The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn

by Benton, Lori

  Ahead the trace crested. He and Cade had hunted these mountains in autumns past. If memory served, it dipped into a meadow where a stream flowed. Along that stream ran another trail, overgrown but passable. He’d make for that, find Tamsen a place to lay her head for a spell.

  Glancing back at her, he reckoned they could be tracked by the hairpins she’d been losing through the night. Her hair spilled down in an inky thicket across her shoulders, halfway to her waist. The lacy bit hung askew. So did her head, lolling toward her chest. Shadows underscored her eyes, and her face showed the strain of fatigue and grief and fear. Still she was so beautiful that Jesse had to remind himself to breathe.

  Then he looked past her, and his chest filled at the sight that greeted him. He brought the horse to a stop on the sloping ground. She jerked in the saddle. He moved to her knee in case she fell, but she didn’t. Getting her bearings, she blinked down at him with dark, suffering eyes.

  “Morning,” he said, with a searching smile.

  She shut her eyes, as if the sight of him and the horse and the world was too much misery to bear. He wanted to give her something to hold against the dark tide of memories sure to be pressing in on her.

  “Tamsen.” When she opened her eyes, he nodded toward their back trail. “Fetch a look.”

  Clearly she was weary beyond caring, but she turned to look and caught her breath.

  They were too hemmed by trees for the grandest view, but a gap in their ranks below gave prospect of a limestone cliff rising sheer from a dark wave of forest crashing, mist-foamed, against its stony face, ablaze in every shade from rose to ruddy gold, giving back the colors of sunrise. Above it in the clear-washed air an eagle turned, catching fire in its wings. Jesse drank it in with the joyous relief that always accompanied his leaving the piedmont behind—though this time he’d brought along more than a few of its complications.

  The horse shifted, breaking the moment. Tamsen Littlejohn had put her back to the view and was looking up the trace, eyes wary as a deer’s. The same alarm jolted down Jesse’s spine when he followed her gaze.

  Where the trace crested, there now stood a string of pack mules with a man at their head, looking back at them.

  The lean little trapper with a scruffy beard was headed to Morganton to divest himself of the hides his mules conveyed. There’d been room for horse and pack train to pass on the trace, which Jesse had hoped to do with no more than a how-do. But the trapper, who’d camped the night past in the meadow beyond, proved inclined to conversate.

  “Charlie Spencer,” he said by way of introduction. “Where ye folks headed?”

  “Homebound.” Jesse berated himself for not abandoning the trace sooner as Spencer took in the drooping horse and Tamsen—more drooping still—with her ripped skirt, tumbled hair, and haunted eyes. Below a stocking cap worn low on his brow, Spencer’s gaze was friendly enough. It was also keen.

  “Where might home be?”

  “West by a bit, then south.” It was as far from the truth as Jesse could deliver on short notice.

  “Over on the French Broad? Ain’t ye taking the roundabout way?”

  Jesse forced a smile. “I’m showing my bride a bit of the country.” He put a hand to Tamsen’s knee. It jerked under his touch.

  “Anything you folks needing? I got coffee, food—nothing fancy, mind, just trail vittles,” Spencer offered, while his eyes pursued another line of questioning with Tamsen, who looked less like a bride than a woman abducted and ravished.

  A sudden baying of hounds made Jesse’s guts seize. Parrish couldn’t be tracking them so soon, unless … Were they seen leaving Morganton despite his care?

  Spencer emitted a piercing whistle. The barking escalated in pitch. The trapper grinned. “Them’s my dogs. Hope they ain’t treed another bear. I got all the skins my mules can tote. If’n I add one more, I’ll be hauling on the ropes to stop ’em sliding down the mountain like tin on grease. You folks out from Morganton?”

  Jesse cleared his throat. “Speaking of skins, I could use me a sturdy hide—for footwear,” he added, then wished he hadn’t when Spencer’s gaze went to the ripped, dirty silk shoe on Tamsen’s foot. “I can pay you for it.”

  Amenable to the notion whatever his suspicions, Spencer moved to the first mule and worked loose a hide from its burden. Six shillings was the going rate for a good deerskin. This one was well cured. Jesse dug inside his knapsack, searching for his coin pouch, praying he’d enough. He and Cade didn’t do much trade with hard money.

  Spencer held out the skin, neatly rolled. “Take it, with my compliments on your nuptials.” Though he spoke to Jesse, he’d been looking at Tamsen.

  “You sure?” Jesse asked.

  Spencer hesitated a beat. “Certain sure, on both counts.”

  Disinclined to argue, Jesse took the skin. “My wife and I thank you kindly.”

  A crashing of brush heralded the arrival of Spencer’s hounds, a lanky trio of spotted hides and lolling tongues. Jesse’s horse shied at their milling. The mules barely twitched an ear.

  “Best be pushing on,” Spencer said, giving up trying to catch Tamsen’s gaze. “Good luck to ye, folks.”

  At the stream that wound through the sloping meadow, Jesse halted. The rising sun spangled the dew clinging to grass and brush, save in the flattened place of Spencer’s camp, set back off the trace. The fire ring emitted faint warmth beneath Jesse’s outstretched hand. Crouching over the blackened remains, he looked back to where the trace crested, but he saw no sign of the man. He stood. “Sorry ’bout the wife talk. I had to think quick.”

  Tamsen’s haggard eyes beseeched him. For rest.

  Concern tightened in his chest. “Reckon you can make it another half mile?”

  She bowed forward in the saddle, a study in misery, but clung on as he turned the horse along the stream, following it into cover.

  Lulled by the monotonous sway, Tamsen fought to stay in the saddle. She didn’t want to fall again into the arms of the man to whom she’d recklessly entrusted her life. She didn’t want him getting ideas, alone as they were in that wilderness …

  “Tamsen?”

  Would the rocking never cease? And the weight on her chest, would it never lift? It stole her will to breathe and pushed her down … down to some mired place, black with shadow, where unseen things chittered and rustled and swooped at her head.

  “Tamsen. You got to wake up now.”

  She woke up. She wasn’t on the horse. The rocking was a hand, shaking her. Under her was hard ground. She hurt all over. And her mother was dead. That was the weight. Not on her chest. In it. As though her heart had been replaced in the night by stone, her ribs by iron bars. She had a powerful thirst and a throbbing in her head.

  She opened bleary eyes to a day she’d as soon never face.

  Seeing she was awake, her rescuer held out a canteen. “Reckon you’re thirsty. Couldn’t get you to drink a lick when we stopped. You fell on the ground asleep.”

  She pushed up to an elbow, took the canteen. The water was cold, sweet on her tongue. She gulped it so fast that it dribbled down her chin. She wiped her mouth with a hand, then offered back the canteen. He wouldn’t take it.

  “You keep that.” He moved to where a small fire burned, giving her the privacy of an averted gaze. He was wearing that long fringed shirt open at the neck. It was a faded, muddy shade, with faint stripes in the linsey-woolsey weave. She tried not to look where his leggings bared his thighs as he squatted to tend the fire.

  “Morning’s nigh spent,” he said.

  It was. The sun beat down, dappled through leaves. Despite the sense that they were high in the mountains, the air was warm. Tamsen felt clammy beneath her stays, which had pressed the folds of her shift into her flesh where she’d lain. Enduring the discomfort, she untied her cloak and let it fall to the ground.

  The past night was a blur. The lurch and sway of the horse, the clatter of hooves on stone, the chill damp on her face. And him. Her rescuer. Her g
uide. Always he was there, the triangle outline of his hat black against the stars, moonlight catching the tail of his hair hanging between broad shoulders, bow and quiver at his back, rifle in the crook of his arm, as he trudged on and on into that endless night, never seeming to tire. He looked tired now. His sun-browned face was haggard, the lower half shadowed with a day and night of beard.

  “We might yet be followed,” he told her, still with his back turned. “If that fellow, Spencer, tells what he’s seen, down in Morganton. I aim to put a heap more miles behind us afore nightfall.”

  Looking around, Tamsen found she had no memory of stopping in that place. Trees draped in woody vines surrounded a break in the forest just large enough for the horse to graze. The man’s bedding, a blanket and a black pelt, lay by her cloak. Had he slept so close beside her?

  Not for long, by the look of him.

  “There’s the stream,” he said into her silence. “If you fancy a wash.”

  She’d been hearing its chatter since waking, she realized. A tiny fall spilled where laurel brush closed in. Ferns edged the clearing, their fronds browning at the tips.

  “And here’s corndodgers.” He held out a cornmeal cake he’d cooked on a rock in the embers. She took it unthinking and put it to her mouth. Instantly her stomach rebelled.

  She made it to the ferns before she vomited. It went on and on, burning, humiliating, until her stomach had no more to heave. Drool and worse ran down her chin and clung to her trailing hair. She had nothing with which to clean herself but the hem of her petticoat. She reached for it, and stared. It was rent to her knees, baring her shift and the snagged remnants of her stockings. She remembered, back in Morganton, the man’s knife in the dark, how for a terrible moment she’d thought he intended something different.

  Tamsen crawled back to the fire where he sat, knees bent, head in his hands, fingers buried in his unbound hair. The sun-bleached strands at his crown stirred in the breeze that shivered the greenery surrounding them.

  She waited, too miserable to wonder what he was thinking. Or was he praying? A tiny seed of pity cracked open within her, and for an instant she wished she could be … stronger, surer. Something. But she was undone, unraveled, a seam left unhemmed.

  After a bit he raised his head. “I’ll take you back,” he said flatly. “If that’s what you want.”

  She bit her lip and looked away. “There’s nothing to go back to.”

  “You’re sure? If this ain’t what you want—”

  “It is. I … you …” She wanted to say she was grateful, but she hadn’t the words. Grief capped them like a well, holding them inside her.

  She turned to see him rolling up his bedding. He gathered up the corndodgers to wrap in leaves and caught her eye. “Want to try again before we head out?”

  She could only shake her head. She went to the stream and splashed her face, then set about ordering her hair. The ivory combs were still lodged in place, but few pins remained in the tangled curls. The pinner dangled behind one ear. She rinsed away the sick, fingered out leaves and twigs, then plaited a simple braid and flung it over her shoulder, slipping the combs into one of the pockets now tied at her waist. Though there was none to see save her guide, who’d already had the privilege of watching her vomit, she covered the crown of her head with the pinner, securing it with the remaining hairpins.

  He’d tied her cloak with his bedding, behind the saddle. “You wear this,” he said, draping the satchel with the corndodgers over her shoulder. “You’ll have it by when you’re hungry.”

  An optimist, he was. Yet the gesture was kind.

  Her mother’s box lay in the grass. Her eyes were dry as she picked it up, but she couldn’t still the trembling of her hands.

  “I can tie that up.”

  She looked away, uncertain. She felt she owed him … something, but couldn’t think beyond the moment and the monumental task of getting back up on that horse.

  “I’d rather hold it,” she managed to say.

  He didn’t object.

  Biting back a groan, she climbed onto the horse’s back, settled the box in front of her, tucked the torn petticoat around her knees. Her guide looked up at her, as if to say something more, then seemed to think better of it. He took up the horse’s lead and the rocking sway that had haunted her dreams resumed.

  They camped at sunset, high in a rocky fastness skirted by firs, having seen no sign of another human being since the man with the mules and dogs, just an endless parade of trees and rocks and the occasional deer or rabbit bounding out of their path. But what trees, some with girths wide enough to hide a horse behind, leafed so thick they turned midday into twilight beneath their canopy.

  Everywhere were birds. Woodpeckers bobbed from their path in flight. Eagles and hawks circled above, keening their wild cries. Ravens croaked at them from the tops of conifers, while down below grouse burst from the brush with a drumming of wings, and flocks of wild turkeys hurried up the mountainsides as they passed. Tiny flitting songbirds raised a constant chorus of trills.

  Once, a great cloud of pigeons crossed over, blotting out the sky for minutes, rustling the air with their innumerable wing beats.

  Tamsen winced as she slid from the saddle for the last time that day. Over and over in the blur of their up-and-down travels, she’d been forced to dismount where the going grew too steep or narrow to trust her perch on the horse. She was blistered, worn, and breathless—the latter due to her stays, which were never intended for climbing mountains or the great gulps of thin air needed for the purpose.

  She sat on a shelf of rock and slipped off her shoes while her guide unsaddled the horse and hobbled it in scanty grass. Then he informed her he was going down the mountain to set snares in hope of getting breakfast.

  “I’ll not go out of shouting range.” He caught sight of her heels, showing blistered and raw through holes in her filthy stockings.

  She tucked her feet below her torn petticoat. He moved behind the rock on which she sat.

  “Try this.” He was holding out a tiny jar stoppered with a piece of cork. “For the blisters.”

  Tamsen took the jar. After removing the cork, she held it cautiously to her nose, expecting it to reek of bear grease or something as nasty, but it had a pleasant smell. Green was the best description she could summon.

  “Neighbor of mine makes it,” he said, “out of her garden. It’s handy for burns and blisters. But best thing you can do is take yourself down to that runnel yonder and bathe your feet. Keep ’em open to the air tonight. Wait,” he amended, taking up the canteen. “I’ll tote you the water. Whilst I’m at it, strip off those hose. I’ll scrub ’em out.”

  She blinked. “You’re going to wash my stockings?”

  “No call for casting off good rags. There’ll come a use for ’em.”

  While he was gone down to the stream they’d passed before stopping, she unrolled her hose, easing them over her heels, and slipped her garters into a pocket. When he returned with the dripping canteen, she had the stockings balled into a dingy lump even she’d have preferred not to touch. Seeming not to mind, he tucked them through his beaded belt, shouldered his rifle, and headed out to set his snares.

  Tamsen spread her cloak in the least stony spot she could find and sat on it with her feet downhill in a patch of grass. She trickled water over them, rubbing gingerly to loosen the dirt. The cold water felt good. The salve, even better.

  She replaced the cork, and for a mindless while enjoyed the novelty of bare feet and ankles. She didn’t think about Morganton. Or her mother. She watched the horse graze. It was a pretty creature, chestnut, save for a rump that looked as if someone had tossed a tattered white blanket over it. The horse had white on its face too, and sweet brown eyes.

  “He’s a Chickasaw pony,” said her guide behind her, startling her out of a near doze. “Indians say they’re bred from horses left behind when Spaniards come through these mountains, long time back.”

  Spaniards. Tamsen
’s throat closed tight as images of her mother careened through her mind, memories tainted by violence and lies. Sarah Littlejohn Parrish hadn’t been Spanish after all … or had she been? A Spanish slave? As dusk gathered and clouds came up over the mountains, covering the few stars already burning in the luminous sky, Tamsen stared at the backs of her hands as if they belonged to a stranger.

  They had corndodgers again for supper. Though it seemed wrong somehow to eat, she choked down one of the dry cakes, then sought refuge in her cloak, only to toss and turn at the painful pressing of her stays. The air had chilled. Her nose ran. Her feet ached.

  Her guide said, “You awake?”

  She rolled over, showing him her eyes in the firelight.

  “Can I borrow your shoes?”

  With no idea what he could want with her shoes, she sat up and handed him the battered things. As he reached past the fire to take them, a long howl pierced the darkness. She dropped the shoes at the flames’ edge. He was quick, dragging them out before they were more than scorched. It hardly worsened their condition. One heel was all but fallen off. The silk uppers were in tatters.

  Another wolf answered the first. At the edge of the firelight, the horse nickered. The man spoke to it almost chidingly, in a language unrecognizable: “Meshewa. Nooleewi-a.”

  Tamsen edged closer to the fire. Her guide was doing something with the deerskin he’d gotten from the trapper. He sat cross-legged, firelight catching sparks in his strange eyes as, at a rustle in the brush or another howl, he’d look out into the vast dark that pressed in close. His hands stayed busy with the deerskin, cutting it with his knife. Other tools came out of his bags. An awl. Beeswax. A sturdy needle. Something coiled like thread, only thicker.

  He made no attempt to engage her in conversation, though she was sure he knew she watched him. Had she not heard him speak it often enough, she could almost imagine he had no English. Though his coloring wasn’t an Indian’s and he claimed to be white, she might as well have thrown in her lot with one of that race. Was she one of that race? There was one place she might look for answers. She hadn’t yet read all the papers her mother’s box contained. But she wasn’t ready for the whole truth yet, or learning the box held only part of the truth, leaving her forever with questions unanswerable.