by Lori Benton
As deep as his own bones, Jeremiah knew it.
That seemed to be the end of the matter as far as Cornstalk was concerned. The Shawnee chief was going to let them work out the situation between them as a family, he and Falling Hawk, Rain Crow and Clare.
He wondered what Nonhelema would say about it.
Cornstalk read his thoughts. “My sister has heard about the situation and is of the same mind as I. She is a Shawnee mother. She will not force another Shawnee mother to do this or that with her child. It will have to be the mother of this boy—not the mother who is your wife—who decides. Unless…”
Here the chief’s lips pressed tight, and he wouldn’t finish whatever thought had been in his head. He didn’t need to. As their gazes held in shadowy light, Jeremiah knew exactly what he’d started to say. The choice about Many Sparrows was going to have to be Rain Crow’s, unless that thing Cornstalk desired to avoid happened—unless there was war, and the Shawnees lost that war, and the Virginians forced the people to give up all their adopted sons and daughters born white as a term of the peace treaty that would follow, that they would be made to sign.
Torn as he was about the boy, Jeremiah would never wish such a thing upon the People, neither the defeat, nor the loss of those who had become dear to their hearts.
It had been only a few days since the meeting with Falling Hawk and Rain Crow, but Jeremiah knew that every moment without her son was an agony to Clare.
He’d gotten her Shawnee clothes, a wrap skirt and hip-length shirt that belted at the waist with a woven sash. They’d left her alone so she could wash, as well as could be managed with a kettle. She wouldn’t go to the creek to bathe with the women. She wouldn’t leave the wegiwa at all unless Jeremiah accompanied her. If they brought in food, she cooked it. If something needed washing—and one of them fetched water for it—she washed it. All the while her anxious expectation filled the lodge, setting nerves on edge.
After learning neither Cornstalk nor Nonhelema would aid them, he’d told her to give Rain Crow time before they approached her again. Time to get used to the idea of Clare’s presence.
She’d railed at him. Argued and pleaded.
“Another day, another week, isn’t going to change the fact that I’m Jacob’s mother, not Rain Crow. He’s my son!”
When none of it availed, she’d settled into silent stewing, and it wrenched Jeremiah to see her misery.
“Clare,” he’d said early on the fourth day, after Wolf-Alone left with rifle and shot-pouch to spend the day somewhere her anxiety didn’t disquiet the air. “I’m done drawing water for you. Go down to the creek. The women will welcome you. If any don’t, they won’t harm you. They think you my wife.”
“I don’t want to disturb Pippa. I just got her to sleep.”
She wore the clothes he’d acquired and seemed to find it easier to move about in them, squatting at the fire to tend a kettle or rummaging through their stores. But clothes didn’t change what was inside her. Fear was the bitter spring from which her stubbornness sprung. And mistrust.
Considering the calamity Philip Inglesby had led her into, little wonder she’d no faith in a man she barely knew, who’d led her into what must seem greater peril and uncertainty than anything she’d known with Inglesby.
“I’ll mind Pippa. If she wakes and cries, I’ll bring her straight to you.” Thrusting a waterskin into her hands, Jeremiah all but propelled her past the door-hide.
To his amazement she went, if stiff-backed and tight-lipped. He stood there as the hide fell shut, fully expecting it to swish aside and Clare to march back in.
When he heard the scuff of moccasins on the path leading from the doorway, he felt his shoulders ease.
She’d lasted three days inside the lodge before the need to do something—anything—to alleviate the torment of waiting outweighed her fear of having to do it in view of a people who thought abducting a child and forcing him to become one of them an acceptable practice. A people Jeremiah Ring insisted she must try to understand. Even befriend.
The man must be sitting in that bark hut thinking he’d cajoled her into taking the first step. He was quite wrong. Had she not already determined to do so—she’d been summoning the nerve since waking—he could never have forced her past that hanging hide.
Only now was she having second thoughts.
From the instant she’d stepped from the lodge, she’d been scrutinized. There was nothing she could do about her hair, plaited in a braid, or her skin, but at least she was dressed like the women taking note of her. A simple stroud-cloth skirt and a long shirt that bound her with nothing but the woven sash securing it at her waist. Going about without stays cinching her ribs left her feeling naked, yet it had made so many tasks, especially nursing Pippa, remarkably easier.
Being outside the lodge without the baby either in a sling or cradleboard left her feeling naked as well, but she wasn’t worried for Pippa. Mr. Ring was good with her daughter, who sometimes settled for him faster than she would for Clare. And she wouldn’t be gone long. How much time could fetching water take?
That would depend on how hard it proved to find the creek. Mr. Ring had described the route…
Uncertain of her path, she halted and looked around with the same disorientation she’d experienced in Wakatomica. All the lodges looked alike. All the faces staring at her.
Her chest grew tight, her breathing labored, but she calmed herself. They aren’t going to attack you. You’re married to one of their own—so they think.
She began to see the wisdom in the subterfuge, however disagreeable the notion.
Thrusting down fear, she decided to do what Mr. Ring had urged for days: make contact with one of these women. But for all their staring from the kettles and fires outside their lodges, not one would actually meet her gaze. Were they waiting for her to do something? Ought she to hold up the waterskin and point? Make a show of drinking from it?
She was raising the skin to give that last idea a try when a slight, round-faced woman hurried into view around a nearby lodge, trailed by two little girls; Falling Hawk’s wife, Crosses-the-Path, out of breath but striding with purpose to intercept her.
Halting in front of Clare, she opened her mouth, then shut it, coppery complexion deepening in the wordless silence. Finally she cleared her throat and said, “You…butterfly…come out…cocoon?”
Butterfly? At least she hadn’t been likened to a snake slithering from under its rock. Clare smiled in pure relief. “Yes, I have come out of the lodge—the wegiwa,” she said, adding the Shawnee word when she detected no understanding in the woman’s gaze.
Crosses-the-Path’s daughters—the youngest about Jacob’s age, the other perhaps two years older—clutched their mother’s skirt and peered up with dark eyes. Clare offered them a smile. The little one giggled, then hid her face.
“I’m trying to find the creek.” Clare raised her gaze to their mother, who noticed the waterskin and babbled something at Clare, whose turn it was to stare blankly.
Crosses-the-Path tried saying just one word.
Clare didn’t know it.
The woman shook her head, brows bunching, then grabbed Clare’s wrist. With her other hand she beckoned, backing along the path through the lodges.
Clare took a reluctant step.
The woman backed away another step, repeating that one word, as if trying to coax a frightened animal to come along. Was it the word for creek? Clare hoped so because she was coming along now, the little girls in their wake, chattering to each other.
Crosses-the-Path faced forward, still clutching Clare’s wrist, seeming pleased by the stares of those who watched them pass. Clare came with pounding heart and mounting confusion, feeling at once ridiculous…and touched. She’d had no idea this woman felt anything remotely kind toward her. At their meeting three days ago, her focus had been all on Rain Crow. She’d given Falling Hawk’s quiet wife spare regard.
They reached a stand of trees where fewer lodges st
ood, then it was all trees for a distance and the land dipping down, then the woods opened to the creek where women crouched or sat along its bank, some busy with tasks Clare couldn’t discern from a distance, others filling skins and bladders and trade kettles from the creek’s flow.
At that point the creek widened around a bend, though not so wide she couldn’t have tossed a stone across it. The broad gravel beach there made it seem wider, and the creek flowed shallow and chattering. Most of the women were gathered in that spot. A little ways upstream where the water deepened, a few bathed, completely naked.
Clare looked away, cheeks blazing.
Crosses-the-Path released her hold on Clare’s wrist, pointed at the creek, and said that word again. She made a motion of drawing water, as if Clare mightn’t yet have made the connection. Obligingly Clare nodded her understanding, raising the waterskin between them. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for showing me the way.”
Her tone conveyed what her words couldn’t. Crosses-the-Path nodded.
Forcing herself to move, Clare chose a spot on the gravel beach downstream from a knot of women who made a show of minding their business. She caught a wary glance to two, but they seemed content to let her be. Children were about, most playing quietly; they had no compunction about edging nearer for a look at her. She glanced along the stony beach, offering smiles to the children, trying to read the body language of their mothers, the sidelong looks they gave each other and her.
She hadn’t asked Mr. Ring what was being said about her outside the lodge. Did these women know Rain Crow well? Falling Hawk’s sister didn’t live in Cornstalk’s Town, though at that moment Clare wished she did. She’d have ventured from the lodge sooner had there been the slightest chance of catching a glimpse of Jacob.
With a stab of longing, her thoughts returned to her son. She yearned to touch his hair and kiss his face. Hear his laughter and incessant chatter. Let him ask her a thousand questions. Feed him. Smell him.
It was a visceral, burning ache to think of another woman doing those things in her place.
She pulled up the dripping skin and stood, flinging her gaze and her heart across the creek into the woods beyond. There was a path there, the beginning of one. The path to Nonhelema’s Town? It lay somewhere across that creek, but how distant? She saw no one on the path, no indication anyone was near, and yet…she felt the burn of a gaze upon her.
She looked toward the women to find half of them had left the creek. Those remaining were minding their tasks. Even the children had drifted off upstream to play.
Turning, she saw Crosses-the-Path still standing where she’d left her, apparently waiting to escort her back into the town. Clare relaxed, thinking it was the other woman’s gaze she’d felt.
Just then the older of Crosses-the-Path’s daughters came racing up and tugged at her mother’s shirt hem with some urgent need. Crosses-the-Path called to Clare, beckoning.
Clare shook her head. She didn’t wish to return to Mr. Ring’s lodge yet. It was pointless perhaps, but she wanted to stay at the creek, if only to gaze across it and yearn for Jacob.
She waved the woman away, hoping she would go.
Crosses-the-Path looked unhappy about leaving her, but with a last half-worried glance she hurried along the path, leaving Clare wondering for the first time if Falling Hawk hadn’t told his wife to watch her—and not out of kindness.
Putting her back to the women on the creek bank, Clare made her way downstream, moving without seeming purpose, hoping to draw no attention. She wasn’t a captive but a guest. One who had brought trouble, but a guest who could go where she wished, within reason.
And still feeling like she was being watched.
She halted and looked back, but a clump of wild roses overhung the bank now, hiding the spot where the women gathered. None had followed to spy.
She should return to the lodge. What was it going to solve, standing there staring across the creek? It only deepened the pain. She started to turn away, heart dragging like an anchor, when she caught movement in the shadows beneath a tree, directly across the creek from where she stood.
An animal too shy to come and drink? A deer perhaps?
From the shadows beneath a tree, a man stepped into the cloud-filtered light. A white man. And he was looking at her. He was tall, fair-headed, and from that distance looked enough like Philip that the shock of it rendered Clare’s fingers numb. The waterskin dropped from her grasp to the pebbles at her feet.
The man stepped nearer the water’s edge, arm lifted in supplication. “Mademoiselle, je suis désolé—my sincere apology. I intended you no startlement.”
He hadn’t shouted to be heard, for he seemed to know his voice would carry across the water, which ran smoothly just there, quieter than its chattering around the beach upstream.
A Frenchman. Not Philip, of course.
He wore the long, fringed shirt of a frontiersman and, with it, fawn knee breeches and a pair of stockings that must have been donned that morning for they were remarkably clean. The moccasins on his feet seemed a bit incongruous, but all in all he gave the impression of a man who hadn’t forgotten where he came from, whatever turn of events had brought him to this place.
Clare composed herself but didn’t reach for the waterskin. “It’s all right. No harm done.”
“Merci. Bonjour, Mademoiselle. I was downstream a small distance engaged in…well.” The man peered across at her as if to gauge from her appearance some clue as to what she might be willing to abide when it came to the details of a man’s morning toilette.
“You were bathing, Monsieur?”
“Just so.” The man smiled engagingly. “And then I come along to the trail,” he went on with a nod to indicate the path she’d noted, upstream, “when I see you across the creek. At what do you gaze, Mademoiselle? I see nothing out of the commonplace.”
“Actually, it’s Madame,” Clare said, hesitating to answer him directly. Had it been his stare she’d sensed? Despite his explanation she wondered how long he’d been watching her from the shadows.
“Je vous demande pardon, Madame,” the man said. “May I begin over with a proper introduction? My name is Jean-Paul Cheramy. I am a trader out of Montreal.” Mr. Cheramy bowed, the movement gracefully executed save that it made the wide satchel hanging from his shoulder swing precariously forward. He grabbed for it and, straightening, said with unperturbed aplomb, “May I have the honor of knowing your name, Madame?”
“Clare Ing—Clare Ring. Jeremiah Ring is my…husband. They call him Panther-Sees-Him here.” She was too far away to read the man’s expression clearly but thought it shifted when she said Mr. Ring’s name. “Do you know him?”
“Do I know him? Not well. I prefer to do my trading in the town of Cornstalk’s sister. And you, Madame? I judge you a Virginian by your speech. This is true?”
Stifling impatience at this irrelevancy, she answered, “Yes. Born and raised. But have you—”
“Ah. For me it is Quebec—born and raised as you say. Though the trading keeps me much away.”
With her mind teeming with questions about Jacob, Clare could find no suitable reply to this. Perhaps noticing her lack of interest, Mr. Cheramy shrugged the subject of himself away.
“But you I see here on the bank of this creek looking across as one who has great interest. What is it over here that so engages you? Will you tell me?”
Clare looked down as wetness seeped into her moccasins. In her eagerness to inquire about Jacob, she’d stepped up to the creek’s edge. Ought she to cross over to speak to the man? The water there looked deep, with no convenient stones exposed as they were upstream. Crossing would be difficult.
“Have you been long in Nonhelema’s Town?”
“A fortnight perhaps,” said Mr. Cheramy.
“Have you seen a little boy? A white boy, hair about your shade. He’ll not have been there long.”
The trader’s brows drew together. “A boy four, five years of age?”
The jolt went straight to the pit of Clare’s stomach. “Yes, he’s four! His name is Jacob. He—”
A sudden tug on her hand made Clare yelp. She turned to find Wolf-Alone’s young friend, Wildcat, clinging to her.
She tried to pull away. The boy clung tenaciously and shot a scowl across the creek.
“Clare-wife. Come away to your man and baby. Leave that one.”
“Where did you come from?” She hadn’t seen him among the children playing along the creek. “Were you spying on me?”
Wildcat dropped his gaze, his grip on her loosening. She pulled her hand away.
“Did Mr. Ring set you to follow me?”
The boy dug a bare toe into the pebbles of the bank. “No.”
“Wolf-Alone then?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“He want you…safe. Safe is word?”
“I have no notion what Wolf-Alone is thinking. Is that the only reason?”
Wildcat didn’t understand that question. Or pretended he didn’t.
“Come,” he said again with a look across the creek. Mr. Cheramy had stood watching them. His genial smile was gone, but he gave her a polite nod before striding back into the forest.
“Wait!” Clare called as Wildcat snatched up the waterskin and thrust it into her hands.
The trader had gone.
“All right,” she said and followed the boy back along the bank to the gravel beach. “Why didn’t you want me to talk to Mr. Cheramy?”
The boy shook his head and would answer only vaguely, “Not good, talking much to traders.”
“But why? Do they cheat your people?”
“Sometimes cheat. Lie. But not all,” Wildcat added, as if trying to be fair. Still the scowl between his brows remained.
They’d nearly reached the first of the lodges. Clare put a hand on the boy’s shoulder to halt him. “Should you not cease speaking English, if it’s meant to be a secret between you and Wolf-Alone?”
It was a lot of words at once, but the boy appeared to understand. He lowered his voice. “I speak you, Clare-wife, they think you talk me?”
