The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn

by Benton, Lori

  The room was devoid of servants, the physician moved on to deal with casualties elsewhere. The last to come and go had been a girl with a chamber pot. Said pot sat by the door, reeking of troubled bowels. Only the wounded lay about, adding the stink of blood and sweat to the fetid air.

  Who could heal in such quarters? Soon as he could move about, he’d go into the wood, build a shelter and a clean fire, and bring Cade out by stretcher. Open air. That’s what was needed. Long as they didn’t freeze to death, and why didn’t Tamsen come back?

  He determined to get to his feet and find her.

  Moments later, drenched in pain and clammy sweat, having made little headway toward the goal, the door opened and she entered. Sight of her lifted his heart, but there was trouble in her face. He eased back down, wincing as his leg met the floor.

  “Where’s your lovesick suitor?”

  His teasing fell flat. She crossed to him, unsmiling, and knelt. “Seeing to the Trimbles. He’s taken them into custody.” Her voice turned wary. “Jesse?”

  Before he could reply, another voice, one a mere thread, said his name. “Jesse … am I dying?”

  “Pa.” Jesse leaned close, fussing with the blanket drawn up to the linen bindings at Cade’s chest and shoulder. “You got shot, but nothing vital’s hit. Reckon in a day or two, we’ll—”

  “I have to tell you … before it’s too late.”

  Jesse shook his head. “You’re going to live, you hear me? But you need to rest. Whatever it is can wait.” Talk of dying gutted him, as did those eyes staring up, drinking him in as if for the last time.

  “Jesse?” Cade’s fingers fumbled for his.

  Jesse held them tight. “Yeah, Pa?”

  “Hush.”

  Something betwixt a laugh and a sob stuck fast in Jesse’s throat. Tamsen squeezed his arm. Tears were on her cheeks.

  “Fighting you is costing him more than if you just let him talk, Jesse. And you need to hear what I think he has to say.” She touched Cade’s arm, drawing his gaze. “It’s about Collin?”

  Cade swallowed. Nodded.

  Jesse closed his eyes. He burned to know what his pa had to do with Kincaid but feared what the telling would cost. “All right. Say it. But set to bleeding again and next thing I’m binding is your mouth.”

  “Think you can take me … with that bum leg?” Cade countered, and Jesse beamed as though he’d risen up to dance a jig.

  Cade’s lips moved again in silence, mouthing a word. Water. Jesse lifted his head to let him sip from a horn cup, then eased him back. Cade’s eyes never left his face, the look in them beseeching. It hollowed Jesse with dread.

  “You aren’t Jesse Bird,” he said.

  Jesse stared, then forced a chuckle. “That’s no news. You’re the one borrowed the name, remember?”

  Cade blinked, languid and slow, as if even such small movement taxed him. “Time I gave you back … your rightful one.”

  Tamsen gripped his arm again. Jesse didn’t look aside at her. “My what?”

  “The name you were born with. Alexander … John … McLachlan … Kincaid.”

  Jesse waited, but there was no mistaking what he’d heard. Cade had formed each name with care, a strained breath drawn between. He looked at Tamsen. He looked back at his pa. A buzzing was in his head.

  “Who told you that’s my name?” He knew he’d asked the question, but the voice hadn’t sounded anything like his.

  “Your father told me … the day you were born.” Cade swallowed again, lips cracking, showing tiny threads of blood. “It was Collin Kincaid …”

  “Collin Kincaid was my father?”

  “No. He … killed your father. He killed Bryan and Fiona.”

  Cade’s voice had faded to a rasp. He needed water, but Jesse couldn’t move. It was Tamsen who pressed the cup to his parched lips. When he lay back again, blood spotted the bindings around his chest and shoulder. Stop now, Jesse wanted to say. Don’t say any more.

  What he heard himself say was, “That was their names? My parents?”

  “Bryan and Fiona Kincaid. For nearly three years you were theirs … Alex.”

  Rooted to the floor, Jesse stared into the void that was his life before the Shawnees, waiting for a spark, a memory, a bridge for him to cross back to that name. Alexander John McLachlan Kincaid …

  It was the name of a stranger.

  Tamsen touched Cade’s brow. “It’s true, then, what Ambrose told me. Collin was Bryan’s brother. Jesse and Ambrose are cousins.”

  “It’s true.”

  Jesse could half-believe his pa was raving mad with wound fever. “How could you know this? How did you know these people—my parents?”

  Cade’s eyes closed. His face went so still, for a terrible moment Jesse thought he was gone. Then the linen-bound chest rose. The throat cords worked. Jesse leaned forward. Suspended. Waiting.

  “Beg pardon, suh.”

  Startled, Jesse turned at the voice behind them. Ambrose stood in the doorway, one of Tipton’s slaves attempting to edge past him with a steaming pan. The man stepped aside, laying his hat and greatcoat on the chair he’d vacated earlier.

  Jesse said, “How long you been standing there listening?”

  While the maid picked her way past sleeping wounded and set down her pan on the hearth, Ambrose came to stand at the foot of Cade’s pallet. He made no answer to Jesse’s query.

  Instead, he said, “Theophilus?”

  Jesse gave serious consideration to whether he might be delirious from fever and dreaming this entire conversation, for there was his pa gazing up at Ambrose Kincaid, nodding as if this was making all the sense in the world. He braced himself, hands flat against the floor in case that decided to tilt catawampus next.

  “Who in blazes is Theophilus?”

  Ambrose pushed aside his coat and sat, meeting Jesse’s gaze square on, looking almost as dazed as Jesse felt. But far less bewildered. He was slow to speak, as if needing to gather his thoughts.

  “To answer your initial question, I heard enough to confirm the suspicion raised when I first saw your face, again when I heard the name of my father spoken in this room.”

  Jesse’s brows pinched tight. “What suspicion?”

  Tamsen placed her hand over his. “Jesse, let him tell it.”

  He took his wife by the wrist and felt her pulse hammering away, though he didn’t think it was with fear. His own blood was running wild, quickening the more as Ambrose raked him with that blue-burning gaze of his.

  “You strongly resemble your mother,” he said. “But there’s enough of Uncle Bryan in you that I can see the likeness. I never met them, of course. But in the summer parlor at Long Meadows is a wedding portrait of Bryan Kincaid and his bride, Fiona McLachlan. And as well as bearing his name, Alexander, you have our grandfather’s eyes. As does he,” Ambrose added, bending a nod at Cade.

  Our grandfather. The shock of it shuddered through Jesse’s bones. “Are you telling me he’s not fever-mad? You and me—we’re kin?”

  Ambrose’s mouth twitched. “ ’Tis unexpected, I grant you, and no doubt more than a little confounding.” He glanced at Tamsen. “Your wife may recall that I possess a certain failing when it comes to recounting familial histories. Permit me to start at the beginning, as best I know it?”

  While Ambrose spoke, Jesse watched the Tipton’s maid bend for the chamber pot by the door and, nose wrinkled, flash them a curious look before taking the smelly thing from the room. Robbed of her, he fixed his stare on Cade, who before his eyes was transforming from the man he’d called his pa purely out of affection and respect into his genuine half uncle, born to a Delaware slave at Long Meadows, a plantation on the James River, fathered by her master, Alexander Kincaid—born a slave and given the outlandish name of Theophilus by his mother.

  “Theophilus—Theo, he was called—and Bryan were friends from the time Theo was a tad, toddling about the summer kitchen, where his mother served. ’Twas no secret he was their brother, b
ut Collin despised him—and Bryan, for not rejecting their connection. Then Fiona McLachlan came into their lives. Whatever brotherly bond Bryan and Collin retained was demolished when she fell in love with Bryan. By then my father was well on his way to becoming the profligate drunk he remained until the end of his days.”

  “I saw … his grave.”

  They all started at Cade’s soft words.

  “You did?” Jesse turned sharply in query. “How? When?”

  “When I left you.” Cade’s eyes flicked to Tamsen, warming in a way that flooded Jesse’s soul with comfort, even as his mind reeled. “You talked of settling … farming. Before I could trust in your safety, I needed to know.”

  “You’ve been to Long Meadows?” Ambrose broke in. “Does my grandfather know?”

  Cade’s head moved across the pallet. “Slaves hid me … I wasn’t seen.”

  “Is this why we’ve been so long rootless?” Jesse demanded. “You didn’t think it was safe to stay put for long with Collin Kincaid alive?” Though he nodded, Cade was clearly losing strength. Jesse looked at Ambrose in his chair. “Make me understand.”

  “I shall do my best.” Ambrose looked from face to face, the thoughts behind his eyes assessing, questioning, as if he was still piecing together the truth from the scraps of history they each possessed. He raised a hand to worry the hairs at the base of his neck. “As Grandfather tells it, when Fiona married Bryan, my father lost what little restraint upon his wickedness he still possessed. Suffice it to say, he made life unpleasant enough that Bryan and Fiona fled Long Meadows. They left Virginia, choosing to homestead near the headwaters of the Yadkin River, in North Carolina. They took Theo with them. He was young still, fifteen, sixteen years of age. Grandfather agreed it was for the best. Collin would have made his life a hell, without Bryan to protect him. Do I have it right thus far?”

  Jesse realized Cade was listening closely. His body must have been wracked with pain, far worse than Jesse’s own. “Pa? You all right? We can stop this if you need to.”

  Golden hawk’s eyes found him, eyes folk said were so like Jesse’s, and what were the odds, them being no true kin?

  “Jesse,” Cade said on a shallow breath, and for an instant he was still Jesse. And Cade was Cade. Simple, sorted, and plain.

  But it wasn’t, and Jesse didn’t know if it was anger roiling inside him, or wonderment, or just the dumbfounding shock of it all. He stared at the melting rivulets of snow on Kincaid’s riding boots, wanting to lie down and sleep for a week and wake up Jesse Bird again. Yet a part of him was beginning to be … not used to the idea of Alex Kincaid. Not liking it. But intrigued.

  “Is there more to this tale?”

  “Until I heard my father’s name spoken here,” Ambrose replied, “I’d have had no good answer to that question. Grandfather knows Bryan and Fiona died when their cabin burnt, some twenty years ago, for their land was left to Collin, in the event Bryan died without an heir. Bryan told Grandfather so in a letter not long after they established themselves in Carolina. I’ve always wondered why Bryan did so, given their history—an attempt at reconciliation, even if it would be from the grave, perhaps? Regardless, how the fire started and what happened to the child Grandfather alone knew had been born remained a mystery. Grandfather never told me I’d had a cousin until Collin’s death. He believed the child—a son, his namesake—must have perished in the fire as well. But here you are.”

  Ambrose’s gaze shifted from Jesse to Cade. He leaned forward in the chair, expression braced. “So it is true, then. My father started the fire?”

  Cade’s eyes answered, even before he added, “Covering … the murders.”

  Jesse felt a moment’s pity for Ambrose as something in the man’s face shattered.

  “I’d dared to hope … but I knew him too well, too long. Did you see it done?”

  “I was … running traps … came home to ashes.” Cade’s eyes found Jesse again. “I combed that cabin … every cinder … every bone. You weren’t there.”

  “But you found the tracks,” Jesse said. “The tracks of the Shawnees that came on the scene, who took me. That’s why you came to Cornstalk’s Town and ran the gauntlet, became Shawnee? For me?”

  “For you … for Bryan. He gave me freedom.”

  Of course. Ambrose had just told him Cade—or Theo—had been born to a slave. That would have made Cade a slave too. Bryan had given his half brother his freedom, as well as friendship. “How’d you know it was Collin who killed them if you weren’t there to see it?”

  “You know this part,” Cade reminded him. “Shawnees … told of the man … what he did before they found you. By their words I knew him. I wanted to find him … kill him. But couldn’t risk … losing you again. So I stayed with you at Cornstalk’s Town.”

  Jesse tried to hold back the question, but it broke free. “Why didn’t you tell me this years ago? After we left the Shawnees. You could’ve told me then.”

  The pain in Cade’s eyes deepened. “Remember … after we fled the Long Knife hunters, you broke your leg? I left you with those settlers …”

  “I mind it.” He’d been out of his head with pain and grief, thinking the warrior he knew as Wolf-Alone had abandoned him to white strangers. It had been a week, at most, then Wolf-Alone returned, calling himself Cade.

  Kincaid. “You took on your father’s name? Why? Why after everything?”

  “It was … Bryan’s name too.” Cade paused, swallowed, went on. “When I left you with the Birds, I went to Long Meadows … Needed to know … did Collin live? Could he learn of us … hunt us down?”

  “To cover his murders, like my stepfather tried to do,” Tamsen said.

  Cade met her gaze, understanding passing between them. “I saw him … drunk in the stable. By then … I pitied him. I let him be.”

  Ambrose gave an ungentlemanly snort. “I cannot begin to guess how many times Grandfather and I found him so. Collin Kincaid cast his shadow over every soul he touched.”

  “Yet he sired a son … with a good heart.”

  Cade’s words took Ambrose by evident surprise. And pleasure.

  Jesse frowned, unsure he was willing to extend such favor to the man. “Was keeping shed of Collin Kincaid the only reason you didn’t tell me?”

  Cade shook his head. “I was waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “To see the man you’d make. A man who could forgive … or one to seek revenge.”

  “You saying I’m come up short?”

  Cade’s eyes took on a sheen. “You are your father’s son,” he said, with such pride in his exhausted gaze that Jesse couldn’t speak a word past the tightening in his throat. “If I was wrong … holding the truth this long …”

  “You made the right choice, Uncle Theo.”

  Jesse glanced at Ambrose, startled, then annoyed, at the familiar address. It rankled, like having his hair rubbed against the grain. It felt like …

  Of all things. He was jealous of the man. Jealous of his having genuine claim on Cade, and Tamsen too—not because of some misguided obsession with her, but on account of him, his own blood that linked them.

  With his next breath, he knew the foolishness of such thinking and saw instead another hand at work, one that had been weaving their paths for good. Not just Tamsen’s and his. Cade’s. Ambrose’s too. Even that unknown grandfather for whom he was some sort of namesake. That man who’d lost his sons, one to murder, one to drink and darkness. And a third son, born a slave, whose fate remained to him unknown.

  “And I suspect,” Ambrose continued, still addressing Cade, “you’ve been thinking all these months I’d picked up where my father left off. That I was bent on a like persecution, pursuing you all as I’ve done.”

  “I was wrong.” Cade closed his eyes, beyond exhausted now. “I pray there’s time … for both of you … to forgive me.”

  “No.” Tears were starting, but Jesse didn’t care. “I don’t need time. He’s right, is Ambrose. You’d
reason enough not to tell me. You were trying to protect me, like you’ve always done. Tamsen too, because I chose her, love her. And even if you are my uncle, I mean to go on calling you Pa. If that’s all right.”

  A breath went out of Cade’s parted lips, curving them in the faintest of smiles. But he didn’t speak, and for another wrenching moment, Jesse feared he was that quickly gone.

  But he only slept.

  The day passed over them, and the snow fell, but whatever lingering concern with the Franklin skirmish that might have troubled the Tipton household was kept at arm’s length by Ambrose Kincaid, who came and went throughout the day, making sure their needs were met. The rest of the battle wounded had been removed by kin, leaving Tamsen, Cade, and Jesse in relative solitude in the small parlor while the house was put back in order. They were offered food. Bandages and dressings were changed. Cade slept, woke, talked a little, slept and woke again. Though he mightn’t have realized it yet, Tamsen could see that with each waking, the spark of life in him stretched taller, greedy as a candle flame reaching for the air that sustains it.

  That air was Jesse, his brother’s son. His son, in all the ways that mattered. In the silence of her heart, Tamsen pondered all she’d seen and heard and was certain what had turned the tide between life and death for Cade had been Jesse’s swift forgiveness, his love. Aiding to a lesser degree—one of the greatest ironies she’d ever witnessed—was the presence of Ambrose Kincaid.

  Watching them from across the room—Cade propped now on a bolster, Jesse and Ambrose seated on the floor beside his pallet—she could almost see the bond of kinship widening to embrace one until this day counted an enemy, as together Cade and Ambrose wove a picture for Jesse of his heritage. And as the shock of revelation gave way to acceptance, Jesse drank it in and asked for more, until the cup of his past was spilling over.

  Tamsen watched, and she pondered, and the image that kept coming to her was that of a young woman’s brown hands weaving … weaving many-colored canes into a basket that was really two baskets, just as their identities—hers and Jesse’s—had proved to be two, one nestled inside the other, joined by the skillful hands of the Master Weaver.