by Sadie Conall
“Yet they move like ghosts, for no-one on that wagon train even knew they were here.”
“Oh, but they’re well aware of the wagon train. That youth and others were watching it for most of the night. Which is why he saw you arrive at the river,” he paused and looked at her.
“People on wagon trains think there’s no-one around when they see no sign of life, but these people are always here, watching from the woods, or up in the hills. Believe me, they know everything that’s going on in their lands. You say they’re like ghosts, but they’ve known enough harassment from settlers to be wary. And they’ve heard stories from the east about tribes being moved off their lands to make way for settlers so for now, they watch. But there’ll come a day when they’ll have no choice but to fight back, to keep safe what is theirs. But the day they fight back, that will be the end of the wild as they know it, I’m sure of it. For how can it ever be what it was?”
“Is that what you see ahead for this country?” Ella asked in dismay. “Bloodshed?”
Marrok nodded. “Yes. Because I’ve seen it in the east. It’s inevitable it’ll happen here, for no man can stop the tide of humanity pouring into this country. Millions are coming, Ella. Every year more settlers come, and until the Government closes the borders to the west, they will keep coming. But what man alive wouldn’t want this country for his own? Or fish from its rich waters? Or hunt in its forests which team with great herds of deer and moose and bear.” He shook his head and looked at her, his eyes lingering on her mouth.
“All I hope is that I’m an old man, or long gone, before they find my valley and take it for themselves. I hope I’m not alive to see that.”
For a moment all was still between them as Ella held his gaze, then Marrok moved, lifting his hand as though to reach for her, but instead he pulled back. But not before he saw the disappointment in her lovely eyes. And as he tried to dismiss the ache in his body for her, he knew it was time for the truth.
“Ella, if I touch you, I’m lost. For I couldn’t stop myself if I took you in my arms. I’m as red-blooded as the next man and I’ve been doing my damndest to hold back since I first met you, yet when you look at me like that, how can I possibly keep my distance? Yet I must, for we’re different people, heading for different lives and if I allowed myself to love you, the bravest woman I’ve ever met, I know you’ll haunt me for the rest of my days. And I won’t live like that.”
Ella felt the tears on her cheeks as she heard his words. This is what Ruby had seen, and Martha, and why Martha had warned Ella to stay away from him. Marrok was not a man to commit to any woman.
But Ella couldn’t stay away. It was asking the impossible. She didn’t care about the consequences. She shook her head, even as she reached out to take his hand within her own and this time Marrok didn’t move away. He sat utterly still, his breath shallow as she turned his hand over in her own, tracing the scars and calluses she found there. Yet she could feel the power of that hand within her own and knew well enough what Marrok was capable of doing with it. But he sat quietly, as she raised his hand to her face and held it there.
“Marrok,” she whispered. “Can you not see my own feelings? For everyone else thinks them so transparent!” She moved to kiss each finger. “I loved you from the moment I saw you sitting at the table in my father’s kitchen, when you stood up so suddenly on seeing me that you almost knocked it over. And when you helped me in my hopeless fight against Milton and Jebediah and again, here today, when you saved me from being brutalized,” she shook her head, the tears falling freely.
“You think me brave my love, yet I am not so brave. I would have married Jebediah, for I saw no way out of it. So if anyone is to speak of courage here, it is I who must speak of your own. And that boy, for he saved your life and with it, my own.”
She moved his hand to her heart as Marrok took a deep breath before moving to kneel before her, reaching up with his other hand to wipe away her tears. But as he went to speak, a shout suddenly came from somewhere upriver.
“Miss Ella? You here girl? I’s been worried about you all morning. Where are you, girl? You alive down here or you done gone and drowned?”
It was Jasper.
Marrok spun away from Ella as though touched by a hot poker and he groaned, not only from the wound on his shoulder.
“You can’t be seen with me. Go now Ella. I beg of you.” He looked tortured as he spoke and hearing the urgency in his voice Ella moved, running down to the river and pushing herself once more through that current.
She reached the other side, turned back once, even though the wet material hugged her legs and thighs, then ran into the trees, back towards her clothes.
7
Marrok crouched there for long moments, hearing the distant muted sounds of oxen bellowing, a horse neighing, and the faraway hum of the wagon train as people went about their daily chores. The clang of a hammer on iron, a vague sound of a man shouting, children screaming, but they were far away and distant, meaning nothing to him. And then he heard Ella’s call to Jasper.
She had dressed then, covering that glorious body and when Marrok peered out of the trees he saw her running along the river bank, back the way she had come.
He closed his eyes, feeling the pulsating hum and burn of his body, yet ashamed of how close he had come to ruining her. A child might have resulted from their union here today in the woods, for Marrok knew well enough that Ella would have let him have his way. He had seen the flush of desire in her face and had he pulled her into his arms, not even Jasper’s desperate call would have been able to stop the inevitable. He silently cursed his own weakness.
8
Marrok kept to his own camp that night and stayed with his men. But he found himself glancing across the wagon circle to where Ella sat with her own team. He could hear Abe and Wilber laughing and then later Ruby began to sing and Martha and Willard drifted over to join them, leaving Constance to rest in the wagon while her children slept.
But Marrok remained where he was, drinking coffee alone well into the night after his men went to their beds for it was impossible to sleep, not after what Ella had told him. She loved him. But she knew so little about him. And for her sake, Marrok knew she must go on to California with Martha and her family. There she would meet a boy closer to her own age, who would give her what she wanted.
Yet, there it was again, that crawl of something in his belly as he thought of Ella with another man
Marrok threw the dregs of his coffee onto the coals of the fire then stood up to move out into the dark to check his animals. And as the wagon train quietened for the night and people settled in their beds, he envied them, for he felt restless and uneasy, as if a storm were coming for which he was utterly unprepared. And for the first time since he left his mother’s village as a youth to strike out alone in the world, Marrok felt completely out of his depth.
*
Ella watched him discreetly from her camp fire, seeing him with his men, disappointed he didn’t join her. But by staying away, Marrok had made his feelings clear. She had told him she loved him, but he never said he loved her back. And if nothing else, she now knew that his future did not include her.
She watched as he stood up and stepped back into the corral to check on his animals grazing alongside her own. And Ella half stood, still wanting to go to him despite everything she knew, when Ruby came and sat down beside her. She reached out to take Ella’s hand within her own.
“Be careful, my pretty,” the girl said softly, pulling her back.
Ella looked at her and Ruby nodded discreetly towards Martha and Willard who sat opposite her, laughing with Abe and Wilber. And on the other side of them, sat Clara and Jasper talking quietly.
“I saw Marrok ride off bareback down to the river early this morning,” Ruby said, her voice so low that no-one could possibly hear. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, except I saw you walk back from the river with Jasper hours later, your hair wet, dressed in clean clothes.
Jasper won’t tell me anything, he said he knows nothing, and I believe nothing happened. But when Marrok rode back into camp just a few hours ago, he wasn’t himself. And he has an injury to his shoulder, for he clearly favors it. So let me tell you Ella, as someone who admires you and who cares for you, if I noticed something odd, others have noticed it too. You were gone for hours this morning. And when Clara and Martha asked after you, Jasper said you’d gone visiting. I think that’s probably a lie to protect you, so I say again, be careful my lovely.”
She glanced towards the corral, where Marrok wandered amongst the animals. “He’s a dangerous man, Ella. And there’s some folk here who see everything.”
“Like you?”
Ruby shrugged. “My life over the past four years has depended on me seeing things. I watch everything and everyone, waiting for my father’s thugs to appear, to attack. So yes, I see everything. All I’ll say is, go easy Ella. We’ve still got a few weeks ahead of us before we reach Fort Hall. A reputation can follow a woman until the end of her days.”
Ella said very little for the rest of the night. She loved a man she couldn’t have, a man who wanted her but didn’t love her, and soon they would part ways to live very different lives. Yet Ella wondered how she’d go on without him, for Marrok was as much a part of her life now as anyone she had ever loved and she couldn’t bear to think of him not in it.
October 1846
1
The following day the wagon train rolled out on their last push west to Fort Hall. Ella never saw Marrok, for he’d already left when that first bugle call come blasting across camp at 4am. He didn’t return for almost a week.
She tried not to think of him, but he filled her thoughts as the wagon train rolled on. She watched for him every day, as the flat prairie lands were left behind and replaced by rolling hills and then high mountainous country. And the only thing which took her mind off him were the hard long days of crossing over mountainous terrain and the nights when Artie called for music after supper, when the fiddles were brought out along with harmonicas and exhausted people found the energy to dance.
It was on one of these nights that Clara and Jasper’s growing friendship became something that would last them through many years, becoming a bond of trust and something unbreakable.
For as Clara made her way back to camp, leaving Ella and Ruby dancing with Abe, Wilber and Moss Weslock, she found Jasper sitting alone. He had made a fresh pot of hot coffee and offered her a cup. And as she joined him, Jasper noticed the deep lines around her mouth and eyes and the grey through her hair. When she saw his gaze on her, she smiled.
“Oh yes! I do feel as weary as I look. An’ although I’d dearly love to go to my bed Jasper, I ain’t got no show of that happenin’ with all those fiddles playin’ and folks dancin’. There’s enough noise in this camp to wake the dead I reckon.”
Jasper smiled. “Where’d you grow up then, Miss Clara. You never did speak of it, although I reckon you’s lucky if you do, for I remember nothin’ about my early years.”
Clara looked at him in surprise. “You remember nothin’ at all?”
“No ma’am. I doan’t know if that’s because it was real bad or if I got a problem up here,” he reached up to touch his head. “All I’s remember is bein’ with my old mama, except Violet wasn’t my mama at all. I first met her in a slave market, where Ella’s daddy bought me and Violet together.”
Clara tried to hide her shock, for she had thought Jasper a free man.
“Oh, doan’t get me wrong,” Jasper added, seeing the surprise on her face. “We weren’t never treated as slaves. We got to be a part of that family I reckon, once Ella’s mama got used to the idea of us livin’ there. But I ain’t complainin’ about my past. The part I remember anyways.” He looked at her and smiled. “So where’d you grow up Miss Clara?”
She thought on it a moment, remembering vividly the heat of the big house, the mosquitos in summer, the hard boards of the floor in the bedroom where she slept.
“A place down in Louisiana. Although I’s sure doan’t miss the bugs down that way. I was born on a plantation, finest place you’d ever see Jasper. When I was nothin’ more than a child I was taken out of my mama’s arms an’ moved into the big house, to be slave to the master’s youngest daughter,” Clara paused for a moment, before carrying on.
“Her name was Ada-Rose and she was a sweet enough child, just a few years older than me. I slept on a pallet at the bottom of her bed for the next fourteen years, right up ‘til she was eighteen, got married and left for New Orleans. I remember tellin’ her I doan’t want to leave, for my mama was still alive, but that sweet child wanted me with her an’ that was that. So I left. I was with her in New Orleans for the next twenty years,” again Clara paused, but she didn’t look at Jasper.
“She died some five years or so ago from river fever, just a month after her husband. Her only child, a girl they called Esther ‘though I never did take to that name, had moved to New York to live with her husband years before. When Ada-Rose died, Esther came back to New Orleans to sell the house an’ pay off the servants, includin’ me. She said she had no use for me in New York and she doan’t want her husband’s family knowin’ her mama had slaves. So I was sent out into the street with the few dollars in my pocket she gave me, but with no mind of where to go or what to do. I got no schoolin’. I’d been slave to one woman since I was four years old an’ now I was nearly forty. I called myself the forgotten slave.”
“How you’d get to be with Miss Ruby then?”
“I found work on one of the paddle steamers on the Mississippi River. Just cleanin’. Mostly moppin’ up folks’ sick when they didn’t take too kindly to river crossing.” She shook her head.
“One day I was walkin’ around St Louis, askin’ folks if they wanted a cook or cleaner, for I could do both well enough. The saloon where I met Ruby took me on. I was there more’n five years. But that man done wore me to the bone. But I stayed, for I got no better offer. And where else a tired old black woman goin’ to go, heading for her forties,” she paused again, and this time she did look at Jasper.
“But I’ll tell you now Jasper, I do fret some over what’s ahead for me with Miss Ruby, for I know she ain’t a girl to stay put for long. She’s a child that needs constant movement, constant change, but I ain’t like that. I like to settle.”
“Well, I reckon you should talk to Marrok. He’s lookin’ for folk to help him set up his ranch. And if Miss Ella decide she doan’t want me, I’s going to work for him. He might need a cook. Or a cleaner. You go on and ask him, Miss Clara. It can’t hurt none to ask. All he can say is no. But I’s hopin’ he’ll say yes.”
And as Clara looked at him, she knew she loved Jasper. But not like that. Not in that way. Not like her mistress’ husband liked to love her.
*
The night before Marrok rode back into camp, Elmer Weslock collapsed and died. And the following day, Moss asked Ruby to marry him.
Elmer’s health had deteriorated rapidly over the past four months, with the hard physical work of looking after the wagon and oxen every day often leaving him struggling to breathe. When he collapsed while walking alongside the wagon one warm autumn day less than three weeks out from Fort Hall, everyone grieved for him, with Nell and Moss burying him by the side of the trail.
The following day, after Ella invited Nell and Moss to join her and her team for supper, Moss took Ruby aside and proposed to her. Ruby declined, doing it as gently as possible, although Moss was devastated. But Ruby assured Ella he’d get over it.
“It’s grief that made him do it,” she said. “And once he meets the right girl, he’ll understand this was the right decision. I could never make him happy.”
Meanwhile Abe and Wilber continued to court the two sisters from South Carolina although Ella watched this with a growing sense of unease.
She wished the brothers would just stop and ask themselves if this was what they wanted. For she had a feeling that if Ab
e and Wilber let this drag go on for much longer, the girls’ father was likely to come looking for them with a shotgun.
2
Marrok stood under a pine and looked out across the densely forested hills. He couldn’t see the wagon train from here, for it was another two days away from reaching these hills, but it would come.
He had spent the last two days with the Blackfeet and listened as they talked of going to war. And now as he looked back towards their village, he wondered if Artie’s wagon train would make it through, although the Blackfeet had given him their word they wouldn’t attack.
And although Marrok had no reason to doubt them, he also knew this tribe were at the end of their fuse.
And all someone had to do to stir things up, was light it.
*
He killed a small deer that evening and roasted it on a spit over a fire, sharing it with two old French fur trappers he’d found camped on a river.
The men were in their seventies and had spent all their lives in the wild trapping furs. And like Marrok’s grandfather and father, it was likely they would die in the wild.
“We’ve just come back from looking at another new trading post that’s opened up, way in the north. Mostly trading with Indians, but that will change as more settlers come through,” the eldest of the pair said, a man by the name of Richaud.
He spoke in French, and although he knew several Indian dialects, he knew little English.
“And they reckon there’ll be more of them trading posts in the years ahead,” said the other man, who went by the name of Gysbert.