by Lori Benton
He didn’t rise from his crouch. “Give me a moment, Clare.”
Her gaze dropped to his hand as he placed the last stick on the flames. It was shaking. She glanced up in alarm, but if he was angry enough to tremble, his face didn’t show it. His features were expressionless.
Too expressionless.
She wanted to clench her fists and scream. To blame someone for this night’s failure. Only she didn’t understand what had gone wrong or who to blame. Mr. Cheramy? Rain Crow? Jeremiah? Nonhelema? Herself for daring to hope again? The Almighty—for letting any of this happen in the first place?
Taking a sleeping Pippa from the cradleboard, Clare settled her on the bed platform, putting her back and the tears she couldn’t stem to Jeremiah Ring. Wishing him to berate her and get it over with, if that’s what he meant to do.
When he spoke at last, his voice was strained. “I’m going to tell you something about Cheramy, something you should know.”
She felt the burn of his gaze on the back of her head. No longer certain she wanted to know, she asked, “What of him?”
Jeremiah spoke readily now, apparently having found the words he’d sought, or the self-control to speak them. “Not long after I came here—about a year after—Cheramy came to Cornstalk’s Town for the first time. He was a young man then, generous with his goods. Generous in many ways. He quickly became a favorite, especially of the women.”
Clare wiped her tears and forced herself to face Jeremiah, though she would rather he couldn’t see her now.
“As is the way of the French,” he went on, seeming to find no difficulty holding her glare, “Cheramy found himself a willing Shawnee girl and married her. But he didn’t go away and leave her to remain with her kin, as is their usual practice. He claimed their marriage was more than a formation of kinship ties to aid his trade. He loved her and wanted her by his side. So she left Cornstalk’s Town when his trade here was done—and none who knew her ever set eyes on her again.”
Clare couldn’t see what this had to do with Jacob, but she wasn’t liking it at all.
“His young wife had died in Montreal, so Cheramy told her family when he came again to the Scioto towns. I don’t recall what sickness he claimed, but such is common enough. The tale was taken as truth, and before he left, weeks later, Cheramy found himself another woman willing to marry him and, like the first, persuaded her to leave her family and travel back to Montreal. Months later Cheramy returned alone with another tale of tragic death. Childbirth, this time.”
Jeremiah’s gaze bore into her. “The mothers and fathers of those women began to suspect the man of lying, but how could it be proved? Their daughters might as well have gone to the moon when they left for Montreal.”
Kneeling by the fire, hands balled on his thighs, his voice had grown more ragged as he spoke, the edges fraying.
“The third woman, Tall Doe, he didn’t even marry but enticed her away with…whatever women see in such a man. Charm, I suppose.”
Charm is deceitful. Clare’s face burned hot with humiliation. Though it had been their fathers who arranged their union, Philip’s charm had swept her off her feet when they first met. And for many months after.
“Tall Doe was the only child of Split-Moon and Red-Quill-Woman,” Jeremiah was saying, gazing now into the fire. “They begged her not to go with Cheramy, fearing never to see her again. Of course that’s exactly what happened.”
Split-Moon and Red-Quill-Woman. The old Shawnee couple who had adopted Wildcat. The sinking in Clare’s middle seemed a harbinger of worse to come.
“When Cheramy dared show his face in Cornstalk’s Town without Tall Doe, Cornstalk himself turned him away. Though Cheramy protested his innocence, he was no more welcome to ply his trade and entice away their young women to sell as slaves in Montreal.”
Clare could keep silent no longer. “Slaves? How could Cornstalk know that?”
Jeremiah turned to her, his long face fire-shadowed and bleak. “As I said, it cannot be proven, but Cheramy wouldn’t be the first to do such a thing.”
His words chilled her, yet they kindled outrage. “Then how do the Shawnees justify what they do, stealing white children from their parents?”
Jeremiah stood, unruffled by her agitation. “Whether their ways are right or wrong, they’re what we have to contend with. I just wanted you to know what sort of man you chose to put your trust in.”
Clare stood too. “Whatever happened to those young women he led away, you don’t think Mr. Cheramy meant me harm?”
“Clare…with or without Jacob, Cheramy would’ve taken you away this night and you’d have wound up in Montreal. Maybe he’d have kept you and rid himself of Pippa. At best—best, Clare—if Cheramy managed to procure Jacob through trade or purchase, he’d have held your son hostage until you repaid him many times what he paid to ransom him from the Shawnees. Had Wildcat not followed you at my request, seen you with that scoundrel, and told me of it…”
He stopped, the look of fear that crossed his eyes startling in its intensity. Then he looked away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her.
“Tell me this, then,” she managed to force out on the wave of bitter regret this night had become. “Why didn’t you let me go with him, even without Jacob? It would have relieved you of the trouble I’ve brought upon you. You could have been done with us. Free of it all.”
His head jerked back as if she’d slapped him. His brows rose, then plunged over eyes that flashed as he faced her again.
“Clare. I— You…”
Now she’d done it. Angered him so thoroughly he couldn’t even speak. Why had she even opened her mouth?
Pippa was stirring, not crying yet, but Clare seized the excuse and settled on the bed, turned her back and lay down with the baby to nurse. Behind her, Jeremiah was silent for so long she thought the conversation over, if not resolved. It wasn’t quite.
“Had he taken you and Pippa, I’d have come after you with Falling Hawk and Wolf-Alone and any other warrior willing to follow me.”
The hair on the back of her neck stood erect. “And if you’d found me?”
“Cheramy would have died. And I’d have brought you and Pippa home.”
Home? She didn’t know where home was anymore. It wasn’t this place. This place was her prison.
Wildcat was outside the lodge the next morning. Ignoring him, Clare marched off toward the creek with empty waterskins, Pippa left in Jeremiah’s care. The boy followed her on the path.
Dawn’s light hadn’t dispelled the night’s crushing disappointment. She was appalled at the frightful risk she’d been willing to take for Jacob, shaken that what she’d thought a solid solution had turned out to be riddled as worm-eaten wood. Her feelings, especially toward Jeremiah, were a maelstrom. Humiliation, resentment, gratitude, frustration. What was she meant to do now, beyond kneeling on the stones of the creek filling the waterskins for another day?
And waiting.
She didn’t believe in Purgatory, but if such a place existed, she suspected it felt like this. Trapped. Caged. Suffocating.
“Clare-wife?”
She dipped the skins without turning to look at Wildcat. Creek water rushed cool over her hands. “What?”
“I sorry you angry, but what Panther-Sees-Him say of that one, Cheramy, it true.”
She rose and faced him, ignoring the curious stares of other women come to the creek to bathe or draw water.
“Does your spying extend to listening outside our lodge?”
The boy puzzled out her words, then vigorously shook his head. “He tell you? I know before of my sister I not know…”
He trailed off, brows puckered, at a loss to express himself.
Clare needed no explanation. Of course Wildcat knew the story of Tall Doe, his sister, though he’d never met her. He knew she’d been taken by Mr. Cheramy and in some manner mistreated. Did his sister live still, a slave, a wife by force? Or was she a prostitute long since dead of the profession?
>
The evil of it all.
She relented, having no strength left to be angry with anyone but herself, especially not this child. Who could say but that his part had been the saving of her and Pippa?
“I’m not angry with you,” she said, fighting the sting of tears.
The boy looked at her, pained beyond his years, then nodded and went away, steps dragging.
The women glanced at her, then quickly away, as if they knew what she had tried to do. She hoped they didn’t know. Surely there would be more than curious glances if they did.
She couldn’t fathom these people. She didn’t want to. Hateful, hateful people, to steal her son and keep him for their own, to rename him and remake him into their image. To drive her to such foolish desperation to undo it all.
Jacob would be waking up under Rain Crow’s roof now. Had he already forgotten her? Was he calling Rain Crow mother?
Refusing to look at the women, she gazed hopelessly across the creek toward Nonhelema’s town until her vision blurred. Then she dropped the waterskins and put her hands over her face, unable either to cross the creek or go back into the town among her enemies.
“Clare?”
Crosses-the-Path didn’t stand back as Wildcat had done. She came and put her arms around Clare’s waist and laid her head against Clare’s back. Next Clare knew she was keening into the shoulder of one of the women she despised, weeping into long black hair that smelled of smoke and bear grease.
Crosses-the-Path, oblivious to the loathing rippling through the one she sought to comfort, crooned low in her throat and stroked the hair Clare hadn’t bothered to braid.
Clare made no protest. She knew what she had to do. It would have to be Jeremiah’s way or no way at all. From that moment she would be the most convincing Shawnee wife and sister and friend she could force herself to be.
She would die for Jacob. Lay down her life readily. She could die a little every hour, every day, could she not?
Mastering herself, she pulled back from the embrace, caught the searching gaze of Falling Hawk’s wife, and forced herself to smile. Forced it all the way to her eyes.
AUGUST 5
GREENBRIER RIVER, VIRGINIA COLONY
Sometimes it seemed more livestock than men had assembled thus far at the spot christened Camp Union, where the Kanawha Trail met the Greenbrier River. Captain Alphus Litchfield and his company of thirty-seven able-bodied Augusta County men—ranging in age from a tenderfoot sixteen to a battle-hardened sixty—were among the first to arrive at the rendezvous for Governor Dunmore’s Southern Army. Most of the company were familiar faces, neighbors or acquaintances from annual militia musters, with a handful gathered along the one hundred mile march they’d made from Staunton west into the mountains.
Other Augusta County captains had assembled with their men, but they still awaited most of them as well as their commanding officers.
Colonel Charles Lewis would command the Augusta County Regiment, and his brother, Colonel Andrew Lewis, the entire Southern Army. Dunmore himself planned to lead the northern division, assembling at Fort Pitt. The two divisions were to converge on the Ohio River at the mouth of the Kanawha, the Northern Army coming by water, the Southern along the Kanawha Trail, from thence to march as one into the Ohio country against the Shawnees.
Also assembled were a smattering of the Botetourt County Regiment companies, but of the Fincastle County companies Alphus could find no sign as he trudged through the hodgepodge of men sorting through supplies coming in by pack trains, chopping wood, raising tents, or tending the growing herds of cattle and horses.
He was keen to find a particular Fincastle company, the one James Harrod was purportedly raising; Daniel Boone had found Harrod at his settlement and given the warning to come in and fort up. That was all the news Alphus could unearth about the man.
The cattle filled the air with their bawling and Alphus’s nose with their stink. They were intended to be driven down to the Ohio, feeding the army on the move. That wouldn’t be a fast march, but Alphus was acquainted with the pace of armies, administratively and otherwise. Normally by now he’d have settled his soul in patience to endure the tedium of camp life, but he couldn’t seem to quell his zeal to march.
He’d no eagerness to be killing Indians and no particular dislike of them, save when they brought harm to the innocent. But that sort of meanness came from individuals acting on their own baser impulses, not the designs of a whole race of people. No more than those who preyed indiscriminately on Indian lives represented every white man’s notion of living peaceably on the frontier.
It was memory of that busted, abandoned wagon giving him no rest; he’d no better notion how to get word of Clare than finding James Harrod, who he prayed would bring his company in soon, eager to make safe the path to his chosen settlement.
Mayhaps Philip himself would be among their ranks and all this fret could be swept aside.
The sun was setting across the western ridges, bathing the clanging, thunking, cussing, bawling, whinnying, smoke-and-cow-scented camp in gold as Alphus left off watching the trail for late arrivals and made his way to his men. They were busy frying up their supper. It smelled of bacon.
His boots scattered grasshoppers through the weeds dotting the clearing where the army was convening as he came in sight of the oiled canvas shelters belonging to his men—and that solitary canvas strung off the ground between two trees. The sight still made him smile.
Geordie Reynolds, youngest of the company, had defended his hammock in the face of thirty-six incredulous stares and jibes about his thinking he’d joined His Majesty’s Navy instead of Dunmore’s Army.
The boy had claimed he couldn’t catch a wink of sleep on the ground no matter what he did to pad his bedroll. “But I sleep like a tucked-up baby slung a few feet above it.”
“Waking every hour bawling for hunger, ye mean?” Tom Woodbane had retorted, to the guffaws of the men and a blush from Geordie.
Eldest of the company and Alphus’s lieutenant, Woodbane couldn’t let a chance to rib the young’un pass, but everyone knew it for good-natured. Alphus had heard the promise Woodbane had made to Geordie’s mother, a cousin of some degree, to bring the lad home alive, Geordie being his mother’s youngest.
All in all, Alphus was pleased with the camaraderie grown among his men, the easy respect they afforded him as their captain. He was more than pleased by their marksmanship and—hammock aside—their fortitude on the march thus far.
He came unnoticed to the gathering, those doing the cooking and those waiting to eat it. Bacon it was, and proper biscuits to put with it, now they’d fresh stores of flour. He stood in the shadow of a nearby poplar, arms crossed. Woodbane, the watchful old scout, took note of him after a second or two but didn’t call attention to his arrival as he listened to talk pertaining to news gleaned from camp.
“I’m telling you true,” Ezra Baldwin was saying. Nigh thirty, white-blond as a young’un, the man nodded toward the encampment of a newly arrived company. “Heard it from one of the Botetourt fellas. There’s more’n a few settlers stayed on their Kentucky claims despite the Indians raiding over the countryside.”
“Better they come in,” said another, watching the bacon sizzle in the pan. “Help put down the uprising, then go back to their cabins.”
Baldwin bobbed his head. “What one man can’t do, all us together can.”
“And what would that be?” Woodbane inquired with the lift of a grizzled brow.
“Whoop every red scalawag from here to the Miami River, that’s what. Send ’em west across the Mississippi.”
“And if they whoop you back instead of turning tail and running west?”
Baldwin laughed at that. “When have they ever?”
Braddock’s name came to mind, but Alphus’s thoughts snagged on what began this line of talk. The stubbornness of certain settlers, refusing to budge off their land. Would Philip be of a mind to force Clare and the children to remain at Harrod’s s
ettlement, when Harrod himself had retreated east? Alphus feared he might be. Rarely could you tell Philip anything he didn’t want to hear, no matter if you saw clear the cliff he was rushing toward and he didn’t.
The conversation shifted; someone had heard from someone else that several companies of the Northern Army had already headed downriver to Wheeling Settlement.
“They planned a campaign up the Muskingum,” the man—Baldwin again, in the know this evening and enjoying it—said with a barely contained grin. “Hear tell they’ve carried it out.”
Alphus stepped forward into the brightening ring of firelight. “A campaign into Shawnee country already? Who’s in command, Private?”
Baldwin straightened at the address. “Colonel by name of McDonald, sir. Took four hundred up Captina Creek to the Muskingum, to some Shawnee towns up that way. They was some fighting, but the Indians fled, so they burned the towns and the cornfields and came on back down to the Ohio.”
So it had begun.
Alphus didn’t like to think on Clare and her family being taken from that wagon by Indian hands and carried off to some village across the Ohio—far better to imagine that scout leading them somewhere safe—but neither dared he dismiss it. Might she have been there on the Muskingum?
“You happen to know the names of those Indian towns?”
“Can’t say I heard ’em all named,” Baldwin replied, still basking in the company’s attention. “Though I recall to mind Snaketown was one.”
He paused, brightened, then added, “And another was called something like Wah-kah-toe-mee-kah.”
MID-AUGUST
CORNSTALK’S TOWN
The dancing to celebrate the summer’s first corn harvest—the Green Corn Dance, Jeremiah called it—had begun at sundown the previous evening and had lasted deep into the night. Nearly everyone, including Clare, kept wakeful by the beating of drums, was red-eyed and wincing as they tended roasting pits and kettles the next morning.
Only Crosses-the-Path was bright-eyed as they gathered in her lodge to prepare more food to add to the mounds of corn, roasted or milky-fresh from the husk, the people would consume during the coming days. Confined to the lodge where Shawnee women spent their menstrual cycles, Crosses-the-Path had missed the first night’s dancing.