Though learned in Quaker school years ago, he’d never felt the truth of Shakespeare’s line till now. Fort Tygart seemed hollow, lifeless, even weary. The pickets profoundly ugly. Lacking. Tessa seemed to be needed everywhere he looked, not on the Buckhannon where he couldn’t ensure her safety.
He tripled the spies, sent them out in continuous batches, heard their reports, which included one skirmish at the smallest station upriver, and perused numerous dispatches from Fort Pitt. Privately he’d warned Jasper not to have Tessa at the ferry where there’d been repeated sign. Neither was he comfortable leaving her at the cabin with the men in the fields, but without reason to voice this other than he was in love with her and wanted her safe, he’d stayed silent. His unending prayer was for direction. Protection.
“What’s this I hear about you spending the Sabbath with my great-niece?” Hester never failed to serve his supper with an inquisitive question or two.
“Not only your great-niece but your five great-nephews and the new Mister and Mistress Westfall,” he said, sitting down to eat.
“Humph.” Hester poked at the coals in the hearth. “I suppose courting in all that company slows one considerably. But I reckon you can’t marry her yet. Sometimes I’m sorry you’re not the sort to promise a preacher and just pretend you’re wed till then.”
“Nay.” He forked a bite of catfish fried to perfection. “She deserves better.”
“That she does, and don’t you forget it!” Hester straightened, a hand pressed to the small of her back as if it was ailing her. With her other hand she aimed the poker at him. “But I’d like to see her nuptials before I go to glory.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Clay answered, hoping he could indeed fulfill that final wish.
She went out, shutting the door to the blockhouse firmly as if to allow him to ponder the matter more thoroughly without interruption. He’d considered sending to Fort Pitt for some official capable of marrying them according to colonial law. But with the frontier so hunkered down, he couldn’t put anyone at risk. Nor would he take her to Pitt, an unholy place to begin wedded life.
He reached for the salt cellar and sprinkled his potatoes. All he wanted now was Tessa. Tessa opposite him at table, doing her handwork by the fire, reading to him in the firelight. Tessa right here, in whichever way he could have her. To talk to and laugh with. To welcome winter in together.
All the little details about her drove him to distraction. The dark fall of her hair with its threads of red. The startling hue of her eyes with their forthright gaze. Her smile, a bit crooked, her mouth soft and dimpled. The way his hands spanned her waist . . .
Lord, let it be.
28
The cloudless August day dawned with a sky so blue, the air so crisp, it bespoke the change of seasons. Tessa rose before first light, swinging the kettle on its crane over the ashes she’d banked carefully the night before. Breakfast was a blur of bowls and mugs and terse words as her brothers hurried to their tasks at field and ferry. Ma was never so missed as at peep of day. But she’d made peace with Ma’s going just as her brothers would make peace with her going in time.
Six days had passed since she’d seen Clay. Would he ride in on the Sabbath like last week? Or would some fort matter keep him rooted? She filled a wash bucket with lye, scrubbed her brothers’ shirts clean, and set out her own Sabbath best. Draping the laundry across a near fence, she pondered what needed doing next.
Taking the whetstone she’d gotten from the creek bed, she began sharpening knives, the sound rasping her nerves. Next she gathered the last of the greens from the garden, braiding the onions to hang from the rafters. For supper she’d make fried mush with maple sugar that Zadock had expressed a hankering for. Such required a rasher of bacon.
Bent on the smokehouse, she took a step toward the open cabin door when the hard, shuddering thwack of an axe stopped her. The thud had an odd sound unlike her brothers’ wood chopping. The jarring thwack came again, right outside the door. It sent her back a step. A dark form filled the doorway that had been so flooded with light but a second before. It reminded her of an eagle’s shadow in passing. Her bare skin turned to gooseflesh.
A lone Indian looked at her, tomahawk in hand, one moccasined foot clearing the threshold. His eyes were like flints in his lean face. Half his features were swathed red, the other half painted black. A bold paw print—a wolf’s?—marked his left cheek. The garish display nearly tore a scream from her throat.
He circled behind her, the hard thwack against the cabin’s outer logs continuing. He’d not come alone then.
Lord, spare us.
Her legs twitched. She fought the impulse to run like a rabbit before a red-tailed hawk. Slowly, the intruder prowled through the cabin, poking at this or that with his tomahawk. A string of dried beans rustled like a rattler. A basket of cleaned wool was emptied. With one menacing sweep of a tawny arm, their prized salt-glaze pitcher tumbled from its mantel perch and shattered with a fearsome clatter.
Her back pressed against the cold hearthstones, Tessa watched him, riveted to his tomahawk. If she turned her back to him, mightn’t she find that terrible weapon sunk into her scalp? She had no means to fight with but an iron poker. Her rifle rested nearer the Indian than she.
The warrior passed outside the cabin, taking her rifle with him. Woozy, she leaned into the trestle table, Pa’s fate taking hold of her afresh. God was here. God was near. Yet terror held the firmest grip.
Clenching her shaking hands, she looked at the steaming pot ready for the mush she’d been about to make. Outside, the tomahawk throwing continued, accompanied by loud, wrathful voices. Would they hack the cabin to pieces?
The wolf-marked Indian was at the doorway again, a hand on the hilt of his scalping knife. Tessa turned her back to him against her will, dumped the cornmeal she’d ground into the waiting pot, and stirred it, as she would have done had she been making supper for her brothers.
Would she meet a bitter end before this hot hearth?
Excruciating moments ticked by, the mush finally made. Raising a hand, she pushed back a strand of damp hair before heaving the pot off the crane and moving toward the door. Bypassing the Indian, she now faced nearly a dozen outside. They regarded her with steely silence, their painted features and ready weapons nearly buckling her knees.
An empty sugar trough rested at the edge of the garden. She set the pot down and turned into the springhouse, a squat Indian following. When she emerged with a crock of milk, he poked a finger into the creamy top and tasted it, shadowing her as she poured the mush into the waiting trough. Thick and hot, it spread down the length of the wooden vessel in a pale stream, then mixed with the milk she poured next. Setting her jaw against her rising panic, she went back into the cabin to fetch molasses and spoons.
She knew her brothers. Surely these redmen were the same. A full stomach was far better than an empty one. Her very life depended on it. Hardly aware of what she did, she handed each Indian a spoon before adding molasses to the trough of mush. Were these men Shawnee? Wyandot? Lenape? Stepping back, she dredged up one of the few words Keturah had taught her.
“Mitsi.” Eat.
