by Lori Benton
Surprise flared in her eyes, at his touch or his question he didn’t know. “For my part, since I was twelve years old.”
Reginald had in mind another period of their lives to mark the start of what might properly be called their friendship—around the time of her marriage to Jacob, actually. But her response added weight to his reassurance. He squeezed her hand between his and released it. “So you know you can tell me whatever it is. Mind you, if there’s aught I can do for you, you’ve but to ask it.”
She smiled softly, perhaps hearing the Welsh lilt strengthen in his voice, as it often did at times of deep emotion. Did she know that?
“Very well.” Though seeming reassured, the smile disappeared. “Of necessity I’ve refrained from saying this for months—years, if I’m honest—but now that things are altered and what once stood between us as insurmountable does so no longer…” A tide of pink surged into her cheeks. “You see, I’ve often thought…that is I’ve felt that I—that you—”
Fumbling to a halt, Lydia breathed out audibly through her nose. He watched her, fascinated by this uncharacteristic ineloquence.
“I wish to know…I need to know, Reginald, where your heart and head are concerning Heledd.”
He stared, lost in the blue of her eyes as her words tumbled round him, graspable as the rain still pouring in runnels from the lintel of the office doorway. His heart and head? His heart was in his chest, whipped to a rib-bruising gallop. But the mind of which she inquired was gone utterly blank. “You wish to know…about Heledd?”
“Yes.” She waited, staring at him.
He waited, staring back. The rain had slacked off to a steady patter.
“This is more difficult than I feared.” Lydia seemed to gather her small person, drawing herself up straight and looking him in the eye. “Reginald, I am attempting to say that, should you be so inclined to bestow them, I would welcome your attentions in such a manner as might, in due course, lead to our mutual and united happiness.”
In the face of his stunned silence, she colored up again and added with less articulation than haste, “Should it not be too forward of me to invite them. Should it not be too soon after…”
“Heledd,” he finished for her. He thought his knees might buckle and drop him to the floor at her feet. It was a near thing, but he stayed standing. “Lydia, I—you—my romantic attentions?” he asked round a tongue as clumsy as a block of wood.
“Exactly.” She gazed up at him, obviously relieved he’d understood.
Something like a Roman candle burst inside Reginald’s chest, shooting giddy sparks out from his center. He could only stand there and let it sweep through him, mute and lightheaded with the wonder of it, when he wanted to shout, to take her in his arms and twirl her around.
Perhaps those desires had made themselves known on his face. A tentative smile curved her lips. “So it’s not too precipitous to be speaking of such things?”
Precipitous? He’d been waiting a decade, he realized, to have this conversation, the want of it—of her—darting at the edges of his soul through the years, never invited, never entertained, never allowed to bleed into the realm of the possible. Yet always it had been there, she had been there, in the shadows of his heart and mind.
Heart and mind. She’d asked about those. And Heledd. At last he found the words. “I lost Heledd years ago, when she took William to Wales. Long before that, truth be told. What I feel at her passing now is a grief I’ve carried long. Nothing prevents…”
Prevents what you ask of me, and what I want with all my heart to ask of you in return. Your heart and mind.
They were the words he’d meant to say. The words he remembered, almost too late, that he could never say. The speaking of William’s name checked his flight and sent him plummeting back to earth, Icarus with melted wings.
Instead of the words, a strangled sound escaped his throat. He turned from her, half staggered to the counter, reaching for a ledger, opening it blindly. Putting his back to the bewildered pillar of silence that was Lydia.
“You’ve a fair point,” he said, the words bitten off like a wince. His gut twisted with the need to face her, to explain himself and what he was doing to her. To them. Instead he took up a quill, removed the cork from an inkwell, and began writing—he barely knew what. “About Heledd…and with William coming home…’tis best I keep a narrow focus. He’s unhappy about this turn, see, but I think given time he’ll settle into life here with content.”
He wasn’t sure he believed his words, but they were the only ones that came to him to say. He couldn’t say he feared to take her to his heart and cherish her. Feared if he did so, she would be taken from him.
A punishment long deferred.
Behind him, like a presence in the room, was Lydia’s hurt at being brushed aside. Her humiliation. When she spoke, her voice was slow and thick, as though merely forming words now was a challenge.
“So you’re saying…it is too soon?”
The quill stilled in his hand. “Aye. Too soon.”
Too late. What had he been thinking, to have assumed for even an instant there could be a future for them? She didn’t know him. She only knew the man everyone knew. The man they believed him to be. Not the man who stole a babe, abandoned his own dead child…Lydia would despise that man, reject him utterly. And that he couldn’t bear. Let them go on in friendship, if that was possible after this. Let her go on seeing him as the wounded soldier, the broken hero, the man who brought Anna into her life. Let that be enough.
Behind him Lydia said, “Reginald, are you certain? Because I don’t think that’s what you began to say to me.”
He tried to swallow so he could give her answer. It was like trying to force down a gourd. “You took me off guard. I never expected…”
“That I love you?”
“Lydia.” Her name came out a groan. “Don’t…”
He could never recall exactly what she said to cut short the interview, but he would never forget the raw wound in her voice as she asked, with all politeness, whether she should expect Anna on the morrow as usual. He’d said “Yes, of course,” and the tap of her heeled shoes had retreated out onto the quay, into the rain still falling, though gently now.
The quill dropped from fingers shaking too badly to hold it. He pictured himself turning, running after her, catching her before she was away into the town, telling her he hadn’t meant it, that he’d admired her since she was the girl who named his Anna, that her coming to him today was both honor and joy, that he loved her as he’d never loved any woman. And he would kiss her, and kiss her, until memory of the pain he’d caused her was drowned between them.
He dared not grasp at such unbridled happiness. Dared think no further ahead than William’s homecoming. William, to whom he owed a debt the lad must never comprehend. Sin compounding sin.
But there was time to make it right, to strengthen the fraying ties that bound them, to be a father to the lad. Toward that end he must bend all his mind, and for that he would need blinders to keep his heart from straying after other needs, other hopes.
Lydia. Had the Almighty prompted her to make her feelings known, knowing full well the guilt he bore would prevent him pursuing the joy of a union with her?
Reginald folded onto the bench by the door and put his head into his hands. The ache in his chest rivaled the pain of his hip, yet the stone lay firm across his soul. The burden hadn’t lifted. Lydia wasn’t punishment enough. What more must he deny himself? He dared not bring another cherished face to mind. It was only a matter of time ere God required payment in full.
27
Thunder Moon 1776
Two Hawks found his mother kneeling at the fire, packing a carrying basket, when he came breathless into her lodge with news that had him torn two ways in his soul. “Where is my father?”
Good Voice’s long braid whipped like a panther’s tail as she turned, in her hand a sewing awl. Surprise at his abrupt appearance changed to pleasure. “He is
gone to the fish camp. He left yesterday with his uncle to put the camp in order. The rest of us will follow in the morning. It is good you are back in time. Are you hungry? There is corn soup.” She waved toward a gourd bowl set near the fire. “Not so warm now.”
“I am not hungry.” He was too full of news, and worry, and regret, to think of food.
“You eat too little, so I do not know how your bones have grown so long. Maybe that girl you go to see is feeding you? Maybe you prefer her food to mine?”
His mother smiled as Two Hawks crossed the lodge and hung his rifle and bow above his sleeping bench, hiding the ache her teasing caused. He sat on the bench and leaned forward to meet her gaze. “I cannot go to the fish camp. When I tell you why, I think you also will not wish to go.”
His mother’s smile faltered. She seemed to gather herself, though she didn’t rise. The gathering was all in the planes of her face, splashed golden by the fire’s light, in the blue eyes, creased now at the corners. She knows what I am going to tell her. After all these times of going to Anna Catherine, she knows this time it has happened.
Then memory jolted him, making him less certain what was in his mother’s mind. Two things of importance had happened in the spring-leafed wood where Anna Catherine found him waiting for her, but only one had to do with him. The other was about—
“He-Is-Taken.” The name passed his mother’s lips like a prayer.
“Yes,” he said, knowing now which of those two happenings had flown swifter than his running feet and embedded itself in his mother’s heart. Two Hawks wished it might have been the other. “My brother is coming home. Already he is on the great water in the ship that is bringing him.”
Saying the words didn’t make the news feel more tangible to Two Hawks than when Anna Catherine had all but shouted it.
“William is coming home!” she’d called before she reached him, breathless from running across the clearing. “I’ve been waiting all winter to tell you. He’s already on his way. He’ll be here in a fortnight—maybe sooner. Around the middle of May.”
Anna Catherine’s eyes danced with joy. She was looking at him expectantly, but his throat was a knot of dread. As his heart thundered beat after beat and the silence stretched and only a bird in the trees nearby sang, the light in her face dimmed. “Two Hawks, did you hear me?”
“I heard,” he said and wanted in a rush of frustration and longing to tell her everything. Who he was. Who William was. What the man she called Papa had done to his family. And mixed with all that, he yearned to take her by the arm, lead her up the hill to the cave where he’d waited, and make her his in the oldest, surest way he knew—now, before his brother returned and everything changed.
These were not the thoughts of a Christian, but they were strong in him. Two Hawks didn’t know what to say, or even to feel.
Anna Catherine was frowning. “Aren’t you happy William is coming home?”
“I did not know it would be so soon.”
It was not an answer, but the words must have seemed fitting, for she smiled again, so happy about William that she was quickly put at ease. “I’ve had months to grow accustomed to the news. Papa told me right after I last saw you—the very day after. I wanted so much to tell you then. Had I known the path to Kanowalohale, I’d have come running after you.”
Her words made it hard for him to breathe. “Bear’s Heart…come up the hill with me.”
Though he wanted to go to the cave, he knew he mustn’t take her there. He turned aside to the little waterfall, and they sat on the rock they’d shared many times, touching all down their sides because the stone now barely fit them both. On her other side the water fell with its small plashing.
The air was cool. Somewhere in the woods, a fox barked.
She clasped her hands between her knees as though she felt a chill. He wanted to take them between his own but didn’t trust himself to do even that much.
It was wise that he didn’t. She glanced up, and he knew she was also thinking of the cave, and what he asked her to do for him when they were inside it. Thinking of how she’d taken her hair down for him, letting it spill around her, letting him touch it.
He felt the pull of her to his core. “There is something I must tell you.”
She leaned away from him, searching his face. “What is it?”
He wrenched his gaze to the greening forest spreading out from the slope on which they sat.
“I am not the firstborn to my mother. I had a brother born before me. We were two-born-together. Twins. Not long before this, my mother was captured by redcoat soldiers, and it was among them she birthed us, in an English soldier fort. Afterward she escaped those soldiers, taking me to my father, but before she could get away, one of the redcoats, an officer, took my brother from beside her while she slept and in his place put a dead baby—his own, we think—and that is how my brother was lost to us.”
The words had poured from him like a spring bursting from the rocks, so fast Anna Catherine couldn’t have squeezed one of her own in had she tried. He looked at her. She was staring at him, open-mouthed.
“A British officer stole your brother?”
“Yes.”
“And your mother couldn’t get him back?”
“No. The fort had surrendered. The English left. She never saw his face.”
“Two Hawks…” She went on staring, a dozen more questions crossing her eyes before she said, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it happened.”
She shook her head. “I mean, why now? Why haven’t you told me before?”
“I could not.” His father wouldn’t be happy about the little he’d already said, and yet…he didn’t wish the words unsaid. They’d beat inside him to be spoken for so many years. He only wished he could tell her more, and in wishing it his feelings for her came surging up and he didn’t want to think about William anymore.
He lifted a hand to her face. She wore a cap today. Her hair was pinned up beneath it, but in his mind she was in the cave with it down around her shoulders. That was the moment he would go back to and live in, if he could choose a moment. But time was moving forward, out of his control. Would there ever be a moment like that again?
“Anna Catherine, I would keep things as they are now, if I could.” No brothers. No fathers. No peoples. No wars. Just the two of them alone, like first man and first woman Heavenly Father put in His garden. He ran his thumb along her jaw to her chin, then brushed it across her lip. “Will you keep a place in your heart for me?”
He felt her shiver, but her breath flowed warm across his hand as she said, “Of course I will.”
Telling himself to be content with that, he drew back his hand, even as hers lifted. Her fingers brushed his cheek. He sucked in a breath.
Like a child caught stealing another’s food, she snatched her hand away and dropped her eyes. Her touch on his skin lingered as though all his nerves had awakened singing. “Bear’s Heart. Look at me.”
Her dark lashes swept up. She glanced over his face, then away.
“No. Look at me as you did when we were children. Without fear.” He wanted her to drink in his face as she once had—with the innocent fascination of a child for the strange and new. He wanted her to look at him and never stop looking so he could drown in her eyes.
She was trembling. “I cannot.”
“Why can you not?”
“I…”
Which of them moved first, Two Hawks didn’t know. Did he tilt her face up to him? Did she find the courage to lift it? The meeting of their mouths was gentle, a brushing of lips. When she didn’t pull away, he fitted his mouth closer to hers. A groan came up from her throat, a feeling sharp and sweet lanced through him, then his arms were around her, pulling her across his thighs, the earth spinning away beneath him, and it was joy.
She swayed in his arms and put out a hand as though to catch herself. He tried to hold her tighter, but her reaching hand found stone and she used it to push he
rself away, scrambling off him in a tangle of skirts.
She found her feet and stood, breathing hard.
He sprang off the rock and reached her in a stride. She didn’t back away nor resist his arms enfolding her, his mouth seeking hers again, until with a small cry she thrust free.
“Two Hawks…I cannot think when you do that. I need to think!”
He couldn’t think either and didn’t want to. Her mouth was full and red from his kissing it.
“I only need you,” he said, all his love and wanting in the words, in his eyes. He held nothing back, and maybe that was his mistake. Maybe it was too much, even for a woman with a bear’s heart.
She whirled from him, and before he could move she was halfway down the hill.
He stood as he had that first time she—a scared little white girl—took fright and ran from him, leaving him watching helplessly as she disappeared into the beeches across the clearing.
My brother is coming home. Already he is on the great water in the ship that is bringing him. Her son’s words wrapped themselves around Good Voice’s chest and throat like vines. She couldn’t swallow past them, couldn’t breathe. At last she forced out words. “Coming here?”
Two Hawks’s brows soared. “No. Where he lived with Anna Catherine.”
Of course her son wouldn’t come there. He knew nothing of them, his true family. But he might soon learn. The thought sank into her, down through flesh into bone, and started her trembling like a frail grandmother. She put her hands over her face.
She was unaware of Two Hawks stirring until his arms encircled her. They were a man’s arms.
As it did from time to time when she stopped and looked at Two Hawks, really looked, and her thoughts would fly to that shadowy newborn who lived in her mind and she’d know he was also a weanling, unsteady on fat legs, or a skinny little boy, or a tall, gangly youth, it struck her now that, like his brother, He-Is-Taken would soon be nineteen summers. A man. But a white man in his heart.
