Mince tarts concluded the meal, served with strong coffee. Maddie and Jude joined them in time, filling the cabin to bursting. Talk and laughter ebbed and flowed, and as the night ripened Hester made her praiseworthy flip, beating up a froth of eggs, ale, and rum. Tessa took the new grater from her pocket and ground a dusting of nutmeg atop each cup, giving Clay an especially generous dash.
Come morning, would the rest of the Swan clan leave? Or would a spy’s dire report forbid them? For once their slow return didn’t chafe, though she longed to know if Lemuel was well. If she had her druthers she’d take her book of poetry and retreat from so many eyes and ears, feel her soul take flight at a pretty turn of phrase. How she wished for a little of that refinement interwoven with the roughness that was Colonel Tygart. She was all homespun when what she craved was a bit of lace.
In time, the men began a dice game. Tessa looked on as Clay explained the rules of play to her eager brothers. Inexplicably, Keturah became visibly excited at the rattle of the dice in the wooden cup, hovering over the men’s shoulders and watching their every move. The dice were cleverly painted peach pits, the scoring depending on which number landed atop the table. Here Clay had the upper hand, his every move confirming he’d played it long and well.
“Mamantuhwin,” Keturah said to Tessa with a touch of pride, as if pleased to be teaching her for once.
Tessa repeated the lengthy word as Jasper scored and the tension mounted. Would Clay win?
Candles sank into their holders as the game reached fever pitch. Though Hester was yawning, she didn’t dare bring the rare merriment to an end.
Quietly, Tessa slipped out into the May twilight to clear her head of the smoke and noise and cure her craving to watch Clay’s every move. Finding a crude bench at the heart of the common garden, she caressed the book’s smooth cover, breathing in the vanilla perfume of sweet rocket and phlox interwoven with the pungent spice of thyme and sage. Night insects winged about in swarms amid the lazy wink of fireflies. Bedtime at the fort was far later than at home. Yet neither Hester’s flip nor the late hour tired her. Lights were snuffed in the surrounding cabins one by one. A dog barked, and a baby gave a plaintive cry.
’Twas the first time she’d be sorry to face first light. No longer could she deny the reason why. The fort’s gates no longer spelled freedom but absence. Tonight her whole being stood on tiptoe because a man who’d left her addled by asking her to breakfast had addled her further with some poetry.
Lightning struck, she was. To the bone.
13
Clay left Hester’s cabin not long after Tessa, his gaze circling the fort’s two enclosed acres. Rosemary passed him on her return from the necessary, likely. He doffed his hat. He’d not refer to her as widow as some did. The way Westfall eyed her, she’d not be widowed long.
Above him, assigned men stood along the rifle platform, one of them yawning. He’d soon mount those steps come midnight watch. Hester’s flip had done its mellowing work for a time, but now his every sense was needlelike in its sharpness.
Somehow he managed to lose sleep and still function when others fell into a stupor. Seasons of hunger and being on the move with the Lenape had toughened his frame and his temper, another reason this precariously situated fort bore his name.
He paused at a loophole, scanning the stump-littered clearing that led to the river. The spies still hadn’t returned, a worrisome matter, though any minute they might ride in with good news or ill. If the country continued calm, they might overnight at some agreed-upon rendezvous place till first light. Thankfully there were no shirkers among them anxious to return to the fort for their own comfort. They served the settlement well.
He walked on through the dark, finding all in order but for the incessant barking of a dog near the spring, the only flaw in the moonlit scene. Most of the fort folk were abed, the cabins shuttered, dark boxes.
His moccasined feet trod the slight slope to the east corner, where the cur stood at bristle-backed attention as if desirous of charging that lofty picketed wall. Panther, likely. Jasper had spoken of seeing tracks.
Kneeling, he spoke in Lenape, an old habit he’d never been able to shake around animals. Indians were notoriously fond of their dogs, and he’d come of age with Halfmoon, a lame pup given him at his adoption into the Wolf clan. Of all the things torn from him at his reentry into the white world, he’d missed Halfmoon most.
He ran a callused hand down the dog’s rough back, then gave him a bone he’d picked up on the common. Returning the way he came, he listened, ears taut for the slightest sound. Indians weren’t often night raiders. They mostly struck at dawn after studying their intended target, be it farm or fort.
He checked the locked magazine, the corralled horses, both gates. Bypassing the blackened hulk of the smithy, he skirted the garden, breathing in the scent of sun-warmed soil.
A seated silhouette stopped him. Tessa? She’d left the cabin during their dice game, but he hadn’t thought much about it. The moon slipped free of a cloud, casting her in a gentle pool of light. Tonight her pale cap was the only ruffled thing about her. She looked serene, the poetry book he’d lent her in her aproned lap. Other times it seemed she’d rather spit than speak, like this morning when Hester had sent her to make his breakfast. Now she regarded him coolly, shoulders straight, showing no signs of the wear and tear of the day.
“I thought you’d be abed,” he said in that candid, cut-to-the-chase way he’d never speak to a town-bred girl.
“Hard to sleep of a night when it feels like summer.” There was no complaint in her tone, just honest appraisal of a stifling May eve.
“You can tell your great-aunt I won’t be needing breakfast.”
Her mouth twisted wryly. “Am I that sorry a cook, Colonel?”
“Hardly. I’ll be out on a scout.” He wouldn’t add that her leaving in the morning was the reason that sent him beyond fort walls. Since sign had been noted near about the Swan homeplace, he wouldn’t rest with a secondhand report.
She was studying him now—rather, his rifle, as if recognizing it for the work of art it was. Moonlight glinted off the brass inlays and mountings as the gun dangled from his hand.
“Pennsylvania made, I’d wager,” she said. “Lancaster lines. Stocked in black walnut. Smoothbore. Twenty-nine balls to the pound is my guess.”
He schooled his surprise. “Aye.”
“Pa had a cumbersome Jäger.”
“Have your own rifle?” It was a foregone conclusion, which another nod of her head confirmed. “Something tells me you’re a fine hand in a siege.”
