The Pursuit of Tamsen Littlejohn (10 page)

He found it lodged against the pine under which they’d halted. Back on the trace, she took it from him with quiet thanks. He wondered what it was she deemed so precious, but didn’t ask. He got out the canteen and handed it to her. “Want to walk a spell? It’ll help you keep awake.”

Sleep was what she needed, but she gave him back the canteen and said, “I’ll walk.”

Pleased with her fortitude, he took the horse’s bridle and started.

Not a dozen steps on, she gave a little cry. Jesse turned back to find her hunkered on the trail, rubbing at her foot. He’d forgotten she wore those dainty-heeled shoes. He’d have to do something about that. Ahead lay stretches they’d both have to manage afoot. But not yet.

He went back and offered her a hand. “Come on. Let’s get you up on that horse.”

He caught her falling from the saddle twice again before the stars faded and the trail grew clear enough to follow without his senses focused on every stone and root and knife-edged drop. A mist had crept up from the hollows. Chill tendrils of it nipped at his heels. They were deep in the mountains and high, with rank on rank of giant hardwoods crowding in, here and there dark pockets of spruce and fir. They hadn’t been seen—by
human eyes—but with dawn coming, a change of direction seemed in order.

Ahead the trace crested. He and Cade had hunted these mountains in autumns past. If memory served, it dipped into a meadow where a stream flowed. Along that stream ran another trail, overgrown but passable. He’d make for that, find Tamsen a place to lay her head for a spell.

Glancing back at her, he reckoned they could be tracked by the hairpins she’d been losing through the night. Her hair spilled down in an inky thicket across her shoulders, halfway to her waist. The lacy bit hung askew. So did her head, lolling toward her chest. Shadows underscored her eyes, and her face showed the strain of fatigue and grief and fear. Still she was so beautiful that Jesse had to remind himself to breathe.

Then he looked past her, and his chest filled at the sight that greeted him. He brought the horse to a stop on the sloping ground. She jerked in the saddle. He moved to her knee in case she fell, but she didn’t. Getting her bearings, she blinked down at him with dark, suffering eyes.

“Morning,” he said, with a searching smile.

She shut her eyes, as if the sight of him and the horse and the world was too much misery to bear. He wanted to give her something to hold against the dark tide of memories sure to be pressing in on her.

“Tamsen.” When she opened her eyes, he nodded toward their back trail. “Fetch a look.”

Clearly she was weary beyond caring, but she turned to look and caught her breath.

They were too hemmed by trees for the grandest view, but a gap in their ranks below gave prospect of a limestone cliff rising sheer from a dark wave of forest crashing, mist-foamed, against its stony face, ablaze in every shade from rose to ruddy gold, giving back the colors of sunrise. Above it in the clear-washed air an eagle turned, catching fire in its wings. Jesse drank it in with the joyous relief that always accompanied his leaving the
piedmont behind—though this time he’d brought along more than a few of its complications.

The horse shifted, breaking the moment. Tamsen Littlejohn had put her back to the view and was looking up the trace, eyes wary as a deer’s. The same alarm jolted down Jesse’s spine when he followed her gaze.

Where the trace crested, there now stood a string of pack mules with a man at their head, looking back at them.

The lean little trapper with a scruffy beard was headed to Morganton to divest himself of the hides his mules conveyed. There’d been room for horse and pack train to pass on the trace, which Jesse had hoped to do with no more than a how-do. But the trapper, who’d camped the night past in the meadow beyond, proved inclined to conversate.

“Charlie Spencer,” he said by way of introduction. “Where ye folks headed?”

“Homebound.” Jesse berated himself for not abandoning the trace sooner as Spencer took in the drooping horse and Tamsen—more drooping still—with her ripped skirt, tumbled hair, and haunted eyes. Below a stocking cap worn low on his brow, Spencer’s gaze was friendly enough. It was also keen.

“Where might home be?”

“West by a bit, then south.” It was as far from the truth as Jesse could deliver on short notice.

“Over on the French Broad? Ain’t ye taking the roundabout way?”

Jesse forced a smile. “I’m showing my bride a bit of the country.” He put a hand to Tamsen’s knee. It jerked under his touch.

“Anything you folks needing? I got coffee, food—nothing fancy, mind, just trail vittles,” Spencer offered, while his eyes pursued another
line of questioning with Tamsen, who looked less like a bride than a woman abducted and ravished.

A sudden baying of hounds made Jesse’s guts seize. Parrish couldn’t be tracking them so soon, unless … Were they seen leaving Morganton despite his care?

Spencer emitted a piercing whistle. The barking escalated in pitch. The trapper grinned. “Them’s my dogs. Hope they ain’t treed another bear. I got all the skins my mules can tote. If’n I add one more, I’ll be hauling on the ropes to stop ’em sliding down the mountain like tin on grease. You folks out from Morganton?”

Jesse cleared his throat. “Speaking of skins, I could use me a sturdy hide—for footwear,” he added, then wished he hadn’t when Spencer’s gaze went to the ripped, dirty silk shoe on Tamsen’s foot. “I can pay you for it.”

Amenable to the notion whatever his suspicions, Spencer moved to the first mule and worked loose a hide from its burden. Six shillings was the going rate for a good deerskin. This one was well cured. Jesse dug inside his knapsack, searching for his coin pouch, praying he’d enough. He and Cade didn’t do much trade with hard money.

Spencer held out the skin, neatly rolled. “Take it, with my compliments on your nuptials.” Though he spoke to Jesse, he’d been looking at Tamsen.

“You sure?” Jesse asked.

Spencer hesitated a beat. “Certain sure, on both counts.”

Disinclined to argue, Jesse took the skin. “My wife and I thank you kindly.”

A crashing of brush heralded the arrival of Spencer’s hounds, a lanky trio of spotted hides and lolling tongues. Jesse’s horse shied at their milling. The mules barely twitched an ear.

“Best be pushing on,” Spencer said, giving up trying to catch Tamsen’s gaze. “Good luck to ye, folks.”

At the stream that wound through the sloping meadow, Jesse halted. The rising sun spangled the dew clinging to grass and brush, save in the flattened place of Spencer’s camp, set back off the trace. The fire ring emitted faint warmth beneath Jesse’s outstretched hand. Crouching over the blackened remains, he looked back to where the trace crested, but he saw no sign of the man. He stood. “Sorry ’bout the wife talk. I had to think quick.”

Tamsen’s haggard eyes beseeched him. For rest.

Concern tightened in his chest. “Reckon you can make it another half mile?”

She bowed forward in the saddle, a study in misery, but clung on as he turned the horse along the stream, following it into cover.

Lulled by the monotonous sway, Tamsen fought to stay in the saddle. She didn’t want to fall again into the arms of the man to whom she’d recklessly entrusted her life. She didn’t want him getting ideas, alone as they were in that wilderness …

“Tamsen?”

Would the rocking never cease? And the weight on her chest, would it never lift? It stole her will to breathe and pushed her down … down to some mired place, black with shadow, where unseen things chittered and rustled and swooped at her head.

“Tamsen. You got to wake up now.”

She woke up. She wasn’t on the horse. The rocking was a hand, shaking her. Under her was hard ground. She hurt all over. And her mother was dead. That was the weight. Not on her chest. In it. As though her heart had been replaced in the night by stone, her ribs by iron bars. She had a powerful thirst and a throbbing in her head.

She opened bleary eyes to a day she’d as soon never face.

Seeing she was awake, her rescuer held out a canteen. “Reckon you’re thirsty. Couldn’t get you to drink a lick when we stopped. You fell on the ground asleep.”

She pushed up to an elbow, took the canteen. The water was cold, sweet on her tongue. She gulped it so fast that it dribbled down her chin. She wiped her mouth with a hand, then offered back the canteen. He wouldn’t take it.

“You keep that.” He moved to where a small fire burned, giving her the privacy of an averted gaze. He was wearing that long fringed shirt open
at the neck. It was a faded, muddy shade, with faint stripes in the linsey-woolsey weave. She tried not to look where his leggings bared his thighs as he squatted to tend the fire.

“Morning’s nigh spent,” he said.

It was. The sun beat down, dappled through leaves. Despite the sense that they were high in the mountains, the air was warm. Tamsen felt clammy beneath her stays, which had pressed the folds of her shift into her flesh where she’d lain. Enduring the discomfort, she untied her cloak and let it fall to the ground.

The past night was a blur. The lurch and sway of the horse, the clatter of hooves on stone, the chill damp on her face. And him. Her rescuer. Her guide. Always he was there, the triangle outline of his hat black against the stars, moonlight catching the tail of his hair hanging between broad shoulders, bow and quiver at his back, rifle in the crook of his arm, as he trudged on and on into that endless night, never seeming to tire. He looked tired now. His sun-browned face was haggard, the lower half shadowed with a day and night of beard.

“We might yet be followed,” he told her, still with his back turned. “If that fellow, Spencer, tells what he’s seen, down in Morganton. I aim to put a heap more miles behind us afore nightfall.”

Looking around, Tamsen found she had no memory of stopping in that place. Trees draped in woody vines surrounded a break in the forest just large enough for the horse to graze. The man’s bedding, a blanket and a black pelt, lay by her cloak. Had he slept so close beside her?

Not for long, by the look of him.

“There’s the stream,” he said into her silence. “If you fancy a wash.”

She’d been hearing its chatter since waking, she realized. A tiny fall spilled where laurel brush closed in. Ferns edged the clearing, their fronds browning at the tips.

“And here’s corndodgers.” He held out a cornmeal cake he’d cooked
on a rock in the embers. She took it unthinking and put it to her mouth. Instantly her stomach rebelled.

She made it to the ferns before she vomited. It went on and on, burning, humiliating, until her stomach had no more to heave. Drool and worse ran down her chin and clung to her trailing hair. She had nothing with which to clean herself but the hem of her petticoat. She reached for it, and stared. It was rent to her knees, baring her shift and the snagged remnants of her stockings. She remembered, back in Morganton, the man’s knife in the dark, how for a terrible moment she’d thought he intended something different.

Tamsen crawled back to the fire where he sat, knees bent, head in his hands, fingers buried in his unbound hair. The sun-bleached strands at his crown stirred in the breeze that shivered the greenery surrounding them.