by Lori Benton
Anna’s belly turned over in a sickening mingle of relief and dismay. She was about to say she’d go along when he yawned hugely, and abruptly changed his mind.
“No…Was anything amiss he’d send to fetch me. May it all come well for the beast, for I’m done in. I’ve spent the day since dawn helping load supplies for Stanwix—and provision to accompany Schuyler to German Flatts.”
“German Flatts? What is General Schuyler doing there?” She’d sounded breathless, nervous. Papa didn’t seem to notice.
“Meeting with the Six Nations, trying to talk them round to staying clear of Fort Niagara and the British. Nothing for you to worry over.” Sighing, Papa settled deeper into his chair, his face lined with fatigue. “Never have I sent so many boats upriver at once. Aside from Schuyler’s council, a fair number of Oneidas have been attached to the garrison at Stanwix and must be fed.”
Silence stretched. Smoke from the pipe wafted toward the ceiling. Anna’s gaze fixed on the thin scar across the curve of Papa’s cheekbone, as old as her adoption. She swallowed, knowing it had to be now. “Oneidas are scouting for the army. Spying on the British and their Indians at the lake forts.”
Papa lowered the pipe from his lips, studying her quizzically. “How come you to know that? Been talking to William of it, have you?”
Anna’s face and fingers chilled. Talking to William about Oneidas?
She was on her feet with her next breath, dizzied by what she was about to do. “No, but I mean to. I—I know about him, Papa. I know the Oneidas are scouting for the army because William’s brother told me.”
Papa’s face blanched. “What did you say?”
“I’m trying to say that I know who William is. Or was.”
Papa’s blank expression lasted but a heartbeat before understanding seized his features, freezing them in a look of startled horror. “What do you know of William?”
“I know he has a twin. An Oneida twin. He’s called Two Hawks.” The pipe slid from Papa’s hand and fell to the rug, but Anna kept talking. “I’ve known him for years, only he never told me who he really was, and because I hadn’t seen William in so long I didn’t realize—”
Papa wrenched out of his chair, crossed to her, and took her by the shoulders. “Hush you. Hush!”
He’d never before touched her with anything but kindness. Not even to smack her bottom when she was small. His roughness now shocked her. Then a smell hit her, pungent and sharp. Where the pipe had fallen, the rug was sending up wisps of smoke. “Papa—the rug!”
He let her go to stamp the rug, the heel of his shoe coming down on the pipe’s stem. It cracked with a pop like breaking bone.
Papa bent, wincing, picked up the pieces from off the scorched rug, then he stood, looking at her from a face she barely recognized. “How is it you can know of a brother—an Indian—what was it you called him?”
The acrid stench of burnt fibers caught in her throat, cracking her voice like the pipe’s stem. “His name is Two Hawks—but his Christian name is Jonathan. I met him after William left for Wales, in the clearing where we used to play. They were just…there one day. They’d found you. Only it was too late for finding William.”
Papa clenched the broken pipe. Clenched his face too, as if to keep that from breaking. “They?”
“William’s brother. And their father.”
“Not…the mother?”
Anna shook her head. “I’ve never met Good Voice, but…she isn’t Oneida by birth. She’s white. That’s why William looks as he does.”
“I know.” Untold remorse lay behind those whispered words. A lifetime of lies and deception. William’s lifetime. Lydia was right.
Anna’s throat closed over a terrible ache. “Papa…why?”
It was the wrong question to ask. Papa’s face hardened until it appeared chiseled in stone. “How many times is it you have gone across that creek to see these Indians?”
“I haven’t seen their father since I was a girl.”
“But this other. The son?”
Anna hoped the candlelight was too dim for Papa to see the heat that rushed into her face. She was afraid now to say how often. “I don’t know. I’d find him there waiting sometimes when I went to gather herbs or pick berries. I used to read William’s letters to him.”
“And you are telling me you never knew who he was? All this time, you never suspected?”
“Why would I have? Truly, Papa. I didn’t know. Not until I saw William again, at Lydia’s.”
“And since? Have you seen the Indian since? Does he know William is come home?” Papa’s mask of control was cracking.
She hated to tell this part, the part that was going to change everything. “I had to tell him. I had to be sure it was true. And he told me to tell—”
“Enough, Anna. Enough! Just…go to your room.”
She stood her ground, too stunned to obey. “But I haven’t told you yet—they don’t know what Stone Thrower will do when he learns William is here.”
“Stone Thrower?” Papa’s face lost what little color remained, as if he had no need to be told of whom they spoke. “Anna, go to your room. You will say nothing of this to William. Not a word, see? I forbid it!”
She’d never had such sharp words from Papa, such a stinging look. “Papa—”
“Have you thought this through? Thought what this will do to him? I’ve tried to make it right for the lad, to give him a good life. A purpose. A place. Now you come wanting me to tear it all down—tear William to shreds. Is that what you want me to do, Anna?”
How could Papa think he could keep the truth from William now? It was out of their hands. Two Hawks had gone to bring their mother…
“Of course I don’t want to hurt William. I love him.” Her mouth quivered over the words, and she couldn’t hold back the tears a moment longer. “And I love you, Papa. But I love Two Hawks too, and he and his parents have been—”
“What?” Papa had put his face in his hands when she said she loved him. He jerked it up again, in his eyes shock and dismay, and she was left to wonder how things might have turned out had she not said that part about loving Two Hawks.
The news reached Kanowalohale that the Americans’ council at German Flatts was going badly. Warriors early to arrive were misbehaving. Some Mohawks, foolish with rum, shot at a bateau full of flour sent upriver to feed them and sank it.
Two Hawks stood with his father and Clear Day as they talked about the situation. He waited to see what his father would do, relieved when the two decided to journey to the council that was getting off to such a bad start, to see if they could help bring order. Or whether the rumors were even true.
“If things are going so badly, I do not know how long I will be gone,” Stone Thrower told Two Hawks and Good Voice by the fire that night, as he prepared to leave. “Will you be all right without me?”
The fishing and the hide-hunting were done for the summer, such as they had been. There was still hunting for meat to do—always that—but to have his father occupied for days up on the river at German Flatts…They couldn’t ask for better circumstances to help keep William’s return secret.
“We will be all right,” his mother said, quick as he to come to this conclusion. “I pray you bring a wiser head to help those others. Both of you,” she added, turning to include Clear Day sitting nearby, listening and watching. Watching very closely.
“I will hunt if need be,” Two Hawks said, wanting to hold his father’s attention, keep him from noticing what wasn’t being said between the rest of them except with eyes. “We will be well.”
Stone Thrower paused in filling his pack to smile at his son. Two Hawks found it hard to hold his gaze.
In the morning Stone Thrower and Clear Day left for German Flatts, with other warriors and sachems curious what the white general would say to them. Watching them go, Two Hawks’s blood stirred to be doing something as well, maybe to be out watching the borders of their land for any who might make war across it. Some of the young men
he’d grown up with were volunteering to do such things for the soldiers at Fort Stanwix.
He stilled those thoughts. It wasn’t for him to do those things. Not yet. Anna Catherine had promised to speak to Aubrey. And to William.
“I will go back to her.” He said this to his mother after Stone Thrower and Clear Day walked out of the village, headed east, though not as far east as Two Hawks meant to go. They stood beneath the arbor outside her lodge. He felt his mother’s hand grip his and looked down into her face that in the morning light showed its sorrows and its hope. “Will you come with me this time?”
Never had his mother hinted she might want to see the place or the people who had had the raising of his brother. He felt the shudder that rocked her now as she looked in the direction his father had taken. Two Hawks knew she was looking far beyond the river valley to the lake called George. She stood in memory at the edge of a forest, a dead white baby in her arms, looking at the fort where he and his brother were born.
“I will come with you,” she said. “I will see my son again at last.”
34
July 1776
At the knock on her door, Anna abandoned the window and dove beneath the rumpled bed covers. She was safely tucked between stale linens before the door opened and Mrs. Doyle peered into the room.
“Anna, dearie, how—” One look at her face, peeking over the summer coverlet, and Mrs. Doyle didn’t finish the question. She shouldered into the room with a tray of tea and toast, the only nourishment for the past two days she’d persuaded Anna to accept.
“Thank you,” Anna mumbled, sounding as if her nose was swollen shut. It was, but not from the summer ague she’d been claiming to suffer.
Mrs. Doyle set the tray on the foot of the bed. “Can I bring you aught else before I’m out to the garden?”
Anna sank down the pillow until her face was buried in the coverlet. “No…thank you.”
The feather tick sagged under Mrs. Doyle’s weight. “Anna…you’re sure ’tis nothin’ else the matter? The Major bid me let you rest, but William’s worried. He said you wouldn’t see him again this morn.”
She’d heard the concern in William’s voice through the bedroom door, when he’d all but begged her to open it and let him see her. She longed to do so, but how could she and not blurt everything Papa had forbidden her to say? One look at her and he’d know something was terribly wrong.
“Is it to do with William?” Mrs. Doyle persisted. “Has he done aught to upset you?”
“No.” Fresh tears came hot into her eyes. She pressed a wad of linen to her face to staunch them. “I’m not upset with William.”
Papa hadn’t told Mrs. Doyle about their quarrel, or she wouldn’t be fishing for an explanation of Anna’s misery—beyond the state of her health. As tears were most definitely not a symptom of a cold, she kept her face hidden in the covers. “Papa’s right. I want to rest.”
What she wanted, desperately, was to get across the fields to look for Two Hawks. But she couldn’t.
“You will go across that creek no more,” Papa had told her, during that distressing encounter in the sitting room. “You will confine yourself to this house and yard, else you will pack your belongings and go to Lydia.”
As she’d stared, barely recognizing him with his hard-set jaw and unflinching gaze, a wave of rebellion had swept over Anna. His threat was empty. He would go into town again. When he did, she would slip across the creek and find Two Hawks—or at the very least leave him a note, explaining what had happened. She’d kept her lips shut over those words, but she might as well have shouted them in Papa’s face.
She hadn’t come down to breakfast next day, pleading tiredness when both Mrs. Doyle and William tapped at her door and inquired. When William and Papa were gone to the Binne Kill, she’d dressed and crept from the house. She’d barely started down the lane between the fields before Mr. Doyle stepped across her path.
Whatever else Papa had kept secret, he’d told Mr. Doyle she’d been meeting an Indian in the wood. Mr. Doyle informed her flatly that she wasn’t to go across the creek, that he knew what she’d been doing there, that she had lied to Mrs. Doyle about it, and it was never to happen again.
She might as well have placed the lock on her cage. Knowing he’d every right to see what she’d done as lying, she’d fled back to her room and hadn’t come out again, and by now she felt sick in truth, with apprehension, grief, confusion.
“All right then, dearie. I’ve brought you fresh tea. And there’s toast. I’ll be down to the garden if you need me.” The bed shifted as Mrs. Doyle rose and went out of the room.
The stairs creaked under her descent.
Anna flung back the covers and padded barefoot to the window. The sill was cool to her touch, there on the west side of the house. A breeze came in thick with the scent of corn and cows and the river. She looked to the line of trees that marked the creek. Was Two Hawks there, expecting her to bring William? What would he do when she didn’t come?
Movement below her window made her start. Rowan Doyle stood at the edge of the cornfield, looking up at her. She stepped back, heart beating like a netted bird’s.
“Come down from her room yet, has she?” Reginald kept his eyes on the brush in his hand, and the horse he groomed between himself and Rowan Doyle, who leaned in the open box stall.
“Not to my knowin’. You’ll be after askin’ Maura to be sure.”
Reginald’s gut twisted at thought of his daughter, confined to her room, pretending to illness. Sick at heart she was.
“I’ll talk to Maura directly I’m done here.” He was home from the Binne Kill, just ahead of the dark—and alone. William had stayed in town, saying he’d be late. Not saying it was Sam Reagan he was going to meet with. No need of saying it.
The widening gulf between them was a worry and a grief, but it was not a new grief. This estrangement with Anna…There was a crippling to his soul. It had taken him unawares, and there was no fixing it, no expunging from her mind the things she knew. No more pretending he was the man she’d thought him to be.
Beneath his hands the horse quivered, pleased to be relieved of its saddle and the sweat of the day. Light from a hanging lantern fell warm across his hands. Dust smells and manure smells and warm horse smells filled his nostrils, but the only sound in the barn was that of industrious chewing and the occasional stamp. Until Rowan cleared his throat.
“She hasn’t left the house in body, but her heart is well away. She’s at her window starin’ across the fields for hours at a stretch. Maura would know—how soon shall we be expecting Indians on the doorstep?”
Reginald fumbled the brush, chasing it with clumsy fingers along the horse’s spine. The animal shifted its weight and stamped a hoof in agitation a hair’s breadth from his shoe.
“You’ve told Maura?”
“Maura can tell a weepin’ binge from a summer ague. When she asked me straight did I know what was wrong, I had no wish to lie.”
Rowan waited.
“It is over now, with that Indian. She will get past it.” Reginald circled the brush over the horse’s side, loosening dirt thrown up from the road, his left hand smoothing behind. Anna would have to get past it. Perhaps he should insist she stay with Lydia now regardless, to keep her away. To keep her safe…
But no. She might defy him and have that conversation with William, there in the town, where he had less control of the pair of them.
Control? Did he still have such a thing?
Rowan looked unhappy with his answer, but he let it stand. “William did not come home with you?”
“He’ll be along. He’s for socializing, is all.” Reginald took up a softer brush to sweep away the hairs and dust he’d loosened.
At last Rowan bade him good night. When his footsteps faded, Reginald raised his gaze to the open barn doors. Beyond them twilight was darkening. Gazing into the wall of corn across the lane, he saw nothing but leaf blades and shadows shifting with a papery rust
le and the last of the evening’s fireflies winking like feral eyes among the stalks.
Perfect cover for creeping feet.
The dread of a hunted thing stirred in his blood. Thinking he heard a sound—a step—he whirled to look behind him, deeper into the barn, startling the horse again.
“There is nothing,” he said, soothing the creature, if not himself.
He winced from memory of the hurt in his daughter’s eyes as he told her she wasn’t to speak to William of what she knew or see the Indian again. William’s twin. After so many years he’d almost persuaded himself that tiny brown infant could bear no relation to the one he’d taken. Perhaps the woman had no connection to William either, for she’d been with Indians and couldn’t be expected to birth a child so white it might have been his own.
She had, though.
Good Voice. He longed to carve the name from his mind. He was as terrified now as that night in the encampment outside Fort William Henry, when he’d stood between Heledd and their changeling, and the Indians prowling the firelight. Again he stood between, though he couldn’t see the Indian staring back at him now. That terror from his dreams had known where to find him. Could have long since taken his revenge.
That he hadn’t meant one thing. He meant to have his son back first.
“Papa?”
Anna’s voice gave his chest a wrench so sharp he dropped the brush to the straw-littered earth. Abandoning it and the horse, he moved into the aisle to see her standing at the edge of the lantern’s glow, arms crossed at her waist. The night was a sheet of black behind her.
One look at her sorrowing, swollen eyes and he was overcome with the need to gather her safe into his arms. He spread them wide and she flew to him, face crumpling in relief.
“Papa, I’m sorry—”
“Dear girl—”
She cried into his shoulder, and he pressed her to him, crooning to her, every other thought consumed by the love bursting like a mortar in his chest.
At length her crying quieted and he fished a kerchief from his coat and she blew her nose, the undignified noise making them both laugh. He’d missed the sweet sound of her laughter.
