Jack.”
Like a tinker’s monkey attracted to a shiny object, she inched toward the glowing old tree, drawn to the comforting light it cast upon the surrounding phalanx of slim saplings and leafy branches. Close enough to see that there was a large patch of lady’s slippers in bloom near the base of the old tree, she reached out and dared to poke a fingertip to the trunk.
“Jack?” she whispered. “That you, Jack?”
Her palm flat to the rough bark, the old, broken tree became the center point to her circle, and her outstretched arm, the compass. Moving in a slow arc toward the light source, she rounded the apex, and gasped, careening back a step, dropping her bedroll, shielding her eyes to the uncommon brightness.
“Whoa!”
The back side of the tree trunk was covered in a tumble of flat-capped mushrooms emitting blue-green light.
Mushroom lights? Anne had never heard tell of such a thing. Just as a laundress would test a hot iron, she licked her fingertip and quickly touched it to one of the broad caps. Curiously cool, the glowing fungus put Anne in mind of the lamp end on the fireflies she and her brother, David, would capture as children. Snapping one of the shining mushrooms free, she moved away from the tree, fascinated to see every line on her palm illuminated in eerie clarity by the light cast from a single mushroom.
“I could write by this light—I could read by it!”
Anne looked around, entranced by the enchanted scene created by the phosphorescent tree fungus. The leaves on the surrounding trees reflected a thousand shades of blue and green, shimmering as if fashioned of taffeta and bombazine. The downed upper portion of the rotten tree had—in falling over—created a rift in the dense canopy overhead, exposing a narrow patch of star-strewn sky. The luminescence cast by the fungus and the added starlight turned the huge fallen snarl of twiggy branches into a dense swath of silver-blue lace draped over the black velvet of the forest floor.
“Ho-hoo… hoo… hooooh!”
Anne spun round to the owl’s call. In the distance, bobbing golden lights playing on the branches and canopy overhead preceded a figure carrying a torch. Weaving through the trees, he was wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat.
The figure stopped and circled the torch over his head in a whoosh. He cupped hand to mouth and once again mimicked an owl’s call. A second figure appeared alongside the torchbearer.
Jack and Titus!
Waving her mushroom lamp, Anne called, “Hoo-hoo!” and the torchless figure came bounding toward her.
Like something out of a dream, Jack met her in the glow of the odd mushroom light, dressed in Indian garb and carrying a long rifle strapped over his shoulder. Exclaiming, “There you are!” he swooped her up into his arms and kissed her twice, soft on the lips. “You were so long in coming—I worried maybe you’d changed your mind.”
Slipping his hand into his shirtfront, he pulled forth his half of the crown token worn strung on a leather thong round his neck. Anne quickly dipped down her shift to retrieve the token she carried, and fit her piece to his.
“There!”
“I don’t know why,” Jack admitted, “but it makes me feel good to see it whole.”
Laughing, Anne wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her ear to the real-world steadiness of his heartbeat. The familiarity of his strong arms, his breath on her hair, the smell of woodsmoke on his skin—it all rooted Anne in time and place. Jack was hers and she was his, and her heart, tipped askew in his absence, was set aright by his presence.
“A hundred paces is an awful long way in the dark—” She held up the mushroom, and with the light she could see he’d washed his face clean of the painted tattoos. “See how it shines even when plucked? Have you ever seen such a thing?”
“I have—but never so much in one place.” Hand in hand they went to examine the mushrooms up close. “I know some folk call them fairy sparks,” he said, “but we always called it foxfire—grows on rotten wood, especially after the kind of rain we’ve been having.”
“Foxfire,” she repeated, thinking the name very fitting.
Jack poked one of the mushrooms. “I remember being scared to death as a boy the first time I ever spied foxfire. I ran inside and told my brothers there was a ghost living in our woodpile.”
“Koué!” a strange voice proclaimed.
Anne startled to see Jack’s torch-bearing companion had joined them, and was not Titus at all. The strange man was wearing Jack’s hat. “That’s a very big patch,” he said. “Watch…” The man put the torch close to the tree, and in the light, the fungus instantly lost its luminous quality, reverting to a drab, mushroomy hue.
“Oh no!” Anne cried.
“Don’t fret. The green fire never shows in the light,” Jack’s companion explained as he tossed the torch down and stomped out the flame. The mushroom light at once began to glow in verdant intensity. “There’s why it’s best to see it when the moon is hiding.”
“Anne Merrick, I’m pleased for you to meet my friend Ned Sharontakawas.” Jack clapped the man on the back.
Anne took Ned’s proffered hand and regarded with some amazement his very gallant bow. He was a tall and handsome young fellow, Jack’s Indian guide, and seemed nothing at all akin to the often gruff and surly Indians who wandered in and out of the British camp. There was an exotic quality to his facial features, but dressed as he was in Jack’s hunting shirt and breeches, Anne would have been hard-pressed to figure he was an In
dian at all. A Frenchman, perhaps…
“Shé-ku, Jack’s woman.” Ned’s smile was shy but friendly. “I found the crown you drew beneath the recipe for snake stew.”
“And Jack is wearing your clothes…” Anne said.
“And I wear his,” Ned replied with a tip of Jack’s hat.
The men got busy using their tomahawks to prize free two chunks of mushroom-covered bark.
“Let’s get a move on.” Scooping up Anne’s blanket, Jack set forth. “Our camp’s up the hill a ways.”
Anne fell in behind Jack, and was surprised to see Ned follow after, both men lighting the narrow footpath with their mushroom lights. They traveled with speed and assurance up a narrow, switching trail—pausing for brief moments to check bearings invisible to Anne’s ignorant eye—easily covering five times the ground in the same time it had taken her to stumble-bumble less than one hundred paces.
“I don’t understand how you can navigate,” she said, impressed to see Jack not only take the lead, but know where he was heading, and how to get there.
“Without a moon, this forest is as black as the Earl of Hell’s weskit, but we’re pretty good at getting around in the dark,” Jack said over his shoulder. “Aren’t we, Neddy?”
“Yup.” The trail widened and the Indian scooted forward to walk two abreast with Anne. “Like big cats, Jack and me work our mischief in the dark,” he said.
An instant tension stiffened her neck and shoulders. Anne pulled her shawl up to cover her hair and moved as far to the right as possible. Putting a little skip in her step, she tried without success to catch up to Jack. But no matter how slow or quick she moved, the Indian matched her pace, lighting her path, ready with the support of a gentle hand at her elbow when required to negotiate a tangle of tree roots or a tumble of stone.
Nothing but kind…
“Mind your head, now, miss,” Ned warned, shining his mushrooms on a low-slung limb crossing the path.
Anne ducked under. Small-minded I am… and fearful.
Jack was never either. Anne suffered a moment of silent shame hooded in the depths of her shawl. Perhaps she’d been too long amongst the British… Always looking down on those of inferior rank.
With a twist of guilt Anne was put in mind of her dearest friends—a slave-born black man and a lowborn Scots servant girl—two of the best people relegated to the very bottom of the social order. She determined if Jack found Ned Sharontakawas worthy of being called “friend,” then she could do the same.
Anne drew her shawl down. “Your torch was such a welcome sight, Ned.”
“Made it to help Jack find you,” he said.
“I was sorry to see you put it out.”
“It’s risky traveling with a light,” Jack explained over his shoulder.
Ned added, “Don’t want to draw the enemy.”
“You both must be very skilled at avoiding British patrols.”
“Dodging Burgoyne’s soldiers is easy enough…” Jack said matter-of-factly.
Ned added, “Them stomping around in boots with torches and swords like they do.”
“But Burgoyne’s Indians—” Jack began, and Ned finished, “Oho! That’s another matter altogether.”
Jack turned around, walking backward for a moment to announce with a smile, “Our camp’s just up ahead.”
They burst through the brush onto a wide ridge shelf under an open sky at the base of a steep cliff. Facing east, the view of the valley below was filtered through a curtain of close-growing white pines. An outcropping of jagged stones and scrubby brush buttressed the cliff at an angle offering a natural windbreak for the fire ring and the low log seat beside it. Opposite the seat, on the other side of the fire ring, a curious mound of green balsam boughs were arranged in careful order, one atop another, and neatly corralled within a six-foot-square log frame.
She followed the men straight to the ring of stones, where Jack dropped Anne’s blanket down onto a small pile of gear stowed behind the log. In the glow of blue-green mushrooms, both men shed their weapons and pouches. Dropping down to one knee, Jack used his tomahawk to split a piece of firewood into lath, while Ned raked up the ashes. Jack arranged the kindling in a fretwork and Ned fanned the smoldering coals with a scrap of birchbark. The thin strips of oozing pine caught fire at once.
Amazed by their wordless cooperation, and the speed with which a fire had been kindled, Anne sidled up to the friendly light. “I’m happy to see you keep a fire.”
Jack admitted, “We rarely do.”
“This camp is well sheltered from view,” Ned said, as he selected a few pieces of wood from their supply of gathered deadfall and dropped them beside Jack.
“And it’s too dark to see smoke rising.” Jack broke a thin branch in two, crisscrossing the wood over the burning kindling. Yellow-orange flames curled over the fuel, encouraging the flecks of glassy quartz embedded in the sheer granite cliff to sparkle and shine like citrine and topaz.
Swiping his hands on his shirtfront, Jack rose to his feet. “It’s time to say good-bye to our Iroquois friend, Annie.”
“Iroquois?” Twin lines creased the bridge of Anne’s nose. “You said he was Oneida…”
“He’s both.”
Ned gathered up some gear and a haversack. “English, French, and Dutch call us Iroquois, but we say Haudenosaunee—people of the Long House.”
Anne grabbed ahold of Jack’s forearm. “The Iroquois fight with Burgoyne, Jack…”
“The Iroquois are a league of six nations”—Jack counted off on his fingers—“Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onandagas, and Tuscarora. Some Iroquois fight with us rebels, and some Iroquois fight for the King…”
“Most Iroquois fight for the King,” Ned corrected, slinging his pack on one shoulder. “Just like you English, choosing sides in this war has divided our people.”
“Enough of that…” Jack draped a four-point blanket over Ned’s shoulders like a cape. “We don’t want to keep you here discussing politics. I know you have important business to attend to.”
“I hear you, at-uhló, I hear you…” Ned laughed and squatted down beside the fire. “I’ll take a piece of this fire and be on my way.” Using a twig, he herded two egg-sized coals into a tin cup. Weapon on shoulder, he toasted them both with the cup of fire starter. “I’ll be back when the redbreast sings in the day. Ona kí wahe—till next time.”
Anne stood beside Jack and waved Ned off as he disappeared in the darkness beyond the glow of the campfire, oddly uncertain as to whether the Indian’s presence or departure was more discomfiting.
“All right!” Jack clapped his hands together and began digging through a haversack. Producing a leathern flask, he sat down and swung his legs around to face the fire. “Peachy?” he offered.
Anne came to sit beside him. “I could use a drink of water.”
Jack took a quick gulp from the flask, then leaned back and rifled through the gear to come up swinging a barrel-shaped canteen into her lap.
“Water… such as it is.”
Anne took one swallow, grimaced, and recorked the vessel. The inside of the wooden canteen was made tight with a coating of pitch, imparting an unpleasant, turpentinish flavor to the water.
“Maybe I’ll have a drink of your brandy, after all.”
Jack handed over the flask. Though she was careful to take but a small sip, the strong liquor still stung her throat. She handed the bottle back, sputtering, “Never quite as peachy as the name would imply.”
Jack laughed. “You made that same funny face after drinking your share of the Quaker’s Armagnac, and there’s no finer brandy in the world than French Armagnac.”
Anne shrugged. “I’m not one for hard spirits.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Jack scooted close and wrapped an arm around her waist, his grin devilish. “As I recall, the evening drinking Armagnac ended with you and me carried away—doing the deed right there atop the press!” He took another scoof from his flask. “Ha! I w
on’t soon forget that night.”
“Seems like forever ago…” Anne could feel the blush sprung to her cheeks. “The night we printed the counterfeit banknotes…”
Jack grew suddenly somber and took another good gulp from his flask. “What started out a good and clever idea didn’t end all that well, did it?”
Anne shook her head. The recollection of the unsuccessful counterfeiting scheme sent a torrent of troublesome memories through her brain—from the awful sight of Jack, bound at wrists and ankles, swinging from the prison-yard gallows, to Titus carrying Patsy Quinn’s lifeless body through Canvastown, to the haunting look of betrayal in Edward Blankenship’s eyes when she pulled the trigger to fire a musket ball point-blank to his head.
Giving her head a shake to banish her disturbing thoughts, she rested her hand in the spot between Jack’s shoulder blades and asked, “How have you been faring? How’s your arm?”
“Lucky thing I’m left-handed, eh?” Jack perked up a bit, flexing his right hand, stiffly opening and closing his fist. “Blankenship did me the favor of keeping a well-honed blade. Sliced to the bone, but a clean cut. The wound’s healed well and gives me but little trouble. Working the ax as much as we do has helped me regain strength—that’s for certain.”
“And Titus is well?”
“Titus has taken to this life like a pig to the muck. He says running these hills puts him in mind of his boyhood in Virginia.” Jack stood, unbuckled his belt, and dropped it into his open haversack.
Anne stared into the black hole of Jack’s haversack, murmuring, “I never knew Titus was from Virginia…” She turned in her seat, and cast her eyes around the campsite. “So where’ve you pitched your tent?”
“You’re under it, darling girl.” Jack smiled and swept his arms up to the star-strewn sky.
“No! Really?” She squeaked out the last syllable.
“Canvas is too burdensome to tote around. Most days we just curl up in our blankets and catch sleep where we can.” Jack gathered up a pair of woolen blankets, including the one Anne had brought along.
The Turning of Anne Merrick Page 11
