Shawnee Bride. Elizabeth Lane
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to move in harmony with the current, not against it.
Clarissa felt her fear easing. She leaned forward, the breeze lifting her hair as the water foamed along the narrow bow. Her hands kept their tight grip on the cross brace. Except for the persistent churning of her stomach she could almost believe she was going to survive this wild ride.
Moments later they shot out of the rapids and entered a calmer stretch of water. Clarissa slumped over the bow. “Are you all right?” she heard Wolf Heart ask.
“I’m just dandy,” she snapped, feeling dizzy and nauseous. “For someone who’s been half-drowned, forcemarched barefoot through the woods, stuffed with halfraw meat and taken on a giant whirligig ride, I’m doing magnificently! Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
She leaned over the side of the bobbing canoe and proceeded to lose everything he had so insistently fed her.
Behind her, dead silence had fallen. In the midst of that silence she heard Wolf Heart chuckle. The sound was so deep and warm and startling that, for all her miserable condition, it sent a shock of pleasure through her body-pleasure that was swiftly replaced by outrage. Shawnee or white, this backwoods ruffian had no right to laugh at her discomfort.
She turned around and shot him a malevolent glare, only to see him grinning broadly at her. “Clarissa Rogers, you’re a caution,” he said.
“A caution?” She shook her head at the homeyness of the word, coming as it did from a bare-chested savage with silver disks in his ears and two eagle feathers jutting from his scalp lock. “I have no idea what you mean by that!”
Sunlight rippled on his massive shoulders as he maneuvered the canoe expertly around a large boulder. “You’ve been through enough to undo most white women,” he said. “But you still haven’t lost your spunk.”
“I can see you don’t know much about white women!” Clarissa huffed, still feeling light-headed. “Did you expect me to swoon? Did you expect me to whimper and cry like a helpless little ninny? For your information, I’m way beyond that now. I’ve long since had all the crying scared out of me!”
Turning her back on him, she frowned down at the greenish brown river, wondering how deep it was. If she could touch bottom, she might be able to wade ashore and flee into the woods. She would be taking a dangerous chance, but even drowning could prove to be a kinder fate than the unknown terrors awaiting her in the Shawnee village.
“Where do you come from?” she asked, resolving to bide her time and wait for exactly the right spot in the river. “Your speech, some of the things you say—you don’t sound as if you started life in a log hut on the Allegheny.”
When he did not answer, Clarissa realized she had stepped on to forbidden ground. As a man who had buried his past, Wolf Heart was clearly uncomfortable with her question.
“Very well, if you won’t talk, I will,” she said, setting out to distract him with chatter. “My father was a cloth merchant. He owned one of the finest shops in Baltimore. He and my mother were very happy, as I recall, but she died when I was six, and the rest of my upbringing was left to our housekeeper, Mrs. Pimm.”
She spoke into the breeze, letting her words float back to the brooding presence behind her. “My father passed away seven years ago, and, of course, my brother Junius, who was already grown, inherited the house and the business. We never did get on well, Junius and I. He’s made no secret of counting the days until I take my dowry and leave him alone with his precious, moldy, old ledger books.”
Clarissa glanced back over her shoulder to see if Wolf Heart was listening. His stony face had assumed a mask of studied indifference.
“My dowry includes a fine ten-acre parcel of land just outside the city and fifty pounds in gold,” she continued, ignoring his silence. “All of it, of course, will go to my husband when I marry.”
Her voice trailed off as it struck her that, in all likelihood, she would not live to bestow her dowry, or herself, on any future husband. Her land and money would go to the penny-pinching Junius, to gather dust with the rest of his possessions. Her bones would lie in unmarked earth, somewhere in this alien wilderness, unmourned and unremembered.
Tears blurred Clarissa’s sight. She blinked them furiously away, determined not to show emotion before her grim captor. Straightening her shoulders, she cleared her throat to speak again, but no words would come. Her hands whitened on the cross brace as the silence grew more and more oppressive.
“I was born in Boston.” Wolf Heart’s voice, low and husky behind her, sent a tremor through Clarissa’s body. “My father was a schoolmaster, a good and gentle man until my mother died. Then he took to drink, and that changed everything.”
He lapsed into silence once more, and Clarissa sensed the struggle that raged inside him. He was not a man who revealed himself easily, that she already knew. This slow opening of his past left her strangely touched, as if, in exchange for her empty prattle, he had presented her with a rare and valuable gift.
Quiet minutes passed, broken only by the ripple of the water and the calls of morning songbirds. At last he cleared his throat and spoke again, each word laced with the pain of memory.
“The whiskey turned my father into a violent, foulmouthed stranger. The more he drank, the more he cursed and beat me. I should have run away, but I was only a boy, and he was all the family I had.
“After we lost our home to the moneylenders, he began having grand dreams about making a fortune in the fur trade. He hired both of us out until he’d saved enough for traps. Then we headed west—farther west than any reasonable white man would have gone alone. We were trapping beaver near the mouth of the Little Miami when a bear came charging out of the willows. She grabbed my father before he could even turn around.” Even now, Wolf Heart’s words quivered with self-blame. “I couldn’t save him. All I could do was run for my life.” He emptied his lungs in a ragged exhalation. “The boy named Seth Johnson died that day. He was reborn as a Shawnee.”
Stillness lay like a wall between them, growing thicker, heavier. “The Shawnee found you and took you in?” Clarissa prompted when she could bear it no longer.
“They offered me everything I thought I’d lost,” he said. “Family. Honor. Kindness. A life filled with meaning and purpose.”
“And when they put you on trial—” a bitter undertone had crept into Clarissa’s voice “—did you prove yourself worthy to live among them?”
“Yes.”
She strained to hear his half-whispered reply.
“As I have had to prove myself many times over. Even now.”
The canoe shot forward as he drove the paddle hard into the current. Clarissa stared bleakly ahead—trees, willows and water blending into streaks of muted spring color. She knew now why Wolf Heart had taken her prisoner, and why he would never let her go. To show compassion for a white captive would prove, to him and to all his adopted tribe, that he was not a true Shawnee. He would be an outcast, torn from a world he had come to know and love.
She could expect no mercy from him.
They were passing through a level stretch of river. Here the floodwaters had crept outward across the bottomlands to form a lake, so calm and glassy that the current was scarcely visible. Clarissa stared down at the clouded water, wondering what lay beneath it. Surely, with the river spread so wide, it could not be more than a few feet deep in any spot. Better yet, the bank on the near side was thick with brush and willows. If she could reach them, it might be possible to duck beneath the water, then surface and hide in the shelter of the trailing branches until Wolf Heart gave her up for drowned.
Clarissa’s mind reeled with the daring of her idea. It was a reckless scheme, to be sure. But a fighting chance at escape was better than no chance at all.
She glanced back at Wolf Heart, hoping to catch him off guard. He was watching her intently.
“How far is your village?”