AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(11)
The sudden crying from her own bedchamber recalled her to the reality that was the tempest of her life now. Shaking off her apprehension, she returned to her room to swoop up the infant and work her fingers between its blanket folds. “Aye, Robbie, tis a soggy mess you have made. Sshshh, let me change you, and then tis feast you will on this holy day.”
As would the rest of the inn’s residents, all three who could be heard below, traipsing through the kitchen’s back door. The babe cradled in one arm, she descended the stairs to find Bonnie Charlie, kneeling on one knee, as he stuffed split wood chunks into the oven. The old coot flashed nearly toothless gums in a knowing grin.
She knew she felt different. Did she look that different?
“Yewr bread’s arising,” he cackled, “so was yewr visitor last night.”
She blushed as hotly as if she were still a virgin. His keen sight missed nothing. From a broken twig on the inn’s outskirts, which he scouted regularly, to assessing her varying facial expressions, which betrayed her every emotion.
His hearing was somewhat less acute. Slammed upside his head by the flat edge of a Shawnee tomahawk, he had collapsed verily at the inn’s doorway shortly after she had taken occupancy. He had never left.
Gantu was shoveling the shucked corncobs onto the tamped coals for roasting. His tall, powerful body was nigh as black as the coals. His head, which he shaved in the horse trough every other morning, gleamed in the fire’s light. “Heard the mon in the stable,” he said with his Caribbean English. “Though he might be one of those Powhattans bent on stealing Millie or Molly, you know? Helped the mon reshod his mount, I did.”
“Was he . . . did he say anything? About where he might be headed . . . or if he planned on returning this way?”
Bonnie Charlie cocked his mouth into a one-sided grin. “Reckoned, as how he wore the look of man who kept his own counsel, that was twixt yew and him. Will say he ‘peared the sort of man sure of whatever he undertook to do.” His weathered face, framed by a gray-brown bush of hair, crimped into a rascally countenance. “And I did take note that he wore the look of a man well pleasured.”
“Did anyone milk Millie?” she asked, feeling her blush grow even hotter.
. “Steamin’ fresh, Mistress,” Gantu said, his sentence rising in pitch at the end. “On the work table behind you, it is.”
She sidestepped Skute to collect the milk-filled pail. The mangy mutt stirred from its position only long enough to whoof a greeting before it went back to biting its fleas. Wherever Gantu went, so went Skute, and vice versa.
“I take baby,” Rasannock offered, entering and shutting the back door behind him. The sleekly muscled young man quickly set aside the basket of eggs he had gathered and held out his arms. Needing to make the pap, she gratefully handed over Robbie.
Rasannock, or Two Spirits, a name his people used to described one with both masculine and feminine attributes, possessed enviable, long black hair, as coarse as a horsetail, caught at the crown of his head in a topknot. He wore leggings with a blanket draped over one shoulder and a purple sash around his waist as gracefully as any cavalier – or courtesan.
Collecting the cow horn, she said, “On the hearth in the main room is a basket. You three might discover something for yourselves. It is our Christmas, you know.”
Gantu grinned widely. “You give us presents, right?” His West Indies lilt softened his ferocious appearance, with rings piercing both his ear lobes and a single one transfixing his septum.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “No. The Dutch Sinterklaas has left you garlic bulbs.”
Ignoring her, he limped through the half-door ahead of the other two. His shriveled calf muscles in his left leg was his only imperfection in his superb physique.
After he had been recaptured in an escape attempt, his owner had ordered his Achilles tendon severed Daily, she massaged his lower leg with sunflower oil in hopes of reviving the atrophied muscle, but she feared too much time had elapsed since the horrific punishment.
She finished fitting the leather nipple over the pap-filled cow horn, then joined the three in the main room. She caught redhanded the irreligious Bonnie Charlie arranging with great care the nativity figures on the mantle.
“Hated to see ‘em go to waste,” he grumbled. “Not that I am hornswoggled by the Christmas story.”
“Here, give me Robbie,” she told Rasannock. “You’ve yet to look at your present.”
A noisy feeding Robbie cradled in one arm, she sat and watched her three wise men, digging through the basket like overgrown children. She had created this. This family of misfits.
Furred beaver cap covering his shorn head, Gantu was posing proudly, arms akimbo, his chin jutting upward. Rasannock eyed him with both approval and affection.
She smiled. “Magnificent.”
Fingering the razor-sharp blade of his whittling knife, Bonnie Charlie’s leathery face beamed. With the knife’s edge, he testingly scratched himself under his deerskin shirt. “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, if this doesn’t beat everything hands down.”
Next, Rasannock was preening around, one hand on hip, his other flicking his wrist to flourish the woolen panel of her red cape. Glee was written all over his coppery face. “I am pretty, yes?” he asked with a worshipping kind of simper directed at Gantu.
Gantu rolled his eyes.