Thayendanegea made a brief gesture to Ian, to go ahead. This wasn’t a matter of bravery or skill, only speed. The animal had broken a hind leg—it stuck out at a disturbing angle, the splintered white bone showing through the hair, and the snow around it was splattered and speckled with blood.
Weakened as it was, it raised its chest free of the icy snow and menaced them—a young male, in its first winter. Good. The meat would be fairly tender.
Even young and weakened, it was still a full-grown moose, and very dangerous. Ian dismissed any notion of cutting its throat and dispatched it quickly with a musket shot between the eyes. The moose let out a strange, hollow cry and swayed empty-eyed to one side before collapsing with a thud.
Thayendanegea nodded once, then turned and shouted into the emptiness behind them. A few men had come out with them, ranging out to hunt and leaving them alone to talk, but they would still likely be in earshot. They needed to butcher the carcass before the wolves showed up.
“Go find them,” Thayendanegea said briefly to Ian, drawing his knife. “I’ll cut the throat and keep the glutton off.” He lifted his chin, indicating the high rock where the wolverine kept a beady-eyed watch.
As Ian turned to go, he heard Thayendanegea say, almost offhandedly, “You’ll tell this to the Sachem.”
So he was taking it seriously, at least. Ian was grimly pleased at that, but not hopeful.
Before he had run a hundred yards, he heard the crunch of a riding animal’s hooves, and rounding a bend in the trail found himself face-to-face with what had to be Gabriel Hardman, riding a big, rawboned mule with a mutinous eye. Ian took a step backward, out of biting range.
“I killed a moose,” Ian said briefly, and jerked his thumb behind. “Go help him.” Hardman nodded, hesitated for a moment as though wanting to say something, but swallowed it and snapped the reins against the mule’s neck.
THE MEN WENT back together, laden with meat and exhilarated with cold and blood. It was midmorning when they returned to the house, and Rachel was looking out for them, peering out of the front window. She waved and disappeared.
Ian saw Hardman come out of the barn, where the man had helped finish the butchering.
“May I ask,” Hardman said, giving Ian a direct look, “how it came to be that you were traveling with my—with Silvia and the … girls? I take it that you were not aware I was here, as plainly Silvia wasn’t.”
“No. I came to visit the woman who was once my wife,” Ian replied. No point in being secretive; the whole of Canajoharie would know about it by this afternoon, if they didn’t already. “I had word that she and her children were in Osequa when the attack there happened, and that her husband had been killed—but none of my friends kent anything of her condition. So I thought I would come and see.”
“Indeed.” Gabriel Hardman glanced at him, one eyebrow raised.
“I have a new wife,” Ian said equably, in reply to the eyebrow. “She’s with me, and so is our son.”
“So I understand,” Hardman said. “I hear that she is a Friend?”
“She is, and she’s told me that Friends dinna hold wi’ polygamy,” Ian said. “I didna have that in mind, but if I had, I wouldna have brought her with me.”
Hardman gave him a sharp look and a short laugh.
“Silvia told you, then. Why is she with you? Why did you bring her here?”
Ian stopped and gave Hardman a look of his own.
“She did a great service for my uncle, who sent me to see after her welfare. If ye want to hear the state in which I found her and her daughters, I’ll tell ye, man, and it would serve ye right if I did.”
Hardman reared back as though he’d been punched in the chest.
“I—I couldn’t—I couldn’t go back to Philadelphia,” he said, furious. “I was a prisoner—a slave!”
Ian didn’t reply to that, but looked deliberately around him—at the house, the woods, and the open road.
“I’ll leave ye here. Go with God,” he said, and walked away.
87
In Which Rachel Paints Her Face
BRANT HAD SEEN WORKS With Her Hands the evening before, and told Ian that she would welcome his visit today, in the afternoon.
“Ye’re goin’ with me,” Ian had said firmly to Rachel. “You and the wee man both. I’ve come to see to her welfare, not to court her; it’s right for my family to be with me. Besides,” he added, breaking into a sudden smile, “I dinna want ye back here by yourself, takin’ potshots wi’ the Sachem and imagining it’s me tied to the tree.”
“And why should I do that?” she asked, hiding her own smile. “What is there about thee visiting thy former wife by thyself that should give me a moment’s uneasiness?”
“Nothin’,” he said, and kissed her lightly. “That’s my point.”
She was happy that he wanted her to go, and in fact she felt no uneasiness whatever about meeting this woman who had shared her husband’s bed and body—and a good bit of his soul, too, from the little he’d told her of his dead children.
Ha, she thought. So I am to walk up to this woman, carrying Ian’s large, healthy, beautiful son. Plainly he wants her to see that—and I am ashamed to admit that I want that, too, but I do. It is not right that she should see my inner feelings, though. I am not come to triumph over her—nor cause her to doubt her wisdom in dismissing Ian.
Consideration of what she should wear for this occasion wasn’t vanity, she assured herself. It was a desire to look … appropriate.
She had only two dresses; it would have to be the indigo. Beyond that …
Catherine had taken her to the Sachem, who had listened carefully to her request and looked at her with the sort of keen interest she’d seen on Claire Fraser’s face—and Denny’s, for that matter—when presented with some medical phenomenon like a teratoma, a hollow tumor filled with teeth or hair. But the Sachem had nodded, and with great care had shown her how to make the paint from white clay and a handful of dark dried berries, soaked in what was likely deer urine from the smell, then ground into a blue paste and mixed with some of the white clay.
Catherine had watched the process, and when the pigments were prepared and approved by the Sachem, she had taken Rachel to her boudoir so that she might use the looking glass there to apply them neatly with a rabbit’s-foot brush.
Rachel had combed and tied her hair carefully back, then painted only the upper part of her face, from her hairline to just below the eyes, a solid white, and below that—after some thought—a narrow band of blue that crossed the bridge of her nose. Ian had told her some months ago—and Catherine Brant, though somewhat amused at her intent, had confirmed it—that to paint your face white in that manner meant that you came in peace, and that blue was for wisdom and confidence.
Rachel had wanted to ask Catherine whether she thought this course a wise one, but didn’t. She knew quite well it wasn’t, but the blue band was meant as an exhortation to those who saw it, as well as she who wore it.
“It is done?” Rachel asked; she’d asked before, and asked now only to hear reassurance. “Women do paint their faces, as well as men?”