Suddenly, though, Cinnamon’s wide shoulders relaxed and the look of wariness was erased by relief.
“In fact, I came to see my friend,” he said, and nodded toward the house. William turned quickly, to see another Indian picking his way through the raspberry brambles littering what used to be a small croquet lawn.
“Manoke!” he said. Then shouted, “Manoke!” making the older man look up. The older Indian’s face lighted with joy, and a sudden uncomplicated happiness washed through William’s heart, cleansing as spring rain.
The Indian was lithe and spare as he’d always been, his face a little more lined. His hair smelled of woodsmoke when William embraced him, and the gray in it was the same soft color as smoke, but it was still thick and coarse as ever—he could see that easily; he was looking down on it from above, Manoke’s cheek pressed into his shoulder.
“What did you say?” he asked, releasing Manoke.
“I said, ‘My, how you have grown, boy,’” Manoke said, grinning up at him. “Do you need food?”
MANOKE WAS HIS father’s friend; Lord John had never called him anything else. The Indian came and went as he pleased, generally without notice, though he was at Mount Josiah more often than not. He wasn’t a servant or a hired man, but he did the cooking and washing-up when he was there, kept the chickens—yes, there were still chickens; William could hear them clucking and rustling as they settled in the trees near the ruined house—and helped when there was game to be cleaned and butchered.
“Your hog?” William asked Cinnamon, with a brief jerk of the head toward the covered firepit. He’d seen to Bart, then joined the Indians for supper on the crumbling porch, the men enjoying the soft evening air and keeping an eye on the drying fish, in case of marauding raccoons, foxes, or other hungry vermin.
“Oui. Up there,” Cinnamon said, waving a big hand toward the north. “Two hours’ walk. A few pigs in the wood there, not many.”
William nodded. “Do you have a horse?” he asked. It was a small hog, maybe sixty pounds, but heavy to carry for two hours—especially as Cinnamon presumably hadn’t known how far he’d have to go. He’d already told William that he’d never visited Mount Josiah before.
Cinnamon nodded, his mouth full, and jerked his chin in the direction of the sheds and the ramshackle tobacco barn. William wondered how long Manoke had been in residence; the place looked as though it had been deserted for years—and yet there were chickens …
The clucking and brief squawks of the settling birds reminded him suddenly and sharply of Rachel Hunter, and in the next breath, he found the scent of rain, wet chickens—and wet girl.
“… the one my brother calls the Great Whore of Babylon. No chicken possesses anything resembling intelligence, but that one is perverse beyond the usual.”
“Perverse?” Evidently she perceived that he was contemplating the possibilities inherent in this description and finding them entertaining, for she snorted through her nose and bent to open the blanket chest.
“The creature is sitting twenty feet up in a pine tree, in the midst of a rainstorm. Perverse.” She pulled out a linen towel and began to dry her hair with it.
The sound of the rain altered suddenly, hail rattling like tossed gravel against the shutters.
“Hmmph,” said Rachel, with a dark look at the window. “I expect she will be knocked senseless by the hail and devoured by the first passing fox, and serve her right.” She resumed drying her hair. “No great matter. I shall be pleased never to see any of those chickens again.”
The scent of Rachel’s wet hair was strong in his memory—and the sight of it, dark and straggling in tails down her back, the wet making her worn shift transparent in spots, with shadows of her soft pale skin beneath.
“What? I mean—I beg your pardon?”
Manoke had said something to him, and the smell of rain vanished, replaced by hickory smoke, fried cornmeal, and fish.
Manoke gave him an amused look but obligingly repeated himself.
“I said, have you come to stay? Because if so, maybe you want to fix the chimney.”
William glanced over his shoulder; the vine-shrouded rubble was just visible, past the edge of the porch.
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. Manoke nodded and went back to his conversation with Cinnamon; the two of them were speaking French. William couldn’t make the effort to listen, suddenly overcome by a tiredness that sank to the marrow of his bones.