The Long Knife Page 4

  Oh, this had been stoppered down in Meg Farney for a long time. “It was not Annalee who was your wench. She was your true love. But she could not line your pockets with guineas, nor leave her husband to come westering with you. It is I who am your wench.”

  “One trifling incident—” The lieutenant slashed at nothing with his hand. “I scarce remember it.”

  “Trifling to you, Richard, who’ve known so many women.” Oh, there was no more holding this in than holding steam, Cam could see. “But how well I remember. It happened that night when you knew there was no hope of recovering your Green Manse by court or diplomacy and you came to tell me, and I was already abed. It did not surprise me that in your despair you had drunk too much and your tongue was glib enough, up to a point. Then, in the middle of a word you stopped talking and climbed into bed beside me, and passed into a stupor. All night you lay thus, nor did it seem to me any sin. You had come to my side, finally, in your exhaustion, for solace and rest, and if you wished me by your side there would I stay. And I thought, now my Richard, my adored cousin and hero will marry me. But within two days you were suddenly full of your plans for a new plantation in Ohio, and too busy for me, with your trips to the legislature and petitions to Governor Henry and in finding a buyer for Fairlea so that I could dower us with capital for the venture. Yet”—and her tears seemed to burn dry from the flush of her cheeks—“you found time, Richard, to tarry overnight twice a week with Mistress Annalee. She gave her word to it and I believe her, that you would not have given her up as long as you abode in Virginia.”

  “If I’d wed you then, she’d have been after me day and night to betray our marriage bond. It’s done and over and it was never in my mind to marry another. And now that you’ve flowered your beauty is more to me than your money and our kinship twice over.”

  “I cannot believe that,” Meg Farney said. “Maybe you do thirst to kiss me. But what pretty girl don’t you thirst to kiss? I can think of no wish or word of mine my beauty has made you hark to.”

  “Ha,” the lieutenant said. “You give yourself away, my dear. You’re piqued because, to your schoolgirl mind, I have not been humble enough about begging for your favors. Admit it.”

  “I’ll admit only that you’ve made me think, Richard, and thinking, face the fact that I do not love you. I once loved a man I thought was you, but you were never that man.”

  He stiffened, like a hound on point. “Strange it is that you should have kept all this to yourself till this minute and this place and—in this company.” The lieutenant looked down then and he saw Cam’s eyes open, and on him. “Could it be that you fancy the notion of evening the score with me by dalliance with some such stallion as this?”

  The lieutenant was a quick man, and he thought with his hands. The pistol came at Cam like a snake’s open mouth.

  Meg’s scream was thrown fast and clean as a knife at the lieutenant’s ear. “That’s murder, Richard.”

  Oh, the lieutenant wanted him to be afeared and frisk his head aside. The Shawnees would tease a man that way for hours, throwing hatchets at him to make him flinch. It was the lieutenant who had to flinch and pull the pistol aside and all Cam got was a singe and a ringing in his ear when the pistol shot off.

  The lieutenant looked him level in the eye. “You were almost killed by the accidental discharge of my piece, Galway. Never forget it.”

  “Nor will I forget it,” Meg Farney said.

  Scully and Barker came a-scrambling around one end of the shack and three more soldiers around the other.

  “Shawnees, Lieutenant?” Barker, the one with a wart on his nose like a huckleberry, called and waved his musket at the shore.

  “I told you there were no Shawnees about,” the lieutenant said. “I was clearing my barrel—the ball’s been set for two days. Dismissed.”

  “Lieutenant—” Barker shuffled a step nearer.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you in fair way to be talked to? I mean—well, we been awaitin’. It’s a military matter, sir.”

  “About Kiefer?”

  “Partly. He knows something in the military way about this Flash-in-the-Sun. It’s why he butt-clubbed him, only you wouldn’t hear him on it.”

  “Bring Kiefer here.”

  “He won’t come, sir. He says you confined him to the pigsty under arrest, and until you come and listen to him and ask him out your own self, there he’ll stay.”

  The lieutenant squinted. “Kiefer hit Galway for a military reason that had nothing to do with the fact that Galway rousted him around?”

  “That’s it,” Barker said. “You ought to hear it, Lieutenant. You just ought to hear it the way Kiefer tells it.”

  “I’ll do that,” the lieutenant said. He smiled at Meg Farney. “On second thought, my dear, tend our prisoner, if it suits your fancy. Herbify his hurts. It can’t do him any harm or you any good.”

  chapter 4

  Her fingers were as light and quick as a hummingbird’s needle bill. With cloths that Noah, the little black, had brought from her own store, she soaked off the scabby blood to get at the cuts in his face where they’d dragged him across the splintered deck boards and in the back of his head, split by Kiefer’s musket butt. Then she had sent Noah for wine, to put in the open wounds, she said—though everybody knew you put clay-mud on what was swollen up and tobacco spit, if you couldn’t get fresh buffalo or deer dung (or anything that browsed on grass) in cuts. But this time, when Noah came back, he wouldn’t come closer than six feet.

  “Flash-in-the-Sun, he same as Shawnee, Missy Meg. I heard ’em say it.”

  “Nonsense, Noah. Bring those things here. Shawnee or not, he’s fast bound.” She looked behind Cam, to make sure. “Your hands are bleeding, too.”

  “Dried whang,” he said. “Cuts like saw grass.”

  “But if I loosen you—I’d have to cut you loose—the first thing you’d do—wouldn’t you—you’d attack the lieutenant?”

  “Hadn’t thought on it.”

  “Would you run?”

  “Not on water, ma’am. And we’re too fur out for me to swim, and my hands and legs all numbed to sticks.”

  “Maybe it’s better that you stay bound for a while. This wine will hurt like hot grease when I pour it on. What do you woodsmen do when you have to stand up to a great deal of pain?”

  “Bite wood. Reckon, though”—Cam hesitated—“you might put my Bess between my knees to clamp on. She’s a comfort.”

  “Your Bess?”

  “My rifle-gun.”

  “Oh,” she said like he’d said something wrong. “Named for a girl somewhere?”

  “Not directly. Jist something to talk to.”

  “Talk to me,” she ordered, already dabbing away with a swab; the peppery liquor fumes cleared his nose to the keenness of a hound’s, and the woman-smell of her warmed by her work came so heavy into his nostrils and got so quick into his blood he didn’t half feel the sear of the wine in open cuts. It was something he’d never heard tell of before about a woman, that she could douse the hurt in a man. “Tell me about yourself. By the smoothness of your face I’d say you’re not more than seventeen. Yet you’re at least a hand taller than six feet.”

  “Twenty, by my countin’. Face’s been Injin plucked.”

  “I can’t believe all you told Richard about yourself. No boy could live like that, and even less a man, unless he’s touched. Tell me true. When did you last talk to somebody—anybody, white or Indian?”

  “Last summer it was. In Limestone, when I traded there with Cracken.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re just at the bragging age.”

  “Must ’uv passed it.”

  “You haven’t reached it.” She dabbed at his ear. “Once a man reaches it he never passes it, if there’s a woman to listen.”

  From the sear of it, she must have been pulling his hairs out one by one; she said she was only cleaning the wound, though, and smearing it with a herb salve. “This hair,” she ke
pt whispering to herself, “you could spin it into cloth-of-gold.”

  She stopped hurting, and brushed her hand over his head like she had a real hairbrush in it. “A man will even brag about his troubles, if that’s what he has the most of.”

  She must have been thinking about that time the lieutenant knelt down beside her bed, Cam figured.

  “I’ll believe you if you can give me one good reason why a man, no, a boy would want to live like a solitary with never a friend, or kin, or a woman—” She pulled his hair, for no reason he could guess except maybe no woman wanted to see a man go to waste in the woods. “There is no sensible reason.”

  “Reckon there be, ma’am,” he said. “A man kin take his rifle and go into the woods and right off he’s got the biggest, finest house in the mortal world to live in, and no rent to pay and no taxes owin’ and food in another place if the crop goes bad where you’re settin’.”

  “Just like a boy,” she snapped. “A full belly and tree house to live in—you were only a boy when you took to the woods.”

  “I had a man’s reasons, I reckon,” Cam said. “When I lit out from Galway’s place I had it in my mind that never would a man lay a gad on me agin, and I said to myself never would I give a man cause to. Way I figure it, a man ought to live so’s to give none the call to hate him nor to be a-skeered of him, nor to have to favor him. Never do I want a man to take a minute from his chorin’ to do a lick of mine. If a man does you a good turn, or if he does you a bad turn, either way you’re owin’ him equal and it can take all a man’s life payin’ up. I don’t figure to owe nobody in this life but the Great Spirit that made all, and I reckon he’ll collect in his own time. When a man lives solitary in the woods no man kin put a debt agin him, and when I die in the woods the gravedigger wolves will take care of me and no man out a copper for my box or bury hole.”

  “And for what,” she asked him, “do you want all this being free?”

  “For what? For nothin’. Free’s free. Bein’ free’s like not bein’ crippled or poorly. It’s bein’ all man and all yourself.”

  She backed off and beelined a look right between his eyes. “Richard is right. You are a savage. That’s the only word I know for a human being turned animal. And yet—” She raised her eyes to his hair. “I don’t really believe that.

  You have the softest drawly voice and your movements are so gentle and smooth.”

  “Animals mostly are gentle and smooth, ma’am.”

  “But that hair—” She closed her eyes against it. “Surely I’m not the first woman who ever saw it.” And then she began to bandage his head. The bandage was too loose, and she knew it and yanked it tighter. “Why do you think I’m doing this?”

  “Reckon it’s so’s you kin put a debt agin me and then you kin ask me a favor—not to even up with the lieutenant for doin’ me dirt.”

  “Nonsense. I simply hate the sight of suffering.”

  But when she’d knotted and neatened up the bandage she sat back on the deck, with her feet to one side, like a little girl playing with her dolls on the floor. It was the way the sun stroked through her hair that made it blue or black, and the same way with her eyes; it depended on what kind of light you saw them by and what kind of look was coming out of them. A man would have to study her awhile before he’d know what hand to take with her; she looked to Cam to be three or four different women and girls, one right after another, the way her face would change. But one thing a man would have to notice, all the women she was were each as pretty as a different bird or flower.

  “I’d only trick myself out of my own purpose by lying to you, wouldn’t I?” she said. “Yes, I want you not to kill Richard. All he can see now is how you made a tom fool of him. But what I saw was how easy it would have been for you to kill him.”

  “What’s been done to me up to now I can’t rightly hold agin the lieutenant, ma’am. And it wa’n’t a thing to kill over.”

  You’d have thought that would have satisfied her. But no. “I mean not only for what’s been done but for what may be done,” she said.

  He couldn’t see that it was fair to ask him to hold both hands behind him every time he saw the lieutenant. But a woman didn’t figure fairness like a man. “And supposin’ I vowed this for all time,” he said. “Kin you git every man in the territory to vow the same? I reckon’ the lieutenant won’t be to the likin’ of many a borderman and there’s some I know would have put their mark on him back at the ambush. A woman can’t mammy for a man everywhere he goes.”

  The pale underleaf softness of her skin flushed up redder than a hoe-cake griddle. “You did hear everything we said, didn’t you, you sneaking eavesdropper?” Then she caught her lip between her fingers. “No. I take it back. We even quarreled before Richard’s men. And you were bound and nearly senseless. I’ve had to do so many things for Richard—ever since I was a little girl. And he doesn’t even realize it. Oh, I wanted to be his wife. I tried, once. But I can’t be. I can be the mother of his children, but never a wife to him. It all started wrong, a long time ago. He thinks of me as a child to be ordered about and ignored when he’s cross or teased or played with when he’s jolly—” She stopped; a tear dropped on her hand, and she jerked like it was a June bug. She swatted at her eyes. “But he’s coming into new country now, and he has so many plans that I’m sure if he gets started right—oh, he’s had so many disappointments. Would you understand if I told you about him?”

  “Might.”

  “Richard is a second cousin, and my last and only relative—” She smoothed at the bandage—or his hair—again. “He was an aide-de-camp to General Washington when he was only sixteen. Oh, he was big enough then, and brave enough, and he could ride a horse as though he’d been born six-legged. So he went away when the war came, leaving his father and mother alone at Green Manse. And when the British came tramping through in ’76 Tarleton took them captive, partly because of Richard being a rebel soldier, and he shipped them to England and there they stayed with relatives until ’82, when they died within days of each other, of a summer fever. But the worst of it was that they died, too, it is said, of heartbreak, for they had had word that Richard was dead, as he very nearly was in ’81, when he hid in the barn at Fairlea and I nursed him whole again between terms at school. But he came well and hearty out of it and there he was with General Washington when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and he came a-galloping home in his patched regimentals thinking himself victor and conqueror and I had to tell him that Green Manse was no longer his. For his parents, thinking him dead, had willed Green Manse to the English relatives who had given them shelter, and the will had already passed through the English courts. Every year in England, it seems, the word was that the rebels would be put down in the next campaign and, seeing it as the only way to secure Green Manse for Richard, who was a rebel and would forfeit all his property rights if not his life when the rebellion failed, his parents had sworn allegiance anew to the Crown. Four long years Richard fought in the courts of England and Virginia to recover his estates, but nothing could be done. And I couldn’t help because Fairlea had been ravaged by Tories and all my blacks stolen or frightened away and the fields went untended and I was in school, kept there on the money my mother, who was from Philadelphia, had left me in her will for that purpose alone. And I was not able to run a plantation in any event. What money I had left after schooling I gave to Richard for his trip to England, and there was nothing to do but sell Fairlea when he came back and his pockets empty. I think Richard would have turned highwayman or pirate had not the Virginia Legislature kept back, when it gave up its claim on the Ohio country to Congress, a land tract for the Virginia men who had mostly never been paid for carrying arms during the war. But Richard was fired up by that and by purchase and trading and through friendship with Governor Henry, he managed to get warrants for two actions of land. Do you know how much that is?”

  “Not rightly.”

  “Two square miles, twelve hundred and eighty acres
.” She paused. “The way the Northwest Ordinance is written a man must own five hundred acres of land to be a judge in the territory, and a thousand to be governor. Not many men own a thousand acres and Richard plans to make his reputation quickly out here, as a soldier in the Shawnee campaign of course, but also as a man of parts, able in many things, law and business, farming, and civil affairs, and with his standing with our great men of government, Governor Patrick Henry, General Washington, Mr. Jefferson—do you know what I mean?”

  “Anybody’d know when a man tries to big himself up.” Her eyes blinked wider open. “You do understand. He wants to big himself up. After the Shawnee campaign we’re going to live here in this country. So he wants to cause a stir, appear at his best, make an impression when he enters Limestone. I’m sure he means no more than to turn you over to the authorities there. I’m sure he wouldn’t have shot you. You have friends in Limestone, haven’t you?”

  “Don’t figure Cracken would see me hanged, ma’am. Or Jim Waters, the smith. Or Lew Wetzel.”

  “Lew Wetzel?” she said, the whites of her eyes fluttering like candle moths. “Oh, oh.”

  “You’ve heard about Lew Wetzel, ma’am, and him naught but an Injin scout?”

  “I’ve heard of nobody else since we left Pittsburg. I think he’s the real reason we’re going into Limestone. We don’t have to go that far, you know. Every night Richard and his men sit down for a smoke and a glass and talk the tree frogs to sleep with how they’ll get their hands on Wetzel and what they’ll do to him when they do. Are you—a good friend of Wetzel’s?”

  “Reckon he’d be the first to say so.”

  “Oh,” she said. “What’ll I do? What’ll I do now?” And she turned away and looked out across the water for an answer.