Heart's Heritage

by Cecil, Ramona K. ; Richardson, Lisa Karon;

  The proposal proved a favorable solution to both Annie and Brock. It would be far enough away from Annie’s cabin to satisfy propriety, yet close enough for Brock to tend the crops.

  Brock enthusiastically seized upon the plan. The notion of being viewed an usurper left a bad taste in his mouth. And, he had to admit, he’d be tempted to forgo shelter altogether if it might help him to wriggle back into Annie’s good graces.

  He ducked into the dark interior of the little log structure. Tamped smooth, the dirt floor bore an almost slatelike hardness. A dozen or so iron traps hung from the east wall along with a few small animal pelts. Only a couple of stools and two straw pallets covered with buffalo hides served as furnishings. The place smelled of animal skins, earth, and neglect.

  Annie walked to the hearth at the cabin’s north end. She looked up at the cat-and-clay chimney where Brock could see several large cracks.

  “The earthquake damaged it back in December,” she said flatly. “Papa got sick before he had a chance to fix it.”

  Brock panned the room, wishing he could think of something to say that might ease the tension between them. Discontent niggled at him like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. He hated that his inclusion in Jonah’s instructions regarding the land had soured Annie toward him. Why his uncle named him as cobeneficiary would most likely forever remain a mystery.

  His first inclination had been to assure Annie he had no long-term interest in part ownership of his uncle’s land—or in farming. However, something halted him from rashly voicing that thought. It was clear that, unless compelled to do so, this stubborn girl would resist any assistance with Jonah’s farm. Brock’s partial claim to the land forced her to accept his help. But other, more selfish reasons lurked in the shadows of his mind, preventing his outright withdrawal from the claim.

  Brock joined her at the chimney. Reaching up, he ran his palm across the cool brownstones, then poked his head into the fireplace and peered up at the chimney’s interior. Other than a half-dozen or so sleeping bats, he saw nothing amiss. Despite the fissures in the structure’s facade, he detected only minimal damage.

  “It looks sound.” Ducking out of the chimney, he rubbed soot from his hands onto his pant legs. “I have to commend your pa on a right solid job of building this cabin. I’d say a little clay to fix the cracks is all that’s required to set it right.”

  She rewarded his compliment with a smile that sent unexpected heat marching up his neck.

  “Was the quake not so bad here, then?” Brock asked to cover his unease. He remembered the widespread destruction the earthquakes had done to the area around Newport, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, last December and January.

  Fear flickered in Annie’s eyes. “The shaking was awful,” she murmured somberly, hugging her arms around her body. “Je vous dis la vérité. I thought the earth was going to swallow us up before it quit.” A little shudder shook her slight shoulders. “I remember thinking I was going to die in the same cabin I was born in.”

  The vulnerable look in her eyes evoked a feeling of protectiveness in Brock. For all her starch, Annie was but a girl left all alone in the wilderness—too naive and stubborn to know just how scared she should be.

  Brock resisted the impulse to wrap her in his arms. The action would more than likely be misconstrued, and the last thing he needed was to feed his undeniable attraction to his uncle’s young widow. Instead, he gave her a solemn nod, then quirked a grin. “It near flattened Newport Barracks. Threw me plumb out o’ my bunk, and sent seasoned soldiers runnin’ from the barracks out into the winter night barefoot, dressed only in long johns.”

  Annie perked up. The look of surprised interest on her face alerted Brock to his mistake.

  “You were in the army?”

  Sometime in the future he would need to tell her—make a clean breast of it all. But not now—not here.

  “I did a bit of scoutin’ for the army out of Newport Barracks, just across the river from Cincinnati,” he murmured, hoping his true but meager reply would sufficiently slake her interest.

  The wrinkle knitting her trim dark brows together told him it hadn’t.

  Before she could lob another volley of uncomfortable questions at him, Brock decided to apply the time-tested military strategy of diversion. He walked to the window, feigning interest in the piece of greased fawn hide covering it.

  “You said you were born here. Is this where you and your pa lived before you married Jonah?”

  Annie walked to a pile of straw covered with a buffalo robe and plopped down, sending up a little puff of dust. “Oui, but up until two years ago, we mostly lived on the riverside in camps along Papa’s trapline.”

  Sensing a thawing in her attitude toward him, Brock lowered himself to the floor and sat cross-legged, hoping to encourage her conversational mood.

  Her uplifted face turned as she took in the cabin’s interior. “Papa was a squatter on this place when it was still Indian lands, long before it was opened up to white settlers. He built this cabin for my mama before I was born.” An appealing dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth. “Papa liked to tell how some months before I was born, Mama got powerful tired of traveling the rivers. One day she got her Irish all up and said, ‘I’ll not be havin’ me wee one born out in the open like a savage, Gerard Blanchet! You’ll be buildin’ me and the babe a proper roof o’er our heads, or I’ll build it meself!’”

  Brock couldn’t help a chuckle. Obviously, the daughter had inherited her mother’s fiery spirit.

  “Your mother was Irish?” From what he’d heard, trappers more often chose Indian women for wives.

  “Oui.” Annie’s eyes glistened with unshed tears, making Brock sorry he’d probed the painful subject. But after a few brave blinks, a smile lit her face, and she seemed happy to expound. “Papa met Mama at a trading post on the Wabash River just north of Vincennes. She’d been brought over from Ireland in 1791 as a bond servant to a well-to-do English family.”

  Brock knew that Fort Sackville near Vincennes had been an English possession before Colonel George Rogers Clark defeated the British, but he thought the English had left after that.

  “I thought Clark and his boys rousted the British back in ’79.”

  Annie nodded. “Most of them, but a few stayed on after the war and settled there.”

  A dark look crossed her face, and her voice hardened. “The family who owned Mama’s bond treated her cruelly, so she ran away. She got as far as one of the trading posts just north of Vincennes when her bond master caught up with her.”

  Her eyes held a distant look as she gazed out the cabin’s open door. “Papa had been trapping along the Wabash. He’d brought a season’s worth of beaver pelts to trade when he came upon Mama being beaten by her bond master.”

  She turned back to him and smiled, displaying again, the fetching dimple he’d noticed earlier. Pride laced her voice, which lifted with her brightened demeanor. “Papa traded away every pelt he had to buy Mama’s freedom.”

  Both surprised and pleased that she should share such intimate family history with him, Brock began to hope he and Annie could at least be friends. He sat transfixed, beguiled by both the story and its charming narrator. “I think I would have liked your papa very much,” he said at last.

  Her answering smile ignited a warm glow that radiated all the way through him, while stoking his hope that they could, indeed, become friends.

  As their gazes locked, a lovely pink hue suffused Annie’s cheeks beneath the golden dappling of freckles. Suddenly she stood and turned her full attention to swiping dust from her faded brown calico skirt.

  “Well,” she said, sounding a little breathless, “you’ve seen the cabin, and I should be getting back. I left Cap’n Brody guarding my mule and cow, but he can’t very well do the milking now, can he?” A hint of nervousness warbled through her little laugh.

  Brock scrambled to his feet, his heart soaring at her obvious attempt to cover her disconcertion. It told him
she, too, had felt a connection during their shared look. Even if she didn’t consider him a friend, perhaps she no longer viewed him as a foe.

  Annie turned and kicked at the straw pallet with her bare foot, plumping up the indentation she’d made sitting on it. “Aïe!”

  Reaching down, she rubbed her toe, then lifted a shaggy brown corner of the buffalo robe, uncovering a little wooden box.

  She gave a muted gasp. “J’avais oublié! I’d forgotten about this.”

  She picked up the box and lifted the lid. Her eyes brimmed with tears. One clung for a moment to her lashes like a drop of crystal morning dew before a blink sent it meandering unheeded down her cheek.

  The sight pricked Brock’s heart.

  “These were Papa’s treasures.” Her solemn voice sounded breathless as she fingered through the box’s contents.

  Feeling somewhat like an intruder, Brock watched silently as she reverently touched each article.

  She unrolled a piece of paper on which the shadowlike profile of a lady had been drawn in charcoal. The name Fiona was visible beneath the picture.

  A fond smile tipped Annie’s lips. “A silhouette of Mama,” she explained. “Papa traded a traveling artist six beaver pelts for this.” That musical little giggle Brock found so captivating bubbled out as she lifted an auburn coil of hair from the box. “My baby hair,” she said before dropping the clipped tress back into the box.

  Suddenly her mood changed. With a look Brock could only describe as pride, she held out her open palm in which lay a yellowed cotton twill chevron.

  Brock needed no explanation for the scrap of V-shaped cloth. It was the insignia worn on the left sleeve of an American soldier who’d served at least two years of exemplary service during the War for Independence.

  Annie’s chin lifted an inch or two. “Papa earned this by running through a volley of musket fire to drag four wounded men, including Jonah, to safety.”

  Respect for both the father and the daughter bloomed inside Brock. From what he had just learned of her parents, Brock better understood the glimpses of bravery and spunk he’d witnessed in Annie.

  “Your papa was a true hero,” he told her with a smile.

  Annie nodded, dropped the cloth back into the box, and snapped the lid shut. “Papa always said, ‘Les soldat combattent, mais les poltrons s’enfuient.’ A soldier fights, but a coward runs.”

  Brock’s heart dropped like a stone to the pit of his stomach. With that one statement, all hope of winning Annie’s friendship and respect withered. He had no doubt that when she learned what he’d done, the only sentiment Brock would be able to generate in this daughter of Gerard and Fiona Blanchet would be contempt.

  Chapter 4

  C’est inutile!”

  The French words expressing her useless efforts exploded from Annie’s lips on a burst of frustration. She had tried three times to harness the mule to the plow without success.

  Fighting the urge to sob, she watched the mule lope toward the grassy creek bank, its harness traces trailing behind.

  She kicked at a clod of dirt with her bare foot, scattering it in a shower of sandy loam. How was she to get five acres of corn planted if she couldn’t even hitch the mule to the plow?

  Leaning backward, she pushed her shoulder blades together to ease her aching back, and looked at the field unmolested by the plowshare. The gray-brown stubble of last year’s corn crop dotted the land. Poking up amid weeds and prairie grasses, they seemed to mock her efforts to bury them beneath the soil and prepare the ground to accept a new crop of corn.

  Although not raised to farming, Annie was well aware that the couple of acres each of wheat and oats Jonah had sowed would not be sufficient to keep her and the animals through the winter. How many times had she heard Jonah say, “A farm fails or succeeds on its corn crop”?

  With Joel Tanner’s new grist mill on the Piney Branch, a good corn crop would be like gold. Proving she could bring in a decent crop would silence those folks, however well-meaning, who continued to urge her to sell the land.

  The appearance of Jonah’s nephew intensified her need to make the land pay. Jonah’s instructions had sent a chill whooshing through her like a January wind. She knew little of the law. Brock was Jonah’s blood kin—and a male. Over the past seven years, Papa had allowed Jonah to clear and farm the most fertile, level acres of her father’s land. Plenty long enough for Jonah—or Jonah’s blood kin—to stake a claim to the property.

  Thoughts of the man sent worrisome emotions swirling through Annie. She hadn’t seen Brock since she’d shown him the trapper’s cabin three days ago.

  Remembering the day, Annie’s face grew warm. She regretted having shared so much of her family history with him. And allowing him to see her tears.

  What could this land mean to a drifter? It was true he’d shown genuine respect for Jonah’s and her father’s military service. But Annie could hardly imagine such a man feeling obliged to keep Jonah’s land and pass it on as tribute to an uncle he’d hardly known. Papa and Jonah placed this land into her keeping, and nobody was going to rip it from her!

  Stiffening her back, she lifted her chin in defiance. She would plant this field. God help me, I must plant a corn crop! The scripture she clung to like a lifeline leaped to the front of her mind and vaulted from her lips. “‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’”

  Renewed vigor surged through Annie’s aching muscles on a wave of determination. She tromped toward the stupidly content draft animal munching on Indian grass. Paying scant heed to the throaty barks of Cap’n Brody who romped several yards away, she grasped the mule’s harness lines. The sound of beating wings told her the dog had flushed another bevy of birds from a nearby thicket.

  “Right nice o’ you to unhitch the mule for a rest, but it don’t look like she’s done enough to deserve it yet.” Brock’s teasing tone yanked Annie around.

  Her heart fluttered at the sight of him.

  Espèce d’imbécile!

  Scolding herself, she decided her rapid pulse was the result of him startling her. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on folks?”

  Musket in hand, he scanned the area, a habit she’d noticed before. “I did no such thing. Cap’n Brody, here, announced my arrival while I was still several yards away.” He reached down to rub the dog’s brindled head. “Didn’t you, Big’un?”

  Cap’n Brody, his tail swishing with glee, nuzzled Brock’s hand until he received the desired scratch behind the ears.

  “I suppose you are an expert at farming.” Annie met Brock’s maddening grin with a scowl and felt heat rush to her face. Was this his plan? To convince her she couldn’t handle the farm?

  Squinting, he glanced at the sun riding high in the pale blue sky, to the grazing mule, then back to Annie. “Reckon I’m more expert than you. Don’t you know how to hitch a mule to a plow?”

  Annie fixed him with a glare. “I was about to get her hitched.” She pushed against the mule’s haunches in a desperate attempt to position the animal in front of the plow. Her efforts only elicited a bray of objection from the unmovable beast.

  “Of course you were.” Brock’s grin widened. He laid his musket on the ground and took the harness lines from her hand.

  Annie’s indignation at his mocking tone was swamped by the rising hope that he might actually perform the perplexing chore. To her relief, he began to do just that.

  “I thought I’d come over and take a better look at the land, seein’ as how it’s half mine,” he said as he worked.

  The fear Annie had tried to squelch for the better part of the past week flared inside her. “So you plan to stay in Deux Fleuves?” She held her breath, unsure what answer she preferred to hear.

  “For now.” He shot her a grin as he finished the task.

  Something akin to disappointment boiled up inside Annie. Just as she suspected, he had no interest in keeping the land—or passing it on to later generations.

  “You ma
y look at the land at your leisure, Monsieur Martin, but I have work to do.”

  She snatched the harness lines from where he’d draped them over the plow and tried to remember how Jonah and other farmers she’d seen accomplished the task. She couldn’t figure out how to knot the lines together to hook them over her shoulder as Jonah had done. Holding the lines in her left hand while grasping the plow’s handles, she managed to give the lines an awkward flick against the mule’s back. “Sal, marche!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Uh, have you ever done this before?” Brock stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his lips tipped up in an infuriating grin.

  A brew of exasperation and irritation bubbled up in Annie. She wasn’t sure if she was angrier at Brock or the mule. She had to prove that she was capable of farming this land. Dear Lord, please make this stupid mule move! She smacked the leather reins harder against Sal’s back. “Giddup, Sal!”

  Unfazed, Sal stood still, nibbling at a patch of clover. The only indication the mule gave that she felt the harness line against her rump was a sweeping swish of her tail.

  Brock stepped to Annie’s side. “Why don’t you let me do this?” He glanced down at her bare feet peeking from beneath the hem of her faded brown calico skirt. “You have no business trying to plow in bare feet. Don’t you know the corn stubbles’ll tear ’em to pieces?”

  Annie wanted to cry. She hadn’t thought of the corn stubbles. She hadn’t thought of anything beyond getting these five acres plowed.

  Her shoulders sagged with her heart as she reluctantly relinquished the harness lines into his hand. She’d wanted to prove she could manage this farm, but instead had proven the opposite.

  “H’ya, girl!”

  At Brock’s barked order, Sal obediently began plodding forward.

  Annie watched him follow the plow as it turned the stubble and weeds to a neat row of rich, dark earth. Practicality soothed her injured pride. He’d all but said he didn’t plan on putting down roots here. What would it hurt if he helped get a corn crop in before he moved on? As he said, he was part owner. If he was still around when the crop came in, she would give him a generous share of the ground meal to keep or trade.