Firebrand's Woman

by Vanessa Royall

  Felix Wohl and Stan Loftis arrived, without their wives, and then—brilliant in his scarlet coat and gleaming coach—came Rupert Harris. Introductions were made, and Harris made a point of thanking Jackson for the fine hospitality he had enjoyed at the Hermitage. Then the men sat down on the verandah to talk business.

  Delia took Gale to the parlor.

  “Isn’t there some way we can hear what they’re saying?” Gale asked, her tone now friendly and conspiratorial, seeking Delia’s help.

  “I think not,” Delia responded coldly; but as she did, an idea came to her, born of memory. Once she had crept close to a Chickasaw council meeting and listened behind Teva’s tent, trying to learn what her fate would be. Was it possible to do the same thing now?

  True, if she were to sit out on the verandah, the men might pay her little attention, but…

  But there was something else. They were sure to talk about the Indian question. That was one of Rupert Harris’s favorite topics. No, she could not be present, but she had to know what was being planned.

  “I must tend to preparations for the meal,” she told Gale. “Here are some books, and a portrait album. I hope you will find them diverting. I will have lemonade sent in, and join you as soon as I can.”

  Delia left the parlor, gave Tanya a few instructions, told little Andrew about arrowheads, and then managed to slip out of the house. Over in the orchard the men of Jackson’s escort were resting or dozing beneath the apple trees. She turned the corner, went around in back of the house, and could not see or be seen by them.

  She heard the mutter of the men talking on the verandah, and it became louder and more distinct as she crept along the house. Honeysuckle bloomed there, and sweet forsythia; morning glory vines climbed trellises all the way up to the eaves. Skillfully she slid behind the flowers and slipped silently closer to the sound, all the while thinking how little difference there was in red men’s and white men’s regard for women. Useful to give pleasure and comfort! Useful in the rearing of children! Useful in the work of servants! True, she was more than those things to Jason, but now other men had shown up to deliberate high matters, and where was she? She was creeping behind banks of flowers, eluding drowsy bees, in order to learn what her fate might be! It was precisely as it had been in the Chickasaw village, stealing up behind the witch-woman’s wigwam!

  “Now, Ginral, how can you say that?” Rupert Harris was asking, apparently slapping his thigh on a tabletop for added effect.

  “I can say it because I ain’t a damn fool,” Jackson shot back. “I can’t make it this year, and there’s no way to change that fact. We westerners ain’t strong enough yet. That limp-ass Quincy Adams got everything sewed up this time around, so we got to wait until ’twenty-eight.” Jackson was using the vernacular of the frontier, which he knew so well.

  “Adams is only planning one term?” This was Jason’s question.

  “I don’t care what the hell he’s planning,” Jackson growled. “He’s goin’ to be a washout, a one-term washout like his old man.”

  “That’s right,” someone said.

  “Sure is,” said another.

  “And, boys, in 1828 we are going to go on glory road all the way to Washington, D.C. Ain’t nothin’ goin’ to stop us then, neither. Why, lookit that Adams, will you? How could he ever hope to run the country? I understand he went to this here Harvard college. I’d like to take that boy down here in these mountains when the redskins is acting up, put him behind a tree, an’ tell him, ‘Now, Quincy, soon as you see an Injun coming to scalp you, hold out your college degree there, an’ that’ll stop him dead!’”

  A great burst of laughter followed, and it tore Delia’s heart to hear Jason laughing right along with the others.

  Chula Harjo! She had almost softened on the verandah earlier, when he’d given little Andrew the arrowhead. What a mistake that would have been. Jackson was, would always be, an enemy to her people. He would have to be destroyed.

  “Speaking of redskins…” Rupert Harris said. “Now I been thinking this over…”

  How to destroy Jackson, though. That was the question. Poison? Delia had none. A gun, a knife? Of course. But if she killed him here in her house, she would certainly be arrested and tried. People would ask questions, and all the suspicions would be confirmed: She was an Injun all the time—we ought to’ve known.

  But Jackson was here, and he might never be again, and she could end his life now. How many more depredations would he wreak upon the Indian nations should he ever occupy the Great White Wigwam in the East?

  And yet, had not Jason explained to her that Jackson did not favor senseless, random forays against the tribes?

  “Ginral, we got to do it once and for all,” Rupert Harris was advising, in a tone that said, Look here, this is clear to us all!

  “And we have to settle some questions about land rights as well.”

  Delia’s attention quickened the more. The voice was Phil Foley’s. She knew that Phil and Jason were fairly close, but she had never trusted him, since Gale was his wife. And yet here was young Phil, bringing up before a powerful outsider an issue with which certain aggrieved citizens of Harrisville had not yet decided how to deal.

  “Land rights?” Jackson drawled.

  There was a long silence, during which time Delia imagined the men sipping drinks and looking at one another out of the corners of their eyes.

  “Land rights,” Phil Foley repeated.

  “Apparently, things have been handled incorrectly in filing pertinent papers up at Lexington,” Jason commented.

  Delia understood. Phil and Jason were giving Harris an opportunity to go back and change the situation on his own! If a crisis could be avoided by the threat of Jackson’s ascendant authority, all might be well.

  But Jackson had to be alive if the ploy was to work. How could she kill him now?

  What was she to do? Listening for the next remark, she saw Gale Foley steal around the corner of the house, heading for the edge of the verandah. Of course Gale would want to know what the men were discussing! Why hadn’t Delia imagined what the blond woman might do? Had she underestimated her enemy, again?

  Was Gale a Little Swallow with white skin?

  And then she decided. Gale would be the one to suffer exposure. From the dirt beneath the flower bed Delia picked up a half-buried rock, and waited, as Gale came creeping alongside the house, half-bent, awkward, without Delia’s stealth.

  “Sure, in a new state like ours, there can be errors made about land claims,” Jackson was saying judiciously, trying to guess why the subject had come up in his presence. “But we are men of Tennessee, men of good will, and these things can be settled without trouble. We westerners have got to stick together.”

  Gale did not bother to hide behind the flowers. A bee might sting her. She might dirty her dress. Instead she simply edged along the outside of the flower bushes and strained to hear what was being said on the verandah.

  Delia threw the rock. She threw it hard, so that it struck the wooden wall of the porch with a sharp crack, and the men ceased talking abruptly.

  “Hey!” exclaimed Felix Wohl.

  Delia saw Gale stop, still as a stone, suspended there next to the flowers for one absurd, open-mouthed moment. The woman seemed incapable of deciding what to do, run or stay, and had insufficient time to fashion an artifice before Phil himself leaned out over the verandah railing and cried, “Gale!”

  “I was just… I was just…”

  Phil was chagrined. Gale was terribly embarrassed, and angry at having been caught. Had she thought faster, she might have invented some plausible reason for skulking along the side of the house. But she’d been too surprised by the strange, sudden sound to think that quickly.

  “It’s an enemy scout!” guffawed Rupert Harris.

  Andrew Jackson politely said nothing.

  “Would you care to come up here?” Phil Foley asked his wife; and, having no choice, Gale did so. While the men were having thems
elves a good time asking the mortified woman how the garden looked and how the flowers were, Delia stole back into the house, with none the wiser, and appeared calmly in the verandah doorway to ask when the gentlemen might wish to dine.

  From Rupert Harris’s point of view, Andrew Jackson’s visit to Riverbend could not be recorded on the credit side of his ledger.

  In the first place, Jackson was oddly realistic about his political chances in this year of 1824. He wanted support, of course, but he wanted it for 1828. Given that fact, he was not desperate, and had no wish to stir up a situation with the Chickasaw when, as Jason had pointed out, “over two years have gone by since the last violent incident.”

  “Only a clear-cut Indian attack will bring out my militia,” the general said.

  Delia glanced at Harris as the big red-bearded empire builder listened to Jackson. Harris chewed his dinner, drank ale, and seemed to be thinking hard about his coal. Certainly his eyes were as dark as coal, brightening only slightly when Jackson added, “Now, ’course we all know the Indian is a tricky, devious, absolutely unprincipled animal, and anything can happen. We got to be on constant guard. But there ain’t no lack of wisdom in the saying ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’—right, men? Who was it made up that one, anyway?”

  “Quincy Adams?” drawled Felix Wohl laconically, drawing a laugh.

  Secondly, Harris had been put on the defensive when Jason and Phil brought up the land deals. No more was said about the situation, but it had not been forgotten; and over elderberry pie, without prelude, Jackson alluded to the matter again by saying, “I’m sure you boys down here in an area ripe as Harrisville can get your territorial affairs settled without a lot of legalistic shenanigans.”

  Everyone nodded, quite soberly, but without any great hope or trust.

  And finally, Harris was astute enough to be aware that the impression he was making on Jackson was by no means overwhelming. At first glance red-beard Rupert seemed the most powerful personality present, an effect aided by his big body and blunt, peremptory speech. But Jackson’s presence was paramount in the house, and in his aura Harris seemed—indeed was—more tentative. Harris’s rough-handed manner set off more clearly the personalities of the other men.

  Jason was clearly the best educated, and drawing upon his fine Virginia breeding, he spoke very well. Phil Foley, in spite of his youth, was sincere and occasionally passionate in his belief that Harrisville had a great future. Felix Wohl was every bit as tough and no-nonsense as Rupert Harris had ever seemed to be. Stan Loftis, a landowner, showed little interest in political questions, but his grasp of market locations and river access to them was close to encyclopedic.

  So as these men spoke their various pieces, Harris’s crude luster dimmed a bit, though it was by no means extinguished. Delia could not help being pleased by this transition, however temporary it would prove to be.

  “Well,” Jackson said, standing to end the evening—which, as honored guest, it was his responsibility to do—“let me put it this way. You’ve come a long way toward a great community in a very short time. Don’t stir up the Indians. Settle whatever squabbles you have among yourselves, if you can.”

  He seemed to think of something. “Rupert,” he asked, turning to the big man, “when you were up to the Hermitage, didn’t you tell me there was some hotshot new chief of a tribe down this neck of the woods?”

  “That’s right, General. Firebrand, we call him.”

  “S’posed to cause you a lot of trouble, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s a fact,” said Rupert Harris.

  “Well, see, it didn’t happen, did it? But if we’da gone up into those mountains when you wanted, a lot of people would have died. It wasn’t necessary. And I hope to hell it ain’t ever gonna be.”

  “Well, we just had to plan on all the possibilities,” Harris temporized.

  Gale Foley, who had remained quiet and abashed throughout the meal, chose now to get in her two cents.

  “Tell me, General,” she cooed sweetly, “how can a person tell one tribe from another?”

  Jackson, who’d fought almost every nation and tribe in the southeastern United States at one time or another, was not averse to sharing the knowledge he’d gained. And he’d been feeling a little sorry for Gale, who’d been so starkly embarrassed by the flower beds.

  “There’s lots of ways, lots of ways. Headpiece, for example. Style of hair. Style of dress. The Cherokee marks himself different from the Choctaw, and the Sac has an arrowhead different from the—”

  “But,” Gale interrupted, drawing closer and closer to what she wanted to know, “in what tribe do they wear bracelets in the form of serpents?”

  Delia, who had grown almost relaxed, now tensed immediately, and she saw a startled look appear on Jason’s face.

  “Why, that’d be Chickasaw, of course,” Jackson drawled, pleased with his knowledge, and with Gale’s question, which had given him a little forum to demonstrate his expertise. “The Chickasaw warrior often wears that kind of ornament.”

  “How did you come to have one of those?” asked Gale, turning, with all the world’s innocence, on Delia.

  “Why, I’m sure you are mistaken,” Delia managed quite smoothly, after just the briefest pause; and the unexpected confidence in her reply disconcerted Gale and left her in smiling silence, save for a faltering “Oh, that’s odd, I thought…”

  But had damage been done? Jackson was looking at Delia very closely, almost as he had regarded her upon entering the house earlier this afternoon—almost with a glimmering of familiarity, recognition. Yes, his eyes had been full of memory! Did she resemble her mother? Did Jackson truly know?

  Then the moment passed, the guests left, and Jackson remained to spend the night. His outriders and escort troops, having eaten at the field kitchen with the hired men, would now sleep outside under the stars or inside the hayloft, depending upon their preference. Haylofts, for many of those rough men, were highly prized elements of country hospitality, especially in winter.

  “Do you think I might have a bath?” the general asked, when Harris and the others had gone.

  “Of course,” said Delia, and ordered Tanya to start heating the water.

  “Used to be I didn’t have but a bath a month,” she heard Jackson telling Jason. “Now I swear a day on the road leads me to crave one. I must be getting old.”

  The general smoked his pipe in the parlor, and Jason went out to check on the comfort of Jackson’s men. Tanya heated bathwater. And Delia’s mind worked furiously.

  The bathtub was in a bare, wooden room just off the kitchen, next to the bricks that backed the kitchen fireplace, in order to ensure warmth. The room could be entered from the kitchen, but also from outside, through a wooden door. Ever since his arrival Jackson had worn the knife. But he would not wear it in his bath, would he?

  Suppose she were to kill Jackson in the tub? Suppose she were to manage the deed with such stealth that she would not be captured, or even identified? He was a guest in her house. She had been most hospitable. Everyone had seen that, hadn’t they?

  Many people, for many reasons, would like to have Andrew Jackson out of the way. Many might pay to have such a thing done. An assassin might have trailed him here to Riverbend farm, waited until the general was having his bath, entered the bathroom, and then…

  True, Jason would guess right away what had happened, who had done it—but would he betray her?

  Even if he did, she had already decided to pay whatever price was necessary to fulfill her vow, to avenge her parents. The land, the deeds—surely they were minor matters compared to life and death.

  She had seen Andrew Jackson’s stabbing eyes on her, and she knew he could not but be engaging in deception when he made public remarks about “letting sleeping dogs lie.” Words like that were said solely to delude victims. And neither Gyva nor the Chickasaw would be deluded ever again by Jacksa Chula Harjo. See how fierce he would be, bleeding to death in a warm bath on Riverbend farm!
r />   So she waited for her moment to come.

  Presently Tanya poured water into the tub, an elaborate receptacle of the latest style, which rested on four supports designed to look like the claws of a bear. The servant also laid out soft towels and soap and hung a lighted lantern from a nail on the wall.

  “Your bath is waiting, General Jackson.”

  He walked slowly from the parlor after extinguishing his pipe and slouched through the kitchen. He was tired. Delia saw that and was glad.

  There was no lock on the door, all locks having been removed in fear that little Andrew might contrive one day to shut himself behind some door. Jackson closed the door, and in moments Delia heard the water splashing.

  “That is all, Tanya. Go have some sleep.”

  “All right, Miz.”

  “Are you still up?” asked Jason, coming in from his check on the men and the farm.

  “You go up,” she told him. “I’ll wait to see if he wishes anything.”

  His glance was frank, and not without suspicion. He recalled their conversation in bed after the barbecue dinner.

  “Delia, shall I stay here with you?”

  “Haven’t I behaved well? I shall do what is right, as I have always done.”

  Yes, that is true, she thought. She would do the right thing. She would kill Andrew Jackson.

  She thought then, too, that this was the first time she had ever deceived Jason in anything.

  The decision was very difficult. But she had to deceive Jason in this matter, or else Jackson would go on living. Jackson’s death was necessary, since without his leadership white rampages against the Indians might falter, and thus the lives of many people, both Indian and white, would be spared. One deception, one death—both wrong in themselves—were nevertheless necessary to accomplish something good: a potential end to future bloodshed. Believing this utterly, Gyva steeled herself to lie and to kill.