Blue Moon

by Jill Marie Landis

  There beneath the moon they made slow, tender, burning love as the night air caressed them and fireflies danced against the backdrop of trees like fairies come to celebrate with them. There was healing. There were silent promises and unspoken vows.

  Bond Homestead

  Illinois in summer. The air was close and humid, thick as a hot wet towel. Payson walked to the open cabin door and stared out over the field where the stalks of Indian corn had grown taller by the day, but he did not see the corn stalks as he stared absently across the field. Nor did he see the clear blue sky above. All he had been able to dwell on for the last two days was Olivia, of what she had endured and what she might even now be enduring at Darcy Lankanal’s hands.

  He leaned against the doorjamb, idly scratching his shirt-front. No words came to him, nothing the poets had written that could fill the void of Olivia’s leaving again; nothing could replace his own self-loathing. Because he had been too afraid to pursue her about the details of where she had spent the last year, because he had been able to fool himself into thinking that he would ask her when the time was right, he had made them all vulnerable. He had left the door open for Darcy Lankanal to waltz right in.

  He heard Little Pay shouting at the side of the cabin. The boy’s words were indistinguishable, something about boats and pirates. He and Freddie had been running at full tilt all morning, chasing each other in and out and around the cabin. Without warning, they appeared around the corner of the house and ran straight at Payson, hooting and hollering. Each of them wore an identical swath of red fabric tied around his head and down over one eye. They tried to duck past him.

  “What are you two doing?” He was sorry he had given them so little of his time of late.

  “We’re playing Noah and the river pirates.” Little Pay stuck out his narrow chest and proudly pointed to himself. “I’m Noah.”

  “An I’m Little Noah,” Freddie quickly informed him. They ran inside, disappeared up the ladder to the loft and in what seemed like two minutes were climbing back down again.

  They came and went and Payson did nothing to even slow them down. Because they did not comprehend the full weight of Olivia’s departure, the boys carried no burden of worry. Nor should they have to, Payson thought. Let them play, he told himself. He wanted them to be young and carefree for as long as they could.

  Behind him, Susanna set down a bowl of cornmeal and walked across the room. She reached out to him when she got to the door, slipped her arm around his waist and leaned into him. Together they stared out at the same field, the same clear sky.

  “He’ll find her, Payson. Noah will bring Livvie home again.”

  “You think so?”

  “He will go all the way to New Orleans if he has to, and it won’t be just to clear his name.”

  He stood away from the doorjamb, his arm around her shoulders. “Susanna, I keep asking myself why I didn’t talk to her sooner, why I didn’t sit her down and make her tell me what happened. I saw such sorrow in her eyes when she first came back to us that I just could not bear to dredge it up for her again. Why didn’t I act?”

  “To what end? What could you have done?”

  He sighed. “I could have prevented all this. I could have been on the lookout for Lankanal. I would have already known what she had been through. I could have thought more clearly. I would have come up with a plan to keep him from her. Susanna, when he told me all those things, about buying Livvie from the colonel and his men, I was in such shock that I couldn’t think clearly. If it hadn’t been for Molly—”

  “Who could blame you?”

  When he turned and looked down into her eyes, there was such suffering reflected in his that it made her ache for him.

  “Certainly not you, Susanna, although you have every right to blame me for all of this. I should have listened to your father—”

  She put her fingers to his lips to silence him. “Never say that, Payson. You would have never survived living under my father’s roof. I know that now.”

  “But can we survive out here? Look at all that’s happened. It was my place to protect you and Livvie and the boys. I failed on our journey West. Without Noah’s help this summer, I could not have provided for all of you for another winter. Now I’ve failed Olivia again.”

  “She understands now that you did what you had to do that day on the river. The last thing she told me before she left was that she wanted you to know that she forgives you, Payson. She said that she realizes now that sometimes one has no choice. Livvie knows you only did what you had to do last summer. She told me that she survived once and she will again. When she went with Lankanal, she was doing what she thought she had to do because she loves us … and Noah.”

  Payson frowned. “But Noah can defend himself. How she thought Lankanal could best him, I’ll never know.”

  “I’m sure Livvie didn’t want Noah put to the test.”

  “But she knew I was wanting. Even Molly knows that I can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a rifle. Livvie knew that, too. She must have sincerely doubted that I could protect myself from Lankanal. But I could have warned Ern about him, I could have gotten help, if only I had known about him. I could have asked the neighbors to stand with me. I could have been ready for him, if I’d only had the nerve to make her tell me the truth.”

  “But could you have told anyone in town why you needed help against Lankanal? Would you have wanted all of it to come out? I think that you would have wanted to keep Olivia’s past a secret, for her sake.” She stepped away from him, returned to the table and started to pour the hoecake batter into a skillet. She felt him watching her.

  He left the open door and crossed the room to be near her.

  “Do you really believe it, Susanna? Do you think Noah will bring her back?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “Yes.”

  “When he does, I’m taking you all back East. This is a wild place. It’s too hard on all of you. The boys are turning into hellions and you have suffered enough. You deserve the finery you had before you married me, the help, a grand house.” He sighed, looked at his worn hands. “Lord knows, I’m not a farmer. I’m a teacher.”

  Susanna reached up to him and smoothed his hair back behind his ear. There were new lines at the corners of his eyes, lines carved by the sun and the wind and endless hours outside. She traced them with her thumbs as she cupped his face.

  “We can’t leave here now, Payson. Not now that you have a good crop coming in. We’ve enough put by for the winter and … I’m on my feet again.” She looked out the window toward the treeline, where the small wooden cross stood all alone. “We’ve invested a child into this land, Payson. A baby. Your sweat and blood, too. Our tears. We can’t just walk away now. And you will teach again. Did you notice how much the town has grown, just in the year since we first arrived? Soon there will be a church and a school and folks around here will be looking for a teacher.”

  Excited by the direction of her thought, a grand new idea came to her right there over the hoecake batter.

  “This fall, after the corn is in, why don’t you think about calling on the families closest to us, ask them if they wouldn’t like to send their children over here for lessons a few hours a week? Our own little hellions could certainly use some tutoring.”

  She saw a light flare in his eyes that had not been there for a long, long while.

  “I don’t deserve you, Susanna.”

  “You stood by me when I was locked inside myself. You stayed.” She leaned into him. “I love you for that and so much more.”

  “I love you, too, Susanna.”

  He looked out the window at his fields and beyond. “Maybe,” he said softly. “Maybe I will teach again. But I can’t even think about anything of the sort until Livvie comes home.”

  Shawneetown

  Much to Darcy’s intense shame, the local hayseeds lined the main thoroughfare of Shawneetown as Noah and Olivia led him bound at the wrists from the edge of town all the
way to Ern Matheson’s Nu Way Dry Goods store. By the time the humiliating little parade reached the front door and they walked into the dark interior, cooler than the bright sunshine, rich with the smell of tobacco, spices, and citrus fruits brought up from the South, the speculative nature of the curious had turned into the surly catcalls of a crowd on the brink of becoming a mob.

  “I was beginning to think I was never gonna see the likes of you again,” Ern Matheson said to LeCroix.

  Darcy watched the storekeeper reach for LeCroix’s hand and pump it up and down. The man would have started thumping the half-breed on the shoulder if LeCroix had not quickly shrugged him off. Then Matheson noticed the bloodstain on Noah’s shirt and his bandaged shoulder beneath.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Lankanal happened,” Noah told him, nodding at Darcy.

  Ern turned toward Darcy, staring at the bonds that held his hands tied together at his wrists. Darcy didn’t even try to straighten and present himself, what with his good clothes torn and filthy, his face looking like a map with purple bruises marking the hills and valleys.

  “We brought him back to clear my name, but he says he didn’t kill Betts either,” LeCroix told the peacekeeper.

  Ern wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Folks around here are expectin’ a hanging. Where the hell have you been? When you weren’t back in two days’ time I had to tell folks what Susanna Bond told me and how I let you go. Now here you are claiming this man didn’t kill Betts either?”

  “I didn’t,” Darcy said. There was no way he wanted to provide the entertainment for the populace of Shawneetown at a hanging.

  Ern turned on him. “I suppose Telford Betts shoved that knife into his own heart?”

  “No, I did, but—”

  “But you didn’t kill him? Betts looked good and dead to me. He didn’t let out a peep when we buried him,” Ern groused. “Hell.” He started to spit on the floor, thought better of it, and swallowed. He looked at Olivia, stared at the front of her torn dress, eyed LeCroix carefully, too, and finally looked back at Darcy.

  “I guess you all got a real good explanation?”

  “Betts was already dead when I stabbed him. He just keeled over.” Darcy thought that the honest-to-God truth sounded lame even to his own ears. Ern Matheson stared back at him in outright disbelief.

  Darcy looked at LeCroix. He had tried to tell the half-breed that no one was going to believe him, that they should have let him go back to New Orleans, but LeCroix had needed his own alibi and unfortunately, he was it.

  “Yeah, and I can fly like a bird on a good day, too.” Ern was looking at all of them as if they had lost their minds. “Tell me you don’t believe him,” he said to Olivia and her lover.

  “Why would he want Betts dead? The man was just a land agent. He’s the one who brought Lankanal here,” the river pilot argued in his defense.

  “This man tried to frame you for murder, Noah.”

  Darcy decided it was up to him to plead his own case. “The idea didn’t even come to me until after Betts died,” he told Ern. “He had picked up LeCroix’s knife after the fight in the tavern. When I saw that, I figured I’d get LeCroix out of the way once and for all.”

  “So you could take the girl?”

  Darcy looked at Olivia. “Yeah. So I could have Olivia.”

  Over the past couple of days, while he had been traveling back upriver with Olivia and LeCroix, he had slowly become somewhat accustomed to seeing them together. For the most part, they hardly communicated when they were in earshot of him, but he noticed they did not need words. That Olivia loved the half-breed, there was no doubt.

  He remembered thinking, Let her go on and marry the man and have a passel of grubby little candy-faced children. He had wasted the spring and most of the summer tracking her down. It was time to get over her, to get on with his life—if he could just save himself from a hanging.

  Suddenly a middle-aged woman appeared on the stairs that led to the second floor. When she saw the three of them she came flying down the steps, her brown eyes wide behind her spectacles as she began fussing over Olivia.

  “Oh, you poor thing, what happened to you?” The woman, whom Darcy took to be none other than Matheson’s wife, pulled Olivia into her embrace and then brushed her tangled hair off her face.

  “You come upstairs and let’s get you out of that ruined dress.”

  Darcy stared at the floor as Matheson’s wife clucked over the torn bodice. When he looked up again, the peacekeeper’s wife was pinning him with a knowing glare.

  “What are you going to do about this, Ern?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned to Olivia and then Noah LeCroix. “You two look like you could use some decent food and rest.”

  Darcy watched her bustle around, collecting some items from the shelves. Matheson’s wife stopped a few inches away from him.

  “Is this that fancy New Orleans gambler?” Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and her dark eyes snapped as she inspected him from head to toe.

  “That’s him,” Matheson told her. “Darcy Lankanal.”

  “What are you gonna do with him, Ern?” She was eyeing him over her spectacles.

  “Put him in the smokehouse, I reckon. Claims he’s not guilty, so we gotta hold off the hangin’ and bring the circuit judge in.”

  Darcy closed his eyes, fighting to stay on his feet. He was hurting, hungry, and tired. He wanted a bath and a change of clothes and he wanted to get the hell out of Illinois. He thought of his grand suite in the Palace of Angels, of the beautiful women there who would give anything to sleep with him, pamper him, and cater to his every need. He tried not to imagine how good it would feel to soak his aching bruises and muscles in a deep, warm, scented bath, to slip into a silk dressing gown and light up an expensive cigar. He tried not to think at all, but he was facing impending doom. Suddenly Ern Matheson’s last statement registered.

  “You’re putting me in the smokehouse? Like some … some …”

  “Ham.” Noah LeCroix stepped up to him and actually smiled. “It’s not as bad as it sounds, Lankanal. You’ll get used to it.”

  Chapter 20

  Shawneetown

  The Mathesons fed them fried catfish and beans, lent them clothes, and promised to keep Darcy Lankanal locked up right and tight in the smokehouse until the circuit judge could be summoned. Ern extracted a promise from Noah that he would appear at the hearing. Insisting she wanted to get back home before another night fell, Olivia easily convinced Noah they should walk the two miles back to the homestead. A tense silence accompanied them. She had no idea what he was thinking, or how long he would stay this time. Certainly he would be here until the hearing was over.

  They were almost home, at the last bend in the road, when she suddenly stopped walking and let go of Noah’s hand. A war whoop cut the air, a high shrill sound that had Noah going for his gun and Olivia’s heart racing.

  Little Pay and Freddie suddenly appeared beside the trail, scratches on their arms from the low bushes, dirt rubbed into their faces. Each of them had strips of turkey-red cloth tied over one of their eyes, Little Pay’s right, Freddie’s left.

  “Thurprithe!” Freddie called out, oblivious to the fact that Noah might have shot them both if he had not hesitated. Little Pay ran up to Olivia and threw his arms around her waist.

  “Boy, Livvie, is Daddy ever gonna be glad to see you. He’s been waitin’ by the door and looking out the windows since you left.”

  She felt her heart quicken and looked over at Noah. He was frowning as he stared down at the two boys.

  “Why are they wearing those rags?”

  “Why do you think? They are pretending to be you.”

  Noah looked down at the boys a few seconds longer, then went down on one knee. In an unexpected show of affection, Freddie threw his arms around Noah’s neck before the man could get a word out. Noah winced, but did not pull away.

  “Be careful of Noah’s shoulder,”
she warned them.

  “Thankth for bringing Livvie home again, Noah,” the child said softly. “Daddy wath worried, but Ma didn’t doubt for a minute but what you wouldn’t bring our Livvie back.” Freddie’s inflection was so much like Susanna’s that Olivia smiled.

  Noah looked uncomfortable with Freddie’s nearness, but then he reached out, touched the swath of red cloth the boy wore, and smiled.

  Noah said nothing, but he hauled Freddie up in the crook of his arm on his good side. Little Pay bounced around them, demanding equal attention. When Noah turned to her, she could not read his expression.

  “Let’s go, Olivia. Your family is waiting.”

  They crossed the cornfield together. She thought the stalks must have grown a foot since they left. So great was her happiness that the sky seemed bluer, the forest around the homestead richer and greener, the cabin warm and welcoming and hardly shabby-looking at all. She knew then she was coming to think of the place as home.

  Little Pay ran ahead to announce their return, calling out at the top of his lungs, tripping on clods of rich, dark soil, waving his arms over his head. Freddie was content to walk beside Noah and hold his hand, trying to match the man’s stride.

  Payson appeared in the open doorway. Olivia watched her father wave at them, take two steps out the door, and then stop to watch them cross the field.

  It was all so reminiscent of her last homecoming, she thought. This time, even though there were no dark secrets left to hide, the future was still uncertain.

  When she reached the yard before the cabin, she left Noah and Freddie and walked straight into her father’s embrace.

  “Oh, Livvie,” he said, holding her close. “Thank God Noah found you.”

  She put her arms around him and patted him gently on the back. Compared to Noah, he was so much smaller that he seemed almost frail. With shattering insight she realized that in many ways she was far stronger than her father ever was or would be. If she had not been tested over the past year, she would never have known how very much she could endure and survive.