There were poplar saplings growing up through the buckled boards of the small porch, too; the forest had begun its stealthy work of reclamation. But the forest didn’t smoke its meat. Someone was here.
He dismounted and tethered Bart to a sapling, primed his pistol, and made his way toward the house. It could be Indians on a hunt, smoking their game before carrying it back to wherever they’d come from. He’d no quarrel with hunters, but if it was squatters who’d thought to take over the property, they could think again. This was his place.
It was Indians—or one, at least. A half-naked man squatted in the shade of a huge beech tree, tending a small firepit covered with damp burlap; William could smell fresh-cut hickory logs, mingled with the thick smell of blood, fresh meat, smoke, and the pungent reek of drying fish—a small rack of split trout stood beside an open fire. His belly rumbled.
The Indian—he looked young, though large and very muscular—had his back to William and was deftly dressing out the carcass of a small hog that lay on a flattened burlap sack beside the firepit.
“Hallo, there,” William said, raising his voice. The man looked round, blinking against the smoke and waving it out of his face. He rose slowly, the knife he’d been using still in his hand, but William had spoken pleasantly enough, and the stranger wasn’t menacing. He also wasn’t a stranger. He stepped out of the tree’s shadow, the sunlight hit his hair, and William felt a jolt of astonished recognition.
So did the young man, by the look on his face.
“Lieutenant?” he said, disbelieving. He looked William quickly up and down, registering the lack of uniform, and his big dark eyes fixed on William’s face. “Lieutenant … Lord Ellesmere?”
“I used to be. Mr. Cinnamon, isn’t it?” He couldn’t help smiling as he spoke the name. The young man’s hair was now little more than an inch long, but only shaving it off entirely would have disguised either its distinctive deep reddish-brown color or its exuberant curliness. A French mission orphan, he owed his name to it.
“John Cinnamon, yes. Your servant … sir.” The erstwhile scout gave him a presentable half bow, though the “sir” was spoken with something of a question.
“William Ransom. Yours, sir,” William said, smiling, and thrust out his hand. John Cinnamon was a couple of inches shorter than himself, and a couple of inches broader; the scout had grown into himself in the last two years and possessed a very solid handshake.
“I trust you’ll pardon my curiosity, Mr. Cinnamon—but how the devil do you come to be here?” William asked, letting go. He’d last seen John Cinnamon three years before, in Quebec, where he’d spent much of a long, cold winter hunting and trapping in company with the half-Indian scout, who was near his own age.
He wondered briefly if Cinnamon had come in search of him, but that was absurd. He didn’t think he’d ever mentioned Mount Josiah to the man—and even if he had, Cinnamon couldn’t possibly have expected to find him here. He’d not been here since he was sixteen.
“Ah.” To William’s surprise, a slow flush washed Cinnamon’s broad cheekbones. “I—er—I … well, I’m on my way south.” The flush grew deeper.
William cocked an eyebrow. While it was true that Virginia was south of Quebec and that there was a good deal of country souther still, Mount Josiah wasn’t on the way to anywhere. No roads led here. He had himself come upriver with his horse on a barge to the Breaks, that stretch of falls and turbulent water on the James River where the land suddenly collapsed upon itself and put a stop to water travel. He’d seen only three people as he rode on above the Breaks—all of them headed the other way.
Suddenly, though, Cinnamon’s wide shoulders relaxed and the look of wariness was erased by relief.
“In fact, I came to see my friend,” he said, and nodded toward the house. William turned quickly, to see another Indian picking his way through the raspberry brambles littering what used to be a small croquet lawn.
“Manoke!” he said. Then shouted, “Manoke!” making the older man look up. The older Indian’s face lighted with joy, and a sudden uncomplicated happiness washed through William’s heart, cleansing as spring rain.
The Indian was lithe and spare as he’d always been, his face a little more lined. His hair smelled of woodsmoke when William embraced him, and the gray in it was the same soft color as smoke, but it was still thick and coarse as ever—he could see that easily; he was looking down on it from above, Manoke’s cheek pressed into his shoulder.
“What did you say?” he asked, releasing Manoke.
“I said, ‘My, how you have grown, boy,’” Manoke said, grinning up at him. “Do you need food?”
MANOKE WAS HIS father’s friend; Lord John had never called him anything else. The Indian came and went as he pleased, generally without notice, though he was at Mount Josiah more often than not. He wasn’t a servant or a hired man, but he did the cooking and washing-up when he was there, kept the chickens—yes, there were still chickens; William could hear them clucking and rustling as they settled in the trees near the ruined house—and helped when there was game to be cleaned and butchered.
“Your hog?” William asked Cinnamon, with a brief jerk of the head toward the covered firepit. He’d seen to Bart, then joined the Indians for supper on the crumbling porch, the men enjoying the soft evening air and keeping an eye on the drying fish, in case of marauding raccoons, foxes, or other hungry vermin.
“Oui. Up there,” Cinnamon said, waving a big hand toward the north. “Two hours’ walk. A few pigs in the wood there, not many.”
William nodded. “Do you have a horse?” he asked. It was a small hog, maybe sixty pounds, but heavy to carry for two hours—especially as Cinnamon presumably hadn’t known how far he’d have to go. He’d already told William that he’d never visited Mount Josiah before.
Cinnamon nodded, his mouth full, and jerked his chin in the direction of the sheds and the ramshackle tobacco barn. William wondered how long Manoke had been in residence; the place looked as though it had been deserted for years—and yet there were chickens …
The clucking and brief squawks of the settling birds reminded him suddenly and sharply of Rachel Hunter, and in the next breath, he found the scent of rain, wet chickens—and wet girl.
“… the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual.”
“Perverse?” Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.
“The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a rainstorm. Perverse.” She pulled out a linen towel and began to dry her hair with it.
The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel against the shutters.
“Hmmph,” said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. “I expect she will be knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve her right.” She resumed drying her hair. “No great matter. I shall be pleased never to see any of those chickens again.”