He wondered briefly whether perhaps he should take Dottie there for a while. The weather was getting colder and rain more frequent; a newly bereaved woman weakened by illness surely oughtn’t to be required to ride through storms and mud for weeks. And if Manoke was still in residence, he and the Indian could easily repair enough of the house to give them shelter …
No. This was a fantasy, born of his own desire to sit still on his shattered stoop and think about things. He needed to get Dottie back to Uncle Hal as soon as possible, where she could be taken care of, heal in the bosom of her family. And, said a small treacherous voice in the back of his mind, you might just want to see Amaranthus again before too long.
“That, too,” he said aloud, and nudged his horse into a faster pace.
He had enough money to bring Dottie back by coach—but that was assuming a coach was to be had. The settlement of Wilkins Corner boasted three oxen, one mule, and a small herd of goats, plus the odd pig or two. There were only four houses, and a brief inquiry of a woman milking a goat sent him directly to the door of Fear God Elmsworth.
This gentleman proved to be in his eighties and quite deaf, but his much younger wife—only sixty or so—was able by shouting into his ear at a distance of two inches to get across to him William’s identity and mission.
“Dorothea, you say?” Mr. Elmsworth cocked a bushy brow at William. “What’s he want with her?”
“I … am … her … cousin,” William said, leaning down to address the old gentleman at the top of his voice.
“Cousin? Cousin?” The old man looked at his wife for confirmation of this unlikely statement, and receiving it, shook his head. “You don’t look nothin’ like her.”
William turned to the wife.
“Will you please tell your husband that Dorothea’s father is my uncle, and his brother is my stepfather?”
The woman heard this but was plainly baffled by the genealogical information, for she opened her mouth for a moment, then shut it, frowning.
“Never mind,” William said, keeping his patience. “Please, just tell Dorothea that I’m here.”
“Dorothea ain’t here,” said Mr. Elmsworth, somehow catching this. He looked puzzled and glanced at his wife. “Is she?”
“No, she isn’t,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, looking puzzled as well.
William took a deep breath and decided that shaking Mrs. Elmsworth until her head rattled wouldn’t be the act of a gentleman.
“Where is she?” he inquired, gently.
Mrs. Elmsworth looked surprised.
“Why, her brother came and fetched her, near on a month ago.”
WILLIAM HAD NODDED in automatic response to Mrs. Elmsworth, but then actually heard what she’d said and jerked as though stung by a bee.
“Her brother,” he repeated carefully, and both the old people nodded. “Her brother. What was his name?”
Mr. Elmsworth, who was now lighting his long-stemmed clay pipe, removed it from his mouth long enough to say, “Eh?”
“He don’t know,” Mrs. Elmsworth said, shaking her capped head in apology. “I was workin’ in the orchard when the man came, and by the time I came back, they’d gone away together. Dorothea left a sweet note, thanking us for looking after her, but she said nothin’ about her brother’s name in it, and my husband was too deaf to understand what they said, beyond them making signs to him.”
“Ah.”
It was possible that Mr. Elmsworth had misunderstood the situation entirely, William reflected, but it was just possible that it had been Henry. When last he’d seen Henry Grey, the man had been living in Philadelphia with a very handsome Negro landlady who might or might not be a widow, recovering slowly from having lost a foot or two of his guts after being shot in the abdomen. William supposed that Denzell might have paused in Philadelphia on his way to New Jersey and given Henry word of Dorothea’s presence, and either had asked Henry to go and fetch her or Henry had determined to do so on his own.
A sudden thought struck him, though, and he inflated his lungs, leaned down close to Mr. Elmsworth’s hairy earhole, and shouted, “Did he wear a uniform?”
Mr. Elmsworth started and dropped his pipe, which his wife fortunately caught before it could shatter on the floor.
“Goodness, young man,” he said reprovingly. “’Tisn’t manners to shout indoors. That’s what I was always taught as a young’un.”
“I beg pardon, sir,” William said, in a slightly lower tone. “Mrs. Hunter has … two brothers, you see; I wondered which it might be.”
Henry had been invalided out of the army, but his elder brother, Adam, the middle one of William’s three cousins, was captain in an infantry battalion.
“Oh, ah,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, and set about questioning her husband in a high-pitched howl, eventually eliciting a dubious opinion that the young fellow might have been in some sort of uniform, though with so many folk going about with guns and colored britches and fancy buttons these days, ’twas hard to say.
“We don’t hold with vanity, see,” he explained to William. “Being Friends, like. Not with armies nor guns, neither, save they’re for hunting. Hunting’s all right. Folk have to eat, you know,” he added, giving William a faintly accusatory look.
William kept his patience, there being no choice, and was rewarded with a more promising thought. He turned to Mrs. Elmsworth.
“Will you ask your husband, please—did the man who came for Dorothea resemble her?” For Henry and Benjamin were slender and dark-haired, like their father, but Adam looked like his mother, as did Dottie, both being fair-haired and pink-cheeked, with rounded chins and large, dreamy blue eyes.
Mr. Elmsworth had grown somewhat tense during the questioning and was puffing on his pipe with an air of agitation, but relaxed when this was put to him. He exhaled a great cloud of blue smoke and nodded, hard.
“He did, then,” he said. “Very like, very like.” Adam. William relaxed, too, and thanked the Elmsworths profusely, though they refused any gift of money.
As he prepared to take his leave, he had another thought.
“Ma’am—do you still have the note my cousin wrote to you?”
This request resulted in a quarter hour of fussing about the tiny house, picking up sticky jars of preserves and putting them down again, and concluding in Mr. Elmsworth’s belated recollection that he had used the note to light his candle.
“There wasn’t much to it, son,” Mrs. Elmsworth told him sympathetically, seeing his disappointment. “She only thanked us for keeping her, and said as how her brother would take her to her husband.”
IT WAS LATE in the day by now, and his horse was tired and in need of food, so despite his urge to ride off immediately, he reluctantly accepted the hospitality of the Elmsworths’ small barn for the night. They had invited him to share their supper as well, but having seen that their supper was to consist of a dab of cornmeal porridge with a few drops of molasses and a few slices of hard and curling bread, he assured them that he had a little food in his saddlebags and retired to the barn to see to Betsy’s needs before seeking the refuge of his own thoughts.
In fact, he had a bruised apple and a small chunk of hard cheese, this oozing grease and slightly moldy. He paid little attention to his sparse supper, though, his mind being occupied with what the devil to do next.