The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn Read online

  Thunder-Going descended the bank toward the cow lying dead at the river’s edge. With a wolfish grin, Bears drew the hunting knife from his belt. “If the other cow does not make it, leave it lying. We will see to it as well. Then you can tell Allard and the rest you got every one of their stinking cowhides to market.”

  Jesse came up from the river in darkness, rid of trail dust, hair dripping. Thunder-Going-Away and Catches Bears, having delivered the promised hide and meat—and having told them to come for the wedding after the corn harvest—had started the long trek back over the mountains to Chota, the Overhill’s principal town. Billy slept, rolled in a blanket. Cade sat cross-legged on his bedroll, head wreathed in pipe smoke and the familiar smell of his blend of tobacco and kinnikinnick—red-willow bark and sumac. The sunken fire cast barely a glow but enough for Jesse to see the object lying across Cade’s lap. The arrow that had pierced Jesse’s hat.

  “You only smoke that pipe when you’ve deep thinking to do.” Or praying, Jesse didn’t add. He unrolled his blanket, sat, and tied on his buckskin leggings. “You celebrating or brooding?”

  Over by the brush pen, a cow bawled. An owl hooted in the distance, and the river chattered in its bed. Jesse rummaged out the cleanest of his shirts, then poked a stick at a slab of seared beef left on a stone in the embers. He glanced sidelong at a brief blaze in the pipe bowl. Cade blew a ring of smoke that rose and drifted, blending into the dark.

  “I’m pondering the brevity of life.”

  Brooding, right enough. Jesse quit his poking and thrust the stick aside. “Look, what happened back on the trace, that was nothing compared to Kings Mountain.” He and Cade both bore the marks to prove they had fought in that frontier battle, late in the war with the Crown. Along with the rest of the Overmountain militia, they’d whupped the redcoats under the command of an arrogant major called Ferguson, who’d dared threaten to come whup them. “We’ve nary a scratch between us to show for today.”

  “God be thanked.” Cade looked away from Jesse, features glossed like beaten bronze in the fire glow.

  “ ’Sides,” Jesse added, “you seen enough wounds to know they heal.”

  “And you’ve seen enough men fall beside you to know wounds aren’t all we’ll ever get. A bullet might’ve ended either one of us today. Or an arrow.” Cade snatched the one off his lap and tossed it at Jesse, as if to underscore his point.

  Jesse tossed it back. “Didn’t, though.”

  Cade thrust the arrow into the fire, where it charred and smoked. “Tomorrow, maybe, or next year—if we go on like this. You ready for it?”

  The night was cooling. Jesse pulled on his moccasins. “Ready for it? You fretting over the state of my soul or something, Cade?”

  “Or something.”

  Jesse tried to quell a grin. “What for? Long as I do enough good to outweigh the bad, I’ll wind up singing with the heavenly hosts. I don’t aim to do nothing truly sinful, like steal my neighbor’s wife or covet his rifle or—”

  “Jesse!” Cade’s brows were strongly marked, black and slanted as crows’ wings. Even in the dark they glowered thunder.

  Jesse kept his face innocent of mirth. “What?”

  “Be serious about this.” Cade was in no frame of mind for teasing, though Jesse couldn’t hold back a chuckle.

  “All right, then. Can’t figure why you’re fretting, though. You mind that day at the blue hole when the preacher put me under? I might’ve been all of twelve, but I meant every word I owned to. And aren’t you the one always saying the Almighty has a plan for me? That’s why you took me from—”

  Behind them in the dark, a stick cracked. Cade and Jesse reached for their rifles but checked when Jabez came out of the dark, face glistening from his river dip.

  “All well?” Cade asked.

  “Even the shot one.” Jabez toweled off with a shirt, then wadded it for a pillow and lay down next to Billy, who was still snoring like a hibernating bear. “Left Mast’ Rhodes watching ’em.”

  “I’ll stay up,” Cade said. “Spell him in a bit.”

  In seconds Jabez was snoring in chorus with Billy.

  Jesse tugged on his shirt and lay back on his blanket, enjoying the cool, and being clean, and the blaze of stars overhead. Turning, he watched Cade tap out the pipe and stow it in a knapsack. “I’m glad you still worry for me, Pa,” he said, knowing Cade liked it when he called him so, though he’d never once asked Jesse to do so.

  This time Cade didn’t soften right off. Whatever was eating at him, it’d bit down hard.

  Jesse stifled the urge to sigh. One would think he was still twelve years old, struggling to hold his first rifle steady and making up his mind about heaven and hell. Best Jesse could figure, he was nearly twice twelve now. Cade ought to know he could manage this life and the next besides, having been the one to teach him the ways of both.

  He waited, pondering if he ought to say more. Then Cade’s big hand came down warm on the crown of his damp head, as it had most every night when Jesse was a boy and it’d been just the two of them alone in the world. Which it pretty much still was, all things considered.

  “I do worry for you, Jesse Bird. Reckon I got my reasons.”

  Jesse half-smiled in the dark, but as Cade’s hand lifted away, something he said before came back to niggle. If we go on like this. What this? Taking beeves to market each fall, or something else?

  It couldn’t be Cade was dissatisfied with the life they’d made for themselves—fur trapping half the year, deer hunting and a bit of farming the other half, living by the grace of neighbors on land they didn’t own, accountable mainly to themselves. A good enough life. Maybe the best two rootless hunters could hope for, one a half-breed, the other half red on the inside. ’Course, such hadn’t always been his life, or Cade’s. Sometimes it was possible to forget that. But not lying on the edge of sleep with the fire crackling by. Never then.

  Like most nights since he could recall, Jesse Bird closed his eyes, putting off sleep, and tried to conjure up a face, a voice, a place—anything—from that time before when he’d had another life, another name, another man to call Pa. And like every night before this night, he fell asleep still conjuring, staring into a void blacker than a starless sky.

  Morganton, North Carolina

  Tamsen Littlejohn peered through rippled window glass at the rutted street beyond. “I suppose this is entirely that painter’s fault,” she murmured and hoped her mother didn’t hear the dread behind the words.

  It had to be the painter. Mr. Gottfriedsen, a little mouse of a man, had barely spoken a word to Tamsen the day she sat for the miniature commissioned for her nineteenth birthday. While he hadn’t flattered her with his tongue, he’d done so with his tiny brush strokes. Oval in shape, the miniature portrait showed her slightly paler than she was in truth, dark-eyed, shoulders clouded by coils of inky hair. Framed, it fit easily in the palm of a hand, even one as small as hers.

  It also fit conveniently into Hezekiah Parrish’s coat pocket. Tamsen’s stepfather had chosen his moment well when, over cups in a Salem tavern, he’d accidentally brought out the miniature along with a shilling and allowed Mr. Ambrose Kincaid—nine-and-twenty years of age, unmarried, grandson and heir of a wealthy Virginia planter—to get himself a thorough look at her. Or Mr. Gottfriedsen’s version of her. Thus was the unsuspecting Mr. Kincaid drawn like a rich fat fly into her stepfather’s web of scheming to marry Tamsen up. Not sideways. Certainly not down. Everything must be up for Hezekiah Parrish, reasonably prosperous and immoderately ambitious Charlotte Town cloth merchant.

  Tamsen and her mother had, of course, tamely done their part. They’d followed Mr. Parrish from Charlotte Town to this rustic outpost of civilization, where Tamsen was to wear the gown of blueberry silk that had cost her stepfather a small fortune, comport herself like a lady born, and, above all, charm a proposal of marriage out of Mr. Kincaid.

  “Have you looked at this place, Mama? How can this be a county seat?” Tamsen
figured she was standing in one of the few decent frame buildings in Morganton. The house belonged to Mrs. Brophy, an acquaintance of her stepfather’s who ran her late husband’s tavern. Tamsen, her mother, and Dell, their maid, had spent the night in the tiny parlor below stairs where the pine floors were uncarpeted, the plaster walls bare, the space crammed with a bed, a settee, a clothespress, and chairs. In one of the chairs, her mother sat, stitching at a heap of linen.

  Exaggerated miniatures aside, between them Tamsen’s mother held the true claim to beauty. The daughter of a Spanish merchant, Sarah Littlejohn Parrish, with her light olive skin and ebony hair, had once made Tamsen feel she dwelled in the shadow of Scheherazade, the exotic heroine of One Thousand and One Nights.

  “However it may appear,” her mother said in the cultured tone Tamsen had yet to perfect, “we’ve spent a great deal of effort to come here. I don’t see any way around it, Tamsen. You’ll simply have to meet the man.”

  And pray he isn’t a younger version of Mr. Parrish, Tamsen thought as the butterflies in her belly took wing. If only her mother would stand up to her stepfather and thwart his overbearing designs—as Scheherazade had charmed and outwitted King Shahryar, turning him aside night after night from his wicked plans. Wit and charm her mother possessed, but the spirit to use them for such an end had long since been crushed by her stepfather’s implacable will.

  Tamsen wasn’t quite ready to roll over without a fight. She longed for the freedom to choose her own path, to marry where she wanted. Or perhaps not marry at all. Or maybe …

  But there lay half the problem. How could she demand—plead, bargain, beg for—the freedom to choose her path when she’d no earthly idea what sort of life she wanted? The one thing she did know: the life her stepfather had pushed her toward from the day he married her mother was one of the last she would have chosen.

  Tamsen started to chew her lip, remembered Mr. Parrish’s injunction against lip chewing, and crossed to the vacant chair to rest her feet.

  “Don’t sit,” her mother gently warned. “You’ll crease the gown.”

  Tamsen paced the room. “How does Mr. Parrish manage to get his way in everything?”

  “He’s a man.” Sarah’s needle pierced the linen in her lap with more than needful force. “And your guardian.”

  “He’s never even adopted me.”

  Blinking away a shadow, her mother raised dark eyes luminous with sympathy. “You must marry, Tamsen, and soon. Resign yourself to it being a man of Mr. Parrish’s choosing. Whatever burdens it may entail, your stepfather means to give you a comfortable life.”

  Tamsen refused to be placated. “Mr. Kincaid will be an ogre.”

  “A young ogre, at least.”

  “Nigh thirty. And a planter. He’ll own slaves—or his grandfather will.”

  “We own slaves,” her mother countered, but her shapely mouth stiffened around the words. Tamsen knew that if Sarah Parrish had her way, her stepfather would free every last one of his slaves that hour.

  It often puzzled Tamsen that her mother’s one strong opinion had to do with slaves. Mr. Parrish’s treatment of the few he owned deeply upset her, and her objections still on occasion demonstrated her mother had a scrap of bone remaining in her lovely back. If only she’d use it for Tamsen’s sake—not that it was likely to do more good than advocating for their slaves had done to improve their lot.

  “Don’t borrow worries,” her mother told her now. “You’ve yet to meet the man. He may be far different than you imagine.”

  Reconcile yourself to endure what cannot be altered, her mother meant. Afraid such passivity was beyond her—and equally afraid it was her lot to suffer—Tamsen wanted to drop to her knees and plead with God next. But that would have soiled the gown. If only her mother—

  She shook her head, breaking off the thought. If not for her mother, she might have acted upon the wild and frightening thoughts that had come into her mind since the name Ambrose Kincaid was first brought to her attention. Thoughts of slipping out to the stable one night, saddling her gray mare, riding away to some place of refuge. Where, exactly, remained undefined. She never got that far in her thinking because what was the point? If she fled like a runaway slave, she would have to leave her mother, because her mother wouldn’t run.

  Sarah Parrish was the true keeper of their jail, the one who held the key to the lock and would never hand it over.

  “Will Mr. Parrish never arrive to escort me?” she inquired, not caring that she sighed over the words. “I promise to go meekly if I can but get it over with. As a lamb to the slaughter, I shall not open my mouth.”

  “Surely you aren’t comparing your sacrifice to that of our Lord?” Her mother smiled despite the reprimand. “At least there is the gown. That’s some consolation, yes?”

  Before his death twelve years ago, Tamsen’s father, Stephen Littlejohn, had been a cloth merchant like his cousin, Mr. Parrish. Tamsen supposed a love of clothing was in her blood, for standing in this strange house, in a strange town, preparing to meet a stranger who—should all go as Mr. Parrish planned—she would soon be obliged to call “husband,” a part of her still could thrill to the rustle of brocaded silk, the striking contrast of blue skirts opening to reveal a cream petticoat embroidered in a garden of gold.

  As for the gown’s plunging neckline, her stepfather had debated whether she should show herself modest and wear a kerchief or go without and present the more alluring picture. He’d circled her at the final fitting, assessing the results of his design and her mother’s labor as if she’d been a doll he’d taken pains to dress—and opted for the kerchief. A small, filmy one that covered little.

  Such pleasure was fleeting. The beautiful gown enclosed her like a cage now. The boned stays beneath, drawn tight as she could bear, pressed in so snug that she couldn’t draw a full breath.

  Back at the window, Tamsen fingered the heavy curtain and stared at the wavering view beyond. Morganton wasn’t the setting Mr. Parrish would have chosen for wooing a wealthy bridegroom. It was, however, the nearest Ambrose Kincaid meant to come to Charlotte Town while on business in Carolina.

  “Why must we meet in a tavern?” she asked, simply because she couldn’t bear the silence of the room.

  “Mrs. Brophy’s is a respectable ordinary,” her mother replied predictably, “where women as well as men may dine. And you know Mr. Parrish’s thoughts on the matter.”

  Having resigned himself to this meeting taking place where it was convenient to Mr. Kincaid, her stepfather had decided to bank everything not on their surroundings but on her face and figure bedecked in the blue gown. What better way to strike a contrast, to make an unforgettable impression, than for her to appear in all her glory in a public house? She would shine like a jewel in a pig’s snout.

  The idea revolted Tamsen, as it did her mother.

  Glancing aside, she noticed what sort of needlework her mother was engaged in. Not fine work for profit, of which her stepfather approved, but common mending. A shirt for Sim, their stable hand, the only other slave besides Dell spared from work at home in order to accompany them. Tamsen also noticed the purple blotches on the inside of her mother’s wrist. Inwardly she cringed. She’d never actually seen her stepfather hit her mother, as he did their slaves, but he could be rough in his handling even of her.

  “Oughtn’t you to let Dell see to that?”

  Sarah lifted her gaze—and tucked her wrist from sight. “Dell has enough to do. We’ll hear your stepfather coming.”

  Before her mother ceased speaking, the front door opened and a boot struck the floor of the entry hall. Tamsen’s stomach lurched. Her mother dropped the mending on the floor beside the chair.

  Tamsen flew to her side. “I don’t want to do this, Mama.”

  In the room beyond, footsteps crossed the floor. Her mother clasped her hand. “I know, baby. ’Twill be all right.”

  “Will it?”

  There was no time for her mother to reply. Hezekiah Parrish s
tood in the doorway, hat in hand, brows drawn, forehead rising like a piled thundercloud to a receded hairline. He’d have seemed a nondescript man—neither tall nor short, handsome nor ill made, overly lean nor fleshy—were it not for the force of resolve behind his middling appearance, refusing to be disregarded. Or disobeyed.

  “It’s time,” he said, his gaze pinning Tamsen.

  “Yes sir. I’m ready.”

  “Let me judge that. Turn.”

  With a swish of silk, Tamsen stepped away from her mother and turned, knowing every lock of hair was pinned and curled to perfection, every inch of her below the neck cinched or padded to best advantage. Knowing she hadn’t, against all odds, stained or creased the gown.

  Knowing her mother was fervently praying.

  “Good.” Mr. Parrish clapped his hat on his head. “He’s waiting.”

  Tamsen moved toward her stepfather’s proffered arm. Never mind she had been waiting nigh the day long, too sick with dread to force a bite of food past her lips. Such a notion wouldn’t register with her stepfather. Nor with Ambrose Kincaid, she was willing to wager. Fully prepared to loathe the man, she touched her fingertips to her stepfather’s coat sleeve.

  At the front door, Mr. Parrish glanced at her and frowned. “Smile,” he said.

  Tamsen smiled. Braced to be paraded through Morganton in all her finery, she stepped across the threshold, wondering as she did so whether those mute lambs Scripture mentioned ever screamed on the inside when they saw the altar.

  No one could have been more astonished than Tamsen when, moments after setting eyes on Ambrose Kincaid, her internal screaming ceased. Not an ogre, after all had been her first grudging admission as she passed between benches in her rustling silk and he’d risen to stare like a man vision struck.

  Mr. Kincaid went on staring while her stepfather barreled into formal introductions. Finally the man blinked, very nicely thanked Mr. Parrish, and requested they be left alone to conversate. With thinly veiled reluctance, Mr. Parrish complied, leaving Tamsen to settle her stomach, gather her wits, and bring herself to bear on making a favorable impression on this man her stepfather meant her to marry.