Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  She pulled back from his scrutiny, the wide curve of her mouth pressed flat.

  Disconcerted in his own right, Neil raised the gourd cup to his nose and sniffed. Salix … willow bark. The woman had some knowledge of herbs. He found that reassuring. He sipped the bitter tea, grimacing reflexively as his ministering angel backed away.

  “Would ye be so kind,” he ventured, “as to bring in my saddlebags? I’ll be needing some things out of them if I’m to deal with this arm proper-like.”

  That got him another blank stare. “Saddlebags?”

  “Aye. The ones on my horse.”

  “Horse?”

  For an instant, he wondered if this—the woman, the cabin, the cup in his hand—was a laudanum-induced dream he was having. Why else would she commence to parroting his words as though she didn’t comprehend them, when they’d been having reasonably fluent discourse a moment ago? Was it his accent? He’d taken pains to tamp it down some in recent years, but it did come creeping back thick as Highland mist if he didn’t watch it.

  “Did you not see a horse where you found me? A bay roan. Answers to the name of Seamus.”

  “There was no horse.”

  Her certainty was unfeigned, and he felt too wretched to be anything but full waking. Dash it all, his horse must have strayed after he fell.

  Neil felt a plummeting in his gut as the magnitude of his situation drew clear. By necessity, he’d traveled light into the back country, but there were things in his saddlebags he could ill afford to lose. His medical case. The field desk and its contents. His cooking gear. The plant press!

  He stifled a groan. Was this the end then? Was his hope of creating a collection of botanical drawings of the Adirondack Mountains—in the spirit of Catesby’s work, and Colden, and the Bartrams—to terminate in such ignominious defeat? Must he return to Philadelphia with his tail between his legs … if he could find the courage to show his face to the Philosophical Society members and explain why their long-suffering faith in him—not to mention their monetary investment—had been woefully misplaced?

  And he would be making that journey afoot, without Seamus. He’d never been much of a horseman, but he’d managed to acquire a fondness for the roan—not a mutual regard, apparently. Still, the horse ought to have been his first thought, not the last.

  “Lord Almighty, he’s Thy creature. I’ll trust Thee to watch o’er him and lead him, if not back to me, then to someone who’ll ken his worth and treat him kindly. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ …” He looked up to find the woman staring.

  “Amen,” she finished for him, as if in startled reflex.

  He gave her a half-embarrassed smile. “I’ve fallen into the habit of conversing aloud with the Almighty, alone on the trail.” When that garnered no response, he added, “Well, then. Since I havena got my own supplies to hand, I’ll need something for bandaging. Splinting as well.”

  “I will find sticks for the splinting.”

  Before he could reply, the woman ducked out of the cabin. Cap lifted his head, looking after her, then settled back with a sigh.

  “You’ve reached an understanding with yon woman, I see.” Neil supposed that was reassuring too, but was glad for her departure. What had to be done next was a thing best attempted in solitude, by chance the need to emit unmanly noises got the better of him.

  “Physician, heal thyself,” he muttered, and clenched his teeth.

  A cracked distal radius was his best diagnosis, though for all his stoic teeth grinding as he probed the inner workings of his wrist, it might only be a bad sprain, absent an obviously misaligned bone. Since the treatments were identical—prolonged immobility—he saw no reason to prolong the agony too, when his arm already felt jammed through with a heated poker in place of bone. He was near to swooning from the pain when he felt the woman’s hands easing him back to lie down again.

  “You ought to have waited.”

  “ ’Tis no matter,” he said, sounding weak as a half-drowned kitten. “I’m a physician—or trained as one.”

  The spinning cabin settled into place. He was between the woman and the fire now, its light falling full on her face. Neil found himself staring again, at her eyes.

  They were the most peculiar he had ever seen. Both were large and thick lashed, well set—at the same slight tilt as her cheekbones—but otherwise they might have belonged to different faces. While the left was hazel, predominantly green, the right was a warm, vivid brown, nearly the same shade as her hair.

  He tried but couldn’t look away from them.

  As if accustomed to such rude gaping—and not best pleased by it—the woman frowned and looked away. “I have the sticks for splinting. We should make a sling for the arm, yes?”

  She started to rise, but Neil sat up, and despite his spinning head managed to grasp her wrist. “Aye, but wait. I’ve not asked your name.”

  She stiffened at his touch, and he released her.

  “I am called—” She paused, then with a little huff of breath said, “I am Wilhelmina, daughter of Dieter Obenchain.”

  She had named her father but not a husband. “ ’Tis Miss Obenchain, is it?”

  She leveled a look at him. “You may call me Willa. I expect you also have a name?”

  Heat touched his cheeks again. “Neil MacGregor, your servant, ma’am. At least in time I mean to be, to repay your kindness.” He reached to doff his hat, felt only hair, and realized only then he’d lost it—hat and head, too, it must appear.

  The gesture brought faint amusement to the woman’s mismatched eyes. “Then let us see to your mending, Neil MacGregor.”

  Wrist wrapped and splinted, Neil sat cross-legged on the elk hide spread near the hearth and watched the preparation of a meal—if a handful of parched corn and two cornmeal cakes cooked in the ashes counted as such. Provisions were scarce, it seemed.

  He’d tried without success to ascertain the cabin’s function. The structure was nearly bereft of plenishings. No tables, no chairs, no presses or shelves or even trunks. No kegs or barrels lined the walls. There was a bench. A kettle over the hearth. A musket leaned in the corner, beside the travois and that capacious basket from which the woman had removed the bits and things needed to make the cakes she now transferred to the hearthstones.

  The smell of them baking stirred his empty wame, making him think with longing of the provisions lost with the horse: a slab of cured bacon; a sack of flour, another of beans; sugar, salt, dried apples, and cherries. Coffee. All of which could be replaced but … his field equipment. His horse.

  He closed his eyes, caught in a thicket far more tangled than the one Willa Obenchain had extracted him from. Without the horse and his equipment, with weeks lost because of his injury, he saw no way forward. Only back. He promptly took the matter up with the Almighty. I dinna understand why You let me come so far, only to end it so. If You didna want me out here, doing this, why did Ye not take away the passion for it, like I asked, over and again, all the months I waited out the war and hoped for healing? Have You some other path for me, after all? If so, I’d be much obliged did You spell it out for me.

  He waited, but the Almighty made no answer to his prayer born more of frustration than faith. Then he realized how he’d phrased that last bit in his mind and didn’t ken whether to laugh or groan. All right, then. I didna mean literally spell it for me. How about simply showing me, when You’re ready?

  He’d been so sure his season of waiting had passed.

  Seeking distraction before he worked himself into another headache, he opened his eyes and blurted, “I take it this cabin isna in general use?”

  Squatting before the hearth, Willa Obenchain glanced at him. “It is. Now.”

  Unsure what to make of that, he noticed the bundled flowers on the hearthstones. Even dried, he knew them. Trillium erectum. Erythronium americanum. He ran Linnaeus’s classifications through his mind by habit—and necessity—watching her turn the cakes. “Have you only just arrived yourself?”
/>
  “Hen—yes. I found you in my path.” She sighed as she spoke that last.

  “You were alone when ye found me?”

  “Yes.”

  And his horse had strayed. He cast another look at the basket, noticing for the first time its corded tumpline. If she’d borne that large a burden, it was likely she had no pack animal of her own.

  Realization dawned at last. The woman, burdened on a journey from … somewhere … had found him unconscious, built the travois, put him on it, and hauled him and her burden through the wilderness to this cabin. How many miles?

  One or a dozen, it was a stunning feat of endurance and strength.

  “I left the Mohawk River near Johnstown,” he said, hoping to gauge exactly where in the state of New York he was at present, “and traveled north for a bit, then west.” And found as yet small indication of reoccupation of that frontier landscape, though plenty of burned homesteads, razed by one side or another in the late war between the former colonies and the Crown. “Are we near a settlement? A fort, maybe?” They could not be as far south as Fort Dayton. He could not credit her having brought him that far.

  Willa set the corn cakes on the bench between them. “There was a settlement, Shiloh, about three miles from here. I do not know what is there now, if anything.”

  He’d never heard of Shiloh. “What river does it lie on?”

  “No river. Black Kettle Creek. That flows into the West Canada.” Willa handed him his canteen, which had been filled.

  West Canada Creek. He’d never been that far west but recognized the name from maps he’d poured over years ago, when he first conceived of this venture.

  He thanked Willa Obenchain for the food and bowed his head to thank the Almighty. When he raised it again, she was across the cabin, rummaging through her basket. He realized the cakes and parched corn were meant solely for him. Had she eaten before he woke?

  He broke one of the cakes and, behind her back, tossed half of it to Cap. The collie gulped it down and stared at him, hopeful. Neil took a bite and closed his eyes, washed in comfort by its simple warmth and taste.

  Across the cabin, Willa stood and faced him. “I am thinking of the horse. I did not know to look for it. Perhaps it did not stray far. There could be signs to follow.” She took up the musket, slung a powder horn and shot bag over her shoulder, and was making for the cabin door before she finished speaking.

  Neil choked down his mouthful. “You’re going now? Back to where ye found me?”

  She set her lips in resolve. “The longer the horse strays, the less chance I will have to track it.”

  “You can do that?”

  Her level stare was answer enough. “I will be back by nightfall.”

  She opened the cabin door. Cap bounded up and rushed out past her. She started to call the collie back, then looked at Neil, who shrugged. “He’ll be after his own supper.”

  She went out, shutting the door behind her.

  “Aye, then.” He let out his breath, chafing at his infirmities and at finding himself dependent on a stranger’s mercy—again. He was torn between the hope that she might find his horse, and chagrin that after everything else she’d done, she felt compelled to go back and look for it.

  For himself, he wanted a look at what lay beyond the cabin door. Perhaps it would tell him something about this woman who’d found him in her path, and where that path had led her. But he decided a rest wouldn’t come amiss. Besides, he already had a fair notion of what he’d find. Wherever she’d come from, wherever she’d brought him to, Willa Obenchain, daughter of Dieter, was alone.

  FOUR

  Behind the cabin near the woods’ edge stood a privy, ventilated as a corn crib and listing slightly to port, yet Neil MacGregor stepped from the structure with a prayer of thanksgiving on his lips. Thanking the Almighty for a privy, and the strength to reach it, doubtless was a prayer uncommon to men his age, but he’d learned to count his blessings where he found them. They seemed thin on the ground just now.

  The previous evening, while Willa Obenchain was out tracking his horse, he’d climbed a ladder propped to one side of the hearth and peered into a loft recess. Empty, like the room behind the central hearth. Opening a door at the side of the cabin, he’d found himself confronted by half a room open to the sky, containing a nanny goat, for which he’d obligingly gathered grass. He’d found a springhouse in the woods and filled his canteen and Willa’s kettle. He was back at the makeshift goat pen, holding the gourd cup for the animal to drink from, when he’d felt the sensation of being watched.

  Not a shadow moved out of place when he looked around, yet the feeling drove him back inside the cabin. Eventually, exhausted from the slight exertion, he’d slept, never hearing Willa’s return or her rising that morning. That she’d done both was evident. Another cornmeal cake waited on the hearth for his breakfast.

  He was embarrassed to have slept so long, but he was over the headache. Not even a twinge lingered at the back of his skull when he’d ventured out to the privy.

  The sun, just topping the trees, gilded the line of low ridges to the north of the clearing. Birds were busy in the brush, twittering and rustling. The air was chill, but with a softened edge that spoke of green things awakening. He was still in his shirtsleeves—his only surviving shirt, creased and grubby after his misadventure.

  He’d surmised by the absence of saddlebags that Willa’s search had proved fruitless. Or nearly so. Beside his meager breakfast, he’d found his three-cornered hat of black felt and his tin cup, along with an item that hadn’t been among his belongings. A book—or what had been a book. With its cover and pages pasted into a solid mass, by excessive water damage he guessed, its identity was as much a mystery as its origins. Though had the book been new with the smell of printer’s ink ripe on its pages, its identity would still have eluded him.

  Neil raised a hand to the scar on his brow. Blinding headaches weren’t the only brain-scrambling affliction the events attending that particular wound had left him to suffer. He closed his eyes briefly, refusing the self-pity that sought to fill him at the reminder that the written word was barred to him. He had learned to manage. Harder to shake was this new blow—the loss of his horse and supplies, and the crushing weight of the choice now facing him. Not really a choice, just a matter of when he’d bring himself to admit the inevitable. He’d learned to function with a damaged brain, but what was he meant to accomplish without the tools of his trade? Paint with a twig and his own life’s blood?

  If there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

  Neil took a deep breath, reminding himself to count the blessings and leave off the questioning. The Almighty hadn’t forsaken him. His fall into the laurels, his horse going astray—those events hadn’t gone unnoticed. Indeed, they’d been allowed to happen.

  So, then. He was thankful for the kindness of strangers … and their rickety privies.

  Visible from the present privy, the twin ruts of a track led off through a scrim of leafing trees to the west. The track passed through a swath of cleared ground before disappearing into deep woods. Leading, he presumed, to the settlement called Shiloh.

  Was that where Willa Obenchain had gone? And Cap with her? He hadn’t seen his dog since yesterday either.

  “Turncoat,” he muttered, but with amusement rather than annoyance. No surprise if the collie had latched onto the woman as the more engaging prospect at present.

  Or had it been the other way around?

  For the first time, it occurred to him to wonder if she had taken his horse, and now his dog, and gone off and left him here. He supposed he would suspect it, if it weren’t for the fact that her belongings, such as they were, were still in the cabin. Including the goat. Still, he realized he had no real reason to trust her … save what his gut—or mayhap his spirit—was telling him. That she did not mean him ill.

  He rubbed his bristled jaw, wishing for a shave. No chance of it, not with his razor bouncing about
the wilderness in the saddlebag of a riderless horse. Resigning himself to being temporarily bearded, he started for the cabin.

  The crack and crash of a large body moving through the nearby brush brought him up short.

  Deer? But the tumult was loud even for a deer. Did moose range that far south? He’d yet to see Alces americanus, save in the pages of other naturalists’ work.

  His breath quickened as, nearer the cabin, a screen of witch-hobble set to thrashing. The foliage parted. Through it stumbled not moose or deer or ungulate of any sort, but a woman. And not Willa. This woman was shorter and better fed—though she appeared to be of an age with his enigmatic hostess. Freeing herself from the brush, she shook out her petticoats, tucked up a stray blond curl and straightened her cap, then sprinted to the porch, hidden from his view from behind the cabin.

  He heard her calling, “Is it you? Are you here? Willa!”

  Neil rounded the cabin’s porch as the woman stepped outside again. She halted at the sight of him, wide eyed and pink cheeked.

  “You aren’t Willa,” she said with disappointment so acute Neil laughed.

  “Sorry, no. But I expect she’s about the place.”

  “Is she?” The woman took a step toward him. Her eyes were a light, clear blue, fixed on him in hope. “Willa Obenchain? It’s just we thought … It was understood she … But who are you?”

  “Anni?”

  Neither of them had noticed Willa’s approach. She stood at the head of the track, gripping a long-handled spade, musket slung at her back.

  “It can’t be,” the blond woman whispered. Despite the professed disbelief, she leaped from the porch and crossed the cabin yard to halt before Willa, who topped her by neck and head. “Let me see your eyes.”

  She cupped one of Willa’s sharp-boned cheeks and turned her face to the morning sun, then with a glad cry threw her arms around Willa’s long waist. “I barely recognize the rest of you, but I’d know those eyes anywhere!”

  If she’d been the taller of the two instead of the stouter, Neil was certain the woman would have hoisted Willa off her feet and spun her around.