“I am she. Resolute Catherine Talbot. I have a husband now. My name is MacLammond.”
He broke his stony look with a sly smile. “Mack. Lamb-ben. Talbot now Mack Lamb-ben. What means Mack Lamb-ben?”
I thought a moment and saw Cullah’s face before my eyes, my Eadan with claymore ready, his image bristling with the ancient danger of a Highland fighter under an echo of skirling pipes. “It means Warrior.”
He seemed to be thinking. “Woman named Warrior?” He looked about the barn. “Sister of Shield of Owasso called Warrior.” He turned back to me. “Woman named Warrior, sister Willow Bend Down old. Our people war. Old ones and babes killed by English. Old mother wishes come to sister Mack Lamb-ben. Cannot run, much bend down.”
“Patience is alive? Shield of Bear, I mean. English are killing your babies? Your old ones?” It was too much all at once. “She comes to me?”
He nodded. “Willow Bend Down come this place. You keep? Keep safe?”
I could see him better then. My eyes had adjusted to the glare behind him. “Are you the man who came here before? You came to the house and took yarn?” He understood not. “You go there”—I pointed at him, at the house, made a fist—“took wool.”
He smiled. Why, his eyes shined merrily, his teeth clean and straight, and the face of him not at all threatening! He said, “Skimp wool. Not good to sew, too much breaks. Willow Bend Down tell sister who make skimp wool.”
The smiling dolt had just insulted me. I sharpened the tone of my voice. “It is not meant for sewing, it is wool for weaving. It must be fine to make—oh, what am I saying? Forget the yarn. Where is Patience? Where is Willow Bend Down?”
“Come,” he said, and motioned to me with his hand. He still smiled.
I moved toward the door. He pushed it wider. There stood a woman in deerskins, bent over, crouched under a heavy bearskin cape and holding to a walking stick. Her long, braided hair was motley with red, gray-white, and yellowing strands. She wore grease on her sun-darkened arms, a band around her head. She had a tattoo of a solid black line across her face as if another band encircled her cheekbones and crossed the bridge of her nose. When she saw me, she straightened a little and raised her face.
The man spoke to her. I recognized when he said “Mack Lam-ben,” but nothing more. The woman nodded. She spoke to him and raised her arm, her hand uplifted. He gave the same gesture, even more slowly, as if he were trying to press a memory into his heart. Then the young man looked warily about the place and trotted into the woods where he disappeared, leaving me staring at this creature before me. She stared back, her eyes of pale green searching my face. I pulled my cap back. My hair had not faded as hers had, having rarely seen the sun upon it. I stepped closer. “Patey?”
“Ressie?” Then she muttered something I could not understand.
“C’est moi. Is it you? Est-ce vraiment toi?” I asked. She spoke again, words that seemed more clear but were neither English nor French. “Can you speak no English at all?” I asked, leaning down so our faces were at the same height. I knelt in the dirt. She did the same. When we were both on our knees, we leaned toward each other, staring. At last, I said, “Patience? Patey?”
She nodded. At first hesitantly, then assuredly. I smelled on her the wilderness, smoke from a thousand fires, blood from butchering animals, sweat and sunshine from all our years apart. We fell into each other’s arms, both breaking into loud weeping. As she cried, I smelled something else. A sour, death smell, a disease. No wonder she could not keep up. Patey had come to me, had been brought to me by a son half Indian, half Talbot, not willing to let her be left behind to face the ravages of war.
I made room for my sister at one end of the parlor. With Jacob’s help, we created a bed where, I remembered—before there were children, before there were additional floors to this house—there had once been a bed. Our first. Patience stayed in it, much of the day. She seemed so weary. Then in the afternoons, when it warmed, she rose and sat in my chair by the fire.
Little by little, Patey regained her speech, and she seemed to long to tell me all the years of her life gone by. In short tales by our evening fireside, she told me of her husband Massapoquot, of their nine children, and of the one young man who brought her to me. She would not tell me his name, but said, “Call him John.”
When she had eaten good broth and bread for a few days and seemed more well, I at last asked her, “From what are you ill?”
“I have a stone in my stomach, that is all I know.” She had found her English words, though she spoke slowly.
“I will take you to physicians in Boston.”