CHAPTER FIVE

IN THE CHILL damp before dawn, the camp was stirring. Brother One and Uncle gathered the men’s horses from their makeshift corral in the woods. Agatha was waiting as though expecting her horse to be brought to her until Margaret hissed and led the way to get Jenny and Star.

Bringing their horses in, Margaret gestured to Uncle to give them their boots. Extracting them from his pack, he threw them onto the ground. Hastily, Margaret and Agatha tied them on, then mounted.

Topknot was standing at some distance, scanning the trees as though, Margaret thought, he was looking for a sign. For the first time, she wished for a language to speak to him, to find out what he thought was about to happen. She had begun to sense that he did understand some English. Greatly daring, she leaned down from her horse and asked, “Do you see an enemy coming?”

He ignored her. She expected nothing else. Yet asking the question relieved her.

Then the men mounted. Girty was nowhere to be seen.

“I could fancy some pone,” Agatha said, riding up alongside Margaret.

“Drink a little of your water, Sister, it will quell the hunger pangs.” Agatha screwed the top off her canteen and drank.

They were riding in the middle of the party. Topknot was leading, then Uncle, with Brother One and Brother Two following at the end. The little troop passed quickly through the morning woods. The rising sun shone on pale patches on the trail, well-worn and clear of stones.

A break in the trees showed a large river, glittering in the sunlight. Sand bars created eddies near the bank; out in the middle, the current ran fierce and strong, carrying a large tree, its branches raised to the sky.

At a word from Topknot, Brother One and Uncle skidded their horses down the bank and splashed into the water, sliding at the same time out of their saddles and seizing their horses’ tails. Almost at once the horses lost their footing and began to thrash crosswise to the current, their riders yelling and hanging on. Brother Two plunged his horses in next and all three were soon in the middle of the river.

“Surely we will not be expected—” Agatha began.

“Hush.” Margaret was watching Topknot haul a canoe out of the bushes. The canoe was narrow and Margaret feared for their lives if it should tip. She had never been taught to swim at the Greenbrier. Still, at a gesture from Topknot, she dismounted and stripped off her saddle and bridle. Agatha did the same. Topknot loaded their gear into the middle of the canoe and then beckoned them to climb in.

They climbed in without mishap. Then Topknot stepped in lightly and shoved off, taking up the paddle.

In the current, the canoe bucked and lunged. Topknot righted it and began to paddle at a slight angle, heading toward the far shore. The three horses floundered into the water and followed.

Margaret dared finally to loosen her hands from the sides of the canoe. She looked around. The other Indians were already on the far shore, their horses shaking off sheets of water.

She looked at Agatha. She was trailing her hand in the water as though they were on a holiday picnic and smiling at Topknot’s back.

Margaret surmised that Agatha was going to use her old ways as though their captors were white men. Margaret did not count the Indians as men but as instruments of destiny only. Girty, although a monster, was a man because he was white. Yet Topknot’s hands on the paddle, she saw, were hardly darker than her own. What strange mixture had gone into his creation!

Their canoe was approaching the bank. Margaret began to piece a map in her mind of the route they had traveled and realized what river they were crossing.

The Ohio.

The name called up no sweet associations as did the Shenandoah. She had never seen either river, but she knew the song and hummed it to herself for comfort: Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you … She felt her lips begin to quiver.

Agatha looked at her sharply. “Sister!”

“That old song—” She stopped.

Topknot was back-paddling hard to reach the bank.

“Pray for our deliverance,” Agatha said. “Pray ceaselessly.”

“Never,” Margaret croaked, smearing her tears away with the back of one hand.

“Why, Sister—”

“Not since Father died. If He would do that—”

“The ways of the Lord are inscrutable,” Agatha parroted.

“Then he’s no lord of mine.”

Brother One was wading into the water to catch the canoe as Topknot brought it close to shore.

“Blasphemy,” Agatha said softly, as though she was thinking it over. “You increase our peril.”

“I’d as soon pray to that savage,” Margaret said as Brother One seized the prow.

“Never!” Agatha cried.

“Step out, Sister—but carefully—”

“You first,” Agatha said.

Crouching, Margaret maneuvered one foot over the edge and stepped down into the shallow water as the canoe swayed violently. Water rose to her knees. Then she held out her hand to Agatha, who stepped out daintily. Topknot had already climbed out of the canoe, turning his back on the two women and hurrying up the bank. Margaret dragged the canoe up the shore.

Agatha was still chewing the topic. “What foolishness to go out hunting in that blizzard! Everyone told him not to go.”

“We were starving,” Margaret said abruptly. “Father was desperate to feed us.”

“And froze instead in a snow bank.”

“Yet you believe in God …” As she spoke, Margaret was crawling up the steep bank on hands and knees. Then she stood, shaking out her wet skirts. Brother One was making a fire for the warriors to dry themselves, but she knew she would not be welcome at the blaze.

Quickly, she unfastened her waistband and stepped out of her soaked skirts. John’s breeches were wet as well, but they would dry, exposed to the sun. Agatha made a small noise of objection, but Margaret paid her no mind. She threw her skirt down on the river bank and left it.

“You are indecent,” Agatha said. She did not remove her own soaked garment.

Margaret did not bother to answer.

They found their gear in the pile on the shore and began to saddle and bridle their horses. Jenny was restive from the river and took some gentling before Margaret could cinch her girth.

Further up the bank, the Indians seemed to be conferring. Brother One was asserting something, Margaret thought, and Topknot was calmly disagreeing. Then Brother One turned and stared at the two women, a glare that Margaret understood too well. They were a hindrance, requiring the canoe to cross the river and then slow to saddle.

“Quick, Agatha,” she said. “Brother One is saying we are delaying them.”

Agatha stood gaping by Star.

Uncle came sliding down the bank, scowling. He grabbed Agatha by the arm and tossed her away like a dry weed.

Margaret helped her to scramble up. For the first time, her sister did not complain, and Margaret wondered if she was grateful to be spared a more serious punishment. They ran to their horses and mounted. The Indians were already riding into the trees.

Margaret looked back. Now the great river lay between them and deliverance. She felt a kind of clearing as though she had suffered a spell of dizziness that now had passed. She looked down at Jenny’s neck and laid her hand along her mane. Brave little mare, pacing on steadily by the river, although unfed and terrified. When a green branch crossed their trail, Jenny snatched a few leaves.

As they rode on, Margaret felt a new wetness in her stained and wrinkled shirt waist. Her right breast was leaking its useless milk.

She kicked Jenny and urged Agatha on. They had fallen behind.

She heard her sister scream as her horse jolted forward, whipped from behind by Brother One. Mercifully, this time she did not fall. Margaret goaded Jenny into a trot, and the two women finally regained the rest of the party.

They rode for many hours on the west side of the river, through tall reed thickets that switched their faces, moving out at a trot as a cleared space, almost a pasture, opened in front of them.

Margaret groaned, bouncing on her chaffed thighs. The coarse leather of John’s breeches ground against her. Yet she must keep up, must keep hissing at Agatha to hurry.

At the edge of the clearing they slowed, passing into woods from the riverside thickets: black walnut, hickory nut, and chestnut.

Her shirt waist was now soaked on both sides. Two days since her baby was murdered, yet her breasts were still dripping miserable drops of milk.

At a shout from Topknot, they halted. He pointed at Margaret with a sideways twist of his pursed mouth she had seen before: an order, wordless but clear. She opened her saddlebag and began to hand out her jerky, but she was not quick enough. Raven Wing snatched her saddlebag from its binding and poured the jerky out on the ground where all went for it.

She watched Topknot’s hands sorting through the jerky. She thought, You held my baby’s feet in those hands. You held them long enough to feel her fine, firm flesh. Then you took a fresh hold and bashed her head against a tree.

A beech, I think.

She saw her baby’s face in that moment, mouth open in a wail. Only a moment of terror before you flung her. If there is a God, I would thank him for that. And for her being nameless, not expected to live.

Yes, it was a beech. There are many of them in the woods at home.

Her little body like an empty sack dropped at the root of that tree.

A beech.

And we rode on.

She knew they would ask her later—if she ever saw the Greenbrier Settlement again—why she hadn’t snatched her baby from the Indian, bowing her head for the tomahawk. She would tell them that with her gone they would still have slaughtered her baby and probably Agatha as well, removing all impediments to their flight.

But truly there had been no time for such calculations.

The other answer, the answer she would never give them, was that she had wanted to live.