by Burning Sky
Anni raised a hand but not to receive the coins. “No, Willa. I don’t want—But where did you come by the coin?”
It was a question she ought to have foreseen. Likely Anni was the only soul in Shiloh who knew just how destitute she’d been before the gifts of house plenishings and food—and Joseph’s arrival. She glanced aside at Neil, who’d drifted into conversation with Charles, out of earshot in the noise of the falls. He did not know about the coins. How was she to explain to Anni without revealing Joseph’s presence at the cabin?
Seeing her glance, Anni precluded the need. “Of course. Mr. MacGregor’s paying for his board. But, Willa, Charles and I weren’t the only ones to help—our blacksmith and his wife did as well. Besides, I never expected payment and don’t want any. Having you back with us is enough.”
“Thank you, Anni.” Willa smiled at her friend and slipped the coins back into her pocket, letting the misinterpretation stand. Bending for her basket, she leaned close and asked, “Where is Richard?”
“He rode home that morning from your farm, told the Colonel you’d come back, packed his saddlebags and left. He’s gone down to German Flats, to find the assessor.” Anni cast a look at the tumpline once again crossing Willa’s forehead, then resolutely linked their arms. “Never mind Richard. There’s me and the children, and Mr. MacGregor on our heels, and none of us mean to leave your side for a moment.”
NINE
A rumble of male laughter stilled as Willa entered the store. After the brightness outdoors, it was too dim for her to see the faces of those clustered at the far hearth—particularly when a veritable maze of barrels, tables, and shelves piled with trade goods rose between. She could smell them, their sour stink faint above the crowding odors of wood smoke and tobacco leaf, tallow and tanned hides. Heads craned and mutters rose, but Willa did not catch their words. It was too much to take in at once. Her eyes could find no rest among the clutter of iron, sacking, leather, cloth bolts, wood, glass, copper, tin, and fur.
She’d halted inside the door. Anni edged around her and with hands on hips surveyed the gaping faces emerging from the shadows. “Jack Keegan! Are you back there with that lot? You’ve folk here mean to give you custom.”
During Willa’s childhood, the store’s elderly Irish proprietor, John Keegan, had kept a tap for whiskey and other liquors in a side room. From its doorway now, a long-faced man emerged, ducking the lintel and wiping his hands on an apron.
“Brought me customers, have you, Mrs. Keppler?”
Though white sprinkled his sandy hair, Willa guessed this was Irish John’s son, who she was surprised to remember had gone away trapping down into the Ohio country when she was a small child.
Anni made introductions. “This is Willa Obenchain. And Neil MacGregor, from Philadelphia. Charles and I would be obliged if you’d tend to them.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” From under bushy brows, Keegan’s gaze settled on Willa. “Shall we be starting with you, then, Miss?”
“You mean all of us at once, Jack?”
The crude remark was buried under too much sniggering for Willa to tell which man in back made it, but it stood the hair on her neck erect, as into her mind rose tales of what the militia soldiers had done to the women of the People during raids through the Mohawk Valley and elsewhere.
Jack Keegan, seeing her white-knuckled grip on the musket slung at her shoulder, shot a glower toward the hearth. “I’ll have none of that talk with ladies present.”
“Aw, Jack. She ain’t no—”
“Shut yer trap,” Jack snapped, “or consider my tap shut for the day. That’s all I aim to say on the matter.”
“I’m here as well, let’s not forget!” Red faced with fury, Anni hustled her children back outside, telling them to wait on the porch.
Neil MacGregor’s anger was plain in the set of his jaw. He made as if to study the wares on display, in so doing putting himself between Willa and the men at the hearth. He caught Keegan’s eye. “Have you ink and quills, sir, and a razor and strop I might have a look at whilst ye see to Miss Obenchain?”
“Up front there, back of the counter.” Jack Keegan indicated the long table just opposite the door, then shot Willa a look of apology. He peered at her carrying basket, which rode too high for any but the tallest man to see that it was empty. “Now, Miss, have ye something to barter, or shall I start an account in my book?”
“I have coin to pay.” Hearing the edge in her voice, Willa struggled for calm. Despite her resolve, she tensed as a man she had not noticed seated behind a stack of pelts stood and stepped away from the others. Black haired, heavily muscled through the shoulders and arms, he clutched a worn hat as he stopped in front of Neil and spoke a stream of unintelligible words.
“Ciamar a tha thu, a MhicGriogair? Tha e math do choinneachadh. Is mise Gavan MacNab.”
“Chan eil mi ro dhona, tapa leat.” Neil’s response was equally incomprehensible, but the surprise and delight sweeping his features made Willa understand he’d found himself a fellow Scotsman. She’d never heard the Gaelic tongue before but assumed they had exchanged some manner of greeting.
“That’s Gavan MacNab,” Keegan interjected, grinning at her bewilderment. “Our blacksmith since … what, Gavan? Thirteen years back?”
“Aye,” Gavan MacNab agreed and, nodding at Willa, switched nimbly to English—or something near it, for the man’s accent was twice as thick as Neil MacGregor’s. “Ye maybe dinna mind me, lass, as I was new come to Shiloh the spring ye was carrit away, but I’d seen ye with Miss Anni here, lassies the pair o’ ye. Can I be telling my Leda ye’ve come to town? She wouldna be averse to speaking a word to ye, I’m thinking.”
A beat of silence passed before Willa realized a question had been asked her. She nodded, uncertain what she’d just agreed to, and was still frowning after the blacksmith’s departing back when Anni leaned close. “He meant his wife. It was Leda MacNab gave you the gown you’re wearing.”
Sturdy leather shoes, woolen stockings, candles, a pair of horn lanterns, scrap lead for bullets … cornmeal, maple sugar, soap … a kneading trough, two pewter plates … Willa filled the carrying basket and piled the overflow by the door. Yards of ticking, enough checked linsey-woolsey for a skirt and short gown, half-bleached linen for shifts … thread, needles, buttons, shears. No ribbon. No lace. One cap. Neil’s purchases, though few, added to the bulk so that when it came to reckoning the accounts, Willa wondered how they would get it all back to the farm.
Though no further comments were aimed at her directly, the men now playing draughts at the hearth spoke and laughed in low murmurs, and there was an ugliness to the sound that was difficult to ignore. Despite the blacksmith’s friendly overture, Neil MacGregor was subdued, as mindful as she of the thin barrier of civility maintained by the presence of Anni and the proprietor. Willa saw his surprise when she took from her pocket some of Joseph’s coins, but a warning glance prevented his asking about them.
Keegan had created separate accounts in his book. Neil bent over the counter to frown at the column indicated as his. A tide of red rose from the collar of his coat.
“Do you need for me to pay?” Willa asked, thinking it more than he could afford after his losses. She glanced at the total for the ink, quills, razor, and strop, and read it aloud. “I have enough,” she added, but Neil’s expression had cleared. He took from his satchel a small leather fold, picked out the exact amount of his purchases, and handed the few coins to Keegan.
Willa was still puzzling over his hesitation—or had it been confusion?—when behind her a high, wobbly Irish voice slurred out a name.
“Dagna Mehler?”
In a doorway behind the counter, beaming at Willa, stood a shrunken wisp of a woman with white hair pulled back from an age-spotted brow. Though one corner of her mouth now sagged and she was greatly aged, Willa recognized Maeve Keegan, old Irish John’s wife. She’d been a friend of her grandmother’s, the only friend Oma ever made in Shiloh.
“No, Ma.” Jack Keegan stepped between them. “This is Mrs. Mehler’s granddaughter, Willa Obenchain.”
“I know who it is!” the old woman snapped, as a thin string of drool moistened her chin. She was out from behind the counter faster than Jack could prevent, grasping Willa’s arm. “Dagna Mehler.”
Willa remembered Maeve Keegan as a robust and domineering figure. The change in her was shocking. It was like being clung to by a child.
“Jack, you gonna stand there letting an Indian hug on your ma?”
“Yeah, Jack. If she’s of that mind, send her back here. Wager she’s had worse than us.”
Resolve forgotten, Willa put the old woman away from her and faced the back of the store, where the crude comments had issued. “What do you know of me that you speak such things? You know nothing.”
“Richard Waring heard it from your own mouth,” one of the men at the game board shot back. “So don’t go pretending you kept yourself to yourself all them years with the Mohawks. You ain’t fit to walk that street out there, much less to come around doing trade in your begged-for gown. There’s other ways of doing trade for your likes.”
The words struck like stones, stealing the air from her lungs.
“That’s done it.” Neil MacGregor started for the back of the store, then stopped, his face going white. Jack Keegan had grasped his arm—the splinted one.
“Sorry.” He let go quick, then raised his voice to the back of the store. “Now didn’t I tell you boys—”
“You boys,” a third voice said, hurling like a lance across the cluttered trading post, a voice accustomed to authority. And obedience. “Abe, Dexter, Orram—clear out of here. Your game’s done, and it won’t be played again.”
Willa turned and felt a jolt drop down her spine. She thought for an instant it was Richard. It was not, though the man filling the doorway, blocking the daylight beyond, was very like his eldest son and would have been nearly as tall if he had not been bent to the support of a walking stick.
Colonel Elias Waring’s hair was still the dark gold she remembered, hardly touched by gray, though the years had lined his face with less mercy. He moved aside for the men to file out past him. When they were gone, he fixed her in his gaze.
“Wilhelmina. It seems you found your way back to us at last … God be thanked.” It was all he had time to say before he was nudged aside by someone intent on wedging past him, someone not the least intimidated by his presence—a handsome woman on the cusp of middle age, wearing a calico turban, its yellow a striking contrast to the brown of her face.
With a leap of heart, Willa recognized the Warings’ longtime housemaid, the slave who went by the name of Goodenough.
TEN
“Never mind the endless work needs doing for these Waring men—weren’t nothin’ keeping me homebound, not after Mister Crane come blatting that you was in town—and the Colonel knew better than to tell me different.”
Though an intermittent clang from the smithy punctuated Goodenough’s words, Colonel Waring was within earshot of her voice, kneeling to talk to his twin grandchildren in the smithy yard. The look she slanted him was met with a glance that hinted at amusement rather than reproof.
Goodenough turned her gleaming smile back to Willa. “Never thought to see a woman standing taller than my spare bones, but look at you now, growed up to prove me wrong.”
Though she recalled Goodenough—undisputed mistress of the Warings’ kitchen—as a towering figure from her childhood, Willa now topped her by three fingers’ width. Goodenough had measured it.
Of greater surprise was the long-legged, barefoot boy that had danced around Goodenough’s skirts while they shifted their purchases from the trading store to the log-built smithy, where Gavan MacNab’s soft-spoken wife added two wicker cages with a laying hen in each to the pile.
“This here’s my boy, Lemuel.” Goodenough pulled the child’s head to her hip. His skin was the color of smoked deer hide, and his brown hair curled loose like a floppy cap. “Tell Miss Willa how old you be, Lem.”
“Six year old, ma’am,” the boy said.
“Lem! Speak true.”
“Almost six,” the boy amended, with a grin so appealing even his mama laughed.
“Old enough to do a favor for me.” The Colonel rose to his feet, aided by his walking stick. “Think you can manage Cicero to the stable and back, Lem?”
The boy gazed up at his master, then at the big bay gelding hitched to a post outside the smithy, and nodded hard enough to bounce his curls.
“Then ride home and tell Mr. Crane we’ve need of the mule. You can lead it back, but be sure he puts the packsaddle on it first.”
“Yes sir, Colonel!”
Understanding dawned on Willa. “Do you mean the mule for me? Please … do not go to the trouble.”
“Actually,” Neil said, emerging from the smithy in time to hear her protest, “we’d be obliged by the loan. I dinna see how else we’ll be getting this lot back to the cabin,” he added, turning to her with a rueful glance at his injured arm.
Willa closed her lips over further protest. The Colonel swung Lemuel into the saddle. Small hands took up the reins, and heels far short of the stirrups kicked the bay into a jouncing trot along the track leading west from the village. Tiny on his high perch, the boy clung to the saddle with knees and dirty toes.
“He was on the back of a pony nigh afore he could walk,” Goodenough told her. “And it ain’t but a mile, you recall.”
The Colonel’s mouth pulled sideways. “He’s pestered me to ride that horse unaided since he was four. Tall as he is, I’ve suspected he could do it since he turned five.”
With a last glance at the boy disappearing over the wooded hill to the west, Willa realized she’d yet to hear his father named and opened her mouth to ask. Before she could, on the heels of that realization came another. She looked at the Colonel, then at Goodenough, but it was Anni, standing by uncharacteristically silent, who caught her eye. Willa sensed Anni had been watching her, following her glances—and the progression of her thoughts. Now she was staring at Willa with her blue eyes wide, in them a look both acknowledging and beseeching silence.
Willa looked away, knowing her question need never be asked.
It was as well, for she’d lost heart for talk. Her soul felt pressed by all the faces she’d seen in a short space of time, most of them strangers, settlers come since the war’s ending. A few of Shiloh’s inhabitants who remembered her had approached her, though none made mention of her parents. More had kept their distance, peering out of cabin doors only to step inside when she returned their gazes. Some had greeted Neil MacGregor and pretended not to see her standing there. The thoughts of most were easy to read. The thoughts she could not guess at were those of the man now talking with Neil.
In daylight she could see how sharply Elias Waring had aged. The stick he leaned upon explained the lines of pain around his mouth. Anni’s news of their family’s losses explained those of grief.
If his physical presence had diminished, his authority had increased, for he was now a county magistrate as well as colonel of militia. The temptation was strong to blurt out her concerns to this man who’d called off her harassers in the store—but she could not forget he was also Richard’s father.
She let the talk swirl around her.
A breeze brushed her face. Rain clouds had risen above the trees in the west. From a distance a grumble of thunder sounded, all but muffled by the clanking and steamy hissing from the smithy.
She closed her eyes. The voices around her speaking rapid English, the half-forgotten smells and noises, seemed things from out of a dream, lacking substance to make them real. She did not feel real, standing in the middle of it all. “You found your way back to us,” Anni’s father had said. But had she? Was she trying to wrestle back t
o life a person dead and buried? Maybe Joseph was right. She thought of him with affection and gratitude and not for the first time wondered at the inscrutable ways of the Almighty. Why had she not been adopted by a Bear Clan woman, or Turtle Clan? Why a woman from the same clan as Joseph Tames-His-Horse, who loved her with a devotion few women probably ever knew?
She could not help thinking of what he asked of her, to come back to the People. Was she meant to remain Burning Sky of the Wolf Clan? Should she have gone to Niagara? Should she still go?
Hearing the thud of approaching hooves, she opened her eyes. Lemuel had returned, proud and triumphant, leading the mule with its packsaddle.
With their purchases loaded and the chickens secured, Willa lifted the heavy carrying basket, settled the tumpline across her brow, and took hold of the mule’s lead rein.
The Colonel stopped her with a hand to her arm.
“Wilhelmina. There are matters you and I should discuss.” He searched her face. The look in his eyes … she could only call it cautious. “Let it be when you return the mule. I’ve explained to Richard—and will to anyone necessary—that until the auction, you’re to be allowed to remain where you are.”
Willa thought relief might buckle her knees. Neil was swiftly at her side, looking into her face. “Are you all right? Shall I take the mule?”
Willa shook her head. “I will lead it.”
The Colonel looked at Neil. “Mr. MacGregor, I’d be obliged if you’d accompany Wilhelmina when she returns the mule. If ’twould be no inconvenience to you.”
Willa saw the look of warning that passed between Neil and Elias Waring. She would not be made to leave her land, for the time being. The Colonel had said that. He had not said he could prevent all harm from touching her, out there on her isolated farm.
The daylight grayed as clouds rose above the ridges, covering the sun. They had not gone far past the mill when the drumming of thunder came again. That was what Willa thought it at first, but it did not stop when thunder should, but grew louder, coming on.
Halting, they turned to see two mud-spattered horsemen coming up the track. One of them was Richard on his blazed bay. He rode his horse past them and halted in the track, blocking the way.