by Lori Benton
“Miss…Missus.” His voice was tight with the effort of restraining her. “Reckon your baby’s right here between us.”
Recoiling, she wrenched free, not expecting the stranger to simply let her go, nearly falling when he did so. She caught herself and faced him.
“My son. My four-year-old son. Jacob. He’s gone!”
The words were little more than a wail. Even so those eyes above strong cheekbones flashed understanding and concern.
“Your son is lost?”
Was it concern? Or was it cunning?
“Not lost—taken. You know it! You have him!” Clare lunged for the hatchet, but another pain gripped her and she halted, holding her breath, hands fisted against her sides.
The man took a step back, rifle still raised between them. “I haven’t got your boy.”
His gaze swept her, seeing far too much, but when the pang loosed its grip she stood straighter, uncaring what he could or couldn’t see. “Someone does!”
“You didn’t see him taken?”
“I was asleep! If I’d seen—”
The next pain came so swift it stole her breath. She bent over, panting, unable to mind the man or anything except getting to the other side of that agony.
“God in Heaven,” she thought he said but she was groaning so loudly she couldn’t be sure. When at last she looked up, his sun-browned face had gone ashen. “You’re having your baby now?”
“They don’t ask by your leave to be born. Now get out of my way!” She pushed past him and made for the wagon, all but certain by the look of him he’d be no help to her—not that she meant to ask. Limbs shaking, she started to climb into the wagon.
“Wait, Missus.” The man was beside her, a hand encircling her arm. For all his strength she could feel him shaking. “Let me get whatever—”
“Leave me be!”
He didn’t release her. “What sort of man would abandon you like this?”
“My husband, for one!”
Now here was this stranger offering the promise of support. She wanted to collapse into it, trust in it, but knew better.
But if he would at least fetch and carry…
“I need bedding. Get it from the wagon and take it to that brush shelter yonder. I’m going to have this baby there. Wait,” she added as he set the rifle against the wagon’s gate. “Before you touch anything, go wash at the stream.”
She wrinkled her nose in his direction, though he wasn’t soiled or greasy-looking, unlike many of the frontiersmen she’d seen at Redstone. In fact, he was in far more presentable state than she. Not looking to see if he obeyed, she headed through the fringe of trees between the wagon and the clearing where she and Jacob had camped.
Jacob. How would she find him? How long until she could start? Don’t let it rain again. Let those tracks stay clear. The sky above was clouded but looked to be clearing. If it didn’t there was nothing she could do about it. The weather—and her body—were beyond her control.
Don’t let me die.
The going was slow, halted twice by pangs so stunning she could do nothing but stand and ride them out. By the time she reached the shelter so had the man, beard and lashes wet from washing, arms full of bedding. This he spread beneath the shelter; then took off running back toward the trail.
Clare lowered herself to the ground and crawled inside, thinking that was that. He’d lost his nerve.
Before she could grind her teeth over the thought, he was back, a pack and the rifle in hand. He propped both against the shelter, along with her hatchet. Tucked into the sash belting his shirt was her pistol. He removed it, testing its weight.
“This primed, loaded?” She grunted affirmation. He set the weapon aside. “What else can I do?”
“Water…and my simples box…the wagon—”
She’d brought along supplies for this hour, though she’d hoped not to need them until they had a cabin raised or at least were among a party with other women. Before she could describe the box in question, the man spied the small kettle at the edge of the ashes, snatched it up, and was off again.
In moments his footsteps returned. The kettle thumped down, dripping full. The box appeared beside her.
“Open it,” she said.
He obeyed, fumbling with the latch, clearly rattled. She told him what she needed: shears to cut the cord, twine to tie it, clean rags to wash the baby, a vial of oil she needed to use immediately. He set each item beside her.
“Turn away now. I don’t want you watching.” Knowing what the man was eventually going to see—if he stuck around long enough—it was a pointless command, but he put his back to her obligingly. She rucked up her shift and used the oil to lubricate delicate flesh about to be very much abused.
But please not torn. The baby was early. Perhaps it would be small. But please not too small.
She pulled her shift back over her knees. The man had gotten the fire going, the kettle over it. Now he ran a hand over his bound hair, an agitated gesture.
“May I turn around?”
She’d have to let him do so at some point. “Fine.”
He turned, still kneeling. “Can I do more?”
She pushed up on her elbows as the next pain built, expecting to feel the urge to push. It didn’t come. “There’s no helping me now.”
“I know that well enough,” she thought he muttered. Louder, he asked, “How long since your husband left?”
Time had muddled. It felt like moments. It felt like weeks. “Days. Two, I think.”
The man wore an odd expression. Pity? Regret?
“And your son? He was taken when?”
“In the night just past. My pains started. I went into the woods so as not to frighten him.” The anguish and frustration were almost too great to bear. Jacob was being carried away, and it was her fault, but she was trapped here with his brother who’d chosen the worst possible time to be born. The man was staring at her, thoughts moving behind his eyes.
“Do you know who took him?” she asked.
It could never be so easy. But the man didn’t say no. He hesitated, looking as if he’d something to tell her he’d no wish to say.
Jacob isn’t dead! She wanted to scream the words at this stranger with eyes full of doom, but the baby was coming, the undeniable need to push gathering at last in flesh and bone. The man hovered near, terror in his gaze again, but his next words evidenced some notion of what was next to come.
“Where do you want me? Behind you or…?”
“Someone has to catch him.” No thought of modesty now, she rucked up her shift and he knelt between her knees.
She strained and pushed and wasn’t quiet about it. At last she gasped for breath. “He’s early. Can you…see him…yet?”
“I don’t think so. Hold on…” While he hemmed and hawed, she pushed again. “I see his head!”
The man’s eyes were huge. She felt his hands on her as the baby’s head emerged. She pushed, rising up enough to see him pull the baby out of her, a blur of purplish limbs. Then she lay back on the coverlet, feeling the hard ground beneath, and simply breathed with the visceral relief of it, until she realized she’d heard no newborn’s cry. No sound at all.
She struggled to her elbows, spots swirling as she raised her head. She blinked them clear to see the man still kneeling between her knees, but his attention wasn’t on her. He’d snatched up a rag, was doing something with water, or was it the twine?
“Is he alive? Tell me!”
The man looked up, eyes still round but no longer glinting with terror. As though the worst had happened and there was no more need for fear.
“Your baby’s breathing, Missus—thanks be to God.” He’d spoken with relief, but those eyes beneath level brows met hers warily, as if to gage her receptivity to some less favorable news of the child. “It’s only…”
She wanted to claw the tangled shift away to see but hadn’t the strength. “Only what?”
“Only it’s not what you’ve been sa
ying,” the man replied. “Not a he. A she. You got a baby girl.”
It had all come right in the end. The woman had survived. The baby girl seemed strong, if a tad on the puny side. He had kept a tight lid on his nerves and done what he’d had to do.
Jeremiah Ring rehearsed the facts, giving thanks for the Almighty’s deliverance, yet his hands quaked as he knelt at the trail-side creek. He winced as the bloody score across his hand touched the water’s flow. She’d dealt him the scratch before she knew he meant to help her.
A fighter, that one. Not that Hannah hadn’t been…
He took that thought captive. Instead he pictured the woman from the wagon, blond hair streaming, green eyes aflame, coming at him with that hatchet like she meant to take him down—alone and in the grip of childbirth.
Desperation could lend a body strength, and to Jeremiah’s reckoning there wasn’t much more desperate a woman could face than birthing a child. But was she strong enough to bear what he’d yet to tell her? And what was he to do about her once she grasped the extent of her plight? He’d his own business to be about, and it lay in the opposite direction she would need to go.
The first whispers of the tragedy at Baker’s had outpaced Jeremiah to Pittsburgh, where Major John Connolly proved more interested in securing Ohio land for Virginia’s Governor Dunmore than in a few lost Mingo lives. A seething Alexander McKee, the Indian agent, had enlisted Jeremiah as one of the carriers of a message to the Shawnee chiefs—and to Logan—inviting them to a council in Pittsburgh in hopes of turning aside reprisals for the Yellow Creek killings.
Jeremiah feared the plea would fall on deaf ears in Logan’s case. The Mingo’s words as he stood over his murdered kin tolled in Jeremiah’s memory. “For every life here taken from me, by my hand ten of the whites will die.”
“Not that I don’t sympathize with Logan’s desire for revenge,” McKee had said. “In his place I’d want it. But if he takes it, we could find ourselves plunged into an all-out border war, one no side can win, save maybe Dunmore.”
He’d promised McKee to do all he could to keep the peace, as well as to take word of the summons down the Monongahela to Redstone Fort, cautioning every man there against interfering with any Indians on the river heading for Pittsburgh. From Redstone he’d meant to travel west to Wheeling by canoe, then on to the Shawnee towns on the Scioto River, but while at Redstone he’d heard talk of a settler who’d taken his family down a packhorse trail against urgings to the contrary—in a wagon.
Nursing a bad feeling about that settler, Jeremiah had taken to the trail. Rainfall had washed out most sign of the wagon’s passing, but here and there Jeremiah saw the scars of small trees the man had removed from the path, rocks dislodged where he’d made way for his wagon’s wheels, ruts where those wheels had mired.
Then he’d found the man, stripped, scalped, and left for carrion alongside the trail he’d labored to bend to his will. Or Jeremiah supposed it the man. The absence of a family didn’t surprise him. They’d be taken captive. But where was the wagon or its charred remains?
He’d buried the man, piled him over with stones, and decided to press on to Wheeling.
It was while lifting the last stone onto the makeshift grave he’d found the timepiece, its gilded case half crushed so that it wouldn’t yield to prying. He’d slipped it into his knapsack, thinking he’d force it open when next he paused to rest, hoping for an inscription inside. It was still in his knapsack, leaning against the shelter where the woman rested with her newborn. He could see her lower half, muddy shift, long pale calves, dirty feet.
Returning to her, he crouched at the shelter’s opening, half hoping she’d be asleep.
She was awake, gazing at the babe beside her, wrapped in a blanket he’d fetched from the wagon. The blanket, tiny and blue, had stirred his heart with pity. She’d prepared it for this day, planning for the child’s advent. A busted wagon, a vanished son, a brush shelter in the wilderness, a stranger to midwife—none of that would have figured into those plans.
She’d yet to learn the worst of it.
The baby’s tiny features were knotted, scrunched and red. The small head was capped in hair surprisingly dark for a fair mother and, best he could tell by what remained of the man’s scalp, an even fairer father.
Shoving those thoughts aside, he cleared his throat.
“Reckon we ought to introduce ourselves, Missus. The name’s Jeremiah Ring, lately out of Fort Pitt.”
The woman looked him over with those clear green eyes, an assessing gaze. He wondered what she made of him. He’d never gone wholly native as some men did, living long stretches among the Shawnees, but squatting there in breechclout, leggings, and quilled moccasins, he didn’t much resemble the Virginia farmer he used to be.
The woman dropped her gaze. Tired bruises ringed her eyes.
“Clare Inglesby,” she said, then frowned. “Mrs. Philip Inglesby, I mean.”
He’d noted her momentary confusion, the coloring of her cheeks. He felt it too, the disconcerting intimacy that oughtn’t to lie between two people just exchanging names. As if shy of him seeing her bare skin now, she tucked her feet beneath the dirty hem of her shift.
Again he cleared his throat. “What were you doing when I found you, Missus? You weren’t trying to follow those ones who took your boy, were you?”
“That’s precisely what I was doing.” Mrs. Inglesby pushed herself up to sitting, hair falling in golden ropes to her lap.
Now he had space to really look at her, Jeremiah noted she’d a comeliness undiminished by months of child-carrying or the ordeal just past. She’d eyes wide-spaced, a nose not small but nicely sculpted, a sharp jaw ending in a delicately pointed chin.
“What else was I to do?”
He’d no answer to that. None she’d want to hear.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s happened.” Maybe she’d let fall some clue as to who killed her man and made off with her son. Maybe he’d find it wasn’t even her man he’d buried.
She told the story from the busting of the wagon to her husband’s insistence on leaving them, the long wait, the vanished horse, the labor coming on, up to that morning when she woke to find her son vanished as well.
She spoke precisely, unhesitating, and somewhere in the midst of her tale he realized she was what his mama would’ve called gentle-born. Virginia seaboard by her accent.
By the time she’d reached the part where he entered the tale, Jeremiah couldn’t say for certain who’d been the death of Philip Inglesby, nor who’d taken her son, nor if they were one and the same, but his gut was telling him who it had been.
Logan.
“I can wait no longer for Philip.” She leaned forward and gripped his arm, catching him off guard. “Can you tell me where to go from here? Where do I begin to look for Jacob?”
He stared at her hand clamped above his wrist, then into her determined face. “Look for him?”
She released him. “You cannot imagine I would simply abandon him?”
“I don’t…You’ve just…” Did she think she was going to cross the Ohio, march into Logan’s town at Yellow Creek, and—if his gut was even correct about that—simply demand her son back? Just delivered of a baby?
But he’d yet to tell her the one thing that might bring her around to seeing sense.
“You’re right, Missus. There’s no point in waiting any longer for your husband.”
She blinked at him, a rising dread overshadowing her determined gaze. It crystallized into stark knowing before she banished it with a blink.
“Why would you say that?”
“Because I found the man dead on the trail yesterday, about a mile from here.” Scalped, mutilated, probably tortured, but she didn’t need to know that part. “I buried him. It was getting on toward sunset,” he added lamely.
The woman was wagging her head. “But how do you know? How could you know it was Philip?”
“I said I was out of Fort Pitt, and that’s true
. But I’ve come by way of Redstone, where I heard tell of you and your husband. I was bound for Wheeling so decided to come along after you. There’s been other killings.” He told her about the massacre at Yellow Creek, again sparing the gruesome details. “In my hearing, Logan vowed his revenge. I don’t know was it him and his warriors killed your husband or took your son. Probably was. Unless it was a passing band of Cherokees. But as I said, I came along the trail and found a man lying dead—”
“And as I said,” Mrs. Inglesby interrupted, “you cannot know it was Philip!”
Jeremiah rose to retrieve his knapsack. “You’re right, Missus. I don’t know. Maybe you can say.”
He fished inside and found the object he sought, withdrew it, and thrust it at her, resting on his open palm.
“This recall itself to you?”
Mrs. Inglesby stared at the battered timepiece; Jeremiah was watching her face when the blood drained, leaving it pale as chalk.
Oh, Philip. He’d been so proud of that timepiece, an heirloom of his grandfather’s given to him on his eighteenth birthday, one of the few of his family’s treasures he hadn’t sold to pay his father’s debts. It was battered and broken now, as if a rock or a boot heel had come down on it. She took it in her hand, which shook from exhaustion and the grief crashing over her like a smothering sea-breaker. Philp wasn’t coming back. Philip was dead. Buried by this stranger with sense enough to come down that trail after them.
A second wave, as relentless as the first, broke over her and washed away grief, flooding her with rage and determination. Philip was lost to her, but Jacob would not be. He would not know this yawning emptiness, this terrifying abandonment she now faced and to which she could see no end. Not for one second longer than he must.
She was going to find her son. No matter if Philip had left her to do it alone.
Despite her pallor, Mrs. Inglesby hadn’t swooned. She’d taken the timepiece from him, closed her fist around it, drew back her hand, and hurled it past his head, out into the clearing.