“Recollect their names?” He asked himself mostly. What he most remembered were faces. Names told little.
“Jasper. Lemuel. Zadock.” Maddie pursed her lips in contemplation. “I disremember the rest. The youngest was at the ferry.”
“That would be Ross. The other’s Cyrus.”
“And Miss Swan?” A low, throaty chuckle. “Remember her given name, Colonel?”
Tessa.
“Nay,” he lied. He purposed to forget it.
Tessa sought the privacy of the barn to gather her scattered thoughts before returning to the cabin. She kept close the Indian word the colonel had given her, still battling disbelief that Keturah had come back to them. But like the colonel said, ’twas not the Keturah of before.
Leaning against the ridgepole, she listened to the cooing of a dove in the rafters. The plaintive sound only aggravated her already tumbled feelings, which had little to do with Keturah’s sudden return. What had happened out there betwixt herself and Colonel Tygart? Not the words but all the rest. The long looks. The weighty pauses. Like heat lightning, something had passed between them, something immediate and intense.
Succumbing to a childish habit, she fell back into a pile of old hay, hardly feeling the scratch and prickle. Maybe it was on account of his eyes that she was so a-snarl. Never had she seen such a sight. One fiercely blue, the other a deep, earthy brown and mossy green. It startled and mesmerized her and turned him half feral.
Colonel Tygart couldn’t pass as handsome. Not with a nose too narrow and a jaw too wide. Few could fault his frame. She doubted all five of her brothers could take him. He oozed an immense vigor like a sugar maple oozed sap. When his odd gaze met hers, she felt all ablaze, flushed and tongue-tied and weak-kneed all at once.
Was she moonstruck?
“Tessa?” From the cabin doorway came Ma’s voice. Its strident tone yanked her back to the present and had her picking bits of straw from her skirt and hair as she collected herself and left the barn.
Laden with firewood, she returned to the cabin to find Keturah cross-legged on the floor, playing with a kitten. Ma was busy shelling peas, the first from the garden. Bacon crowded a skillet, overriding the stale tobacco smoke of the night before. Overpowering everything was the last wintered-over cabbage from the straw-filled trench near the springhouse. Seasoned with onion, it could be smelled clear to the barn. All familiar, welcome sights and scents now made strange by the presence of the woman more Indian than white and the rattling presence of the man who’d brought her here.
In the lull of lost years, she’d forgotten how lovely her friend was. Once again Keturah’s beauty struck her hard. Beautiful in ways that she herself could never be. Fair. Flawless. The colonel intruded again. Surely a man like Tygart would find her plain as a sparrow in comparison. Maybe Tygart was as smitten with Keturah as her brothers were or had once been.
Ma looked up from her task. “Set Keturah a place between us, aye?”
With a nod, Tessa put utensils on the table, pausing at Pa’s place. A thin sliver of mincemeat pie remained, which she ate if only to clean and put away the dish. Colonel Tygart had even pushed in his chair, a courtesy rarely practiced by her brothers.
Tessa kept busy till supper, skirting Keturah as she played with the kitten and then walked about the cabin as if familiarizing herself with a place she’d once known well. If only Keturah would speak. Should she try to remind her old friend of English things? Say simple words? Maybe Keturah knew them, had not forgotten, but was holding back. Being around so many Swans might loosen her tongue in time.
When her brothers came into the cabin before supper even graced the table, Tessa bit back a smile. As if being first would garner a seat beside their unexpected guest.
Keturah settled between her and Ma, eyes down demurely as they all found their usual places, joined hands, and prayed. ’Twas Ross, most like Pa, who said grace.
“Lord, we would ask Thy blessing on this food. Bless it to the good of our bodies that we may be better prepared for the battles of life. For Christ’s sake we ask it. Amen.”
After so lean a winter, everyone wanted a fair helping of the first peas of the season. Their very greenness was odd at table after winter’s barren sameness of hog and hominy. Keturah ate sparingly, her continued quiet hardly noticed as the Swan men revisited the eventful afternoon.
“The colonel seems a right capable character,” Jasper said, murmurs of affirmation following.
“I never saw a gun-toting Quaker before,” Cyrus said. “No thees or thous to speak of neither.”
Jasper shook his head. “He’s no Quaker other than his roots and raising. Rifle-bred to the bone, sure to rile his Quaker kin. Word is he’s not on the best terms with them.”
“Militia musters when?” Ross asked, clearly dejected at all he’d missed. “Week’s end?”
“Saturday noon. Nominations will be made for office of captain and lieutenant.” Lemuel balanced his peas on his knife. “Frolic to follow.”
Tessa perked up. Frolic? A rare occasion to dress in their humble best and step a reel or a jig. With women so few, she never lacked for partners. It would be a fine time to don her new petticoat.
“Going to barbecue that white ox of Westfall’s,” Cyrus added.
Ma took note of this, setting her fork down. Westfall was their nearest neighbor to the north, a widower of some merit.
As bowls and plates emptied, Tessa listened to the usual manly banter—of the white bear with dark nose pads and white claws seen near Dog Run, of the proper way to roast a brace of turkeys, if the Ohio River was mightier than the Monongahela, why Fort Pitt had become little more than a spirit-sated gaol, of the spreading conviction that western Virginia belonged more to Pennsylvania, and how Ross had nearly sunk the ferry by overloading oxen the day before.
