The Wood's Edge Read online

  Now she was the one blinking back tears.

  To distract herself, she asked after William’s studies. He plunked down on the damp hillside, heedless of his breeches, and grew animated as he talked about English history, Welsh myths, Latin, and mathematics. Though he still tore about the fields and woods with Anna when chance offered, William was proving an apt pupil, no doubt destined for some eastern college. He wouldn’t be a warrior, or a sachem…whatever he might have become in another place, with other parents.

  William’s eyes were as blue at eight as they’d been at four. His hair had darkened but still might have been a blend of Heledd’s rich brown and the major’s fairer shade. But other than in coloring—even that couldn’t be said at the height of summer, when every exposed inch of him deepened to a startling brown—William didn’t remotely resemble the major or his wife.

  Three years on, much of that fevered confession still puzzled. Lydia knew Heledd had given birth during the siege of Fort William Henry. By the major’s admission, that son had died, and he’d taken—stolen—a replacement from another woman.

  Two babies. Had William been a twin?

  The white one. A child of mixed blood, white enough to pass as his and Heledd’s? And the other darker of complexion? Indian?

  Yes. She could see it in him. Or thought she could.

  It had taken months to draw even such incomplete conclusions, longer still to come to terms with what had prompted the major to such a terrible act.

  I did it for you. For Heledd.

  Lydia often ached with wondering what the major thought about that now, for while William had brought Heledd undeniable consolation in an otherwise unhappy existence, the major’s deception had—Lydia strongly suspected—contributed to the widening gulf between the Aubreys she’d witnessed over the years. Perhaps it had been the root of it.

  Lydia walked up the track from the barn, leading her saddled horse. Anna clutched her hand. William trailed behind. Near the cottage they halted, as Heledd’s voice drifted through the open back door of the house: “ ’Tis a wilderness infested with savages! Maura saw a canoe full passing on the river just this morn. And you mean to go upriver and leave us?”

  “Look you, Heledd.” Reginald’s reply was weary. “I promised I’d not go so far as the Oneida Carry. I’m only going to Herkimer’s, and I’m sure those Indians Maura saw were about their own business and no threat to any.”

  “How is it you can be so easy about them? Would you let wolves overrun our yard?”

  “Do I own the river? Whoever wills is free to use it.”

  Having no other way to go but forward, Lydia continued on. They passed the cottage, but Maura didn’t appear. Gone to earth till the storm blows over, Lydia thought, and wished for a similar escape. The clop of hooves had drowned a portion of the argument. She paused the horse but felt unable to abandon the children.

  “I tell you I have no intention of returning to Breconshire,” Reginald was saying. “Our future is not in Wales, but here.”

  “Our future? Never did you ask me where I wished to live!”

  Anna’s small hand tightened its grasp. The girl exchanged a glance with William, who frowned and rubbed the toe of his shoe in the dirt. He didn’t look at either of them again.

  “Have I not provided well for you? This house, acres of land, the Doyles to serve you. A tutor for William. I’ve promised he’d go on with his schooling.”

  “I wish him to be schooled in England. Mr. Blakeley says—”

  “And I’ve told you there are colleges he may attend without putting an ocean between us.”

  William stiffened, his head rearing erect.

  “Reginald, your brother would take us in. He would, I know it.”

  “You’d have us live by my brother’s charity? That I will not do. Not when I’ve built a life here. For you and William. ’Tis a good life, Heledd. If you cannot see that by now, then I despair of you!”

  A sob. A door slamming. Silence, ringing and sharp.

  Lydia breathed out in relief, thinking that the end of it. Only it wasn’t quite. Major Aubrey lunged through the open back door, still dressed for work at the Binne Kill in a coat the color of buckskin—the better to hide wood shavings, he’d once quipped to her.

  His sudden appearance startled the horse. Lydia gave her attention to the animal, assuring it didn’t sidestep onto tender toes. When she’d attention to spare the major, she found him staring with stricken eyes at William, whose summer-brown face echoed the look. The major took a step toward the boy. William spun on his heel and sprinted for the nearest cornfield. The major didn’t call him back or follow.

  Anna did both, after squeezing Lydia’s hand and wistfully confiding, “I wish you were his mother. And mine.”

  That left Lydia and the major standing in the yard with the horse—the only one not awash in mortification. The major scrubbed a hand down his face. “Lydia. I didn’t know you were here…and now you’re going?”

  She attempted a smile. “As you see. And you’re bound upriver? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overhear.”

  “Tomorrow, aye. Just to the Little Falls.” Major Aubrey crossed the yard, the permanent limp his wound had bequeathed him more pronounced than usual. “I’ll help you to the saddle, shall I?”

  Lydia thought he meant to give her a boost. Instead he encircled her waist with his hands and lifted her easily. His strength was reassuring, but the warmth and pressure of his hands made the blood warm her cheeks. She took more time than needed to arrange her skirts, then donned her gloves and took the reins from his hands.

  “Thank you, Major.” Her voice at least was steady.

  He was looking up at her, his eyes the slate of the clouded sky, one hand on the horse’s neck. The hand of a craftsman now, scarred and callused. “I hope…” He glanced away. “I hope young van Bergen knows what he’s getting.”

  Lydia quirked a brow. “I daresay he’s forewarned.”

  He looked abashed at her wry tone. “It was kindly meant, that was.”

  “I know it was, Major.”

  She watched his expression ease, then his brows twitched together. “You’ve taken to calling Mrs. Doyle by her given name. And my wife by hers. Why do you not call me Reginald?”

  He seemed to consider his motives for asking the question only after he’d spoken it. As their gazes held, in his eyes rose something like surprise, mingled with appreciation—as a man might have for a woman. It left her feeling that the thirteen-year gap in their ages had just melted away.

  “May I call you so?”

  The major stepped back, letting his hand fall. “I’d like if you did.”

  “Then when next we meet—at my wedding—I shall.” Summoning self-possession, she shut away what dwelled in the secret chambers of her heart, the awareness of his unhappiness, his loneliness. Most of all, her desire to assuage both. She gave the horse a heel tap and didn’t look to see if he watched her away down the track.

  She prayed for him, for Heledd, and for the children he called his own, until Schenectady’s stockade came into view. Then she turned her thoughts ahead to the good man she’d agreed to marry. If she regretted what couldn’t be, she yet knew herself a woman blessed, with more cause for contentment than not.

  13

  Thunder Moon 1768

  Good Voice had come to the fields to decide which portion of her allotment would be planted that season, a hard thing to do when hunger lived in the belly. Last year’s sickly crops hadn’t stretched to feed the People until wild foods could be gathered again. The face of her son had grown lean, the blades of his cheekbones sharp. She’d ground some of the seed corn to feed him over the past moon, which was why it had come down to choosing what part of the field to sow and what to let rest.

  Some said the hunger was their own fault for allowing whites to come among them. They didn’t mean the settlers pushing up against Oneida lands, with their farms and ranging hogs and cattle. They didn’t mean the traders who
’d come among the People since before the grandmothers were born. What the sachems grumbled against now was new. For the past two years white men had walked the paths of Kanowalohale, had put up houses, and called it home. They called themselves missionaries.

  One of these was Samuel Kirkland, who’d come to them after being driven away from the Seneca, where he tried to live for a time. Few Senecas had welcomed him. Good Voice thought she knew why. He had with him a holy book. It was said the book talked much about peace, but in truth it brought division, when already there was division enough over land and hunting and white ways of living thrusting in like spades to uproot their traditions.

  Kirkland’s book said there was one God and His name was Jesus. The book said no man could be happy in the Life After unless he confessed sin and got this Jesus in his heart. Good Voice had never heard Kirkland say such things because she kept out of his path. Her lodge stood at the opposite edge of the sprawling village from the missionary’s, so this wasn’t difficult to do. Until today.

  With her mind on what she was going to give Two Hawks to eat that day, she nearly stumbled over an older boy sitting at the back of a crowd gathered outside a lodge not far from the fields. Good Voice froze. Kirkland stood under the lodge’s arbor. She’d stepped into view around the side of a neighboring lodge as he started to talk. She stepped back behind it and looked around. If she didn’t want to cross an open space in full view of the missionary, she would have to backtrack and take another way.

  Good Voice hesitated, her ear caught by something the missionary said. He had a strong voice, loud enough to reach the back of the gathering, and though sometimes his words were clumsy, he’d learned her language well enough to make himself understood.

  “There was a certain man who lived, long time back,” Kirkland was saying, “in the city where Jesus taught the people about His Father in Heaven. This man was a sachem called Nicodemus. Though he was curious about Jesus, he feared what other sachems who hated Jesus and His words of Heavenly Father would think of his interest. Nicodemus thought, ‘I will go to Jesus in the middle of the night, when no eyes will see me go, no ears hear the talk I mean to make.’ ”

  Good Voice lingered, curious to hear what happened next to the sachem planning to sneak about in the dark.

  “Nicodemus went at night to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher, we know You come from Creator, for no one can do the great things You do unless Creator is with him.’ He said this because Jesus had made the blind to see and the lame to walk and had done other things impossible for a man to do without the help of Almighty God.”

  Kirkland paused at that moment. In that pause, a rumble rose among his listeners, the sound of many throats expelling breath in an ahhh of surprise and intrigue. Good Voice was startled to hear the sound from her throat. Jesus had made the lame walk? Her mind went to Bear Tooth, who’d found a Cayuga woman willing to marry him even though he still limped badly. He and his uncle had gone to live with her people at Oquaga Town, far to the south.

  Since the day he left her lodge, Bear Tooth had not spoken to Good Voice again. Perhaps he blamed her, as well as Stone Thrower, for his misfortune. She blamed herself.

  Would Jesus have made it so his ankle had healed better than Hanging Kettle and the Oneida healers had managed? Good Voice peeked around the lodge, looking out with one eye at Kirkland. The missionary was not impressive to look at in the way white men could be. Still she fixed her attention on the man in his drab coat, with a cloth wound tight around his neck and a hat with corners on his head, the book open in his hand.

  Kirkland looked out across the heads of his listeners—some glossy black in the spring sun shining down, some plucked to a scalp-lock tied with feathers that fluttered on the breeze—and, still speaking about Nicodemus, locked his gaze with hers. Absorbed in listening, Good Voice had stepped out from the corner of the lodge, and now for a choking beat of her heart…two beats…three…there might not have been all those heads between them. No space at all.

  Good Voice ducked behind the lodge and hurried away until she could hear the sound of Kirkland’s voice no more.

  “I found a patch of nettle growing,” Bright Leaf said. “And fern tops, and here—some dried squash I set aside. It is not much…”

  “A beginning.” Good Voice put happiness in her tone as she added the meager gleanings to the water heating in the pot. Her happiness wasn’t all feigned. Much had changed for her family since the night she piled Stone Thrower’s belongings beside the door.

  In the end it wasn’t Stone Thrower’s belongings she cast, but the child he didn’t know about. She’d lain for a time afterward, heart on the ground and body fevered, certain it was the last time her womb would ever try to grow a child. That had been a bad time, but something good had come of it. Returning at last to find she’d nearly died had worked on Stone Thrower like a hand shoving him off the bad path he’d followed since Fort William Henry. He stopped going to the Carry where liquor was easy to come by. He stopped talking about the dreams, or the redcoat, or their missing son.

  It was the son who’d always been there that Stone Thrower finally took under his wing, near to his heart. He’d made Two Hawks a new bow, one big enough and strong enough for a man to shoot, and though Two Hawks was a better shot than most boys twice his age, he practiced daily, growing strong. He didn’t have his own musket yet but was learning to fire Stone Thrower’s. They were out hunting together even now.

  It gladdened Good Voice to see her husband acting like a man again, but later when the pair pushed aside the door hide and came into the lodge, she knew the hunting hadn’t gone well. Two Hawks’s face was a careful mask. Stone Thrower must have given him the shot, but whatever game the boy had aimed the musket at, he’d missed.

  Maybe next time he would use the bow, but she knew her son. He pushed himself too hard. Expected more from himself than anyone else expected.

  “We are not empty-handed.” Stone Thrower gave their son a small push toward the fire. In his hands Two Hawks held a grass nest. Inside were six speckled quail eggs. One had cracked and leaked part of its contents, but the other five were whole. Two Hawks’s eyes shone with tears he fought to banish. “I held it too tight. One is broken.”

  “But not empty,” Good Voice pointed out. “Most of it can be saved.”

  While Two Hawks held the nest, she extracted the broken egg and slipped what remained of its contents into the simmering soup. It bloomed yellow and white, hardening into lumps. One by one she broke the eggs. It wasn’t enough to feed them all.

  Stone Thrower had crossed to their sleeping bench to clean his musket. Good Voice met his gaze and saw the worry there. “I will go out again,” he said, as if sensing she needed to hear it.

  Good Voice nodded, pretending that the goodness between them didn’t feel as fragile as those quail eggs.

  “What else is in that pot?” Stone Thrower asked.

  “My aunt brought squash and nettles. And fiddleheads.”

  “Fiddleheads?” Stone Thrower repeated the English word. “What are fiddleheads, and where did you hear such a word?”

  “My aunt said your uncle called them that, those curled tops of ferns. You have seen a fiddle played? At the Carrying Place maybe?”

  Understanding lit his eyes. “That thing they take a stick to and make sounds like wildcats quarreling?” He raised his head and emitted a ghastly, high-pitched screeching.

  Two Hawks laughed, forgetting his disappointment. “Fiddleheads!”

  As if her mention of him had called him to her lodge, Clear Day knocked on the doorpost, entering when she called out. Her husband’s uncle carried a sack of something Good Voice hoped was edible. He held it up, looking around at their grinning faces. “I have this cornmeal for you. A gift. From Kirkland.”

  While Good Voice made ash cakes from the meal to eat with the watery soup, Clear Day and Stone Thrower lit their pipes and fell to talking of Kirkland, the good and the bad of him.

  This was good: the
man was adamant against traders’ rum. He’d made deputies of some warriors, charging them with seizing any liquor that came into the town and spilling it on the ground before anyone could drink it. There was much less disturbance now from men and women getting drunk and breaking things, and each other.

  Also the man had a generous heart. He lived no better than they in a simple log lodge. Any clothing or tools or food he got from his important friends back east he shared. He gave them a voice with those friends, like Warraghiyagey did for the Mohawks. The Onyota’a:ka needed that voice. Not only were the whites taking the game from the forest, their crops had spread new diseases, causing the People’s harvests to fail.

  Kirkland and those assisting him had begun teaching some of the People to read white men’s words, which was in part a good thing, but also something that was bad about Kirkland. He wanted to change them too much. He wanted their warriors to dig the ground, not understanding that this was the women’s birthright. He wanted them to forget the traditions of their fathers. That was why the sachems spoke against those in Kanowalohale who called Kirkland brother.

  “Not all of the sachems,” Clear Day said as he sat near the fire, watching the smoke of his pipe drift toward the roof hole. “Those in Old Oneida Town are angry about it. But some of the sachems here are listening to Kirkland’s words.”

  Stone Thrower nearly choked on a draw of his pipe. Clear Day had been one of those who stood against Kirkland. Now he came bearing food for his nephew’s family given by Kirkland, admitting that the man had some good qualities.

  “Did you go and listen to his talk?”

  Good Voice, waiting for the ash cakes to need turning, watched her husband’s uncle, who shifted, looking uncomfortable.

  “I decided to stop listening to what people say Kirkland says and hear it for myself. Today seemed a good day to do that.”

  Good Voice hadn’t noticed Clear Day among the people gathered to hear Kirkland teach. Had he been hiding too?