Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  At supper that night conversation was desultory indeed, save for the fact that Jason had found a promising plot of land.

  “It’s very rich,” he said, describing it, “and it won’t be too hard to clear of trees. The only problem is that it lies down near the river. You know—where the bend is?”

  “Sure, I know the place,” Phil Foley said.

  “I was worried about flooding, especially in spring.”

  “Didn’t flood this spring. Didn’t flood last spring either, far as I know.” He glanced at his wife, and seemed to realize that she wasn’t saying much this evening. “Feeling tired, dear?”

  “Oh, no, no,” replied Gale with forced gaiety.

  “How do I go about making a claim on that land?” Jason asked.

  “Just wait until Mr. Harris gets back. He makes the decisions about who gets what.” He said it matter-of-factly, but with a delicate undercurrent of disapproval.

  “How did that—that arrangement come about?” Jason wanted to know.

  Phil was a bit defensive. “Well, Rupert organized the original party that came out here from Wheeling, and in the beginning there were a lot of problems. With the redskins and such, and people, wanting to leave. He held it together. When there was conflict among the group, we turned to him. It’s rather an accepted practice now, as if he were a judge.”

  “I see,” said Jason, but he did not pursue the matter. He had just arrived in Harrisville; it was no time to begin suggesting improvements, much less pointing out deficiencies.

  After supper the men went out to feed and curry Phil’s horse, shell corn to feed the chickens, and milk the two cows. Gale, in the kitchen, was trying to teach Bright Badger how to dry dishes. He had a hard time holding on to the slippery things.

  “The boy is tired,” Delia observed. “Here, let him rest, and I’ll-”

  “The job of a slave is to be tired!” snapped the innkeeper. “What do you think? Look, I’m getting mighty tired of—”

  She seemed just on the verge of a terrific explosion of temper, but somehow she found the strength to hold herself in check. Delia knew for certain not only that she must leave this house quickly, but also that she would never be safe from the possibility that Gale would fashion some kind of revenge for her humiliation in the field. It might come tomorrow; it might come in a month or two. Or it might come in years—if, the heavens forbid, Delia had to stay here that long.

  She went immediately up to the loft and lay down on the bed, waiting for nightfall. Tonight, at least Bright Badger would know free air, and the whispering leaves of the trees as he fled through them. If only she could go with him!

  Someone sighed aloud, and it was a moment before Delia realized that the sound had come from herself. Reasonably safe now here in Harrisville, with the moment-by-moment exigencies of survival no longer pressing, Delia was aware of her body’s needs. She thought now, in the evening with the sun descending and the sky soft and many-colored, of a man’s love—of Torch’s love—and her body burned in all the places he had kissed. She put it out of her mind, that memory—or tried to. But it was no use. Even when she succeeded in making her mind blank and clear as the ice on a winter lake, yet did her body remember…

  The twin agonies of need and memory tormented her as nightfall slipped across the land, spreading its soft cloak from the river across the rich fields, the forests, and upon the far mountains that marked the borders of her vanished life.

  Phil and Jason came inside, having completed the chores. As Gale retreated to her room in the back of the house, the two men lit pipes downstairs. One of them gave Bright Badger food and said kind words to him.

  After a long time Jason’s footsteps sounded on the rickety stairs.

  Delia shuddered, breathing hard.

  Jason paused outside her curtained place, then entered his own. She heard him removing his boots, his clothing. She could hear his breathing for a time as well; then everything was still.

  She waited until midnight, and then she waited more. Finally, when night was high and sleep deepest, it was time. The stairs would be too dangerous, too noisy; so she rolled the soft blanket on the bed lengthwise, did likewise with the thin sheet, knotted them together, and knotted one end to the railing of the loft. Soundlessly she slid down to the kitchen floor, let her eyes adjust to the darkness, and looked toward Bright Badger’s corner.

  He wasn’t there!

  Approaching, she saw that the hook was still in the wall, the big rope still knotted in the hook. But the other end of the rope had been cut through, where it had been tied to the leather collar around his neck.

  Had he managed to reach a knife after all?

  Quickly she checked the big door, found it securely braced by the mighty oaken bolt. That must mean Bright Badger was still in the house. But where? Certainly he would not have gone back where Gale and Phil were sleeping. He was not under the table, or in the front section of the house. She would have heard him if he had gone upstairs.

  Mystified and a little frightened, she climbed her blanketladder hand over hand, unknotted the device, and returned to her bed. But something about all of this seemed drastically wrong, and she could not contain her need to know what it was. The only one who might help her was Jason.

  She slipped barefoot across the loft to his bed and paused beside it. His breathing was deep and regular, and in the small space he gave off a man-smell that was not at all unpleasant, although it was distracting.

  She moved forward, accidentally brushed against his bed, and immediately felt herself pulled forward, flung through the air. Then she was on her back in the bed, and he was above her, in an attitude of attack, as if to strike her. His fist was raised for a blow.

  “No!” she managed to gasp.

  “Delia!” he whispered. “Don’t ever do that again! I thought…”

  The moment of instinct passed, and they were suddenly aware of each other. She wore a thin chemise Gale had given her; Jason wore nothing. She slid off the bed, half crouched, half kneeling beside it. He rested full-length on his elbow and drew a sheet halfway across his body, which in the darkness seemed all heights and hollows.

  “What on earth is it?” he whispered.

  “Bright Badger,” she replied. Had that been a noise downstairs? The Foleys? The Indian boy himself? “Bright Badger seems to have gone.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I went down there to—”

  “Why?” His question was curt.

  She decided to admit it. “I wanted to set him free.”

  “Perhaps he’s gone on his own.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head in the darkness. “By himself, he could not manage the bar on the door.”

  There was a long silence in the darkness. Finally he made a decision of his own. “I lifted the bar for him,” Jason told her. “I set him free.”

  They spoke no more; but her gratitude, in spite of the silence was evident, and did not require words. After a time she reached out and touched his face, gently, gently, and she felt his fingers seek her, and find the place where her neck and shoulder met, where her black hair fell and flowed upon her bare skin. Delia was reluctant to withdraw her touch, and Jason his; but, whatever his reasons, he did not quite curl his hand about her willing neck and draw her toward him, and she did not quite bend her head to him.

  The moment passed, but it had been neither dream nor accident.

  And they both knew it.

  Chapter VIII

  “So,” grunted Rupert Harris, sliding a jug of corn whiskey across the rough wooden table, “it’s time we talked business.”

  Jason nodded, pulled the cork from the thick neck of the jug, and stuck his thumb through the curved thumbhole on the base of the neck. Then, lifting the jug onto his shoulder, he half turned his head, tilted the jug a bit, and let several healthy gulps of the clear, strong liquor pour into his mouth. He swallowed it, gasped, and slid the jug back across the table. Harris grinned, wiped the neck with the
palm of his hand, hoisted and gulped down twice as much as Jason had. The two men sat at a battered table in Harris’s shack.

  This was a frontier negotiation. One drank from a common jug, to show trust. One drank more than an adversary, to show endurance, if not necessarily wisdom. Just recently a cultured Frenchman named de Tocqueville had toured America, from the eastern seaports to the backwoods settlements, and had concluded: Whiskey is the wine of America, drunk daily and in quantity by all, including children.

  Certainly Rupert Harris was a patron of the local still.

  “Mentioned your name to Old Hickory when I was up there to the Hermitage,” Harris was saying. There was a guarded shrewdness in his eyes. “He said he knows your folks back in Virginny. Asked to be remembered to you.”

  Jason said nothing, but he saw that Harris was not entirely pleased about the fact. He also understood that, properly used, the family connection to the general might serve him in good stead.

  “Yep, stayed overnight at the Hermitage,” Harris felt compelled to add. “That wife of his, Rachel, is quite a woman, there.”

  Harris often spoke of women. No, he did not so much speak of them as make insinuations about them. Harris was, he said, a “self-admitted bachelor—leastways, so far.”

  “I think Rachel Jackson is a fine lady, from what I have heard,” Jason said agreeably. “And one of the general’s best characteristics has always been his love for her, in spite of the vicious talk. He is, I understand, gentle and civilized with all women.”

  “That’s a mistake now, ain’t it?” grunted Harris, taking another good belt of the liquor, and sliding the jug back to Jason.

  Talking business required a certain mellowness, and if that pleasant state took time to achieve, so be it.

  “How’s that there dark-haired wench doin’?” Harris was asking, “since the two of you got booted out over at the Foleys’?”

  Stunned, Jason looked at the cunning, red-bearded brawler. “What?”

  “Come on, Randolph. You’re a man like me. I don’t blame you none.”

  “Blame me for what?” asked Jason, thoroughly mystified. Was this some devious ploy on Harris’s part to get him unnerved?

  Harris slapped his thigh. “That’s the way,” he chortled. “That’s the way to be, all right. Don’t even pay it no never mind.”

  “Look, would you please tell me…”

  Even Harris, in spite of his gleeful thickness, seemed to realize that Jason didn’t know what, was going on. “It’s all over town,” he said. “How Gale had to kick the two of you out of her so-called inn there, on account of…” He made a loop with thumb and forefinger and slid his other thumb back and forth through the loop, chortling gleefully while doing so.

  Jason went icy cold with anger. From the first he had read Gale Foley correctly—a gabbling busybody who felt, alternately, as if she owned the world, or as if everyone in the world were dedicated to making her life miserable. Talk like hers was difficult to combat, hard to stop. Old Hickory had learned the danger of talk well enough himself, and he was not free of it yet. Rachel had been married to a man named Lewis Robards, but it had gone badly. Pursuant to Tennessee law, Robards petitioned the legislature for permission to seek a divorce, and it was granted. Robards, however, did not immediately seek the actual divorce; and Jackson, however unknowingly, wed a woman who was still legally married to her first husband. Had the general not been an already controversial public figure with an obvious political future, the entire affair might have been quietly set aright. But not even the fact that Robards did eventually get the divorce, and Rachel and Jackson took vows a second time, stopped the talk. Rachel was loose, immoral, and worse! And what was Jackson, to consort with such a woman?

  Talk, even the talk of a babbling nitwit like Gale Foley, could be dangerous, Jason knew. He had heard that the innuendos of smug moralists and vicious people were breaking Rachel Jackson’s heart. He had no intention of permitting either himself or Delia to be destroyed by the flapping lips of a lightweight social climber!

  “Rupert, I’ve got to apologize for my ignorance, but what exactly did the Foley woman say?”

  “Huh? Why, that one mornin’ you didn’t come down for breakfast right on time, so she sent Phil up the stairs to wake you, an’ that’s when he saw it. You an’ that Delia wench, an’ she was—you know, with her mouth.”

  Surprised and upset, Jason held back his anger.

  “It’s not true, Rupert,” he said. “Talk like that is not good for the community. Gale is just irritated because Delia and I moved out of her place.”

  Indeed, that was the most likely reason for Gale’s pique, although Jason was also aware that the Foley woman envied Delia her beauty. Since leaving the Foleys’ Delia had moved in with Mrs. Randall, helping with the Randalls’ four children, and Jason had set up a lean-to shelter out in an area of woods he wished to claim and clear for farmland. That was the purpose for this meeting with Harris tonight: Jason had to get the man’s permission to homestead the rich land down by the river bend.

  “You’ll notice,” he said, handing the jug to Harris again, “that Gale put the accusation in her husband’s mouth. How typically courageous of her. Anyway, there’s not a word of truth in it.”

  “There isn’t?” groaned Harris, clearly disappointed. But he could tell that Jason was not lying. Harris knew every trick but he also knew when a man was telling the truth.

  “If you want my opinion, that Foley woman should be horsewhipped.”

  “Aw, Jason, forget it. Women will always be talking that way, I suppose. I’m a little put out that the story’s not true, ’cause I was sorta lookin’ forward to havin’ a little of that Delia myself. Maybe I still will.” He drank, and wiped his mouth. “Never can tell, can you?”

  Jason said nothing.

  “An’ anyway, Gale ain’t all bad. She volunteered to train that there Indian boy for us.”

  “How did that boy happen to get here?” Jason asked innocently.

  “Aw, he got lost from his tribe,” Rupert Harris lied casually. “I figured we’d take him in an’ give him a home. Thought maybe, since we can’t afford niggers yet, we might try Indians.”

  Wishing to avoid a discussion about slavery, which would only rile Harris’s less-than-humane instincts, Jason kept his mouth shut.

  “An’ how’d that boy bust out, anyway?” the village boss asked.

  Jason had known the question would come up, but he had already answered it many times, explaining to the people of Harrisville that the boy must have secreted a knife, cut his bonds, and slipped out of the house in the darkness.

  “Yeah, but on the inside of the house, the bar was still in place by the door. How could that be?”

  “The boy was slight, and wiry. Also, I doubt he could have lifted more than one end of the bolt. So he did, eased out the small opening, and let the bolt fall to when he closed the door.”

  It was all very plausible.

  “Indians. You know how sneaky they are. Even when they’re young.”

  For some time after Bright Badger’s departure the village braced itself for an assault by the Chickasaw. But none came. “It’s some kind of a trick,” the people kept saying, then gradually they relaxed a little. Not much, true, but a little.

  Rupert Harris never relaxed, not about the danger of Indians, anyway; and the thought of Bright Badger reminded him of this preoccupation. His voice slightly slurred now, he grunted and confided to Jason, “You know, I sent word east again that we need more settlers out here, but news of what happened to that wagon train of your’n has done got there first. Ain’t too many people who want to chance it.”

  “The people will come, though. Give them time, they’ll come.”

  “Not until we go on up into those mountains and bring us that there Firebrand back down here on a rail. Why, that red bastard near burned us out when we first got here. Had to set up the village all over again.” Harris took a pull on the jug, swallowed, stuck a wad of
chewing tobacco in his cheek, looked over his shoulder as if someone might be eavesdropping, then said, “I got me a mind to get Firebrand, cut off his head, and send it to President James Monroe in Washington and say, ‘Here’s what Rupert Harris had to do hisself. Now why ain’t Andy Jackson on the job?’”

  Harris was still angered at Jackson’s reluctance to attack the Chickasaw.

  Jason declined tobacco but took a short slug of whiskey. It was beginning to affect him, and they had not even gotten around to discussing the distribution of farmland.

  Harris initiated the exchange. “So what’s on yer mind?” he grunted, turning his head sideways, shooting a gleaming brown swash of tobacco juice onto the floor.

  “Well, to be blunt, I’d like to have that land down along the river.”

  Harris’s eyes narrowed. “Down there, eh?” He spit, wadded the tobacco far up inside his cheek, and took a drink. “Well, that’s rich land—mighty fine land, mighty fine. What’ll you offer?”

  Jason had learned by now the secret of Harris’s control over much of the land. According to Tennessee law, each man’s claim, subsequent to surveying and boundary demarcation, was to be registered in Knoxville. But Harris knew that many of the settlers would endure one or two seasons in this rugged country, give up, and return back east. Some would be—and had already been—killed by Indians. Thus, plots of farmland or potential plantation acreage might theoretically be subject to resale. Only theoretically, though, because Harris had never filed the original claims! “We’ll do that when we get settled,” he told the people, who were in general agreement with him because the situation meant greater flexibility in land trading, and freedom from the onerous precision of deeds and titles and laws. “We’ll work it all out here amongst ourselves,” Harris told the people, “an’ that way nobody but ourselves is gonna tell us what to do.” But what it came down to was that Harris claimed ownership of considerable portions of land, and held effective control, on the basis of authority or force or both, over a lot more. Anyone making a claim for land on which to build and settle could count on pledging a significant portion of whatever his land might produce to Harris himself, who kept a share, but who was sufficiently shrewd to turn over to the community just enough to make the whole venture seem cooperative and idealistic.