'Do you think it was so that you might fly with the man he meant to kill that Hiakin took the trouble to put into your food a herb which should make you fall deeply asleep? He handed you over to Cornplanter's people and these did but snatch you from them – but you are quite free to go back to them!'
'I might even say that would suit us fine,' Tim added, 'because then your husband would have good cause to seek a reckoning with Cornplanter and break the alliance between them. And, what is more, little lady, I'm wondering what General Washington is going to say when he sees you step ashore. I'll be mighty surprised if he's best pleased, because it's not quite what he asked us to do. Besides, you're slowing us down and we are in a hurry.'
Gilles, for his part, said nothing. Sitapanoki's tirade had wounded him too deeply for excuses or explanations. Ever since he had first seen her, he had lived in a kind of waking dream. He was Tristan setting down the empty cup which had contained the philtre given him by Yseult, he was Merlin held captive by the enchantments of the fairy Vivian, and never for a moment had it occurred to him that his spontaneous passion could fail to be returned with a tenderness at least as natural. Like a fool, he had believed that the goddess with the golden eyes had needed him, he had believed that she was unhappy – in exactly the same way that he had believed that Judith was drowning.
The thought of Judith, set abruptly alongside that of Sitapanoki, had the effect of giving him a painful jolt but was not otherwise unpleasant. Her image lay hidden somewhere deep in the recesses of his heart and he knew that whenever he chose to look for it, he would find his love for her intact, though quite different from the love he felt for the Indian girl. It was his body, much more than his heart, that called for Sitapanoki. He hungered for her and he knew it, but what he could not guess was what would become of his passion when once that hunger was assuaged.
A hand touched his arm and a timid voice said softly: 'Forgive me! I – I did not know.'
Perhaps because at that moment Judith was uppermost in his mind, she got no more from him than a cool look. Gently detaching the hand that lingered on his bare arm so that he could feel its warmth, he bowed slightly and murmured in polite, cold tones:
'I have nothing to forgive. Gunilla is right. You are free to go wherever you like, Sitapanoki. I am only sorry to have displeased you. Perhaps, after all, you knew that your food had been drugged.'
She drew herself up, her eyes flashing.
'What do you mean?'
'No more than I said. Cornplanter, too, is a great chief… and a very handsome man.'
Even before the word was out, her hand had smacked across his cheek. He accepted the blow with a disdainful smile and a shrug.
'As you wish,' he said and turned back to Tim. 'But that proves nothing.'
After that, he and the Indian girl appeared to ignore one another and did not speak. She walked in front of him, behind Gunilla who was following Tim, and never once turned round. When the storm caught them among the wooded hills of Pennsylvania, it was more than twenty-four hours since the start of their quarrel. Not that any of them had talked much and all day long there was little to be heard except Tim muttering through his teeth from time to time: 'We're losing time! If only we could get along faster—'
Possessed by the same haste, Gilles kept silent, but the thought of what could be happening at West Point at any moment was always with him.
The path they were following was climbing through the woods when, with no other warning than the increasing heat, a fierce clap of thunder broke over their heads. As if that were the signal, a perfect torrent of water descended with such violence that it penetrated the light covering of branches in an instant and drenched the four travellers ruthlessly. Almost before they could draw breath, they were soaked to the skin.
'We must find shelter,' Tim yelled above the storm. 'The wind is in the east and when the clouds build up in the mountains along the Hudson like this, it generally lasts at least two days.'
'Shelter?' Gilles echoed. 'Where do you think we'll find any? We're right in the middle of nowhere.'
'No, we're not. Someone made this path. And just now, as we came round the shoulder of the hill, I thought I saw some smoke ahead. Let's run, before the path turns into a swamp. We'll have to stop in any case. It's getting dark and we can't go on in this weather.'
He set them an example. Gunilla followed him like clockwork but Sitapanoki was less hardened to fatigue than her one-time slave. Far from copying, she seemed to collapse inwardly. Her legs buckled and in an instant Gilles was at her side.
'You are tired out. I'll help you.'
She started as though bitten by a snake and glared at him.
'No! I do not need you.'
She tried to move faster but she could not. Gilles grinned harshly, drawing back his lips in his tanned face.
'And we don't need you to delay us further.'
With that he picked her up bodily and began to run after his friend, and such was his pleasure in his small triumph that he did not even notice the extra weight he carried. Even so, it was a considerable achievement, for Sitapanoki, with an offended air, refused to put her arms round his neck but kept them folded firmly across her breast. Luckily, the smoke that Tim had seen proved to be not far off.
A small farmhouse with its back against a high rock stood at the corner of the wood and not far away a hole cut in the mountain and lined with pine logs proclaimed the presence of a mine.
The house was low, squat and grey, with a small wooden veranda. Seen through the rain it looked almost ghostly but for the small column of smoke rising gallantly from the chimney. As the fugitives approached, a dog barked somewhere and almost at the same time a man with a sack over his head emerged from the mine and started towards the house. At the sight of them he turned and stood staring at them.
His features were half-hidden under his improvised umbrella but he was evidently cast in the same mould as Tim. The voice that came from underneath the sack was deep and cavernous.
'Peace be with you,' he said, rather as if the phrase were a declaration of war. 'What brings you here?'
'The heavens' opening,' Tim answered him. 'If this house belongs to you, allow us to shelter here for a while. We have women with us.'
'And Indians also, by what I see,' the man said. He had not moved from where he stood and seemed to be rooted in the mud until Judgment day.
'When did you ever see a fair-haired Indian?' Gilles asked shortly. 'There are times when one wears what one can get. I am a Frenchman – and a Breton. As for this woman – oh, what more do you want! We'll take shelter whether you will or no.'
He leaped for the veranda where he set down his burden and shook himself like a spaniel.
'My name is Tim Thocker,' Tim said, giving him a disapproving glance. 'I'm the son of the minister of Stillborough, on the Pawtucket River. We need help. Will you give us hospitality?'
A granite eye appeared from under the sack, framed in a fringe of grey hair and a long beard of the same colour.
'Hospitality is God's commandment, brother,' their owner pronounced solemnly. 'Enter into my house and do not fear. It is open to you, but your friend, the fair-haired Indian, might have allowed me to make my own decision.'
'I am not an Indian,' Gilles protested. 'I am—'
'You've said that already,' Tim whispered, digging him hard but discreetly in the ribs.
Before they went inside, however, they were obliged to submit to a curious kind of ceremony. The man with the sack stood on the threshold and kissed them, one by one, upon the lips before turning to the interior and calling:
'Wife, here are guests! Heat some water so that we may wash their feet according to our law.'
Gilles' eyes widened but Tim knew at once with whom he had to deal.
'You are an Amish, brother?' he asked, casting a swift glance over the plain black clothes and austere hair-cut revealed as the sack was shrugged off.
'I am indeed a follower of Menno Simonsz,' was the
reply. 'It means that you will find naught but peace here. Enter, brother, and have no fear. My name is Jakob Van Baren and this is my wife, Mariekje,' he added, indicating a figure of indeterminate age, as thin and solemn as himself. She differed from her husband only in her full skirts and the head-dress of coarse, unbleached cloth which marked her sex.
Inside, the little house was extremely simple but its cleanliness was wholly Flemish and did credit to Mariekje's talents. It was surely something of a record for a woman whose husband must have spent most of his time down a mine and who probably worked the small cultivated patch before the house with her own hands.
The walls and floor and what few furnishings there were were of pine, so well scrubbed that they looked as though they had been painted white. The only luxuries were a big black book upon the mantelshelf, a pair of brass candlesticks and a few Bible texts done in red and black cross stitch and hung here and there about the walls. Above the chimney piece was O give thanks unto the Lord for He is good; for His mercy endureth for ever. The wall on one side proclaimed And He said to me: Son of man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak to thee, and on the other: Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God. There was a similar inscription over the door but that was so faded and so profusely ornamented with flowers that it was quite impossible to read it.
At a sign from the master of the house, the four guests sat down in a row on a bench beside the hearth and had to dip their feet in turn in Mariekje's basin. It was an odd experience but Gilles found himself rather enjoying it and was only sorry he could not plunge his whole body in. But it seemed that Van Baren's kindness did not stop there. As soon as they were on their feet again, Jakob presented Gilles with a black cloth bundle.
'It is not fitting that you remain so immodestly clad under my roof, brother,' he told him, with a disparaging glance at the soiled Indian trousers Gilles had inherited from the dead Iroquois and which, except for his blanket, were his only covering. 'These garments are worn but serviceable and we must be much of a size. You will find a pump and a lean-to behind the house. Go and dress yourself.'
Abandoning the problem of why they had washed his feet only to send him wading out into the mud again, Gilles took the clothes and went out. He put them on without much relish.
His body was beginning to get used to the feel of the fresh air, in the Indian way, and the clothes themselves, while clean, seemed to him to have an unpleasant odour. But he could not refuse them without giving offence to his host who appeared, all things considered, rather well disposed towards his uninvited guests.
He washed himself quickly, partly under the pump and partly in the rain, and got back just in time to take his place at the end of the table assigned to the men. At the other end, seated on either side of Mariekje, Sitapanoki and Gunilla were struggling to keep their eyes open and to fend off sleep. Jakob Van Baren noticed it.
'Feed these poor souls, wife,' he commanded, 'and then put them to sleep in the loft. They can hardly stay upright. The men can sleep in the barn.'
He muttered a prayer of which Gilles, trying vainly to pick up some familiar phrase, could disentangle not one single word, and then, as it was rapidly getting dark, set about lighting a reeking oil lamp which he hung from a hook over the table.
His wife, meanwhile, was trying to get Sitapanoki and Gunilla to eat something but they were too exhausted to have any appetite. They took a little milk and some small rolls made of maize flour straight out of the oven and then begged permission to retire. At that, Mariekje put the men's supper on the table and then led them away.
Somewhat to the two young men's surprise, the supper was excellent. It consisted of some pickled cucumbers, big river trout rolled in maize flour and fried over the fire and a vast blueberry pie which had presumably been cooking along with the maize bread. There was cool beer and then hot tea to wash it down with.
The three men ate in silence. Gilles was so hungry that he felt he could have eaten everything in sight, the table included, but he had a formidable rival in Tim. The young American ate as if it were his last meal before crossing the desert but all the time he continued to absorb vast quantities of food, his friend noticed, his brow remained furrowed and Gilles wondered why. When Tim looked like that, it meant that something was bothering him and Gilles could not guess what it could be.
When they had swallowed the last mouthful, Jakob Van Baren muttered another, equally unintelligible grace, wiped his beard and, rising from the table, invited his guests to be seated on the bench by the fire while he fetched a long clay pipe and began to fill it with tobacco.
'Now that the needs of our bodies have been satisfied,' he said with the same unctuous gravity which informed his every word and gesture, 'we must gratify our souls, brothers, by becoming better acquainted. A Frenchman is a rare visitor to our mountains. Tell me something of how you and your friend came here. Who are the women you have with you? The Indian, especially, does not have the air of a common squaw.'
The granite eye was fixed on Gilles and he was just opening his mouth to answer when Tim broke in first.
'We are escaped prisoners. We were on a hunting trip in the Catskills when we were captured by Senecas. They were going to put us to death but we managed to escape with the help of the fair girl who is with us. She was their slave. She managed to cut through our bonds when we were tied to the stake for the night.'
'And the other? The Indian?'
Tim shrugged with an air of resignation.
'She saw it all. She asked us to take her with us, or she threatened to rouse the whole camp. She, too, was a captive in a way.'
'But not a slave. She is far too beautiful and—'
'I know nothing of her reasons,' Tim interrupted him, a hint of irritation in his voice. 'She wanted to come, that's all I know.'
Gilles' eyes narrowed, looking from one to the other, from Tim, seated on the bench and also apparently fighting a losing battle with sleep, to Jakob Van Baren standing looking down at the hearth, with the flames reddening his long nose and his beard. There was a kind of tension between them. Tim had succeeded in wiping away the furrow from his brow but Gilles could feel that his suspicions were awake and he determined to be on his guard. There must be something wrong about this man, for all his generous welcome to them.
There was a silence, unbroken by anything save the drumming of the rain on the roof and the noise made by the woman washing the dishes. Gilles glanced across at her. Seen from behind, her figure in her black dress looked almost as athletic as her husband's. They could hear her cough from time to time but they had not yet heard her voice, for from the moment the travellers arrived she had never once opened her mouth except to eat.
'Really very beautiful that Indian girl is,' Van Baren went on, almost as though talking to himself. 'I wonder who she is, for with such beauty she must be famous among the Six Nations… It's a fact that the four of you make a curious party: a woodsman, an escaped slave, a – Frenchman, dressed as an Indian – and then her. It certainly does make one wonder.'
'You're right there,' Tim said, flushing visibly without any help from the fire. 'There's always plenty to wonder about when you've a mind to it. Take yourself, for instance. I've always heard that the Mennonites live entirely off the produce of the earth they till. Yet there is a mine close by your house—'
Jakob raised his curiously dull eyes to the ceiling, as though calling it to witness.
'And is coal not the produce of the earth? I found that little mine abandoned when I settled here. It was a gift of God,' he added, wagging a finger sententiously. 'I take from it no more than is needed to assist the poorest of our small community scattered about the mountain. And we ourselves live, according to the law, only on what we grow. But you have not yet told me—'
Gilles stood up suddenly and began to yawn, with more ostentation than politeness. He had had enough of this fellow's questions and, in particular, he was irritated by the man's continued harping on
Sitapanoki's beauty. He was even beginning to think quite kindly of the rain-sodden woods.
'Your pardon, brother,' he said, 'but we have still a long way to go before we reach Stillborough. We must start at daybreak. Will you be good enough to show us where we are to sleep?'
'Of course, of course… but you should not be in such a hurry because you will have great trouble in reaching the Hudson River without me to guide you – and I cannot do so tomorrow, for it is the Lord's Day.'
Tim started and frowned. 'Why? What should stop us?'
Jakob shrugged, fetching a second lamp and making something of a business of lighting it before he answered.
'A gang of Cowboys has been seen in the area. It is strong and well-armed and led by a man who calls himself The Avenger, and it is made up of lawless, brutal men who will rob and burn – and kill all those who do not share their views. And it's my belief that you don't fit into that category – or else the French have changed a good deal?'
Tim stiffened and his eyebrows drew into a single thick, red line across the bridge of his nose.
'Cowboys – here? But surely we are in Pennsylvania, the first of all the Independent States?'
'That does not mean that everyone is of the same mind. There are still plenty of tories even in Philadelphia. But they say the night brings counsel. We'll speak more of this in the morning. Follow me.'
They bowed to the mistress of the house but she was busy with the fire and took no notice of them, and then followed Van Baren out of the house. It was pitch black outside but the rain had eased. They followed the flickering light of the lantern and reached the barn which stood behind the house, not far from the entrance to the mine.
The door creaked open and Jakob raised his lantern. 'There's not much room,' he said, 'but you'll be quite comfortable. Good night. I'll come and wake you before daybreak.' The barn was three parts filled with great bales of dried bracken which smelled nice and promised a soft enough bed. They looked at it contentedly enough but, just as Jakob was about to leave them, Gilles asked him whether he would mind leaving the lantern. When the man expressed some surprise that they should need a light to sleep by, Gilles explained in a quavering tone, taking care not to look at Tim, that he had never been able to sleep in the dark ever since, as a child, the ceiling in his bedchamber had collapsed on him. It was a nervous complaint, he added.
Falcon 1 - The Lure of the Falcon Page 27