'But I did ask!'
'Not when we would marry. It cannot be tomorrow. I am not ready.'
'John Tilly,' I explained, 'is not only a ship's master but an ordained minister. As such, he married my mother and father, and he can marry us.
'Tomorrow we will float his ship. He cannot linger on this coast. It would be foolhardy to trust the weather another day, and as it is, he has been unbelievably fortunate. Only a little wind could pile sand up behind her so she might never be floated.
'I regret that we must hurry, but unless you wish to go into the forest traveling with a man and unmarried to him, then I think it would be wise if tomorrow was the day.'
'Oh, you do, do you? Have you thought that I may have changed my mind?'
'If you have,' I said, growing irritated, 'now is the time. Captain Tilly will take you home. He is planning to stop by Shawmut, and he would be glad to take you there.'
One of the Indians asked a question, and I replied. They stared at her with admiration and many grunts and exclamations. 'What is that all about?' Diana demanded.
'They wanted to know how many blankets I traded for you.'
'Blankets? For me?'
Chuckling, I told her, 'I said I traded five muskets, one hundred pounds of lead, a keg of powder, and ten blankets for you.'
'That's a lie!' she objected. 'You have done noth--'
'Ssh!' I admonished. 'What I told them is an enormous price. I told them you were the daughter of a great chief, a wise man, and that you were a wise woman, a plant woman, and a medicine woman. That makes you very important by their standards.'
'And not by yours?'
'Of course! I wish them to respect you, and to do that I must speak a language they understand. Now they think of you as a princess.'
Long before daylight we gathered on the beach to attempt the floating of the Abigail. She had been pumped free of the water she had taken on, and some of her cargo had been landed on the beach. The sand had not begun to pile up behind her, and with a line run out to a boat and twelve good men at the oars, we went to work. Yet it was midmorning before we worked her free of the sand and got her fairly afloat. And it was nearly dusk before her cargo was reshipped and she could set her sails. While she lay off the shore, Diana and I, standing upon the beach, were wed.
It was a scene I shall never forget. The long sweep of the glistening sands, the vast marches of the ocean nearby, the low stunted growth inland, and about us the small group of British sailors and Catawbas.
When all was over, John Tilly held out his hand to Diana, but she ignored it and kissed him lightly on the cheek. A moment we lingered, saying a few last words, with a last minute message from Diana to her father, whom we soon hoped to see, and then they shoved off and were taken aboard.
We waited only a moment longer to be certain she cleared, but her sails filled, and she bore away to the open sea. We walked inland then, going toward the place where the Catawbas had left their canoe, and only once did we look back. Only her topmasts were visible against the red afterglow of the sunset.
Diana was quiet, as well she might be. She had trusted herself to a man of whom she knew, after all, very little and to six Indians of whom she knew nothing.
Their canoe was large, a birch-bark canoe such as the Hurons make, far better than the heavier dugout canoes of the Iroquois. That it was a captured canoe, I had no doubt. The inland waters were calm, and we made good time, moving up a bay called the Sinepuxtent. The Catawbas, great wanderers and warriors, now wished to be home. We swept to the head of the bay, had a brief glimpse of the open sea again, and then moved across a wider bay and into the mouth of a river.
We made camp there under the loblolly pines and some scattered hardwoods, and one of the Catawbas killed a deer that had come down to the river to drink in the late dusk.
At daybreak we went up the river until it became so shallow we had to walk in the water and pull the canoe behind us. The river flowed from a swamp called the Pocomoke, and we crossed the swamp moving west and south, then up another stream, a long portage, and gradually we worked our way westward. We saw much game but few signs of Indians. Coming at last to a wide bay, we followed it down until we entered the mouth of another river.
Diana and I talked but little, and the Indians spoke only a word here and there, alert for all the sounds of the forest or swamp. From time to time I took my turn at the paddle, for I had long been familiar with canoe travel.
From the Abigail I had come well armed, with a musket, two pistols, powder, and ball. We had also brought a good stock of food from the ship so that little time would be lost in hunting.
Our first destination was the trading station of the man named Claiborne in the upper part of the bay, or so I had heard. This was the place where I had suggested Captain Tilly might sell or trade a part of his cargo, but I doubted that he had made such a decision, being eager to get on to the north and hence to Newfoundland.
At the Claiborne station I was sure I could obtain knowledge of what was happening in the country about and what supplies we might further require. The Catawbas knew of the station but had not been there.
Those first days, despite the swamp and its mosquitoes, had been idyllic. The weather was fair, the water smooth, and our progress steady. All about us the land gave evidence of fertility, but it was largely uninhabited. Several times we saw distant smoke, as from campfires or perhaps a village, and once, far off, we saw a canoe with three Indians. As we were the larger number, they shied off and vanished into an inlet on the eastern shore.
To deny such country to the impoverished of England was criminal, and when I thought of the crowded, sweaty, ragged people of the European cities of whom my father, Jeremy, and Kane had told me, I knew this must indeed be their promised land.
Surely the two peoples had much to learn from each other, yet even as I thought of this, I shrank from it, for I could see no common ground of meeting. The exchange of ideas and methods offered much, but I had dealt with Indians enough to know that our ways and theirs were poles apart. It would be no easy thing to bring them together.
We moved along at a goodly speed, slowing our pace as we neared the southern tip of Kent Island, wishing not to surprise them into hostilities, for they knew not who we were. On the shore we saw several men armed with muskets and with them a few Indians. I lifted a hand, waving to them, and we came on in, moving slowly so they might see who we were.
The fort, if such it might be called, sat back from the shore on a slight rise of ground. The great gate was closed; only a smaller door that would admit the passage of but one man at a time stood open.
A thickset man with a wide, florid face came down to the small-boat landing they had built into the water. He stared at us curiously, obviously surprised to see a white girl amongst us.
'Claiborne?' I asked.
'I am Deal Webster,' the man said, 'a trader here. William Claiborne is not here at the moment.'
'We would trade,' I said, 'and buy supplies. I am Kin Ring Sackett, of Carolina, and this be my wife. She is newly from Cape Ann.'
'Come ashore! Come ashore!' he said cheerfully. 'You be welcome here, and seldom it is we have visitors.' He glanced at the Catawbas. 'I do not know your Indians.'
'They be Catawbas, from Carolina, and friends to all white men.'
'Ah? Yes, I have heard them spoken of. Fighting men, I hear.'
'If need be,' I replied cautiously, 'but they come now in peace, escorting me to my home in the mountains.'
I stepped ashore and offered my hand to Diana, who followed me, stepping easily to the small landing. The Catawbas drew their canoe up on the shore near the small pier, disdaining to even glance at the Indians who stood about. Those Indians needed no introduction to the Catawba, I knew, for their fame was wide.
Webster took us to a cabin built against the outer palisade and utilizing its logs for a back wall. It was a pleasant room, with a fire blazing on the wide hearth and a general air of comfort and well-being. Seated at a table, a servant brought us food, well-cooked venison and some pieces of fish of a kind I knew not. The bread was fresh and warm, and there was butter, real butter.
