A Flight of Arrows

by Lori Benton

Sam ducked past him and was gone. William’s breathing was loud in the empty tent. He stood rooted, fighting to keep from running heedlessly after the traitor, down a path that led straight through dishonor, to home.

  The sky still held a greenish glow along its western rim, though overhead stars clustered. Dotting the edges of the grounds adjacent to the fort, the fires of Indian, ranger, and regimental camps burned, snapping sparks into the night, conflagrant eyes gazing inward at a wildly various assemblage from across oceans, lakes, and vast frontiers, come to meld themselves into a consolidated force. So their leaders hoped.

  William stood near enough one of those fires to feel its heat radiating down his face and limbs. It was second nature now to seek out smoke at night—blast all mosquitoes to some bloodless wasteland.

  Though attendance at the assembly was compulsory, they weren’t made to stand in rank. Even so, William stood immobile as the talk went on. St. Leger had spoken briefly, then Colonel Claus, officially in command of the Indians. The latter had also been given their chance to speak. Sachems and war chiefs, Senecas, Mohawks, Cayugas, Onondagas. Surrounded on all sides by soldiers and Indians standing, sitting, wandering in search of liquor, William watched as men ascended the makeshift stage erected for the evening and proclaimed their grievances against the rebels, what it was they meant to do in the coming days, how King George would reward his faithful subjects.

  After Sam’s defection, William had grasped one final hope—that the campaign would unravel. That St. Leger would prove unequal to the task of holding on to his native auxiliaries, on whom the campaign depended. Instead he’d sensed the Indians’ mood rising with each speaker, mounting like a gathering storm, until now there came a breaking tumult of howls that jarred like a thunderclap, prickling his scalp. St. Leger had presented the Indians with their long-awaited gifts. The delighted screams were bolstered by the crack of muskets firing skyward in celebration—and relief, William sensed, catching sight of Angus and Archie MacKay among a knot of fellow Scots, eyes shining with exhilaration as they took in the hair-raising ferocity of their allies.

  But among the crowd, William spotted a countenance that reflected no pleasure. Joseph Tames-His-Horse stood a stone’s throw away, beside him a Negro nearly as tall. Or was he also Indian? William blinked as firelight tossed shadows with abandon, then realized he was looking at another mixed blood, a man both African and Indian. Another Indian joined the pair, slipping out of shadow to put a hand to the darker man’s arm.

  William caught his breath, recognizing the warrior he’d seen with Sam the night of their arrival. None of the three joined the shouting or rushed forward to receive St. Leger’s gifts. Joseph stood tall in the firelight, arms crossed. William stared, minded of their last conversation. “Creator is over all, and in all…” Did Joseph still believe it, standing so grim while all around him celebrated? How did one know such a thing?

  When, he wondered, was the last time he’d prayed? Not by rote but honestly from his heart. He’d no prescribed words, only raw need. Are You in this? Because I don’t see it if You are.

  Before he’d even finished the prayer, a cold blade lanced down his spine. Colonel Butler had taken the stage to address the Indians, reaffirmed in their purpose by St. Leger’s gifts. Bronzed faces lifted, shining in the firelight. The screaming died away.

  “This army you see gathered here, my brothers,” Butler called to them, gesturing expansively, “will soon be marching upon Fort Stanwix. With it you will go. There, if it please you, you may stand and watch as that fort falls to us. Then the valley it protects will be open to you, and I tell you now that upon its inhabitants you may make war however you desire!”

  Scattered ululations rent the air, but Butler wasn’t finished. “For every rebel scalp taken, you may expect to receive from your Father, King George, twenty pounds worth of gifts, such as you have received this day!”

  The bedlam that shattered the night in response to this pledge nearly struck William to his knees. Had any of these warriors still harbored reservations over committing themselves to St. Leger’s campaign, those reservations were just obliterated. For every rebel scalp…

  Butler couldn’t mean to let the Indians make war upon women and children. Would the people of the Mohawk Valley stand against such brutality?

  Sam had lied about the garrison. It was stronger than St. Leger believed. Could the army still be halted at Fort Stanwix?

  Around William the air crackled and seethed, a cauldron of bloodlust on the boil. Butler stoked the fire with his martial words. Indians yelped. Drums beat. A few danced their war dances. Soldiers in green and red began to draw together, made uneasy yet held in thrall by their allies’ fierce display.

  “Anna,” William whispered, her name drowned in the tumult. And he was about to be swept along in its tide, used as an instrument of destruction against those he ached to protect. Unless he could swim free of it. Unless he threw honor to the wind and did whatever he had to do to see them brought through the coming storm safely.

  Anna. Lydia, Rowan, Maura. Even him. Aubrey. Had he once stood in such a place as this, contemplating the doing of a thing he never thought within his scope? Because he loved?

  He looked for Joseph Tames-His-Horse and found him standing alone, his companions gone into the night. He was staring at William—also thinking of that conversation back on Buck Island? Compelled as though a fist had shoved the small of his back, he took a stride toward the Indian.

  “Private Aubrey!”

  He nearly tripped, so quickly did he turn. Sergeant Campbell wore his grinning sneer.

  “Feelin’ at home, are ye? Here among your kind.”

  William clamped down on the urge to send the sergeant reeling into the nearest fire. He hadn’t kept the wanting from his face. A pitiless glee lit the Scot’s eyes.

  “Your captain requests the pleasure o’ your attendance, Private. Now.”

  Finding Captain Watts in his tent as ordered, he learned he would be part of an advance guard finally heading out in the morning for Fort Stanwix, as would nearly sixty other handpicked marksmen from Johnson’s regiment. Their mission was to prevent the blockage of Wood Creek, to seize the lower landing on the Mohawk River and capture any supplies or reinforcements attempting to reach the rebels.

  “Find Private Reagan,” Watts told him. “No one’s spotted him in the crowd this evening. Tell him, will you, Aubrey?”

  William saluted his commanding officer, came within a breath of telling the captain there was no point in looking for Sam, then cleared his throat and asked, “Sir. Are they—we—certain the fort is thinly manned?”

  Watts looked up from his camp desk, upon which he was scribbling in a ledger, brows raised in inquiry.

  “Those prisoners taken from the fort, sir,” William hurried to add. “What if they spoke truth?”

  Sweat ran down the side of the captain’s face, the trickle white with hair powder. “The general thinks otherwise, Private. Whatever awaits, I’ve no doubt my men—including you—are the equal to it. You’ve your orders. Now get some sleep.”

  23

  July 27, 1777

  Schenectady

  War and rumors of war. Such was the refrain in the background of their days. While war raged in the east, rumors of war came downriver from the west with the increasing regularity of birth pangs, mounting with intensity. They marched into Lydia’s kitchen on the lips of the wives of merchants and river men. Quiet alarm pinched the faces she passed on the street, sharp reminder of the last war when French-allied Indians ravaged the frontier and folk as far east as Albany trembled in their beds.

  “And where are we to go then?” asked a cooper’s wife, come for tending of a suppurating gash on her fleshy upper arm. The woman blew a frazzled breath, puffing out strands of equally frazzled hair fallen from their pins. “Albany’s no safer, now Burgoyne’s taken Ticonderoga and those forts up the Hudson. The British have The City. Now more redcoats gather westward, ’tis said. Wolves got
us circled, I say.”

  “There is no safety,” Lydia said, thinking aloud as she applied honey to a linen pad. “Only under the wings of the Almighty.”

  “Hmph,” the woman said, patently uncomforted.

  Lydia understood. Trusting in unseen Providence when a very visible enemy threatened required more than a little faith and yet…she had to trust. For Anna—away since dawn, delivering a babe most like since it was past noon and she hadn’t returned—still going about mired in bitterness and grief. For Reginald, who seemed to have cut her from his life for her meddling. For Two Hawks and his parents, longing for their lost one. For William, lost. It was a torment to see loved ones in pain and be unable to do anything about it for lack of knowledge or medicine. Or a suitable scalpel.

  “And there went those bateaux upriver yesterday,” her patient was saying. “Stuffed to the gills with provender for the forts up that way. Dayton, I suppose. Or no—must be Stanwix, at the Carry. Pray they hold back whatever’s coming, for where are we to go if the redcoats and their savages get past them?”

  It was the second time the woman had voiced the query. Lydia gave no answer, too busy absorbing this news so casually dropped. There’d been high activity on the Binne Kill for weeks, reinforcements sent upriver, regular companies, militia, supplies and arms, but she hadn’t heard of this latest flotilla’s departure. She asked, but the woman couldn’t say whether Reginald Aubrey had gone along.

  Even so, a shadow fell across Lydia’s soul.

  She was tidying up after the woman’s departure, the urge to go down to the Binne Kill all but yanking her out onto the street, when there came a knock at the door. The fourth of the day. Busy days were good days. They gave her something to occupy her thoughts and divert her from fretting. And the temptation to go and plead yet again with Reginald.

  Turning her thoughts to who it might be, what the need, she opened the door and gave a yelp of startlement.

  On the threshold stood an Indian.

  Lydia’s heartbeat was still going at a trot but no longer out of surprise. Daniel Clear Day occupied a bench at her table, sipping at garden-leaf tea served in her best china cup. Lydia sat across from him, waiting for the man to explain this unexpected visit.

  Clear Day’s pockmarked face had aged in the years since their first encounter in her father’s apothecary shop. Sun-weathered creases bracketed his mouth; careworn furrows tracked his brow. Thin gray braids lay against the yellowed linen of his shirt. His eyes, when they lifted and caught her staring, were so grave in their appraisal that Lydia’s stomach clenched. Not more grief to bear, she was thinking when Clear Day set down his cup.

  “Is that one who called himself the father of my nephew’s firstborn still on the river, making his boats? It is with him I must speak.”

  Lydia struggled to keep her voice steady. “Have you looked for Reginald at the Binne Kill? I’ve only just heard—more bateaux are gone upriver with supplies for Fort Stanwix. Did he go with them?”

  Clear Day frowned. “I do not know this. It was in my mind you would know where to find him.”

  Warmth climbed Lydia’s face. Clear Day had visited her home on his way east with Samuel Kirkland to see General Washington’s army, back when Two Hawks was still Reginald’s apprentice. She debated concealing how badly her relationship with Reginald had deteriorated since then, but what was there to be gained by hiding the truth?

  “Anna and her father have barely spoken since Two Hawks left us,” she blurted before she’d quite made up her mind. “That’s partly my fault because I tried to bring them together—meddling, I suppose. I so wanted to fix everything—” She clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the rush of words, mortified as tears spilled.

  Silence reined in the kitchen. When she could bear to raise her gaze to check his reaction, Clear Day looked neither surprised nor dismayed by her outburst.

  “You are one whose heart is for healing,” he said. “It is how Creator made you to be, what He made you to do. Will you go now with me to the place on the river where Aubrey builds his bateaux? We will see if he is to be found, and I can give him the words I bring.”

  Lydia was on her feet, heart beating hard now with hope. “Of course. What do you mean to say to Reginald? Is it to do with William?” And if so, was it good news or…?

  “It is.” Clear Day rose from her table. “He was seen by his brother. At Oswego, far in the west. He is there with the army that will be coming into our land. He wears the green coat of Johnson’s regiment, as we have learned.”

  And feared. William was in the enemy’s ranks.

  “Was he alone?” Lydia asked. “I mean was Sam Reagan—the man he left with—was he part of Johnson’s regiment as well? Oh, but I suppose Two Hawks wouldn’t know him even if he’d seen him. Or…would he?” Lydia amended, catching the sharpness that had come into Clear Day’s gaze at mention of Sam.

  Clear Day hesitated but at last said evasively, “Of that one I cannot speak.”

  Could not, or would not, Lydia wanted to ask, but the old man continued too quickly.

  “My nephew and his son are needed by the soldiers at Stanwix fort, to come and go as scouts, and by the People to be ready to fight. That is why I am the one come to tell Aubrey this news.” He looked at her searchingly, seeing her own sudden indecision no doubt, for he asked yet again, “Will you show me where it is Aubrey has his boats, or shall I find my way alone?”

  “No, I…” Lydia began. “It’s only…” She had no idea how Reginald would react, what he might do, once he heard this news. She remembered how eager he’d been back in autumn to strike out recklessly after William, not even knowing where in all of Quebec to find him. What would he do with the certain knowledge of Oswego?

  But he had to be told. As did Anna. She’d no right to keep this knowledge from them, and she didn’t wish to. What if this news was the very thing that banished all else and reconciled their hearts?

  Lydia gazed across the table between them, praying that she was looking upon what for years she’d sought to grasp and wield, though she’d never expected it to take the form of an aging Oneida warrior—her scalpel.

  “Come,” she said. “I’ll take you now.”

  Was it possible for the threads of a heart to wear so thin they could fray apart? Just disintegrate into scattered filaments and cease to be?

  The July sun beat down, causing sweat to gather beneath Anna’s cap and trickle in rivulets down her neck as she pushed through the stifling air. She’d paid scant attention to her wandering since leaving the Brouwers’ home…ten minutes ago? An hour? She didn’t register the faces of those she passed in and out of meager shade thrown by shops and trees. Didn’t hear the voices bidding her good day.

  It was unbearable. All of it. The streets, the faces, the sticky heat dragging her down—limp in spirit, parched in soul. Days of waiting and yearning and fearing that looked like stretching on forever. The relentless ache of longing. The bitterness.

  That last was a black root inside her, thickened and twisted, choking off each seed of hope that dared to sprout. It coiled round every thought of Papa. Entangled her prayers. Pulled her down like petticoats in deep water. She’d just helped bring a healthy baby into the world and placed him pink and squalling into the arms of a woman who’d prayed ten years for a living child…and Anna felt nothing. Nothing she ought to feel.

  With her midwifery case and her hot, dragging feet, she wandered the streets of Schenectady, lacking the will to go home. There was nowhere now that painful memories didn’t linger, waiting to pounce. Lydia’s house. The Binne Kill. The farm.

  Home had vanished at the wood’s edge, with Two Hawks.

  Hearing a sob, Anna halted and looked around, only to realize the sound had slipped from her throat. She’d drawn the attention of two matrons outside the chandler’s shop, faces crimson with the heat. Anna turned from their solicitous stares, got her bearings, and made a beeline for Lydia’s, still lugging the case Lydia had presented h
er on her last birthday. She had prayed for a guide, someone willing and able to lead her to Two Hawks’s village, but now she was desperate enough to drop her case in the street and keep on walking all the miles to the farm, to saddle William’s mare and ride it west along the river until she found someone who could point her to Kanowalohale.

  Did Two Hawks still want her? Did he hope for a future with her? Or was all hope and wanting obliterated, silenced forever by some enemy’s arrow or musket ball? Would she ever know?

  She’d reached the house and the alley to the stable in back when footsteps sounded behind her.

  “Anna!” Lydia reached her, flushed as if she’d been running up and down the streets in the heat, blue eyes animated, bright. “Come into the house. I’ve something to tell you.”

  Without curiosity or care, she let Lydia push her into the house, pluck her case from her grasp, and place it on the table. Without reminding her to restock it immediately, as was her unswerving practice, Lydia grasped her hands. “Daniel Clear Day is down at the Binne Kill, with Reginald.”

  It needed a moment to absorb that. Clear Day was here. Come to see Papa. The blood drained from her heated face, leaving her dizzy. “Is it William? Two Hawks? Lydia, tell me.”

  “Anna, sit down.” Lydia caught her as she swayed and walked her to a bench. “Two Hawks is well, or was when Clear Day left to come here. And, Anna…so was William. Two Hawks has seen him.”

  “Seen him?” Anna echoed, the blood now pounding in her temples. “William? You mean they found him? He’s at Kanowalohale?”

  Lydia sat beside her. “Not there. And no, they haven’t found him exactly.”

  “But you just said…” Anna shook her head. “Lydia, what did you say?”

  “Let me start at the beginning.” Anna refrained from interrupting—barely—as Lydia told her the tale of Two Hawks scouting and the fort at Oswego and the ravens in the sky and his going down to the fort gate and getting that fleeting glimpse of William in his green coat. “I took Clear Day down to the Binne Kill, and thankfully Reginald was there. I left them together and came to find you—are you all right now?”