Whether he’d wanted to believe it or not, everything she’d said to him had been true. He had thought to pacify her with the bath. Hell, every white woman he’d ever known would have forgiven him anything if he’d produced a bathtub in the middle of the wilderness. But not stubborn little Anna Jenson, he thought, remembering the fury in her eyes. And, of course, he had to admit she’d been right and he’d been wrong.
He tossed Mrs. Jenson’s letter on the desk and swore. Anna hated him. That had been her message when he’d left her. And he deserved that hate, for he’d treated her like a whore. No, he thought, staring pensively at the portrait of Jake’s mother that hung on the wall behind the desk, he’d treated her like trash.
Hell, she’d won the game. A game he’d started and had intended to win. Never before had his daily thoughts been so tangled up with a woman. He’d realized long ago that Anna was a far greater danger to his self-control than Sarabeth had ever been.
He pulled out his watch and swore again. It was nearly time to meet Sky at the river.
He left the library, taking the steps of the finely molded staircase two at a time until he reached the top. When he got to his room, he quickly pulled the bedding up over his spare, low-post Shaker bed and folded the soft, deerskin blanket back over the end. He removed his “civilized” clothes, hanging them carefully in the tall, plain oak wardrobe, and changed into his buckskins.
As he was leaving his room, he met his sister-in-law, Gretchen, in the hallway.
She gave him a frosty smile. “Leaving again, so soon?”
He detected the note of hope in her voice. “Now, now, Gretchen. Don’t sound so disappointed.” He gave her a wide, boyish grin, one she answered with a haughty shrug.
There was a time when he would have been drawn to Gretchen’s cool, blond beauty. Now, since he’d been home, he’d done nothing but compare her to Anna. No one would deny that Gretchen was beautiful. Her perfectly arched eyebrows were shades darker than her hair, and her eyelashes, long and spiky, framed her wide, bluish-purple eyes. But next to Anna, she was nothing. Anna, with her caramel-colored hair and sun-kissed skin, was like Concetta’s flan. Sweet, rich, with layers of interesting and unusual depth. Gretchen was like milk toast. Colorless, bland, and shallow.
She brushed past him on her way to the stairs. “Where are you off to this time?”
“Hunting.” Her question was innocent enough, but Nicolas knew better than to take her into his confidence. She’d made him feel even less welcome in his own home than Marcus had. And both of them had done some snooping into his affairs on this trip home. Nicolas had done some subtle probing himself. He’d discovered Marcus had been gone a number of nights, all night long. He hadn’t crept into the house this morning until the sun was spreading light on the rooftops.
“Hunting?” She raised an arched, tawny eyebrow before she turned and picked up some folded linens from the Empire mirrored console table that stood against the wall by the window.
“With Sky.” He watched the distaste linger on her face at the mere mention of Sky’s name.
She turned back to the table, brushed some fallen rose petals into her apron pocket and frowned at the vase of dying flowers.
“Concetta!” she shouted down the stairs. “That woman is absolutely worthless,” she huffed under her breath. “Concetta!”
Nicolas watched the fury build in Gretchen’s eyes. “You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”
“Fat lot of good it’d do. The old woman hates me.” She put the linens down on a leather-upholstered side chair and began refolding them. “I don’t know why I can’t have a housekeeper of my choice. After all,” she added, her voice clipped, “I’m the one who has to work with the woman.”
“You might try smiling at her now and then.” Nicolas watched Gretchen’s long, delicate fingers move quickly over the linen pieces. It was hard for him to believe she was Dolf Mueller’s daughter. Nowhere in her cool, slender beauty was there a hint of her ponderous, guttural, heavy-featured father.
“When you grow up and accept some of the responsibility Marcus has had to shoulder since Jean-Claude’s death, I’ll take your advice on how to handle the hired help.”
Nicolas threw her a devil-may-care look, one he knew she’d come to expect from her “worthless half-breed brother-in-law.” “Ah,” he answered as he descended the stairs, “then I’d have to move in permanently, wouldn’t I? Do you really think you could stand that, Gretchen?”
He met Concetta at the bottom of the stairs, twirled her around and gave her a bear hug. The heavyset Spanish woman shoved at him indignantly, although there was loving warmth in her deep brown eyes.
“Dios! Now I have a broken rib,” she complained, rubbing her fat-padded ribs as Nicolas crossed the highly polished entry floor on his way to the kitchen. She straightened her apron, retying the strings around her ample stomach. “Where you going, Nick?”
“Hunting!” he shouted as he disappeared out of sight.
She snorted. “Hunting? Don’t give me—”
“Concetta!” Gretchen called, her voice cracking like a whip from the top of the stairs. The lighthearted way Nicolas and the housekeeper teased one another had always bothered her. It made her feel like more of an outsider than she was.
“What you shouting at me for?” Concetta lifted her bright red skirt and started slowly up the steps.
“Look at this vase!” Gretchen ordered when Concetta finally reached the top step, her face rosy and her breath labored.
Concetta wiped her face with the hem of her apron and scrutinized the wilting flowers. “Si? I look.”
Gretchen grabbed the sturdy glass vase and shoved it at the housekeeper. “Fool. Do something about it!”
Rolling her eyes, Concetta muttered a string of Spanish expletives, took the vase and made her way back down to the kitchen.
“I will have a little more respect from you, Concetta,” Gretchen called after her. “Remember, Nicolas is not in charge of the household staff. I am!”
With a frustrated sigh, she watched Concetta’s broad behind waddle out of sight. No one took her seriously. Not even the hired help. Not even Marcus. Especially not Marcus. She quickly picked up the linens, hurried downstairs to the dining room and deposited them on the square-leg server that stood under the large black-and-gold-stenciled mirror.
She looked into the glass and smoothed back the wisps of blond hair that had come loose from her braided chignon. The square-cut opening of her deep navy percale gown enhanced her long, slender neck, and she knew the color was dramatic on her. She was a very beautiful woman. Isn’t that why Marcus had married her? So, she thought, turning slowly from the mirror, why had he been ignoring her?
Even though she and Marcus didn’t have an ideal relationship, she had worked hard at making Marcus happy. Whatever he had wanted, she had given him. Those people Marcus detested, she automatically scorned. And she knew how curious Marcus was to find out where Nicolas went each time he left, and on a few occasions she had even tried to have him followed when Marcus wasn’t around to do it himself. But Nicolas, his savage blood giving him the speed of the wind, always disappeared without a trace.
Gretchen slowly left the dining room. As she passed the grandfather clock that sat in the hallway next to the front door, the late morning sun struck the glass face, revealing a thin layer of dust.
“Concetta!” Her steps became purposeful and her spine rigid as she went in search of the fat, lazy housekeeper.
There was an eerie quiet in the air as Nicolas rode toward the collection of huts that made up the Indian village of Deer Crossing. He and Sky had split up earlier, Sky having gone up over the north ridge to check on an elderly couple who lived alone in a cave.
The thin, blue lines of smoke rising from the lodge fires were a good sign, yet Nicolas found it necessary to soothe Diablo, who’d become skittish on the trail.
He moved ahead, silently noting the absence of the dogs. A shiver stole up h
is back, standing the hairs at his neck on end. He put his hand on his rifle, gripping the butt firmly.
He cantered into the clearing. The sight that met him had the force of a physical blow. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes. Vigilantes!
No matter how many times he saw this kind of senseless murder, he was never prepared for it. His eyes burned as he scanned the crude huts. At each opening lay bodies, strewn everywhere like useless debris. Even the dogs, those usually lively pets that heralded the coming of friend or foe, were lying on their sides, their brains spilling out onto the ground.
Diablo whinnied and drew away, stepping nervously from side to side as Nicolas coaxed him forward. The animal’s eyes rolled back and he snorted savagely, reacting to the powerful smell of death.
He dismounted and tied Diablo behind a thicket of manzanita brush. He pressed his face into the stallion’s neck and sucked in a heavy, shaky breath, rubbing his forehead back and forth against Diablo’s sleek, comforting hide.
Pulling away, he walked into the field of the dead, stepping around the bodies that lay weltering in their blood in the afternoon heat. Many had had their throats slit. Others displayed bullet-ridden torsos. They’d all died brutally. Nicolas knelt down beside a young woman whose scalp had been lifted and whose brain had begun to fry in the August sun. He gently lifted her torn garment up over her gutted abdomen and quickly looked away when he saw the dead fetus that lay at her side, still attached to her womb by the long, twisted cord.
He raised his eyes and scanned the village. Few bodies were outside the main circle, a clue that indicated the raid had been very early in the morning.
Nicolas found breathing difficult. What he was feeling wasn’t new. Each time he viewed a massacre scene, visions of another massacre throbbed in his head, and each dead woman he looked at began to look like his mother. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, wanting desperately to cleanse his mouth of the metallic taste of blood that permeated the air.
His red-rimmed eyes took in an old couple locked in an embrace, clinging to each other in their terror, their bodies spattered with their own blood. Recognition clawed at his skin, exposing the raw edges of his nerves. Swift Jack and Sweetflower. Bending near them, he gently closed their sightless eyes, then drew in a tear-choked breath and looked away.
Oh, God, what a waste! Swift Jack had had the riches of their tribal heritage locked away in his mind. Now, Nicolas thought, overwhelming sorrow enveloping him, the tiny tribe and its history was lost forever. There would be no more legends told around the fire. There would be no more eager young faces hanging on Jack’s every word as he told them of Coyote and Turtle, or chanted the songs of the Ancients.
Nicolas rose, and as he trudged through the village, he recognized most of the bodies as those of the Elders. But some he couldn’t even identify, for their faces had been either blown away or hacked mercilessly with a knife. Exceptionally few were young, except for some young men who had apparently tried to fend off the attackers; their lean, hard bodies lay bludgeoned or shot, their own less sophisticated weapons snapped like twigs in the wind. The bodies lay everywhere, victims of a senseless depravity that Nicolas would never understand.
He peered into each hut, his hope of finding anyone left alive disappearing with each step he took. And as he continued searching the village, a realization crystallized in his mind. Those killed and left to die were the old people, the strong young men, or the helpless babes. The young women were gone. So were the children.
Suddenly, from behind one of the redwood u-ma-chas, he heard a small sound. He rushed around to the back of the hut and stopped short, frozen by what he saw, knowing he would never forget, and never forgive.
A child clung to the body of a woman, his mouth weakly attempting to get nourishment from his mother’s lifeless breast.
“Suke?” Nicolas bent over the child.
Upon hearing the familiar sound, the child raised its tiny head and looked at Nicolas with glazed eyes. His face and chest were smeared with blood. Nicolas swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. He plucked the baby off his dead mother and whipped out his handkerchief. He pressed the cloth against the wound at the child’s neck, then looked at it carefully. It wasn’t too deep. The child needed attention, but he wouldn’t bleed to death.
Cradling the child in his arm, he ran to Diablo, rummaged through his saddlebag and pulled out a flask of whiskey and the sugar lump treats he carried for his horse. He ripped off a strip of his shirt, doused it with liquor, and wrapped it around the sugar.
After patiently coaxing the baby to take the crudely fashioned nipple, he laid him down on a blanket in the shade. Then he looked around him. The silence was a disturbing paradox to the scene that must have led up to the slaughter.
He rubbed the tight muscles of his shoulders and looked toward the large, low dance house at the far edge of the village. Crossing to the wood and brush-covered building, he made his way down the sloping incline into the dark room, dragging the cool, damp earthen smell deep into his lungs. A small tunnel of light filtered in through the smoke hole, spreading over him like an eerie, dusty cloak of death.
He listened to the quiet, painfully remembering the joyous day the dance house had been built. Everyone, men, women, and even the children, had been crowded into the cavernous room, working together, raising the posts, lashing the beams, slapping earth onto the roof. They had welcomed him in, shared their special feast with him and asked him to stay and help them celebrate. Now, he thought, his eyes misting, it would be their final celebration.
With his heart like a rock within his chest, Nicolas left the sanctity of the dark, soundless building and began his task.
Body after lifeless body he dragged or carried into the hall, lying each one carefully beside the last, until all were inside. When he had finished, he stood quietly, his lungs burning from exertion. The only sound to be heard was his heart slamming against his ribs and his breath rasping in his throat.
He leaned against the door and stared at the bodies that would never see fulfillment of their dreams. Probing his memory, he found the words to the burial oration his grandfather had taught him, then haltingly uttered the intonation in his native Wintu tongue.
“You are dead.
You will go above there to the trail.
That is the spirit trail.
Go there to the beautiful trail.
May it please you not to walk about where I am …”
When he’d finished and he took a last look at his friends, tears of grief streamed unchecked down his cheeks. Would the whites continue to kill until all of his people were gone? His grief turned to rage, fed by the deaths of all his people in the past and fueled by the massacre of these peaceful villagers. The anger roiled and festered in his gut, and before he turned to leave, he let out a howling mournful cry. It ricocheted off the trees and the rocks and came back to him in an even eerier echo, a sound befitting the empty anguish he felt inside.
When he finally turned from the opening of the dance house, he pulled a dry, gray board off the roof and thrust it into the low burning fire that was dying in the cooking pit. When the blaze caught the wood, Nicolas touched it to the roof and stood back as the makeshift pyre burst into flames.
Slowly, each step heavy and sad, he lifted the sleeping child off the blanket and mounted Diablo. He made his way through the thick, mountainous brush toward the camouflaged entrance that would lead him into the compound, the driving force in his thoughts being his hatred for the white man.
Cub fascinated Anna. He lay there sleeping so quietly, when only hours earlier he’d been his usual rambunctious self. He grunted in his sleep and Anna smiled. As she moved closer to adjust his twisted blanket, she kicked something that lay on the ground. Stooping over, she picked up the garment and held it out in front of her.
It was a shirt, generously cut from a fine linen cloth and boldly decorated with colorful geometric designs. It must be something Shy F
awn is working on, she thought, admiring the skilled needlework.
She folded the shirt, carefully put it on top of the sewing basket and thought of her own crude drawings of Hissik the Skunk. With a rueful shake of her head, she realized what a shame it was that she and Shy Fawn couldn’t work together.
She heard commotion coming from the path to the river, and just as she looked up, Nicolas galloped into the clearing. He leaped from his horse right in front of her. Anna’s heart pounded with fear and surprise, for his face and hands were covered with dirt and blood.
“Where’s Shy Fawn?”
Anna shook her head, foolishly disappointed that he wasn’t looking for her. “I … I don’t know.”
Nicolas looked around, his body tense and agitated. “I need some help.” He looked down at the bundle in his arms.
Anna saw the tiny blood-soaked head poking out from the blanket. Her horrified gaze flew to his face. Their eyes met briefly before he turned and bounded toward his sleeping quarters.
Anna hurried after him. “My God, Nicolas. What happened?”
He stopped and turned, riveting her with a hate-filled scowl. “Your people did this.”
Chapter Thirteen
Anna stopped, stunned at his news and the venomous way he’d spat the words at her. Pressing her fingers to her mouth, she hurried into the cabin behind him and followed him to a high wooden table.
“Bring me some of those,” he ordered, nodding toward a stack of flannel blankets.
Her fingers felt like ice. She fumbled with the blankets, finally grabbing two or three and making a soft bed on top of the table. She stood back as he gently lowered the whimpering child to it.
Clasping her hands together in an attempt to warm them, she watched him remove the blood-soaked handkerchief from around the child’s neck. “Oh, God!” she gasped, looking with horror at the long, ragged wound. “What happened?”
Secrets of a Midnight Moon--The Moon Trilogy--Book One Page 19