The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn

by Benton, Lori

  The large public stable spanned the yard behind the trade store, next door to Mrs. Brophy’s house. The night was moonless. With her eyes still growing accustomed to the darkness, Tamsen felt her way past the stable’s unlatched door.

  Outside the air had been clammy, cool after a warm day, but the thick scents of hay and manure enveloped her as she passed the stabled mounts of Morganton residents, and of those just passing through, the air on her face warm with the heat of so much horseflesh. Snorts and shufflings followed her along the row. She found her dappled mare in the last stall but one. The horse’s nose thrust over the gate, nudging Tamsen’s reaching hand.

  “It’s me, sweet girl,” she said, just above a whisper. With one hand she fondled the mare’s nose, with the other groped for the sidesaddle she hoped was close to hand. The bridle and reins were there, hanging from a post, but not the saddle. She felt along the gate of the empty box at the end, peering within to see if it contained what she sought. The box was black as pitch. She banged a knee against the boards and froze, heart slamming. Sim had to be somewhere near. In the loft above?

  The mare nickered. Tamsen hurried back and grasped the horse’s head between soothing hands. “Hush now. We have to be quiet.”

  And quick. She hadn’t wanted to risk dressing in the house. She’d brought the rust-brown linen petticoat and matching jacket worn on the journey to Morganton, bundled in a summer riding cloak. She opened the mare’s box, set the bundle on trampled straw, and dressed clumsily in the dark. She bent for the cloak to shake it free of straw. When she straightened, a man stood in the half-open box gate.

  Tamsen jumped back, dropping the cloak, startling the mare. The figure, tall and featureless, loomed closer. A hand clamped her arm.

  “They’re liable to hang horse thieves in these parts.”

  It wasn’t Mr. Parrish. That brought a flare of relief, despite her heart’s crazed hammering. For a second she thought it was Ambrose Kincaid, but the voice was too deep—and too unrefined. She found her voice in a rush of outrage. “I’m no thief—release me!”

  “Give me good reason,” said the man, sounding, of all things, amused. His grip sent panic coursing through her.

  “You’re hurting me!” He was, but only because she fought his grasp. He was strong, and he smelled of horses and dressed hides, and since she couldn’t break his hold, she stopped struggling. He relaxed his grip.

  “All right, then. If you’re not set on thieving, what’d you aim to do with this fine mare?”

  “Who are you, Mrs. Brophy’s stable guard?” She’d edged her voice with mockery, keeping fear and desperation at bay. Whoever this interloper was, he was dangerously nigh to ruining her escape—one she was already starting to regret—but that wasn’t the salient point just now.

  Tamsen stepped back, nearly tripping over the cloak tangled at her feet.

  The man caught her again and set her to rights as if he could see perfectly well in the dark. He made no effort to curb his voice. “I guard what’s mine and Cade’s. Not everyone sneaking ’round in the dark is to be trusted, are they?”

  Tamsen reached for calm. “Please, keep your voice down or—”

  “Miz Tamsen? That you making a racket?” Sim emerged from the shadows.

  “Tamsen?” echoed the interloper, the spoiler of her plan.

  “Sim … yes, it’s all right,” she said, thankful for the darkness when she felt the burn of helpless tears. “I-I heard something in the stable and … Where did you come from?”

  “Mast’ Parrish got me sleeping in the loft. But I didn’t hear nothin’ save you tromping about.”

  “Go on back to sleep, then.” And forget you saw me, she added silently. Precious time was ticking past. Oh, what was she even doing here? What had she been thinking?

  Sim hadn’t budged. “You sure you all right?”

  Tamsen, better able to see now, caught the glint of his eyes. He was glaring at the stranger. “I’m sure. Now go before—”

  “Who is there?” a voice called down the stable’s length. The voice she’d dreaded to hear.

  “Go,” she hissed.

  Sim went, scurrying up the loft ladder, sending down a sifting of hay as light spilled through the stable door.

  Hezekiah Parrish strode down the aisle, a horn lantern lighting his way and, incidentally, bringing out of shadow the face of the stranger who’d spoiled Tamsen’s escape. It was the man she’d collided with after fleeing Mrs. Brophy’s tavern. His hair was brown, tailed back none too tidily, his jaw lean and in need of a razor. He wore the same dusty buckskins and fringed linsey-woolsey shirt she’d seen him in before, with a beaded Indian belt cinching his waist.

  But he wasn’t the one she’d collided with, she realized. That one had been older, darker. This was the younger one who’d gaped at her as if he’d never seen a woman before. He was looking at her so now, with eyes of a peculiar golden brown. He didn’t retreat before her stepfather’s advance. In fact, as the lantern light swelled around them, he moved nearer.

  “Get away from her.” Mr. Parrish halted nose to nose with the young man.

  Nose to chin, rather, for he was inches shorter than the stranger, who said, “Why? She got something that’s catching?”

  Mr. Parrish grasped her arm. “Because I’m her stepfather, impudent whelp, and I bid you do so.” He turned on her, fingers biting hard. “Has he molested you in any way?”

  She tried not to wince. “No sir.”

  “He’s frightened you,” her stepfather said, as if he blamed her for this state of being. “You’re shaking.”

  She was. She was also painfully aware of the cloak in the straw that she dared not glance at, and of the young man gazing between them, eyes watchful, unreadable.

  No. There was something in those eyes to be read. A brief, flaring intensity, as if he meant to communicate a thing to her alone. Before she could fathom it, her stepfather demanded, “What business have you in the stable at this unseemly hour? Have you no sense of propriety? Of what you risk?”

  Risk? If he only knew.

  The grip on her arm tightened. “Answer me, girl.”

  “No. I … yes.” Flustered, she glanced again at those golden eyes.

  “Your daughter thought she heard a ruckus. I was bedded down with my gear.” The young man nodded toward the empty stall box. “I came out when I heard her.”

  “Plainly all is well,” Mr. Parrish said, unappeased by the explanation. “You can go back to your … stall.”

  Unruffled by the implied insult, the young man stepped forward, standing square in front of where the cloak lay. He looked down at Tamsen, ignoring her stepfather. “My apologies, miss, if I frighted you.”

  Tamsen risked a glance at the cloak but didn’t see it. She looked up at the man in time to catch a hint of a nod that might have been meant to accompany his apology but she sensed was meant to convey something else.

  “I thought I’d be safe enough to check on the mare,” she choked out. Thankfully her stepfather forbore asking how she could have heard anything at the stable from Mrs. Brophy’s parlor.

  He reached to shut the mare’s stall. “Return to the house,” he bid her. “At once.”

  Tamsen spared the young man a look, with no idea whether she despised him for the ruination of her plan or was grateful for his inexplicable assistance in the wake of that ruination. Anger at her mother’s weakness was cooling, cracking, showing her its selfish core. She wanted to run from the stable, back to her mother in their bed, tell her she didn’t mean it, that she was sorry, but couldn’t with her stepfather hard on her heels.

  Hezekiah Parrish disapproved of females running.

  “I presume your mother spoke to you of the other matter,” he said as they reached the stable doors.

  Ambrose Kincaid. And she could tell by his tone Mr. Parrish was certain of getting his way in the end. The desperate spark that had carried her into the night sputtered out, leaving no more than a trailing wisp of its memory
.

  “Yes sir,” Jesse heard the girl tell her stepfather. “I’ve agreed to see him.”

  Likely she meant to sound compliant. What Jesse heard was despair.

  Neither noticed him dogging their steps, quiet as a hunter. He let the stable door shut in his face, waited a breath, then opened it to peer without. The pair made for the house next door, the man with his hand clamped to the girl’s arm, still berating her with words like unseemly and risk. Jesse reckoned he was the unseemly. As for risk …

  A shadow under the stable eave peeled away from the dark—Cade, rifle and knapsack slung at his side. “Jesse?”

  “Pa. How much of that did you hear?”

  “Enough to make me wonder why you lied for that girl. The only thing disturbing the horses was the two of you.”

  “I gave him the tale she gave. I’d no call to be saying different.” He didn’t mention he’d caught the girl trying to slip away into the night. That was her secret to tell.

  Cade lit a lantern in the back stall. Since he was one of the few men Jesse knew who never touched hard liquor, there was little call for their crossing a tavern’s threshold. Cade would’ve slept happy under the stars if a stall hadn’t been free.

  “Why’d you figure you had call to say anything—to either of them?”

  Jesse lay back on his bedroll, caught Cade’s gaze, and flicked his eyes toward the ceiling. Above them was the loft and the one called Sim. A groom? Whatever else, a slave with a healthy fear of his master. Jesse tapped his ear.

  Cade nodded, then asked in an undertone muffled by the rustle of rolling out his blanket, “It was the girl from before? The one in blue?”

  Jesse propped himself on an elbow. “Her name’s Tamsen. Pretty name, huh?”

  He’d been startled to find it was that girl banging about outside the stall where he’d just drifted to sleep. Not till the first beam of lantern light struck those dark eyes scowling up at him had his blood quickened with recognition. Seeing her out of that fancy gown and closer up than she’d been on the street, it was clear she had a decent height to her. It must have been that tight-cinched dress and Cade’s nearness that made her seem so tiny. Not that she wasn’t slight as a wisp. His skin still tingled with memory of her slender arm beneath his hand …

  “Jesse.” It was a chiding growl.

  “Yeah, Pa?”

  “What are we in Morganton for?”

  “I know what we’re here for.”

  “Salt, sugar, lead …” Cade reeled off the list as if Jesse hadn’t spoken. As if they hadn’t done this trek years running. “And to hire on with the next crop of wagons headed west—which I may have found while you were dallying with a girl you’d no business looking twice at.”

  “Tamsen,” Jesse said again, liking how it felt to say it. “Don’t know her back name. Yet.”

  “Don’t matter. That girl’s the last thing you need to be thinking on.” Cade settled and snuffed the lantern candle. “You hear me, Jesse Bird?”

  In the darkness Jesse smiled. “I hear you.”

  “You best.”

  “G’night, Pa.”

  After Cade slept, Jesse got up and opened the neighboring box to retrieve the cloak he’d hidden in the straw. The mare had put a hoof on it. He ran his hand down a foreleg, urging it to lift, and felt the telltale heat and swelling above the fetlock as the mare obliged. Had the girl made good her escape, she’d not have gotten far. Jesse would’ve thought her foolish for trying had something in her stepfather’s eyes not sent a cold stake through his belly. He hadn’t known he was thwarting an escape when he rose to investigate her noise, but now it was done.

  What had he sent her back to?

  As he bundled the cloak among his belongings, there came a rustle from the loft above. On the morrow, Jesse decided, he’d have himself a talk with Sim, the groom.

  After breakfast, Tamsen’s mother retired to the parlor with Dell to see the blue gown freshened. Her stepfather, having failed to speak with Mr. Kincaid the previous evening, went out again in search of the man. Mrs. Brophy went to see to her tavern. Tamsen, seizing the moment, slipped out to the stable to retrieve her cloak.

  Dressed in her riding clothes, hair pinned under a cap, she drew little notice in the yard, though here and there men and women were going about their business. Inside the stable a man was shoveling manure into a cart, halfway down the aisle. Morning shadows showed her no more than a long back and broad shoulders that strained against a shirt.

  She pressed on, hoping he’d ignore her while she found her cloak and hurried out.

  Hearing her step, the man rested the shovel, propped a moccasined foot on its blade, and boldly watched her approach. Tamsen glanced aside and met the eyes of the man who’d sabotaged her escape in the night. Startled, she stumbled into the cart. He thrust the shovel away and moved to catch her.

  Blushing at the memory of his hands on her in the darkness, she caught herself and stepped back from his reach. “I never took you for a stable hand.”

  A corner of his mouth lifted, as if in amusement. “Clever of you, since I ain’t one.”

  His voice was well timbred, if uncultured. Aside from his eyes, it was the only true impression she’d carried from their midnight encounter. He was taller than she recalled—her eyes were level with the sun-browned hollow of his throat, visible since he wore no manner of neckcloth. His hair was tied back but seemed barely tamed. The brown of it was sun streaked, putting her in mind of a hawk’s variegated feathers.

  There was something hawklike in all his features. His thin-bridged nose was slightly aquiline, the nostrils curved in faint echo of a raptor’s beak, narrowly flared as though he’d just scented something—prey perhaps—on a breeze. He’d shaved off yesterday’s beard stubble, leaving clear the lines of cheekbones and jaw slanting forward to a chin indented by a slight cleft, kept from sharpness only by the wide, full-shaped mouth above it. Taken with those gold-brown eyes, the total effect wasn’t so much displeasing as disconcerting. It was a wild face. Maybe a reckless one. And she hadn’t liked his tone.

  “If you aren’t a stable hand, what business have you mucking stalls?”

  “Those lacking coin to pay their way use what they got. In my case, time and muscle.”

  Muscle he had, especially through the shoulders, though the shape of him under shirt and buckskin trousers was lean.

  Not trousers, she realized, catching a scandalizing glimpse of skin below his shirttail. He wore a breechclout, embroidered at its edges, and leggings that left his upper thighs bared. She dragged her gaze back to his face to find him smiling, boldly returning her inadvertent scrutiny. Did he presume what passed between them in the night gave him the right to ogle her so?

  She was scouring her mind for a recrimination withering enough to suit when he said, “You’ll be wanting your cloak back, I reckon.”

  The cloak. Reminded of her errand, she pushed past him and headed for the stall. Her mare thrust out a dappled head, which she pushed aside as well. The straw beneath the mare’s hooves was freshly strewn. There was no cloak. She turned to confront the man, to find he’d followed her silently. She stepped back, lifting her chin. “What did you with it? Return it at once—please.”

  “I’d aimed to.” He tilted his head, beckoning her. Warily she followed him to the last stall. Stacked therein were bundles wrapped in oilcloth, two saddles, packsaddle frames, rifles, and other sundries she supposed men needed when traveling long distance by horse. But a bow and quiver of arrows? She narrowed her eyes at the man as he moved among the stacks.

  “You’re a white man, aren’t you?” she blurted before thinking better of it.

  “Guilty as charged.” He turned with her cloak in hand and, as if to reinforce the observation, made her the mock of a courtly bow as he handed it over. “Your cloak, miss.”

  The dark wool had been brushed and folded. “Thank you.” The words nearly stuck in her throat.

  He crossed his arms, studying her. “Is t
his you thanking me for the cloak or for saving you landing in a worse shambles than it seems you’re already in?”

  She felt her brows soar. “Saving me? Are you under the delusion that you rescued me last night? If I’m in a shambles, then it’s your fault, in the main.” It was a ridiculous exaggeration, but she fixed him with a glare she hoped would put him in his place.

  “Hold on now,” he said, arms uncrossing. “I lay no claim to having aught to do with whatever drove you out here in the dark last night. But I did have a talk with your groom this morning.” He jerked his chin at the neighboring stall. “That mare’s lame.”

  “Still?” A stab of guilt deflated her pride. She hadn’t spared the horse a thought since her flight was curtailed. The man’s mouth twisted, sparking her to add, “I’d have checked had I not been interrupted.”

  “I checked. It’d be plain cruel to ride her again inside a week. Whatever your scheme was, reckon it’s good I interrupted it.”

  “Good?”

  “For your horse. She needs time to heal. Time to herself, to recover.”

  It was disconcerting the way those golden eyes looked straight into hers as he spoke. He was still talking about the horse, wasn’t he? Only time was the very thing she desperately needed. Her stomach rolled, thinking of what was yet to come that day. Another meeting with Mr. Kincaid, if her stepfather arranged it. Even if not, there would be some other rich prospect eventually. Another sprawling plantation, worked by more men and women bound to servitude than Mr. Parrish could hope to own in a lifetime.

  The man in the stall had crouched to fold up the oilskin bundle where he’d put her cloak. “Where’d you aim to go,” he asked, “had you got away?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far.” To whom could she have fled? There was no one in the world she trusted who wasn’t under her stepfather’s influence. No place of refuge. Nowhere to hide.

  She’d never felt so great a fool. Maybe she ought to be grateful for this interfering—

  “Then tell me this.” Crouched still, he looked up at her, balanced on the balls of his feet. “What’s gone so amiss for that blossom-eyed girl I saw yesterday, the one all decked in blue, that riding off alone in the night seems a better prospect than sticking with her kin?”