Tasmin, with a flare of her eloquent nostrils and a cool glance at Father Geoffrin, at once disputed it.
“What foppish nonsense, Geoff!” she said. ‘Are you going to argue that I wasn’t in hell when I thought Pomp was dying, or that I shan’t be in ecstasy when I know he’s out of danger?”
Though Father Geoffrin, no mean surgeon, had very skillfully removed a flint tip from very near Pomp’s heart, the crisis caused by the Ute Walkura’s well-placed arrow had not ended there. For three days Pomp’s fever soared; except to relieve herself, Tasmin never left his side. Monty, her baby was brought in to suckle. When Pomp’s fever rose she bathed his face and neck from a basin of cold river water; she covered him with blankets when he shivered with chill. Only that morning the fever had at last broken, leaving Pomp calm but very weak. In his dream deliriums he had several times had visits from his mother, Sacagawea, dead many long years, who insisted that he heed Tasmin’s anxious whispers and stay with her in the world of the living. His mother and Tasmin together held him in life—without them he would have slipped into the easeful shadows. At the height of his fever he felt some resentment at the two women’s tenacity—couldn’t they just let him go? But the women, one dead, one strongly alive, were more powerful than the fever. So there Pomp was, weak but still alive, in the big camp in the Valley of the Chickens, though his employer, the sportsman William Drummond Stewart, had been hacked to death by the invading Utes. Bobbety Berrybender, Tasmin’s brother, was also killed, trampled as he wandered in the fog by thirty charging horses. Now, in the crisp air of a sunny morning, Tasmin and Father Geoffrin were quarreling volubly, as they often did.
“I accept that some women are not quite suited to the life of moderation,” Father Geoff told her. “It’s why your Shakespeare is so popular—all that raging. And of course there’s opera—same raging. I fear you’re the operatic sort, Tasmin—if you can’t have passion you’ll have torment. Personally, I’d be happy just to buy some nice clothes.”
“Not much opportunity for clothes shopping here,” Tasmin told him. The trader William Ashley, frightened of Tasmin because she had cursed him violently when he suggested that Pomp was unlikely to survive his wound, had lent them his tent for Pomp’s convalescence. With Tasmin supporting him, Pomp had just taken a few steps out into the bright sunlight and the clean mountain air. Once he was settled comfortably on a buffalo-robe pallet, the two bear cubs Pomp had caught, Abby and Andy shuffled up, eager to be petted. Below them, the same party of Utes who had attacked them a week earlier were placidly trading pelts with Eulalie Bonneville, William Ashley, Jim Bridger, and the other mountain men. From the river came the low, melancholy notes of Venetia Kennet’s cello, playing a dirge for William Drummond Stewart, who had been her lover.
When the Utes, whose village was nearby, had come diffidently back to trade, Tasmin had been too focused on Pomp and his fever to pay attention to what went on in camp, but now that she saw their attackers milling around among the mountain men, exchanging peltries for hatchets, tobacco, blue and green beads, she felt incensed.
’Aren’t those the same savages who trampled my brother and hacked up poor Drum Stewart?” she asked. “Why are those fools giving them hatchets, the better to brain us with?”
’Ah, there’s your extreme nature getting in the way of good business sense,” Father Geoffrin chided. “Last week the Utes were enemies, but now they’re customers. Bill Ashley has his profits to think of, after all.”
It was a day of fine sunlight. Tasmin looked around the camp but failed to spot her husband, Jim Snow, who had wisely left her to her nursing when Pomp was in danger. She didn’t see Kit Carson either, but her father, Lord Berrybender, was down by the river, listening to Vicky Kennet’s mournful music—soon, no doubt, he would be trying to coax the tall cellist back to his bed, his dalliance with Milly their buxom laundress, having quickly run its course.
Little Onion, Jim Snow’s young Ute wife—though a wife in name only—sat not far away, keeping an eye on Monty, Talley and Rabbit. Monty was Tasmin’s, Talley was Vicky’s, and Rabbit belonged to Coal, Toussaint Charbonneau’s Hidatsa wife, who was, at the moment, drying the meat of an elk Tom Fitzpatrick had shot the day before. Rabbit could toddle about uncertainly, while Monty and Talley were still at the crawling stage. All three little boys were extremely fond of the bear cubs, but the bear cubs, far speedier than the three human cubs, either adroitly avoided the boys or licked their faces until they sneezed and crawled away.
Bess, called Buffum, was helping Cook pick berries from some distant bushes, while Mary Berrybender, their sinister and uncompromising sister, was helping her Dutch friend, Piet Van Wely chip with a small hammer at some rocks that, Tasmin supposed, might contain interesting fossils.
“I don’t see Jimmy. Where could he be?” Tasmin asked. “I don’t see Kit, either. I hope they haven’t left, just as Pomp’s feeling better.”
Toussaint Charbonneau, Pomp’s tall, shambling, much-stained father, had been drinking whiskey and dipping snuff with old Hugh Glass, oldest and rawest of the mountain men. Old Charbonneau, officially the party’s interpreter, was a tenderhearted parent; for days he had been shaking with worry, fearful that Tasmin would come out of the tent and tell him that his son was dead.
“Why, look, there’s Pomp!” old Charbonneau said, tears springing to his eyes as he saw Tasmin ease Pomp down on the comfortable pallet.
“That English girl’s got more brass than all of us put together,” Hugh Glass observed. “I wish she liked me better. Maybe she’d take the trouble to pull me through, next time I find that I’m dying.”
But Toussaint Charbonneau didn’t hear him—he was stumbling up the hill, excited to see his son alive—the son he soon enfolded in a tight embrace.
“Careful, monsieur—he’s weak,” Tasmin said. “We don’t want that wound to start bleeding.”
“We don’t—I’ll be careful,” Charbonneau assured her, wiping the tears off his face with snuff-stained fingers.
Father Geoffrin took Tasmin by the arm and strolled away a few steps, so father and son could have a bit of privacy. Tasmin had taken to guarding Pomp as an eagle might guard its egg.
“William Ashley has some nice silk shirts,” Father Geoff remarked. ‘And also a rather well-stitched pair of whipcord trousers.”
“So what? They’re his clothes, not your clothes,” Tasmin said. “You’ll have to wait for Santa Fe before you can buy clothes . . . and who knows when we’ll get to Santa Fe?”
Monty, spotting his mother, whom he had not seen much of for days, began to crawl toward her as fast as his hands and knees could carry him. Tasmin met him halfway, swooped him up, wiped dirt off his nose, gave him several enthusiastic kisses, but then, to his dismay, handed him back to the patient Little Onion—his other mother, so far as Monty knew. Tasmin then walked away, skirting the traders and the Indians, heading for the river, noting as she passed near Vicky and her father that Vicky Kennet’s hair was getting long again. Once it had hung in a rich mass all the way to her derriere; then, in a frenzy of dissatisfaction at being always a rich man’s mistress, she had insisted that Tasmin cut it off. Tasmin had done as requested— for a few weeks Vicky Kennet had looked almost as scalped as her unfortunate lover, Drum Stewart, victim of the rampaging Utes.
As she walked down to the rapid, shallow, greenish river, which foamed here and there as it tumbled over rocks, Tasmin kept an eye out for her husband, Jim Snow—called Sin Killer by the Indians and some of the mountain men too. It was Jim, as good a bowman as most Indians, who had killed the Ute chief Walkura only a second after Walkura shot his near-fatal arrow into Pomp Charbonneau. Tasmin walked a step or two into the icy water, stooping to bathe her dusty face and throat; washing was a luxury she had not bothered with or even thought of during her days at Pomp’s bedside. The icy water felt good—having her cheeks and throat clean felt good also, so good that she felt like stripping off and bathing the rest of her body as well. Of course, s
he couldn’t do that with the trappers and Indians watching; besides, she had brought nothing clean to put on.
Standing in the shallows, the cold waters numbing her feet and ankles, Tasmin realized that she was, on the whole, relieved not to see her husband. Normally, in the course of a day in camp, her eyes sought him out frequently—even glimpsing Jim at a distance would provide clues to his mood. Jim never hid his feeling; vibration of what he was feeling could be picked out of the air, like the notes of Vicky’s cello; then, when it came time for Tasmin to be a wife, she knew whether to approach her husband modestly and shyly or boldly, teasingly Some moods she could slip around, kissing him if she felt like it, avoiding his hands if she didn’t— though it was rare enough that she avoided his hands.
She might, she thought, have avoided them today, if he had approached her suddenly and tried to draw her into the bushes for a rut, as he liked to call it. It struck her, standing in the cold water watching the Indians and the trappers casually trading hatchets and beads, that the one thing she really knew about Jimmy Snow was that he craved her. That was good; she craved him too; but she had been with Pomp Charbonneau for five days, intensely with Pomp Charbonneau; she had felt nothing and thought of nothing except the necessity of keeping him alive. Her child she suckled automatically; the rest of her life she stepped away from, compelled by her determination that Pomp not die. Pomp had been her friend, her protector in times when Jim Snow was away. She had not expected the great bird of death to come swooping at Pomp; but when the bird swooped and nearly carried Pomp off, Tasmin had at once thrown her whole self into the struggle for Pomp’s life. Death came so close, at times, that Tasmin was even nervous about stepping out of the tent to make water. Except for the thirty-hour struggle to bring Monty out of her womb, no fight had ever been so intense, so crucial, so starkly a contest between life and death; it required her to call up a level of will that had never been required of her before; it had needed her deepest strength, and she had prevailed, but it was well, she felt, that her husband was not there to want her, just at that moment.
Fortunately, the struggle had ended in victory. Pomp was sitting up, talking with his father and scratching the belly of the bear cub Abby Once his wound was healed he might be exactly the same Pomp: friendly, kind, urbane, amused, amusing, supple of mind. The sight of him with his father and his pet slowly eased Tasmin’s mind, where Pomp was concerned. The bird of death had been driven back to its eyrie. But if he was the same, what of herself? What of Tasmin? It seemed to her she had traveled a great distance during the struggle— thus her relief at not immediately having to deal with Jim, to be a wife again suddenly, as she had eagerly been for a year and a half. Father Geoffrin, at the end of his successful surgery, had seen something of this traveling in Tasmin’s face, and had made a cynical French joke about it; the little priest, as sensitive to emotions as Vicky was to tones, had seen in Tasmin’s look something unexpected, something that went beyond a nurse’s determination to save a patient. Father Geoffrin lifted an eyebrow, he made his joke, but as soon as Pomp’s fever broke he moved the conversation into safer waters— that is, he talked of clothes. It had annoyed Tasmin slightly. Once more a man seemed to be avoiding an important question, leaving her to struggle with it alone. Had she fallen in love with Pomp Charbonneau as he lay near death? Had she perhaps already been in love with him, but only dared to recognize the feeling when it seemed that she might lose him? Now, her cheeks cold from the icy water of the mountain stream, she wondered what became of deathbed emotions once death itself had been avoided. Would she again walk with Pomp along the mild path of friendship? Or had an emotion much less mild been seeded between them— feelings that would lead to who knew what tumult? Her husband, after all, was Pomp’s best friend. It was obvious from Jim’s brief visits to the hospital tent that he hoped Tasmin and the priest could save his friend’s life. But Jim Snow assumed that feelings were settled things; Tasmin knew they weren’t. What if she no longer wanted her vigorous young husband? They had enjoyed a fierce and finally blissful rut only the day before the battle with the Utes—the pleasure had lingered in Tasmin’s body for hours afterward—and yet, what of it? Even the most passionate conjugal connection imposed no permanency. Desire was not a guarantor of much—desire might fade, perhaps always did fade; besides, she was her father’s daughter, the child of Lord Albany Berrybender, a man who had scattered his seed liberally enough to produce fourteen legitimate children and perhaps as many as thirty bastards—and he was by no means through. On this very expedition into the American wilderness he had already given Vicky Kennet one child and might well give her more, if she wasn’t careful. Tasmin, though now a mother, had never been prudish. What if she proved as prodigal in her appetites as her father?
Only the winter before, when Pomp had insisted on walking from Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post to the tent a mile away where Jim Snow insisted they live, Tasmin had sometimes wondered if Pomp was walking her all that way because he wanted to kiss her. Reckless in mood, she had sometimes dawdled on their walks, holding Pomp’s arm and half hoping he would kiss her. But he didn’t, and Tasmin had not quite worked up to kissing him, although she considered it more than once, in part, perhaps, out of annoyance with her husband, Jim Snow, who calmly allowed her the company of this shy, handsome Pomp, Jim oblivious to the fact that kisses, and more, might pass between them. Pomp had once shyly admitted to Tasmin that he was virgin, a condition that, considering his sweet attractiveness, any helpful woman might wish to alter. When Pomp admitted that he seldom felt lustful, Tasmin took it almost as an insult to her sex.
She complained, but she didn’t actively set out to make him lustful, though she felt quite sure that she could make him lustful, given a little privacy.
So here they were, as summer neared its end, in the Valley of the Chickens, west of South Pass, with the big fur-trading rendezvous winding down and with the rather vague intention of heading off to Santa Fe pretty soon, so that her father might shoot yet more buffalo, elk, moose, deer, antelope, and whatever else might cross his path. Her husband was nowhere to be seen, nor was the helpful Kit Carson, and there she stood in a cold stream, wishing very much that Pomp Charbonneau had tried to kiss her at some point, even though, in his eyes, she was the apparently contented wife of his best friend.
Then the pesky Father Geoffrin, who surprised everyone by his competence as a surgeon, had tried to tell her that life was never as good or as bad as one thought it to be. Tasmin was in no mood to tolerate French equivocation; she felt muddled, so muddled in fact that she failed to note the quiet approach of Mary Berrybender, a girl with unusual powers, capable of sniffing out edible tubers and perhaps also capable of sniffing out nascent loves, such as might be said to exist between Tasmin and Pomp.
“Now that you’ve saved Pomp, do you mean to have him, Tassie—I mean carnally?” Mary inquired; she had her full share of the Berrybender directness where the appetites were concerned and had sensed the rising feeling between her sister and Pomp long before either of them would have admitted that they felt such feelings.
So there Mary stood, a half-wild look in her eye, asking Tasmin straight out if she meant to seduce Pomp Charbonneau.
“Shut up and get back to your Dutchman,” Tasmin warned. ‘And don’t be playing nasty games with him, either.”
She referred to the fact that Mary had been lashing the pudgy Dutch botanist on his bare bottom with some brambles, an activity the two claimed to thoroughly enjoy.
“Shame, Tasmin,” Mary said hotly. “You were no older when you were tupping Master Tobias Stiles in the stall of father’s great horse Charlemagne. You did do it, you know!”
“Of course I did it, and lucky to get the opportunity,” Tasmin replied. “When it comes to forthright tupping, I suspect Master Stiles set a standard your Dutchman would be hard put to match.”
“Being whipped with nettles is a common practice among educated Hollanders,” Mary reminded her. “I can’t think why you
’d mind about it, Tassie.”
“I’ve just come through an ordeal—Pomp nearly died,” Tasmin said. “I’m not in the mood to discuss our amatory futures, yours or mine. I don’t see my husband and I don’t see Kit Carson, either. Do you know where they might be?”
“Oh yes, they’re gone on a scout,” Mary informed her. “It’s the Sioux, I believe, that they’re investigating. Santa Fe seems to be a great distance away—Jim doesn’t wish us to blunder into too many Sioux— they’re very irritable at the moment, it seems.”
Just then another sister came trailing up, the sturdy Kate Berrybender, aged four. Tasmin was thinking that while her face and throat felt very clean, the rest of her felt soiled and smelly. The desire to be clean all over rose in her; there were bushes thick enough to hide her up the river a ways. She could bathe in discreet seclusion, but would need clean clothes once she stepped out.
“Mary go find Buffum—I believe she’s picking berries. Ask her to have Milly our amorous laundress, get me a clean shift,” Tasmin asked.
Mary obliging for once, had hardly left to execute this errand when stout little Kate arrived, wearing her usual look of fierce belligerence.
“Mr. James Snow left a message for you,” Kate informed her, without preamble. “He says he is going on a scout and will not be back for three weeks, if then.”
“Three weeks? And he didn’t think it worth his while to say good-bye to his own wife?” Tasmin complained.
“Mr. James Snow does not say good-bye,” Kate informed her, with quite exceptional firmness. “When Mr. James Snow wants to go, he just goes.”
“So I’ve noticed, you insolent midge,” Tasmin replied. “This is not his first abrupt departure, since taking me as his wife. Inasmuch as you seem to be his emissary, perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving him a message from his wife, next time you see him.”
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