Author: Elizabeth Grayson
Category: Western
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/elizabeth-grayson/page,16,76810-a_place_called_home.html
His face flushed; she could see he was straining to be reasonable. "I admit that until now I haven't felt compelled to answer the call."
She felt the burn of anger in her own cheeks. "Not until Reid Campbell came with the lure of land on the frontier being offered in exchange for your services."
"Reid and I are exactly the kind of men George Clark is recruiting, men who can rout the British from the outposts in the west. This is how I can serve my country best, and I'll be proud to do my part with our independence at stake."
"And the land means nothing?" she countered. "Adventuring with Reid means nothing?"
"I'm going to fight because I believe in freedom. I'm going to do it with a man I can trust at my back." All at once David sounded weary. "And why shouldn't I take the bounty in payment for my service?"
Livi knew what he was doing was bold and brave and honorable. She knew she should be proud—except that he was leaving her. She crushed the darning in her hands.
"How soon will you be going?"
David rubbed the back of his fist across his mouth. "Day after tomorrow. Colonel Clark is having the volunteers assemble at Corn Island in the Ohio River. It will take us more than a week to get there."
In the face of his impending departure, Livi's resistance crumbled.
"Oh, David!" she cried and flung herself into his arms. The hours they had left were far too precious to spend them arguing. "I'm so afraid!"
"Afraid for me? I swear, Livi, I'll be so careful..." He wrapped her up so tight she felt swallowed by his size and strength.
"You'd better be," she whispered against his throat. "I couldn't make a life for Tad without you."
"You're more capable than you think."
She didn't believe that, but nestled closer. "Oh, David, hold me. Just hold me. I can't bear it that you're going—"
"Now, Livi, it will be all right."
He tumbled her backward onto the bed, his arms encircling her, his kiss tasting deep. She rose against him, trembling and eager, willing to let passion silence her doubts and fears for a little while.
Preparations for his leave-taking filled all the next day. There were goods to be gathered, both legal and financial provisions to be made, and a boy to hire to see to chores around the house. David put the running of the blacksmith shop into his journeyman's hands and negotiated a monthly stipend for Livi and Tad. As the day progressed, neighbors stopped by to wish David well. Some brought gifts, a pair of knitted woolen socks, a sewing kit, a gleaming pocket telescope.
At dawn on March 10th, 1778, David and Reid Campbell rode west. David left Livi with the taste of his kiss on her mouth and a child in her womb. He left her with responsibilities she felt incapable of discharging and a loneliness that scarred her very soul.
Months passed without so much as a word. Reports filtered back that Clark's troops had captured a town on the east bank of the Mississippi called Kaskaskia and soon took several others. The following February the rangers laid siege to the fort at Vincennes and forced its surrender. She waited for word, but nothing came.
As time slipped by, Livi began to take an odd sort of comfort in knowing David was with Reid. Campbell would do his best to keep David safe, and if something happened, Reid would have the decency to let her know her husband was dead.
While the men were gone, Livi bore a girl-child and named her Cissy. She wrote both David and her mother about the blessed event. There was no reply from either of them.
Livi had been more than two years alone when David and Reid came thundering back. Livi heard the clatter of hooves coming up the street, the ring of neighbors shouting greetings, the melody of familiar voices in the yard. Brimming with anticipation, she scooped up Cissy in her arms and ran toward the front of the house. Tad brushed past her, shouting and dancing with excitement. She heard David greet his son, his tone different somehow now that the boy was halfway grown.
Livi halted, jittery and breathless, just inside the open door. Did she look all right? Had she changed? Shifting Cissy on her hip, Livi slipped off her apron and tidied her hair. When David's footfalls came up the path, she stepped over the threshold to greet her husband—and stopped dead in her tracks.
She saw instantly that David was a man in a way he'd never been before. He was harder and rougher, leaner and broader. A soldier instead of a husband. He loomed above her, all chest and shoulders, buckskin-clad thighs and swaying fringe. The sun had tipped his heavy hair with platinum, pinched fine, sharp lines at the corners of his golden eyes.
"Livi," he said and wrapped her up in his arms as if he were claiming some long-anticipated gift.
He found her mouth with the heat of his and ground the bristle of his beard against her chin. Livi curled her arm around his neck and held on tight. He was home. He was safe. She'd been waiting two long years for this.
Once she and David had recovered themselves, he looked down at the child in her arms. "And whose little girl are you?" he asked, as if there could be any doubt.
"David, I'd like you to meet your daughter, Christine Arabella Talbot," she said. "Tad and I call her Cissy."
David reached out to stroke his daughter's cheek. She drew back against her mother's shoulder and wrinkled her nose. "My God, Livi, when..."
"Just before Christmas the year you left."
"Oh, Livi, I didn't know."
"I wrote, but I wasn't sure how to send you word." They stared at each other in regret, their gazes holding, their hearts in their eyes. In these two years they'd missed so much.
Then slowly, with reluctance, Livi shifted her attention from her husband to the man who was standing by the gate.
"Hello, Reid," she said.
"Good evening, Livi."
"Won't you come on into the house?" In her delight at having David back, she was willing to extend her welcome to Campbell, too. "Both of you must be hungry. I've a slab of bacon I can fry, some corn bread, and some apple pie."
"That sounds good," Reid answered. "Just let me head around back and see to the horses."
"Tad, you go give Reid a hand," David said.
"No, boy, stay with your pa," Campbell demurred. "With him just home, you've got better things to do than curry horses."
Protective as a brood hen with her chicks, Livi shooed her family into the house and shut out the world. Once David sat down at the wide kitchen table, Livi put a mug of just-squeezed cider in his hands and began to cook. Cissy stared at the newcomer with her fist jammed in her mouth, while Tad peppered his pa with questions. Livi had to smile just watching them.
Reid slipped in to join them a short time later. He was barely settled at the end of the bench when Tad draped himself around his shoulders. Cissy soon discovered the clutch of feathers in the band of Reid's black hat and set to plucking them, one by one. David seemed content just to sit back, smoke his pipe, and watch.
It was only after the two men had eaten their fill that they were willing to speak of the months they'd been away.
"We reached Kaskaskia on the Mississippi in July, and except for the size of the mosquitoes, the campaigning wasn't bad," David recalled, bouncing Cissy on his knee. "It was Clark's little jaunt to Vincennes in February that tested our mettle some. We covered two hundred and forty miles in eighteen days, through chest-deep swamps, shivering so hard most nights we couldn't sleep, and going without rations for four full days."
"He threatened to boil up my old boots," Reid put in.
"It's only by the grace of God that we didn't lose any of our men, and then once we reached Vincennes, the British at Fort Sackville refused to fight. Colonel Hamilton—"
"The Hair Buyer?" Tad asked, wide-eyed. "The man who's been paying the Shawnee for settlers' scalps?"
"The very same," Reid assured him.
"—took a day or two to think about surrendering, called Colonel Clark to the fort, and handed over his sword."
Livi spoke up. "We had news of that, but it's a year or more since then."
"You didn't g
et my letter?" David asked. "I gave it to one of the men who took Hamilton to Williamsburg."
"In all this time I've heard nothing at all."
David reached across and took her hand. "I'm sorry, Livi. I didn't stop to think how it would be for you while I was gone."
"And after Vincennes?" Tad prodded his father. "What happened after Vincennes?"
"We stayed on with Colonel—ah—General Clark, he was by then, trying to oversee the country we'd won. We had plans to attack Detroit, but the men and supplies Clark was promised never came. We attacked the Indian villages north of the Ohio River where the British still have allies, but it didn't do much good. The tribes were raiding in Kentucky anyway."
"And since our enlistments had long since run out, we came home by way of Williamsburg," Reid put in. "With my father's influence, we managed to get the land grants we'd been promised—and a good deal earlier, I warrant, than most of Virginia's soldiers will."
"So you did get the rights to the land in Kentucky," Livi murmured and felt her elation evaporate like morning dew.
"I've been telling David that if we're wise, we'll head west to Kentucky right away," Campbell said. "We can have our pick of land if we get there first."
Livi could see the viper in Campbell's smile. Abruptly she rose and gathered up their mugs. "Can't we set talk of land grants and Kentucky aside for a bit? My husband hasn't slept one night in his own bed, and already you're hurrying him off again."
That simple exchange drew new battle lines distinct and clear—Reid Campbell and the land in Kentucky on one side and Livi on the other.
"I told Reid I'd have to wait and see to my family and my business before I could do anything about staking a claim," David answered softly.
"Of course, what you choose to do, David, needn't hold Reid back. He can claim his land in Kentucky any time he likes."
Livi turned from the challenge in Campbell's eyes to the sleeping child in David's arms.
"I'll take care of her tonight, Livi," David said as he rose and turned toward the bedroom. "I'll put little Cissy to bed. I haven't had a chance before."
Clearly, their party was breaking up. Tad grumbled as he climbed the ladder to the loft above the kitchen, though the fact that Reid was sleeping up there, too, softened his exile. Livi gave a final wipe to the kitchen table and blew out the candles.
When at last she and David came together in their room, the house had gone quiet. In the candlelit silence, Livi let down her hair. David unbuckled his belt. She loosened the laces at the front of her bodice. He tugged his shirttails free.
They stood there staring.
"It's good to be home," he said, his voice gone thick.
"It's good to have you here."
The air between them sizzled. It was as if they'd forgotten how this went. Or gotten caught up in remembering.
Livi could barely breathe.
A flush simmered in David's face.
She licked her lips.
He came toward her across the room. His hands were trembling when he raised them to cup her face.
"Livi," he whispered. "Oh, Livi. Livi." He lowered his head and kissed her. The kiss was fragile, delicate—and drew her home.
Her hands scaled the rise of his chest, the bulwark of his shoulders, the thick, strong column of his throat. His flesh was warm beneath her palms, vital and familiar. It reminded her how it felt to be fully alive to sensation, to emotion, how sweet loving a man could be.
She breathed his name.
He carried her to the bed and took her down. She could see the wonder in his face as he bent above her. It was as if this touching and tasting and communion were more than he remembered, more than he had dared dream it would be. He cherished her with the light in his eyes, the stroke of his hands, the depths of his kiss. She melted beneath his touch, opening to him, welcoming him, needing him. She sobbed with elation as their bodies came together.
Loving David had always been easy...
* * *
"Ma? Where are you, Ma?"
At the sound of Tad's voice, thick with sleep and concern, her memories scuttled away like mice before the lantern light. She left David and their life behind, David and her hope, David and her dreams. She scrubbed the last of her tears from her face and took a shaky breath.
"Quiet, Tad," she whispered, hoping he wouldn't hear the tremulousness in her voice. "We don't want to wake the others. I'm sitting out here on the steps."
"What are you doing, Ma?" Tad admonished. "This is dangerous."
"I have my pistol." She lifted her gun so he could see.
Tad didn't seem willing to accept that as adequate protection in the face of this folly. He scanned the yard, the fields, and the woods before sitting down beside her.
In the pale wash of moonlight, he must have been able to see that she'd been weeping.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I'm fine," she assured him. "I just needed some time by myself is all."
Tad looked at her long and hard, a frown marring the smooth, clean lines of his young face. He was clearly overwhelmed by the scope and complexity of the emotions he saw in her. They were things no twelve-year-old should have to witness, facets of an adult's grief—disillusionment, anger, remorse. Livi wished that she had been successful in sparing him her feelings when he'd lost as much as she.
Instead of turning away, Tad slung an arm around her shoulders. It was a gesture he hadn't quite mastered yet. He tangled clumsy fingers in her hair, had to adjust the span between wrist and elbow twice before he got it right.
As he fumbled, Livi's throat burned with a fresh assault of tears. She loved Tad's protectiveness. She loved his tenderness, his sense of responsibility, yet no mother should ask so much of her child. But tonight she did. She took comfort in the warmth of him beside her, in the drape of his arm across her back.
They sat together in the night, looking out across David's fields. Fields that to Livi's eyes seemed black and barren in the cool spring night.
"This is what Pa wanted, isn't it, Ma?" Tad finally whispered, his voice tinged with awe. "To be here. To be part of this."
From the glow in his eyes, from the determination in his face, she could see that Tad understood—this place, this land, this dream—though Livi herself did not. It was Reid's part of David that wanted this, the part she'd never had, the part she'd never been able to comprehend.
"Yes," she answered, around the barb of disappointment lodged in her throat. "Yes, Tad, I think it is."
Chapter 10
Standing on the steps of the cabin in the cool, clear dawn, Livi looked out across her land and realized all they had to do. Somehow she hadn't grasped the scope of it before, the length and breadth of these cleared fields and what it would take to get them planted. She hadn't fathomed the weeks and months of work that lay between the first slice of a farmer's plow and a successful harvest. She hadn't imagined how alone they'd be—five little people in the towering woods. Still, she knew they had to make their way.
They didn't have another choice.
Over the years Livi had cursed and resented and hated this land. It had been the basis for David's restlessness, the source of her fear. It had filled his head with dreams when Livi was his reality.
All these weeks, Livi had believed that when she reached the land beyond the mountains, there would be a watershed—either fulfillment of David's promises or vindication of her doubts. Instead this far Kentucky was beautiful and terrifying, dangerous and life-affirming. But this was no longer David's Kentucky. It was hers—and it was up to Livi to make a life for her family here as best she could.
One by one, the others came to join her in the cabin doorway. Tad, his boyish enthusiasm dimmed by the task at hand. Cissy, needing to be coddled and held. Eustace and Violet, only beginning to grasp how high the price of their freedom was going to be.
They stood there, each of them, in wonder and in fear.
"I think we need to start plowing today," Livi sa
id in a very small voice, then glanced at Eustace as if his knowledge of farming exceeded hers. "We're weeks behind the schedule David set. The corn should be sown and sprouting by now."
To David's credit, they'd come amply prepared for the task at hand. Once all of them had downed a hasty meal, Eustace and Tad hitched their strongest horse to the "jump and coulter" plow and began their work.
The plow was heavy and specially designed for breaking new ground. As they fought their way across the first of the fields, Tad urged the horse forward. Eustace drove the plow's blade deep into the soil, using his weight and all of his strength to slice through the web of tree roots that lay just below the surface. Even in the coolness of the morning, they were both running with sweat in a matter of minutes.
Behind them, Livi and Violet hacked at the earth with hoes. Cissy dragged the roots they loosened into a pile at the edge of the field, to be chopped and burned another day. They worked their way around some of the larger stumps and fought to dig the smaller ones. They had finished only half the first field as darkness fell. They stumbled back to the cabin, ate a cold supper, and fell into bed.
The next day was much like the first, as was the day after and the day after that. When Livi and Eustace agreed that the soil was sufficiently broken, they changed to the shovel plow that turned the earth for cultivation.
The women walked the fields with bags of seed corn slung around their shoulders, digging into the humps between the furrows with long pointed sticks. They dropped a few precious seeds into each of the holes then patted the earth into place. It took them nearly a fortnight to plant the crops—days sweltering in the sun and nights when their sore, knotted muscles twitched, denying them rest. They laid in a patch of turnips at the edge of one field, planted watermelons and pumpkins in the midst of another.
Nature seemed to smile on their endeavors. A warm, soaking rain washed through the Kentucky hills the very night they completed the planting.
During all that time, Livi had managed to bridle her curiosity about the half of the house on the far side of the breezeway porch. But once the fields were planted, she set her sights on seeing what was inside. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was empty and locked to keep the varmints out. But what seemed more likely was that David had stored a cache of supplies in there for them to use as the summer advanced and the stores they'd brought over the mountains ran thin.