by Lori Benton
He paused for breath, his gaze never leaving Papa’s face that was so wretched with fear and grief. Guilt, remorse, and pride. It seemed to Anna that he hadn’t the strength to hide a single thought or feeling. Not from this man. Not from Stone Thrower. She gripped Two Hawks’s hand, straining to catch every word as his father continued.
“Since before the time of the grandfathers, it has been the way of my people to take a captive from an enemy to replace our dead…to ease the grief of our women who have lost brothers and sons. This is a thing I have thought long on as the years have gone around…as I have thought of you…and of my son you took and called your son.”
The last of the sunlight was fading now, pulling westward as dusk crept in. Anna heard footsteps coming with the shadows and the winking of fireflies. Lydia joined them, her face pinched with fear, but a fear fast giving way to puzzlement. There was no sign now of Mr. Doyle. Two Hawks held the man’s rifle. He met Lydia’s gaze as she came to stand beside them, in his eyes a question. She shook her head, as if to say the Irishman would be no further threat.
“Your father?” she asked, taking a step toward Stone Thrower. “He’s hurt.”
Good Voice stopped her. “Let him be. Let this happen. He will not want you to interfere.”
Anna looked back at the big Oneida on his knees in front of Papa, bleeding into the grass, ignoring his wound. From the sash at his waist he drew something long and white. Three strings of beads. Wampum. To Anna they seemed to glow with a light of their own in the settling dusk.
“What is this? What is he doing?”
Good Voice uttered a small cry at the sight—one of gladness, Anna thought. She stood straight and still, fists clenched at her sides, and Anna knew despite her words that it was taking all her self-possession not to rush to her husband’s side. On her face was a look of profound joy.
The same look was coming over Two Hawks. “It is the condolence ceremony,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Or something near to it. My father is offering your father condolence.”
“For his son,” Good Voice said. “His son that I took away dead from the fort.”
Stunned, Anna turned to Lydia. She was crying, tears falling unashamedly, and though her face was white with strain, there was the beginnings of hope in her eyes, as Stone Thrower held up the three strings of beads.
“The woman who gave birth to the male child you took…and that child’s father speaking now…they have mourned his loss. For many long seasons they were not consoled, knowing he lived far from their eyes that wished to see him, their hands that longed to touch him, their hearts that loved him.” Stone Thrower’s mouth trembled. He firmed his lips, bloodless now and thinned. “But Creator was watching. In His time He gathered their broken hearts to Himself. He has been their consolation, though the path has often been a difficult one to see and follow. But you also lost a son, and no one mourned with you, for the thing you did was done in secret. So I give you these strings…”
Papa gaped at the beads held out to him. Then, like a man in a dream, raised his hands to accept them.
“With them,” Stone Thrower said, laying the beads across Papa’s upturned palms, “I wipe the tears from your eyes so you may see clear. With them…I open your ears so you may hear what we say to you. With them…I clear your throat so you may speak to us what is in your heart.” He raised his empty hand to Papa’s shoulder. “Now it must be that He-Is-Taken, called by you William, is returned from over the water, or why would his mother come here as she has never done all these long years of our waiting? So I ask you, Aubrey—” Stone Thrower’s voice faltered. He was leaning close to Papa, struggling not to fall over. Still Anna heard his final words, replete with a lifetime of anguish and hope. William’s lifetime.
“Where is…my son?”
Then like a great tree toppling, Stone Thrower slid sideways. Papa caught him and laid him in the grass beside the buried hatchet.
39
For all her imaginings of how a meeting between Papa and William’s Oneida kin might unfold, for good or ill, Anna hadn’t expected this.
She stood back from Papa’s bed, holding a candle, though Lydia no longer needed light beyond the hearth and the candles on the clothespress, to see to her work. She’d cleaned and dressed Stone Thrower’s wound. The rifle ball had passed through the muscle of his thigh. Probably it had cracked the bone on its way. Miraculously, it had severed no major arteries. Stone Thrower was weak from blood loss, but if wound and bone healed cleanly…The next few days would tell.
Hovering over him now, Lydia checked the linen strips holding the dressing in place across his thigh. Good Voice sat in a chair by his head, while he gazed at her with eyes brimming alternately with wonder, relief, anguish. They’d been speaking to each other in Oneida, about William, and something about a dream coming true. Anna caught only the gist of that. The part about William was all too plain, as was the grief they shared. They’d lost their firstborn again.
Lydia poured a cup of water, handing it to Good Voice. “He needs to drink as much as possible. I’ll see about a broth as soon as I can.”
“I’ll see to that, Lydia.” With a sudden longing for Two Hawks, Anna set the candle on a trunk beside the door and went out of the room.
She found him alone in the kitchen, standing with arms crossed, looking rather lost. He turned sharply when she entered, dark eyes questioning in the light of the hearth fire he must have tended while she helped tend his father.
“He’s going to be all right, I think.” She crossed to him and touched his arm. “Where is Papa?” He’d left after seeing Stone Thrower into Lydia’s care, pausing long enough to pull Anna fiercely into his embrace, before bolting from the room.
“He went out that way.” Two Hawks nodded at the door to the yard between the house and cottage. “He barely looked at me.”
She gave his arm a squeeze. “Go and see your father. I’m sure he’ll want to see you.”
“Has my mother told him William is gone?”
“Yes. Just before I came out.”
He hesitated, then put his hand behind her head, pulling her to him gently. “I did wrong by my father, thinking he would give way to vengeance. I did wrong by Creator, not trusting Him with the power to change my father. Among my people it is thought that dreams—night dreams—have power. If a man has a dream he cannot get out of his mind, then it is good for him to make it come to pass.”
She leaned back, looking up at him. “Any dream? Even strange ones?”
Two Hawks breathed a laugh. “Sometimes strange things are done. But my father…He dreamed of hunting your father and taking his revenge.” His smile wavered even as she felt her own vanish. She let her arms fall from him, but he took up her hand. “This dream troubled him often over the years. He was driven to see it come to pass—even after he came to know Heavenly Father’s path. It is what we thought was happening back in the clearing, my mother and I. At first.”
Anna caught her breath, then frowned. “I thought I heard Stone Thrower say, ‘The dream was a true one.’ I must have misheard.”
Two Hawks’s eyes were radiant. “You did not mishear. In the dream he never killed your father. It always ended with him standing over Aubrey with a hatchet raised, or a club. All this time he thought it meant he was to take his vengeance and kill. Instead he buried the hatchet.”
“He forgave Papa. That’s what he’s been dreaming all these years?” Anna felt her chest expand with the wonder of it.
“In giving the white beads, my father was trying to set your father free, but it was his own heart that was freed.” Tears had welled in Two Hawks’s eyes. They coursed over the blades of his cheekbones as he added in a voice that swelled with the same wonder she was feeling, “And we were there, all of us, to see it.”
“I’m so glad.” Anna reached to wipe away his tears.
Two Hawks studied her with a look of such tenderness that she felt the force of it course through her.
�
�You are my candle flame,” he said. “Shine for me now—pray for me to have good words for my father, healing words, for I have never been so proud to be his son as I am this night.”
He’d made it out of the house before the retching overtook him. Down again on his knees, Reginald vomited at the edge of the cornfield. He missed the approach of quiet footsteps and jerked in violent surprise at the touch of a hand on his shoulder. A woman’s touch.
“Lydia,” he croaked, throat raw from the ravages of the past hours. “For pity’s sake, leave me—”
“It is me. Good Voice of the Turtle Clan. I have words to say to you, if you will hear them.”
Her voice was a shredding to his soul. More words? He’d had words enough. Forgiveness? A buried hatchet? It was his nightmare, turned on its head.
No. The true nightmare stood before him, wearing William’s face. Too dark to see it now. He didn’t need to. Sight of her walking toward him with the day’s last light upon on her, shining with the aspect of an avenging angel, was blazoned upon his mind as though she stood now under the noonday sun. What could she want from him? He hadn’t even her son to return to her. Reginald wiped his face and pushed through agony to his feet, swaying in the dark.
“I have words to say,” she repeated when he stood. “Words of the son you left with me, the day you took mine.”
Reginald’s chest seized with a pain so sharp he feared it was the end of him—wished it was the end. But still his legs stood him up, there at the edge of the cornfield, his constricted heart went on beating. And the words of William’s mother kept coming.
“He has a grave, that son. I dug it for him, good and deep. I put him in it with my tears. With my hands I covered him.”
He had no right to tears, not before this woman, but was helpless to stop them. He put his hands over his face. “Why do you this?”
“Good Voice? Papa? Are you all right?”
Another quiet shadow had joined them. Anna, his dear girl, still holding out to him her heart, in spite of everything.
They would kill him with their mercy.
He staggered as he started for the cottage, recalling he must speak to Rowan before he fell over unconscious. But he didn’t move fast enough to keep from hearing his precious Anna speaking wistfully the name of William’s twin.
“It is soon to speak of it,” Good Voice told her. “Too soon for him.”
Anna replied, but Reginald closed his ears to it. Two Hawks. It was agony even to look at that young man, so like William, so unlike. His mind flashed back to the two of them supporting the big wounded Indian between them, their straining arms touching in the falling twilight, those features hovering near, disconcertingly familiar, unnervingly strange. No wonder Anna looked as she had at William’s homecoming. As if she’d seen a ghost.
Reginald shook off the vision and fixed his gaze on the candlelight falling through the cottage window. He refused to think beyond the fact that he must explain to Rowan and Maura that these Indians were there to stay. For now.
Good Voice had rejoined her son at her husband’s bedside. Though she wanted to give the family their privacy, Lydia didn’t leave the room until she was certain Stone Thrower’s dressing would hold and the bleeding had nearly ceased. The threesome hardly seemed to notice her, so absorbed were they in each other. Clearly a healing of another sort was happening between them. Filling the room was a weighty, peaceful presence Lydia recognized from long acquaintance.
Finally satisfied her patient wouldn’t bleed out onto the bed, Lydia left them, slipping from the room with a basin to empty. In the shadowed passage outside, a solitary figure stood. Faint light from the other end of the house barely reached him.
Lydia clutched the basin, startled but not surprised. “Reginald?”
His voice came up from a place deep within, dry as an empty well. “I spoke to Rowan. He meant only to protect me, even knowing…what I’ve done.”
Lydia had been furious with the Irishman, but no longer. She understood Rowan Doyle had acted out of loyalty and ignorance. “I tried to let them know what was happening. They wouldn’t open the door to me. I’m so very—”
Reginald held up a hand. “There is no need for you to apologize, Lydia, but there is for me. For the terrible words I said to you. I called you foolish, knowing full well that one thing you have never been is a foolish woman.”
A host of words staggered across her tired brain. Just as many emotions pressed against her breastbone. The man must feel his list of sins growing by the hour.
“You were terrified for Anna. I’ve already forgotten it.” She hadn’t. Not quite. But she would. And still it took everything she had by way of self-control not to touch him now. Compassion rushed in, overwhelming any thought for her own heartache and hope. “It will be weeks before Stone Thrower can be moved. Rowan and Maura…Can they accept that?”
“I told them as much. Whether they stay or go is for them to decide.” Reginald’s glance strayed to the door of his room. “Who is with him?”
“His family. But he asked for you. Will you go in to him?”
Even in the half dark she could sense him stiffen, but he said, “I’ve taken William’s lifetime from the man. He may claim of me whatever he wishes.”
Resolve weakening, she freed a hand from the basin and touched his arm. “Don’t wait too long. He would take no laudanum to help him sleep, not until he says whatever more he means to say to you. But once he’s said it…please, Reginald, make him take it and then you get some sleep as well. Somewhere. Anna and I will look after everyone.”
In danger now of either bursting into tears or flinging herself into his arms, she turned and hurried down the passage toward the kitchen.
Her name on his lips stopped her.
“Lydia,” he said, and there was longing in it, as she’d never heard before. “Lydia…you could do so much better than me.”
There was a chair. She put the basin on it, then went back down the passage to him. She took his drawn, unshaven face between her hands and kissed him full on the mouth. It made him groan.
His arms came around her and he kissed her back, crushing her to him, as though she were all that was keeping him from drowning. The taste of him was salty with tears. Her own and his mingled. When at last he let her go, breathless with half a lifetime of wanting, she said, “I honestly cannot imagine how.”
He made a sound that might have been a sob or a laugh, and he kissed her brow.
She touched his shadowed face. “Sleep, Reginald. Soon.”
Remembering the needs of her patient, she found the strength to pull away and leave him, forgetting the basin, so dazed was she with the joy of such tenuous promise.
40
Anna set bread on the kitchen table with a sliced round of cheese, then limped to the hearth where a broth simmered and returned with the kettle steaming for tea. Her movements seemed a blur. How long Lydia stood watching her, drenched in glorious, bruise-tender hope, she didn’t know, before Good Voice and Two Hawks sidled past, casting her curious glances. She shook herself into action.
“Anna, sit down and rest that ankle. Good Voice, Two Hawks, please sit and eat, and…be welcome.”
Two Hawks ate what was set before him, his gaze rarely straying from Anna, but Good Voice didn’t touch the food. She stroked the table, tracing its scars with a fingertip—perhaps imagining William touching them, making them with his own small fingers? Lydia was reaching to clasp her hand when the door latch’s lifting caused every head to turn.
Maura Doyle pushed open the door to the yard and came within. She surveyed them all, brows raised, then moved aside. Lydia glimpsed a figure behind her. An older man, but not Rowan.
Sounding more than a little dazed, Maura said, “I found him in the yard on my way over. He’s claimin’ to know these others here.”
Lydia’s gaze fixed on the man who came forward into the hearth light, an Indian with a blunt-featured face, wrinkled and faintly pitted. His gaze took them in
, as if he searched for a particular face among them. In English he said, “Where is Stone Thrower?”
His voice even more than his face snapped Lydia’s memory back across the years, to a day in her father’s apothecary when the Mohawk healer, Hanging Kettle, had visited with an Oneida warrior. “Clear Day?”
The man looked at her, eyes narrowed. “Black-Hair-Girl?”
“This is she?” Good Voice asked, standing from her place at the table. “This is McClaren’s daughter, who spoke to you of Aubrey?”
“I—he—McClaren was my father’s name,” Lydia stammered. “I met Clear Day in his shop.”
“Daniel Clear Day he is called now,” Two Hawks said in a voice that, despite its dissimilar cadence, rang with a tone like William’s. “Uncle, my father is in this house. Come. Sit at this table. We will tell you about it.”
Anna turned to look at Two Hawks, standing in the doorway of William’s room. It was the only spare bed in the house. She’d changed the bedding and opened the windows to a cooling breeze. “Will it be hard for Good Voice, being so close to William’s things?”
Not that many were on display. William had been back in the room so brief a time. What possessions he hadn’t taken with him were still put away in trunks. Yet standing in his room, all Anna could think about was their last exchange, their bitter parting. She made for the door. “I sleep right across the passage there. Not far.”
Two Hawks made way for her but said, “Anywhere not beside me is far.”
The words stole her breath and sent the blood surging warm into her face. His eyes were dark in the glow of the candle she’d brought upstairs. These moments alone were fleeting. She wanted to hurl caution and conscience aside and spend them in his arms. But William had squeezed between them. Was he still in Schenectady? On his way north with Sam? Did he regret not staying to see his family? Did he regret anything?
