A Wild Yearning (47 page)

Nat stepped back, pulling the door open wider. "Of course. Come in."

Ty didn't move. "In private. I'd like to speak to her in private."

Delia slowly stood, turning around. Ty was a hulking, faceless shadow standing beyond the doorway. Delia spoke to Nat, keeping her eyes safely on Nat's face. "I'll only be a few minutes."

Nat's brow knitted, but with curiosity, not suspicion. "Sure..." He gestured weakly at the table. "I'll just have another cup of tea."

Ty strode away from the doorway and disappeared into the surrounding darkness without looking back, expecting Delia to follow.

Elizabeth opened her short gown and put the baby's face to her breast. Ezekiel's mouth opened wide and he latched onto the pink nipple, sucking greedily.

The Reverend Caleb Hooker sat knee to knee on a stool opposite his wife, watching. He was both fascinated and slightly embarrassed. Elizabeth's breast was small but as round as a fall apple, creamy golden in the light cast from the hearth. It occurred to him that he had never before stared so openly at his wife's bared breast. She had always dressed and undressed with her back to him. When they made love, she kept her nightrail on and they did it quickly, in the dark.

A blush crept up Caleb's neck as he remembered the conversation about lovemaking that he'd had with Tyler Savitch all those months before. The doctor had described men suckling at their women's breasts; Caleb had been appalled at the very idea. But now, watching his son feed, he felt a stirring of envy, and desire.

Caleb's blush deepened when he realized Elizabeth had transferred her attention from the top of their son's head to himself. There was an indulgent half-smile on her mouth and a tender cast to her eyes. It was a look he'd never seen before and it confused him.

"You haven't told me what you think of your son," Elizabeth said.

The firelight made the baby's blond head look like a christening cap of spun gold. His lips, which clung so tightly to his mother's nipple, were a deep, rosy pink, the color of persimmon pulp. His fat, ruddy cheeks flexed with his hard sucking. Caleb wondered what it felt like to Elizabeth, to have her nipple tugged on so vigorously. Was it, as Ty had said, pleasurable to a woman?

"He's a beautiful baby," Caleb finally said in awe, his chest constricting tightly. "I feel so strange, though. I can't quite come to grips with the fact that he's mine. My son. To tell you the truth, I'm a little scared."

"I was, too, at first," Elizabeth admitted matter-of-factly, not sounding the least afraid now. It was a startling thought and Caleb had trouble reconciling this calm, self-contained woman with the Elizabeth who had been taken captive and given birth among the savages. During the past months he had been tormented by thoughts of what was being done to her. Now the Elizabeth who had returned seemed a stranger to him.

Caleb leaned forward, studying his clasped hands where they rested on his knees. He swallowed, moistened his lips. "Lizzie? Did they... were you treated all right?"

Elizabeth stared into the distance and a frozen expression settled over her face. "In the beginning, it was..." She shuddered, disturbing Ezekiel who let out an indignant cry. She switched him to her other breast. "But I don't remember that part very well. Except at night, sometimes, I have nightmares."

Caleb's throat closed around a sob; tears filmed his eyes. "Elizabeth..." He blinked hard, trying to hold the tears back. "Will you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?"

Balancing the baby in her lap, she leaned over to stroke his clenched hands. "Caleb, it wasn't your fault."

"But I brought you out here. A thing like this never would have happened to you in Boston." He wrapped his fingers tightly around her hand, clinging to it. He looked up to search her face. "I'm telling Colonel Bishop tomorrow he'll have to find someone else. I'm taking you home, my love."

"I am home. Your ministry is here, Caleb. This is where you belong." Another soft smile lifted her lips. "'Whither thou goest, I will go.'"

"But the Indian menace isn't over. There could be more raids—"

She pulled her hand away from his, pressing her fingers against his mouth. "I don't think I'm afraid anymore, Caleb. Not so foolishly afraid. Perhaps it's because what I feared would happen to me, happened. And I survived."

He sunk his teeth into his bottom lip, his eyes squeezing shut. "When I think of you in the hands of those savages..."

Ezekiel's head dropped from the nipple. Elizabeth got up and tucked him into the cradle Caleb had had Obadiah Kemble make during the winter. It had scalloped sides and flowers carved on the headboard and footboard. The cradle had been a talisman of hope to the reverend, proof of his faith that God would see his wife safely home to him, with their child.

"The Abenaki aren't savages," Elizabeth said. "Oh, they can be cruel to those they call enemy. But then, so can we." From where she stood in the shadows he couldn't make out her face, but he heard an edge of anger in her voice. "Aren't the whipping posts and the gallows cruel? And we were the ones who started the scalping ritual. We English and French and our foolish, wasteful wars against each other over a land that rightfully isn't even ours. Ask any man in Merrymeeting and he will tell you the Abenaki must be wiped out so that we can farm and log the Sagadahoc in peace. Yet they hunted and fished on this land we now call ours long before we did, and in a harmony we will never achieve."

"You would defend them after what they did to you? They are
heathen,
Elizabeth. They don't believe in God, the Father."

"The Great Spirit is our father and the earth is our mother..." She came up to stand beside him, staring into the flames. Her hand fell softly to his shoulder. "An Abenaki woman told me that. Her name is Silver Birch and she is the kindest, most generous person I have ever met. She became my special friend even though I was considered—" She laughed, a tiny chirrup that startled Caleb because it was so unexpected. "It was amusing really. They all thought I was Dr. Ty's
awakon.

The sound of the guttural Indian word coming from Elizabeth's delicate mouth horrified Caleb. "What?" he croaked. "His slave. They thought I was Ty's slave."

"Slave!"

She laughed again. "He bought me from my captor for five beaver hides. Silver Birch kept giving me advice on what I could do to entice Ty into taking me as his second wife."

Caleb was so astounded at her glib talk about slavery and being bought that it took a moment for the full sense of her words to penetrate his mind.

When they did his mouth fell open.
"Second
wife."

Elizabeth started guiltily and turned away from him.

"Elizabeth, are you implying—"

She whipped back around, interrupting him and there was a sharp edge to her voice. "You have to understand, Caleb. They thought Nat had been killed. That scalp of blond hair hung from the scalp pole by the torture platform all winter. We saw it every day."

Scalp pole... Torture platform...
Caleb's head reeled.

He licked his lips and tried to assume his stern minister's face. "Are you saying Ty and Delia lived openly together in that Indian village as man and wife?"

"Ty saved my life. And our baby's."

"That doesn't mitigate the sin."

"Sin? I thought with sin there had to be intent. They believed Mr. Parkes to be dead. And they were married in a Abenaki ceremony." She knelt at his feet, clutching his thighs. "Oh, Caleb, they are so in love. Never have I seen two people so blessed by love. Together they have found such joy in life. Such joy in each other..."

She turned her face aside, but Caleb couldn't miss the color rise high on her face. "Watching them together," she whispered, "you could see... you could see the
passion
they shared. Sometimes... sometimes I wondered what it would be like, to experience such passion."

Caleb swallowed hard. Since he had found out about her pregnancy, he hadn't dared touch his wife. But he had thought often about all the things Ty Savitch had told him in between hefty swigs of brandy that hot August morning. He had believed Elizabeth would be horrified and disgusted by the acts Ty had so graphically described. But now he wondered...

What if, he thought, what if I took her into the bedroom now and undressed her slowly as Ty suggested? What if I kissed and touched her in those places...
all
those places...?

But it was Elizabeth who fastened dusky gray eyes onto his face, Elizabeth whose lips parted wetly into a beckoning smile. And in the end it was Elizabeth who spoke.

Delia pulled herself up the last rungs of the ladder and onto the sentry walk. Ty was there before her, leaning against the round, pointed logs of the palisade, his arms folded in front of his chest, his long, buckskin-clad legs crossed at the ankles. His pose was one of negligent nonchalance, but tension and anger crackled in the air around him like summer lightning.

At five-foot intervals, pine torches burned, thrust into brackets set into the walls. They illuminated Ty's face, showing the dark cast of a day-old beard and the hard, implacable set to his mouth.

Delia wanted to fling herself against his chest. She needed to be held and comforted by those hard arms. His anger at her hurt and disappointed her, and angered her in turn.

"We shouldn't be meeting like this," she said stiffly. "Nat might suspect—"

"Suspect, hell!" He straightened with a snap, slamming his palms against the peeled logs at his back. "Why doesn't he know by now? When are you going to tell him?"

"I'll tell him when the time is right. I can't just blurt it out at him."

His fingers spanned her upthrust jaw. There wasn't the least thing tender about his touch or in the fiery anger that blazed from his eyes. Yet her whole body hummed with physical awareness of this man.

"You're actually thinking about staying with him," he said, equal measures of bitterness and fury in his voice.

Her eyes clenched shut and she pulled away from him, turning her back. "Oh God, Ty... I'm married to him."

He clasped her shoulders, swinging her roughly around to face him again. "You're married to
me!"

Delia was sure she could actually feel her heart ripping in two. It was like a scream in her mind. She tried to speak and thought she might choke. Surely a person couldn't suffer this much pain and not be dying. "Our marriage, Ty... it wasn't real."

He shook her, hard. He pushed his face up against hers and raged at her. "Goddamn you, Delia! It was real to me!"

Then the pine torch beside them hissed and flared, catching the gleam of wetness in his eyes, and she knew his anger was only a facade. He was hurting as much as she.

She looked back at him through her own tears. She touched his cheek, but he jerked his head sharply aside. "Oh, Ty..."

Below them the gate to the stockade screeched open and a scout rode through, his horse's hooves clattering on the hard-packed ground. They listened to the gates grind closed, squealing in their straps, and to the thud of the crossbar falling heavily into its brackets. The full moon shining through the spiked palisade cast alternating bars of shadow and light on the ground and on the looming blockhouse. To Delia it made her feel shut in, imprisoned, symbolizing what was happening to her life. She felt suffocated with despair.

Ty's harsh grip on her shoulders relaxed. His hands moved up and down her arms. His voice was soft, imploring. "Delia, you have to talk to Nat. Explain to him what happened, that he's got to let you go."

She backed away from him, wrapping her arms tightly around her waist as if she had to physically hold herself together. She shook her head, her throat working spastically.

Ty came after her, bringing himself so close she could feel the heat from his body and his breath disturbed strands of her hair. "Tell him, Delia. Tonight. Or I will."

She pushed against him. "Don't you dare! I'll not have Nat hurt for no reason—"

"Him
hurt! For no
reason!
Jesus, Delia, that is rich. What the hell do you think this is doing to me? Do you seriously think I'm going to stand aside and allow another man to swive my wife?"

She winced at the crudity of his words. To add to all the other emotions that were tearing her apart, there came a sick, chilling dread. Nat had said he wanted to start over. Did that mean he would now want to exercise his husbandly rights on her?

"He won't do... do that," she said, more in an effort to convince herself.

Ty snorted a bitter laugh. "He'll do it. He's been without a woman for five months. He'll do it." He clasped her arms, hauling her up against him. "You can't let Nat go on thinking of you as his wife."

She balled up her fists, slamming them against his chest. "I
am
Nat's wife!" She clutched his shirt, clinging to him, and the tears fell at last, in streams down her cheeks, choking her, drowning her. "Ty, Ty, please try to understand. We spoke our vows before God, Nat and I. I made a bargain with him that day we married. He took me out of the gutter, out of a stinking grog shop, and he made me his wife. He gave me a home and respectability, when all I had was a da who drank up my earnings and would sooner beat me as look at me—"