by Lori Benton
“That he is,” Reginald confirmed. “We both saw the surrender of Fort William Henry.”
“A harrowing,” Willett said. “I’m grateful for an able pilot, but will you not reconsider making the journey as well?”
“Lang is glad for the going,” Reginald said, feeling suddenly older than the six or seven years that lay between him and this officer still visibly in his prime. He laid a hand to the hip that pained him continuously and could, if overtaxed, make rising of a morn a gritted act of will. Yet he couldn’t deny a stir of longing. Willett’s vitality, the sense of untainted purpose and untarnished honor he exuded, put Reginald in mind of the officer—the man—he might have been if…
He shook away such thoughts. “Here is my place now.”
Willett nodded, scanning the ranks of waiting soldiers hugging what shade the warehouses afforded, then turned back to Reginald with a grin that belied his next words. “Moving the regiment and its kit is no light undertaking. Not with the terrain we’ll face—as I’m sure you’re aware.” A shout from a loaded bateau distracted Willett. A private flailed precariously over the vessel’s side, saved a dunking by the quick reflexes of a comrade. Willett cupped his mouth and shouted, “Too late to swim for shore, soldier!”
Willett took his leave, bidding Reginald jovially to build more boats and be quick about it. As the first bateau pushed off from the quay, Ephraim Lang came to bid farewell, blue gaze fixing Reginald squarely.
“Wager you’re wishing now you didn’t run the lad off.”
Lang had made it clear he thought Reginald’s judgment of Two Hawks hasty, its execution severe. But what should he have done? Pretend he hadn’t seen what he saw? Yet Anna’s misery was a noose about his neck, tightening as the days slipped past and the distance between them grew.
“We managed,” he said, indicating the emptying quay.
“You could do a deal better than manage, Major.”
Reginald watched Lang board the craft he would pilot. He’d see them off, then return to his work…though he could easily fall down where he stood and sleep for a week.
In the end he did neither, for Lang looked back at him, nodding at a point over Reginald’s shoulder even as he gave the order to push off. As the fleet crowded the river, beginning the laborious journey westward, Reginald rounded to scan the thinning crowd. At its edge Lydia stood, clad in the blue gown that made her eyes appear the most vivid hue he’d ever seen in a woman’s face. Though half that face was shielded by a broad-crowned hat, he knew by the set of her mouth she wasn’t there to see the regiment away.
Pain like a fist squeezed his chest.
“You haven’t lost all. Anna loves you, else she wouldn’t be so distraught—nor would she still be under my roof. She’d have gone with Two Hawks when you sent him away. She went after him, did you know? He refused to take her from you. Even so, Reginald—believe me in this—she’d have found a means of convincing him were it not for loving you…a love that’s hanging by the merest thread, which you will snap if you do not take the utmost care now in its handling.”
There on the quay Lydia had spilled her heart in what felt like a final bid to heal the relationship that had been the cornerstone of her world since she was twelve; Reginald and Anna, her dearest friends. Her loves. The wound between them had festered with Reginald holed up in his workshop, Anna going about like one half-dead, miserable and much too thin.
“It isn’t the family of your making that you now stand to lose but the family the Almighty has been making in spite of you. Stop resisting and let Him make it.”
The Almighty was weaving something beautiful out of Reginald’s tangled mess. In the hearts of Anna and Two Hawks, uniting in love two families long embittered enemies. She could see it. She was fairly certain Good Voice and Stone Thrower had seen it, were at least open to the possibility of it. Why couldn’t Reginald see?
“Is it that for so long you expected to die at Stone Thrower’s hands, felt you deserved to die thus? Are you unable to face what their forgiveness granted you—life, and the living of it?”
She’d waited until the regiment departed to do this desperate thing. She didn’t know if her timing was inspired or her words were right. At least she’d convinced Reginald to abandon his shop and come to the house, sit down with Anna and talk. Now if only Anna, unaware of Lydia’s errand to the Binne Kill, could summon the courage and grace to do the same.
Lydia let Reginald into the house. With his tired footsteps behind her advancing toward the kitchen where Anna worked, she was still imploring in her heart: You’ve let one decision define you for too long. Here now is a new choice you can make. For Anna’s sake, for your own, make the right one.
At the last, she turned and whispered, “Perhaps it would be best to wait here, let me speak to Anna first.”
“Does she not expect me?” He clenched the hat he’d removed, running its brim through callused fingers. “Lydia, what are you about?”
“Please, Reginald. I’m sure she’ll want to talk to you.”
He looked monumentally less certain than she’d managed to sound but did as she bid.
“You’ve brought him here?” Already pale, with sleepless bruises beneath her eyes, Anna’s face went bloodless as she gripped the worktable where she’d been grinding fragrant rosemary in a mortar. “How could you, with things as they are?”
“With things as they are, how could I not?” Lydia raised her hands in helplessness. “You are miserable. Reginald is miserable. I am miserable for you both.” Her heart twisted at the brokenness in Anna’s face, the stubbornness, the pride—more like Reginald than she knew. “Please, if only for my sake, will you go into the parlor and speak to your father?”
Tears glazed Anna’s eyes. She put down the pestle, wiped her rosemary-scented hands on the apron covering the gown that hung loosely from her wasting frame, drew herself straight, and strode from the kitchen. Tense with hope, Lydia followed into the parlor, where Reginald sat in a stiff-backed chair. At sight of his daughter, he rose, a clench of pain in his face that made Lydia wince. Let me have done rightly…
No sooner had she lifted the prayer than it was evident she hadn’t.
“Why, Papa?” Anna demanded, striding into the room with fists clenched at her sides. “Answer me that at last. Why did you send him away so shamefully?”
Reginald flinched. “Shamefully? Do you tell me ’tis no shame you felt for his gawping at you in that tub yonder?”
Lydia reached for the doorframe. No, she wanted to shout. Not this. But it was Anna doing the shouting, or near to it.
“He barely caught sight of me before he looked away. If you were standing behind him as you said, you’d have seen that. I think you came upon him already turning away and assumed the worst. Of us both!”
Reginald took a step toward his daughter. “Anna. Look you, that is not how—”
“I tried to go with him! He turned me back. He said starting our marriage by betraying your trust was unworthy of us. Are those the words of a shameful man?”
Like an ebbing tide, there went the color draining from Reginald’s face. “Your marriage? What consent have I given to such a thing?”
“None, of course. But here is a thing you should know, Papa. William tried to convince me to go with him to Canada. He was willing to take me from you—but not Two Hawks. Now tell me, which of them has behaved with more honor?”
Reginald looked to Lydia, rooted in the dining room doorway. “Did you know of this as well?”
Anna took a step, putting herself squarely in his sights. “Don’t accuse Lydia. This is between us. And I want your answer. If William and I never knew the truth of his blood, would you have gone on treating him like a son, an heir?”
It was a trap, of course. Yet nothing for Reginald to do now but walk straight into it. “I would have, yes.”
Anna hovered on the verge of tears, then pressed them back and said in a voice flat with pain, “Why then do you close your heart to his tw
in? Why drive him away when he tried so hard to please you? What makes him different from William? Besides the color of his skin.”
Reginald snatched up his hat from the chair on which he’d left it, then hurled it down again. “ ’Tis what you wish me to admit? That the color of his skin matters? Well, Anna, I’m sorry for it, but it matters and ’tis unrealistic to pretend otherwise. It matters in how he will be treated. How you will be treated, did you marry him. But that is not the only difference. There is the raising they both have had, see. Jonathan is Oneida. He’ll have different expectations of a wife than someone raised among us, all else aside.”
“True, Papa. But those expectations aren’t the evil you seem to think them to be. Women of the Haudenosaunee have rights that I, or Lydia, could never have. Oneida women aren’t property. They own property. Fields, crops, homes—all of it is theirs. They have a voice in who leads them and whether their warriors make war or peace. It seems to me I’d have a better life as a woman if I went and begged them to make me Oneida—which is what I tried to do.”
Lydia judged it the worst thing Anna could have possibly said. Reginald had seen Indian women aplenty, back in the days when he made his trading trips upriver. He’d know how they were respected…until the warriors got a taste of liquor. Then would come the howling savagery, the brutality, and woe betide any woman who didn’t hide herself then.
The appalling thought of Anna living in such conditions had rendered him speechless. Into that suspended moment came an urgent rapping at the door.
Anna wouldn’t hear of Lydia answering the untimely call for a midwife. She gathered her case and all but hurtled out the door on the heels of the worried young father who had come knocking. Reginald didn’t go after her. Perhaps, Lydia reasoned, collapsing into a parlor chair, stunned by the utter failure of her plan, it was best he let her go this time.
A scalpel. That was what was needed. A scalpel that could excise the bitter infection of Reginald’s soul, a purulence that had spread now to Anna. She’d saved him once—in body—but clearly that wasn’t to be her role again. She simply hadn’t the necessary tool to hand.
When she could speak, she raised her gaze to Reginald, standing where Anna had left him.
“I am done with it, Reginald. I remove my hands. I will pray for you, for Anna. She is welcome to remain with me—indeed I hope she will. But I shall do nothing to prevent her making her own choices now. I am done.”
Until, or unless, the Almighty gave her an indisputable sign that there was something more she could do. Until, or unless, He put the scalpel in her hand. She looked away from Reginald, unable to bear the breaking in his face.
“Do you think she’s in earnest, about going to…them?”
“Them? Can you not even say their names?” She was bruised. Battered. She’d dashed herself one too many times against the fortress he’d built around his heart. “I’ve done the very thing of which I accused you, forced my will upon what God was doing and made a snarl of it. Mea culpa.”
She waited, knowing that if Reginald stood there and said nothing now she was going to weep. And maybe never stop.
“Lydia.” His voice was graveled. “I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” Wanting his apology less than his silence, she held up her hand. “Please. Leave my house. Now.”
Reginald did so. Most willingly, it seemed.
“I feel no shame in loving you…” Anna could hear Two Hawks speaking, clear as if he stood beside her in the low-ceilinged, soot-smudged bedroom, while she encouraged the laboring woman in the bed, checked the progress of the babe’s passage, prepared the twine and the shears and the soft swaddling ready to receive the infant. “But in defying your father would be much shame…”
She had defied Papa, addressed him in a manner she never would have dreamed herself capable of weeks ago. She didn’t know what she felt about it. Aggrieved. Shaken. Yet at the same time filled with a sense of triumph she shied from examining for fear it was rooted in anger, pride, bitterness.
“Aubrey did not start you in the womb of your mother, but he gave you life, risking his own for yours…” That was indisputable. If not for Papa, she would never have had a life. Never known all these many years with their blessings. And their travails.
“Soon now,” she said, comforting the sweating, suffering young woman by rote, lost inside her own writhing soul, where a different battle waged.
“Even if Creator did not bid us honor our parents, for that alone I would honor him in my heart…” Two Hawks would honor Papa for that one heroic act, saving her life that Two Hawks might know her, love her. But how could she honor Papa when he was wrong about so many things? Unfair. Unyielding. Unforgiving. He who had been forgiven so much.
“Taking you from him without his blessing is not the path I am to walk.”
She should have left with Two Hawks. If she was going to be the wife of an Oneida man, why couldn’t she also be Oneida? She’d been taken in once by those not of her blood. Why not again?
“You are not meant for that world.”
But it was only his tradition preventing her from trying. He was willing to break other traditions for her. Why not that one?
The babe was coming, the young mother straining, tendons standing like ropes in her neck, face suffused with red. Anna reached to cradle the emerging head. “One more push. Good…good.”
Was this rebellion in her heart, or might it be God’s leading?
Her soul was a welter of confusion, a careening of emotions that sprayed like sparks from a smith’s anvil. Blow after blow. She’d hurt Papa and Lydia with her words, yet she couldn’t shake the notion that going after Two Hawks was what she needed to do. Instead of diminishing, it had been building in her over the weeks since the chill spring morning he’d left her. There was only one glaring problem. She didn’t know the path to Kanowalohale.
The newborn—a girl—was out of her mother now, alive and perfect. Anna cut the cord and placed the squalling baby into the woman’s reaching hands, smiling, saying words she’d heard Lydia speak over and again…meanwhile scouring her mind for a face, a name, anyone who’d be able and willing to help her.
She had to find Two Hawks. Or Good Voice, who would know where he was. But who would be her guide?
18
Green Bean Moon
Fort Stanwix
During the past moon, Two Hawks had helped his father hunt for meat and deerskins, but they made sure their hunting took them often to the fort at the Carrying Place. With midsummer past, they were come to Stanwix again to learn what the scouts ranging north and west and winging back home like crows to the nest had to say. They hoped to find Ahnyero. Two Hawks hadn’t seen him since their parting on the trail where Strikes-The-Water found them and ruined everything.
He’d never been nearer to losing his self-possession than when he’d been forced to watch Ahnyero continue north with the rebel spy, Sam Reagan, knowing he’d lost his best chance of finding his brother before the redcoats began their campaign.
“And just who is William Aubrey to you?” Reagan had asked him, the marks of torture angry on his flesh.
“He is my brother, born with me at Fort William Henry, as I think you have already guessed. And you are the one who led him away just when he learned of me and our parents.”
“His twin!” Reagan had said, no longer questioning what his eyes confirmed. “But you have it wrong. He was determined to leave Schenectady—doubt he cared for where, he was so furious. I said I was going over to the British and he was welcome to come.”
Two Hawks had narrowed his eyes, trying to stitch the man’s words together with what Anna Catherine and Lydia and Aubrey had said of that terrible night his brother learned the truth. “As a spy for the Americans, you have said—to us. But does my brother know you are a spy?”
Reagan shook his matted head. “He’s been in no frame of mind to hear it. This—you—the truth coming out…he’s still reeling from it. Took me months to get
it out of him.”
Two Hawks wanted to believe he was hearing a true thing about his brother’s heart, hard as it was to accept. Reeling still, after so much time? How could that be?
Because he ran from every hand that might have steadied him.
As the thought sank like a stone into Two Hawks’s heart, Ahnyero and Strikes-The-Water standing by silent, their prisoner’s wary hazel eyes flicked between them. He wet his cracked lips. “Listen…Help me return to my regiment—with a story that’ll prevent my being flogged for desertion—and I’ll speak to William. Before this expedition gets too far underway, I mean to break from it, come over to my rightful place. I’ll bring William with me…if he’ll come.”
Switching to Oneida, Two Hawks and Ahnyero had discussed the matter. Ahnyero proposed guiding Reagan north, pretending to be an Indian sympathetic to the British who’d rescued a hapless spy from his tormenters. If it proved safe enough and chance provided, Ahnyero would speak to William himself. Meanwhile, Two Hawks would return to the fort with Strikes-The-Water.
Two Hawks had seen the wisdom in it. That didn’t mean he’d liked it.
Now, as he and his father entered the fort through the main gateway, they passed soldiers with saws and hammers, barrows and shovels, busy strengthening the walls and buildings within. New chimneys smoked in the day’s early cool. They’d heard Ahnyero had returned from Lachine and been sent out on other missions, but neither Two Hawks nor Stone Thrower knew whether he’d spoken to William or even set eyes on him.
“Look.” With his chin, Stone Thrower pointed toward the commander’s headquarters, a log building across the open parade ground. Men were issuing from its door. Among them was Ahnyero, deep in talk with an officer Two Hawks recognized as Gansevoort’s second-in-command, Marinus Willett. The scout saw them coming and ended his talk with Willett as they reached him.
“It is good at last to see you both,” Ahnyero said as Willett strode away. “I know you will want to hear what happened with me and that one who found us on the trail.” This he said to Two Hawks, gripping his arm in greeting.
