Queen of Swords
Page 69

Henry said, “Oh, I remember that punch.”
“As if Mother would let you near it.” Rachel laughed.
Luke bought a cupful and drank it down. He flushed a deep red as he handed the cup back and the vendor winked at him.
“Two more of those and you’d have to carry me home,” he said.
News of Jackson’s activity was to be had on every corner where militiamen stood together. Apparently most of their number had been held back at the Rodriguez Canal to strengthen entrenchments along its line from the river to the ciprière and to assist the engineers, who were to cut the levee in front of Chalmette’s plantation and flood the plain between the two armies.
“Little good it will do with the river so low,” she heard one man say to another.
“It can’t hurt,” said his companion.
Generally the militia seemed to be in good spirits and determined to make the most of the free afternoon before they returned to the Chalmette plantation to take up the backbreaking work that would keep them busy through Christmas Day.
“I plan to report back this evening,” Luke said, as though Jennet had asked the question aloud.
There was a set to his jaw that she recognized. She could argue with him now in public and lose, or argue with him later in private and lose. She decided that she didn’t care to ruin their walk, and kept her thoughts to herself.
They stopped to watch a pantomime done by men in colorful papier-mâché half masks in a rapid Creole French that had the crowd howling with laughter. Rachel listened only for a moment before dragging a disappointed Henry away, and then consoled him by buying him a piece of candied ginger.
By the time they had worked their way to the river, young Nathaniel’s good mood had begun to sour. Jennet judged that in another half hour he would be howling for the breast, and was about to announce the need to start back when they were overtaken by a river of men streaming down from the Levee Road.
“More militia,” said Luke. “Just arrived, and look, half of them don’t even have a musket.”
In the last hour Jennet had managed to banish the idea of the war to some point far away, much further than the seven miles to the British encampment. But here it was again, come to claim her attention: men newly arrived and ready to fight. Most of them, it looked to Jennet, more in need of a meal and clothing than they were of weapons. They wore ragged hunting shirts and deerskin leggings and a variety of hats, from old tricornes to fur caps. Rough men who would not complain about the hard conditions at the Rodriquez Canal. In passing, she wondered how they would like being handed shovels and set to work alongside slaves.
Henry said, “Look, that man is wearing a whole raccoon on his head,” and Jennet laughed out loud because she must. The baby produced a deep belly laugh out of simple camaraderie.
The river of men flowed by and past them, and they continued up onto the Levee Road where they could see the traffic on the river, crowded even now with every kind of boat. The keelboats that had brought the militiamen down the long length of the river rocked and fought against their mooring ropes. They would be broken up for firewood or building lumber. To Jennet’s Scots sensibilities it seemed a sinful waste of wood, but in the United States trees were as plentiful and everlasting as the clouds in the sky.
Jennet was standing between Hannah and Luke and she felt them both tense at the same moment that she caught sight of two last men jumping from a keelboat to the dock. Then Hannah bolted, running like a girl, and Luke’s face split into a smile.
He turned the baby in the direction of the keelboat and pointed. “There,” he said. “There comes the grandfather you were named for, and your great-uncle Runs-from-Bears.”
Nathaniel Bonner had been born in the endless forests of New-York State in the fourth year of the nine-year war between the French and the British for possession of the North American continent. Which made him, to Jennet’s reckoning, fifty-six years old. Though she had never asked Runs-from-Bears how old he was—he was far too imposing a figure to bother with such things—she believed the two men to be of an age. Though it was true that one was a full-blood Kahnyen’kehàka of the Turtle Clan and the other of pure Scots extraction, the two men had been cast from the same mold. They looked nothing like the men of Carryck in their dress or even in the way they held their weapons, but the sight of them gave her a sense of homecoming.
Henry made a small, choked sound. Jennet had forgot about the boy and his sister for a long moment, but turned now to see their expressions. For once Henry was stunned into silence. Rachel was trying harder to look nonchalant, and failing completely. No one had thought to tell them about Runs-from-Bears, and now Jennet remembered what she had felt on first seeing him. He had very black eyes that never seemed to blink; the dark skin stretched tight over heavy cheekbones was pox-scarred, and a line of tattoos stretched over the bridge of his nose to his temples. Silver earrings dangled from his ears, and there were feathers braided into his hair, which was still full black. He looked nothing like the Indians Jennet had seen in New Orleans or Pensacola. And then there was the matter of his weapons. Both men were armed with rifles, pistols, knives, tomahawks, and war clubs.
“No cause for concern,” Jennet said to Henry. “You’ll see, they’re the kindest men ever put on earth.”
Henry said, “Will he let me touch his tomahawk?”
Rachel started to answer him, but Jennet shook her head at the girl. She said, “You’ll have to ask him.”