The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn Read online

  Charlie pondered that, then said, “Don’t sound like what a murderin’ rascal would’ve done, kill a woman, then lay her out decent afore hauling the daughter off into the night.”

  Kincaid set his bowl on the ground. He made no move when Nell crept to it. He leaned forward, hungry for word of the girl. “Tell me again of your encounter with her. Tell me everything you recall.”

  Charlie humored the man, closing his eyes to bring up the details, adding at the end, “Afore we parted, the feller asked to buy a deerskin off ’n me. Meant it for the girl, I reckon. Her shoes were banged up. I give him the hide, thinking ’em just married and all.”

  Kincaid frowned. “You didn’t mention that before. About the shoes.”

  “Guess it didn’t seem much to the point.”

  “But Miss Littlejohn—you said she was disheveled, under duress, and spoke not a word during the exchange?”

  “If by duress, ye mean she looked like being forced off where she didn’t want to go … At the time I thought so.”

  Granted, Charlie knew little of women and less of marrying, but could she be the first bride to wind up dazed on the heels of her wedding night—church blessed or no? Might she have gone off with the man full willing, only to have belated second thoughts? Could that suffering, bruised-eyed girl he’d seen have had some part in her own mother’s murder?

  He couldn’t credit it, but he couldn’t put the pieces of the story together and make them fit snug either, and wondered if similar notions were chasing circles in Kincaid’s brain. He’d pulled out that portrait and was back to mooning over it, while Nell licked up the squirrel meat from his bowl, pinned between her paws. Thinking their conversating done, Charlie got up to put the camp in order.

  “Nevertheless I shall find her,” he heard Kincaid say low under his breath, eyes devouring the tiny painted face. “And avenge whatever she has lost.”

  Charlie felt his neck hairs lift, then reached for the stew pot to portion the leavings to the dogs.

  Darkness had fallen outside the cabin. Jesse was stretched out long on his bearskin beside the hearth, engrossed in Gulliver’s Travels. Cade sat cross-legged in the corner where he’d slept since Tamsen’s arrival, a pair of leggings in pieces around him, hands busy with needle, beeswax, and sinew. At the table, Tamsen stitched a shirt for Jesse by taper-light. The fire popped, spraying sparks onto the hearthstone. Jesse snuffed them, then went back to his book.

  In the silence, tension simmered. Mostly it was coming from Cade. He’d had little to say in her presence since his arrival three days past. He left the cabin to hunt at dawn. What daylight remained he spent in the yard, butchering meat, tanning hides, seeing to the stock. His avoidance left her feeling like a guest who’d overstayed her welcome—or maybe had never been welcome at all, despite his words the day he rode in.

  She tried to focus on the sleeve she was attaching to the shirt yoke, but her attention kept straying to Jesse’s enigmatic foster father. A man plying a needle was no novel sight. Mr. Parrish had male slaves trained in the art. It was the man himself who drew her gaze. Even sitting still, engaged in domestic routine, Cade radiated alertness, as if the slightest hint of anything amiss would launch him into action.

  A piercing pain in her fingertip recalled her. She whipped her finger to her lips, chary of spotting the linen with blood.

  Jesse looked up, golden eyes inquiring. “You all right?”

  “Just a needle prick.” The firelight softened his features, making him seem almost handsome, in that hawkish way of his. Not the sort of handsome she’d ever found attractive, yet when he gave her half a smile, she grew flustered and dropped her gaze to her sewing, thoughts spinning back to their mountain crossing, that day the thunderstorm swept over. Not the near drowning, but what Jesse told her afterward, by the fire. How he and Cade were once called Wildcat and Wolf-Alone, then left to become Jesse Bird and … Cade Bird? She’d never heard the name Bird applied to Cade. He was just … Cade. Was it his name from before he was Wolf-Alone? If he’d no other name but Cade, perhaps he’d been a runaway slave seeking refuge among the Shawnees. Some slaves were Indian, though her stepfather had never owned any.

  She glanced across the cabin. This time Cade was looking back at her. “Is there something you wish to say to me?”

  Jesse put down Gulliver’s Travels to look at her as well. More than flustered now, embarrassed, she hurried to say something—anything. “How—how did you come to be among the Shawnees?”

  Surprise glided across Cade’s features, gone when he raised a brow at Jesse. “What’ve you been telling her?”

  Jesse sat up, book balanced on a knee. “I told her how I became Shawnee. I didn’t tell her your story. Leastwise not the start of it.”

  Cade pulled a stitch through the legging pieces draped across his lap, then shrugged. “Tell it, if you want.”

  Marking his place in the book, Jesse drew both knees up. “Cade’s something of a legend among the Shawnees. Or he was at Cornstalk’s Town, up on the Scioto River.”

  “Cornstalk? He was your chief, wasn’t he?”

  “Aye, you remember. Hokolesqua is his name said proper, though.” He sounded relieved to be talking, and Tamsen knew he’d sensed the tension in the cabin as well.

  “So it happened on a morning just after sunup, at the creek where the women bathed,” he went on. “The creek wasn’t wide. Hardly deep enough to swim most seasons. But it was spring and the water was high when Cade came floating down the current in nothing but a breechclout. A girl saw him first, but she’d hardly cried out that a dead man was coming down the creek when Cade stood up and came wading toward the bank. They seen he was Indian—a big warrior, streaming wet, staring over their heads like he was searching for someone in particular.”

  Tamsen couldn’t help casting another look at Cade, ignoring them now as he worked. She’d no difficulty imagining the sight he must have presented those women and girls.

  “They all fell back. Most to gape, a few running to warn the town. Cade passed by the gapers, following the ones that fled. He walked right into Cornstalk’s Town and didn’t stop till he reached the msi-kah-mi-qui, the council house. He wasn’t armed, but not a soul made to stop him. The tale of his rising up from the creek like a fish sprouting legs had swept ahead from mouth to ear. It was Cornstalk himself, tall and fierce, still in his prime, come out to confront him.”

  At last Cade had something to add. “I wondered could Hokolesqua see how my knees shook.”

  Grinning, Jesse went on to tell how Cornstalk, his lined face impassive, had listened to the tale of what the women had seen, staring hard at Cade all the while. Then the Shawnee chief asked what his business there with the People was.

  “Cade didn’t speak a lick of Shawnee then, but it was clear enough what was being asked. He told them—in Lenape, which most of them understood—that he’d come to make himself Shawnee, by whatever means the chief deemed fitting. The audacity of it was enough to win over some right there.”

  “Did you see this yourself?” Tamsen asked.

  “I was there, but can’t say as I recall it. This wasn’t long after I was adopted. But I’m told even Cornstalk looked impressed. Even so, the means settled on was the one they most often use on captives.”

  “The gauntlet?” Tamsen stared at Cade with amazement and horror.

  “That’s right.” Jesse’s voice recalled her gaze. His eyes held the memory of that night above the draw, when he’d explained the practice. “For all he’d made himself a marvel, they didn’t go easy, even fell on him at the end when he made it past the sticks and clubs with barely a stumble. He wrested a club from someone and fought ’em off. In the end, the warrior who’d given him the worst of it put himself forward to adopt Cade as a brother. Falling Hawk made a fine speech of it there under the sky, with Cade all bloodied up and welted and the town looking on, saying as how the Great Spirit had sent him a man to replace the brother he’d lost in a raid a year back. So Cade was tak
en back down to the creek he’d come out of, and the women washed him down and made him Shawnee. Then he was marched back up to Falling Hawk’s lodge and given a meal.”

  “I still bear a mark or two from that day.” Looking up, Cade gave Tamsen what could almost be called a smile.

  “I should imagine so.” In truth she was stunned to think this man sitting before her, placidly stitching clothes for himself, had been through such an ordeal. By choice.

  Jesse rose and poked up the fire, adding more wood.

  Cade started on the other legging.

  Tamsen picked up her needle but didn’t make a stitch. Neither man had said why Cade had come floating down that creek in the first place nor where he’d floated from. He hadn’t sprung into being from that creek. He’d had a life before. Some twenty years of it—if she had the timing of it all straight. And he was Delaware. What made him want so badly to become Shawnee?

  Time for storytelling seemed past. Jesse sat back on his bearskin and drew a blanket close. “Think I’ll turn in. Don’t stop your work; it won’t bother me none.”

  But Tamsen wasn’t ready to bear Cade’s presence without Jesse awake to shield her. She snuffed her candle, gathered up her sewing, and retreated to the back room.

  Listening to the fire hissing as it started to die, Jesse slid into his nightly ritual of calling up the distant past. Futile as it always proved, it usually slid him into sleep. Tonight it did the reverse. Wide awake, he stared at the dying flames thinking on how oddly Cade had been behaving since coming home to find Tamsen sharing their cabin. Despite his seeming support at the outset, Cade wasn’t happy with the situation and made it clear without a word said. It struck Jesse that words needed saying. He rolled away from the fire to face the room.

  “You as tired as me of bunking on the floor?” he asked, knowing Cade was as comfortable on bare ground as on a tick. “What would you say to adding on a lean-to, before Tate’s harvest?”

  Cade’s eyes flicked sidelong. He let a beat of silence pass before he asked a question of his own. “What’s to come of the long hunt this year, Jesse?”

  Was that what was bothering him? The long hunt? Since living on Tate’s land, he and Cade had stuck around in autumn long enough to help bring in the corn, but directly after would close up the cabin and head out to harvest the furs that supplied them through the year. They’d be gone into January. Later, depending how far they ranged.

  “No telling when Parrish or that suitor of hers will catch on to where we are,” Jesse said. “Or if. I’m not saying I won’t do the hunt, just … I don’t know yet.”

  “Best get it figured.”

  Jesse tried to catch resentment in Cade’s tone, but he was impossible to read when he wanted to be. “Let me study on it, Pa. By time we’re back from White Shell’s wedding, I’ll have thought of something. Maybe Tamsen could stay on with Tate and Janet.”

  “You still meaning to go with me to Chota? I’d planned to work it into the hunt.”

  Jesse sat up, all thought of sleep shaken off. He’d blunted his answer about the hunt. Truth was, thought of leaving Tamsen for the winter, even if he knew she’d be there safe and sound when he got back, was a blade between his ribs. Cade’s pointed look drove it deeper.

  “Face it, Jesse. You won’t be on the hunt with me this year.”

  Though he’d give up the winter hunt and more for Tamsen, Jesse felt a wrenching in his chest. “Pa, I been thinking …”

  Cade didn’t look at him. “About?”

  “Being done with it for good. Maybe laying hold of more’n a cow and a few acres in corn.”

  Cade’s hands fell still.

  “I want something more’n this.” Jesse waved at the tiny cabin, lowering his voice so it barely rose above the fire’s crackle. “More to offer her.”

  Cade’s mouth pressed tight before he said, “She’s not your wife.”

  “I know it,” he hissed, worried Tamsen was hearing every word they said.

  “Might never be.”

  Jesse bolted to his feet. “Can we take this outside?”

  “Ki Shawano aatowe,” Cade said—speak Shawnee.

  Jesse opened his mouth to do so, then shook his head. “Ma-tah—no. She’ll hear our tones. Please, Pa.”

  Cade was slow in following him out to the yard. When he shadowed the doorway at last, he had his pipe in hand, freshly lit. Jesse gave a nod toward the stable. They walked in silence down to where the creek burbled a stone’s throw off.

  “Exactly what do you aim to with that girl, Jesse?”

  “Let her catch her breath for now. Hide her. If the hunt dies down, give her time to decide what it is she wants to do.”

  “She hasn’t told you what she wants to do?”

  “I don’t know that she knows.” Jesse’s raised voice made one of the horses start with a ruckle, muffled through the stable logs. “Why’d you tell me to keep her safe, back on the trace, if you didn’t want her around? What did you think I was going to do with her? Wisk her over the mountains and set her loose?”

  “I never said I begrudged her shelter, Jesse. Don’t go putting words in my mouth.”

  “Then I don’t see what’s got you riled.”

  “Abduction? Murder? You forget about those?”

  “Not hardly.” Jesse struggled to tame his rising anger. “But I promised to keep her safe. Reverend Teague bid me give her time. That’s what I aim to do.”

  “With us two fixing to leave? One of us has to, if we want to keep eating.”

  He couldn’t see Cade’s face to read it, just the set of his brows in the glow of the pipe he finally brought to his lips. “If it’s a matter of trusting me alone with her, you can do that, Pa. That promise I made to keep Tamsen safe—I meant from me as well. I won’t touch her. Not unless she wants me to. Not even then till we’re married before God. That put your worries to rest?”

  Cade blew out smoke, and what might have been a laugh, save it held no humor. “What if she never wants that from you?”

  “Then she can leave. Go back to the Teagues or wherever she wants to go.” His voice had risen again. One of the horses kicked at its stall. Jesse held his ground. “But if once she knows what she wants, and if that’s me … I want something of worth to offer her.”

  “I’m of the opinion that, had you nothing but yourself to give, it would be more’n most deserve.”

  Cade spoke so stiffly the meaning of his words took a moment to sink in.

  “Pa …” Jesse’s throat clamped tight. He didn’t know how to put it into words, to make Cade understand how Tamsen had stirred up the embers of a longing he’d kept hidden. The longing to know where he came from. How to say it without sounding like who he was wasn’t good enough, or that he disregarded all Cade had done for him. Neither thing was true and yet …

  “I been meaning to tell you. When her mother died, Tamsen found out some things, things kept secret from her till then.”

  Cade’s pipe glowed, a tiny sun in the darkness. He coughed a bit on the draw, and his voice rasped as he asked, “What sort of things?”

  Jesse told him about Sarah Parrish having been a slave, freed by Tamsen’s father, a truth concealed so her parents could live together and raise their daughter without the stigma of slavery hanging over her. “It got me wondering, if I could learn where I come from, who my people were—or maybe are—it might turn out I’ve something to give her. I don’t know what. Land. An inheritance. Something more’n living season to season.” He hurried to add, “It’s been good for us, Pa, and I wouldn’t think of changing except I don’t reckon it’s the life to be asking a wife to lead.”

  He’d said it. Poorly, no doubt, but it was out.

  Cade had let the pipe fall to his side, forgotten. “I never knew you thought on that. About where you come from, before the Shawnees.”

  “Didn’t seem talking would do anyone good. But I think on it. I’ve thought on it most every night I can recall. Guess Tamsen’s talk of her parents s
tarted me thinking in the daylight hours too.”

  Cade drew on his pipe but found it had gone out. He tapped the bowl against his thigh, looked out to the open land where the dark-shadowed hills rolled away to the west. “So you fixing to turn farmer on me?”

  “I’m fixing to do what it takes to win her. And now I come to think on it, right before we met Tamsen, that day in Morganton, weren’t you the one talking about planting more corn, getting that cow? Sounded to me like you were the one thinking on turning farmer.”

  Cade blew out an exasperated breath. “I hardly remember what I was thinking then. We got a different set of circumstances facing us now, and sounds to me like you’re risking an awful lot for this girl you’ve hardly had the chance to know.”

  “Maybe I am,” Jesse said, heart sinking under the strain come between him and Cade. “And call me a fool for it. But I think I’ve known her since I first looked into her eyes. I love her, Pa.”

  Cade didn’t call him a fool. He stared at Jesse through the dark for a moment, then went into the stable to check the stock, leaving Jesse alone under the stars.

  In the covered dogtrot between the cabins, Tamsen perched on a bench, letting Janet Allard rub salve into her hands, which were cut and blistered after helping harvest corn in the fields. “It’s lard,” Janet said of the salve. “With sweet-balm and mallow-root from my garden.”

  The same Jesse gave her, in the mountains. She caught a softer fragrance beneath the grease and herbs. Rose petals, doubtless from the trellised canes climbing both cabins, still producing blossoms into October. Though across the nearby slopes sparks of red and gold heralded autumn’s blaze, nearer the cabins late vegetables and herbs thrived in sprawling plots that must have presented a veritable Eden in the warmer months.