My mother, would I ever see her again? She was gone across the sea to England with Noelle and Brian, but I remembered her well.
Jeremy came up from the field, his hand hard from the work there but his smile as bright as ever. “It has been too long, lad. You must stay now.”
This man had stood over me when I was being born during a battle with the Senecas, guarding my mother during her labor. He had been my father’s friend and had left England with him, a down-at-heel gentleman, a wandering swordsman, and a farmer now but holding broad acres with excellent crops and a good trade in furs with friendly Indians.
“I have brought trouble,” I said, and explained.
“The men are coming from the fields,” Jeremy said.
They started within where the food was upon the table, but I lingered to look about. There was a place where some of the logs were blackened near the ground, a place where fire started by Indians had seared the logs before being put out. My father and his men had come into this country when no white man was nearer than the coast and had remained here until he went beyond the mountains scouting for fresh land. For this was our way, bred into us, and we knew it well, always to go beyond the mountains to open new lands.
Within all was bright and cheerful—sunlight through the windows upon burnished copper pots and the dull shine of pewter. The floors were spotless as always and the windows hung with curtains. Muskets stood in their racks near the walls, and the heavy shutters were thrown back now but could be drawn quickly shut.
A strongly built man with a shock of flaxen hair pushed back from the table. “I go to the wall,” he said.
When he had gone, Jeremy said, “He is Schaumberg, a German. He heard of us and came looking, one man and his woman with a baby son. They came through the forest alone.”
“He belongs here, then,” I said. “He is a good man?”
“He works hard, and he is handy with tools. He seems to fear nothing.”
“It is better,” I replied, “to fear a little. One is cautious then.”
“Aye, but he is a careful man.”
One by one they slipped away to the walls, and when I looked again at the rack of muskets, it was half empty. I started to rise. “Sit you,” Lila said. “There will be time enough when the fighting begins, if fighting there is to be.”
She filled my glass again and stood across the table from me. “I like her. Does she have family?”
“A father. A good man. He should be amongst us. He would make a teacher,” I added, “and we will need such.”
We talked long then and of many things. Yance came in and sat beside us. When I asked about our enemies, he shrugged. “We have seen nothing, but they are there. A fawn was crossing our field where they always cross, and suddenly it turned sharp away and trotted back almost the way it came.”
“If it is Max Bauer,” I said, “he will want victory without cost. He will wait, or he will find a way.”
I turned my head to Yance. “I want him,” I said. “I want the man myself.”
Yance shrugged. “Let it happen, Kin. If he comes my way or Jeremy’s, so be it.”
My hackles rose at the thought of him. There were few men I disliked, none that I hated but him. But this went beyond hate, for we were two male creatures of strength who saw in the other an enemy. No matter how we met, we should sooner or later have fought. It was in our natures, deeply laid, and he knew it as well as I. We ached to get together; we longed for the moment.
The man was a monster of cruelty, a savage man but cold and mean in his savagery. I had hated no Indian whom I fought. Warfare was their way of life, and they fought because it was their way. They were splendid men, most of them, and although they had slain my father, he himself would have felt no hatred for them. They were men, opposed to him but men, and warriors. They fought, but there was respect there, also.
It was not so with Max Bauer and myself. We must fight, and one must destroy the other, and each was aware.
Lila needed no urging to keep me from the walls, for it was in my mind that he would not attack. He would come, he would look, he would go all about us in the forest, and then he would try to find some way he could hurt or injure me or mine before he killed me. He was that sort of man, and he knew that death can be an end to suffering. He wanted me dead but only after I had suffered all a man can suffer. It was his advantage, perhaps, that he wished to kill and I did not. I wanted to fight him, to destroy what he was, to break him. I did not care about killing.
Jeremy came back and sat down opposite me. “Kin,” he said, “since the death of your father, you are the accepted leader here, but we have troubles coming that you have not, perhaps, considered.
“The settlements along the Virginia coast are growing. People are moving into the Carolinas. This you know.”
“I do.”
“This land we occupy is ours only by right of settlement, which in the courts of England would be no right at all. Think you not that we should take steps to establish a claim to our land?”
“But how? My father dared make no such claim. He was flying from the queen’s justice, a wanted man. Falsely charged though he was. We have held our land for many years now.”
“Be wise, Kin. Explore the chances. Perhaps you might write to Brian? Or to Peter Tallis? Believe me, we can wait no longer.”
What he said was, of course, true. Although I would not say anything of that to Jeremy, I had been worrying over just that very thing and worrying even more since I saw men moving out from Cape Ann and Plymouth, looking for land. The troubles of Claiborne over Kent Island had been explained to me, for although Claiborne had settled there, Lord Baltimore’s grant took in all Claiborne occupied, and he might be thrown off at any time. So it could be with us.
I worried not for myself or for Yance. There was always the frontier for us. Yet my father had brought men with him, and those men held land because of his urging. Some of those men, Jeremy Ring included, had become well off from the trade and the produce of their land, yet they might lose the land itself if something was not done.
“I shall write to Peter Tallis,” I said, “and to Brian as well.”
There was a packet of letters awaiting me and a press of business that needed my attention, for our plantations had grown and their demands upon my time as well. Glancing over the receipts and payments, I could see our small colony was doing very well indeed, but soon it would come to the attention of the tax collectors and of His Majesty’s officials, who were ever greedy for themselves as well as for the Crown.
In the months that I had been gone in the mountains as well as to Jamaica three shiploads of mast timbers had been sent down the river and loaded aboard sailing ships. Thirty-two bales of furs had been sent, seventy tons of potash, fourteen buffalo hides, twenty fine maple logs for the making of furniture.
Our enemies awaited us in the forest, but each thing in its time, and the time for our enemies would come when they attacked or made some move against us. In the meantime I would trust to Jeremy and those others and would be about my business here.
It had never been easy for me to write a letter. I was a man of the forest or of the plow. I could kill a deer for meat, fell a tree, or break ground for a field. I could hew timbers, build walls and houses, but a letter was a painstaking thing that required putting thoughts into words.
First I wrote to Peter Tallis. My father had told us much of him. From a booth in St. Paul’s Walk where he dealt in information and all manner of things that could be done with inside information or knowledge of where lay the powers, he had become a wealthy and respected merchant. He was the middleman, the man to whom one could go if one wished to approach a minister or anyone in a position of power. If there was merchandise to be sold by some stranger or foreigner, Tallis was the man who could tell the best market, the best price. He was our friend in London, our agent as well.