by Lori Benton
Mr. Ring had found her. Was taking her to…
“Pippa?” There was no answer. She looked aside and saw why. It wasn’t Mr. Ring but Wolf-Alone who’d found her, who’d spoken her name when she hadn’t known he knew it.
She heard her baby then, a gurgling near her ear. The Indian was cradling Philippa in his other arm. They were back in the shadow of the council house. There was the pack and the carrier and the skin of water she’d drunk from. Still the spots danced in her vision. She swayed.
Wolf-Alone pushed her to the ground. She landed hard on her rump as he squatted beside her and, with a hand behind her head, pressed her face lower still, between her raised knees, fingers splayed behind her sweaty head. She struggled until she realized it was helping. The wooziness was passing. Wolf-Alone was speaking, had been for some time, she realized. She’d no idea what he was speaking, but again she found his tone soothing.
“I’m all right,” she said, hoping her voice wouldn’t belie the words. When she tried to lift her head again, Wolf-Alone slipped his hand away.
She sat up. He cradled Philippa against his chest, tiny in his keeping.
“I’m all right,” she repeated. “Let me hold her.”
Amber eyes searched her face, then he grunted and gave the child over to her. Relief flooded Clare like medicine at the weight of her daughter in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, breathing in the baby’s scent, love for her daughter welling stronger than she’d ever felt, with it the bitter taste of guilt. “I’ll never leave you like that again. I love you.” She whispered it again, heartbroken that she’d never once said it aloud to this easy-natured girl who could comprehend it no more than could the Shawnee warrior beside her. Clare could feel her heart swell, expanding to include the daughter she’d not allowed herself to fully embrace or treasure, until she’d nearly lost her. “Pippa, I do love you.”
Behind her came swift footsteps on the packed earth. She looked up as fear jolted through her.
“Clare!” Mr. Ring’s face was a reassuring sight—for the second it took to register his fury and realize it was aimed at her. “Where did you go? Wolf-Alone said you went tearing off alone. What did I tell you before I left you?”
Clare blinked at the man, who didn’t crouch beside her as Wolf-Alone had done but remained standing, hands fisted.
“You told me to stay with him,” she said, aware of the village full of Indians beyond Mr. Ring, most too preoccupied with their own concerns to pay them more than passing glances. “But I didn’t think when—”
“Right enough you didn’t! This is no place to lose your head and go rushing off as you please. You might’ve been killed a dozen times over!”
“Once would have sufficed.” Back still throbbing, she gathered her baby against her and stood. “Will you allow me to complete a sentence before you again berate me?”
Mr. Ring made a choking sound, then ran a hand over his bearded chin and clamped his lips shut. Clare had never seen the man lose possession of his temper so thoroughly. She glanced at Wolf-Alone, still squatting by his pack, and thought she caught the trace of amusement in the curve of his mouth.
“I know it was a reckless thing to do, but I saw a child, Mr. Ring. A white child Jacob’s age.” The speaking of his name brought a rush of tears that nearly prevented her finishing. “It wasn’t him!”
“I told you Falling Hawk never came to Wakatomica.”
Clare bent her head to the baby. “I know.”
Mr. Ring was silent for a moment; then he said, “Clare, look at me.”
He stepped near enough to put a hand to her chin, raised her face, and turned her cheek to the sun’s slanting light. His fingertips traced the place that still stung, then jerked away as though she’d burned him.
“Are you hurt?”
She fixed her gaze on Philippa. Tears had fallen on the baby’s downy head. She bent and kissed them away. “I dare say no more than you think I deserve.”
She didn’t care what Mr. Ring thought. She was thinking of that little blond girl who hadn’t been Jacob but was someone’s child. At that moment she hated all Indians. Even Mr. Ring, who’d made himself one of their race for his own inscrutable reasons. She raised her gaze to him at last, but before she could speak, Wolf-Alone’s voice broke over them.
His words were in Shawnee so she could only guess what he was saying, until Mr. Ring, clearly alarmed by it, said, “He’s telling me he found you with Logan. That Logan threatened you. Did he strike you?”
She shuddered, recalling the hatred in those deadened eyes, but quickly shook her head. “Not him. It was a woman—women—but I got away. Or they let me go.”
Mr. Ring turned to speak at length with Wolf-Alone, who answered with a grunt, then bent for his pack.
“Best we go,” Mr. Ring said shortly. “Wolf-Alone will travel with us, if you’re ready.”
“I’m ready,” Clare said, reaching for the carrier.
“You’re sure?”
Arrested in her preparation, hands full of baby, she nodded at Wolf-Alone, standing by with his pack on his back, waiting. “He’s seen Jacob. We know where he is. We are going to Cornstalk’s Town?”
“I only meant are you sure this—going on with me—is what you want to do, now you’ve had a taste of what you’re in for, what you’ll be facing among the Shawnees?”
Clare stared at the man. What else could she do but press on? Leave her son to become a savage? Spend a lifetime never knowing his fate?
Not while she’d breath and strength to prevent it. Which meant her only path forward was trusting a man whose loyalties she now suspected were divided—trusting him to somehow prevail against the wishes of his Shawnee kin and return Jacob to her; or help her steal him back if he couldn’t manage to obtain him any other way.
She knew better than to mention that last desperate plan. She would wait and see if he remained true to his promise, or if whatever loyalty he bore to these Shawnee brothers of his—and their sister—proved stronger.
Kneeling to put her daughter in the carrier, she said, “We’re going with you, Mr. Ring. To Cornstalk’s Town. Nonhelema’s Town. Any other place we must. You need never again question my resolve.”
They’d gone a mile along a trail that wound southwestward, descending low wooded ridges and crossing wet bottomland, before Clare let herself relive that horrifying encounter with the Mingo, Logan. Until then she’d occupied herself by glaring at Jeremiah Ring’s back, stiff-set beneath its pack, speared alternately by shadow and sunlight as he moved ahead of her on the forested trail. His tension hadn’t abated since leaving Wakatomica.
“It wasn’t just Shawnees in attendance,” he’d told her. “Delaware, Wyandots, Mingos too. Puckeshinwah—our war chief—spoke for driving all settlers back over the mountains, but in the end even he agreed to try again for peace. They’re sending a delegation to the Indian agents at Pittsburgh.”
A runner had been sent to Cornstalk and his sister, Nonhelema, both of whom would be pleased with the council’s outcome, Mr. Ring had said. He expected the principal Shawnee chief would lead the delegation. “Won’t be a large contingent, else it’ll look like a war party…”
As he trailed off, Mr. Ring had looked thoughtful, wistful even, leaving Clare to surmise he wished he could accompany the delegation to Fort Pitt.
Since that brief exchange, they’d barely spoken. Wolf-Alone had trudged behind her, equally taciturn. She hadn’t earned either man’s approval at Wakatomica.
The whole interlude was a muddle now, save the moment she’d been imprisoned by the hand of Philip’s murderer. She shivered despite the forest’s muggy warmth. What had Logan said to her? Not the part about taking her scalp. That, and the gut-churning sight of Philip’s, she would never forget. But something else…
The forest receded to a blur of green as she strained to recall. Something about a promise not to harm someone who’d claimed her. Who else could that be but Jeremiah Ring, who called
himself Logan’s friend?
“What claim have you on me, Mr. Ring?”
The man marching ahead of her missed a step on the trail, then rounded to face her, brows tight. “What did you say?”
Behind her came a scuff of moccasins as Wolf-Alone halted.
Clare ignored his presence. “I asked about the nature of your claim on me. Logan said he wouldn’t scalp me, but only because he’d sworn not to harm someone who’d claimed me.”
Color blazed above Mr. Ring’s beard. “Logan threatened to scalp you? Why haven’t you said so till now?”
“I might have had you seemed interested in anything other than berating me.”
The man returned her look with a disconcerting intensity, mingled with a consternation that had him shaking his head. “Missus, I doubt you’ve the smallest notion what interests me.”
“Don’t I?” She’d had time to think about his interests—about the fact that the Indian who had her son, this Falling Hawk, was his so-called brother, that this brother was taking Jacob to be the adopted son of their sister. His loyalties had split asunder as surely as if he’d come to a fork in the trail. The man couldn’t go both ways.
“Perhaps you would enlighten me,” she challenged, as from behind her came the sound of her daughter waking. “For it seems, Mr. Ring, you’re wishing mightily you’d never crossed my path.” The man’s gaze skimmed from her to the Indian lurking behind her, as the baby’s mewls transformed into a full-throated wail. “Since you learned it’s your brother who has Jacob, it’s been clear you—”
Clare bit off her words, seeing by the alarm on Mr. Ring’s face that the baby needed quieting. While Wolf-Alone held both aloft, Clare shrugged out of the carrier’s straps and turned to unlace the baby, avoiding the Indian’s gaze. But when she had the baby in her arms, patting her and pacing a short section of the trail in an attempt to quiet her, it proved futile.
“Come now, Pippa. You should be sleeping still.”
And here I am, she thought, calling you Pippa. She looked into her daughter’s scrunched, unhappy face and thought the name did suit. Not that she’d admit it aloud. She bent and kissed the wailing infant, put her to the other shoulder, sang a snatch of lullaby, then in exasperation said, “I suppose she needs feeding.”
Mr. Ring had been standing in a shaft of sunlight, watching her. He looked away before their gazes met. “We can make another mile or two before we lose the light, unless you’re calling a halt now.”
Clare jiggled the crying baby. “I can nurse her while I walk.”
She’d never done so but wasn’t going to be the reason they halted early.
Far from looking pleased by her accommodation, Mr. Ring began, “You needn’t—”
“I need but a moment of your averted gaze,” she interjected. “Let me settle her, then we may walk on.”
Mr. Ring stared at her with that confounding scrutiny, then spoke a word to Wolf-Alone. Both men put their backs to her. Clare unpinned her bodice and put the clouted baby to her breast.
Blessed silence at last.
The baby smelled of urine. So did the wrappings she wore in the carrier. Clare needed to wash them, but the urgency to reach Cornstalk’s Town—and her pride—forbade it. They would simply have to stink, she and Pippa. She covered herself as best she could with the pungent wrappings.
“I’m ready.” Clare reached for the cradleboard, uncertain how she was going to manage it one-handed, but Wolf-Alone shook his head and stepped out of her reach, letting her know he would carry it. She thanked him, thinking it ironic she should find it easier to communicate with this savage who spoke no English, whom she’d known less than a day, than one in whose company she’d journeyed nearly a fortnight.
Perhaps Mr. Ring entertained similar thoughts as he resumed their trudge down the trail. She’d never known him to be so out of sorts.
They’d gone a quarter mile before Clare realized she’d never gotten an answer to the question that began their exchange, but hadn’t the heart to wade through another argument to satisfy her curiosity.
“Claimed me,” she murmured, thinking perhaps she didn’t want to know. There was something she wanted him to know. “Mr. Ring? It was Logan who killed my husband.”
He halted again and faced her. “What?”
She needed to swallow hard before repeating it. “I said it was Logan who killed Philip. He wears my husband’s scalp. I saw it.”
She tried to read his face, the thoughts that seemed to convulse it, but they passed too swiftly.
“I’m sorry, Missus,” he said, before he turned and continued on.
“So, Brother. Do you mean to finally tell me how this woman and her child come to be in your keeping, or will you go on sitting in silence stealing looks at her while she sleeps?”
Caught in the act of doing so, Jeremiah tore his gaze from the golden braid peeking from the blanket Clare Inglesby had wrapped herself and the baby in to sleep. His brother held one sweeping brow aloft, yet firelight showed concern as well as humor in those amber eyes as he added a stick to the small flames.
Jeremiah sighed. “Remind me what I already told you.”
Though he spoke in Shawnee, same as Wolf-Alone—no chance of the woman he’d ceased for some time now thinking of as anything but Clare waking to hear herself discussed—he kept his voice low, not wishing to wake her at all after the day she’d had.
There’d been scant time to tell Wolf-Alone much of anything save the bare facts of Clare’s plight and his promise to help her. Wolf-Alone said as much. “But you did not tell me how you let yourself be talked into carrying her across the Spaylaywitheepi, a white woman with a newborn. Nor did you speak of her children’s father, though maybe of him I have no need to ask.”
“Dead,” Jeremiah confirmed. “Found him on the trail west of Redstone. Buried him there. Logan wears the man’s scalp. She saw it at Wakatomica. Reckon I did too, just didn’t know it for his.”
“After they killed the father, the Mingos found the boy, but not the mother?”
“She was off in the woods in the night starting her labor, not wanting to wake the boy. She never heard them come.”
Jeremiah skimmed his gaze over Clare, tracing the curve of her slender back, thought of that back braced against a tree as she waited, wracked with pain, willing to birth her daughter on the ground in the dark to spare her son having to watch the ordeal. Now she was willing to go among a people she deemed murderers to get the boy back. What else was she prepared to risk?
“Logan took the boy to Yellow Creek,” Wolf-Alone said, “just in time for our brother to pass through and see him.” He paused, thoughtful, studying Jeremiah. “Had you known that part sooner, about our brother, would you have agreed to help her?”
Jeremiah sought for the truth of that. He’d never have left a woman alone in the straits in which he’d found Clare Inglesby, but would he have agreed to help her recover her son knowing Falling Hawk’s intention of giving Jacob to their sister?
“She was nigh to birthing that one,” he said, nodding toward Clare as Pippa emitted a gurgle in her sleep, “when I found her.”
Wolf-Alone raised both brows. “You tended her through the birthing?”
“Who else was there? Afterward I tried to talk her into returning to Redstone, but she would not hear of it. She would have gone on alone to Wheeling—or died trying—had I not agreed to guide her.”
Wolf-Alone had been gazing at Clare. “She has a strong heart to have come so far. That does not surprise me, having seen her son. I am less certain about her wisdom.”
“I am less certain about a lot of things.”
Jeremiah’s unguarded statement brought Wolf-Alone’s gaze back to him. “Our sister? Yes. I am thinking much of her. She will want the boy.”
That piqued Jeremiah’s curiosity about Jacob Inglesby, hardly more than a phantom until now. “What can you tell me of him?”
Wolf-Alone thought for a moment, then said, “He was afraid when w
e took him from Yellow Creek, but even that first day on the trail with us he did well. He is strong of spirit and does not cry or refuse the food given him. He did not need to be coddled.”
Jeremiah knew these were words Clare would wish to hear translated. Though she’d kept silent while they’d eaten a simple repast and she tended Pippa, washing out wrappings at a nearby stream, he’d caught her casting looks at Wolf-Alone, looks that burned with a need to speak.
“But he chatters like a bird as soon as he opens his eyes in the morning. On and on, the questions. So Falling Hawk says,” Wolf-Alone added with a glance at Jeremiah. “He would be good for our sister, once they got used to each other. She will want him.”
Wolf-Alone said it as firmly as before, but now his eyes revealed the questions he hadn’t put into words. What was Jeremiah going to do when they reached Cornstalk’s Town? Which mother’s cause would he plead?
Jeremiah might once have said there was no question. The boy was white, taken against his will. He’d a mother who wanted him back. But Jeremiah was no longer that farmer from the Shenandoah Valley he’d once been. Nor was he just a frontiersman in the sporadic employ of the Indian agents at Fort Pitt. He was also Shawnee. He’d called Cornstalk’s Town his home—as much as he had a home—for the past ten years. He’d hunted with them, danced with them, helped clear the women’s fields. He’d known his greatest grief among them. A few of them he loved. One of those was Falling Hawk, who’d taken him to his heart as a brother born. And Wolf-Alone, adopted a few years later. But Rain Crow…
Ten years younger than Falling Hawk, born to a different Shawnee father, she’d lived most of her life with their Delaware mother who years ago professed belief in the Christian God and went to live with the Moravians and the rest of their Delaware converts. First in Pennsylvania, then among David Ziesberger’s converts in Schoenbrunn, his mission village on the Tuscararas River. There Rain Crow had married a Christian Delaware called Josiah. She’d borne him a son and, to the best of her brothers’ knowledge, had been content—until her husband and son contracted smallpox and died within days of each other. Soon after, Rain Crow, also called Abigail, returned to her mother’s people, coming to live in Nonhelema’s Town, across Scippo Creek from Cornstalk’s Town, near its joining with the Scioto.