He was awed. Somewhere in this ascetic room this girl had found the audacity to abandon the constraints of her religion and culture and place her life in his care, whatever the risk, whatever the censure. I could turn about and return to my room, he thought, and not place her in the jeopardy of those consequences. I could not bear to cause pain and suffering to this vulnerable creature. He remembered what she had said about being the frightened rabbit, about fearing him. I must leave her inviolate, he thought. I must!
But as he stepped backward toward the door, looking at the dark shape of her head on the pillow, he saw a spark of candlelight in the shadowed hollow of her eye and realized that she was awake and looking at him.
He stood still. A timber joint in the great house popped apocryphally with the night cooling; a mouse rustled in the walls; Teresa breathed. Then the dim shape of her hand stole toward him across the pale counterpane upon which she lay, signaling for him where to sit; the doubt was gone then, and he moved to the side of the bed, sat, laid his broad hand on her damp cool brow, feeling the shape of her skull beneath the smooth skin, as if thinking through his hand: Here is where she is, this unique one; here within this case of skullbone is the essence; here is the astonishing will.
And from there, there was no such thing as retreating; only moist hps, straining, whispers, the gliding of hands over velvet skin, tears, moans caught in stopped throats, the carnal worship, bite of pain, tumescence, fibrillation, opening, the riot of membranes, breathing of vows, the creaking, the evanescent flowering, joyous sadness, gripping the throat, the long, cool, gray, slimy backsliding, and the gratitude: ah, the gratitude!
As silently as breathing they had effected it all, no outcries, no oaths, though their throats had been crowded with cries and oaths; then it was over, even while scarcely beginning. And for the two of them, the whole world had changed, within four stucco walls in the feeble light of an icon wick.
Now, he thought, we are married as she has told me. Now truly, he thought, as her hot breath tingled on his neck and his hand unclenched under the incredibly smooth, sweat-moist skin of her back: Now we are one. God help us …
AN EAR-SPLITTING CRACK AND A BRILLIANT WHITE FLASH JOLTED him awake. His heart was slamming. Rain lashed at the window and he saw the candle guttering under the icon. Another flash of lightning and thunderclap drove Teresa into his arms, quaking with terror. Blue-white light flashed and an incessant salvo of thunder crashed and rumbled, now sounding like cannon echoes, now sounding as if a heavy canvas sky were being ripped from horizon to horizon.
He should leave the room, he knew. This storm would awaken the household and he might be found here. He could not remember falling asleep; he could not believe he had so released his vigilance over himself as to let sleep overcome him in this precarious place. But now Teresa was clinging to him, her nakedness and warmth again enveloping his will. And seeing each other’s eyes black and hungry in the flickering white light, their hearts racing, they blended again into one body, their souls flowing into each other like the confluence of two rivers. If the world ended now, it would be of little consequence.
They lay side by side then, hearing the storm bang and rumble eastward over the Mississippi.
“What, querido mío?” Teresa whispered, feeling him shaking with silent laughter.
“Listen to it. D’you know it sounds as loud as a rolling chamberpot?”
Her mouth fell open. Then she had to bury her face against his chest to smother her laughter and it was a long time before they could stop laughing.
MARIA DE LEYBA, AWAKENED BY THE CRASH OF THUNDER AND banging of shutters, then kept awake by a fit of morning coughing, pulled on a wrap and went to her daughters’ room to look in on them. They were sleeping through the din. Little Rita lay neatly and calmly on her back, mouth open, arms outside the unmussed covers, as if she had just stretched out for a nap; Maria Josefa slept on her stomach, her bare foot sticking out from under her twisted blanket. Maria tugged the corner of the blanket down over the exposed foot, stood at the bedside for a moment gazing thoughtfully at the flashing rectangle of sky outside the window, sighed, then stepped back into the hallway and pulled the door closed. Turning from the door then she was startled by a movement at the other end of the hall. Going stock-still, she watched by lightning-flash as the tall, powerful figure of Colonel Clark, their honored guest, moved from Teresa’s bedroom door to his own, opened it, slipped through, and eased it shut.
Maria stared at his door for a whole minute, slowly raising her fist to her mouth as she realized what she had just seen. Her jaw set, her eyes hardened, and she went to Teresa’s door, turned the handle, and swung the door inward.
Teresa was naked, kneeling at her icon, her black hair hanging to the small of her back and spilling forward over her shoulder. Her face, just turning toward the door, was gilded on one side by the faint light of the candle; beside her on the floor lay her nightdress.
At the moment Maria’s eyes were widening at this stunning sight, an eddy of air from within the room brought to her nostrils the moist, unmistakable musk of carnal sin.
The two women remained this way for many long seconds, only their eyes changing, as their complex, delicate kinship crumbled around them in the half light.
Teresa’s haunch began to tremble as she knelt there. She sat back on her heels, reaching for the nightdress, lifting it from the floor, drawing it up to shield her nudity. Maria shut the door, took two steps into the room to stand over the kneeling Teresa, her face disintegrating into rage and hurt. “Mother of God!” she hissed. “To all I have to bear, you add this disgrace! Oh,” her voice quavered, as she brought her hand up to her shoulder, “thou whore!” She lashed at Teresa and the back of her hand cracked on her temple, hurting them both, knocking Teresa off balance. She sprawled on her side on the cold floor.
Teresa gathered her legs under her and knelt under the crucifix again. She drew the nightdress on and lowered her head, eyes shut. She crossed herself, then stood up, looking to Maria not ashamed, but strangely beatific. Not like a penitente, Maria thought incredulously, but looking like a … a bride. Like a bride. And Teresa said, softly, “If you intend to tell Fernando, please, Maria, I ask you to think first of Fernando himself. I pray you.”
Maria still stared, aghast, heartsick; slowly she began shaking her head and backing to the doorway. “No,” she murmured. “No, I couldn’t …” And then she was gone, with the creak of the closing door.
On the other side of the thick wall, George was washing the musk and dry sweat off his face and body. Water dribbled musically from the cloth into the washbowl; there was rainfall outside, and his head buzzed with happy exhaustion and the sacred imagery of the hours just past.
Thus transported still into the penetralia of Teresa’s soul, thunder now grumbling away in the east and rain hissing down outside his window, he had not heard a sound from her room, and imagined her sleeping exhausted in her bed.
Our bed, he thought. God! As I live, I am surely the most favored man on the face of the earth. Teresa, he thought, savoring the words, I am your husband. You are my wife.
One day, he thought, everyone will know it.
HOPING TO HAVE A FEW MINUTES OF SLEEP BEFORE THE AWAKENING of the de Leyba household, George lay on his bed in a swirl of voluptuous new memories and swells of tender emotion, trying to sink into oblivion. But this attention was caught by the barking of dogs from the village below, then the dramming of approaching hooves through the rain. One horse. No doubt a messenger, he thought. He lay and listened.
Hallooing and a pounding on the door downstairs followed, then the voices of his guards. He raised himself up and drew on his clothing. His loins still tingled, and he was swept repeatedly by waves of an unaccustomed euphoria, followed by such poignancy that his eyes would tear. Then he opened his door and started toward the stairs. He glanced at Teresa’s door, which was closed. De Leyba was just emerging from his room, buttoning his waistcoat; he smiled momentarily, then s
tarted down the stairs with George, brow knitted with curiosity.
The messenger, in drenched buckskins, saluted as George reached the bottom of the stairs. He looked quite downcast. “Colonel, sir, hit’s about Bill Myers.”
“What, man?”
“After he left Corn Island he got ambushed near the Bear Grass. Kilt an’ sculped.”
“Oh, God, no.” George thought of the trusted courier, one of the swiftest and smartest frontier rangers he had ever known, and was stunned. Then he thought of the thick packet of laboriously written letters, reports, and confidential messages, and a chill went down his back. “And the messages to Williamsburg?” he said.
“A few tore up an’ scattered where he laid, sir. Many thought carried off.”
“And John Moore, who was with him?”
“Probably captured, sir. Here. Cap’n George sent up this letter from Jim Patten at the Falls. ’Twas ’e that found poor Bill.”
George read the letter, whose inventory of the recovered papers indicated that a score of valuable and secret documents en route to Patrick Henry had been carried away by the savages. And probably are on their way to Detroit now, he thought.
“I am deeply sorry to hear this, friend Jorge,” de Leyba muttered softly beside him.
“Aye. Well, it means I’ve got to cross back over and rewrite all those papers for Governor Henry.” Damn it all he thought. Days of laborious writing, just when he should be here taking leave with Teresa and her family. He looked toward the stairs as if hoping to see Teresa there, but instead there stood Maria, kerchief to mouth, staring hard-eyed. “Would you have my horse brought around and made ready, please?” he asked. “And I must see Teresa a moment before I go. Madam,” he said to Maria, “will you tell Teresa I must have a moment with her, that I’m compelled to leave?” Maria stared at him for a moment with a strange expression which he first thought was hatred, then he decided that it must be his imagination. She turned then and disappeared upstairs.
AT HIS INSISTENCE, FERNANDO LEFT GEORGE AND TERESA ALONE for a few minutes, and let them sit together in his study to take their leave. Outside the rain had stopped, and water drops, catching the morning sun, fell like sparks from the trees beyond the windowglass.
She sat on a divan and he knelt beside her. He held both her hands raising them often to kiss the delicate fingertips. His heart was going wild. He was confused by the strange, angelic smile on her face and the sheen of tears glinting in her eyes. He released her hands and reached up to place both of his at the sides of her face. She grasped his wrists gently, her thumbs moving and caressing the wrist-bones beneath the skin. They looked at each other’s eyes and remembered each other’s bodies. For several minutes they languished in those reveries. She smiled.
“Had we been wrong,” she said, “lightning would have struck us.”
He smiled, then frowned. “I should be able to come back soon. I expect to go and attack Detroit in June, but I think I can come back here before then. This whole territory is at peace now! I ought not be too busy to come. I …” He found himself looking at her left hand, realizing that it had no ring upon it. No ring to symbolize their secret marriage. I’ll have one made before I come back, he thought. She must have a ring on her hand. What …
“I have a keepsake for you, to hold until I can bring you back a ring.” He reached into the deep pocket of his blue coat and drew out the two little athletic medals. He held them up, one between each thumb and forefinger, and she looked back and forth between them, bemused. “My teacher, George Mason, had these made for me,” George said. “This one is for winning a footrace. This one is for winning a wrestling contest. They are a matched pair. Like you and me, Teresa. I shall give you one of ’em and keep the other. Then when we come back together, they shall come back together, eh?”
She smiled and nodded. Now tears were running down her cheeks.
“Which one for your keepsake, my love?” Her silent crying was infectious, and he found the two medallions to be swimming, vague, through his own tears.
She gazed at the one with the tiny running man in it. “I prefer to think of you running free as the wind rather than fighting,” she murmured. “Should I take that one? No! No, wait. If you have the runner, maybe he will help speed you back to me. And I shall hold the wrestler medallion here, perhaps to keep you from conflict.”
“So be it. I like that notion.”
“I should like to attach it to the silver chain with my crucifix. And wear it always.”
“Aye,” he said softly. He could hear horses outside, and the voices of Fernando de Leyba and his own guards. He put the little medallion in the palm of her hand and pressed her fingers closed over it. She began sobbing.
“But I have no gift for thee,” she said, sounding like a child rather than a woman.
He stroked her hair and tried to think what he could say. “Aye! You have, though!” he exclaimed. “The finest thing. You’ve given me what you can now give to no man else.” She looked at him, puzzled, for an instant, then understanding dawned on her face and softened it. “And,” he said, “I swear it binds us forever.”
She swallowed and blinked, then began to rise. “They’re waiting for you,” she said. “Go now, while I can still bear it!” Teresa turned her face away and did not watch him leave the room.
MARIA STOOD AT A WINDOW UPSTAIRS AND WATCHED HER HUSBAND salute, then embrace the American colonel. Deep in her lungs there was the intolerable tickling pain, and her heart hurt as well, with agony and jealous rage. Be gone forever, diablo, she thought after him as he clapped his hat over his red hair and swung astride the stallion.
From the moment she had seen him appear naked and soiled in the doorway of that ballroom in Kaskaskia almost a year ago, she had thought of him in ways she should not have; she had been like a woman possessed. And this morning she had seen him leave the room of her sister-in-law, and she had smelled the scent of their intimacy. And at that moment her long, fantasized jealousy of the girl had broken completely, and was diverted to an utter hatred of this troublesome George Rogers Clark. Damn you, she thought. I wish thee all the failure and loneliness and disgrace a man can bear. Take my curse with thee! And God save me from ever seeing thee again!
George turned in the saddle and looked at the governor’s house one more time before rounding a corner of the village street, where water flowed like a brooklet. His guard and the courier rode behind him, and watched him take that final look at the mansion. The house was yellow with the clean-washed early morning April sunlight.
I swear it binds us forever, he thought, remembering his last vow to his Teresa. He looked ahead down the street toward the brown Mississippi.
Vowing it to himself this way made it even more irrevocable than saying it to her. It works that way, he thought.
No other, he thought. Whatever our fates, no other for me.
28
KASKASKIA, ILLINOIS COUNTRY
May 1779
I WON’T GET BACK TO ST. LOUIS BEFORE JUNE, HE FINALLY ADMITTED to himself.
Immediately upon his return to Kaskaskia, he became inundated in the myriad problems of administering a new frontier county hundreds of miles from the seat of state authority, and of preparing for a long-range summer offensive against Detroit. Days and then weeks began to flow by in a blur of time, each day distinguished from every other only by the good or bad news it brought.
He was forced to declare war on the Delaware Indians after a band of them killed a party of traders between Vincennes and the Falls of the Ohio, and other Delawares came to Kaskaskia where they became drunk and hostile and created a series of disturbances, claiming that their great chief, White Eyes, had been murdered in cold blood by white men. George sent Leonard Helm an authorization to make war on the Delawares near Vincennes and destroy their camps as punishment for having broken their treaty with the Big Knife. Helm’s frontiersmen struck swiftly and brutally; the Delawares sued for peace; and ultimately Tobacco’s Son and his Piankeshaw
warriors took it upon themselves to answer for the future conduct of the Delawares. The chief chastised them severely for breaking their word and killing his friends, the Americans, told them they deserved the severe blow they had received, and swore by the Sacred Bow that he would decimate them if they did not return to their hunting and remain peaceful. Thus ended the brief war between the new American regime and the Delawares, in such a way that it strengthened further the legend of the invincibility of the Big Knives.
Daily, George made preparations for the provisioning of the Detroit campaign, and awaited the arrival of Captain Montgomery and his five companies of militia that Governor Henry had promised to send.
When Montgomery did at last arrive at Kaskaskia, long overdue, George felt with a sinking heart that history’s misfortune was being replayed: Instead of the five companies, Montgomery had been able to bring only one hundred fifty half-starved and ill-clad men. They had been diverted to join an expedition against the Cherokees in the Western Carolina country.
This stunning disappointment was offset by his joy in the arrival of his young brother Richard, who at last had prevailed upon their father to let him join George in the Illinois country. Now nineteen, Dickie was lithe and determined, with an intensity that George easily recognized as a copy of his own demeanor at that age. After a short period of duty in Captain Robert Todd’s company, Dickie was commissioned a lieutenant.
Because of the condition of Montgomery’s little force, George now lamented that he had not marched on Detroit directly from Vincennes in April. He now fastened his dimming hopes for the Detroit campaign on the three hundred Kentucky volunteers Colonel John Bowman had promised to send to Vincennes by late June. With those added to Montgomery’s one hundred fifty and his own veterans, George could hope to mount a force of some half thousand against Detroit, and he made himself believe that that number, if his fortunes held well, would be sufficient.
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