The Wood's Edge

by Lori Benton

  The major. She still thought of Reginald Aubrey thus, though it was a year and more since he sold his army commission and hung up his red coat. The wound above his hip had proved slow to mend, but after a winter spent convalescing in the McClarens’ home, he’d felt himself fit enough to rejoin his regiment—only to have the wound fester again on the eve of his departure for Albany.

  About that time, across the sea in Wales, the major’s father had died. Though the family estate there—near a village with the outlandish name of Crickhowell—went to his elder brother, the major received a small inheritance. Enough to enable the family to leave the McClarens’ house for a home of their own.

  “You’ll want to slip those shoes back on,” Mr. Doyle called, interrupting her thoughts. “Here we are to home.”

  Lydia buckled her shoes as the cart turned down a narrow track, passing through fields of corn beginning to tassel. Children’s voices reached her before the cart rocked to a halt in the track that ran beside a two-storied, white-washed, stone farmhouse. She slid to her feet as Mr. Doyle climbed down.

  “Lydia!” First to round the cart, a collie at her heels, Anna grappled Lydia’s petticoat in a hug.

  “Well met!” She hefted the child onto her hip. “Oof! You’ve grown an inch since last I saw you. And gained a stone!”

  Anna put her nose to Lydia’s. “I am four.”

  “That explains it.” Lydia inhaled the smell of sunshine and grass and that inexplicable sweetness that was Anna. Feeling a tug, she looked down into William’s lifted face, startled at how sun-browned he’d gotten in a month’s time. “Well met to you too, Master William.”

  The boy gazed at her earnestly from under his mop of hair. “Next month I am four.”

  “Yes, William,” Anna said from her perch in Lydia’s arms. “But I will always be older.”

  William sucked in his bottom lip, thinking how to answer this irrefutable statement. His small face lit. “But one day I’ll be bigger.”

  Lydia slid Anna to the ground and planted a kiss atop William’s tousled hair. “I daresay you shall—if you take after your father.” Like Anna, the boy smelled of sun and grass, and sweat and dog besides. His hair had begun to darken, making Lydia suspect he’d end up with his mother’s coloring. Except for his eyes. They were the major’s, though an even purer blue.

  “And where is your cap, little miss?” she inquired of Anna, whose waist-length hair held a collection of leaves and grass bits that would have done a rolling filly proud.

  “She never wears it,” William said. “She’s a little hoyden.”

  Recognizing his mother’s sentiments—minus her critical tone—Lydia glanced at the steeply gabled house, behind which Mr. Doyle had disappeared. The farm was one of the valley’s oldest steadings, its house and outbuildings Dutch-built in the previous century. Shifting her gaze to the tidy cottage set back beyond a picketed vegetable garden, she asked, “Where’s your mother, William? And Mrs. Doyle?”

  “Mama’s in the house. Mrs. Doyle…” The boy glanced around, half-guiltily.

  “Spreading wash on the bushes out back.” Anna took her hand and tugged in that direction.

  Lydia hesitated. “I best give my greetings to Mrs. Aubrey first.”

  “Mama has a sick head.”

  Lydia might have grinned at the boy’s wording, if the reality of Heledd Aubrey’s suffering—and the major’s—wasn’t so tragic. Only days after they’d settled in their new home, Mrs. Aubrey had birthed her second babe since the major’s return from Quebec. Like the one before, born in the McClarens’ house, ten months after the major joined their household, it had been another boy. And like the one before, it had lived only a few days.

  “Has she taken the dogwood tea my father sent?” Such a feeble offering might mend a headache, but not a broken heart.

  She’d taken a step toward the house when a familiar voice called from the cottage yard. “Lydia! ’Tis yourself then, is it? I thought I heard Rowan’s cart.”

  Maura Doyle, faded red hair pinned under a cap, had come round the cottage, wiping her hands on her apron. With her husband in charge of the fields and stock, Mrs. Doyle had made herself indispensable as cook, housemaid, and second pair of eyes for Heledd Aubrey, who rarely set foot outside, Lydia had overheard her parents say.

  She started toward the woman when the back door of the house opened and there stood Mrs. Aubrey, blinking like a mole in sunlight. A mole with reddened eyes. “Lydia? Oh…I’d forgotten your visit. I’m sure Mrs. Doyle reminded me, but…”

  “Mrs. Aubrey.” Lydia bobbed a greeting, her chest tight with pity at sight of the woman, whose beauty had worn to a brittleness as fragile as glass. “William says you’ve a headache. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Headache?” Mrs. Aubrey looked confused. “But you must stay to tea now you’ve come all this way. Only might we take it a little later?”

  Lydia glanced at Mrs. Doyle, who’d crossed the yard to join them. The invitation to spend the day at the farm had included dinner as well as tea. “Of course, Mrs. Aubrey. That would be fine.”

  Heledd Aubrey nodded. After an awkward pause she asked, “How is your mother?”

  “Not yet recovered, I’m afraid. But she bid me come visit since she was feeling no worse at least.”

  “Ah.” Mrs. Aubrey’s gaze went to William, wrestling in the grass now with the collie, and Anna. “William, do you come into the house now.”

  The boy looked up, pouting. “Mama…Lydia is here.”

  Mrs. Aubrey’s clouded face abruptly brightened, as did her voice. “But I’ve a treat for you, darling. Come and see. Come you, now.”

  William glanced at Lydia, uncertain. Then, unable to resist such a siren call, he followed his mother inside.

  Anna watched him go. The hurt in her eyes, and the resigned acceptance of it, kindled an old blaze of anger in Lydia. Little enough had changed, at least in regard to Anna, with the major’s return two years ago, save that he provided a buffer between his wife’s indifference and the child’s tender heart—when he was present to do so.

  Lydia couldn’t fathom it. It was understandable that the woman would cling as fiercely as she did to William, her only living child, but that she kept Anna at arm’s length was inexplicable. Was there no room in the woman’s heart for a child not born of her body?

  “Anna, dearie,” Mrs. Doyle said. “Run inside to your place and get that thing you wished to show Miss Lydia.”

  “All right.” Anna raced across the yard, hair like tangled banners streaming behind her. She ran to the cottage. Not the house.

  Mrs. Doyle saw Lydia’s surprise. “It seemed for the best.”

  Mr. Doyle came from the cellar beneath the house, where he’d been stashing the goods brought home in the cart. He gave his wife’s shoulder a pat and climbed onto the cart to drive down the track toward the barn, whistling as he went.

  Maura looked after him, a faint smile on her lined face. “We were never blessed with children, Rowan and I. Though we’re still all settlin’ to the notion, we’re happy the child should be called Anna Doyle. At least for now. Perhaps in time…” The woman glanced at the big house. “She’s with child again, poor thing.”

  “So soon?” Barely a month since…Swallowing back dismay, Lydia turned to Mrs. Doyle. “But about Anna…the major agreed to it?”

  “He’d have her under his own roof, sure…” Mrs. Doyle trailed off, for Anna was returning, holding out to Lydia a cardinal’s feather, stunningly red. Heart aching, Lydia knelt and said she simply must be shown the exact spot such a treasure had been found.

  “My favorite place,” Anna began, when William burst into the yard, mouth ringed in crumbs, and slipped a sweet biscuit into Anna’s hand. The little girl smiled in delight—then whipped the biscuit behind her back when Mrs. Aubrey appeared in the doorway, frowning.

  William stepped in front of Anna and said in a rush, “Mama-can-we-show-Lydia-the-creek-and-footlog-and-dock-and-and-and-th
e-other-places?”

  Mrs. Aubrey darted a wary look over the fields to the distant woods, as if they were a line of menacing storm clouds, but seemed helpless against her son’s hopeful gaze. “Lydia…you’ll not let William alone by the river? He is full of such spirit and heedless of his safety.”

  The woman looked in equal parts proud of her son and terrified for him.

  “I’ll watch them like a hawk,” Lydia promised, including Anna in this covering though Mrs. Aubrey hadn’t. Anna’s small hand slipped into hers. The other was still tucked behind her back.

  “Do keep watch and have a care.” Mrs. Aubrey looked on the verge of tears. “And don’t be gone overlong or I shall have to send Mrs. Doyle out to find William.”

  And should Anna fall in the river and drown, I suppose the woman would promptly forget she ever existed.

  Kneeling on the creek bank beside the promised ground holly, in waxy-white bloom, Lydia put away the ungracious thought, bound to spoil the day if she let it. Breaking off a few leathery leaves, she folded them into the last leather scrap she’d brought and slipped it into her satchel, crowded with earlier gleanings.

  Anna and William had showed her the barn—and the cow, oxen, pigs, and horses—the empty corn crib waiting to be filled, and every outbuilding the farm boasted, down to the springhouse and necessary. They hadn’t paused at the old burying ground, fenced in wrought iron and studded with the markers of earlier families who’d owned the farm, and one heartbreakingly tiny new mound.

  For the past half hour they’d explored the creek that came bounding down from the wooded hills stretching westward into a wilderness peopled mostly by deer and bear and Indians—with a few isolated farming settlements—winding its course to the river, which bordered the farm for several acres. They’d waited while she harvested ragwort along its bank, finally coming to a place where a young poplar had fallen across the creek, making dry-footed crossing possible. Beyond the footlog, a path gave access to a wide stand of beeches and a clearing beyond, sweet with birdsong and the hum of insects, then a breathless climb up a rock-strewn knoll where the creek reappeared; Anna’s favorite spot on the farm.

  “My waterfall!” the girl exulted once Lydia reached the level shelf in the largely treeless hillside.

  “Lovely,” Lydia exclaimed, brushing down her petticoat and settling on a nearby shelf of rock. While it was lovely, it was hardly a proper fall. Just a spill where the creek dropped over a broad, mossy stone, then tumbled down the hillside to wind toward the river beyond.

  “Our waterfall,” William corrected, springing up the hill lastly, trailing his collie-shadow. Above the spill was the creek’s spring-fed source, issuing from a thicket of rhododendron choking the narrow spaces between massive rocks.

  “We’re never to go farther into the wood than this.” Anna, hunkered beside Lydia, watched a wren flit at the base of a nearby shrub.

  Already clambering the rocks above them, William scooted down on his bottom and landed with a thump that frightened off the wren. “Mama says Indians will steal us away unless we take care.”

  Heledd Aubrey had more excuse than most to fear such a thing, but Lydia thought her anxiety unreasonable in its intensity, after all this time.

  Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs at Fort Johnson, across the river, lived with a Mohawk woman, Molly Brant, as his wife. His influence over the Mohawks, at least, held strong. And the Oneidas were peaceful neighbors. There would be no uprisings, not with Sir William in charge. Besides, Indians often came into Schenectady for trade. A Mohawk sachem from Canajoharie Town favored her father’s apothecary, arriving yearly with herbs harvested from forest and mountain to trade for simples her father purchased from eastern cities or London.

  “It’s not a wholly unfounded concern,” she’d told the children, trying to be fair-minded. “Not all Indians are friendly.” Nor were all Indians their neighbors. But there was a treaty of sorts, called the Covenant Chain, between the Six Nations and the English king. The Mohawks or Oneidas would warn Sir William of any impending threat from the west. Surely they would do that much.

  She hoped so. It had surprised Lydia to learn—from their visiting sachem—just how much autonomy Indian men had. They were more or less free to do as they chose, holding to a chief’s rule only so long as that man proved worthy of leadership. Which meant, Lydia was forced to conclude, one could never know for certain what might be brewing beyond the peaceful wood’s edge the children were forbidden to pass.

  But how irresistible it must be to be young in the world with such a place as this to be explored!

  With her satchel full, Lydia admired the spot anew. From the height of the little fall, the distant farmhouse could just be glimpsed through the summer-leafed trees lining the creek, white and tall beyond the green fields of corn. It was perfect, a place that felt wild and remote, with the security of home within sight.

  She cupped her hands beneath the tumbling creek and splashed her face, reveling in the coolness. Even in the wood the day was beginning to swelter.

  “Tadpoles!”

  Lydia looked downhill. At its base, the children leaned over a shaded pool. William poked a stick into the water as if he meant to spear one of the tiny creatures.

  Anna shaded her eyes, looking up at her. “Lydia, are you done?”

  William tossed his stick aside. “Let’s show her the river!”

  Grabbing Anna’s hand, he looked to see Lydia descending the slope, then made off across the clearing and through the beeches, back along the path to the footlog.

  Smiling at the boy’s enthusiasm—as if she’d never seen the river before—Lydia followed along its bank until they reached a dock set on pilings braced with stones. William trotted to the end of it, plopped down, and dangled his feet in the river. “My favorite place.”

  “Will you put your feet in the water?” barefooted Anna asked her.

  Lydia’s feet were hot and clammy in her shoes. The river looked inviting, flowing smooth along this stretch. “Why not?”

  She removed her shoes and hose and sat between the children on the dock’s downstream side. The river made a bend beyond; still she might have seen quite a ways were it not for an old maple with a massive branch overhanging the bank, like a green-clad arm dipping for a drink.

  Schenectady, several miles downstream, was the farthest east one could travel by boat on the Mohawk because of the Cohoes Falls. On the Binne Kill, the town’s waterfront, carpenters did thriving business crafting flat-bottomed bateaux for transporting goods—brought overland from Albany—upriver to supply the forts, and for trade with settlers and Indians. Some of those bateaux went beyond the Mohawk River, portaged over the Oneidas’ Carrying Place between the river and Wood Creek, then on to the lake country far to the west.

  Major Aubrey was at work on the Binne Kill.

  While recovering from his wound, the major had met old Mr. Boswell, a bateau-maker, and taken an interest in the craft. Mr. Boswell hired the major upon his leaving the army, then made him a partner as time proved him an able carpenter and businessman. Though sometimes he was gone for weeks at a time on his trading journeys upriver—when he went farther than the Little Falls Carry, a closer portage manned by a German farmer called Herkimer—it pleased Lydia to see the Aubreys prospering. The major was liked and respected in Schenectady. His farm was situated on some of the richest acres within a day’s ride of the stockade. He’d found a good man in Rowan Doyle to help farm it.

  If only their babies would live. If only Mrs. Aubrey would let Anna, as well as William, assuage that grief…

  Determined not to spoil the day with such thinking, Lydia tilted back her head, feeling the sun on her face, the river’s cool on her feet…and the collie’s tongue wet across her mouth. “Impudent dog!” she scolded, wiping her lips as the children howled with laughter. “Stealing kisses is a sign of bad breeding, you know.”

  The collie trotted to William’s side and sat, grinning at its cheek.r />
  Lydia poked William in the ribs. “So, Farmer Billy, have you taken up fishing on this fine river yet?”

  “He means to,” Anna said. “But Pa…Mr. Aubrey doesn’t fish.”

  William kicked his feet, spraying water. “I want to catch a wally. Mr. Doyle said he’d teach me.”

  “A wally? Oh, a walleye.” Lydia just managed not to laugh. “I daresay Mr. Doyle will keep his word. Summer is a busy time for farmers.”

  “In autumn?” William asked. “I’ll be four by then.”

  “I’ll be five,” Anna said.

  Lydia did laugh at that. “There’s the harvest…After that there should be time for taking up the life of a gentleman fisherman.”

  On her left William giggled.

  On her right Anna gasped and pointed. “A canoe!”

  Indeed it was, its single occupant laboring to paddle upstream.

  Indians came in canoes. Lydia scrambled to her feet, only to realize the man in shirtsleeves had hair too light for an Indian’s.

  “It’s Papa,” William said.

  Lydia’s heartbeat quickened. The children stood beside her as Major Aubrey, rowing hard against the current, brought the canoe past the leaning maple and pushed on to the dock, swinging around and bumping against the pilings. As he tied the canoe fast, the children clamored questions at him, but it was Lydia his gaze sought. Though she couldn’t help noting how his shirt clung to his broad chest, the glow of exertion coloring his face, his eyes were what gripped her. They were deeply pained.