Upon awakening the next morning as dawn broke, Nate lay in bed and thought of the incident he had witnessed. Adeline had never returned to offer an explanation, which he regarded as highly peculiar, and he was still determined to discover what had happened to the black man.
He was also hungry enough to eat a bull moose. As he slipped out from under the blanket he felt renewed vitality in his limbs. Stretching, he savored the strength flowing in his arms; he was stronger than he had been since the panther attack, and he craved a heaping portion of solid food, any solid food, not the porridge and soups the doctor had insisted he eat the past few days.
With that in mind, Nate dressed in his buckskins. He strapped on his knife, wedged the tomahawk under his belt, and tucked a flintlock on either side of his belt buckle after reloading each pistol. Feeling like a man renewed, he left the Hawken in the closet and ventured out of the bedroom.
A large hall ran in both directions. His room, as it turned out, was situated at the middle of the corridor. There were other doors on both sides, all closed.
The house was as still as a tomb as he walked down the hall until he reached an enormous dining room opulently adorned with exquisitely crafted furniture and a huge glass cabinet containing gleaming china. Beyond the dining room was an equally spacious living room.
He halted, noting doorways to the right and the left, and speculated on which way to go. At that moment the left-hand door opened and out came the elderly maid bearing a tray of steaming porridge. She stopped in shock on beholding him.
“Good morning,” Nate said, and walked over. Through the doorway behind her he could see a large kitchen and a young man hanging pots over a fire. He smiled at the maid and started to bypass her.
“Non, monsieur!”
Nate had to halt when she blocked his path. “Excuse me,” he said, and again tried to go around her.
The maid stepped to the side to stay in front of him. “Non!” she insisted. “Oú allez-vous?”
“I’m sorry,” Nate said. “I don’t understand.” He pointed at the kitchen. “Now if you’ll let me by I’d like to get something to eat other than porridge.”
“Je ne comprends pas,” the maid said, vigorously shaking her head.
“Pardon me,” Nate persisted. He put a hand on her shoulder and prevented her from interfering as he started into the kitchen. The delicious aroma of boiling coffee and simmering bacon made his mouth water. “Hello,” he stated to announce his presence.
The cook turned, a large spoon in his right hands and gaped. “What are you doing here, sir?”
“You speak English! Excellent,” Nate said, moving closer. “My name is King and I’ve been laid up in bed since my arrival.”
“Yes, I know,” the cook answered. “Doctor Mangel instructed me on the foods you can eat until you have healed.”
“No more porridge and soup. I want solid foods.”
“But the doctor” the cook protested.
“I don’t care what Mangel told you,” Nate said. He rested a hand on each flintlock and ambled up to the fire. “I want bacon and eggs for breakfast, a mountain of each. And I’d like flapjacks if you have them, six or seven ought to do me.”
“I could get into trouble if I do as you wish,” the cook declared.
“I’ll take full responsibility,” Nate assured him. “And if you won’t cooperate I’ll make the meal myself.”
“No one works in my kitchen except me.”
Nate grinned. “Then I’d get to work on my order if I were you.”
The cook glanced at the pistols, then at the doorway where the maid stood. He addressed her in French and she nodded and hurried off.
“I’m waiting,” Nate said.
Displaying marked reluctance, the young man complied. He fetched eggs from a pail resting on a shelf near a door to the outside, and brought over a bowl containing batter already mixed.
Nate watched eagerly. His stomach rumbled continuously. He couldn’t resist plucking a strip of bacon from a pan over the fire and cramming the juicy morsel into his mouth.
“Perhaps Monsieur would care for utensils?” the cook asked, his nose crinkled in obvious repugnance at Nate’s lack of manners. “There is an entire drawer of forks, knives, and spoons by his right elbow.”
“What’s your name?” Nate replied.
“Henri, sir.”
“Haven’t you ever eaten with your fingers, Henri?”
“Not since I was an infant, sir. We French pride ourselves on behaving as proper gentlemen at all times.”
“Do you now?” Nate said, amused by the man’s superior airs. “Then don’t ever visit any of the Indian tribes west of here or you’ll be in for the shock of your life. Why, once I was at a Shoshone village when some warriors brought back a buffalo bull they’d killed. It was the middle of winter and no one in the village had eaten much for weeks. So the braves hacked that old bull into smaller pieces and roasted the meat over a roaring fire.” He grabbed another strip of bacon, trying not to laugh at Henri’s indignant expression. “But most of the Shoshones were too hungry to wait, so they took to tearing the meat apart with their bare hands and stuffing it into their mouths as fast as they could eat. There was blood and fat and gore smeared all over them by the time they were done. And there wasn’t a shred of flesh left on that buffalo.”
“You exaggerate, sir. Not even Indians are that barbaric.”
“Henri, you have a heap to learn about life,” Nate said. “The point I’m trying to make is that behaving like a gentleman isn’t all that important in the scheme of things.”
“If you say so, sir,” Henri said. He cracked four eggs open on the edge of a pan. “But I would no more think of eating bacon without a fork than I would of stepping outdoors without my clothes on.”
“The Digger Indians do it all the time. Doesn’t seem to hurt them any.”
“Indians,” Henri sniffed, “cannot be held accountable for their actions because they know no better. They’re raised as uncouth savages so that is how they live.”
Nate’s amusement evaporated and he resisted an impulse to dunk Henri in the flapjack batter. He was fed up with hearing whites who had never so much as talked to an Indian insult the Indian way of life. When Winona was alive he had never tolerated such degrading talk, and he would be damned if he’d do so now that she was gone.
From the doorway came Adeline’s testy voice. “What are you trying to prove?”
He turned. “So there you are. I figured you must have left St. Louis since you didn’t come back last night.”
“I went to talk to Yancy, and by the time I got back it was late so I retired,” Adeline said, advancing. Today she wore a bright yellow dress that accented the color of her lustrous hair. “I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“Are you hungry? Henri is making a breakfast fit for a king,” Nate said. He saw the maid in the hallway, still holding the tray and the porridge, and raised his voice. “There’s enough for you too, ma’am.”
“We do not eat with the hired help,” Adeline informed him.
“Why not?”
“The servants have their own quarters, their own dining area. They eat at designated times and the maid has already had her breakfast. So enough of this foolishness and come with me. We’ll wait in the dining room while Henri cooks our meals so we can talk in private.”
Although disposed to argue the issue, Nate went with Adeline and pulled out a chair for her near the head of the table. She took her seat and he sat down across from her. “I’m surprised you didn’t raise a fuss over my eating bacon and eggs instead of porridge.”
“I know better now. Why waste my breath when you’ll do as you please no matter what I say?”
Nate leaned back and rested his right arm on the table. “You must regret going to such lengths to track me down.”
“Not at all. I came for a reason.”
“Which you have yet to reveal.”
“Only because I didn’t want to add to your woes. Since you had just lost your family and friends, I thought it best not to burden you with more bad news.”
“What?” Nate said, stiffening. He leaned toward her. “Tell me now.”
Adeline’s face might have been chiseled from marble for all the emotion she showed. “Very well. I wanted to spare you a while longer. But since you insist, I have the unenviable task of letting you know that both of your parents have died.”
For an insane instant Nate told himself she must be joking. Then, with terrible certainty, he knew she was relating a fact, and the full magnitude of the loss hit him with all the force of a runaway wagon. Coming as it did so soon after he had lost his wife and son compounded the severity of the shock. He blinked, stared at the top of the table, and felt his insides twist into excruciating knots.
“I am so sorry,” Adeline said. “I’ve dreaded telling you.”
“You did the right thing,” Nate muttered, his inner turmoil building and building until it threatened to explode. Not his father and mother! Despite his past differences with them, especially his father, he had always cared for them, always loved them deeply and dutifully. “How?” he said, and had to swallow in order to continue. “How did it happen?”
“Your mother passed on about six months after you left New York.”
Nate rose and gestured angrily. “How can that be? I left New York City over eight years ago!”
“I know,” Adeline said.
“I would have heard of her death by now.”
“From whom?” Adeline responded. “Your father blamed you for her death and refused to allow your name to be mentioned in his hearing. He told your brothers not to contact you or he wouldn’t leave any of them a single cent.” She shook her head. “No one wanted anything to do with you.”
“Dear Lord,” Nate breathed, taking his seat again. He had expected his family to take his departure hard, but not this hard! He never imagined them becoming so bitter they would refuse to have anything to do with him. “How could my father blame me?” he asked.
“I was never given all the details, but evidently he took your leaving as a personal betrayal of his love and trust. He had not spoken to your Uncle Zeke in years and wouldn’t answer any of Zeke’s letters, if you’ll recall, and it enraged him that you would take up with Zeke in defiance of his wishes.”
“I know he had a feud with Zeke over Zeke’s going west, but Zeke was his own brother, after all. I always thought he would change his mind one day and accept Zeke back with open arms.”
“If anything he hated Zeke more after you left.”
“But what does that have to do with my mother?”
“Your leaving broke her heart, plain and simple. She took to taking long walks in the park across the street from your house, and one day she went for a walk in the rain. The next day she had a fever and the chills, and when she got no better your father contacted a doctor,” Adeline detailed. “Your mother, bless her soul, died of pneumonia.”
Nate slumped in his chair. Knowing how his father thought, he could understand how the blame for his mother’s death would fall on his shoulders. If he hadn’t gone away, his mother wouldn’t have been pining for him and wouldn’t have taken walks in the park. She would still be alive. “How did my father die?” he asked in a whisper.
“Like my father he worked himself to death. Now we’re both without parents.”
“And my brothers?”
“Sherm never did amount to much. He always drank to excess, and took up a trade in keeping with his habit. He works at a shabby tavern on the waterfront.”
“My father must have loved that.”
“From my father I learned Sherman was warned to make something of himself or be banished from the family for life.”
Nate closed his eyes, his hunger forgotten, wishing he could sink into himself and disappear. Instead of feeling anger at his father, he felt pity. The man had died practically alone in the world, and for no reason other than stubborn pride. What other explanation was there for his father always reacting in the same way when faced with a family member who didn’t see eye to eye with him? He had long suspected that his father didn’t possess a shred of compassion, and the information imparted by Adeline confirmed it. The man hadn’t known how to forgive others, and as a consequence invariably lashed out at those who inadvertently hurt him the most.
“As for Louis,” Adeline was saying, “he went into the Army. Plans to make a career of it, I hear.”
“Do you have their addresses? I should write them both.”
“I’m sorry, no. But I do have something else, important news that has a bearing on the reason I came in search of you.”
“What is it?” Nate inquired, not really caring. He was devastated, the fiery inner spark that had sustained him during his travails in the wilderness extinguished by the dreadful loss of both of his parents. First Winona, Zach, Shakespeare, and Blue Water Woman. Now his mother and father. What was left him? His guns and knife and tomahawk. That was all. And Adeline’s friendship.
“I’ve sought you out because of the will,” she said. “I know for a fact that your father left over one hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and I have cause to believe he left all of it to you.”