by Lori Benton
“That’s fine, Ned. I know ye want to get to Penny. I—”
“That’s their cart.” Ned cut him off with a nod toward the conveyance, parked beyond the stable doors. “Lily rode my horse. She’ll need to ride your roan now—if that’s the horse ye brought. Can ye drive the cart?”
As his brother turned his back to tug at the laces of his saddlebags, Ian said, “Of course I can, but will ye listen a moment? I want to thank ye for—”
“Thank me?” Ned turned sharply to face him, his raised voice drawing the attention of everyone within earshot, stable lads and inn guests and passersby. “So ye should! Leaving us to wait and wonder whether ye were coming at all or maybe dead and scalped somewhere along the way.”
Ian nearly laughed, then thought of Aram Crane and the prickling of said scalp, alone in the forest between Cooperstown and Cherry Valley. How near had he come, he wondered, to proving true at least half the absurd speculation?
Shutting out thought of everything but this brother standing before him, cross-grained as he had ever been, he said, “I couldn’t have guessed the exact moment ye’d be stepping off that ferryboat and ye well know it. What’s truly got ye riled? Or is it just that I cannot ever do a thing right in your eyes?”
He saw the bunching of muscles in his brother’s jaw and wondered if he was about to be hit in the face again—knew he wouldn’t allow it a second time—and then saw the tears in his brother’s eyes.
“I thought—all these days . . .” Ned swore softly, struggling for control of whatever emotion gripped him. “All these days,” he said again, his voice fiercely level, “I’ve waited for ye, looked for ye, every moment afraid we’d lose him.”
“Him?” Ian echoed.
“Gabriel. That ye’d show up at last and your son would be dead. And I’d be the one ye’d blame.”
Dead, like his brother’s own sons.
Ned’s hands were fisted, shoulders erect, face clenched and rigid.
Softening his voice, Ian said, “But he isn’t, Ned. Gabriel is well. He’s awake and asking to be fed.”
Relief wrenched his brother’s features.
“And if he wasn’t,” Ian continued, putting his hand to Ned’s arm, “I wouldn’t have blamed ye.”
The taut muscles beneath his fingers eased. Ned held his gaze but a moment before squeezing shut his eyes and heaving a gusty breath. “I don’t mean to quarrel with ye, Ian. I really don’t.”
Ian gave his brother’s arm a firmer grip. “Old habit, aye?”
Ned opened his eyes, mouth twitching. “One I wish to break.”
“That sounds good.”
They gazed at each other, between them a shared lifetime—the lads they had been, the jealousies and judgments made. As if a wind had come and cleared them all away, Ian saw the man his brother was now, wounded, broken, raw with a newfound hope. “Seona wrote of Penny and a child on the way. I’m glad of it, Ned. Glad too for your bringing my son and his mother and the rest safely this far. I’ll take them from here. Go to your wife, with my blessing—for whatever that’s worth,” he hastened to add.
“It’s worth a lot, actually.” Ned seemed as surprised by the utterance as was Ian. Then concern darkened his expression. “But Catriona—ye’ll take her too?”
“Aye. She’s welcome with me.”
Pain had returned to Ned’s face. Or maybe guilt. “It’s my fault. Everything befallen her. I brought Shelby into our lives. And if I ever see the man again—”
“Ye’ll turn and walk the other way,” Ian finished for him.
Ned raised a brow. “Would ye?”
Ian held his stare. “God willing, we’ll never know. Where is Catriona, by the way?”
“I’m here,” came their sister’s quavering voice from somewhere above. “Eavesdropping on my ridiculous brothers.”
Ian turned as Ned looked up to an open second-story window, where Catriona looked down at them, smiling through her tears.
“Hitch that horse, Ned,” she called to them. “Then come and bid the rest of us proper goodbye before you go.”
21
MOHAWK RIVER VALLEY, NEW YORK
Seona wondered what the hawks circling the bleached sky above made of their party proceeding west along the river road, beset by sticky heat and blackflies, hemmed by thick woods that hid all manner of dangers she could only guess at. Bear, panther, wolf . . . wild Indian? For now the biting insects were enough to contend with. She was smeared hand and face with the brownish grease Ian offered when the pesky critters began their onslaught. Scented with pennyroyal, the stuff sat on sweaty skin like a mask Seona longed to claw away.
She glanced ahead at Ian, driving the cart with Gabriel snug beside him on the narrow bench. He took his hat off his head and waved it over her boy’s curls, no doubt swatting flies. Gabriel laughed, flailing his arms.
Seona’s breath caught. Before she drew another to shout, Watch where you’re guiding that horse! Ian had the hat back on his head, both hands on the traces, eyes on the road ahead. Her heartbeat calmed.
Beside the cart on Ian’s side, Catriona rode Juturna. Snatches of her chatter floated back to Seona and Lily, riding behind. Catriona had a flood of questions about the valley they traversed and seemed bent on sharing with Ian everything she already knew, learned from Hannah Kirby or from Maggie MacGregor’s letters.
The New York frontier was a world strange and new, to be sure, but Seona wasn’t as eager to embrace it. People could look the same from one valley to the next, but every place had its ways of thinking and living. She had kept at arm’s length the knowledge that she must again learn to comport herself among a people unknown, navigate ways she might be slow to grasp. Now that knowledge pressed in on her soul.
“Ye doing all right, girl-baby?”
Seona glanced aside at Lily, astride Ian’s roan. “I’m fine, Mama. Hot and beset. Aren’t we all?”
Though what awaited her at journey’s end was a daunting prospect, she was ready to be done with reins in her hands, the smell of horsehair and lather, reading swiveling ears and bobbing head, watching for snakes and any other thing that might spook the creature jolting under her seat.
“Ye look troubled,” Lily said, tilting the wide straw hat shielding her from the sun’s glare as they passed through a break in the forest lining the river road.
Seona looked ahead, fixing Gabriel and his daddy in her sights. She had Ian to help her find her way . . . if he understood the things she needed to know.
It was different from heading to Boston. In Boston she hadn’t been anyone’s wife. Wasn’t one now but knew that’s what Ian wanted. She had tried asking him, back in Albany, how he meant to go about it but had been too overwhelmed just seeing him again to find the words. Do you mean to lie about me and our son or tell folk the bald-faced truth? What will that mean for me and Gabriel? What sort of place will we have in Shiloh?
“I’m fine,” she said again, glancing aside at her mama. “What about you? You and Ian’s horse getting on agreeable?”
Lily reached to stroke Ruaidh’s cinnamon-sugar neck. “I mind this fellow well enough. He’s a canny wee thing.”
Ian’s Indian horse, got somewhere up in Canada before he came to Mountain Laurel, wasn’t as tall or pretty as Juturna or even her dam, which Seona rode. But he was steady, smart, and never seemed to tire.
“He’s the second horse you’ve ridden on this journey. First Ned’s while he drove the cart. Now Ian’s while he drives it.”
“Might’ve been simpler had I driven the cart,” Lily said with a laugh.
Seona tried to echo it but couldn’t. Her mama had gone from spare horse to spare horse without complaint. Like she had gone from change to change in their lives since Gabriel’s birth, accepting each. Molding herself to it. Did her mama ever feel like the trunks on their cart—baggage brought along for its use?
Tears pricked at the thought. Hiding them with a tilt of her own hat, Seona said, “Reckon we’ll all be glad to be done wi
th horseback.” Looking ahead as Catriona’s voice drifted back, she added, “Most of us.”
Lily followed her gaze. “Catriona’s a born horsewoman. But I’ll be glad. Just a few more days and this’ll be behind us.”
Finding small comfort in that, Seona said no more.
They were four days journeying to German Flatts, where West Canada Creek flowed down from the north. They didn’t stay in the villages that spanned the shallow Mohawk River. Having daylight left, they crossed and rode up along the West Canada a few miles before making camp, as they had done since leaving Albany. Ian was being thrifty, but Seona knew he preferred sleeping under the stars.
The sun set while they pitched camp. Twilight cast purple shadows, lit by the season’s first fireflies. The blackflies gave way to mosquitoes whining about their ears and to moths drawn by their campfire to dance too near the flames. Small night creatures rustled in the trees along the creek bank.
They would see Shiloh on the morrow, Ian had said.
Stewing on that, Seona minded Gabriel while Lily baked johnnycakes on a stone and Catriona helped Ian raise the canvas shelter under which they would sleep one more time.
She had managed not to be alone with Ian since Albany. She was regretting that now, but Catriona lingered at the fire after supper, still chattering away to Ian and anyone else inclined to listen. Seona looked about for something to occupy her hands, but everything was scoured and stowed, ready for an early start. Everything but Gabriel. His granny was attempting one of those tasks with a damp cloth, seated on a stump across the fire with him squirming on her lap.
It had ceased to amaze Seona how fast a boy could dirty himself in the out-of-doors. Gabriel had outdone his usual efforts this day. Face, hair, and hands were smeared with grease, to which had stuck crumbled johnnycake, ashes, twigs, bugs, leaves, and a substance Seona could not identify. By firelight, it looked green.
“Seona, what did you make of Hannah and her uncle?” Catriona, sitting on the log beside her, asked.
“I didn’t talk to her uncle.”
“But you saw him. Were they what you expected western Indians to be like?”
Distracted by the struggle unfolding across the fire, Seona frowned. “Don’t know as I expected they’d be—Gabriel!” His protests had escalated to thrashing, no doubt bruising her mama’s legs where his heels struck. “Mama, I’ll take him.”
Lily hoisted Gabriel onto a hip, then swung him onto the log beside Seona, giving her the cloth. “I’ll go wash my own self,” she said, sounding winded from the fight. “I’m wearing half his mess now.”
Gabriel clambered off the log, making for the fire’s edge. Never one to pay mind to hearth fires back in Boston, he had grown enamored of leaping flames on their journey, wanted to hunker at the edge of every fire they lit, poking a stick at the embers, more than once a reaching finger.
Seona grabbed a fistful of his shirt. “No, baby. Don’t play with the fire, it’s hot—ouch.”
“No . . . ,” Gabriel echoed in a cranky whine, tugging at her grip. “No!”
Ian, who had got up to check on the horses, came back into the firelight, noted Gabriel’s defiance, and caught her eye. Hanging on to their son, Seona read the question in his eyes. Did she want him to deal with this small rebellion?
It disconcerted her. A father ought not to ask whether he should address a naughty turn by his offspring but do what was in his mind to do about it. Now she thought on it, Ian hadn’t once disciplined Gabriel in Boston. He had left it to her or Lily. Since their reunion, he had sought her permission first, the few times he corrected their son. More like an uncle might do.
She thought of Mandy. Was he expecting her to treat his daughter as her own right off? To discipline as well as nurture? Or would there be a gradual falling into the role, like she supposed was happening with him and Gabriel? So much to think through, talk over, find out what the other expected.
For the moment, Ian’s arrival was distraction enough for their boy. She shook her head as Gabriel leaned back against her knees, then grinned up at her, pale curls burnished in the fire’s waning glow. Once more the little angel.
A sleepy angel. His eyelids drooped. He let her scrub his face and hands.
When Catriona asked, Ian said he reckoned they would reach Shiloh by afternoon on the morrow. “Long as the cart holds together. The road ahead gets rough in spots.”
Seona’s arm snaked around her baby. “I’ll take Gabriel in the saddle with me, come morning.”
Ian settled on the stump Lily had vacated, across the embers shedding light. “I didn’t mean to alarm ye. I know the road. Ally and I got the wagon over it last year.”
“Do you think Maggie MacGregor will be at her schoolhouse when we arrive?” Catriona asked, then before Ian could answer, added, “Which reminds me, Hannah Kirby said there are missionaries among the Oneida attempting to attract more tradesmen to their villages to teach the warriors so they can make a living aside from farming, since many of the men see it as women’s work and won’t tend a field. Did you know that, Ian? Among the Iroquois it’s traditionally been the women who tend the fields—and own all they produce—but white men look down on it and call the Oneida men lazy, the women drudges, because their traditions are different.”
Seona sympathized with the hardships the Indians faced adapting their ways to changing times but couldn’t suppress a smile as she again restrained Gabriel, this time from clambering over the log into the trees between their camp and the creek, where fireflies still drifted, winking their greenish-yellow lights.
“Did I say something funny?” Catriona asked, catching her smile.
From across the fire, Ian was staring at Seona’s mouth. The look in his eyes she knew of old, and the feeling it sent through her—like sparks from a flint—she minded as well. Flustered, she waved her free hand. “No. I just haven’t seen you this . . . captivated by anything in a long while. I’ve missed it.”
A shadow darkened Catriona’s face. “I would better understand the plight of the people among whom we’re coming to live, is all.”
“None of which are Oneida,” Ian pointed out.
“Some are Mohawk.”
“Aye. But I think ye’ll find your friend Maggie is far more alike to ye than different. Did ye find that maid back in Albany that much different from ye? There’s Lily, for that matter,” he added as Seona’s mama came back into camp, fresh from washing. “She’s at least half-Cherokee.”
“Half-Cherokee and ready for her bed,” Lily said, making slightly more of her faint Scots accent than was normal. “G’night to ye all.”
“We aren’t far behind, Mama,” Seona said as Gabriel pressed his face against her thigh, wiped his nose, and whined. She pulled him onto her lap and rubbed his back, hoping he would give in to sleep soon.
“I did and didn’t,” Catriona said in response to Ian’s question as Lily ducked beneath the canvas. She went on to talk of Hannah Kirby and her uncle as Gabriel bestirred himself, whined again, then sagged boneless in Seona’s arms.
“This boy needs his bed too.” She got up from the fire, leaving Catriona to Ian, though she felt his gaze follow her to the shelter.
Since his weaning, putting Gabriel down for the night was a quicker affair. She kept quiet so as not to disturb Lily, already asleep under their blanket—a shield from mosquitoes rather than for warmth. She smeared grease over Gabriel’s freshly washed face and neck, sighing at thought of the dirt he would pick up in his sleep. Grime and little boys came hitched like cart and horse. She wondered if Naomi was keeping Mandy clean, living on a raw homestead like Ian’s letters had described.
Tomorrow she would see for her own self.
When she emerged from the shelter, Catriona was still talking, but yawns punctuated her words. Seona caught Ian’s eye as she made to go down to the creek to wash. His glance said he wanted a few moments alone with her, too. She relished the breathless stirring it caused even as she dismissed the thoughts that c
ame with it.
Talk was needed. Nothing more.
She took her time washing up, half her energy spent swatting until a breeze rose along the creek and blew the mosquitoes away. In the air between the creek banks, bats swooped, hunting larger insects, their shapes high and dark and quick against the starry sky.
Ian’s boots crackled the brush when he came into the moonlight that sparkled on the rippling water and lit the creek bank bright as twilight.
“Catriona gone to bed?” Her question made him chuckle, a sound heard above the creek’s chatter, minding her of another moonlit night on the path from the Reynolds’ cabin, first time he ever kissed her.
“Finally,” he said.
Seona laughed, hearing its nervous edge, which only made her more aware of herself, petticoat kilted. The air was cooling, reminding her it wasn’t yet summer despite the warmth of the days. Gooseflesh prickled her creek-wet arms, but she thought that might be due to Ian, who slipped off boots and hose and came into the water to stand close. “You still glad your sister came along with us?”
“I am. I hope she can forget what’s past, make a life here. With us, for the time being.”
Seona heard layers of thinking behind those words. A man weighing his limited means against the need to provide for his own. Whether or not his means would match the need, he hadn’t said, but he hadn’t made his sister feel an unwelcome burden. “You didn’t plan for her,” she said, pressing a little.
“We’ll be fine.” The answer came with a readiness that warmed her. “Are ye looking forward to being home?”
A warmth short-lived. The breeze in the trees and water burbling over stones filled the silence. Another bat dipped low and was gone. Ian waited for her answer.
“I’ll be glad to end the journey.”
“Aye,” he said, stepping nearer. “We . . . ye and I, we’ve hardly had a moment to ourselves to talk.”
“I’ve noticed.”
They were dancing around each other with their words, like those hunting bats. His hand closed on her arm, warm through her sleeve. “Seona.”