The Wood's Edge Page 9

  She grabbed a breath as Lydia came farther into the kitchen to see Heledd, looking days—if not minutes—away from giving birth again, sitting on a stool with William clasped to her bosom. She rocked them both as his small body shook, sobs muffled in her gown. Anna stood alone by the hearth, white-faced with fear. Lydia reached out an arm. The little girl flew to her, wrapping her with skinny arms.

  Lydia met Mrs. Doyle’s haggard gaze and repeated what she’d told her husband in the shop. “I can sit with Major Aubrey and let you rest.”

  “What would your father say did I let you? A girl of sixteen—”

  “Seventeen,” Lydia cut in. By the space of three days.

  “—not to mention where the wound is.”

  “I know where it is.” Lydia squeezed Anna’s thin shoulder and smiled encouragement to the lot of them. “I may as well continue with whatever you’ve been doing for him.”

  Refusal was gathering on Mrs. Doyle’s lined countenance when Heledd’s head reared up. “For mercy’s sake, let her tend him if she’s willing.” Her lilting voice was hoarse with exhaustion and weeping, but her brown eyes made an eloquent plea as her gaze fell to the satchel slung at Lydia’s shoulder. “If there’s aught you can do till Mr. McClaren arrives…please, I wish you to try. I cannot lose him, see? Not here in this wretched wilderness.”

  Drawn curtains dimmed the major’s room. A fire in the hearth warmed it. Before her eyes adjusted to show her the bed and the major’s fretful form within it, Lydia was struck by the rank smell of fever-sweat and purulence.

  “Here be rags, a clean batch.” Mrs. Doyle set a basin on a stand beside the bed, filled from a bucket by the door. “Cool his brow, his neck maybe…” But no more, her tightened lips added.

  The major was unclothed beneath the covers. In his fevered thrashing he’d bared himself to the waist. Mrs. Doyle pulled the linen up to his unshaven chin, leaving the heavier quilt turned back. The major’s head moved restlessly, though no sound escaped his lips.

  Lydia set the satchel on the bed. A chair was drawn close by. She took a seat in it. “Would you light a candle for me?”

  Mrs. Doyle lit two, leaving both on the stand. Lydia noted a small pot on the hearth and thought, good.

  Mrs. Doyle hovered, gazing with pitying eyes at the major, uncertain eyes at Lydia.

  Thinking she required some demonstration of competence, Lydia took a rag, dipped and wrung it, and placed it across the major’s brow. The touch of him was startlingly hot.

  “Is there aught else you’re after needin’?” Mrs. Doyle inquired.

  “Yes,” Lydia said firmly. “You and Heledd resting while you may. And your prayers for the major.”

  “He’s had those—for days,” Mrs. Doyle snapped, then sighed as Lydia flinched. “You’re right. I’m done in. I’ll leave you to watch and thank you for it.”

  Upon touching the major’s flesh, the cool of the rags vanished like water on a heated griddle. Still Lydia ran them over his face and neck, every breath a prayer for his well-being, save those she spared in wonderment. Not in the five years she’d known him had she been granted such liberty to simply look at the man. He’d lost all trace of what youthfulness he’d possessed at five-and-twenty, the angles of his face grown leaner with the years, the bones beneath more prominent. The thin scar along his cheekbone hadn’t changed, but the lines webbing the corners of his eyes had deepened, visible now even by candlelight. Fever had pared away his flesh, yet even now she thought him the handsomest man of her acquaintance.

  Her regard for him—as one above the cut of other men—was a part of her now, part of the weft of her soul, the more so since the day of her mother’s death. With a few spoken words of understanding, the major had rescued her that day on the river, drowning in guilt and grief, a rescue as viable as his snatching Anna from death on a wilderness road.

  The major groaned as she drew back to wet the cloth again. He freed an arm and flung it across his torso, dragging aside the sheet. A hiss of pain escaped his lips.

  “I’m hit. Jones…help me.”

  He was back in Canada with his regiment. At war.

  Lydia grasped his flailing arm. “Major, hush now. You’re safe at home, with those who love you.”

  Love you. Her face flamed. That was a thought she’d no right to entertain.

  Then something more pertinent caught her eye. His thrashing had revealed the edge of the poultice on his hip. Had he disturbed it?

  She’d all but promised Mrs. Doyle to do nothing Papa might find objectionable, but the remembered appeal in Heledd’s eyes proved the stronger compelling force.

  “Father in Heaven,” she whispered. Preserving his dignity as best she could, she folded back the sweat-soured linen to expose his lean hip and a little of his muscular thigh.

  “Father in Heaven,” the major muttered, a startling echo of her prayer. “Not the babe…”

  Lydia waited, uncertain where the major’s mind had wandered now. Rescuing Anna?

  While the fire snapped at her back and a bead of sweat rolled down her temple, she eased away the poultice. A suppurating mess well described it. Pus came away with the pad of oil-soaked linen, exposing the wound—larger than she’d expected, with red lips as mangled as an ulcerated mouth.

  Lydia swallowed, then rose and put the fouled poultice in the fire.

  First to heat water in the little pot. Then boil the sassafras root she’d brought in her satchel. It would make a decent dressing, as she’d once told the major. While water heated, she steeled herself to clean the wound, gently sponging away the oozing matter and the sticky residue of the honey Mrs. Doyle had smeared on as a dressing.

  Lydia approved a honey dressing, but the wound required more drastic measures. With the curtains parted and both candles brought near, she spied deep, whitish pockets of infection beneath the wound’s surface. And thought she saw something else. Major Aubrey’s legs jerked. Lydia held the bedclothes in place while her face burned and her heart thudded. He muttered again about a baby and stilled.

  Lydia brought a candle close, bending low to the odorous wound. There was something there, dark at the center of one pocket of suppuration.

  She straightened, her mind in a spin. Was she seeing a fragment of lead the army surgeon had failed years ago to remove, having worked its way to the surface? Musket balls weren’t known to shatter. Flatten maybe. Perhaps there’d been shrapnel or splinters driven in?

  Whatever it was, ought she to attempt its removal?

  She didn’t let herself debate the question but launched into motion as though it was a thing she’d done a hundred times. From the satchel she withdrew the case taken from the shop window, containing a set of surgical knives and, more to the present purpose, tweezers.

  With the wound as clean as she could render it without a thorough debriding—something Papa would do as soon as he arrived—she took the smallest knife, passed it through flame, then with the candle set by to guide her, used the blade to expose what she’d seen—the tip of something brownish, slender as thread and wide as her thumb, extending down into the wound.

  A scrap of cloth, forced into the wound by the musket ball?

  Excitement and dread throbbed at her temples. Guide my hands, help me…

  When she had enough of the foreign body exposed she grasped it with the tweezers and pulled, gently, fearing to tear whatever it was and leave the bulk of it unreachable. The wound clung to its prize. Perspiration beaded her brow as she applied the blade, cleaning away more suppuration. The major’s thigh muscles quivered. She tried again with the tweezers, still with measured force.

  Major Aubrey’s body jerked as the thing slid forth, a piece of cloth not only as wide as her thumb but as long, brown beneath its coat of glistening matter. Once, she was certain, it had been red.

  She dressed the wound, adding bruised parsley leaves to the pulp of sassafras root, binding it with honey she found in a jar by the hearth. She rinsed the pot in which she’d boiled the ro
ots and brewed a tea of sassafras leaves—with chickweed for fever and dogwood bark for pain—for when the major woke. The cloth fragment taken from the wound she’d wrapped in oiled linen. She’d covered the major decently again and gone back to cooling his flesh, having no qualms now about running the cloth over his chest as well as his face. With a hand resting on his shoulder, she paused to push a straggle of hair behind her ear.

  Reginald Aubrey opened his eyes and groped for her hand. “Heledd…forgive me.”

  “Major?” He’d given her a jolt, but she recovered and leaned close, thinking her face too shadowed to tell she wasn’t his wife. “It’s Lyd—”

  “Do not despise me for it.” His voice cut over hers, roughened by fever, weak but determined. “I couldn’t bring myself to tell you he was dead. Our son…”

  Shock surged through Lydia as visions of William drowned, murdered by Indians, a dozen other calamities his mother habitually fretted over, raced through her mind, until she recalled William whole, if distressed, in the kitchen when she arrived.

  Did the major mean one of their babies born since?

  In her leaning forward, the band of light from between the curtains had fallen past her and across the major’s face, his rigid jaw and clenched lips, his glassy eyes staring…but not truly seeing her. He was still in the fever’s grip. Dreaming.

  What was she to say? do? Before she could decide, his grip on her hand tightened. “Two babies she had, and ours…dead in my arms. I was wrong to do it. All my thinking was wrong. But she’d two babies. I took the white one…”

  Lydia was imprisoned by his grip. His stare. His words. The white one?

  A spasm wracked the major’s face, as though another wound long festered in secret was breaking open, oozing guilt and shame. “I have lived with this every moment since that wretched fort fell. I tell you I cannot bear it if you despise me. I did it for you. And he is our son…whatever his blood. Has he not become so?”

  Were it not for the major’s grasp on her hand, Lydia would have felt outside herself, watching this scene unfold from a distance. Was he saying William wasn’t their son? And Heledd didn’t know?

  There was no sense in it. It was the fever talking. Yet the naked plea for mercy in his eyes tightened her throat. She must answer that soul-suffering—to end this terrible confession, if such it was, and ease him back into healing sleep.

  “Reginald.” She’d never addressed him by his Christian name, did so now only because he thought her his wife—who ought to have heard these terrible things in her stead. Or ought Heledd Aubrey never to hear them? “Reginald, please…say no more.”

  He wasn’t content with that. “You’ve no love for Anna, I know…but do you not love him as if he were our blood?”

  That, at least, Lydia could answer in Heledd’s place. With utter conviction. “Yes, Reginald. I love William. With all my heart.”

  Raving or not, it was what he’d needed to hear. He raised her hand, trembling, to his lips. As the heat of them brushed her skin, Lydia shut her eyes. When she opened them, whatever remained of the major’s fever had pulled him fathoms deep again.

  10

  Hunting Moon 1763

  When the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, took up the hatchet against the British at their lake forts, along with the tribes of those places, the Senecas, keepers of the Great Longhouse’s western door, went to fight with them. The Oneida sachems spoke against the war, calling on their warriors to keep out of it. Though most of the warriors heeded their words, a few from Kanowalohale went to fight. One of those was Stone Thrower, who left in summer after the deer hunting.

  In the moons since, Good Voice had busied herself tending and harvesting the corn, beans, and squash, gleaning nuts and berries and every edible thing to fill their hungry bellies.

  Now the first snow was on the ground. It was time for the hunters to leave for their winter camps, but Stone Thrower hadn’t returned. Good Voice had preserved some deerskins to trade for cloth and blankets, powder and lead, all those needful things that came from white traders, but should Stone Thrower fail to provide the thick winter furs the British craved, she foresaw a lean time for their family.

  “Come with me to my camp,” Bear Tooth said when she met him sitting outside his lodge, testing his new metal traps.

  Bear Tooth was a Turtle Clan brother, not yet married, a few years younger than Good Voice. Over the summer he’d taken to checking on her to be sure she had wood for the fire or meat for the pot. She was grateful, but seeing the young man at her lodge door sometimes made her feel like a woman whose husband had fallen in battle, leaving her and Two Hawks to the kindness of relations for their sustenance.

  Perhaps that was what she was.

  “My uncle’s sons are gone to Oriska Town with their wives, so it is us two alone this season.” With a stick, Bear Tooth sprung the trap he was testing. Good Voice flinched as the jaws snapped the wood with a crack like breaking bone.

  Bear Tooth looked up at her, smiling. “Tend our fire and I will share with you what furs I take. It is better than none.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Good Voice packed her carrying basket and her snowshoes, bundled her son in furs, and set out with Bear Tooth to the winter camp he shared with his uncle.

  Outside the bark hut, Bear Tooth said something that made Two Hawks laugh like a loon. Good Voice smiled as she inspected the fox pelt she’d finished working, keeping one eye on the ola:ná, corn soup, bubbling over the small cook-fire, filling the hut with its wholesome smell. As her chapped hands joyed in the lavish fur, she was thinking how rarely she heard Two Hawks’s laughter these days. He had grown too solemn for a boy of six.

  It should be his father who makes him laugh. Like many thoughts about Stone Thrower, worries clung to that one like ticks to a dog. Had he come to Kanowalohale and found her gone, Bright Leaf would have told him where she was. But the Hunting Moon was passing with no sign of her husband.

  Good Voice set about dishing up soup for the men outside.

  Bear Tooth reminded her of Stone Thrower that first year of their marriage, before Fort William Henry: hard-working, easy to be with—as was Stands-To-The-Side, his uncle, a quiet man of middle years whose wife had died in the spring. They were good hunters and kept her busy. Good Voice admired the curing furs lining the walls: martin, mink, otter, fox, raccoon, wolf, and beaver pelts stretched on hoops. Though the men did most of the skinning and helped build the drying frames, it was demanding work to stretch and cure so many furs coming in, tanning them as time allowed, all while feeding the hunters and repairing their winter moccasins and clothing.

  Two Hawks was a help. He minded snowmelt over the outside fire or fetched downed wood to dry. All in all, it was peaceful being with these Turtle Clan men and her son. Only it wouldn’t be peaceful long if she didn’t give them the corn soup they were waiting to eat so they could put on their snowshoes and head into the forest.

  She’d put chestnuts in the soup. It pleased Stands-To-The-Side, who remarked that his wife had made it that way. Bear Tooth smacked his lips loudly and said, “My aunt was a good cook.”

  Two Hawks smacked his lips, dribbling corn soup down the front of his wool shirt. “My mother is the best cook of all.”

  He glanced at her, and it struck Good Voice that this boy of hers was a helper not only with his hands but also with his heart. “That is a good thing for a mother to hear,” she said, letting him know she appreciated it.

  While they ate their soup and the ground corn cakes she’d made to go with it, Good Voice settled by the outside fire. It was good to see her son filling his belly. Good to see men eating her food, knowing it would warm them while they crossed snowy ridges and frozen streams where their net of traps and snares had been cast. If only it could be…

  Good Voice shut her eyes. Below the surface of every small joy lay the ache. She longed for Stone Thrower, longed sometimes simply to hold him, feel the warmth and strength of him, while at the same time she dreaded his return
. Maybe he would never return and that would be an end to it. The end of their love that started out bright and whole but was tattered now, gnawed by grief, that rabid dog that chased her thoughts in fruitless circles.

  Two Hawks was asking the men to bring in a bear so he could see it, touch its claws and big cold nose.

  “Bears sleep in their winter houses now,” Bear Tooth told him.

  Two Hawks pondered this, then said, “Maybe a bear has to get up in the middle of his sleep and go out to make water, like a boy does. Maybe you will find one doing that?”

  The men laughed. It wasn’t a mocking sound but one of amusement and, Good Voice thought, appreciation. She opened her eyes and smiled at her son, wondering if one day they would be changing his name to something like He-Clears-The-Way. He had a way of circling a thing in his mind until he found a path to reach it. They’d called him Two Hawks for the pair of hunting red-tails she’d seen over Fort Carillon when she stepped from the trees, carrying her living son, one of a pair…

  But she didn’t want to think about that. She filled her lungs with the sharp morning cold, clearing her mind.

  Bear Tooth’s camp, ringed by hemlock and birch, lay two sleeps from Kanowalohale. It was a small camp, only three huts—one for the men, one for her and Two Hawks, one standing empty—and a shelter for Bear Tooth’s two horses. When the wind was right, the fires of other camps could be seen drifting low against the sky. Now and then, women from those camps visited, or a hunter wandered by and was given a portion of whatever she had cooking. It was a good place.

  As she thought it, a kingfisher swooped by, making its dry rattle. Good Voice watched its choppy flight. When it was gone into the forest, she said, “The wolf pelt you brought in…I will work that next. It is beautiful. The best I have seen.”

  “It is yours, that one,” Bear Tooth said as he scraped the last of the ola:ná from his bowl. His uncle got up to get his snowshoes.