The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn

by Benton, Lori

  Covered in the blood of her menfolk, she stood. “Please, Mr. Kincaid. Will you help us?”

  Ambrose’s gaze flicked hard at Jesse, as though taking him in fully for the first time. Something darted across his features, a spurt of startlement Tamsen couldn’t fathom. He looked toward the Tipton farmhouse, then met her beseeching gaze.

  “I have found you. The rest will wait. Can we get them onto the horses, do you think?”

  Daylight fell in wan stripes through the parted curtains of the room in Colonel Tipton’s house, where some of the wounded were being tended. Cade lay on a folded quilt, blanketed against the unrelenting chill the fire across the room couldn’t dispel.

  The ball had been dug from his chest by a harried surgeon who’d arrived in time to pull some of the gravest injured in the skirmish back from death’s door—for now. The torn flesh was dressed with a poultice, but Cade had bled out alarmingly before they’d gotten him across the snowy field to shelter. He’d yet to speak with anything resembling sense. For now he was gone away to some place Jesse couldn’t follow. A fitful place, troubled by pain and dreams.

  Others besides wounded came and went, bustling through the room with its fine furnishings in contrast to its log walls. Women of the house, neighbors, servants—a blur of petticoats and bending backs and basins on hips. A man lying on a pallet near the fire moaned. Two others on a bed slept, or tried to. A fourth sat against the wall, arm in a sling, taking food from a woman helping him eat one-handed.

  Jesse’s wound had been tended. He sat on the hardwood floor beside Cade, back to the cold wall, bound leg bare below his breechclout. Movement caused him throbbing pain, but not as consuming as the need to will his pa to draw breath, and again, and yet once more.

  Kneeling nearby, Tamsen dipped a cloth in warm water. She’d ceased trying to coax him to eat the venison stew someone had left beside him, congealing in its bowl. He watched his wife gently sponging away the crusted blood from his pa’s flesh, and through the capstone of his worriment came bursting up a love for her that stung his eyes. He let the tears fall unashamed, warm on his skin. Her nose was still swollen from its run-in with his rifle stock, her beautiful doeskin clothing bloodstained, but with her face washed and her hair braided, she looked otherwise recovered from their ordeal. He’d yet to thaw, though he’d spread his coat over his bare leg. Blood loss and exposure. He’d come right in time. But Cade …

  “The boy!” His pa’s frame jerked as he cried out. Breath hissed through strong teeth bared in pain. Fingers fumbled at the blanket drawn to his waist. “Taken …”

  “Cade, it’s all right. We’re here.” Tamsen stroked his brow, smoothing back his hair. For the first time, Jesse noticed the white mingled in the long black strands streaming from his pa’s temples. How many of those had he put there? He was up to his neck treading guilt when Cade spoke again.

  “Peshewa …”

  Tamsen shot him a questioning look. “My name,” he said, reaching for Cade’s restless hand. “Pa, I’m here. Nobody’s taken me. I’d do more’n scratch now, did they try.” He bent his cheek to the shoulder of his shirt to wipe it dry.

  Tamsen reached across Cade and clasped their joined hands with hers. She prayed, plain and direct as she would speak to him. “We commit Cade into Your hands, Father. His trust is in You. So is ours. Let Your will be done on earth—in the body of this man lying here between us—as it is in heaven. Amen.”

  With the knot of pain and hope lodged in his throat, it was all Jesse could manage to add his own “amen.” The clearing of another throat intruded like a raven’s croak.

  Jesse had done his best to ignore Ambrose Kincaid, seated in a chair pushed against the wall, staring at them each in turn like a buzzard come to pick the battle leavings. After helping them to the house, he’d gone off again for a while but returned moments ago to sit and stare. He’d removed his greatcoat and hat. His coppery hair was damp at the ends, the crown of it fiery in a shaft of window light, his watchful eyes unreadable.

  Jesse shot the man a look—in time to see those eyes widen. He whipped his gaze back to find his pa awake, head lifted, giving back Kincaid’s stare with eyes like molten amber, ablaze with recognition.

  With a strangled groan, Cade flung an arm at Jesse, as one might shield a child from onrushing danger—an arm too weak for the purpose. Jesse caught it and eased it back to his side.

  “Pa, be still. You’re hurt.” Jesse thought sure Cade would pass out from the pain he’d caused himself, but his gaze steadied, fixing on the red-haired man as if to burn a hole straight through him.

  “Collin.”

  The name was barely a rasp. Baffled, Jesse looked to Kincaid. He was staring at Jesse’s pa like a man thunderstruck, eyes aglitter in the slanting gray light.

  “I never thought I resembled him,” he said.

  Tamsen, clearly as puzzled as Jesse, was quicker to find her voice. “Resembled who?”

  The man glanced at her, a haunting in his eyes. “Collin Kincaid.”

  Tamsen shook her head. “Who is Collin Kincaid?”

  Hearing the name, something almost clicked into place in Jesse’s mind, but like stars reflected in water, his thoughts shimmered and rippled, refusing to align. He stared at his pa’s taut face, light from the window glossing bold bones, tawny skin, eyelids closed now. He swung his gaze to the man sitting straight in coat and stock, white hands splayed on the knees of fine woolen breeches, narrow features exhausted, disturbingly intense. There was no resemblance in their faces. Not in coloring or the bones beneath. Why had he thought there might be?

  “I told you of Collin Kincaid when we met in Morganton,” Ambrose was telling Tamsen. “You don’t remember?”

  Her face went as white as the rag she still clutched.

  “He was my father.” Ambrose turned his stare then on Jesse, as if he were some piece in a puzzle the man was finally fitting together. “And I begin to suspect he was something to you as well.”

  Tamsen stood with Ambrose Kincaid in a chilly corner of the front room, while servants and members of Tipton’s household bustled around them, trying to look as if they weren’t eavesdropping as they passed.

  “I have the Trimbles in custody,” he informed her. “I mean to take them back to Virginia, with the assistance of a Carolina militia captain and a few of his men.”

  So that was what he’d been about, those hours he disappeared after helping them bring Cade to Tipton’s house for tending. Tamsen was glad to hear it but also curious. “However did you manage that?”

  “With surprising ease. I know them of old—they committed a crime against my family, back in Virginia. I’d agreed to stay quiet as to their whereabouts if they helped in searching for you. They found me soon after I’d left you here, thinking to present you as a prize—far too late, of course.”

  Since they’d stepped from the room where Cade and Jesse rested, Ambrose hadn’t taken his gaze from her. He stood now with his hat in hand, nervously rotating the brim. “Miss Littlejohn—”

  “Mrs. Bird,” she corrected. “And I think I know what you’re about to say. You didn’t know my stepfather meant me harm. You didn’t know he was the one who caused my mother’s death.” She sighed, not wanting to relive those memories, but here at last she had her chance to let the truth be known. So she told him. Everything. “I wanted only to escape him—at first. And Jesse was there, offering to help me, asking nothing in return.”

  Ambrose pressed his lips tight, a thin slash amidst the bronze stubble of his unshaven beard. “Yet you’ve given him everything.”

  She met his gaze unflinching. “Yes. And you need to understand,” she added. “I didn’t marry Jesse simply to elude you or to thwart my stepfather. I married him because I love him.”

  Acceptance struggled on Ambrose’s face. “I wish I might have been the one to offer you the help you needed. Had I but known. Had I understood …” He swallowed hard, as if the loss of her was a stone going down. “I hope one day you
will find it in your good heart to forgive me.”

  “For shooting Mr. Parrish?” she asked in surprise. “His brutality and neglect killed my mother. He held me prisoner, meant to kill me as well since he couldn’t silence me any other way.”

  Ambrose shuddered. “You mistake me. I meant can you forgive my making it possible for the man ever to find you again. For the distress I’ve caused you in aiding his pursuit. And for encouraging the Trimbles to aid us. Not that I enlisted them to harm you in any way,” he hastened to add as she drew breath to respond. “Such was never my intention. Please know that even at the start, when your mother was found dead and you vanished from Morganton, I wanted foremost to see you safe, and justice—as I understood its need—served.”

  Not blind to the sincerity in his eyes, Tamsen relaxed in his presence for the first time. Though she hadn’t believed he would tear her from this refuge and spirit her back over the mountains, it had taken courage to stand and face him alone.

  On the heels of Ambrose’s enigmatic comment concerning Collin Kincaid, Jesse’s father had awakened and again grown agitated at the sight of him. Despite Jesse’s protests, she’d herded Ambrose from the room, leaving the door wide between them. She glanced now at that doorway, longing to be back with them.

  “I believe you,” she told him. “But you said my safety was your foremost concern. Had you others?”

  Ambrose rubbed a hand across his mouth, regret tormenting his eyes. At first she thought he didn’t mean to answer her, then he blurted, “Could you truly be in ignorance of the spell you cast upon me at our meeting? Your beauty, your charm, those eyes of yours dark enough to drown a man … I was so lost to you that I was easily persuaded you’d been borne away against your will by a half-savage stranger, the same who slew your mother to get at you. There was no mountain I wouldn’t have crossed, no danger faced, to see you restored—to me, I had thought.”

  Tamsen blinked, not immune to such words, though they couldn’t touch her as perhaps their speaker hoped they might. She fixed on the salient point, saying as gently as she could, “The only true peril was the one you brought Overmountain with you.” Seeing the clench of his jaw as he absorbed her words, she added, “But in the end, you accomplished what you set out to do.”

  The guilt that haunted his eyes wasn’t banished. “Yet how near a thing it was.”

  Tamsen closed her own briefly, remembering Mr. Parrish, the snow, the pistol, the blood—then she pushed the images from her mind, distracting herself with a question needing to be asked. What had Ambrose meant, moments ago in the room with Jesse and Cade, by that comment about his father?

  Before she could gather her thoughts, the man raised a question of his own. “Your husband … his name is Jesse Bird?”

  Frowning, Tamsen opened her eyes, puzzled that he should need to ask. “Yes, Mr. Kincaid. I’ve said so.”

  “And the Indian. He’s your husband’s father?”

  “Cade is his adopted father. Jesse was taken from his family’s cabin when he was small, little more than a baby.”

  “Taken?”

  “By Shawnees.” When Ambrose’s eyes darted toward the bedchamber, Tamsen hurried to add, “Cade wasn’t one of them. He’s Lenape—Delaware. I’m not sure why, but he came to be adopted by the Shawnees too, at the same town where Jesse was living. When Jesse was ten years old, Cade brought him away from the Shawnees. They’ve lived west of the mountains since.”

  Rather than satisfy Ambrose’s curiosity, her answer seemed to deepen it. “From where was he—your husband—taken as a child? Do you know?”

  “Somewhere in the mountains east of here. Jesse has no memory of his parents. They died in a fire.”

  Surprise flared in the man’s blue eyes. “A fire? Then Bird is some sort of Indian name?”

  “It was the name of settlers who helped them after they left the Shawnees. Cade sort of borrowed the name of Jesse Bird. Before that, Jesse was called by a Shawnee name. It’s the first he can recall.”

  Ambrose’s brow was furrowed, as if with great concentration. “Did he—Cade—know your husband before he found him among the Shawnees?”

  “I don’t think so. Mr. Kincaid, why so many questions?” If he meant to disparage Jesse’s upbringing, persuade her of his unsuitability as a husband, it was far too late for such tactics. She opened her mouth to tell him so, but Ambrose shook his head, abruptly dismissing the topic.

  “ ’Tis enough for the moment to know you are free of constraint.” Despite his words, there was something in his eyes, something he was less eager to reveal but seemed compelled to do so. “There is another matter,” he began, then paused as two women passed behind him, carrying linens. “There is another matter that has long weighed on me. I’m aware of the poor impression I made in Morganton because of Toby—my slave.” Color stained his cheeks. “When I saw how you looked at me afterward, it was my mother I saw, looking out from your eyes as she once looked at my father, in his drunken rages. I was undone. Undone that I’d lost control and struck a man who’d served me faithfully since childhood, and done so in your presence. Believe me when I say that such behavior isn’t habit with me.”

  The unlooked-for confession both touched and intrigued her. “Why did you do it?”

  The query took him aback. “I—I wanted desperately for you to be at ease with me, untroubled in mind at our first meeting. When Toby approached, I took offense for your sake.”

  “Did you think me such a fragile flower?” Tamsen hid her amusement as his gaze passed over her now, doubtless drawing comparisons. And if he was, whose fault was that? All he’d ever seen of her were those fragile petals, never the woman within—save in those moments before she stormed out of the ordinary. Perhaps he understood that now.

  But instead of giving answer, he put a hand into his coat and withdrew an object, small and oval framed. “This belongs to you.”

  Tamsen took the tiny portrait and gazed at the girl staring back at her. “Am I so very changed?”

  “Not all for the worse.” When she looked up, biting her lip to keep from smiling, Ambrose reddened to the tips of his ears. “That is to say—”

  “All for the better, from where I stand,” she said, before he could sputter the needless apology. It swelled her heart with gladness to know she was no longer the sort of woman to fire his imagination with dreams of wedded bliss. That woman had possessed little more substance than the portrait she now held.

  Regaining self-possession, Ambrose said, “I have also in my keeping a box to which I believe you have claim. ’Tis with my saddlebags, in Tipton’s stable. Its contents have been unmolested. I have Seth Trimble’s word on that, for what it’s worth, but I shall let you be the judge.” He started to raise his hat to his head but checked the action. “It may please you to know that, after your rather dramatic exit that day in Morganton, I saw straightaway to Toby’s concern.”

  “Your servant who was attacked. What happened to her, if I may ask?”

  “I sent her home to Virginia in the care of a physician, with Toby. After some necessary issues are seen to regarding the Trimbles, I shall look forward to joining them at Long Meadows.”

  Long Meadows. His beloved plantation, where she would never be mistress—thank the Almighty and His ministering angels.

  Minding her manners, she curtsied to the man, wondering if she was the first woman ever to do so wearing deerskins. “I really must return to my husband. Please bring my mother’s box to me here before you take your leave.” She turned to go.

  “Mrs. Bird, there is yet a matter—a troubling matter—the particulars of which I feel compelled to acquaint you with. The injured man, the half-breed your husband calls his father …”

  She smiled patiently as she turned back. “Yes? What about him?”

  Ambrose’s ruddy brows drew tight as a servant approached with a chamber pot, entered the sick room, and shut the door behind her. Tamsen would have moved to open it again—for Jesse’s peace of mind—had Ambr
ose not said what he did next.

  “I cannot yet be certain, but I believe he is not who he claims to be.”

  Cade was resting quietly with Ambrose gone from the room. It was anything but quiet in Jesse’s soul. Or his flesh. The wound in his leg was a fire, wavering betwixt a crackle and a roar depending on if he moved. The floor hurt his backside, making him want to move. He fretted for Tamsen, beyond the closed door with Kincaid. But it was his pa who claimed his deepest anxiety.

  Reaching for the trust his wife had professed in prayer, Jesse laid his hand across the callused brown fingers that had taught him to handle bow and rifle, to fish and hunt, build a cabin, work a hide, gentle a horse, everything a boy needed to know to be a man in that world they’d straddled, somewhere between white and red.

  “Don’t leave me, Pa.” He stared at Cade’s face, its bones sharp beneath the skin, and willed him both to drink of healing sleep and to wake and speak as a man in possession of wits and strength. Cade’s lips stayed taut with pain, the deep-set eyelids closed in their hollows. Brows that normally soared hunched like ravens’ wings in the cold.

  No matter he wasn’t blood of his blood, what Jesse felt for this man ran as deep as any son could feel for a father. Maybe more. Cade had had every choice in the world but to take on the raising of him, yet he’d done it. With all his heart.

  God Almighty forgive him, Jesse thought, for every time he’d yearned for more. All those nights he’d lain awake, summoning buried memories. Cade was his pa. He needed no other. Just let him pull through so I can tell him so—and ask what in the nation he’d meant by calling out to Ambrose Kincaid by the name of that man’s father.

  Jesse couldn’t wrangle sense out of it. They’d never met Collin Kincaid. They’d had no connection to his red-haired son before Tamsen. And what was his wife doing out there, still talking to the man? He couldn’t have forced her out of Tipton’s house, not without Jesse hearing it. She’d have made a scene, fought him like the little wildcat Bears had named her.