by Lori Benton
Clare stifled the urge to smile. “That’s what people will think, is it? Was that Wolf-Alone’s idea?”
Wildcat nodded, looking pleased. “You talk Wildcat?”
“Will I teach you, do you mean? Maybe I should. Your English could use improving.”
The boy grinned. “English bad. You make good?”
Clare lost her battle with the smile. The child was too appealing with his lively amber eyes, his hawk-feathered hair, that impish grin. “All right. And while we’re at it, maybe you can teach me to speak Shawnee.”
“Wesah!” the boy said with enthusiasm.
“Wesah?”
“This means…good. Your first word?”
It wasn’t quite the first, but she nodded, letting him think so.
“We have treaty, me and you.” With confidence that she would follow now, Wildcat continued along the path into Cornstalk’s Town.
The boy left her outside Wolf-Alone’s lodge and scampered off into the village. Clare ducked past the door-hide, expecting to find both Mr. Ring and Pippa grown impatient for her return. She felt a stab of guilt. How long must she be torn between a baby’s demands and doing everything possible to free her son from captivity? It was eating her alive with each passing day, fearing Jacob would forget his life before—forget her. That he would let Rain Crow take a mother’s place in his heart.
Now her mind spun with possibilities, thinking of Mr. Cheramy. Had she found the means to get Jacob back at last? She could envision so many ways it might unfold, how the man might help her…if she could convince him to do so.
She’d expected to hear a hungry infant’s fussing long before now; all was quiet when she entered the lodge, which produced a momentary clutch of panic.
Then she saw Mr. Ring, stretched out on the sleeping platform he’d given up for her, dark hair loose against a heap of bedding that pillowed his head. Sprawled across him, pale little arms splayed wide, wearing nothing but a clout, was Pippa.
Both were sound asleep.
One of Mr. Ring’s big hands covered her daughter’s back, fingers slightly curled, as her tiny body rode the rise and fall of his broad chest. The soft dome of Pippa’s head was tucked up against his neck, her little mouth and chin scrunched against his collarbone, visible in the opening of his shirt.
In all of Jacob’s infancy, had she ever seen Philip do such a thing? Memory failed to supply a single instance.
Scarcely daring to breathe, Clare lowered the waterskin to the ground. Rather than her daughter’s face, her gaze settled on Mr. Ring’s. There was light enough in the lodge to trace the contours of his profile, the narrow bridge of his nose, the dark line of a brow above the hollow of a closed eyelid, the sweep of lashes against a cheekbone.
Pippa jerked in her sleep, emitting a soft whimper. Mr. Ring opened his eyes and saw her. Across Pippa’s head their gazes held. Clare smiled gently, flustered to have been caught watching him sleep.
His gaze dropped to the waterskin. “How did it go?”
Pippa wasn’t settling again. Mr. Ring sat up, swinging both legs off the bed platform and shifting Pippa higher on his shoulder. Like Jacob before her, Clare’s daughter had gradually lost her dark birth cap of hair. Only a few patches remained; soon that would be gone, replaced by a pale down so fine it needed the right slant of light even to see it.
Pippa would be fair like her brother.
Clare bent to retrieve the skin, found a small kettle, and poured water into it. “No one tried to drive me away with sticks.”
She’d meant to make light, but Mr. Ring didn’t laugh. He waited, clearly expecting more. She had no intention of mentioning Mr. Cheramy, so she told him of meeting Crosses-the-Path, the woman’s friendly overtures. And she mentioned Wildcat. “He asked me to teach him English.”
“He asked you?”
Clare looked up at Mr. Ring’s startled tone. He was patting Pippa’s back, but his gaze pinned her, questioning. It was strange, knowing something about Wolf-Alone and Wildcat that Mr. Ring didn’t know. But she needed to be more careful. She’d nearly revealed their secret.
“He has a few words. He made his wishes clear enough.”
Mr. Ring seemed content to let it go. “I’m glad you made the effort to go among the women.”
Finally, she supposed he was thinking. “I was surprised by Falling Hawk’s wife. I didn’t expect…”
“That she’d be curious about you? She’s been waiting for you to come out into the village for days.” A smile played at the corner of Mr. Ring’s mouth.
Pippa was growing red in the face. Mr. Ring stood. Clare did as well. “Let me take her.”
Their hands brushed as she took the baby from him; she blushed unaccountably at the contact. “I’ll fetch the water from now on,” she said.
She turned her back as she customarily did while tending to Pippa, so she didn’t see Mr. Ring’s face when he replied, “It’s only going to help matters, showing yourself friendly.”
“As you keep saying…and no doubt you are right.”
“Am I?” he replied, sounding pleased. Thinking she was falling in with his plans at last?
She was thinking about returning to the creek tomorrow morning, and the next, and next—until she saw Jean-Paul Cheramy again. Until they could continue their conversation about Jacob.
She’d see Crosses-the-Path as well, and yes, she would show herself friendly if it aided her cause. But she dared to hope it didn’t matter now because eventually Mr. Cheramy would bring her word of Jacob. Perhaps he’d even contrive to bring Jacob with him, out of Nonhelema’s Town, down to the creek that ran between. She’d noticed that Indian children, even those as young as Jacob, weren’t tethered to their mothers every moment of the day. They ran together in packs, the oldest looking after the little ones. Perhaps Rain Crow would let down her guard.
She bent over her nursing daughter, biting back a groan of longing. Surely it could be no coincidence, she and the trader ending up at the creek at the same moment. He wasn’t Shawnee. Not even adopted, far as she knew. He would be sympathetic to her plight, not torn in his heart like Mr. Ring. Not bound to any Shawnee kin. He would see the captivity of her son as a white man should—a thing to be undone.
He would help her.
JUNE 12
REDSTONE FORT, VIRGINIA COLONY
A person could vanish on the Virginia frontier without much fuss and bother. A hunter gone out for meat meets instead with mortal mishap crossing a river—or a bear—leaving his bones to bleach lonely on a mountainside. A child playing in the dirt of a cabin yard is snatched by tawny hands and carried off to grow up Seneca or Shawnee. A man pulls up stakes, carts his family over the next blue ridge westward, never to be seen again.
It happened in a hundred different ways and not just to strangers, so why it never entered the mind of Alphus Jacob Litchfield that it could happen to his niece, her husband, and his namesake great-nephew, he couldn’t rightly have said. Maybe the notion had tried to slip its way in and he’d slammed the gate on it like a skunk come nosing. Clare was like a daughter to him, the nearest he’d ever know, confirmed and grizzled bachelor that he was at forty-nine. Thought of her disappearing from the face of the earth was unimaginable.
Until now.
It still rankled that Philip Inglesby couldn’t stay put on the land Alphus had planned eventually to give the man—give—in exchange for working it. Of course one didn’t generally rebuild lost family fortunes farming in the Shenandoah, but for crying after spilled milk, it would’ve been a life worth living, one many a man would trade places for given half a chance. Philip was accustomed to better, and he couldn’t let that go. He’d thought he could find it, or the start of it, in Kentucky. Of all places.
It wasn’t that Alphus didn’t understand the allure of the frontier. As a second son with no prospect of inheriting the family’s Richmond estate, which had passed to Clare’s father, Lawrence, he’d gone west himself, back when the Shenandoah was the frontier and S
hawnees still had a village or two tucked between the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny Plateau.
Those Shawnees had since moved west themselves. Civilization had caught up with Alphus in his gristmill on the banks of Lewis Creek, near Staunton. He reckoned Kentucky was the next generation’s gold at rainbow’s end.
Philip was after gold, but Alphus had never pegged his niece’s husband as having gumption enough to go chasing down a perilous path like the Ohio to find it. He’d tried to dissuade the young man of the notion. Clare’s father had done the same by letter. When the combined efforts of the Litchfield brothers had failed to carry the battle, he’d been the one to watch them rattle off along the Great Wagon Road.
The dust of their creaking Conestoga had hardly settled before murmurings began about the Yellow Creek killings and that Mingo Logan’s about-face from friendly Indian to the white man’s mortal foe. Then those fools at Pittsburgh attacked a peaceful delegation of Shawnees come to talk to the Indian agents. Now not only a few Mingos were riled but an entire nation of warriors already agitated by the overrunning of their hunting grounds south of the Ohio.
The whole frontier was set to go up in flames, with Clare and her family gone straight into the fire’s heart.
So he’d done what Lawrence would’ve done were he in Alphus’s place. Decided not to wait and see if Philip came to his senses and brought Clare and the children—she’d have had that second baby by now—back to Augusta County. He set out to find their girl and see her safe home himself.
Leaving the mill in the hands of an apprentice, he saddled his horse and rode northward up that hard-traveled road to discover how far the Inglesbys made it before news of Logan’s raids turned them back. He wouldn’t have been surprised to come across them a mile down the road, headed back his way. Certainly he’d expected to encounter them before arriving at Redstone Fort, way on up the Monongahela. Mile after mile his horse trod, and he met with many a settler heading east to wait out the threat of Indian uprising, but not Clare and Philip.
Redstone proved busy with settlers who’d abandoned their Kentucky holdings, or their dreams of such, but no one had word of the ones Alphus sought.
“Got no news of Harrod,” was the general response from those camped around the fort, until finally a trader turned back after shaking his head to add, “Though come to think on it, I did hear Governor Dunmore sent out a couple scouts to warn Harrod’s party to come in. Boone was one.”
“Daniel Boone?” Alphus asked, pulse giving a leap.
“The very man.”
Alphus knew Boone. They’d served together during Braddock’s doomed campaign back in ’55, when Boone was a wagoner. A stout fellow. Knew the wilderness better than most and how to stay alive in it.
Hope took an upswing.
“Why the interest in Harrod’s party?” he was asked. “Got kin among ’em?”
“I do.” Alphus was inclined to keep his business his own but decided opening up to a man with more notion than most of how things were unfolding to the westward mightn’t be the worst concession he’d ever made. “My niece and her family. Inglesby’s the name. They’d planned to come through Redstone, meet up with Harrod before his party left, go by water down to the Ohio…”
He stopped talking, catching a light in the stranger’s gaze, the pulling in of shaggy brows. “Inglesby? Blond-headed feller? The wife expecting soon-like? Pretty green eyes?”
Alphus, who’d started to nod, leveled a glare at the trader, who held up a palm. “A man can’t help noticing a set of pretty eyes. Reckon they left these parts before word of Logan’s raids reached us. And I mean right before. They’d come late and missed Harrod’s party, and he was in a hurry to catch ’em up. Wouldn’t wait for a boat to be built but traded his Conestoga for a smaller wagon to go overmountain to Wheeling.”
Alphus stared at the man. “He took a wagon over the Alleghenies?”
“Set out to anywise. Down the pack trail yonder.” The trader lifted his shoulders but forbore showing any further sign of opinion on such doings.
Alphus was busy berating himself. Lord, help. He ought to have tried harder to persuade Philip of his folly in thinking he was in any way suited to the frontier. He’d told himself they’d be with James Harrod, who by all accounts was imminently suited. Had they ever found the man?
“…then word of Logan’s murdered folk come and that scout of McKee’s decided to go after ’em, see could he find ’em on the trail, help ’em did they need it.”
Alphus reined in his attention as a cart went rattling into the fort, near the busy gate of which the two stood talking. He waited for the conveyance to pass and stepped nearer the man. “A scout went after them, you say?”
“That’s right. On his way to Cornstalk’s Town with a message from McKee. He ain’t come back neither, so either he found your kin and got ’em through to Wheeling or…” Buried the remains and went on his way, Alphus read in the man’s eyes.
“This scout have a name?”
“Ring—Jeremiah Ring. Virginia-born, I think, but one of them adopted Shawnees. Don’t know what he goes by with them, but he’s back and forth through Redstone couple times a year, running messages to or from the Scioto towns. Speaks a fair number of the heathen tongues.”
“Ring.” Alphus frowned over the name, but in the seconds that passed before the trader snagged another man passing, he couldn’t place where he’d heard it or why it struck a chord in his memory.
He waited while the two spoke in hushed tones, casting looks at Alphus the while. The second man’s expression flattened, but he gave the trader a nod.
“This here’s Isaac Pentland, come from Wheeling,” the trader said of the man in a battered hat who looked to be in his thirties, though his face was haggard. “He and his family came over the trail your people took.”
Pentland cleared his throat. “Ye say ye’re looking for kin, gone west in a wagon not long since?”
“Inglesby, Clare and Philip. Have you seen them? Did they make it to Wheeling?”
Pentland shook his head. “That I don’t know, but…reckon I seen the wagon, if not the kin.”
The grim line of the man’s mouth sent a spike of dread through Alphus’s chest, but he was jiggered if he knew how to interpret that sidelong flick of eyes, or the look in them—guilt?
Alphus clenched his fists, one of which held his rifle. “Whatever you know, spill it.”
Pentland took a step back. “Maybe better I show ye. Come over to our camp. Ye need to have a word with my wife.”
The Pentlands’ makeshift camp was tucked between pines a stone’s throw from the fort gate, little more than a fire ring and a canvas shelter cluttered with packs and pans and red-headed children. The Pentlands had come in from a homestead twenty miles south of Wheeling with whatever they could carry on their backs and that of two horses, a mule, and a goat—plus a little something they’d picked up along the way.
Pentland’s wife, the source of her brood’s coloring—and well along with the next addition to the ginger-haired clan—wore the same guilty look as her husband, who stood by while she rooted among the family’s scattered possessions, at last finding what she sought at the bottom of a meal sack: a china cup, blue-flowered and rimmed in gold, chipped and battered.
“They was more of’m, all busted up in a box. This’un was the onliest still whole and seeing as tweren’t no one to say me nay and I always fancied me a purty cup…” The woman lifted rounded shoulders. “I took it.”
“Wagon was busted,” Pentland added, sounding a shade defensive. “Team and anything of use gone. Reckoned what was left was free for the picking.”
Alphus heard the man’s nervous prattle, his gaze on the blue-flowered cup. He lifted that gaze to the woman’s, questioning. She handed him the cup. He turned it over, thumbing the chips in its rim. He’d never drank tea from one of these, or even handled them before. Clare had kept them safe atop a hutch in the farmhouse, out of Jacob’s reach.
Sh
e’d loved those cups. All six of them.
“Listen,” Pentland was saying. “They’s likely holed up in Wheeling now even if we didn’t cross paths with ’em, forting up safe. Or maybe they went upriver to Pittsburgh to wait a spell afore heading down to Harrod?”
Alphus looked at the man. “Tell me everything you recall—about the wagon, where you found it. What you found.”
“About two days back along the trail, nigh a little crick and a clearing. Plain what the trouble was—broken wheels, busted axle. There was a fire ring and a shelter, but it was deserted. No sign of struggle. Just like they all up and walked away.”
“Figured they put what could be toted on the horses and went on by foot,” said his wife.
“Or maybe that scout found ’em and guided ’em over,” Pentland added. “That has to be what happened.”
But they all knew that didn’t have to be what happened. Alphus handed the cup back to Pentland’s wife.
“Keep it.”
The woman’s ruddy brows rose. “You sure ’bout that?”
“I’m sure.” He thanked the couple, cast a glance over six…seven small freckled faces, then turned on a boot heel and headed back to the fort, where he’d left his horse watering.
He’d no need to see the broken wagon to know it was Clare’s. That cup was proof enough. Likely too much time had passed to hope some clue survived to where his niece had gone when she and Philip and Jacob left the wagon behind, but he knew better than to presume so. And that scout—where had he heard that name, Ring?—if he had found and helped them along to Wheeling, would he have had the foresight to leave some sign for someone who might come looking?
Without seeing that wagon with his own eyes, he’d always wonder.
So focused was he on getting to it and what he’d find when he did, Alphus reached his horse and was about to loosen its hitch before the stir sweeping through the fort gained his attention.
Leaving the horse, he strode to a knot of men gathered round a speaker on the veranda of an officer’s cabin, who turned out to be a messenger sent not from Pittsburgh with yet another rumor of an Indian raid but from the governor in Williamsburg with, finally, a concrete answer to those raids and the upheaval they’d occasioned.
