The man who owned the horse was desperate for a sale. “Sweet as maple sap in March,” he said.
Ty grunted. “I’ll need some tack.”
“She comes outfitted with a saddle and bridle. I’ll give you the whole kit and caboodle for two pounds.” Ty pushed himself off the fence. “I’ll think about it.” He turned and headed off toward the docks.
“One pound ten!” the man called after him, but Ty kept going. The mare would still be there later.
The town of Portsmouth was a bustling hive of water-powered sawmills and shipyards sprawling on the mouth of the Piscataqua River. It was a prosperous town, as evidenced by the activity on its crowded docks. Just to get to the ferry landing, Ty had to walk around piles of weathered hoops and oak staves, which would be shipped and then assembled somewhere into barrels and hogsheads. There were stacks of other lumber as well: clapboard for houses, shingles for roofs, and the tall white pine masts meant for the King’s ships—masts that were all over a hundred feet long.
Dozens of pinnaces and shallops rode at anchor in the harbor, and small rowboats and canoes dotted the river’s gravelly beaches. It was a busy town of little high-posted houses with sharply pitched gables, narrow brick chimneys, and tiny leaded casement windows, all crowded together on dirt streets. It was a noisy town, too, with clanging hammers, the grate of saws, the squeal of the hogs running wild on the wharves.
On the Maine side of the wide mouth of the river, across from the Portsmouth docks, was the settlement of Kittery— smaller and more spread out. The place had a more rugged look to it, with its two-story garrison houses built of sturdy, hewn logs. In Kittery, a man walking down the street felt he could flap his elbows without knocking someone else to the ground. It was here that Tyler Savitch had spent the first six years of his life.
He couldn’t remember much of those years. Later events had crowded out those scraps of memories. But he always felt a poignant loss, a sad sense of what might have been, whenever he first looked across the Piscataqua after a long absence and saw the piers, the garrison houses, the sawmills and shipyards of Kittery.
“Ty…”
He whirled around, irritation darkening his face. “Christ, what do you want now?”
Delia took a step back, her hand drifting up to her breast. “I’m sorry. I was only … I’m sorry…”
She started to run off, but he grabbed her arm. She whipped back around and that damn proud chin jerked right up into the air—but he couldn’t miss the hurt in her eyes.
“I didn’t mean it, Delia … Don’t go.” He realized it was the truth. He had thought he wanted to be alone, and he had deliberately left the others back at the inn. But now, seeing her, he suddenly felt this strange need to have her with him.
“Don’t go,” he said again.
“I only came t’ see if ye were hungry.”
“I’m not. But I still don’t want you to go.”
He released her arm and let out a relieved breath when she didn’t run off. Her head was turned away from him, and she clutched the folds of her ragged old cloak, pulling it together across her breasts. As usual, Ty’s eyes were drawn to those breasts, prominent beneath the threadbare material. Dammit, why hadn’t he thought about buying a cloak from that farmer when he’d picked out the other things?
The blue-striped calico bonnet he had bought hid her face and hair from him. he didn’t like the thing. He tugged at the strings beneath her chin. “Take this off. It doesn’t suit you.”
“But, Ty, it’s raining.”
She tried to still his hands, but he persisted. She had found some pins to bind up her hair, and he pulled those out as well. Clean raven tresses fell over his hands and a sudden beam of sunlight broke through the clouds, glinting off ruby highlights and making it shimmer like dark wine in a silver goblet. He had to fight a compulsion to bury his face in it. It was so silken, so soft. It was also slightly damp, and he realized she must have just washed it again this afternoon. He suspected this sudden fascination with cleanliness was because of him, and the thought made him scowl. He didn’t want her changing to please him. In his experience when a woman did that, she next started making demands, expecting him to change to please her.
He let her hair trickle through his fingers. “That’s better,” he said. “It’s stopped raining anyway.”
He had dropped the bonnet to the ground, but now she bent and snatched it up. “Oh, damn ye, Ty, here I’ve been tryin’ so hard t’ be a proper lady and proper ladies don’t run around with their bloody hair flying about their face and—oh, hell!”
To his amusement she clapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes squinted up in laughter. “I don’t suppose proper ladies run around a-cussin’ up a blue streak neither, do they?”
“Never mind. I like you with your hair flying about your face. And I’m getting used to that foul tongue of yours.”
Her mouth quirked up into a big grin. “Hunh! An’ you with yer re-fined tastes.”
Laughing, he held out his hand to her. “Come on, brat.”
She regarded his hand so suspiciously that he wanted to laugh again. But it made him sad as well, that she didn’t trust him not to hurt her.
Then she smiled and slipped her fingers around his.
He walked at a fast pace back along the wharf and down to the riverbank, keeping her hand in a tight grip. The feel of her hand, so small and slender enveloped in his own, made him feel strong and protective. He had to chuckle at himself. Tough, gutsy little Delia McQuaid would certainly have laughed if she could have read his thoughts.
She had to run to keep up, but he didn’t slow down. “Where are we going?” she said, panting slightly.
“Across the river.”
“Why didn’t we just take the ferry?”
Ty didn’t answer. When they got to the river’s edge he flipped over a birchbark canoe and slid it into the water. Seizing her by the waist, he lifted her into it.
She looked around nervously. “Ty? We’re not stealin’ this thing, are we? I don’t want to wind up in the Portsmouth gaol.”
“We’re only borrowing it for an hour or so.” He got into the canoe with her. Leaning over, he cupped her face in his hands. “Delia, I’m going across the river and I want you with me, that’s all. No other reason. I just want you with me.”
He surprised himself with what he had said, for until the words came out he hadn’t known his need was so desperate. Perhaps it was a simple matter of wanting her company—he was feeling lonely and restless, and she could always make him laugh.
His words had surprised her as well. Her eyes widened until they filled her face. She half stood up, and for a moment he thought she was going to scramble out of the canoe, then she sat down again. She dipped her head, refusing to look at him.
He paddled the canoe as he had been taught, the Abenaki way, holding his lower arms straight and using his whole upper body, rocking forward in a pushing, sculling motion. The paddle made a soft sucking sound as it left the water at the end of each stroke. He enjoyed the physical exertion of his muscles.
Inside, he felt like the string of a lute tuned so tightly it was about to break.
A light breeze brought with it the sharp fragrance of balsam and cedar. The clouds were breaking up, and late afternoon sun tinted the water a tawny gold. The tall, deep green trees that crowded in at the river’s edge were reflected on the rippling surface. Green-streaked gold … the color of her eyes.
Even as he thought of her, she turned her head to look at him and smiled.
He didn’t go directly across to Kittery but upriver instead. They rounded a bend and surprised a doe drinking at the bank. Her head jerked up and she stared at them, her eyes wide and unblinking, then she disappeared into the trees with a flip of her white tail.
Ty sent the canoe toward the bank where the doe had been. There was only a tiny strip of beach and stands of spruce and balsam fir encroached right down to the water line. The rainwet branches dripped onto their he
ads as they came ashore.
Ty paced the length of the small beach. He kicked at a rotting log that had been tossed up by the tide, his abrupt movement scaring a nearby sandpiper that had been picking among the pebbles.
Delia watched him, a small frown at the corners of her mouth. “This is a pretty spot, Ty,” she said tentatively when the silence had drawn on too long.
“My father was killed here.”
“Oh, Ty … I’m so sorry.”
He had turned his back on her to look across the river. She came up beside him. He had been feeling cold, but then to his surprise she slipped her hand into his, intertwining their fingers, and it made him feel warm inside. Less lonely.
“By the Indians?” she asked softly.
“They were Pequawkets. Led by Frenchmen.” Queen Anne’s War it had been called, France against England, and the New World had merely been one of many battlegrounds. The existence of the war, the reasons for it, had meant nothing to a six-year-old boy living in a small clapboard house in The Maine on the edge of the wilderness. He still wasn’t sure what it had been about.
“There had been talk all that fall about the Indian threat,” he said. “About how the French had them stirred up by offering bounties for English scalps. Lots of folk left the settlements and went back to Boston. But my father had a business—he owned a shipworks and it was just starting to turn a profit. I can remember him and my mother talking about it, about how the business would fail if he had to abandon it, even for a year.”
Ty paused, surprised at the vividness of the memory. Perhaps he remembered the scene so clearly because his mother had shouted at his father and she so rarely raised her voice. It had been his mother who was so dead set against leaving Kittery and the shipworks.
“Once winter came we all breathed easier,” Ty went on. “But then one night we woke up to see a red glow in the sky from the other settlements burning upriver. It was a night in February and it had snowed again only that morning. We never expected to be attacked in the middle of winter with so much snow on the ground.”
Ice had crusted the snow, and it crunched under their feet as they ran. The moon was out. Everything glittered silver, and little ice crystals danced on the wind. He kept falling down, and his father grabbed him by the arm, lifting him so high off the ground that his feet pumped in the air. He laughed aloud with excitement, too young to know he should have been afraid.
“There was a garrison house over in Portsmouth and the river was frozen solid. All we had to do was run across the ice and take shelter there.” His eyes, dark with pain, scanned the narrow bank. “This was as far as we got.”
They had seemed to come flying right out of the trunks of the trees, whooping their war cries. His mother screamed and his father fired off his musket once and then his mother screamed again. A hard arm wrapped around Ty’s throat and he saw the flash of the tomahawk. Although he kicked and struggled, even his child’s mind at last understood that he was about to die. Then his mother flung herself against the man who held him, and although others came and dragged his mother off, the moment was over and Ty knew he wouldn’t die after all.
But it was too late for his father. They had stood right at this spot, he and his mother, while the Pequawkets danced around them, chanting their triumphant battle songs. A pool of bright scarlet darkened the white, white snow beneath his father’s head, and icy crystals swirled around the bloody, gaping flesh where the dark brown hair had been.
Later, when Ty was fourteen and an Abenaki in every way but blood, he had gone on his first war party against the Mohawks to the west, and he had taken three scalps of his own. He had felt so proud and brave and lusty that day, and he had danced in triumph over his victims’ deaths just as the Pequawkets had danced around his father.
Suddenly, Ty’s legs began to tremble. Heedless of the wet ground, he sat among the rocks, settling Delia between his thighs. She leaned against his chest and wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs. Ty thought that he liked having her there, just the feel of her within the circle his body made on the bank. A sense of calm and peace stole over him, perhaps the first he had felt in years … since that day he had been torn from his Abenaki family and brought back into the Yengi world.
They sat in silence for a long time. Then she stirred and rubbed her palm across his bent knee, and when she spoke he knew she had been thinking about him, about what he had told her, and he wished now that he hadn’t done it. He felt suddenly embarrassed to have revealed himself in that way.
“They took you and your ma captive,” she said. “What a terrible thing t’ happen t’ a boy of six.”
He wanted to tell her it hadn’t been so terrible. But then it probably had and he’d only made himself forget. “They loaded us down like beasts with packs,” he said. “Stuff looted from the houses they had burned. And they marched us four hundred miles, all the way to Quebec. The French were paying ten pounds apiece for English prisoners, ten pounds for scalps, too, so if you couldn’t keep up you got beat first—”
“But surely not ye! Ye were just a little boy.”
“I was big enough to walk.” He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger and pulled it behind her ear. “After a while the beatings stopped making an impression. You got so tired and cold you didn’t care what they did to you anymore, and so you just laid down right there on the trail. That’s when you got the tomahawk. We started out from Kittery with twenty-six captives, all women and children, and only ten of us made it to Quebec.”
“I would’ve hated them,” she said fiercely. “I would’ve wanted t’ kill them all.”
Ty thought that maybe not for himself, for he had been too young, but for the others it might have been hate that had kept them alive.
“What happened then?” Delia asked. “What happened once ye got t’ Quebec?”
“The Pequawkets are a tribe of the Abenaki nation,” he said. “Chiefs from all the Abenaki tribes had gathered that winter at Quebec for a powwow, a war council One of them was Assacumbuit, a grand sachem from an Abenaki tribe known as the Norridgewocks. One night, the Pequawkets put on a big bragging show, with singing and dancing, all about the raid they had pulled off. They paraded us captives before the others. Assacumbuit saw my mother and decided he wanted her. He offered the Pequawket warrior who owned us fifty beaver hides for us both—a king’s ransom. So instead of going into a French prison, we went back into The Maine with Assacumbuit and the Norridgewocks. And you might think her a coward, but she didn’t hate him.”
Delia’s hand tightened on his knee. “Oh, no, Ty. She must have been so very brave t’ endure all that. So strong.”
“Not that strong. She died having Assacumbuit’s child.”
“Yet ye loved him,” Delia said, uncannily guessing at the reason for his torment. “In spite of what they did t’ ye an’ yer ma, ye loved yer Indian father.”
“Yes …” The admission felt torn from him. “Yes, I loved him.”
“So why did ye leave him? Why did ye come back?”
“He made me,” Ty said, but now he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Instinctively, she seemed to sense it, for she asked no more questions. She fell into a silence with him, leaning against his chest, and that strange sense of peace stole over Ty again, in spite of the memories.
No one, especially his grandfather, had understood why Ty had so hated being brought back into his parents’ world. They couldn’t understand that after ten years Ty was Abenaki; he could remember little of his earlier life and only a few words of his native tongue. He had a family, a man who had made him his son, and a stepbrother they called the Dreamer, who was both friend and rival, another boy to hunt and fight with. Yet when he was sixteen, a peace treaty had been signed between the Abenaki and the English that called for a repatriation of all captives, and so Assacumbuit had turned him over to the garrison at Wells.
That particular peace had lasted all of six weeks, but by then Ty’s grandfather had sailed up from Boston to
get him. Sir Patrick immediately set about making an Englishman of Ty, usually by flogging him with a cane whenever he lapsed into Abenaki or reverted to his Indian ways. In the Norridgewock village, Ty had been a sannup, a respected warrior, and to find himself being beaten like a slave or a woman had been a shameful experience.
He had endured the beatings in stoic silence, because he’d been raised in the Abenaki way to be respectful to his elders. But he reminded himself over and over that he had done nothing wrong, that he was proud to be Abenaki, to be Assacumbuit’s son. Yet inevitably the doubts had crept in. Before long he felt neither Yengi nor Abenaki. He belonged nowhere, cared for no one. He had spent the last years of his youth lonely, confused, and very, very bitter. At times he wondered if he had ever outgrown those feelings, especially the loneliness.
Ty stirred, jerking his mind back to the present by an act of will. Unconsciously, he rubbed his cheek lightly across the top of her head. “It’s time we were getting back,” he said.
They drifted downriver with the current. Delia sat between Ty’s legs, and he showed her how to paddle the canoe in the Abenaki way. He held her arm, directing the pull of the stroke. He was surprised at the strength he could feel in her firm muscles as she flexed them. Her flesh was warm and she smelled of sassafras and of the piny forest they had left behind. The wind whipped a tendril of her hair across his mouth; her breast brushed against his arm. And in spite of his melancholy mood, his groin stirred and tightened.
Before, it had always been small, ephemeral blondes who would catch Ty’s eye, icy women who had to be wooed and conquered first, then bedded. He had never thought he could be attracted to a girl like Delia, with all her rough edges and easy ways. A tavern wench who belonged only to the last man to have her. Yet she had dignity and pride, and something, something … Was it that she could be wooed and bedded but never conquered? he wondered. The thought disturbed him.
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