Authors: Countess In Buckskin

Merline Lovelace (7 page)

BOOK: Merline Lovelace

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Rage and determination sustained her for the first mile. Youth and resilience for the next. By the third, the fury of the wind and sting of snow began to drain the reserves of strength Tatiana had built during her weeks with the Hupa. By the fourth, only fear kept her moving.

Holy Father, would this white hell never end? Icy snow swept up by the wind crusted her eyebrows and lashes. Cold numbed her cheeks, her lips. More than once, she stumbled. With her arms pulled taut by the rawhide tether, she couldn’t break her fall and landed awkwardly on her knees. The first time, the American jerked her up with a curse and a warning to watch where she put her feet. The second, he shortened the link between them until her wrists were tucked under his arm and she trod almost on his heels. To her silent relief, his bulk blocked some of the wind and made the going easier.

Ever afterward Tatiana would wonder whether a capricious nature or a merciful God kept the clouds from dumping all of their heavy load. Snowflakes skittered and whirled through the air like sharp-bladed knives, but didn’t descend in a suffocating blanket of white. Even without the snow, however, the swirling gray mists obscured all visibility. She plodded behind the American through the blinding haze for what seemed like two lifetimes.

They reached the timberline just as the iridescent light began to fade. Short, stunted trees provided intermittent relief from the biting wind. The American pushed on until the trees grew taller and thicker. Suddenly darkness descended with the finality of an ax.

At last they halted in a stand of towering pines. Too weary for words, Tatiana started to crumple in the snow where she stood. A tug on her bound arms kept her upright. In the icy darkness, she couldn’t see the American’s expression, but the coldness in his voice rivaled that of the air.

“If I untie you, will you stay put?”

“Yes.”

She would stay wherever she dropped...until she’d regained her strength and decided how next she would proceed. She was too tired, too frozen, to think clearly right now.

She held out her hands, expecting him to sever the bonds. Instead, he yanked her over to the pony. A hand in the small of her back shoved her against the pack. Her arms were stretched up and over the bulging sacks and skins.

“What do you do?” she gasped. “I said I would not leave.”

“I don’t believe you, and I’m damned if I’m going chase after you again.”

A few quick loops secured the rawhide thong to the crossed poles of the support. Tatiana’s angry tugs caused the pony to stamp nervously.

“I do not lie!”

A snort of derision sounded above the swish of pine branches. “I don’t believe that, either.”

“Bastard! Evil-eyed horehound!”

Since she didn’t know the English words for her curses, they served no purpose, Tatiana knew, except to vent her frustrations. She ran out of breath before she progressed much beyond the American’s resemblance to several disgusting barnyard animals. Unutterably weary, she pressed her face into the deer-hide pack covering to escape the stinging wind. Bristles scraped her nose and cheeks. Whoever had cleaned this skin did a poor job, she thought dully.

The sounds of heavy labor rose behind her. A series of grunts. The thump of something hitting the snow. The swish of branches and, once, a sudden crack and a curse. Tatiana gave up trying to distinguish the sounds. The pack captured her breath and warmed her frozen face. Moments later, her knees gave. She sagged in weariness, then jerked upright at the wrench to her wrists. The packhorse turned in a half circle, as if to escape this unaccustomed pull. Tatiana followed, her arms aching.

When she thought she could bear the shooting needles in her shoulder joints no longer, a dim shape materialized beside her. The ropes came free, and she collapsed in a shapeless heap. The American ignored her to remove the pony’s burden and lead it away. Tatiana couldn’t find the strength to move. When he returned, a hand under her arm pulled her up and led her through the darkness.

“Duck your head. Lower.”

His splayed palm went to the back of her neck. Bent double, Tatiana stumbled out of the whistling wind into a black hole of silence and, mercifully, warmth. The sharp tang of resin told her that it was a cavelike shelter under the swooping, snow-laden branches of a pine tree. The pungent odor of horse indicated that the pony shared the sanctuary.

Once more she collapsed, this time onto a layer of pine boughs. Shoulders hunched, head bowed, arms and legs aching, she let exhaustion roll through her in crushing waves. Blackness surrounded her, seeped into her soul.

The pine boughs rustled. A small thud sounded close to Tatiana. She felt rather than saw the American ease himself down beside the pack he’d dropped. The harsh grate of their breathing filled the small cavern. After a few moments, a hoarse command came to her through the black void.

“Tell me why you risked your life for a basket of tree cuttings.”

Wearily Tatiana lifted her head. “Will you not untie me first?”

“No. Tell me.”

How changeable he was, she thought. Was it only last night that he’d shown her the portrait of his lost love? Only a few hours since she’d awakened to find him crouched beside the fire and admitted that perhaps she’d been too hasty in her assessment of his person and his manner? Now she sought to find the strength to hate him, and failed dismally.

Tomorrow, she thought, propping her shoulders against the mounded snow behind her. Tomorrow she’d hate and beg and threaten and cajole. Tonight she was too weary to do more than close her eyes and respond to his demand.

“If I do not save the cuttings, my life is forfeit, as is my father’s.”

Silence greeted her low, husky admission.

“Even if I save them,” she whispered, “I do not know if they will stay the tsar’s wrath. I salvaged so little of what was on the ship. Only a small portion of what I brought from Russia.”

Shivers shook her at the memory of those terrifying hours clinging to the top of the huge chest while the sea roiled around her.

“Go on.” There was no pity in the deep, relentless voice.

“Before I go on, I must first go back.”

“Go wherever you will. Just get on with it.”

Sighing, Tatiana marshaled her thoughts. How could she explain? How could she find the words to voice her own vanity, her fatal blindness?

“My father is a renowned scholar,” she began tiredly. “He is most famous, in Russia and elsewhere, for his knowledge of horticultural matters. When he was ambassador to the Court of St. James, he presented learned papers to the Royal Academy. He and the great earl of Lansdowne became fast friends. Always, they puttered in the orchards and the fields.”

Her mind drifted back to those brief, halcyon days in the lush gardens of the earl’s manor house. While her father and the stooped, balding Lansdowne indulged their passion for fruit trees and vines, Tatiana had giggled and splashed in the fountains under her chaperon’s watchful eye and enjoyed the English predilection for picnics with the earl’s grandchildren.

“When we returned to Russia, my father remained at his estates in the south, where he has many orchards. Like other young girls of my station, I went to serve the tsarina. To gain polish and a husband, you understand.”

Her fingers curled inside the furred gloves.

“I gained a husband, but not the one that the tsar had chosen for me. I was young. Foolish. I ran away with a captain of the Imperial Guards. I believed that Nikolas would relent once Aleksei and I were wed. Perhaps... perhaps he would have, had my husband not involved himself in a plot with other young, stupid officers to curb the tsar’s power. Aleksei was executed, as were the other officers.”

Tatiana swallowed, trying to blank the horror from her mind. As always, the images proved too strong to keep at bay. Her husband’s frightened face. Nikolas’s implacable one. The black, cold eyes of the colonel who’d held her immobile, his fingers digging into her flesh, while the executioner placed a knotted rope around his traitorous subordinate’s neck.

The man beside her shifted. The movement was a mere whisper of sound, only the smallest rustle of pine boughs, but it was enough to pull her from the black pit of her memories. Although he said nothing, she sensed a lessening in his cold anger. She wanted not his sympathy, Tatiana thought. Only his help. Gathering her thoughts, she finished the sordid tale.

“I was spared only by my father’s most urgent pleas. He beggared himself to pay the price the tsar demanded for my life. When even the mountains of gold he raised did not satisfy Nikolas, my father made a last, desperate offer. He would save Fort Ross, which the tsar had decided must be abandoned.”

This time the shift was more abrupt Pine boughs swished as he turned toward her. “The tsar has decided that Fort Ross must be abandoned?”

“It is not widely known. Only among a few of Nikolas’s most trusted advisors. So much has been invested in the venture, you understand, that no one wants to voice aloud its failure. Heads will roll if the fort fails. Vast fortunes will be lost. One of my father’s friends whispered to him about the situation, and thus he made the offer to save the fort.”

“With apple tree cuttings?”

She bridled at the disbelief in his voice. “It is the only way! The otters played out long ago in the seas around Fort Ross, you understand. Without the furs to ship back to Russia, the outpost has no use except to grow grains and foodstuffs for the settlements in Alaska, where yet they hunt the furs.”

Instinctively Tatiana tried to raise her hands to augment her recital with the expansive gestures that were so much a part of her nature. Her bound wrists frustrated her. With an irritated frown, she let them drop.

“Unfortunately, the grain harvests have been most poor,” she told her listener. “And the trees brought up from the Spanish settlements have yet to bear heavy harvests. These trees, they are too tender to survive the rains and the cold. The cuttings I bring will join with them at the base, and create a new, more hardy stock.”

Tatiana finished in a breathless rush. She’d come so far. She could not fail now. She had to convince this man to take her back, to retrieve the precious cargo entrusted to her care.

“These cuttings, they are the only hope to save the fort. There are not enough to join with all the trees in the orchards at Fort Ross, of course. I lost too many to the sea. But they will show what is possible, you understand.” She leaned forward, searching the blackness. “You
must
understand.”

Josh understood, all right. His mind raced with the understanding. The tsar had decided to abandon Fort Ross! President Van Buren was going to be mighty interested in that bit of information.

Josh had only visited the settlement once, some years ago. The wooden fort housed some sixty Russians and around eighty Aleuts who’d come down with them from Archangel to hunt the seas in their watertight kayaks. Even then, the otter population in the waters around the fort had thinned. The Aleuts were having to paddle farther and farther offshore to bring in the pelts. Josh hadn’t realized that the fur take had dwindled to the point that the fort had turned to agriculture as justification for its existence.

This was going to take some thinking. Some deep, serious thinking.

Shifting his weight to make a nest for himself in the prickly boughs, he stretched out beside his rifle. The pony stamped and huffed a few feet away. The woman was silent for a few moments before voicing a puzzled question.

“What do you do?”

“I’m going to sleep.”

A startled silence greeted that pronouncement. Then she stuttered a disbelieving protest.

“You...you sleep now? After all that I have told you.”

“Now.”

“But...but what of my cuttings!”

“I’ll have to think about those.”

“And these bonds? You cannot mean to leave me tied like this!”

“I can, and I do.”

“They are too tight,” she protested indignantly. “I shall not sleep in such discomfort.”

The branches rustled as Josh found a better position. “You should have thought of that before you stuck a knife in my throat.”

Chapter Seven

A
fierce growling in her stomach and a burning need to relieve herself brought Tatiana out of an exhausted stupor. Her lids lifted, scraping over dry eyes blurred with sleep. She stared blankly at the grayish white wall before her until her sluggish mind made sense of it.

She was burrowed under a pine tree, she remembered slowly. Buried in a cavern formed of the snow and roofed by the tree’s sagging branches.

Like an avalanche gathering speed, the events of the night before came rushing back. Life pumped into her aching limbs. Curling her legs, Tatiana tried to sit up. At that point, she discovered that she couldn’t move her arms. Frowning, she remembered that she was still bound. She glanced down at the rawhide around her wrists. Its trailing end was trapped under her body and held her arms anchored to the ground.

With a twist that tangled the ties of her cloak around her neck, Tatiana flopped over onto her other side. She expected to find the American asleep beside her. Instead, she saw only the pony. It stood a few feet away, steam rising from its shaggy coat as it regarded her curiously through liquid brown eyes.

Relief skidded through her. She didn’t have to face the American just yet. Within an instant or two, relief gave way to a more pressing need. He must release her. She must relieve herself, most immediately. She craned her head toward the small round opening that showed a patch of lighter gray.

“Josiah! Josiah Jones!”

Her shout made the pony dance, but brought no other response. She called again, louder and longer. Her shouts sank into the thick snow walls. Muttering curses under her breath, Tatiana struggled onto her hands and knees and crawled across the scattered boughs toward the opening. The fox cloak twisted beneath her and tugged painfully at her neck with each jerky movement. Her bound hands played havoc with her balance. Twice she toppled onto her side. Once, she went facedown in the snow.

Choking from the pressure on her throat, she finally crawled into a patch of dappled sunshine. She crouched half in and half out of the cave and glanced cautiously around her.

The howling winds of yesterday had died. The steep granite crags she and Josiah had descended in the blinding whiteness had gentled to a sweeping, tree-covered slope. Snow so pure it hurt the eye lay like a down-filled counterpane over the land. And the trees! Holy Mother, these towering trees! So straight and tall and dark a green beneath their lacings of white. Her father would be astonished at their height, and at the circumference of their massive trunks. When she took in the silent majesty of the scene, she sank back on her heels.

How could it be so beautiful, this land of savage seas and brutal mountains?

Suddenly the fact that she was alone in this magnificent wilderness sank into Tatiana’s consciousness. She swept the area around the snow cave’s entrance again.

She saw no sign of Josiah. No sign, either, of a morning campfire. Not even the battered tin pot he boiled his coffee in. Only a set of footprints in the snow, winding away from their subterranean shelter to disappear among the trees.

A queer little sensation darted down Tatiana’s back. Not quite fear. Not exactly alarm. Still, when she spotted the packs under the concealing sweep of a snow-laden branch, she let out a slow, shaky breath. He wouldn’t leave the pony and his packs, she reasoned. After what occurred yesterday, he might well leave Tatiana to her fate, but he wouldn’t abandon his supplies.

Would he?

She struggled to her feet. Pushing her tangled hair out of her eyes with both hands, she reached awkwardly behind her for the hat that dangled by its cords and dragged it onto her head. A few strenuous tugs righted the heavy cloak. Tatiana gasped in relief when the cutting pressure on her windpipe eased.

Those basic needs attended to, she raised her arms and attacked the rawhide around her wrists with her teeth. The tight knots defied her every effort to work them loose. Nor could she gnaw through the tough, unyielding strands. Jaws aching, she bit down on a fur mitten and tried to pull it free of the thong. If she could tug the mitten off, the bonds might slacken enough to slip her hand through the loops.

After several moments of futile effort, Tatiana gave up. Spitting fur from her dry mouth, she resigned herself to relieving the pressure on her bladder as best she could with her hands still bound. She spent an awkward session behind the tree, then attended to the pony. With much coaxing and tugging on its lead, she got the beast out of the snow cave and tethered to a low-hanging branch. The poor thing looked as hungry as she felt.

She decided to search for something to feed them both. The bindings on the packs almost defeated her fumbling, mittened fingers. A film of sweat dewed her upper lip by the time she dug both fists into the pony’s feed. Dumping a pile of the mixed grains and crushed acorns onto a cleared patch, she left the horse to its breakfast and dug into another pouch for her own.

Retreating to a fallen log, she held a strip of dried deer meat firmly in both hands and tore off a bite. It tasted like old, salty leather, with only a hint of wild onion to temper its bitter tang. Slowly Tatiana masticated the small bite to soften it and release its juices. While she chewed, she watched the trees where the American’s footsteps wound away.

He would come back. He’d gone to hunt. To get their bearings. Perhaps...her jaw stilled. Perhaps to find her basket. He would come back.

She finished the dried meat and quenched her thirst with clumps of snow. Her bound hands clenched uselessly in her lap.

He would come back.

Sunlight slanted through the trees and warmed the air. As it had before, the fur cloak grew heavy and hot. Tatiana brushed a mitt of snow across her heated face.

He must come back.

The minutes slipped by. Her uneasiness mounted and with it a trapped, frightened feeling. She fought the fear for what seemed like hours. Finally her courage deserted her. She bent over her hands and gnawed on the bonds like a trapped wild animal. Her teeth slipped and scraped against each other. The inside of her lower lip split. Blood added its salty residue to the taste of the deer meat. She was so consumed by the desperate need to free herself that the sound of a thud brought her springing to her feet in panting, stomach-churning fear.

Josiah stood a few yards away, his face ruddy from exertion. The packs he’d abandoned yesterday lay at his feet...alongside Tatiana’s basket.

She stared at the intricately woven container, knowing that she should feel grateful. That relief should roll through her in great waves. At the moment, though, the only emotion that consumed her was a heaving resentment at having been left tied like a beast. The American read her feelings in the tight, angry face she turned to him.

“You’ll fare worse if you pull a knife on me again,” he promised quietly. “Far worse.”

Unspeaking, Tatiana held out her hands. She’d do what she must Surely he understood that by now.

He regarded her steadily, then reached for his knife. The blade slipped free of its scabbard and sawed through the tough, unforgiving bonds. Removing her mitts, Tatiana rubbed her sore wrists and reassessed the man who stood before her.

In the bright light of morning, he seemed as tall and as solid as the trees. He’d thrown back the hood of his capote. The sun glinted on the burnished strands in his honey-colored hair and beard and gave his tanned skin the patina of polished oak. His golden brown eyes showed no hint of friendliness, nor yet of the anger that had risen like a live thing between them last night.

“Why did you go back for the cuttings?” she asked, struggling to keep her voice even.

He shoved his knife into its fringed holder. “I didn’t. I went back for the extra food supplies. But I promised you we’d carry your basket as far as we could, and I hold to my promises.”

“I thank you.”

The words were stiff and forced, but the American didn’t seem to take offense at their ungraciousness. Hooking his thumbs in his belt, he regarded Tatiana thoughtfully.

“Do you really believe these twigs will make a difference to the future of Fort Ross?”

“My father believes so. Me?” Her shoulders lifted. “I can only hope.”

“If we make it through the mountains without slitting each other’s throats,” he said slowly, “I’ll take you to the fort.”

“But...” She stared at him, confounded. “But I thought your way went north.”

“It does. I’ll make a detour.”

For one of the few times in her life, Tatiana was at a loss for words. After the events of the preceding day, she would never have anticipated such a change of face.

“Why would you do this after I...after I...”

The tension in his shoulders eased. “After you tried to carve a totem on my windpipe?”

“Why do you do this?”

“Let’s just say you made me realize how important this matter of Fort Ross is.”

She shook her head. Never would she understand him. “You’re a most confusing man, Josiah Jones.”

A brief, elusive smile pulled at his lips. “That’s what Catherine used to say. Only she always called me Josh.”

Ah, yes. His adored Katerina. She of the gilded curls and plump red lips.

Suddenly, inexplicably, Tatiana felt the full weight of two days and nights on the trail. Her eyes itched with the grit of sleep. Her scalp crawled with the need to pull the bone comb Re-Re-An had given her through her tangled hair. The tip of her nose, she was sure, glowed red from its exposure to the sun. She longed to shed the American’s hat, her bulky fox cloak, and her several layers of buckskin and cleanse herself from head to toe.

Tonight, she promised herself. When they made camp tonight, she would scrub herself with boiled snow. Assuming, as he said, she and this strange, confusing man did not slit each other’s throats before then.

Josh waited for the Russian to ready herself, then set off at a steady pace, one he maintained throughout the day. As the miles passed, the wary truce between him and the countess slipped into the familiarity of two travelers who had grown used to each other’s ways.

He didn’t fool himself into thinking that she’d learned her lesson. The events of the preceding day had given him a good measure of her desperation. She’d carve him or anyone else up in little pieces if she had to, to get herself and her damned basket of twigs to Fort Ross. Now that he’d agreed to take her there, she walked with a quicker step and an eagerness that made light of the steep climbs and long miles.

Josh had his own reasons for detouring south, and they didn’t have anything to do with apple tree cuttings. Ever since last night, he’d been thinking of nothing but Tatiana’s startling disclosure. The Russians might abandon their toehold in California!

Fort Ross was the only fortified coastal settlement between the Spanish presidios to the south and the British Fur Company fort at Vancouver. Who would move into the area if the Russians left?

Not the British or the French, if President Van Buren had anything to say about it. He wouldn’t tolerate further European expansion on the American continent. Just the rumor of incursions by the British Fur Company into Oregon Territory had been enough for him to send Josh on this urgent mission to scout the northwest area.

Cathenne’s uncle would be as interested as Josh was in the startling news that the Russians might pull out of California. As president, he’d made repeated offers to purchase “higher California” along with Texas and other Mexican territories, and been refused. But now that the Russians were thinking about leaving the area, Mexico might be more willing to negotiate with the United States for the wild, unsettled stretch of land above San Francisco, if only to keep the French and British out.

The possibilities had tumbled around in Josh’s mind from the moment Tatiana let fall about the fort’s uncertain fate. With the swiftness of a man used to adapting to the unexpected, he’d unilaterally amended his orders. Oregon could wait. Fort Ross might not. He’d check out the situation for himself.

The fact that the detour would mean another few weeks in Tatiana’s company had nothing to do with Josh’s decision. Despite his scraggly beard and stained buckskins, he was an officer in the army of the United States. He had a duty to perform.

That duty occupied his thoughts well into the afternoon, when Tatiana’s sudden exclamation shoved it right out of his mind.

“Look! There, to the right!”

Whipping his rifle from its leather sheath, Josh spun around. Muscles coiled, nerves snapping like the tip of a bullwhip, he searched the narrow gorge off to their right. Nothing moved among the snow-covered rocks.

“There!” Tatiana cried, running to his side. “There it is again.”

She pointed to a thin vapory ribbon that rose from the ravine floor, folded back to the earth, then shot into the sky like a silver arrow.

“What can it...?” She broke off, her nose wrinkling. “Pah! It has the smell of the spoiled egg.”

Josh brought his rifle up, grinning. “It’s a geyser. A hole in the earth where hot water shoots out. This area is full of them.”

BOOK: Merline Lovelace

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