by Lori Benton
She nodded, acknowledging his words. “Good Voice, what is it you want to do? Tell me. If there is any way I can help, I will.”
Two Hawks felt his chest warm with pride. This was his Bear’s Heart talking now. He put his arm around her, claiming her wordlessly in the presence of his mother. Sides pressed together as if they were already one, they waited for her reply.
36
Anna returned from the woods to nary a sign of Papa or William. Mrs. Doyle still slept. There was nothing for it but to retreat to her room to pace—pausing at the window to gaze into the night—and wait.
“I have come to see my son,” Good Voice had told her. Could Anna contrive to bring him across the creek to them?
“I’ll try my best, if Papa brings him home.” It was all she could promise, standing by the little fall, loathe to leave them, yet eager to return before her absence was discovered.
“I hope we yet have some days,” Two Hawks told her. “Before my father returns from German Flatts and learns we are gone. He will come here—bearing the hatchet is what I fear. But if William is here and will stand between our fathers…”
Though the night was warm, a chill had raced up her spine at the words. William stand between Papa and Stone Thrower? If asked to do so now, he was more likely to stand back and let them fight it out.
Good Voice had taken them each by the hand. “My son may know that in my heart I forgive the man who stole his brother. It is not easy to do, but I tell you, Aubrey’s daughter, I wish him no harm. What my husband wishes I do not know. But there is One who does.”
Good Voice had raised her face to the night sky and prayed. She’d prayed in Oneida, but Two Hawks whispered the English words into Anna’s ear. Good Voice had asked for guidance and protection, for truth and grace, with an eloquence and trust that caused the words to rebound through Anna’s soul. I forgive the man who stole his brother. If Good Voice could forgive Papa, dare she hope William might…in time?
Two Hawks had led her back as far as the beech grove. There he’d pulled her into his arms and held her with a fierceness that made her think he feared never do so again. She’d taken his face between her hands and drew him down to kiss her…
Now at her window she lit a candle, a tiny flame she hoped was visible to him, out there in the darkness with his mother.
She paced, and waited, and prayed. Between prayers she tried to piece together her impressions of Good Voice. It had been too dark to glean more than a suggestion of features, of deep-set eyes and high-arched brows, strong hands larger than hers, a braid that caught the starlight and would be blond under the sun. A low, pleasant voice offering courage and trust.
“Ha’tiyo…a good voice,” she murmured and wept a little in this one relief.
Curled at the foot of her bed, she dozed, until the creak of footsteps in the hall had her bolting upright. She was off the bed and at the door before fully awake. “Papa—”
She’d run smack into a broad chest, but it wasn’t Papa’s. “Anna…hush.” Taking her by the arm, William steered her back into the room. “You’ll wake Mrs. Doyle.”
“Where have you been?” She stepped back to search his face in the candlelight. His blackened eye had darkened. He reeked of smoke-filled taverns. “Papa and Mr. Doyle are searching for you.”
“Aye. There’s the devil of a time I had getting round them to the road.” William turned to heft a knapsack, to which was tied a bedroll and shot bag, onto her bed. Slung at his back were a rifle and the bow he’d brought from Crickhowell, with its quiver.
Anna stood in the center of her tiny room, gutted by their implication. “Where are you going? To Lydia’s?”
William slid the weapons to the bed, then perched beside them and removed his hat. He raked a hand over his tailed hair. It was as rumpled as her bed, as if he’d performed the gesture repeatedly the past hours. “I came to tell you where. First there is this I must say—how I spoke to you earlier, at the barn…Look you, Anna, I’m sorry. You deserve better of me. Whatever lies he fed me my life long, you and I have been true. Haven’t we?”
How well Good Voice knows her son, though she’s yet even to meet him. The thought flashed through Anna’s mind as she took in the disillusionment and hope at war in William’s eyes. Eyes that grasped for her amidst the spun-away pieces of his world.
“William…yes.” She moved to the bedside to stand before him, taking his hand in hers. “And I’m sorry too. Sorry you found out like that. I wish now I’d come to you at once. But it’s only been days since I—”
“No, Anna.” William raised his fingertips to her lips. “Please…” He dropped his hand from her mouth but with the other gripped hers tighter, almost bruising. “Did you know they’ve announced a formal separation from England?”
“Who?” she asked, bewildered by the shift.
William’s lip pulled back. “The Continental Congress. They’ve dissolved all connection between themselves and the Crown. ’Twas read in Philadelphia. A Declaration of Independence, they’re calling it. Sam told me.”
Anna pulled her hand away. “I don’t care about that. I care about you and Papa. You didn’t give us a chance to explain.”
“Save your breath, Anna.” William stood, his hand closing hard on her shoulder. “What excuse is there for stealing a stranger’s child and leaving a dead one in its place? For naming that child, raising him to think he was something he isn’t? There are no words you can say that will justify any of it in my eyes.”
“I didn’t say justify.”
William let her go. “Save your breath, I said. I came only to fetch my things and to tell you where I’m bound.”
“You cannot go. Think about—”
“I don’t want to think!” William snapped off the words, then lowered his voice. “Do you not see? I am sick in my soul for thinking.”
“But your mother and brother want to see you. Aren’t you even the least bit—”
“Curious? To meet strangers—Indians—who think they have some claim on me?” Emotions passed across William’s eyes too quickly for her to read by candlelight, but last to emerge, and linger, was bitterness. “Who is my mother and my brethren?”
“William! Do not use the words of Christ to—”
William clapped a hand across her mouth, cutting off the exclamation. She glared at him over it, until he took it away. “Only listen, Anna. This declaration of war has decided Sam. He’s headed north, to Quebec. Sir John is there, raising a loyalist regiment. Sam means to join, and he’s asked me to come with him. So I suppose this is me declaring my independence.”
Anna’s heart dropped down and down, as if into a bottomless well. “You’re leaving us?”
William took her shoulders between his hands, dizzying her with the resemblance to his brother he bore, even to the way he was touching her. “We don’t have to be parted. Come with me. Here is no less a web of lies for you than for me. You needn’t stay caught in it.”
Anna shook her head. “It’s not all lies.”
“Fair enough,” William allowed. “He came by you honestly—the great war hero. But you cannot want to stay here now, with him.”
He couldn’t even call Papa by name. “William, please. There’s so much you still need to hear. Once you do, you’ll think differently.”
“Not about him. He had no right to me, yet he took me. Then soon as Mother—Mrs. Aubrey, I should say—was in her grave, again he yanks me from my life with no more thought than was I one of his blasted boats.”
Anna pressed her hands to her temples, trying to think. “Then don’t stay for Papa. Stay for Good Voice, for Two Hawks. They’re right there.” She pointed past him to the window. “Waiting to meet you.”
William stepped back from her, pivoting on his heel as if he expected his mother and brother to materialize from the shadows of her room. “Where?”
“At our place. The waterfall.”
“We never did go there,” he said, but the wistfulness in his voic
e didn’t touch his eyes, which were filling with suspicion as he faced her again. “ ’Tis your place with them now, is it? Tell me something—why is it you are in such sympathy with these Oneidas?”
Anna’s heart leapt with hope. “They found me there. Your father and brother.”
“Stop calling them so!”
“William…all right.” Though her mouth was dry as dust now, Anna told him how she and Two Hawks met, only weeks after his leaving for Wales, that she hadn’t known who he was to William, until William came through the door of Lydia’s house. “I realized then that he’d been coming here all these years because he and your parents never forgot you. How could they? William, they want so badly to see you. I had to sneak out of the house after Papa left, but I found them waiting and—”
“He forbade you to see them again, didn’t he? That’s why you’ve been shut up in your room for days, playing sick.”
Nothing she had said had softened William in the least.
“Papa needs time,” she began, but he had no wish to hear it.
“I don’t care what he needs. I’ve made my decision, Anna. Now I’m asking you to make yours. Do you love him more than you love me?”
Anna felt her face blanch. Was he speaking of Papa, or could he have somehow guessed her feelings for Two Hawks? She shut her eyes, trying to sift through it all to what mattered most now. “I do love you. You know I do.”
“Then come with me, Anna. Leave this place, leave all of it. We can have a new life. One not based on lies.”
Not based on lies. Based on what then? Denial of the truth?
“I want you to come with me, Anna.” The candle was behind William, his face in shadow, but the hope in his voice broke her heart.
“Please…don’t ask it. I cannot leave him.”
“Who? Who can you not leave?”
She mustn’t say Two Hawks. She mustn’t. “Papa!” she said on a sob, knowing that answer was no better to him.
William’s features twisted, a grimace of pain. “So it’s him you choose. I suppose I oughtn’t be surprised. He always loved you more.”
“No, William. That’s not…” But she couldn’t say it. What if it was true? The one pure thing, Papa had called her.
Turning his back, William took up rifle and bow, slung them over his shoulder, then the knapsack. Anna watched him from beside the door. She couldn’t look away, couldn’t stop time and keep him with her though everything in her screamed for it to stop. On the threshold of her room he paused, looking down at her as if he meant to memorize her features like a landscape he expected never again to see. In his eyes was desolation.
“Give my love to my family.”
He was gone through the door before he was done speaking the bitter words.
Anna came downstairs in the gray of dawn. William had made it out of the house without waking Mrs. Doyle, who was beginning to rouse as Anna drifted past the sitting room, through the kitchen, and out the door to find William’s mare in the yard, reins trailing in the grass it was busy cropping. He’d left on foot rather than take the horse Papa gave him. Or had he left by river? Which way should she go to try to catch him?
In a daze of fatigue and heartache, she picked up the reins, gathered her petticoats, and raised a foot to a stirrup. Mr. Doyle came around the house on his horse. William’s mare stepped forward in greeting and Anna fell in a sprawl on the grass, bare feet wet from dew. She’d forgotten to put her shoes on.
“Anna.” Mr. Doyle dismounted, caught her by the arm, hauled her up off the ground. “Where is William?”
She blinked into his face as the first crest of sunlight fell upon the yard and knew by the way he was looking at her that there were no more secrets. “I couldn’t make him stay.”
It was all she had time to say before the kitchen door opened. Mrs. Doyle stood in the doorway. “Rowan? Where is Reginald?”
Mr. Doyle let go Anna’s arm. “Go to the cottage, Maura. I shall come and tell you everything once I’ve seen to the beasts. A long night of it they’ve had.”
Mrs. Doyle seemed only then to register the gray mare. “That’s William’s. Where…?” She broke off that question to fix Anna in her gaze. “What about—”
“She’s to wait in the house for her father.”
Anna roused from her daze. “But William will be gone!”
“That he will be.” The look Mr. Doyle shot her held no warmth. Had he set his heart against Papa? Against them all? Whatever it meant, another piece of her world had crumbled away. “Maura. Come you now.”
Mrs. Doyle opened her mouth, then shut it and stepped into the yard, clutching her shawl to her bosom.
37
Lydia’s eyes felt gritted with sand as she came within sight of her doorstep. After a night and a day sleeping in snatches by an unfamiliar hearth, she was weary enough to drop her midwifery case in the rutted lane and crawl the last steps home—though less weary than the woman who’d spent most of that time laboring to deliver her firstborn through hips almost too narrow for the task. To Lydia’s profound relief, the grueling effort had paid off at last in a loud and lusty baby boy, if an utterly exhausted mother and midwife.
Her bleary thoughts returned to a concern as consuming as the one just shed, giving her the push needed to reach the house. No further word had come from Reginald, which she hadn’t expected. But neither had there been word from Anna. It was hard to think past the buzzing in her head. She wanted to fall across her bed and sleep the rest of the day through, but as she let herself into the house decided instead to don a fresh gown, eat something, and if any strength remained, saddle the horse and…
The horse. A neighbor lad cared for the beast when she was called away overnight, but she ought to make sure all was well. Shutting the door, she hefted her case and summoned strength to reach the kitchen. Just one more push.
On the kitchen’s threshold she halted. Reginald sat at her table, shoulders bowed, unshaven face etched with devastation. He said nothing, only stared at her through eyes that looked as hers felt, desperate to close and shut out the world but denied the mercy.
Lydia forced herself into the kitchen, set her case on the table, and gripped it for support. “What has happened?”
“Well enough you know, having played your part in it.”
The words came from his lips—she saw them move—but the graveled voice might have issued from a stranger’s throat.
Lydia lowered herself onto the bench across from him, mustering words she’d waited half her life to say, finding them now with great effort. “Whatever has happened, bear this in mind. I’ve known the truth about William since I was barely seventeen and—for my part—have counted you my dearest friend for much of that time.”
His eyes flashed to hers. “The truth about William, is it? Here is truth—he’s gone. To Canada. All night we’ve searched for him, Rowan and Ephraim and myself, with naught to show but that scrap of news. He’s gone with Sam Reagan to join the regiment Johnson is raising. So I’m here at last to see you, for I am desperate. Do you know which road my son has taken? Did you aid him in his going?”
“Aid him? This is the first I’m hearing of Canada.” Lydia wanted to reach across and cover the man’s hand with hers. His haggard eyes forbade it. “Reginald…had I kept quiet and not ‘played my part,’ it would have left Anna caught between you all with no one to stand beside her. Would you have had me abandon her?”
Reginald ran a hand over his face, wiping hard at his eyes. Lydia hesitated, then asked, “When last did you sleep?”
He stiffened, jerking his hand from his face. “When did you?” Even he cringed at his harshness. “Lydia…there has always been with you a love for my Anna. And you say you’ve held me in regard—though I cannot fathom it, knowing how long since I must have come crashing off the pedestal you set me on as a girl. I’m come crashing down in the eyes of my children now as well. I’ve lost them both.”
Lydia wanted to weep. Held him in regard? Loved him
beyond all reason was what she’d done. Dull pain throbbed behind her eyes, but they were dry of tears. “I don’t believe that’s true—especially of Anna—but even if it is, there is only one loss that matters now.”
Wariness sprang to his eyes. “What is that?”
This moment had caught her at the end of her strength, and she feared she would find only wrong words to say. God help me. She flung the prayer heavenward and started in.
“Shout at me, rage, whatever you like, if I’m wrong in this, but I believe that on the day you took William, you lost the man you thought yourself to be. Because of it, you suffered an even greater loss and this is the loss of which I speak. You put the Almighty at arm’s length that day, I think, and have held Him there since. You separated yourself from His mercy, out of mistrust, anger, grief—I don’t know—but it’s left you striving to atone for that one great sin before you dare approach Him again. You have crucified yourself, but that work will never be finished, Reginald. It cannot be. You are not Christ.”
Reginald didn’t shout at her, only stared at her with the look of a prisoner hearing himself condemned. She hurried on, too exhausted for anything but honesty.
“Leaving aside for the moment what you did nineteen years ago—you, Reginald Aubrey, are a man of more merit than any other of my acquaintance. You loved Heledd and were faithful to her, when she was difficult to love, even when she took herself across an ocean from you. I know you love Anna and William. You have spent yourself daily, often through pain, to give them good lives. And I know, had the truth of William’s parentage never come to light, you’d have gone on devoting yourself to their well-being until your last breath.”
Across the table Reginald’s lips quivered. He pressed them tight.
“But in the end,” Lydia continued, “it wouldn’t have brought you nearer to what it is you need. No amount of sacrifice can atone for a single sin, not the smallest sin, or earn a right to God’s forgiveness. You never lost that right, Reginald. He’s always been as near to you as your next breath.”
