“To marry a Scotsman would be a fate worse than death?”
“You can laugh at me all you want, but I’m serious. If I can take your rampant lust for me seriously, I think you should take my problems just as seriously.”
“Rampant—” Alex stood up straighter. “All right, lass, tell me how going into the jungle will help you.”
“Maybe if I accomplish something, it will make my family overlook the fact that I ran across several states when men with guns were chasing me.”
“And drawing pictures will help you?”
“If they’re for a cause. I’d like my father to be proud of me. I’d like my future husband to have something to tell our children about.”
“The way you tell people about the fruit company your mother ran?”
“Yes, exactly. Several of the women who worked for her now live in Edilean, and they married men my father knew.”
Alex turned away from her. He did owe her, he thought. He might joke about it, but if it weren’t for her bravery, he wouldn’t be alive now. The real truth of it was that he very much wanted her to go with them. In spite of what they’d heard from her brother Adam—who Cay seemed to think was a saint put on this earth to boss mere mortals around—Alex had never felt safe about leaving her alone. He’d thought about all the bad things that could happen to her. Not everyone could have heard that her name had been cleared. What if someone realized that she wasn’t a boy but a red-haired girl? He’d want to know why she was in disguise, and it wouldn’t take much to think of the scandalous news that had come down the coast from Charleston. Alex didn’t like to think what would happen to Cay if she were confronted by someone who hadn’t heard the latest news.
Also, there was the personal side of it. He enjoyed her company. She made him laugh, made him feel good. On the day he married Lilith, he’d sat there with a glass of champagne, watching his beautiful wife moving among their guests and quietly talking to everyone, and he’d thought that he was the luckiest man in the world. Based on the number of guests and their good wishes to him, he thought he’d made a lot of friends since he’d been in America. He smiled as they laughed and drank to his health and future happiness. They’d slapped him on the back and talked about horses, and about investments they’d like to share with him. On that day, Alex had felt part of a world of rich, happy people. He was no longer the man just off the boat with three horses, his clothes dirty and ragged. He’d been Someone, a young man on his way up.
But the next day, Lilith’s body had been found next to Alex’s, and after that, everything had changed. The rage of the town had rushed the trial through. And while Alex was in that filthy jail, not one of his so-called friends had visited him. Only T.C. had shown up. Right away, Alex had asked for pen, ink, and paper, and T.C. had brought it. Alex had been obsessed with telling the people he’d thought of as his friends that he was innocent, that he would never have killed Lilith. He’d loved her so very much. He’d poured out his heart in the letters and T.C. had personally delivered each of them.
Not one person had answered his letter. In fact, Alex had made T.C. tell him the truth, that all the letters had been returned, unopened. No one wanted anything to do with Alexander McDowell after he’d been arrested. It seemed that no one had even considered the idea that Alex might be innocent.
After three weeks of frantically writing to people he’d met since arriving in America, he wrote to Nate. Maybe it was because they’d been friends since childhood and they’d tried hard to impress each other, but he didn’t want to admit to his friend that he’d failed—for that’s how Alex viewed it. He’d arrived in America sure that he could do anything, achieve everything. He’d had a lifetime with his father telling him of the opportunities in the new country. After all, it was where his father had made all his money. Many years before, Mac had been awarded a thousand acres of land through the Ohio Company, but Nate’s father, Angus, had persuaded Mac to sell the land to a Captain Austin, who was trying to accumulate an estate for the woman he loved. In the end, it proved to be the best thing Mac ever did, because the king of England never signed the papers. None of the thousand-acre plots were given to the people who held certificates of ownership for them. Captain Austin had lost everything.
For Alex, the new country had seemed to be a land of riches—until the morning after his wedding, when everything was taken from him, including, it seemed, the friendship of everyone he’d met. It was only after his new “friends” had shown their true nature that Alex swallowed his pride and wrote to Nate. The letter had taken weeks to write. T.C. was allowed to stay for only minutes at a time, and some days he wasn’t allowed to visit at all. He sneaked in pen and ink inside his boot, and lined his coat with paper. Alex would write as much as he could, as fast as possible. He told Nate everything that had happened, in as much detail as possible, hoping that there was a clue somewhere in the story. He knew that Nate’s mind would be full of questions. Was there a mysterious person who had asked Lilith questions? Not that Alex had seen. But then, he’d been so in love he noticed little but her. But there must have been someone, because a person had hated her enough to kill her—not Alex but her.
“Are you here?” Cay asked.
It took Alex a moment to come back to the present. His mind had been so into the past that he could smell the jail cell that had been his home for so many weeks. More than anything, Alex wanted to pull Cay into his arms and feel her healthy young body against his, to put his face in her hair.
When she seemed to know what he was feeling, to even understand, he made himself step away from her.
“You have your ‘wife look’ on.”
“My what?”
“When you think of her, your eyes scrunch up into lines, and your body seems to droop. If that’s what love does to a person, I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“It’s not love that did this. It was—” He broke off because he knew she was trying to get him to stop feeling sorry for himself. “You mean your Abraham doesn’t make you feel like this?”
“Ephraim. No, but his son does.” With that, she left the clearing and went back toward the settlement.
Alex stayed where he was, but he was smiling. “Be at the boat at five a.m. and have T.C.’s trunk with you,” he called after her. When she nodded but didn’t turn back to look at him, he smiled broader. Yes, the truth was that he wanted her to go with them because he just plain enjoyed her company.
That he also . . . What had she said? Lusted after her? Something like that. Yes, that was a factor, too, but he knew he could control it. Later, once they got through this, and once his name was cleared, maybe they . . . He couldn’t think about the future. Right now, all there was was the present, and he had to live with the here and now.
Seventeen
The next morning, Alex had to work to suppress his amusement when, at 4:30 a.m., before full daylight, he looked up to see Cay sauntering toward them. Behind her came the twin girls carrying T.C.’s heavy trunk full of art supplies, and behind them was Thankfull, holding an old leather satchel and a big basket that he hoped contained food.
Alex looked at Eli and saw that he, too, was about to burst into laughter at the sight of this parade, but Grady was frowning.
“Yates!” Mr. Grady said in the voice of a commander, and Alex didn’t know which “Yates” he meant. “Tell your young brother that from now on, he’s to carry his own gear. We don’t allow parasites on this voyage, and if he can’t follow the rules, he’s to stay here.”
Cay stood by the side of the flatboat and didn’t seem to know what to say. “They wanted to help me,” she mumbled. “So I, uh . . .”
Alex dropped the ropes he’d finished tying and hurried over to her. “Say nothing,” he whispered in his deepest accent. “A boy wouldn’t explain.”
“Right. Never explain. I’ll add that rule to my list.” She lowered her voice. “Along with rating kissing.”
Alex knew she meant it as a joke, but he didn’t s
mile. “Get the trunk and start working.”
“Doing what?”
“Look around. Find what needs to be done, then do it.” If she actually were a sixteen-year-old boy, he would have taken the trunk and dumped it in her arms. That Grady had reacted with shock that a boy was allowing women to carry his gear for him, showed Alex that Cay needed to toughen up—and she needed to do some work if she was going to pull off being a boy.
On second thought, Alex went to the girls, took the metal chest from them, and held it out to Cay. When she didn’t move, he said, “Take the bloody thing!”
She did, but she was unprepared for its weight of about fifty pounds. She staggered backward but managed to hold on to it even though she hit the side of the little building that stood at the far end of the flatboat. Alex knew her side must have hurt, but she did nothing more than wince. At last she managed to get her feet under her and stand upright, the chest still in her hands.
When the kid Tim started laughing, as though he’d never seen a funnier sight in his life, Alex wanted to hit him. Instead, he said to Cay, “You need to get some muscle on you if you want to go on this trip.” He knew she could hardly hear him over the raucous laughter of Tim, but she understood his meaning and nodded. He saw her put the trunk down on the deck, and Eli showed her how to tie it securely.
Alex stayed busy securing their goods on the boat while Cay said good-bye to the three women. He was glad when he saw Tim muttering as Cay exchanged cheek kisses with all three females. As Alex had told her, Tim was one of those males who very much would have loved the attention of the young girls, but they never so much as looked at him.
At five, they were ready to leave. Alex had given Thankfull more instructions about the care of the two horses that they’d had to leave behind. About a hundred miles downriver was another trading post, where they’d leave the boat and get more horses to begin their inland trek. But for now, they’d be traveling by water during the day and spend the nights on land. If it was too dangerous onshore, either from animals or Indians, they’d stay inside the little structure at the end of the boat.
Grady let Tim untie them from the dock, and the four of them stood there for a while as the women waved to them. Cay started to wave back, but Alex poked her in the side and shook his head.
“How boring men’s lives are!” she whispered. “You have to constantly work to keep yourself from doing even simple, pleasant things.
“Nay, lass,” he whispered back. “We don’t want to make fools of ourselves by waving at the girls.”
“You’re not—”
“Young Yates!” Mr. Grady yelled. “What’s that bird?”
“I have no idea, sir,” she said, shading her eyes to look up at a bird with a wingspan that looked wide enough to provide shade to a school yard full of children.
“Well, what do your books say?”
“My books?”
“In your trunk, boy! Aren’t T.C.’s research books in your trunk?” He was frowning at her, his handsome forehead creased deeply.
“I haven’t looked inside, sir, but it’s heavy enough to hold Mr. Jefferson’s library,” she shot back.
Eli laughed but then rubbed his hand over his mouth to cover it.
Mr. Grady’s frown didn’t change. “I’m sure your mother finds your disrespect amusing, but I don’t. Look over there at that pouch and you’ll see some plants that I picked because I’ve never seen them before. Am I right in assuming that since you don’t know what the birds are that you don’t know what the plants are either?”
“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, that’s right. I don’t know anything but the roses in my mother’s garden. Oh! Sorry, sir, I wasn’t trying to make a joke. I’ll get the books out and look up what the plants and birds are.”
It was Alex’s time to hide his laughter. He exchanged looks with Eli, and they both shook their heads. If Grady and Cay were going to spend the weeks ahead arguing, it was going to be a very interesting trip. Alex thought that if Grady got so angry he sent Cay packing, he, Alex, would, of course, have to go with her.
As they started down the river, Alex felt that a weight was being lifted off his body, and as he glanced down at Cay, seated on the floorboards, her sketchpad in front of her, a dozen plants on her lap and beside her, he smiled. He was glad he’d not left her behind. If he had, he knew he’d be worried about her now. He knew he didn’t trust even the supposedly glorious Adam to look after her properly.
“Want me to hold those for you?” She was struggling to keep a plant still in the breeze so she could see exactly how the leaves attached to the stem. T.C.’s drawings were as much science as they were art. She knew that in the best nature drawings, a person could see the fuzz on the leaves, count the nettles, and, most importantly, identify it by its Latin name—or see that it hadn’t yet been given one.
Cay grimaced. “If you help, he’ll probably say that I’m not working.” She motioned her head toward Mr. Grady, who stood at the helm, looking out at the placid water. The St. Johns was well known to be a “lazy” river. It was wide, sometimes even three miles across, and its flow was very slow, and in what had been seen of it by explorers, its elevation varied little.
Alex looked back at Cay. “It’s my job to get dinner, so that means birds and fish. How about if I let you draw whatever I shoot or catch before Eli skins it for the pot?”
“That’s a wonderful idea.”
The gratitude in her eyes made Alex shake his head. She was looking up at him through her thick eyelashes, from under the brim of her straw hat, and he’d never seen a prettier girl—or one more kissable. How could the others not see she was female?
“Mind if I help my little brother with the plants and animals?” Alex called across the deck to Grady.
“Whatever you need to do, do it, but don’t neglect your own duties.” He was studying his charts and didn’t look up at Alex.
“There, now, I told you things would be all right.”
“You usually make them so,” she said as she looked back at her drawing paper.
Her words made him feel good.
Six hours later, he was beginning to wish he’d never volunteered for the job. At Cay’s insistence, but much to Eli’s disgust, each bird he shot had been different, and he’d turned them over to her to draw.
At first, she couldn’t figure out how to pose them. She’d leaned the first one against a tied-down crate and, as she’d been taught, she drew exactly what she saw. When she finished, she had a picture of a dead bird against an old board. It wasn’t pretty.
Mr. Grady glanced at the drawing and asked her if she meant to paint the cooking pot next to it. Eli looked at her as though asking how she’d take this rough criticism, but Mr. Johns’s never-ending complaining had prepared her for anything Mr. Grady said.
“Imagination!” Cay muttered under her breath and quickly sketched the bird as though it were alive and feeding. That she had no idea what the bird ate hindered her. Should she include an insect with the bird or a fish or a plant seed? “What does this bird eat?” she called to Alex.
“The curlew or the snipe?” he asked.
After a moment of staring at his back in disbelief, she used the strongest Scottish accent she could muster and told him in detail what she thought of him for concealing the fact that he knew one exotic Florida creature from another.
“A man must have a few secrets,” he said as he brought down another bird for her to draw.
An hour later, she hissed at him, “Just hold it still. How can I draw it if you don’t keep it from flapping about?”
“If I could wring the bloody thing’s neck, it would stop trying to get away,” he said under his breath. On his lap was one of half a dozen birds he’d shot that morning, but he’d only winged this one, and it was very much alive. Who could believe that a bird could be so strong? When it first woke up in Alex’s arms and immediately began trying to free itself, taking skin off Alex’s hands and arms in the process, he’d started to sil
ence it, but Cay had stopped him.
“It’s too beautiful to kill and certainly too lovely to eat. Just let me draw it, then you can release it.”
“You wouldn’t think it was beautiful if you—Ow! Here, you hold it and I’ll draw it.”
“I won the contest, remember?” She had to keep her head down to hide her smile.
When Mr. Grady came over, Alex was sure he’d be on his side. But Grady said to Cay, “I can see that you’re an afficionado of Mr. Bartram.”
“Yes, sir, I am,” she said firmly.
“Carry on, then,” Grady said as he went back to his maps and charts.
Cay looked at Alex as he pulled his head back just in time to keep the angry bird from taking a beak to his jaw. “Don’t even bother to ask me who Mr. Bartram is. I have no idea. So why do people say you’re a magician with animals?”
Narrowing his eyes at her, Alex mumbled about her ingratitude. It was one thing to spend time and effort gentling an animal that was about to run a race, but this was a bird that . . . that was frightened half to death. For a moment he was ashamed that he’d forgotten all he’d learned as a child. With a childhood as lonely as his, he’d had to turn to the animals around him for companionship.
He looked down at the bird he held firmly in his arms and gave all his attention to it. Long ago, he’d found that if he closed out the external world from his mind, it often did the same thing to whatever animal he was touching. He felt the bird’s wildly beating heart begin to quieten, and as it did, Alex touched its head. The feathers were warm and smooth, and he worked with his mind to project peace to the creature. His mother used to say that the gift Alex had inherited from her family extended to what he could make animals feel.
Slowly, the bird began to relax and stop fighting.
When it was still, Alex looked up and saw that the other passengers were watching him.