credit to any great lady. She had taken on European ways easily and naturally while losing none of her own, and it was a rare thing, I thought, who had little experience after all, that so many women could live together ... or near to each other, without friction.
John Quill had been almost a second father to Noelle. A man married to his farm, he thought of little else, yet he was forever bringing her the largest strawberries, birds' nests, or flowers from the woods or the edges of his fields.
It had been a good life we lived, and what school we had was conducted by the various wives and by Sakim, whose depths of knowledge none had ever plumbed.
Like the boys, Noelle had grown up on stories known to the Catawba and the Cherokee, to the Irish (from Kane O'Hara) and Sakim's stories of Scheherazade.
Sakim read also from the Katha Sarit Sagara, the so-called 'Ocean of Story' as gathered together by Somadeva, a court poet to King Ananta of Kashmir, and his queen, Suryavati.
Often I wondered what their vision of life must be, learning, as they had, from such oddly dissimilar storytellers. They had learned the Catawba story of the beginning of things. Kane O'Hara told them stories of Cuchulainn or of Conn of the Hundred Battles, and of the Irish longs who lived on Tara. From Jeremy they had stories of Achilles and Ulysses and of Xenophon's retreat of the Ten Thousand. From Sakim, stories of Ali Baba and Sinbad, of Rustum and his fabled horse, Raqsh, who killed a lion to protect his sleeping master.
From Abigail they had the story of God and of Jesus and Mary, and from Sakim, of Allah and Mohammed, and from Sweet Woman the story of Wakonda the Sky Spirit.
From Barry Magill they learned something of weaving, from Peter Fitch a love of good wood and the uses of it, and from John Quill a love of the earth and the magic of making things grow.
What was left for me? A little of each, and the pointing out of things along the trail, and something of England's history, of the Normans, the Danes, and the Celts, of the Norsemen and their raids and wanderings.
Yet there were strange gaps in their knowledge, realized suddenly when after hearing the story of Rustum and Raqsh, Noelle asked me, 'Papa, what is a horse?'
Chapter 32
The cabin with which they provided us was no place for a man, what with all the sewing and stitching, and the talk of the women as they stitched skirts and petticoats, and tried on and fitted, and exclaimed over this and that. For neither Abby nor Noelle had the proper clothes for shipboard nor for landing in England, either.
Kin returned and we sat against the log wall outside the cabin. 'Jonathan Delve has something on his mind,' he said, 'But nobody has a notion of what. This much I did learn. He was taken by a British warship and was in Newgate for a time, and somehow bribed his way out.'
'He is not idling here for nothing,' I said.
'Aye, that he is not. Brian is just now sitting over ale with a sailor who's been aboard her, and if I know Brian he will soon have all the man knows.'
Kin ran his fingers through his long hair. 'Pa, we may be late tonight. There's some looking about we'll do.'
'Be easy with it, son. The British are no fools, and are sharp upon the form and manner of things.'
A thought came to me. 'Where's Yance?'
'Him?' Kin said, almost absent-mindedly. 'He's helping the blacksmith who is behind in his work. You know Yance. He must be busy all the time.'
Aye, I knew him. Busy indeed he was, but with what? Yance was never one to be idle but often enough his business was trouble.
However, the day was a quiet one, and I enjoyed sitting in the sun and watching what went on about us, for it had been long since I'd seen any settlement but our own. From time to time some of them would stop to pass the time with me, and so I heard much of the story of the early settlement of Jamestown, which had been only a shadow-tale until now.
Indians had told us a bit here or there. How the colony came near starving, and how many had died. And how at last John Smith was given the command he should have had at the beginning and then all began to come right. They told us also of some of his explorations up the coast, and how he had gone to islands far off the north coast to another settlement for supplies.
That night, warm, bedded down, I lay awake beside Abby and looked up in darkness at the hand-sewn rafters. A knowing hand had shaped them, a knowing hammer drove the pegs. There is a quiet beauty in such things as these, a beauty more than paint or chisel make, the beauty of quiet men, making strong things for their own use, shaping each piece with loving fingers.
At last I slept, awakening slightly when the boys came, and wondering in my half-sleeping way why they came so late when the dawn was in the sky.
Captain Powell came the next morning.
'If there's trouble,' he asked, 'will you and your lot fight with us? For Captain Delve is with us still and a ship comes in this morning with a thousand weight of powder aboard, and as much of shot and lead. She'll have clothing aboard, and seed and much for which we've waited.'
'When she leaves, where does she sail?'
'To London, Captain Sackett, straight to London town.'
'Will she carry my wife and my daughter and my son Brian?'
'She will if you help us. For I fear that Delve means to take her. We've lately discovered he's low on powder, and needs all she carries for whatever it is he's about, and he has put his ship around this morning and his guns aim at the town.'
'We'll stand by you,' I said.
'Aye,' said Kin, 'that we will, if needed. But do not worry, Captain Powell. Arm your men and have them stand by, too. But they need fear no cannon fire.'
'No cannon fire? He has thirty-six guns, man. Can you mean to say no cannon fire and him with thirty-six guns?'
'Aye.' Kin smiled his slow smile and looked up, his gray-green eyes alight in his lean brown face. 'And not a one of them will fire. Last night we went aboard, my brothers and I, with O'Hara and Jeremy Ring and Mr. Burke, and while two of us guarded the doors just in case, we spiked every gun!'
'Spiked them!' Powell exclaimed. 'How could you, with men on watch, and-'
'We be woodsmen, Captain Powell, who move quietly even among Indians. They heard us not. One man on watch was put quietly to sleep. The other ... well, I regret to say it, but one was strong and made a fight and took the blade like a good lad. He's down in the river now, drifting toward the sound.
'Some guns we merely spiked and in some we wedged cannonballs tight against the base of the bore, and hammered them home snugly with wooden wedges. Oh, we made a few sounds then, but those aboard were snug asleep after all their rum, and we not too much worried.
'What's needed now, Captain, I leave to you, but if it were me I'd draw Delve's teeth by taking what powder he has left. We'd not want him chasing after a ship that carries our mother and sister, although Brian can care for himself.'
'Whose idea was it,' I asked, suspiciously, 'to go aboard at all?'
Kin smiled, 'Why Yance's of course, but it appealed to us, too. Would you have had us done other than what we did?'
'You might at least have awakened me,' I grumbled.
Kin chuckled. 'It would have worried Ma. Then, too, you older men need your sleep.'
He ducked when I struck out at him, and laughed at me with tender eyes.
I thought of my father, of Ivo Sackett. He would have loved them, too.
'Captain Powell?' It was a soldier at the door. 'Captain Delve is coming ashore, and he has twenty men with him.'
'Summon the company. Muskets charged and ready. I will meet them here.'
So we took up our muskets then and went down to the water with Captain Powell, and when the men came ashore we moved in around them, with muskets and pistols, sixty men to their twenty, and all armed and ready.
