The Wood's Edge Read online

  They were near the center of the column, most of the regulars ahead, a few companies behind, the colonials and their camp followers bringing up the rear. As they passed from the encampment, Reginald blanched. Indians crowded close in the burgeoning dawn, most observing the exodus in stony silence. But some were dragging wounded soldiers out of nearby huts and tomahawking them, while forty feet away Captain de la Corne leaned on his musket, his guards standing idle around him.

  Reginald heard Colonel Monro shouting at the captain to halt the barbarity, to honor the terms of surrender. De la Corne turned a faint shrug toward the colonel’s voice. “If you do not wish to give them your blood, then give them the baggage of the officers and men. Command your soldiers to throw down their packs!”

  Some abandoned their packs forthwith, eager to part with them in lieu of their scalps. Indians snatched them off the ground. The wagon jolted over a rut, heading toward the forest still black with night, a wilderness pressing in so close it seemed to swallow the track and the red-coated ranks that trod it. Gut already heaving with pity and outrage for those dying behind him, Reginald felt his innards lurch again. More Indians lined the road ahead. Some lunged forward to snatch at the soldiers who hadn’t dropped their packs. Scuffles broke out as men were tugged aside and stripped.

  Above him in the wagon, Heledd’s face blanched. She gave a strangled scream a second before Reginald was hit from behind. He staggered but kept his grip on the wagon. Behind him, an Indian yelped in triumph.

  “Steady,” he called to Heledd, a throb starting at the base of his neck where he’d been struck. “It was only my pack.” And his musket. The weight of both were gone, the straps sliced clean and lifted away. His open coat hung loose.

  Fresh uproar engulfed the rear of the column. The driver shot a backward look. “The Indians! They’re taking the clothes off the provincials’ backs. Sir—what do we do?”

  Reginald, trotting now to match the wagon’s pace, met Heledd’s frantic gaze. “Drive on. Preserve the baggage if you can, but not at risk of your life.”

  Sunrise streaked the sky above the mountains a delicate coral, but the forest rose like a green-black wall. Reginald moved to the verge to look ahead. An advance guard of Canadian regulars, white-coated, marched ahead of the first British ranks, which remained in some semblance of order. Before veering back to the wagon, he glimpsed an Indian a dozen yards ahead, crouched in forest shadow. More crept out, flanking the first. One broke from a thicket and rushed at him. With violent hands he grabbed a lapel of Reginald’s coat and yanked.

  Reginald shrugged out of the garment, letting the savage take it. He yanked his shirt free of his belt to cover his remaining weapons as more Indians picked their targets among the ranks, darting in from both sides of the track.

  “Reginald!” Heledd and the wagon were yards ahead. He sprinted to catch them.

  The provincial ranks behind them had dissolved in panic. He reached the wagon, as behind them rose an ululating war shriek, taken up by hundreds of trilling throats.

  The natives lurking on the verge had been but the vanguard. Throngs poured into the open now. Arrows flew. Muskets barked. A woman was dragged, screeching, into the woods. The wagon lurched to a halt, jarring Heledd nearly over the side. Reginald caught the wailing babe out of her arms as the driver leapt down.

  A painted warrior vaulted up in his place.

  “Jump!” Reginald shouted, but Heledd sat gaping at the Indian tearing through the baggage within arm’s reach.

  Tucking the reeking, swaddled babe into his shoulder, Reginald clamped an arm around Heledd’s waist and dragged her from the bed, tearing her petticoats over splintery wood. They fell together, Reginald to his knees, Heledd sprawled on the verge. She thrashed and scrambled, clawing at him with groping hands. “My baby! Be careful—be careful!”

  “He’s safe. I have him.” Reginald scanned the brush along the track. Aside from the Indian busy with the baggage, there seemed no others in their immediate vicinity.

  Holding the babe, he led Heledd at a crouch past the wagon’s wheels, past the wild-eyed horse, then raced with a group of regulars toward the Canadian escort. Several British officers, having overtaken the guard, were demanding intervention. Heledd in tow, Reginald shouldered his way to the front in time to hear a Canadian officer declare his men had no intention of dying to save them.

  “Your only choice,” the officer shouted in thick-accented English, “is to leave this road and scatter to the wood. Look to your own safety, and try to reach your people at Fort Edward!”

  Despite outcries of protest, Reginald feared the man was right. But Fort Edward was too far. They’d never make it by road, not with the length of it become a bloody gauntlet. Refugees streamed up the track, some barely clothed, some dazed and terror-stricken, some with faces set, gazes wild with calculation. The Canadians backed away as men and women chose conflicting directions of flight. Some fought back. Others cowered together while Indians picked off those at the edges, dragging away captives.

  A wagon came careening down the track, its team panicked, four Indians clinging to it. British and Canadians threw themselves from its path.

  Using the distraction as cover, Reginald pressed the babe to his shirt to muffle its noise, gripped Heledd’s sweating hand, and made for the wood south of the road. He barreled through laurels, forcing a path, then turned along the narrow thicket. Deeper in, the trees soared in massive pillars, forming a canopied gloom. Yards away, two Indians flitted like shadows between them.

  He yanked Heledd down behind a fallen tree, hitting the ground with her and the babe sprawled across him. He clamped a hand over her mouth, stifling her yelp, then rolled to the side, curving around her. The babe’s fetid stench was a scream in his nostrils. With every breath he expected a tomahawk to split his head, but the Indians passed, too far off to smell a soiled clout or too intent on reaching the melee on the road to notice.

  Hearing their shrieks as they joined in, Reginald cautiously sat up. A woman screamed, hair-raisingly close to where they hid, a few yards off the track. “Strip his clout,” he hissed, scooping up handfuls of forest loam and rubbing it into his shirt.

  Heledd gaped at him until he repeated the command. With shaking hands she obeyed, yanking aside the babe’s swaddling to unwind the filthy clout. He took it from her and shoved it into the rotting tree-fall, then rubbed more dirt into his sleeves. “Get the back of me,” he said.

  Grasping at last what he intended, she steadied the babe on her knees and rubbed handfuls of dirt across Reginald’s white garment. Her gown was dark enough in stripes of rust and blue not to stand out like a flag of surrender in the wood, so he let her be. She’d be begrimed soon enough. If they survived long enough.

  “Must we go into that?” She seemed as frightened of the forest as of the slaughter beyond the laurels.

  “Fort Edward is south,” he said near her ear. “A little east.”

  “No.” Heledd’s eyes were huge with desperation as she wagged her head. “No.”

  “It will be hard. I’m sorry for it—”

  “I cannot!”

  He clamped his fingers over her mouth, pressing hard. She didn’t take her hands from the babe to wrench free, but her eyes were wild above his hand. Tears spilled, trickling over his dirty fingers. “Look you, Heledd, I will help you. Every step of the way. But we cannot stay here. Do you understand?”

  She nodded through her tears. He released her and staggered to his feet. Through a gap in the laurels he saw what had transpired while they hid. Most of the killing was happening back toward the fort, but just here on the road a woman lay slain, two men fallen near her. Over one an Indian crouched, knife in hand. Reginald motioned Heledd to stay down.

  Finished with his work, the Indian kicked his victim into the weeds. Reginald stood unmoving as the warrior made off down the road, never noticing the baby tangled in the petticoats of the woman lying dead on the verge. The child flailed, freed itself, and set to wail
ing. It was older than the newborn, though doubtful it had seen its first year out. Gowned in a dirtied shift, it sat up amidst the carnage, ceased its crying, and looked about with wide, unblinking eyes.

  But its noise had given it away. Another Indian, loping down the road toward the heart of the action, veered aside with hatchet raised, making for the child.

  He’d Heledd to think of. It would be all he could do to bring her alive to Fort Edward. But at sight of that defenseless babe sitting there as death approached, for the second time in two days something within Reginald Aubrey snapped. He charged through the laurels, wrenching free his hatchet, and snatched up the child one-handed as the Indian took the low swing meant to crush its head.

  The child—a heavier weight than the newborn—gave a startled squawk. Reginald jostled it, seeking firmer grip. The Indian caught himself and whirled with a panther’s grace, took in the child Reginald clutched to his ribs, then pointed his blade at Reginald’s head and shrieked as though the kill were a fait accompli.

  They met beside the bodies of the dead, blade to blade. The clash jarred up Reginald’s arm as he turned to protect the child. The warrior’s blade grazed his cheekbone in a searing line. He feinted and turned with a wild backward stroke, felt his blade catch in flesh and bite deep.

  Howling in rage and pain, the Indian fell upon him again. Staggering back to avoid the stroke, Reginald tripped. He rolled as he hit the earth, hand splayed protectively over the child’s head. The warrior’s blade bit the ground inches from his face.

  Still gripping his hatchet, he wrenched to his knees, then stood to find the warrior swaying on his feet, hand clamped to a hideous gash that had nearly severed his arm. The hatchet fell from his grasp. Blood snaked through his fingers. As the warrior fell, Reginald shoved the hatchet into his belt and sprinted for the laurels with the child.

  On her knees with the babe, Heledd greeted him with eyes as flat as stones, widening as she took in his gashed face, his bloodied shirt. The child—a girl, he thought it—was looking at him too, tiny hands pressed flat against his chest. He could feel the blood coursing down his cheek. “How bad is it? Can you see bone?”

  Heledd shook her head, rocking the babe, dazed eyes staring as if at a stranger. “Blood and bone,” she murmured, crooning as a lullaby. “Blood and bone…”

  Wrenching his gaze away, Reginald scanned the track beyond the laurels, littered with corpses. Had that woman been the child’s mother, one of those men her father? If not, perhaps at Fort Edward someone would claim her. If he could get them there.

  A crashing in the wood made him look sharply round, fearing further attack. It was a pair of red-coated soldiers, blundering into the wood. Instinct urged him to herd up with them to make their way, but the pair was too far off. Shouting might draw more deadly attention. He reached for his wife, his hand sticky with blood. She recoiled from him.

  “Heledd—” He fought the impulse to run like a rabbit into the wood, dragging her behind. “We will come through this, you and I. And our son.”

  Guilt caught like a bone in his throat, but at last Heledd suffered the grasp of his bloodied fingers.

  With panic urging reckless haste, Reginald picked a path into the dismaying wood as, each carrying a stranger’s child, they started for Fort Edward.

  4

  She was a quiet one, the girl. Time and again Reginald glanced down, expecting her to be asleep against his chest, only to find her looking back at him with eyes too sober for a babe. Impossible to tell their color under the thick leaf canopy, until they passed into a birch grove. Dappled sunlight flashed across her eyes. Between her rapid blinks he saw they were a clear green-brown, no more one shade than the other.

  Woodland eyes. It made no sense to reason, yet as he gazed into them, his fear lifted a small degree. Not so Heledd’s. Every unwilling step she took was fraught with the horror of certain death lurking behind each tree and rock, waiting to spring. She went silently weeping, finding comfort only when they paused so she could nurse the boy.

  She didn’t offer to feed the girl. Thus far the child hadn’t demanded to be fed—nor cried for her mother; perhaps she was in shock. Reginald didn’t press the issue.

  By afternoon they reached a stream. While the girl sat on a flat stone patting its cushioning moss, Heledd washed the newborn’s nether regions, careful of the cord stump.

  Reginald thought they’d made three miles, as the crow flew. Impossible to tell the position of the sun even if the thick forest allowed. Clouds had come boiling up, dark and ominous, muttering in the distance.

  And if it rained, what then? Should he find them shelter? Even if they pressed on, it would take days at this rate to reach Fort Edward, if they didn’t run up against swampland or other hindrance to force them out of their way. Such might have happened already. He’d shied from clearings for fear of making themselves targets to roving savages, but without the sun for guidance, the wood was as disorientating as a hedge maze.

  One eye on the girl, he cupped his hands upstream from his wife and slaked his thirst. He could hear Heledd’s belly complaining to be filled. Helplessness gnawed more fiercely at his own vitals as Heledd unpinned her bodice, loosened her stays, and put the boy to her breast. Reginald removed the girl’s wet clout and set it in the runnel to rinse, leaving her bare beneath her shift. Despite being freed of the clout, she began to fret, looking about as if in expectation of a familiar face and not finding it.

  When his wife finished with the boy, Reginald ventured, “What of the girl?”

  Heledd had been cooing at the boy, playing with his toes, forgetting for a moment the horror of their situation. She raised her face. Disbelief, then repugnance, overcame her look of tenderness. That baffling shadow-self of hers—that dismaying stranger—rose in her eyes, coming between him and the woman he loved. He could see it.

  Heledd curled her lip. “Put a stranger’s child to my breasts? Reginald…I couldn’t.”

  The words were barbed with his own guilt. “Heledd, the child must eat.”

  As if to underscore the statement, the girl’s fretting escalated to a wail. Desperate to hush her, he scooped her up and brought her to his wife.

  “Till we reach Fort Edward—for pity’s sake, before she brings down worse upon us.”

  Heledd lay the boy on soft moss and, with evident aversion, took the girl into her arms. “But I shan’t have her taking what our son needs. She eats second.”

  “Do what you can for her. That is all I ask.” Reginald started to step away but hesitated when his gaze fell to the boy. While Heledd grudgingly fed the girl, whose hunger outstripped any shyness over suckling a woman strange to her, Reginald gathered up the milk-full babe and laid him on rags Heledd had torn from her petticoat. As he wrapped the boy, he looked at him—truly looked—for the first time since finding him. Looked to see had his eyes played him tricks in the dimness of the casemate.

  The boy was still blond, fair. To outward appearance white.

  With his back to his wife, he finished the swaddling, then retrieved the girl’s clout, wrung it, and tucked it through his belt to dry. Above the stream’s gurgling, thunder grumbled. When Heledd at last pinned her bodice and handed over the girl, she refused to look at him. He stood, bone-weary. “We should make another mile, at least.”

  Heledd groaned as she got to her feet. There were bloodstains on her petticoat but not so much as to alarm or convince him to stop for a longer rest. “Heledd…I am sorry.”

  The words ground up from the depths of him, broken shards dredged from a place deeper than regret. Still his wife didn’t look at him. She gazed at the babe she carried, as if all her reason for pressing on began and ended in his sleeping face.

  The girl slept in his arms as they followed the stream south. Thunder continued to grumble, sometimes cracking. Sheet lightning illuminated the surrounding wood in alarming flashes. The air pressed upon them like a wrapping of wet linen, soaking them through, clothing, skin, and hair. Almost Regina
ld longed for the rain, just to break the oppressive humidity.

  They’d gone half the intended mile when Reginald halted, lifting a hand for silence. Heledd walked into the back of him. He steadied her, a finger to his lips. He’d heard voices downstream. As he looked for somewhere they could hide, the heavens rumbled, drowning the voices. When it quieted, they’d risen in volume. Relief overcame him.

  “English,” he said. “But let us go carefully. They could be Canadians.”

  They weren’t. One wore a red coat. Two men on their feet were arguing, while a third lounged at the base of a tree, taking no part in the conversation, though by their gestures he was the topic of debate.

  A stick cracked beneath Heledd’s foot. The two broke off their argument, whirling to face them. The one in the red coat, filthy and bedraggled, was Lieutenant Jones.

  “Major? Major Aubrey! It’s grand to see you, sir.”

  “Lieutenant,” Reginald said as Jones rushed forward. “My wife and I share your profound relief at the sight of a friendly face.”

  Jones’s companions were both New Hampshire militia, among those who’d borne the brunt of the assault at the column’s rear. The one on his feet, some fifteen years Reginald’s senior, had a stubborn jaw and a bold gaze, and sported a bloodied knot on his brow. At odds with his tight-muscled frame, his hair was salted white, his face weathered.

  “Ephraim Lang,” Jones said, somewhat less than amicably. “Rank of captain. Militia.” The other, Joshua Wells, a lad of seventeen or so, lay propped on a makeshift stretcher, the remains of his shirt binding his ribcage, blotched red. “Just now, sir, we were debating whether to press on or stop, and did we press on, exactly which direction it was we ought to be pressing.”

  “Ye needn’t stop…on my account,” came a thready voice from knee height.

  “Hush, Wells,” Captain Lang said, his accent the clipped twang of a New Englander. “You get no vote. You’ve not reached your majority, and I don’t see your honored parents by to tell you your opinion on the matter.”