The Wood's Edge Page 14

  Forever, Lydia had prayed, relieved the major refused to abandon his farm and business on the Mohawk, each prospering with the continued stream of settlers moving upriver, needing provisions and a means of transporting them.

  Thus it was with no little dismay that she’d received word the previous autumn that Heledd had at last prevailed upon Reginald to allow William’s education to continue in England. Heledd would accompany him and reside at the Aubreys’ Breconshire estate.

  That winter Heledd was like a creature reborn, the steadiest of temper Lydia had ever known her; she was going home, and there would be no snatching back such a long-deferred hope, not once her hands had closed upon it.

  And so the following spring, ten-year-old William journeyed with his mother by sloop from Albany down the Hudson River, took ship from New York, and left behind the only home he’d known, the only father, and a distraught girl who’d been to him a sister, who now went about the farm alone, the seams of her heart unraveling behind her.

  Lydia put an arm around the girl.

  To her credit, Anna made an effort to show appreciation for the gowns. “Thank you, Lydia. They’re lovely and…”

  “And the child’s in dire need o’ them,” Maura finished with a firmness to make up for Anna’s lack. “Sproutin’ like a garden weed whenever I turn my back.” Maura’s face was lined with worry over Anna, yet there was a lightness about her these days Lydia hadn’t noticed for years. If William’s absence left them lonely, Heledd’s made life decidedly less taxing.

  “Will Papa be home to supper?” Anna asked, calling the major what he’d always been to her, now there was no one willing to deny her the comfort of expressing it aloud.

  “I’m after fixin’ it for him, so if he isn’t to home when ’tis served I’ll be knowin’ the reason.” Maura’s mock severity elicited a lackluster smile from Anna. Over her head the women exchanged a look.

  “Why don’t I bundle these,” Maura said, reaching for the blue-striped gown. “And you two can oblige me by gettin’ out from underfoot while I start that supper.”

  “Shall we go walking?” Lydia pulled Anna close to plant a kiss atop her head, thinking it wouldn’t be long before that head stood too tall for it. “Out to the creek, perhaps?”

  “All right. I’ll find my shoes.” Anna pulled away and left the room.

  When she was out of earshot, Lydia said, “Oh dear.”

  “Poor lamb. ’Tis like watchin’ someone fade o’ the wastin’ sickness.” Maura lowered her voice. “Rowan and I…we’re after having her move into the house with the major, into William’s room.”

  Lydia gripped the bedpost, searching Maura’s face. “But what of you and Mr. Doyle?”

  Maura sighed. “I’ll miss her under our roof, but she’s always been his daughter. We’ve known that. And won’t she be right across the garden and me seeing as much o’ her as ever?” The older woman sighed again. “Such sadness and discord has attended that house. May those two together find a happier content.”

  Hearing Anna coming down the ladder steps from her loft room, Lydia whispered, “Does she know?”

  “ ’Twas settled only this morn. The major thought you might like to tell her.”

  They sat on the creek bank, not far from the footlog. The day was warm for May. As the westering sun thrust golden spears of light through the trees, Anna leaned over to trail her fingers in the creek’s burbling flow. Her silence made Lydia’s chest feel heaped with small round stones, like those littering the creek bed. The child bent so low her cap slid askew. Lydia caught it before it fell into the water.

  “I’m sure William misses you, too.”

  Anna sat up, clutching a smooth gray stone. It dripped in her lap, darkening her petticoat to match her soaked sleeve. Her braided hair, pinned round her head like a many-shaded crown, looked too heavy for her slender neck. “He wanted to go. He told me so.”

  There’d been no denying William’s excitement for the adventure of weeks aboard ship, then taking up residence at the Aubreys’ estate in the border hills of Wales, where he would be tutored before attending university.

  Yet Lydia had heard the boy promise to write—a dozen times if she’d heard it once. “Never think it was easy for him to leave you.”

  A tear rolled down Anna’s cheek. “Is that supposed to make it easier for me?”

  “Would you fancy having his room?” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out but was desperate to comfort the girl.

  Anna’s fingers tightened around the stone in her lap. She looked at Lydia, uncomprehending. “His room?”

  “Major Aubrey and the Doyles thought you might be happier sleeping in the big house now—in William’s old room.”

  Anna’s face fell as though Lydia had told her William would never write her a single letter. Not one. “I don’t want William’s room—I want William!”

  On her feet, Anna hurled the stone into the creek, then darted away along its bank, leaving Lydia clutching her abandoned cap. “Anna!”

  Half-blinded by tears and streaks of sunlight, Anna ignored Lydia’s call and sped across the footlog. She raced through the beech grove, all her heart set on that special place she and William had found together. It was there she would feel near to him. Not his room, in which she’d hardly ever set foot. Besides, moving into his room would be like admitting he was never coming back. He’d told her he would come back. She didn’t want his room touched until he walked through its door again.

  She broke from the beeches into the clearing where so many summer days she’d picked daisies and wove them into chains for her hair. For William’s hair too, when he’d suffer it.

  He’d be too old for daisy chains when he came back.

  The pain in her chest was as blinding as the sunlight that hit her full in the face. She didn’t need to see. She knew every tussock and molehill in the clearing and ran on, her steps sure, glimpsing through the sun blots in her vision the hill where the creek tumbled down.

  At the base of the hill, speared by sunlight, a boy stood.

  William. He was here. Not on a ship. Not leaving her. He’d changed his mind. He’d run away from his mother. The surprise of it sent a shock down to her toes, yet she didn’t hesitate. “William!”

  The boy at the clearing’s edge started like a deer at the sound of her voice and bounded away. The dappling shadows hid him.

  Anna staggered to a halt. Her braid broke free of its pins and tumbled down, falling around her shoulders, unraveling to skim her hips. Tresses blew across her eyes. Panting, she whipped them away and looked desperately for William.

  At last she spotted him—in the shade of a big hickory.

  She ran for him again, crying now for relief, afraid somehow, too, because she knew if William had come back he wouldn’t be skulking in the forest, waiting for her to find him. He’d have found her. At the house.

  Still obscured by shadow, the boy she desperately wanted to be William turned as if to run away again.

  “No—wait!”

  He stopped. And faced her. His height, the turn of his head, were so like William that her heart leapt again with unreasoning joy—but he wasn’t William. She could see that now. This boy’s hair was black and long, straighter than William’s. His face and hands were browner than William’s got by summer’s end, though it was only spring.

  She slowed. Just within the shade of the hickory tree, she halted, feeling round nuts roll beneath her shoes. The boy looked at her, not moving a muscle. Such stillness wasn’t at all like William, who almost never stopped moving unless he was reading a book. Not even a lock of this boy’s hair lifted to the breeze.

  It felt like one of them should say something, not go on staring at each other like a pair of stumps. Since he didn’t, she did. “Are you real?”

  That made the boy smile. “Are you?”

  Anna gasped. For the first time she’d noticed what he wore—breechclout and leggings and fringed shirt. Hanging against that shirt from a cord looped
round his neck was a knife sheath, decorated in bright quills in a design she was too far away to make out.

  “You’re an Indian!”

  “Onyota’a:ka,” the boy said. When she frowned at the strange word, he said, “Standing Stone People…Oneida.”

  Oneida. They lived west of their nearest Indian neighbors, the Mohawks, beyond the treaty line. The way he spoke English sounded like the man called Hanging Kettle, who she once talked to in the shop that used to be McClaren’s but was now van Bergen’s. Jacob and Lydia’s shop.

  Lydia. Anna looked back, expecting to see Lydia coming through the beeches after her. But she wasn’t. She didn’t hear her calling either.

  Another voice, deeper than the boy’s, spoke words Anna didn’t understand. She whipped her head around, searching for the source. Beyond the boy, on the other side of the hickory, two more Indians stood. These were both grown, though one was bigger than the other. His hair was plucked on the sides and front, his chest and arms tattooed. The rest of him was all feathers and beads and gleaming bronze skin. The other Indian had gray in his hair. His cheeks were pitted with scars. The big Indian was looking straight at her as if he wanted to eat her. The older one had hold of his arm.

  Fear froze Anna where she stood. The menacing Indian spoke something harsh to the boy, who flinched and looked at his elders. The Indian thrust his chin toward her, his mouth set in a scowl. The boy turned back to her. Fear was in his eyes. He spoke his next words with care. “Who live in house of stones?”

  Anna dropped her mouth open to say, “I do now,” when at last she heard Lydia calling from the other side of the beeches.

  “Anna—Catherine—Doyle!”

  The boy’s eyes went round. “A-nuh-Cath-run?”

  She couldn’t afterward say why, but she didn’t want Lydia to see this boy. “My name,” she said, and like a frightened rabbit she bolted, leaving the Indians standing beneath the hickory.

  She half expected them to chase her down. They didn’t.

  Back across the clearing and through the beeches she ran, nearly colliding with Lydia at the edge of the grove. Clutching her forgotten cap, Lydia grasped her as Anna tried to catch her breath.

  “Anna! Did something frighten you?”

  “No. I just—don’t want—to be there now.” She gulped a breath and looked away from Lydia’s face, where concern was melting into understanding. Misunderstanding.

  “Oh, Anna. It will grow easier to bear, I promise. Especially when William’s letters start arriving. I’m sorry I upset you.”

  Anna’s heart was slamming hard. “I’m all right. Can we go home?”

  “Of course.” Lydia took her hand. “We’ll try on those gowns, shall we?”

  She nodded and set the pace, hurrying Lydia along, eager to put the creek and fields between them and the Indians. She looked back only once, while Lydia was crossing the footlog.

  There was no sign of them. Not the big warrior. Not the older one. Not the boy that for one gloriously perfect moment she’d believed was William.

  I have a son born to me. A son I have never seen. A son his mother has not seen since she pushed him into this world. There were two sons—two-born-together—one with skin brown like mine, the other white, like his mother. That is what she tells me. I have wished in my heart that she never told me, that I knew of only the one. That my heart was whole. It was the white one taken, snatched from the side of his brother as an egg is stolen from a nest. Now he walks this earth far from the land of his people and does not know what he is.

  Listen, and hear me. I am going to tell you what he is. He is the empty place at our fire. He is the hole in the lodge where the bark has rotted, letting in the wind, rain, and snow. We are left exposed in the place where he should stand. Bad things have come into our lodge through that place. Bitterness. Hate. Dreams. The drink the traders are eager to thrust into my hands. I grasp these things, floating twigs to a drowning man. Under me is a black lake going down. In dreams I sink under the flood…Then in my hand is a war hatchet. I am hunting. I am strong. The earth beneath my feet speeds me on. The paint is black on my face. It is blood I want. The blood of him who traded his dead son for my living son and left us to bear it in brokenness. My feet run to spill it. My hands long to drench themselves in it.

  Round and round the circle of seasons I have pursued him who bears my son away from me. But at long last I have caught him. He is on the

  ground before me, on his knees and at my mercy. At last his eyes see me, wide with fear. I have no mercy.

  My blade is sharp and bright. My heart leaps. My ears hunger for the sound of his skull splitting like a pumpkin dashed to the ground. But even in such visions I have yet to hear it.

  To carry a dream this long is a hard thing. But who is there to help me see it fulfilled? I bear it alone, a stone I cannot put down.

  16

  October 11, 1770

  Anna slipped her hand beneath the table, feeling through layers of linen the satisfying crinkle of paper in her pocket. By force of will she’d read the letter but thrice since Papa brought it home last night, though soon enough it would be creased and memorized like the rest of William’s letters.

  This one had been sent in remembrance of her birthday—or the day Papa called her birthday. He’d reckoned her about ten months old when he rescued her on the road from Fort William Henry, which meant she’d been born in October. He’d chosen to mark her birth when the hills were ablaze with color—today, in fact, which made William’s letter more like a present than ever. She reached for it again, as if it might have vanished from her pocket in the past few seconds.

  “Finish your breakfast, Anna. Then take yourself off someplace quiet with that letter.”

  Papa was watching her across the table, his mouth a knowing curve. She sprang from the chair and grabbed her plate. “I’ll clear up.”

  His amusement grew less veiled as she hovered at his shoulder, eyeing his nearly empty porridge bowl. Papa was home today to help with the harvest. He’d dressed for it in shirt and nankeen breeches, over which he’d don a coarse frock for the dusty work of bringing in the stalk-dried corn. Placing a hand over hers he said, “You needn’t today. You’ve the morning free of chores.”

  She bent and brushed a kiss across the scar he’d taken saving her—and snatched his bowl from under his nose.

  “Imp!” he said, reaching to swat her and missing. “Mind you, I’d like to read his letter as well—when you can bear the parting.” Papa pushed back his chair, standing stiffly on account of his hip that pained him of a morning. “A most blessed birthday to you, my girl.”

  He kissed her forehead and went out to the day’s work.

  Frost lingered in patches in the yard. Over the river, mist hung in drifting bands. Anna grabbed a shawl and set off for the wood that beckoned beyond the fields, where Rowan Doyle was filling a cart with corn in the husk. So were several of Papa’s crewmen from the Binne Kill, among them Captain Ephraim Lang.

  The Yankee captain had fetched up in Schenectady two years back, a river man for hire, amazed to find his old wartime acquaintance—Papa—in the business of shipping goods up and down the Mohawk. He and Papa had renewed their friendship, forged that harrowing day she became Papa’s ward. Before long they were partners in the business, old Mr. Boswell having gone to glory years ago. Papa, who once made trading trips upriver, now stayed moored in Schenectady, overseeing the boat-building and account-keeping, while Captain Lang managed the shipping and crew.

  Standing in the wagon’s bed, the captain saw her passing along the field’s edge and hailed her, wishing her a happy natal day with such exuberance every gaze was drawn to her. Face flaming to rival the scarlet maples, Anna waved and hurried toward the creek.

  Beyond the footlog, the beeches enfolded her, wide of trunk, soaring to a golden canopy. Leaves lay scattered like coins underfoot. The scent of smoke and wet earth spiced the chilly air with a smell faintly melancholy as she climbed the hill beyond the
clearing. She settled on the stone that jutted in a little shelf beside the spill that she persisted in calling a waterfall. Though the rising sun slanted warmth now through the misty trees, cold seeped from the stone beneath her. She kept the shawl pulled close as she freed the letter from her pocket and unfolded its pages.

  “Anna Catherine,” a voice said above the purl of creek water.

  She yelped, nearly dropping the precious letter. Leaping to her feet, she spotted him standing above her on the rocks, the boy she’d once mistaken for William. Her heart slowed its gallop, but a small thrill raced through her. “Two Hawks!”

  Looking smug for having startled her, he descended, slender as a colt in leggings and breechclout, a blue shirt rolled at the elbows baring skinny brown arms. His black hair swung free as he descended nimbly over the rocks, moccasined feet landing with a thump beside her.

  “Shekoli,” he said, his word for greeting.

  “Shekoli.” Anna looked him up and down. He had his bow and quiver and wore the familiar quilled sheath knife against his chest—worked in a bird design, two tiny hawks with red tails—but its placement was a good deal higher up than it had been. “You’re taller than I am!”

  She could see the observation pleased him. “It six moons since I see you. I grow.”

  Nearly an inch for each of them. “How old are you, Two Hawks? You’ve never told me.”

  “I count thirteen summers. How many you?”

  “I mark ten-and-four today.”

  Surprise flashed in his brown eyes. “Good I come this day.”

  She regarded him, taking in other changes half a year had wrought. He was becoming handsome with his strong-bladed cheekbones and smooth skin of a light copper-brown. His nose was straight, and his mouth well molded, curving up at the corners in a way that seemed vaguely familiar.

  Anna was glad Two Hawks didn’t mind her staring. She’d learned to bear his steady gaze in return. He seemed as fascinated by the way she looked as she did him. He settled on the rock she’d vacated. “You not run from me this time.”