by Lori Benton
Their sister’s time of formal grieving had passed. Now Falling Hawk was bringing her a son to fill her heart. He wouldn’t be keen to hear of that son’s white mother wanting him back.
“What was it this woman was saying to you, back on the trail? Something that made you angry.”
Wolf-Alone’s question pulled Jeremiah back to the present. A tightness gripped his chest; he sidestepped the question. “She can see my loyalties are torn. I want our sister to be whole again, but I have promised this woman to help get her son back.”
“That is what makes you angry?” his brother asked. “Having to choose between this woman and our sister? Or is it something about that woman herself?”
Jeremiah reached for a stick and stabbed at the fire’s embers, spilling sparks. Wolf-Alone was probing close to what bruised like truth. When his brother had slipped into the msi-kah-mi-qui at the council’s ending and whispered urgently that Clare had run off into the village, screaming Jacob’s name, the intensity of his fear for her had taken him aback. Once he saw her safe, that fear had translated into fury at her for putting herself in peril.
He wasn’t certain what to make of such powerful feelings. He’d handled them badly.
“Is it that she reminds you of…” Wolf-Alone began, stopping when he caught the sudden warning gaze Jeremiah shot him.
“You think I look at her and see Hannah?” The name still trailed pain across his soul.
“No, Brother. She is nothing like that one. I was going to say she reminds you of yourself when you first came into this country, following the warriors who stole what was yours, as she follows now.”
Well, that much was true. He’d thought it more than once himself. Was that all it was then? That he saw himself in Clare Inglesby—himself at his most vulnerable, a time he would rather now forget but that she kept rekindling like a fire that wouldn’t die? She was certainly stirring memories he’d thought he’d laid to rest.
When Jeremiah could find no words, his brother remarked, “You have not told me what she said to you on the trail.”
“She asked me…” Jeremiah’s face grew hot. “I claimed her as my wife, in front of Logan. He must have told her so. She asked me why I did it.”
Since Yellow Creek he’d suspected it would come to it, and sure enough, Logan had seen him at the back of the council house and drawn him away from the others. One of Logan’s warriors had seen Jeremiah and Clare enter the town moments before and had already told Logan he’d come with a white woman. Logan asked about her. Jeremiah had told Logan exactly who Clare Inglesby was, that they’d been to Yellow Creek looking for him, that they were looking now for the boy he had taken, but that Clare Inglesby and her baby were his.
Logan had looked long at him, as if trying to decide whether he believed Jeremiah. No warmth filled his gaze. No memory of friendship.
Finally Logan had nodded. “When I made my vow in your hearing, I let you go in peace. I will also let this woman you claim and her child go away from this place in peace. I will not touch them. As for that boy—her son? He is no longer in my hands.”
Jeremiah shared with Wolf-Alone all that had passed between him and Logan concerning Clare.
“She would not have left Wakatomica alive, I think,” Wolf-Alone said, “if you had not done what you did. Called her your wife.”
“But it is the last thing she wants from me, no matter the reason I did it. I do not think things were well between her and the husband she had before. Knowing I claimed her as mine would only give her one more thing to fret about.”
“She has told you these things?”
“Not all of it.”
“Then be careful of thinking about her as if such things were true. You cannot see her heart. You cannot know her mind. Even the things she says may be colored by her own untruths.”
Jeremiah shook his head, then laughed softly. “Sometimes you speak in riddles to devil me, I think.”
Wolf-Alone himself was a riddle, or at least his past. Jeremiah remembered well the day, seven years ago, when the warrior came into his life. He knew how to make an entrance, Wolf-Alone. It was on an early spring morning when the creeks were running full that the big Delaware, just eighteen years old, had come floating down Scippo Creek like one dead, only to rise from the water like a hero out of legend, giving the women come to bathe a proper fright. Dressed in only a breechclout, with no adornment or markings to proclaim his origins, he’d said not a word but strode past them into the town, straight to the msi-kah-mi-qui where he was met by Cornstalk himself. He hadn’t spoken Shawnee at the time—only the tongue of his mother’s people, the Delaware—but had made it clear his intentions were to stay with them, become one of them. So he had done, after being forced to run the gauntlet.
The Delaware stranger who would become Wolf-Alone had taken a hard beating, but he’d stayed on his feet and run the gauntlet’s length, to be set upon at the end by one young warrior who he finally bested by snatching the man’s war club out of his hand and landing a blow to the head that ought to have caved in that warrior’s skull but hadn’t.
That young warrior had been Falling Hawk.
Once he’d recovered from the ordeal, Falling Hawk had asked what they’d done with the bold Delaware who wanted to be Shawnee. He was told they had tended his wounds but were holding him captive, Cornstalk being undecided what to do with such a one.
“Good.” Falling Hawk had said. “I know what to do. I will make him my brother.”
So that was what they’d done. Some of the women took the stranger, who had told no one his name, down to the creek from which he’d come and washed away his Delaware blood, and whatever other blood ran through his veins, and he became Shawnee.
It was a good story and had been told many times, but what had come before it…if anyone but Wolf-Alone knew, Jeremiah had never heard it repeated. There was something about the big warrior that forbade his asking, a barrier that, for all Wolf-Alone’s loyalty to his adopted family, no one was allowed to cross.
Jeremiah turned from the fire to look at Clare Inglesby, thinking of a change he’d noted in her since leaving Wakatomica. It was in her tending of Pippa, the way she held her daughter, looked into her face, a devotion that had been missing since the baby’s birth. She’d run off into the village and abandoned Pippa with a warrior she didn’t know; Wolf-Alone had had the baby in his arms when he came into the msi-kah-mi-qui seeking Jeremiah.
Had she come to her senses, somewhere in the village, and feared she’d lost her daughter as well? Maybe that fear had broken open a place in her heart for the child, a place she’d kept sealed tight, reserved for the son she couldn’t reach with her arms.
If so, that was a good thing to come of it. But as he and Wolf-Alone settled to sleep, Jeremiah found himself praying she wouldn’t repeat such a rash act in Cornstalk’s Town or wherever she finally set eyes on that son.
They’d begun encountering Indians on the trail two days ago. Hunters mostly, though twice they met runners bearing word from Cornstalk to the chiefs at Wakatomica. Now, emerging from thick forest into a more rolling, gentler landscape than any she’d crossed these past weeks, Clare was astonished at the prospect opening before her—broad tracts of cleared earth occupied by women bent over hoes or on their knees with hands in the dark soil, sowing some crop not in rows but in large hillocks that made the land look as if it were infested with giant voles. Accustomed as she was to the sight of Virginia steadings, her mind calculated the area of cultivation—what she could see as they advanced between fields—and translated that into a rough approximation of the numbers such acreage could sustain.
Cornstalk’s Town would be larger than any she’d yet seen, and it was but one in the vicinity. South of Scippo Creek was the village of Cornstalk’s sister, Nonhelema. Other towns lay across the Scioto River. The sheer number of Shawnees inhabiting this landscape pressed upon her, but it was those nearest demanding her immediate attention.
Most stopped their work t
o stare. Some called out to Mr. Ring or Wolf-Alone. With memories of Wakatomica fresh, Clare was afraid to return their stares but couldn’t keep herself from studying the children playing. Spotting no fair head among the dark ones, she bit back a groan of longing, comforted only by the solid weight of Pippa on her back.
She would conduct herself with proper decorum in this place. She would do nothing to jeopardize her goal—leaving with both of her children, unharmed, as soon as possible. She’d show Mr. Ring it had been no mistake to bring her this far.
“I need you to listen,” he’d told her as they lingered by what would be their last fire, camped in forest where Shawnees hunted, where others called Miamis, Wyandots, Senecas, Patawatomis might be encountered. “I’m going to tell you how things will be for us when we reach Cornstalk’s Town tomorrow, best I can foresee.”
Clare had known how they would be. The Almighty hadn’t brought her this far to deny her Jacob, whatever dire prediction the man was about to make.
“First I’ll have to ascertain if Jacob is in our sister’s keeping, as Wolf-Alone believes.” Mr. Ring had glanced at his brother, sitting across the fire; Wolf-Alone’s enigmatic gaze had moved between them, though he showed no comprehension of their exchange. “If so, I’ll learn whether he’s been adopted, then whether our sister is willing to meet with us and talk.”
Clenching her teeth against dismay at the notion, Clare kept her mouth shut and waited.
“It’s going to take time.” Mr. Ring said the words carefully, as if unsure she would grasp his meaning. “Longer than you’ll wish.”
“How much time are you thinking it will take, Mr. Ring?”
Again his dark eyes shifted, gaze going to Wolf-Alone before he shook his head. “That’ll depend on Rain Crow, Falling Hawk as well. We’ll need him on our side if we can get him there. But I caution you not to count on that.”
“I will count on the Lord,” she said, more desperation than conviction in her voice.
He leaned forward, bringing his face into fuller firelight, features thrown into shadowed relief. “I need you to trust me, let me see this through for you. You cannot do what you did in Wakatomica, not in Cornstalk’s Town. It matters what these people think of you.”
More than ever she felt he resented being put in this position, pulled between her and his Shawnee kin. She wished he wasn’t in this position, wished she and Philip had remained in Virginia, content to be dirt-poor farmers raising their children by the strength of their backs.
Mr. Ring had asked for her trust. Pippa set to crying, relieving her of saying more than “I understand.”
Next morning Mr. Ring had shaved off his whiskers. She’d blushed when first she saw him, finding it impossible not to stare, disconcerted that she missed the beard, though she noticed now that his mouth was nicely shaped, wide and full. The skin on the lower half of his lean face wasn’t much paler than that across his cheekbones and brow. She supposed he kept himself clean-shaven among the Shawnees, only letting his beard grow while traipsing about the wilderness or wherever his Indian agency business took him.
He’d altered his dress that morning too. Gone was the battered hat. In its place he’d tied what looked like turkey feathers in the leather whang that tailed his hair. Though the leggings and breechclout were the same, the shirt he’d donned was of billowy linen sewn with beads at the collar instead of the worn, linsey-woolsey hunting shirt he usually wore.
Taken altogether he seemed more Indian than before.
Walking between him and Wolf-Alone as they pushed past the Shawnees’ fields and into the edges of the town—a mingling of wegiwas and, to her surprise, squared, split-log cabins that might have been plucked by some great wind from any of a hundred Virginia farmsteads and dropped across the Ohio—Clare felt like a sparrow strayed into some alien flock that promised no welcome. The babble of voices enclosed her as women and children left their tasks to trail behind.
Thus surrounded by her enemies, with more doubt in the man who stood between them than she cared to admit, Clare Inglesby straightened her back and followed Jeremiah Ring into Cornstalk’s Town.
The warrior called Falling Hawk met them within sight of the msi-kah-mi-qui, a structure in the town’s center Clare recognized on sight. She had no need to be told of his identity. Somehow she knew, in those seconds his bent head emerged from a nearby lodge and he straightened, lean and muscular, with thick black hair that fell halfway to his waist worn loose and flowing. He wasn’t as tall as Wolf-Alone or even Mr. Ring, whom he caught sight of and greeted with an expansive smile, but he strode toward them with a carriage so straight he seemed tall.
Mr. Ring called a greeting to the approaching warrior, then turned to her. “That’s my brother. Keep quiet ’less I speak to you. I’m going to explain things now.”
Her mouth was a desert. She couldn’t have spoken had she wanted to. Sensing movement near, she looked up. Wolf-Alone didn’t look at her, yet it seemed he was offering what he could—his familiarity and the substantial force of his presence. The depth of her gratitude surprised her, but she was distracted by the greeting being exchanged by Mr. Ring and Falling Hawk. The two fell to talking, and Clare strained to listen, though she couldn’t comprehend a word. Falling Hawk looked her way, surprise lifting feathery eyebrows. Something Mr. Ring said drew reactions from Indians nearby. Noises of surprise, curiosity. More glazes flicked to her as Falling Hawk crossed to Wolf-Alone and greeted him as warmly as he had Mr. Ring. The two exchanged a few words, then the warrior turned to Clare.
“Good you here with my brother.” He added more that she didn’t catch, but the gist of what he’d said was plain despite his imperfect English. He’d welcomed her.
“Thank you,” Clare said, sounding breathless with nervous relief. “Thank you so much. I…” Truth warred with necessity before necessity won out. “It is good to be here with you.”
Jacob’s name was on the tip of her tongue when she heard Pippa waking in her carrier. Falling Hawk heard too and asked a question in Shawnee, turning to Mr. Ring, whose face reddened slightly as he replied. Clare sought to catch his eye. He sensed her gaze. She knew he did. But he wouldn’t look at her.
Her belly turned over, as around them bodies smelling of bear grease pressed close and she felt the touch of fingers. Were they touching Pippa too? She wanted to remove the carrier and hold the baby, shield her, but feared to cause offense. She could feel her nerves unraveling like a spool of ribbon with each moment’s passing. She yearned to ask about Jacob.
Just then a woman emerged from the lodge Falling Hawk had exited moments before. She stood and looked their way, smooth-skinned, slender, and arresting.
Assuming this was Falling Hawk’s wife, Clare took a second look and realized it wasn’t the set of the woman’s features that rendered her striking, though the bones beneath were strong in shape. What made her so arresting came from within, a joy that radiated from shining eyes as she caught sight of Mr. Ring and Wolf-Alone and blazed a dazzling smile.
That smile betrayed the woman’s true relationship to Falling Hawk, for Clare had seen its twin moments ago. Not wife. Sister.
The woman called to them in Shawnee. Mr. Ring turned at the sound, just as Clare felt the breath go out of her in a rush. She was no longer looking at Falling Hawk’s sister but at the child she was turning back to coax out of the lodge. A child emerging from the bark hut into sunlight that shone almost blindingly off curling pale hair.
The woman took the child by the hand.
The world narrowed until it included nothing but those clasped hands. Slender graceful brown hand. Small trusting white hand. Bonded in a manner that seared her soul with violation.
Jacob. She could neither speak nor move, so paralyzing was the shock, the joy, the outrage coursing through her.
“Clare,” was all Mr. Ring had time to say before Jacob saw her too.
Her son’s face hung expressionless and remained so for a breath…two…long enough for Clare to fear t
hat already he’d forgotten her. Then Jacob’s face broke with recognition and a relief so wrenching Clare knew it matched her own. His features screwed up as tears came in a flood.
“Mama! Mama!”
Shrieking at the top of his considerable lungs, her little boy twisted in the grasp of Falling Hawk’s sister, yanked free, and hurtled toward Clare, who fell to her knees in a billow of stained linen to receive him, the agony of the past weeks lifting away.
“Jacob—Jacob.” She closed her eyes, feeling little arms clamped around her, smelling soft hair, tasting the salt of tears and sweat—familiar, beloved—while above and around them voices rose, exclaiming, querying, protesting. They collided like waves crashing. An island amidst the breakers, Clare paid them no more heed than she would such waves. Not even that high, desperate voice calling the same Shawnee words over and over. She cared not. Jacob was found. Safe. Hers.
Then hands were on her, pulling at her gown, her hair. Pulling too at Jacob. Her grip on him tightened as a growl escaped her lips.
A blow glanced across her cheekbone. Still she clung.
Pippa was wailing, still strapped to Clare’s back…until suddenly she wasn’t. The weight of baby and carrier lifted away, the straps falling slack into her lap. For an uncomprehending second she stared at the severed leather. Then, still crouched, Jacob clinging to her burr-like, she whirled to catch whoever had taken her baby, ready to battle for both her children against an entire Shawnee village.
Wolf-Alone stood just out of reach, holding the carrier with Pippa in it, the baby red-faced and squalling. While above the din Mr. Ring shouted something in Shawnee, Clare surged to her feet, Jacob clutching her petticoat.
Holding her iron gaze like a lodestone, Wolf-Alone backed away a measured step. Enraged by his betrayal, she staggered after him, hampered by Jacob’s clinging. In that instant her son was yanked away. She felt the wrench of her garment, heard the tearing of seams as his grip broke.
