He shrugged. “I have no home now. There is no use returning across the sea, for much would have changed, and I have changed, also. If you will have my company, I will come with you.”
“There is one thing that yet must be done, John. As you did for my father, so I would have you do for us.”
He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Marry you? Aye, I will do it, lad, and be glad. She’s a fine lass.”
Tom Carboy had also come up to the fire, leaving behind the work on the ship to drink a bowl of broth. “If the lass will have me, I would be glad to stand in her father’s place, to give her away.”
She looked up at him very seriously. “Tom, had I no father of my own, I’d be glad to claim you for mine. Would you stand for him?”
The old sailor looked around, suddenly shy. “I would, miss, I would indeed.”
“Tomorrow, then?” Tilly suggested. “At the nooning, to give all a chance to make ready.”
I went for a walk along the shore. Was this the right way for me? Something inside me said it was so, yet I did not know. I had small experience with women and knew little of their ways except what I had observed when Lila and my mother were about, to say nothing of Noelle, young though she was, and the wives of Kane O’Hara and some others whom I’d seen. Yet being a husband could be no more difficult than some other things I’d done.
The shore was quiet, with only the rustle of the surf along the sand and the mewing of the gulls. I sat on a driftwood log and watched the water roll in and saw the moon rise over the sea.
She would be well received amongst us, and Temperance, Yance’s wife, was her old friend. It was a good thing, a very good thing.
The sky was cloudless. It would be a good day on the morrow, a good day. We would launch the Abigail again, with luck, and Diana and I would be married.
There was a faint sound in the sand behind me, and I came swiftly to my feet, taking two quick steps forward before turning, a hand on a pistol.
Three Indians stood there in the moonlight, their hands by their sides. Each carried a spear, each a bow and quiver of arrows slung over a shoulder.
The nearest one, a broad man with a deep chest, spoke. The tongue was familiar.
“You are Catawba?” I asked in his tongue.
Immediately they were excited, and all began to talk until the first man lifted a hand for silence. “You speak our words. How is this that you, a white man, speak to us in our tongue?”
“I have a friend,” I said, “who was the friend of my father before I was born. His name was Wa-ga-su. Many Catawba have fought beside us.”
“Wa-ga-su strong man, great warrior. I know.”
“You are far from home,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Eat,” he said. “We are much hungry.”
“Come,” I said, “and walk beside me that they will know you for a friend.”
Surely fortune was with me, for now we should have company on our long trek to Shooting Creek, for our way was also the way of the Catawba.
CHAPTER XX
The way of our return to the home of my people must be devious, for the Catawba had enemies, as did we. Yet I was told by the Catawba there had been no raids since the death of my father, that the Seneca bided their time. “They will come,” he said, “for they will wish to know if the sons are as strong as the father.”
“Let them rest beside their fires, in the lodges they have built,” I said. “We wish to kill no more of them.”
The Catawba added sticks to the small fire. “The old men know that times change, and they would be content with peace, but what of the young men who wish to test themselves? How better than against the sons of Barnabas?”
In the morning we would float the Abigail, and the Catawba would help. They were six strong young men, for although but three had come to the fire, three others had remained behind until it was known how they would be received. Had they known I was a son of Barnabas, they would all have come at once, for had not the Catawba always been the friend of the white man? And did not the sons of Barnabas know this?
“Many white men do not know the Catawba are friendly, and to them all Indians look alike, so be careful whom you approach.”
The Catawba smiled cheerfully. “So we came to one man alone. If one man is unfriendly, he is easier to kill than many.”
They looked at Diana. “She is your woman?”
“Tomorrow she becomes my woman. You have come in time.”
“What do they say?” Diana asked.
My smile was wide when I told her the question and my answer. She flushed. “You have not asked me!”
“But I did ask!”
“Not when we would marry. It cannot be tomorrow. I am not ready.”
“John Tilly,” I explained, “is not only a ship’s master but an ordained minister. As such, he married my mother and father, and he can marry us.
“Tomorrow we will float his ship. He cannot linger on this coast. It would be foolhardy to trust the weather another day, and as it is, he has been unbelievably fortunate. Only a little wind could pile sand up behind her so she might never be floated.
“I regret that we must hurry, but unless you wish to go into the forest traveling with a man and unmarried to him, then I think it would be wise if tomorrow was the day.”
“Oh, you do, do you? Have you thought that I may have changed my mind?”
“If you have,” I said, growing irritated, “now is the time. Captain Tilly will take you home. He is planning to stop by Shawmut, and he would be glad to take you there.”
One of the Indians asked a question, and I replied. They stared at her with admiration and many grunts and exclamations. “What is that all about?” Diana demanded.
“They wanted to know how many blankets I traded for you.”
“Blankets? For me?”
Chuckling, I told her, “I said I traded five muskets, one hundred pounds of lead, a keg of powder, and ten blankets for you.”
“That’s a lie!” she objected. “You have done noth—”
“Ssh!” I admonished. “What I told them is an enormous price. I told them you were the daughter of a great chief, a wise man, and that you were a wise woman, a plant woman, and a medicine woman. That makes you very important by their standards.”
“And not by yours?”
“Of course! I wish them to respect you, and to do that I must speak a language they understand. Now they think of you as a princess.”
Long before daylight we gathered on the beach to attempt the floating of the Abigail. She had been pumped free of the water she had taken on, and some of her cargo had been landed on the beach. The sand had not begun to pile up behind her, and with a line run out to a boat and twelve good men at the oars, we went to work. Yet it was midmorning before we worked her free of the sand and got her fairly afloat. And it was nearly dusk before her cargo was reshipped and she could set her sails. While she lay off the shore, Diana and I, standing upon the beach, were wed.
It was a scene I shall never forget. The long sweep of the glistening sands, the vast marches of the ocean nearby, the low stunted growth inland, and about us the small group of British sailors and Catawbas.
When all was over, John Tilly held out his hand to Diana, but she ignored it and kissed him lightly on the cheek. A moment we lingered, saying a few last words, with a last minute message from Diana to her father, whom we soon hoped to see, and then they shoved off and were taken aboard.
We waited only a moment longer to be certain she cleared, but her sails filled, and she bore away to the open sea. We walked inland then, going toward the place where the Catawbas had left their canoe, and only once did we look back. Only her topmasts were visible against the red afterglow of the sunset.
Diana was quiet, as well she might be. She had trusted herself to a man of whom she knew, after all, very little and to six Indians of whom she knew nothing.
Their canoe was large, a birch-bark canoe such as the Hurons make, far better than the heavier dugout canoes of the Iroquois. That it was a captured canoe, I had no doubt. The inland waters were calm, and we made good time, moving up a bay called the Sinepuxtent. The Catawbas, great wanderers and warriors, now wished to be home. We swept to the head of the bay, had a brief glimpse of the open sea again, and then moved across a wider bay and into the mouth of a river.