Rebecca sighed and pushed another stick into the coals. She had known the facts of life when she’d wed Simon, but she’d still been an innocent in sexual matters. It hadn’t occurred to her that a husband might be unnatural when it came to the marriage bed.
Or that she might someday find herself lusting after a half-naked Indian . . .
Chapter 8
Talon crawled into the cave and rose to his feet, stamping off fresh snow and filling the cave with the sharp scent of evergreen and the deeper musk of damp furs. His eyes met hers across the fire and widened in mild surprise. “You are awake, woman.”
Rebecca saw that he had brought a bundle of what seemed to be pelts with him. He dropped to one knee, untied the thongs, and unrolled an assortment of Indian garments across the dirt floor. His waist-length hair fell carelessly forward over his left shoulder as he concentrated on the task, and Rebecca’s heart gave an odd leap as dancing stars of firelight reflected off his crow-black tresses.
Would his hair feel as soft as it looked, she wondered . . . or would it be coarse, like a horse’s mane? Instantly, the unspoken questions shamed her, and she covered her mortification with forced anger. “I have a name,” she snapped at him. “Rebecca! How many times must I tell you? Stop calling me woman!”
She glared at him, while confusion blurred her reason. What was happening to her? She was a decent Christian matron—eight years wed. Was she losing her mind from the strain of her ordeal? Or had she finally succumbed to the total lack of morals that Simon insisted her mother had revealed when she gave birth to two bastards.
Why she was having these intimate fantasies about Fire Talon didn’t matter, Rebecca told herself sternly. She must gain control of her wayward emotions and fight this unnatural physical attraction she felt toward him.
“You are my prisoner,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “You have no rights but those I give you.”
“I would expect as much from you,” she flung back. His expression was solemn, but he was making fun of her. She knew it, and it made her angrier still. “You savages treat your squaws like beasts of burden,” she accused.
He looked at her with those fathomless, sloe eyes and her skin prickled. The air seemed charged between them, and she found it hard to draw breath.
“Doubtless, you have known many Shawnee women.”
“No . . .” She swallowed. Where did he get this keen sense of wit? With his quick tongue, he should have been born an Irishman; he was using her language to make her look foolish. “It . . . it’s common knowledge,” she stammered awkwardly.
“Wrong knowledge.” His pronunciation was proper, each syllable enunciated . . . but still, the words rang with a hint of music.
She shook her head. “Simon is an expert on Indians. He told me—”
“Tah hah shee! You are wrong. Your man is wrong. Shawnee and Delaware women have more rights than any white woman.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“E-e! Yes, I speak the truth,” he retorted. “I have no wife, but if I did, I would own my weapons, my moccasins, my pipe. Our wigwam would be hers. Our food, our blankets, clothing, my canoe—even our hunting ground would be hers. My sons and daughters would inherit her family clan. To you, as a European, that means my wife’s surname. And if she wished to be rid of me, she need only put my moccasins outside of the house and declare that she had divorced me.”
“I don’t believe a word of it.”
He shrugged. “Do I care what the wife of Simon Brandt believes? You are ignorant.”
“Rebecca. Say it.”
“Becca.”
She winced. Only Colin called her by that childish nickname. On Talon’s lips, it sounded—no, she argued, trying to ignore the shivers playing up and down her spine. She would not allow herself to be cajoled by her captor. These days in the forest must have affected her mind. What matter if he said her name in a husky tone that brought moisture to her eyes? He was the enemy—a cold-blooded murderer.
Still, her awakening curiosity would not be denied. “How do you speak my language so well?” she demanded. “You did not find your English mannerisms and vocabulary in a greenbrier thicket.”
He nodded. “Correct. My mother accepted your Christian religion. She even had me baptized as a young child. She believed that her children must learn European ways if we were to survive.”
“A wise woman.”
“Not so wise. Her love of Christianity killed her. She was in a church when Simon Brandt and his friends burned her alive.”
Rebecca turned her head away. “I don’t believe you,” she protested, but something deep inside told her that he wasn’t lying. She’d heard Simon boast of Indian villages he’d burned—of scalps he’d taken. Burning a church to kill savages inside wasn’t beyond his capability. “Simon is my husband. I won’t listen to lies you tell about him,” she said. But her stomach constricted and a lump rose in her throat. If it was true—if Simon had done this awful thing—Talon would have little mercy for her once his father was released.
“My mother’s devotion to her new religion ran deep, so deep that she sent her oldest son to the English at Williamsburg. They have a school at the College of William and Mary where small naked natives are dressed in proper coats and breeches and taught their catechism. She knew that a young child learns best, so I went at four and stayed two years. Since I was too little to manage the doors in the Wren Building, I lived with a physician and his family. They were kind enough to let me sleep on the kitchen floor with their dogs.”
“Two years you lived there?” His eyes reflected flickering light from the fire, and for an instant she forgot who he was and looked into the soul of a lonely, frightened little boy.
“They whipped me when I spoke Delaware, so I learned quickly. They say leather stimulates the brain if applied often enough to the back. When I passed the moon of my sixth birthday, I stole my benefactor’s best horse and rode away. I was halfway to the Ohio River when a Shawnee hunter found me.”
“It must have been a difficult experience for you,” she said stiffly. “But I can’t believe that you mastered our language at so young an age.”
“So my mother thought. She sent me to Williamsburg again when I was eleven. This time, I was housed at The Brafferton on the college grounds with boys from a half-dozen tribes. We studied religion, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and other subjects. Religion was the favorite class of our instructors, but I preferred the history of your Greek and Roman generals. Do you know that the library at William and Mary contains detailed accounts of the battle tactics of Alexander the Great?”
“You are an educated man?”
He shrugged. “My teachers thought I had a gift for learning languages. Naturally, they kept us locked in Brafferton House. Who would sanction savages roaming the streets of town—coming in contact with decent folk? At night, a friend and I would climb down the brick walls from the upper floor and run for hours. It was a way to keep myself fit and to remember who I was.”
She swallowed, and her voice came out softer than she intended. “Why didn’t you escape again?”
His lips tightened into a thin slash across his inscrutable face. For a long moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer, and then he said simply, “My mother made me promise that I would stay until I knew enough about your people to be an asset to mine.”
She almost laughed. “Your mother? You stayed because your mother wanted you to?”
“You do not honor your mother? You would break your word to her?”
“She’s dead.”
“Then you realize her value, if you did not while she lived.”
She shut her eyes as the pain knifed through her. Once again, the awful scene that was seared on her brain came to mind . . .
She was thirteen again—coming down the stone stairs from the new wing of her father’s house with an armful of linens, a gift for the itinerant tinker families that camped every summer on her father’s land, when she’d first seen her mothe
r lying at the foot of the steps. She lay moaning, sprawled in a spreading pool of blood and birth fluids from a babe brought to birth too soon. Standing over her body was father’s cousin, his pious face twisted in a smug grin. “Murderer!” Rebecca had whispered, as she knelt in her mother’s blood and looked into her ashen face. “Murderer!”
“Becca.”
Talon’s voice dragged her from the past. “I always knew my mother’s value,” she murmured. “I loved her . . . more than anyone else.” She looked up into his chiseled male face and remembered who he was and who she was. “My mother has nothing to do with this. If you are a Christian—”
“I am not a Christian. The Shawnee and their grandfathers, the Delaware, have their own religion. We have practiced our faith for time out of time, long before the Irish ceased worshiping standing stones.”
“All Christians are not perfect. You cannot blame our God for—”
“Your God and mine are the same, Becca. It is your eyes that are clouded by ignorance. Does it matter whether we call him Wishemenetoo or Keshaalemookungk or Jehovah? There can be only one Creator, a Supreme Being of love and benevolence.”
“If you’ve been given the advantages of our culture—if you know us so well—then how can you hate us?” She was beyond anger now. He disturbed her in a way that went far beyond his burning their farm and holding her hostage.
In a heartbeat, he crossed the distance between them and seized her hand. She tried to struggle free, but he was stronger than she remembered. “Don’t—” she began.
He held her hand firmly, not twisting it or hurting her, but so that she knew that she had no chance of pulling away. Fear possessed her and she clamped her other hand over her mouth to hold back her screams.
“Be still,” he ordered. Almost gently, he turned her palm so that it was lit by firelight.
“Please,” she whimpered. “I don’t—”
He raised his eyes and gazed into hers. “I do not hate you, Becca,” he said. “I mean you no harm. So long as my father lives, you are safe with me.” He clasped her hand with his lean, brown fingers. “There is something I do not understand,” he continued softly. “Your flesh is no different from mine.”
She shuddered with terror as he pulled his knife from his sheath and sliced the skin on the back of his hand. A thin trickle of blood ran down over her palm.
“Do you see?” he asked. “Do you see that my blood is the color of yours? I am a man. I thirst and hunger; my heart is glad when the first flowers bloom through March snow, and I know sorrow when those I love come to grief. Am I so different from an Englishman—an Irishman—a Frenchman? Am I?”
She shook her head.
“Then why do the Europeans come to our land and treat us no differently from the game they slaughter for sport?”
“I am Irish. I told you that. The English stole my country as well. You can’t blame me for—”
“We have a treaty signed in the name of King George. It says that no whites will settle on Indian land. Simon Brandt built his cabin on Delaware hunting grounds.”
Rebecca dropped her gaze, unable to answer. It was true. Simon had no right to be there. “I didn’t choose where to clear the forest,” she protested. “I go where my husband tells me and—”
He would not let go of her hand. “And you dare to say that Shawnee women are without rights?”
Her chest felt tight and she was dizzy. She desperately wanted him to release her . . . and yet she took perverse pleasure in his touch. His half-naked chest was very close, and she had the strangest urge to reach out with her other hand and stroke his bronze skin.
Mary and Joseph! What was she thinking? She turned her head away as tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
Instantly, his mood shifted. He opened his hand and let her slip away. “I did not want to frighten you,” he said. “I only wanted you to see that I am as much a human as—”
“No.” Her voice cracked with emotion and her lower lip quivered. “No, you are not human. You are a cruel, heartless barbarian, and you’ll never convince me otherwise until you return me unharmed to my husband.”
He retreated to the far wall of the cave, moving on silent feet with the lithe grace of a hunting animal. “There is nothing I would rather do, wife of my greatest enemy . . . as soon as my father is free.”
Inside the commandant’s quarters of Fort Nelson, Simon Brandt, Amos Dodd, and two members of the Virginia Free Militia met with Colonel Pickering, the ranking British officer. Pickering was seated at a table with his second, Major Brooke; a young, red-haired orderly stood just behind the two.
Simon leaned across the table and slammed his fist down with so much force that an ink stand fell to the plank floor and shattered. “Damn ye, Pickering! This is yer fault,” he accused. “If you’d taken action immediately, my cabin wouldn’t be in ashes and my wife wouldn’t be in the hands of that red devil.”
Brooke motioned toward the broken glass and the orderly hastened to clean up the mess. “I’ll thank you to keep a decent tongue in your head, Brandt,” the major admonished. “Colonel Pickering is new come to the wilderness. He must have time to adjust to our rather unusual circumstances here.”
“My orders were to placate the savages, not stir them into frenzy,” Pickering said. He was a meek man, the fourth son of an English baron, and had had the good fortune to serve in London for most of his career.
The extremes in weather that Colonel Pickering had experienced since coming to Virginia had strained his frail body. This morning he was suffering from a sore throat and a hacking cough; his throat was wrapped in red flannel to protect him from the chill, and he gave off a strong odor of garlic.
Simon sneered. “Ye treat Injuns like ye do all vermin. Hot lead and cold steel is all they understand.”
Pickering covered his mouth with a monogrammed handkerchief and coughed into it. “My superior in London . . .” he began. His voice lost volume and he repeated himself in a louder tone. “My superior in London is deeply concerned by the rising French influence among the natives. He fears treachery from that quarter. If I anger the Indians by—”
“I ain’t askin’ ye to do anything, Colonel. My militia can handle this job. All we want from you is powder and protection for the men’s families while we move west and cut us a swath through the hostiles.”
“And recover your lost wife, I presume,” Major Brooke put in. “My condolences, Brandt. I understand that this is not the first time Indians have—”
Simon’s face darkened with rage. “Aye. They killed my first wife,” he lied glibly. “Scalped and murdered my brother Peter, his wife, and their youngins. I buried ‘em with these two hands—what was left of ’em. And I struck down the beasts that caused their deaths.”
“This Indian captain . . .” the colonel said. “What is his name? Fire something . . . Are you certain he’s the one who . . .”
“He’s the one,” Amos Dodd said. He shifted his cud of tobacco from one cheek to the other and leaned forward on his long rifle. “He sent word by Red Jim the Nanticoke that he had Missus Brandt. Claimed he’d trade her for the old man we got locked up here.”
“Fire is Medicine Smoke’s son,” Major Brooke explained. “He’s a big war chief—a real hothead. He leads the Mecate Shawnee, but he draws braves from a lot of other tribes.”
“Aye,” Dodd agreed. “You snuff him, and you’ll stop a lot of the killin’ on the frontier.”
“Fire Talon,” Simon corrected brusquely. He paused, glanced around, and aimed a stream of tobacco at the brass spittoon beside the fireplace. He missed by six inches. “His name is Fire Talon,” he said. “Half Shawnee, half Delaware, and half devil. Him and me go way back.” He fixed Major Pickering with a malevolent stare. “If he’s got my missus, she’s dead. You kin count on it. Or if she ain’t dead, she’s prayin’ to be. The Shawnee love to get their bloody hands on white women. And my woman’s got red hair. Hell, they’d boil up their own grandma for a
chance at a red scalp.”
Pickering paled and wiped the corners of his mouth. “I am so sorry for you. My deepest condolences.”
“Best be sorry for her,” Simon replied, because if she ain’t dead yet, she soon will be. His gut twisted until he tasted bile rising in his throat. He’d not expected this. All the nights he’d left Rebecca alone in that cabin, he’d never thought the hostiles would dare to touch her. Now Fire Talon had taken her, and they both had to die.
He couldn’t believe it was happening again. It had been so many years since Injuns had killed his brother and family and run off with his first wife, Jane. She should have died with the others. It was God’s will that she die with them, but she hadn’t. She’d let some filthy brave crawl into her and fill her belly with his seed. She’d shamed him over and over—clung to her pitiful life when any decent woman would have killed herself. Until he found her . . . and did what had to be done.
He’d had his revenge . . . near twenty years of it. He’d suffered but he’d made sure that the red bastards suffered more. Foot by foot, he and good men like him had pushed the savages back to the Ohio. They’d did what God’s chosen showed in the Old Testament, slaying the heathen, young and old, burning their towns, and plowing over their graves. Now it was time to finish them off, and to settle with his old enemy, Fire Talon, once and for all.
“Mister Brandt had requested that we send to Philadelphia for certain items,” Major Brooke said. “Blankets to give out to the hostiles as gifts. Good wool blankets from the smallpox hospital on Water Street.”
“Smallpox hospital?” Pickering said. “I wasn’t aware that . . .”
“The Quakers run a charitable institution for the dying,” Brooke answered. “The blankets can be purchased reasonably. There is military precedent. It’s been done before in the lower Pennsylvania Counties.”
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