Abe was not sure anymore if he was excited or afraid to enter the house, a well-kept structure of milled lumber with paned glass windows, evidence of Milner’s modest success. He half expected to be devoured by ravenous harpies. But as they entered the foyer, all he saw of the girls was the backs of their skirts as their mother, Esther, shooed them into the kitchen, presumably to allow the men to conduct their business and so clear the way for the more important social congress that lay ahead. When the former was accomplished, Tobias Milner raised his voice loud enough for the entire household to hear, saying, “Let’s shake on it then.” Within seconds, his daughters appeared and swept into the chairs awaiting them while their mother offered tea. The charm of their flowery scents and the soft rustle of their skirts filled Abe with bittersweet sentiment. All this trouble for me, he thought, while Marian treats me as if I could be replaced in a heartbeat and in the next, forgotten. He rose from his chair briefly to greet the women with respect.
“You will, of course, spend the night with us?” Tobias Milner asked. “You could give all the news from Greensborough.”
“Thank you for your kind offer,” Abe said “But I must be off before dark, Mr. Milner. I lost a week or two coming here for various reasons. I need to make up for time lost.”
The three Milner daughters were sitting across from him in a row of precisely equidistant straight-backed chairs. Colored ribbons threaded through the braids of their hair, their cheeks were pinched pink, and their hands were folded demurely in their laps. Despite their studied similitude, each delivered protest to his leave-taking in her own manner. Bekka, the plump pretty one, tapped her little feet lightly against the floor and whispered, “No!” Judith, the serious one, furrowed her brow and shot him a wounded look from her great blue eyes, fluttering a delicate hand over her breast and going so far as to feign the blinking back of tears. Hannah, the youngest, grabbed a lock of her auburn hair and stuck it in her mouth to stifle an anguished cry.
“I never would have marked you as a cruel lad, Abrahan,” their father said, knocking his pipe out against the fireplace. “My daughters have such little company. You cannot deny them the pleasure of yours for a mere evening.”
From out the corner of his eye, Abe spied their mother at the doorway of her kitchen. He pretended not to notice as she mimed instructions to her daughters with a desperation explained only by the fact that no matter how fresh, how dewy their cheeks, neither Bekka, Judith, nor Hannah were getting any younger. In the old country, it would have been scandalous to have them unmarried so long. Scowling, she communicated to the plump pretty one she must sit straight without fidgeting her feet, to the serious one she should turn up the corners of her mouth posthaste, and to the youngest to get her hair out of her mouth. Her hand then rested over her chest as if her mother’s heart twisted there on their behalf.
The room turned still while Abe took his time to formulate a polite response to the farmer’s insistence. Breath was held all around. He opened his mouth to speak but no sound emerged. Tobias Milner pouted pleadingly, nodding encouragement. “Yes? Yes?” he said, softly, sweetly, as kittenish as his daughters. A multitude of considerations swarmed through Abe’s mind. On the one hand, if he delayed his rounds to stay overnight, that was one more night before he could return to Marian in the end and how he ached for her! On the other hand, if he stayed, Tobias Milner would be pleased and perhaps increase his invoice. These were Hart’s first days back on the road. Surely a horse coming back from injuries might welcome a solid night’s rest in cozy shelter. Cooking smells from the kitchen also enticed. It had been an American era since he’d eaten anything that resembled an old-fashioned family meal. He could ride harder and longer the following day, perhaps knock more than two farms off his list, if both he and his mount were better fed and slept well overnight. The three doting, squirming young women who leaned toward him in unison in a melting mass of feminine anticipation, waiting for an answer, pulled at him. How often had he the chance to immerse himself in not just womanly, but gentile attentions? He had to admit there was a dose of exotic spice added to the proposed dinner. Such an invitation would never have been extended back in London.
He capitulated.
“Indeed,” Abe said, nodding to the women with as much grace as if he had a plumed hat to doff and sweep in their direction, “if my poor company can brighten the spirits of three stars of the firmament which …”
The ladies’ shoulders rose in expectant unison. Encouraged, Abe colored his many-hued phrase with a splash more purple.
“… already glimmer so impossibly as to near blind me. Yes, I shall stay on the single night, though I must be gone before the dawn or risk eternal bedazzlement!”
Parental eyes widened, filial sighs sang. Abe congratulated himself on his sophistication.
After the sisters occupied him by selecting various items out of his wares—a small brass candlestick for one, a paperweight of pressed daisies under glass for another, and a brush with a tortoiseshell handle for the last—dinner was served. The meal was as fine as he’d hoped. It was difficult to believe the family had not spent days preparing for him. The table sparkled with their treasures in crockery and cutlery. Esther troubled herself with a holiday roast although it was only a Wednesday in the middle of an unremarkable week. Besides the beef, she served mushroom soup and airy biscuits for sopping it up. There were carrots, turnips, and a tangy fruit stewed in the juice of the meat. When Abe complimented Esther on her expertise, she shared credit with her youngest. “Hannah’s the baker in this house,” she said. “She made the biscuits, and the honey cake that’s coming too.” Abe rephrased his compliments for the daughter in question, who grinned from ear to ear, then dropped her head in belated modesty.
After dinner, the older girls got to shine. Bekka played a fiddle reasonably well, and Judith recited of a psalm of David, delivered with dramatic gestures and facial expressions. Despite the delights of being an object of desire, Abe found himself struggling to stay awake until Tobias Milner brought up the legend of an Indian woman who, it was rumored, lived in the woods thereabouts though few had seen her.
“You could run into Dark Water out there, if you happen to meander off established tracks,” the farmer said. “And if you do, pray to the Lord for deliverance is my advice. She’s more than fearsome to look at. The sight of her can freeze the blood of the bravest man. To hear her war cries is to hear the howls of hellhounds. It’s a sound that’ll ring in your ears the rest of your life.”
It took Abe time to catch on. At first he thought Tobias Milner was surely speaking of a child’s nightmare, an old crone, a barbarian witch, no doubt a harmless creature made shibboleth to frighten children into good behavior. Why his host would juggle fairy tales in the air was inexplicable. He affected a bemused interest.
“Might she steal my soul?” he asked, the joke playing visibly about his lips.
“She’ll steal your life without thinking twice,” Tobias Milner said. “Just ask Teddy Rupert. Are you headed his way?” Rupert was the owner of a vast plantation half a day’s ride west at the very boundary of the Cherokee Nation. Abe nodded. Milner harrumphed and continued. “He lost a son to her flaming arrows. Now, Billy was a selfish boy and fairly impolite. I’ve no doubt he likely insulted her, as the story goes. But she cut him down for it, didn’t she, and for a Cherokee woman to murder a white man in peacetime and in such a cruel manner. Well, there’s no excuse. No excuse at all.”
“Flaming arrows, sir?” Abe asked in disbelief.
“Oh, yes. Ones soaked in Injun pitch. They’re thicker than the usual, you know. More like pegs or stakes. And once they pierce the flesh, the poor devil pinned by them cannot move while the flame devours his flesh. I’m telling you, these natives are savages. You can cover their nakedness and teach them English, stick a plow in their hands too, but they remain as malicious as Amalekites and as godless as the people of Sodom whom the Lord saw fit
to destroy.”
“Husband, please!” With two words, Esther put an end to the conversation. The two older girls had gone pale and trembling in the hearing of it while the youngest seemed eager for more details.
While the talk drifted into safer realms, Abe wondered if his Marian knew this Dark Water. It hardly seemed likely the wilderness round about teemed with Indian women living on their own. In the previous year he’d come across only the one.
Before he retired that night to a cozy makeshift bed of pillows and comforters set up in the kitchen on a wide shelf usually reserved for the larger pots, Abe went to the stable to check on Hart. On entering, he stepped over the sleeping stable boy, a youth worked hard enough from dawn to dark caring for three cows, four goats, and two horses; the structure that housed them; as well as the chickens and geese kept separately that he did not stir from his slumber, not even when Abe stumbled over a bale of hay in that odorous dark and banged into a stall door, rousing every animal the Milners possessed. They lowed, bleated, and neighed alarmingly, although at his insistence, they quieted soon enough. Hart was calm throughout, nodding his great head from over a stall door at the end of the aisle. He nickered softly at Abe’s approach. “How are you, my friend?” he asked the horse, petting his neck in long strokes once he’d entered the stall. Hart poked his nose along the length of Abe’s trunk, sniffing in his pockets for a treat. The peddler could not help but laugh and hug the beast’s head uselessly in an effort to make him stop.
“That horse surely loves you,” a feminine voice said from a place in the aisle where a circle of light splintered the dark.
Abe started, mortified to be caught in such an unguarded moment. “Who’s there?” he called out to the figure hidden by the glare of a lantern. It was disconcerting to be observed by an unknown entity. A vague unease replaced his embarrassment. “Who’s there?” he repeated, this time in a more insistent tone.
“Only me. Hannah.”
The youngest Milner girl stepped out from behind her lantern and approached Hart’s stall so he could see her. She wore a plain muslin nightgown and a blue robe over it that she’d failed to close. On her head was a ruffled nightcap, which her thick auburn hair escaped to tumble down past her shoulders. Seeing her apart from her elder sisters, Abe realized that she was not quite as young as he’d thought. Her fair skin had gone a lovely pink, a thin line of moisture glistened above her upper lip, and another graced the shallow scoop of the gown’s neckline. Her intentions were perfectly clear. She’d sought him out alone in the night where neither her parents nor her siblings could monitor what might next transpire.
Abe was terrified.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. She shrugged and lifted her gaze to the rafters as if to say, It’s my family’s stable not yours, isn’t it? Hanging the lantern on a post in the middle of the aisle, she boldly stepped into the stall with him, standing close. She pet Hart along his topline and asked, without looking at Abe but also without shame, “Do you like me, Abrahan?” What was a young man to say to such a question from the ripe daughter of a valued customer? “Of course I like you, Hannah,” he said, straightening his back and filling his chest with air in the hope that he might seem bigger, more powerful to her, and so inspire a shyness the girl plainly lacked. “You’re quite charming.” He coughed and lowered his voice to lend it authority. “But now we must leave Hart to his rest. Come along, child.”
With the stamp of a slippered foot against straw and a raised hand, Hannah stopped him in his tracks. “I am not a child!” she said. Anger heightened her color further, her chest heaved with hot air. Petulance became her, Abe observed, and a place at the root of him ignited ignobly. “Yes, yes, you are not a child. I beg your indulgence, lady, but we must get from here,” he said as rapidly and forcefully as possible.
Once the pair stepped over the stable boy and into the open, Abe was hopeful of escape. Only forty paces more and he would be back in the kitchen, where surely this bold girl could not linger without fear of discovery. Besides, now that she’d had what she wanted from him—a simple admission that he liked her, which was not half as much as he feared—she’d calmed, took his hand in an innocent way, and looked up at the stars. Heaven’s lights stretched across the skies like a wedding canopy with not a cloud to dim them. “It’s a beautiful night,” she said. “Hard to believe there are creatures as awful as Dark Water creeping about, isn’t it?”
Abe sighed heavily. It dismayed him that from the moment he’d arrived on America’s shores he’d heard fanciful stories about the Cherokee. Though some had taken up European ways, it did not stop people from calling them primitive pagans, stubbornly resistant to both Bible and sword. He’d heard they were brutal, capable of the most grotesque tortures, and generally lived lives steeped in bestial habits. But having come to know Marian, who had only been helpful and generous to him, he was certain the worst of what he heard about this Dark Water was calumny, similar to the calumnies leveled against the Jews. According to most Europeans, he should have horns and drink the blood of Christian babies. Could the Cherokee dream up worse tortures than those his ancestors had suffered at the hands of the Inquisition? Why should he believe the worst of what Tobias Milner told him of Dark Water?
“Surely she cannot be as dreadful as your father claims, Hannah,” he told the young girl, considering his instruction a kindness.
“Oh, yes, she is. I saw her once.”
“Tell me.”
“My sisters and I went berrying. I was only four at the time and they liked to ignore me, as I annoyed them. They found it a horrid chore whenever Mother said to look out for me or take me with them anywhere. Naturally, I wandered apart, going off our usual paths and into the woods. I was following a rabbit, I think, or it might have been a bird. Anyway, I don’t know how long it was, but sooner or later, I came to a huge clearing and it was full of corn and squash and other cultivated plants. In the middle of these fields without farmhouse or shed was a savage Indian woman, tall it seemed to my child’s eyes and dressed like a man. She was in a crying fit. Her hair stood up. It was full of twigs. Her face was streaked with dirt. She wailed and danced a terrible dance. Her body keened. Her feet stomped about in a circle. She ripped ears of unripe corn from their stalks and threw them down, wailing louder and louder as she did so. I’m telling you, the sight of her would make you, a grown man, frozen in fear. Just then my sisters called out for me. ‘Hannah! Hannah!’ they called, and the madwoman’s head snapped up and, I swear, turned all around like a pumpkin twirled upon a stick. Her eyes met mine for an instant, an instant only, but I shall never forget them ’til my dying day. They sent ice through my veins. I took off, running toward my sisters’ voices. I ran and I ran, and by the grace of Jesus, I found them. They beat me for wandering off and asked no questions about where I’d been or what I’d seen. I told them nothing because they beat me. Ah! Here we are,” she announced, her tone taking a sudden lighthearted turn when they reached the house. “I’ll say good night to you now, Abrahan, and cherish your fondness until we meet again. Godspeed on your journeys, especially the one that brings you back to us.”
The girl stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, then slipped swiftly and silently into the house through the kitchen. Abe followed and happily found himself at the hearth alone. He lay on his shelf, a row of birds on a wire drying above his head, and considered Hannah’s story. Summoning his reason, he discounted it as the fevered imaginings of a small child lost in the woods, much colored over time. It made sense to him that this Dark Water was no nightmare creature as both the girl and her father had described but rather a flesh-and-blood woman who’d fallen on tragic times. He pictured a woman much like Marian in a demented misery. Imagining the whys of it agitated his sleep.
He headed west through midafternoon the next day until he was just below the highest mountain peaks, deep in a fertile valley where the ground plateaued and farms far richer than the Milne
rs’ dotted the landscape. As he neared Teddy Rupert’s plantation, the full ramifications of the Milners’ stories sunk through to the core of Abrahan Sassaporta’s brain. He wondered with reluctance if the fair object of his most passionate affections might herself be the fearsome Dark Water. Twice now he’d covered the territory of the foothills where Dark Water was said to live and not come across even the slightest sign of any Indian woman on her own except Marian. If they were the same, his beloved one had a most violent history, an infamous one. Farfetched as it seemed, the possibility tormented him. It would explain much about her that he did not yet understand. If her native name was notorious, it would explain why she never told him what it was. If she were a pariah, it would explain the isolation in which she lived, which, he had to acknowledge, might be part and parcel of why she’d embraced the company of a stray peddler who’d happened by her sanctuary. Disturbingly, it would also explain why three rough customers had been searching for her that day. Perhaps, he considered, there was a bounty on her head? He decided he would have no peace until he investigated the matter.
An Undisturbed Peace Page 5