Twin Willows: A Novel (4 page)

Again Stuart Martin laughed. “You sound like Aunt Matilda,” he said. “She wants me to make a great deal of money, without engaging in vulgar trade or commerce.”

“How do you feel about that? You must know that my father has been a trader all his life.”

“Yes, and unlike some who deal with the Indians, Ian McKnight not only made money, but also seems to have conducted himself honorably. Not all such men can say that.”

“You are a good teacher. I can’t imagine anything you could ever do that would be any more suited to your talents.”

Stuart looked away from Anna, then stood and walked over to the window, where a fine sleet rattled against the pane. After a moment he returned and sat down again, avoiding looking directly into her eyes. “If I tell you what I might do, will you agree to keep it to yourself?”

A shiver completely unrelated to the cold moved down Anna’s spine as she realized that Stuart Martin was about to tell her something that he would probably not even discuss with his aunt. “Of course,” she said faintly.

With fascination, Anna noticed for the first time the steady pulse beating in Stuart’s temple. Had it always been so visible, or was she just now seeing it because of the heightened sensations she felt in his presence?

When he continued to be silent, Anna laid her hand lightly on his coat sleeve. “It’s all right if you’d rather not tell me—I understand.”

Stuart covered her hand with his and stared intently into Anna’s eyes as if testing the truth of her words. “I believe you do, at that,” he said. “So many do not.”

“It is the same with me,” Anna said quietly. “Many people don’t understand my existence. Sometimes I think they wonder why I should be living at all.”

A look of anger passed over Stuart’s features, and he shook his head slightly. “The world is full of ignorant people, Miss McKnight. Sometimes I think I’m being presumptuous to assume that I can teach them better, but perhaps that may be my call.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be a teacher,” Anna said.

“I said I would never teach here. Your father first put an idea into my mind that has stayed.”

Anna looked puzzled. “My father? What did he say?”

“As you know, your father and I became very good friends. Sharing rations and quarters, we had many opportunities to speak frankly, as men are apt to do before battles they’re not sure they’ll survive. At such a time he told me about your mother, and how some members of his own family—he didn’t name them—had cut him off when he married her because they thought of Silverwillow as a subhuman savage.”

At Anna’s sharp intake of breath, Stuart stopped, concern apparent in his expression. “I feared my words would be hurtful,” he said.

“No,” Anna managed to say. “It’s nothing I haven’t heard before about—savages.”

“Of course, your father said that the aunt who brought you up didn’t feel that way,” Stuart hastened to add.

Anna nodded. “Yes, Aunt Agnes never differentiated between me and her own children. But I’ve heard such things from others, even my own cousins, all my life. I try not to let it bother me, but I do feel sad that people can be so cruel.”

Stuart took her hand in his and gently pressed it. “Exactly what I thought when your father told me about it. Then he suggested I should consider living on the frontier, as he has done.”

“Your aunt would not approve,” Anna said.

Stuart pulled the corners of his mouth down in an imitation of Miss Martin’s perpetual expression. “Aunt Matilda hasn’t liked anything I’ve ever done—she’s unlikely to start now. Anyway, she cannot control my future.”

“What would you do if you went West?” For a moment, Anna allowed herself to imagine Stuart Martin in buckskins. She liked the picture.

Stuart took his hand from hers again. “I would like to start my own school, but that will take more money than I have now. I might stay on at Princeton and tutor for a time when my own studies are completed. Then I’d like to cross the mountains and see the Northwest Territory,” he said.

Where I was born
? Anna’s thought answered her unspoken question and finished what his own words had not. “It’s still wilderness out there,” she said, more distantly than she intended.

“It will grow less so in time. Anyway, all that’s still far in the future. That’s one reason nothing must be said about it now.”

Anna’s eyes silently reinforced her spoken words. “I understand. You can trust me.”

For a moment Anna and Stuart gazed into each other’s eyes, aware that something important had passed between them, but not quite understanding its true nature.

Then Stuart gestured toward the forgotten Latin book. “We seem to have strayed from the subject at hand. Shall we continue? I believe I can show you how to continue to study Caesar on your own after I leave.”

“I wish you could stay here longer,” Anna dared to say.

The way Stuart looked at her made Anna know that he shared the sentiment. “It is probably just as well that I must leave soon,” he said, and Anna thought she knew what he meant.

Stuart Martin had his whole future ahead of him. Despite their apparently mutual attraction, she thought, having a half-breed wife would be a disadvantage to him. Immediately Anna chided herself for the presumption that marrying her could ever enter Stuart Martin’s mind.

“Very well, sir. I will do my best to study on my own,” Anna said.

Moments later Miss Martin entered the room, looking almost disappointed to see her nephew standing on the opposite side of the table from where Anna sat, listening as the young woman haltingly read aloud in Latin.

“I should think you’ve both had enough of that for one day,” said the headmistress with some asperity. “Clear off the table and we’ll take some tea.”

W
ACCACHALLA
, N
ORTHWEST
T
ERRITORY, 1781

The girl the Shawnee knew as Willow sat at the entrance of the lodge she shared with Bear’s Daughter and gazed at their village without really seeing it.
Something unusual will soon happen
. Willow knew it in the same way that she knew that rain would come, even when the sky was blue. Furthermore, Willow sensed that Bear’s Daughter shared her belief that some important change awaited them both.

We’ve had much change lately, and not for good
, Willow thought as she recalled the source of their recent hardships. The red-coated
Shemanese
, who not many years past had fought the French and some of the O-hio tribes, now warred with Shemanese settlers. They brought fine gifts, rifles and powder, and iron cooking pots to any Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, or Wyandot who would raid the
Shemanese
settlements to the west and south. Sometimes the red-coats even led the warriors themselves. Some of the septs had refused to take part, only to have their corn burned in the field by
Shemanese
who blamed all Indians for the work of a few.

The general unrest and persistent shortage of food forced Chief Black Snake to move his people from one place to another in a vain search for the security they had once taken for granted. They had wandered far to the north, visiting with their brothers along the way, but no one had much to share with them. A few moons back they had returned to Waccachalla. Once more they repaired their
wegiwas
and planted crops they knew they might never harvest.

Since their return, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, at least on the surface. Willow did not have to be told, however, that all was not well. Vague rumors spread through the village almost daily, and the lines between friend and foe, once so clear, were now less certain. Some said that the
Shemanese
settlers would spill from their farms to the east and make the Shawnee leave their villages. Others said that the redcoats and the other
Shemanese
would soon quit fighting each other. Then all would return to the faraway land from which they had come, and the Shawnee could continue the life that the
Shemanese
had so disrupted.

In the meantime, Black Snake’s warriors spent a great deal of time away from Waccachalla, raiding with first one group and then another. Sometimes they came back with bounty from
Shemanese
settlements or from the strange flat boats the
Shemanese
rode on down the O-hio-se-pe. Even when they stayed in the village, the men spent more time readying their weapons than using them to hunt food. Often the warriors put on war paint and preened for no reason. With fierce war whoops, they’d shake their tomahawks at imaginary enemies while the old men, women, and children laughed and shouted their approval.

Willow had watched these rites from afar. While she wore a long, fringed deerskin shift identical to those of the other village women, Willow looked nothing like them. The Shawnee women were generally short and sturdily built, with high-bridged noses and coarse black hair. In contrast, the tall and slender Willow had lighter skin and more delicate features. Most strikingly different was her waist-length chestnut hair, which Bear’s Daughter took great pride in adorning. This morning, the old woman knelt behind Willow as she braided thin rawhide strips into its soft, lustrous strands.

Willow grew weary of sitting still and turned to address Bear’s Daughter, her tone carefully polite. “Is something wrong that you spend so much time dressing my hair this day, my mother?”

“The stiffness that holds my hands makes them slow, Littlewillow,” Bear’s Daughter replied.

“You are not well, my mother. The medicine man—”

“Sits-in-Shadow has no medicine for me,” Bear’s Daughter said scornfully, and Willow feared she spoke the truth. Her mother hadn’t fully recovered from the terrible cold of last winter when even the O-hio-se-pe had frozen solid and they’d all hungered. Bear’s Daughter touched Willow lightly on the shoulder. “Turn around. I will put this fine blue jay feather over your ear. Then I will be done.”

Willow sighed. “No one else calls me Littlewillow. Am I not already even taller than the chief of Waccachalla village? I am no longer ‘little,’ my mother. The others smile behind their hands that you still call me so.”

Bear’s Daughter grunted in disapproval. “Do I not always tell you not to care what others say? Their laughter means nothing. I call my daughter what I like.”

Willow well knew the futility of attempting to change her mother’s mind. “It is so,” she murmured.

Bear’s Daughter leaned over Willow’s shoulder and pointed toward a young warrior who had just returned to the village with a brace of rabbits. “What of Short Elk, Littlewillow? Perhaps he will yet bring you a deer.”

Willow glanced at the Shawnee, a lad she had beaten in foot races as a child; then she looked away lest he should see her watching him and think she meant to invite his attention. “Short Elk is well named, my mother. I would not look down on my man.”

“It is not good to say such things.” Bear’s Daughter tried to sound reproving, but her tone told Willow that she agreed. “My daughter must soon take a husband. Black Snake says it is a disgrace before the village that she does not already do so.”

Willow’s mouth tightened. “Why should this be true? There is not one warrior in Waccachalla you would want me to wed, nor any who would have me.”

Bear’s Daughter did not try to deny Willow’s statement. “You are feared because you are different, but my kin the chief knows better. For many years Black Snake has cared for us both. It is right that someone else should now share his burden.”

Willow regarded her mother with suspicion. “Does the chief himself say these words?”

“Black Snake does not have to speak. The women whisper that the great warrior Otter wishes to take you into his lodge.”

Willow drew in a sharp breath and her eyes widened. Much older than she, Otter had been married for several years until his wife died of a fever. Willow had never thought of Otter as a possible suitor, nor did she wish to now. “Otter has not said this thing to me.”

“Ayee, but his eyes speak it when he looks at you.”

Willow shook her head in disbelief and raised her chin, half in defiance, half in appeal. “Does my mother think the chief will make this match?”

Bear’s Daughter stood and looked at the beautiful young girl she’d reared from birth. She recalled how, years ago, Littlewillow’s mother had said almost the same words.
I cannot choose from these warriors of the Clan of the Turtle
, Silverwillow had told Bear’s Daughter.
There is not one I would have
. Scarcely a week later, she had met the redheaded white trader Ian McKnight. From the moment each had set eyes on the other, Bear’s Daughter had known that Silverwillow would have no other man.

“The chief will know your wishes,” Bear’s Daughter said.

“My wish is not to take a husband from Waccachalla,” Willow said.

“That is bold talk,” Bear’s Daughter said. Her tone was reproving, but the suddenly relaxed lines around her mouth indicated she was not displeased by her daughter’s words.

“You will know how to make it less so,” Willow said.

Bear’s Daughter lowered her head and sighed. “I will try, my child.”

Black Snake has always listened to Bear’s Daughter
, Willow thought.
She will see that I do not have to take this man Otter
.

“It is good, my mother,” Willow said aloud.

Yet after Bear’s Daughter left, wearing her best white deerskin robe and ornamented as befitted an audience with the chief, Willow had to consider the possibility that her mother’s mission might fail. Black Snake had shown a great deal of kindness to one so obviously different from the rest of his people, and to dispute his wishes would be unthinkable.

If only I looked like everyone else, perhaps I would be more content among them
, Willow thought. From a very young age she had realized that she wasn’t like the others in Waccachalla, even including the woman she called mother. At first Willow accepted without curiosity Bear’s Daughter’s explanation that she looked different because she’d been fathered by a white man, long since dead. When Willow asked Bear’s Daughter what her father had been like, she would say only that he was a good man, for a
Shemanese
. Over the years, whenever Willow saw any
Shemanese
, she always wondered if her father might have looked like them. Lately, seeing men like Simon Girty and Alexander McKee, who worked for the redcoats and seemed ready to turn on their own kind, Willow hoped that her father had not been like them.

As Willow grew older, the other village girls near her age began to take husbands and have babies, but no suitors sought her out in the forest or brought deer to her lodge door. She had always expected to marry someday, as was the custom, but she had seen no man who interested her, nor was she in haste to exchange the gentle care of her mother for the hard life of a Shawnee wife and mother. Without Willow’s having to tell of her feelings, Bear’s Daughter had seemed not only to understand, but also to sympathize with her.

Now, however, Willow knew that as a properly dutiful daughter, she was expected to marry, and thus provide for herself and Bear’s Daughter in her mother’s old age. Black Snake, both as her chief and her guardian, had the power to make her accept Otter, should he wish to do so. In that case, Willow would have no choice but to enter Otter’s lodge.

I will do what I have to do for the sake of my mother
, Willow resolved, but the thought of having to accept the touch of a man she cared nothing for made her cringe.

I could provide my mother with meat as well as any man in the village
, she told herself.
It is not fair that I am not allowed to hunt
.

As a child, Willow had learned to set snares, to make arrows fly true, and to fear neither man nor beast. Yet from her twelfth year, she had no longer been allowed to go into the forest to do those things. The other girls who had learned the ways of the woods with Willow now seemed content merely to plant and tend their corn, tan and sew the skins of the animals their men brought in, and bear and raise their babies.

Is it so with Shemanese women
? Willow wondered. Her only knowledge of white women came from brief glimpses of some captives she’d seen during their wanderings, and of one blue-eyed woman with hair the color of corn-tassels who stayed in Waccachalla only a few days before being taken somewhere else. Without offering any reason, Bear’s Daughter had made Willow stay inside their lodge until the woman left, and she never got to see the light-haired woman up close.

Willow sighed. A feeling of vague restlessness, always there just beneath the surface, had lately grown inside her. Bear’s Daughter had taught Willow to honor and obey her elders, but she had also set an example that had led the girl to be independent.

Whatever Black Snake decides will change my life forever
, Willow thought uneasily.
Why is it that my mother stays so long
?

When at last Bear’s Daughter slowly made her way toward their lodge, Willow rose and forced herself to walk, rather than run, to meet her.

“What says Black Snake, my mother?”

Bear’s Daughter glanced at Willow, but remained silent as she reached the lodge and exchanged her best robe for her everyday deerskin shift.

Willow longed to repeat the question, but she knew from experience that it would avail her nothing; Bear’s Daughter would speak only when she was ready. Willow sat cross-legged in the center of the lodge and tried to curb her impatience while she waited for her mother to join her.

When Bear’s Daughter finally sat opposite Willow, she did not at first speak of her meeting with the chief.

“You know that you were not born in Waccachalla,” she began, then paused for Willow to confirm her statement.

Willow nodded. “Yes, my mother. You say I was birthed near the forks of the Muskingum in the village of your Delaware cousins.”

Bear’s Daughter nodded. “Ayee, it is so. You have no blood kin among the warriors in Waccachalla. Since you do not have to look elsewhere for a husband, Black Snake would have you accept a deer from one of his own warriors.”

Willow allowed her disappointment to show for a moment, then raised her chin and nodded assent. “I understand. How much time do I have?”

“The chief says only what he wants, not when. Do not concern yourself about this thing yet, my daughter.”

My mother will not allow me to be forced into marriage
, Willow told herself. Somehow Bear’s Daughter would find a way to give Willow what she wanted. Had it not always been so?

“It will be as you say,” Willow murmured, then hugged Bear’s Daughter.

If Otter brings me a deer, my mother will deal with him herself
, Willow assured herself. For now, that hope would sustain her.