The Wood's Edge

by Lori Benton

  Reginald glanced round, half expecting another woman to appear, come to claim one of the babes as her own. They couldn’t both belong to this woman. They were as different as two newborns could be except—a peek beneath the blanket told him—both were male.

  That was where resemblance ended, at least in that dimness. For while the infant on the left had a head of black hair and skin that foretold a tawny shade, the one on the right, capped in wisps of blond, was as fair and pink as Reginald’s dead son.

  The ringing in Reginald’s head had become a roar as he bent over Heledd to wake her. His heart battered the walls of his chest like a thirty-two pounder set at point-blank range, waging internal war. Despite his mistakes with Heledd, he’d still considered himself a good man. An honorable man. For five-and-twenty years he’d had no indisputable cause to doubt it. Until now.

  How could he do this thing?

  With a groan, he backed from his wife. He would set this right, return things as the Almighty had—for whatever inscrutable reason—caused them to be. There was time to undo what ought never to have entered his thoughts.

  Only there wasn’t.

  Heledd’s eyes blinked open. A slender, reddened hand felt for the infant gone from her side. With a cry she heaved up from the cot, hair flowing dark across her crumpled shift.

  “Where is he? My baby!” Panic pinched her voice, twisted her fine-boned face into a sharp mask.

  Reginald’s heart broke its pummeling rhythm, swelling with love, aching with shame. “He’s here. I have him here.”

  With grasping hands Heledd took the swaddled babe. The child’s features were scrunching to cry, but the instant it settled in Heledd’s embrace, it calmed.

  Reginald’s hands shook as his wife stared at the child in her arms. She would know. Of course she would. What mother wouldn’t? In another heartbeat she would raise those brown eyes that had claimed his heart, sear him with accusation, unleash the darkness that he knew bedeviled her, and he’d have lost more than a fort and a son and his honor this day.

  Heledd’s narrow shoulders heaved. Like a mirror of the babe’s, her face calmed, softening in a manner Reginald had never seen. Not even on their wedding day when she’d looked at him as though he’d lit the moon. It was as though, in the face of the child in her arms, she’d found her sun.

  “Oh…it is well he looks. When I saw him before I thought—was his color not a bit sickly? But do you look at him now, Reginald. Our son is beautiful.” With a bubble of laughter she raised her face to him, joy shining from her porcelain features, her beautiful eyes alight in their bruised hollows.

  He couldn’t see the darkness.

  For a fleeting moment Reginald was glad for the thing he had done. “He is—” The catch in his voice might have been for reasons purer than the truth. He was beautiful, Heledd. As I lay him beside the dark child, I saw he had your eyes…my mouth…and I think my father’s nose.

  “Major?” a hurried voice hailed from the doorway. “Ye’ve but moments to be on the parade ground, sir.”

  Reginald nodded without looking to see who spoke. Grief and guilt swallowed whole his gladness.

  For mine iniquities are gone over mine head…neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin—

  As footsteps hurried away, he tore through his soul for refuge, even the most tenuous—and found it in Heledd and what he must now do to see her safe across fifteen miles of howling wilderness. He clenched his hands to stop their shaking. “Quickly,” he told his wife. “Let me help you dress.”

  Heledd wrenched her gaze from the babe to echo vaguely, “Dress?”

  “Aye. You must rise, and I am sorry for it, but we have lost this ground. We’re returning to Fort Edward.”

  2

  Good Voice of the Turtle Clan woke to the screams of wounded men being slaughtered in their blankets. The fort had surrendered to the French. This much she knew, and for it she had given thanks to the Master of Life, telling herself she need only gather strength, bide her time. Soon she would be free to return to Stone Thrower, if he still lived.

  None of the a’sluni—the whites—not the women who tended her through the birthing, not the soldiers who questioned her, knew how much she understood their talk. English traders came often through her town. Many of her clan sisters spoke to them and passed on their words to Good Voice. But since being hauled a prisoner into this fort, she’d let none of those words pass her lips.

  But now she had new reason to fear. She could hear that Montcalm’s Indians were already inside the fort, killing the English. Though in her heart Good Voice was Onyota’a:ka—Oneida—with her light hair and blue eyes she looked as English as any woman in the fort. More than some. And now she had Stone Thrower’s sons to protect.

  On her knees, Good Voice yanked aside the blanket to lift the nearest baby, the second-born—the brown one—alarmed by the weakness of her arms. She’d lost much blood. Willing her bones to be like iron, she reached for the firstborn, marveling afresh that her sons had not in the usual way of two-born-together shared their parents’ blood in equal measure, but one taken more of hers, the other more of Stone Thrower’s. It was a thing that would be much talked of once they were all safe away, back home at Kanowalohale.

  A yipping shriek curdled down the corridor beyond the recess where Good Voice had pushed her sons into the world. It raised the hairs on her scalp, even as she felt against her cradling arm the light-skinned baby’s stiffening chill.

  A more visceral panic gripped her. Holding the brown child to her shoulder, warm and solid, she laid his brother on her thighs and bent over his tiny face. No breath! For a moment her own breathing ceased, her throat clutched by shock, then choking grief. She had let this happen—let Stone Thrower’s firstborn slip away while she slept.

  More screams rent the dank, earth-tanged air. Good Voice pressed the dead child to her shoulder. With the living clutched to the other shoulder, she staggered to her feet. The blood rushed out of her head and from her womb. Earthen walls and timber frames and lantern light spun. She braced herself with feet planted wide lest she spin, too, and fall.

  Other feet pounded the earth. A warning shout rose in the passage behind her. She whirled as an Abenaki warrior fell across the bloodstained pallet where she’d lain, war club falling from open fingers, a hatchet buried in his back. The one who’d shouted came up behind the Abenaki, relief in his eyes as he looked at her. Lizotte, a Canadian coureur de bois—a woodsrunner, as the English named them. They served the French as interpreters for their Indian allies. Lizotte snatched the hatchet from the Abenaki’s back and caught Good Voice as she staggered, nearly dropping her dead son.

  Lizotte took the body and steadied her, eyes fierce in a face narrow and sharp like a bird’s. “Stone Thrower sends me for you. He did not know whether the babe had come—two of them! Can you walk? Montcalm’s Indians have slipped the leash, but I will take you out of this.”

  “I must walk,” Good Voice said in his French language.

  Sparing no more words, Lizotte swept her out of the recess, seeming not to notice the child he now held was dead. There was much else to demand his attention. Along a dark corridor, past scenes of slaughter, he led her, deeper into the earth, finally up again into daylight, where Good Voice blinked and squinted until her eyes could bear it.

  Lizotte had spoken true. The fort’s interior swarmed like an anthill kicked over. Indians were coming over the broken walls, through the gun embrasures, taking prisoners of the English left behind, stripping some of clothing, tomahawking any who resisted. They raced about, shrieking, angered to find so little baggage to pillage or rum to drink. As Lizotte pulled her along in the shadow of a barracks wall, she saw a big Huron pick up a broken barrel and hurl it in anger.

  Lizotte made for the gate, hatchet ready to defend them both, though with his stocking cap and quilled leggings he looked too French to be mistaken for English. Halfway to the gate his stride faltered. He looked down at the child he carried,
then at her. “Dead?”

  Good Voice wanted to release the keening trapped within, but she had one son still living. For him she must be strong. “Yes. Dead.”

  Another Huron came loping past, lofting high a fresh scalp. A black-robe priest rushed into the fort, long skirts flapping, face pinched in fury at sight of the Huron’s prize. Behind the black-robe more French came. Soldiers. More Indians. Good Voice couldn’t tell who meant to join the slaughter and who—besides the black-robe—meant to stop it. She didn’t think anyone could stop it. The warriors needed scalps and plunder, or who would believe their boasts of victory? But this…it was very bad.

  Outside the fort, Indians were digging up the soldier graves so they could plunder them. There had been no time for the English to bury their battle dead. These were spotting-sickness graves. Could those warriors not see what horror they touched?

  Spots danced in Good Voice’s vision, a mockery of the sickness that had stalked the fort, an enemy within. She stumbled on, her insides raw, aching in protest. She should have spent this day in a birthing hut, cared for by the clan mothers—more days still, until her bleeding stopped.

  They were nearly to the forested hills to the west when her arms sagged. At her cry, Lizotte turned back to take the living child, trading it for the dead one, which seemed to weigh nothing in her weakened arms, its spirit flown. Lizotte hurried on, but paused at the wood’s edge to wait for her.

  “Stone Thrower was wounded when you were captured. He was taken to the French at Fort Carillon to heal. He waits for you there.”

  Good Voice knew about the wounding. They had come with a party of Oneidas in answer to Montcalm’s call for aid, but Stone Thrower had decided not to take up the hatchet for the French. They’d been heading home when the redcoat soldiers burst into their camp. Before she was dragged away from him, Good Voice had seen Stone Thrower take the thrust of a bayonet in his side, had feared he’d died of it.

  She rejoiced that he lived, but what her eyes were telling her, now that she saw their dead baby in the light of day, wiped the gladness from her heart. This was not her child. She looked back in bewilderment at the detestable fort. Indians and woodsrunners poured from its gate, making for the entrenched camp into which the redcoats were marching.

  “Good Voice! Hanyo, hanyo.” Hurry, hurry, in the tongue of her people.

  She gaped at the dead baby she held, then at Lizotte. “I do not know this child. It is not mine.”

  Lizotte’s sun-weathered hand splayed over her second-born, cupped to his shirt. “What are you saying? Did you not birth two?”

  “Yes. Tekawiláke’.” Two babies. “But I would know the son out of my own body, even dead. This is not him!”

  How could this be? Whose child was this? Where was her son? A scream of sheer panic swelled until it threatened to tear out her throat with the need for release.

  She must have appeared ready to bolt, and not for the safety of the forest. Lizotte put himself between her and the fort. “What are you thinking? You cannot go back.”

  “I must find Stone Thrower’s son!” But as she spoke, knowledge of what had been done burst inside her head like one of the big fort guns exploding.

  Another woman in the fort had given birth. As Good Voice’s sons raised their first cries, she’d heard that woman screaming, seen the two English women cleaning her babies wince, heard them speak of that woman’s husband—how he worried for his fragile wife, for the babe taking long to come. Then one had given the other a sly look and their talk changed to how good that woman’s husband was to look at, so tall in his officer’s red coat.

  In desperation, Good Voice latched onto the one bit of importance…his officer’s red coat. That one whose wife had given birth was a redcoat officer. Had those women named him?

  “Good Voice!”

  Ignoring Lizotte, she closed her eyes, summoning memory of English words spoken heedlessly in her presence. Aw-bree. One of the women had called him that. She opened her eyes.

  “I know who has done this.” She hadn’t heard anyone say that other woman’s baby had died, but this child, newborn as her own, must belong to Redcoat Aw-bree. He had done this. She could see it in her mind. While she slept he’d come, taken her living baby, light-skinned like his, and left behind his dead one.

  As certainty engulfed her, she almost flung the strange child to the ground. She wanted to do it. Meant to do it. But her arms would not obey.

  Lizotte slid the hatchet into his belt and reached for her, strong fingers closing over her arm. “Save this son. Save him to place in Stone Thrower’s hands. Then you will tell him of the one who has taken his brother. It is for Stone Thrower to make this right.”

  She didn’t want to accept Lizotte’s words, but what use was there in going back, trying to find one man in that chaos? One whose face she didn’t know. Even if she found him, who would speak for her against a redcoat?

  Turning her back on that fort was harder than being torn from Stone Thrower’s side. Harder than the tearing of her body as her sons were born amidst strangers.

  Good Voice’s heart tore in two as she slipped into the forest, weeping at last for her firstborn. Each tear was a prayer to the Master of Life to guard that son and watch where he was taken, so that one day his father could be led to that place. And take him back.

  3

  August 10, 1757

  From the edge of the fire’s shrinking light the Indian watched him: a gleam of oiled flesh, bristling scalp-lock, silver glinting in stretched earlobes, eyes staring from a black-painted mask. Reginald clenched his musket, feeling keenly the want of ammunition and bayonet, relinquished upon surrender to Montcalm’s Frenchmen. The Indian’s gaze licked along the gun, pausing at Reginald’s white-knuckled grip. Teeth gleamed in the blackened face.

  Anyone who’d thought the walled encampment sufficient to keep the Indians at bay had been disabused of such thinking. Barely were the British within the palisade before hundreds of warriors surrounded the camp, the boldest pushing past the halfhearted French guards to stalk among them, pilfering whatever struck their fancy from wagon or person, striking down any who offered hindrance. Though Montcalm himself had come hurrying from his camp to wrangle his Indians into order, sporadic intrusions had continued throughout another sleepless night.

  With darkness finally lifting and the march to Fort Edward tantalizingly near, Indians were slipping back into the camp to have another go at looting. From all quarters came sounds of helpless protest, but Reginald didn’t take his eyes from the lone warrior confronting him. He tried to look menacing—he’d several inches on the Indian, a hatchet and knife belted beneath his coat to attract less notice—but he was wretched with fatigue and strain and knew it showed.

  The Indian’s gaze shifted to Heledd, asleep beneath one of the regiment’s baggage wagons behind Reginald. Dread stabbed hot down his throat. Do not punish her for my sin—

  As he moved to block the Indian’s view of his wife, a new alarm gripped him, spinning a tangle of speculation. Was it the child the Indian had fixed upon? Could this be the father of the babe he’d taken? He hadn’t seen the blond captive in the encampment. No reason he should with more than two thousand soldiers, women, children, and Negro slaves packed within. Had she died in the fort? escaped to the forest? What had become of his dead son, abandoned beside the dark infant?

  Remorse and self-loathing battered from within, tempting him to open his coat and invite this bloody-minded heathen staring him down across the embers to try for his heart. Only knowledge of what would happen to Heledd afterward kept him from it. His hand went to his hatchet. The Indian’s eyes gleamed, taunting him to raise the blade.

  Suddenly Reginald sensed them there, a soldier on his left, two moving up on his right, no more armed than he yet giving the Indian back his menace. So quickly it left Reginald weak-kneed, the Indian slipped into the shadows, gone to harry another corner of the camp.

  Reginald nearly tottered as he turned to see Heled
d, awakened, eyes gaping shadows in her stricken face. In the faint glow thrown beneath the wagon by the dying fire’s light, her mouth trembled.

  “Reginald, where are my gowns?”

  Gowns? He knelt and saw in her gaze the bewildered fear of a child woken from a nightmare. “They’re above you, Heledd, in the wagon. They’ll be safe until we—”

  From somewhere outside the encampment shouts arose.

  Heledd clutched his hand, hers icy despite the morning’s muggy warmth. “What is happening?”

  Reginald drew her from beneath the wagon. She came out clutching the babe she hadn’t relinquished even in sleep.

  Though dawn tinted the sky above the eastern hills, it was too dark to tell what was afoot beyond the palisade. On their feet at the first shout, a company of regulars ahead of their wagon lurched forward as if to begin the march, and as abruptly halted, stricken with confusion as more shouts rent the dawn. Children set to wailing, including the babe Heledd attempted to comfort. Reginald could smell his reeking clout.

  As the ranks ahead shuffled forward again, the wagon’s driver, who looked all of sixteen, clambered onto the seat. Before he could snap the lines across the horse’s back, Reginald called, “Bide you! Let me see my wife to her place.”

  The lad peered down, face strained in the graying light. “Hurry, sir. I don’t know what’s afoot but don’t mean to lose the column.”

  Shouts outside the palisade turned to screams. Were they under attack? Where was de la Corne, Montcalm’s captain, left in charge of the camp? Where were the guards? Reginald took the babe and helped Heledd to the space provided her at the rear of the bed. As the wagon creaked forward, he handed the bawling infant into her care. His place for the march was with his men, but given the state into which circumstances had deteriorated, he wasn’t about to let Heledd out of his sight. Let them punish him for it at Fort Edward, as long as he and Heledd made it there. He clung to the wagon, keeping pace alongside.