“Maddie . . .” Clay began, a note of caution in his tone.
“I won’t stand by without speaking my mind. You’ve got to get out from under that burden of believing a lie.”
“A lie?” Temper frayed, he swallowed the epithet between his teeth. “You can’t deny that when I fix my affections on someone, something dire follows.”
Her prolonged pause seemed confirmation. “It’s just chance, Clay. Seems otherwise, but it’s perilous times we live in. Folks you care about get cut down, so you stop caring, stop letting folks in. Time after time I watch it happen. Don’t you know Miss Swan is partial to you? What’s more, you’re partial to her.”
“All that aside, it’s a matter best left alone. I wasn’t sent here to conduct a love affair but manage a militia and guard the border. All else is a stumbling block.”
“Since when is love a stumbling block?” she countered. “My worry is that you’re going to keep passing it by till your only companions in old age are aches and pains and a great many what-ifs.”
“Not everyone is meant to marry, Maddie.”
“Well, seems like a man of your years should give it some thought.”
He made no reply. Trouble was, he didn’t know how old he was. Two and thirty, mayhap. His Quaker kin reckoned he’d been seven or so at the time of his capture. But who knew?
Maddie aside, he’d not had a moment’s peace since leaving Swan Station. But why? He usually kept his distance from anything in petticoats. His reserved stance had even been in place when the beguiling Miss Penrose cornered him on a Philadelphia street. That caution served him well in every overdone parlor and ballroom, frustrating more than a few women he’d not thought twice about since. So why had all this misfired and left him feeling gut shot instead?
Because he’d let his guard down and Tessa Swan had ambushed his affections.
To make matters worse, the spatterdashes Tessa fashioned were equally well made, thoughtful even, and wore a deeper hole inside him.
Alone now in the blockhouse, Clay did another unthinkably foolish thing. Lifting a stocking Tessa had fashioned, he breathed in its scent and felt the wool softened by sheep’s lanolin. It held the very essence of her, of all things earthy and honest and good.
Gathering up the work of her hands, he climbed the stairs to his sleeping quarters. A trunk was open, home to his finer garments, and he put the stockings inside, closing the lid with a resounding thud.
Out of sight if not out of mind.
What did Maddie mean by believing a lie? How could it be a lie when nearly every person he’d cared for deeply was lost to him, severed from his life with hatchet-like ferocity? His parents by an Indian raid. His adopted Indian family by disease. A tutor to a duel. And the one woman who in hindsight he might have married had she survived a riding accident.
He was no prize. Raised among Indians, more at home in the wilds than a cabin, always on the move and exposed to every danger. What sensible woman would stake a claim on a man who’d likely leave her a widow? With children who’d be apprenticed, bound out, because he had no inheritance?
Aye, he had wealthy Pennsylvania kin, Plain folk who looked askance at him because his years with the Lenape had eroded any white kinship or familial feeling. That and his gun-toting. Though his aunts, uncles, and cousins still welcomed him into their homes, they seemed to regard him as half-feral still. No doubt due to the fight he’d given them as he became Clay Tygart again after being seized from the “red brethren” and Christianized.
How ingrained was the memory of his first day at Hallowells Friends School. He’d been dragged toward civilization scratching and kicking and been tied fast in a chair, the cold scrape of the razor against his sun-browned neck shearing the hair that had grown out on his recapture. He’d nearly lost his spirit those years in Philadelphia, before he’d run away to rejoin the “sons of the forest,” as the Quakers called them, only to become a scout interpreter for the British army instead.
Averting his gaze from the burgeoning trunk, he went below and resumed studying his maps, preparing for the fort’s spies who would soon ride in and give the latest report.
“Like this, lieverd,” Keturah said, taking a leather thong and stringing a shiny tubular bead the likes of which Tessa had never seen. “Wampum.” In her lap was a hill of purple and white shells that had been hidden in her medicine pouch, along with two fetching feathers.
“Wam-pum.” The echoed word felt flat, even foolish, on Tessa’s tongue. Surely such pretty beads deserved a prettier name. But Keturah had again called her by the Old Dutch endearment. Such was cause for joy.
“From the big water,” Keturah told her, clearly fulfilled by her task.
“The sea?”
Their eyes met, each of them grappling with new words. They sat on a quilt near the creek that shot through Swan land like a blue arrow, spared the sun by a sycamore’s shade. ’Twas the Sabbath, the quiet hours between their morning Bible reading and hymn singing and supper. Axe and anvil were idle. Jasper and Zadock had gone to the fort. Ma napped in the cabin, worn down by a summer fever. Lemuel sat beneath the barn’s eave, whittling. Ross was repairing a rifle near the well. No telling where Cyrus was. Her own rifle was primed and within reach.
“Who taught you to do such fine beadwork?” Tessa asked. “Your Indian mother or sister?”
“Chitkwësi.” Keturah’s fingers stilled. “No talk of the dead.”
Was this Lenape custom? Tessa mumbled an apology, sorry for the flash of pain in Keturah’s face. Forehead furrowed, Keturah returned to her beading.
Tessa’s fingers worked the wampum a bit hesitantly, even clumsily, slowly creating a passable design. The undertaking was more troublesome than she expected, maybe because her thoughts of late scattered like dandelion seed. How did fort folk spend the Sabbath?
With no preacher to be had, there would be no preaching, just a quiet observance of the day while overmountain folks gathered to worship in a church, a structure she’d never seen. More miraculous still, some of these civilized places had bells and pointed spires called steeples. The mere thought lanced her with a peculiar longing. On the other hand, the wilderness surrounding her, the glory of creation, called for worship without walls every day of the week.
