At day’s end he sat down to pen a letter to Heckewelder to be read to Keturah in the event it ever reached them. He inked the quill, his hand poised over the paper, the dull ache in his head keeping words at bay. He wanted to turn back time to when Tessa was making him stockings and he was simply giving her a pretty book of verse. Not this. Not a debacle in the field and the woods, where good if misguided men had died on both sides and a brother had vanished. Two brothers. Had Tamanen not once been that to him?
To expunge some of the ill feeling, he pressed the ink to the page and scrawled, Brother Heckewelder . . .
Guilt ambushed his next thought. Gripping the quill, he forced the next line.
I trust you and your party are well and have met with success establishing your mission along the Muskingum.
He nearly rolled his eyes. Such foolish greetings when he was driven by one irrefutable fact.
I regret—
At that he almost slashed the word out. He did regret the killing he’d done that day. No peace was to be had violating “Thou shalt not kill.” But it was either Tessa or the Lenape, and the choice was never clearer. Bending his head, he grasped for gut-wrenching words to ask forgiveness.
Still, he could not say, I regret to tell you of the death of Tamanen, Keturah’s Lenape husband.
When he’d fired the shot to save Tessa, his one consoling thought was that it would be quick. A merciful end when it might have been unmercifully drawn out. But nay, he could not say in truth, He fell in an ambush near the west fork of the Little White River. Instead, he wrote only what he was sure of.
I regret to tell you of the capture of Ross Swan, last seen on the banks of the Little White River.
The quill shook. He set it down.
What had become of Tamanen?
32
A fortnight passed. August waned with a thwarted attack on a small station downriver. One man perished, and then the raiding Indians melted away. Clay kept a quarter of Fort Tygart’s men constantly reconnoitering. He resumed his scouting rounds, more at peace outside the garrison than in it. He and Tessa had barely spoken since he’d gone to Hester’s to tell them the sorrowful news that the search party had returned without Ross. Tessa’s hand was healing, and he saw her about the fort—drawing water at the spring, talking to Maddie, doing one-handed chores—but mostly she kept to herself and the cabin, turning her great-aunt uneasy and raising fresh concerns of his own.
She seemed a shadow of herself. Gone was the quicksilver smile that rose to light her lovely eyes. That lilting laugh. Her clothing began to hang on her slender frame. When he came in and out of the blockhouse he often saw her sitting by the cabin window less than a stone’s throw away. She looked at him without emotion, meeting his eyes only briefly. It cut him in ways he couldn’t fathom.
There was no help for a moment in time that couldn’t be undone. “There are other ways to try and recover him, understand,” he’d told her once. “I’ve written to Fort Pitt, sent word to various outposts. Trappers and traders often bring word of captives they’ve seen or heard about. The chase is far from done.”
She regarded him dully. The lackluster look she’d taken on since his recovering her hadn’t altered. A sense of hopelessness lodged like a millstone in his own soul. He vowed not to seek her out again. Let her come to him if she would. If. The crushing uncertainty of it hung over him like a hatchet.
Hester darkened his door, all but wringing her hands. “Can you do nothing?”
“About Ross?” he said, a hair away from exasperation.
“Nay. Tessa.” She shut the heavy door with surprising strength despite her small frame. “She’ll soon join Jasper if we don’t take action, pining away night and day like she is.”
“What do you advise?” The words came out harsher than he wanted, his own sense of helplessness skirting fury. Passing a hand over his jaw, he fumbled for answers.
“Her spirit’s troubled and there’s no help for it. ‘A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.’”
The proverb was not one he liked to dwell on.
Hester came nearer his desk, all but pacing between it and the hearth. “Was it just my silly, gray-haired hopes, or did I sense some spark betwixt you two?”
“It’s since ebbed,” he said stoically.
“On her part or yours?”
“Not on mine.” There was no letting up with Hester. Once begun, she’d not rest till she had a remedy. “But Tessa is in no temper for courting, as you yourself just said. And I have far more on my mind than frolicking.”
Hester snorted. “A little frolicking might do you both a world of good.”
The kisses they’d shared in the all-too-distant past cobwebbed in his memory.
“This fort is crawling with soldiers, given reinforcements from Fort Pitt just arrived.” She faced him, arms akimbo on her narrow hips. “Seems like you could take Tessa beyond those pickets anytime you please.”
