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  Ben felt a sense of disbelief. “You want me to manage Father’s business? But that makes no sense. I’ve only one year left before finishing my degree in Divinity.”

  Lavinia waved her hand dismissively. “The world has plenty of preachers. We’ve already made arrangements to sell this house and the furniture. Our steamer sails in February.”

  Ben loosened his cravat, which suddenly felt too tight. As so often when in his parents’ presence, he felt like a fish floundering in the net of a particularly determined fisherman, or, in this case, fisherwoman. While he tried to think of what to say, Lavinia bent over and kissed her son’s forehead with cool lips. “It’s all settled. I’ll go tell the cook we’re ready for dinner.” She swept out of the room with a rustle of satin skirts.

  Ben’s father shrugged. “You know how your mother is, Benjamin. Trust me, this is for the best.”

  The best for whom? Ben wanted to say, but he bit back the words.

  That night Ben tossed and turned until finally pushing aside the covers and pacing by the flickering light cast by the fire in the fireplace. What should he do?

  Ben enjoyed Harvard, not just because of his studies but because living in Cambridge had freed him from his parents’ incessant demands. Ben had always found it hard to stand up to his mother’s will, a trait he despised in himself and his father.

  Stopping suddenly, Ben clenched his fists. “No,” he muttered aloud. Going to Oregon with them meant his life would never be his own again.

  Next, Ben’s thoughts turned to the upcoming war. The conflict had many causes, of course, but all were rooted in the enslavement of black men. Maybe, he thought suddenly, the war could bring freedom not only to the Southern slaves, but to himself as well, a freedom of a different sort.

  Pushing aside the drapes that covered the French windows overlooking Washington Square, Ben stared up at the stars in the black sky hanging over Manhattan. He had decided what to do.

  Chapter Five

  Annabelle

  Cascade Mountains

  Late Fall, 1860

  Annabelle and Richard sat on a boulder, watching shadows slowly crawl across the valley floor. In the earlier chaos the hens had fluttered off, but a while after the bandits left, the poultry returned and now pecked a few yards away. The cow and oxen were nowhere to be seen.

  After less than an hour the fire had smoldered out, leaving a blackened shell and ruined contents. Not that it mattered. Without oxen, the wagon was useless anyway.

  A numbness had descended on her, a sense that soon she’d wake up and find this was all a dream. That the smell of smoke came from a cooking fire, not the burned-out wagon, and that her mother would call and tell her to hurry, that it was morning and Annabelle must get dressed while her father finished harnessing the oxen. In the meantime, though, she was trapped in this nightmare.

  The strangers’ careless vandalism had spared some of their supplies. Some of the seeds and grain spilling from overturned barrels might be salvageable. The tools, which her father had carefully oiled and wrapped in rags, lay under the wooden chest, which the men had kicked open and then shoved over in disgust. The clothes and bedding, now covered with dirt, could be shaken out and used.

  An egg-sized lump in her throat made it hard to swallow. One task must be done first, she told herself. “Practical” matters like finding food or shelter had to wait. Their wagon had passed many graves raided by wildlife, with arm bones and skulls strewing the side of the trail. That must not be allowed to happen here.

  Taking a deep, ragged breath, Annabelle turned to Richard. With her parents gone, she would have to make the decisions now. “Go fetch firewood. Take plenty of time. We can’t travel anymore today, so we’ll have to camp here.” She tried to sound normal. “We’ll decide what to do tomorrow.”

  Richard nodded. Except for his pallor and trembling hands, she would not have known what he was thinking. She watched his small form trotting toward a stand of pine trees in the distance. Only when he was gone did Annabelle allow the tears to come, but not for too long. There was work to be done. With a final shuddering breath, she dried her face with her pinafore and went to get the shovel from the mess of scattered tools on the ground.

  Earth clung to the shovel while she worked, dark and moist, the kind her father said was best for growing crops. Several times she stopped to rest, blinking away a new bout of stinging tears that made it hard to see what she was doing. At one point, the shovel hit a large, buried rock, and Annabelle thought that she would not be able to dig deep enough after all. Then the image of the grisly relics along the trail returned, and she wielded the shovel with renewed strength.

  When Richard returned, he saw at once what she was doing and set down his load of firewood. “I’ll help, Annabelle.”

  She wanted to tell him no, that no boy his age should have to do such a task. At the look of determination on his set, grimy face, though, Annabelle handed him another shovel.

  When they were done, her insides felt as if they had been squeezed through a laundry wringer, and her voice sounded raspy to her own ears. “We’ll need their shoes.”

  Richard’s eyes grew round.

  Although he didn’t ask why, she felt compelled to answer the unspoken question. “We can’t survive winter barefoot, and our shoes are already nearly worn out. By spring, our feet will be too big for them anyway.”

  Her brother watched silently as she tugged off their father’s heavy boots one after the other, and set them on the ground next to their mother’s smaller, more delicate ones.

  As she did so, Annabelle noticed a small hole in the sole of one of her father’s black worsted socks. He must not have told Caroline about it, wanting to spare his wife the trouble of darning it. Annabelle’s throat closed up again.

  She found the family Bible in the jumbled heap and brushed dirt off its pages before flipping through them, searching for the right scripture. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…. Was that in Proverbs or Psalms?

  Annabelle couldn’t find the verse she was looking for, so she read the Beatitudes instead, clearing her throat several times before she could finish. Richard’s gray eyes fastened on her face with the same intent expression as when he used to listen to the preacher on Sundays back in Philadelphia. Reluctantly, she closed the Bible, dreading the next act.

  Tentatively, Richard spoke. “Maybe we could use the tablecloth.”

  She flung him a quick look of gratitude, then went to the chest and lifted out the folds of snowy Dresden lace that Papa had given to Mother as a wedding gift. It had adorned the family’s Sunday table every week.

  The makeshift shroud made the task easier as, shovelful by shovelful, they filled the grave. The boulder nearby, on which they’d sat earlier, would serve as a natural marker.

  When the task was finished, Annabelle realized they hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Neither of them was hungry, but she rummaged through the unspoiled provisions and found some hard biscuits, which they washed down with fresh, cold water from the creek just as the sun lowered behind the mountain peaks. A chilly breeze sprang up.

  She fashioned a bed under the wagon’s charred remains and managed to start a smoky little camp fire with Father’s flint. Belatedly, Annabelle remembered to help Richard say his prayers, and then pulled a blanket over his shoulders. He was already yawning sleepily. Bending over, she kissed his forehead, the way their mother used to do.

  “Goodnight, Richard. Tomorrow will be a better day.” She only hoped it was true. If the bandits didn’t come back. If wild animals didn’t get them. If they could find enough food to eat.

  Despite bone-numbing weariness, Annabelle tried her best to stay awake, feeding twigs into the fire with her father’s shotgun against her knees, although she didn’t have the faintest idea how to use it. What would the next day bring? The next month? The next year? Huddled near her brother’s small body for mutual warmth, she shivered from more than the creeping cold.

  Toward dawn, Annabelle fell asleep.
When her eyes opened to sunlight, Millie was lowing mournfully from a distance. They found her in a thicket, udders painfully full. Leading the cow back to the campsite, Annabelle relieved her of a bucket of warm, foaming milk, which, supplemented with several handfuls of blackberries, made a satisfying breakfast. Then Annabelle told Richard her plan.

  “We’re staying? Here?” Richard stared at his sister. His berry-stained mouth made him look like a tragic clown. “You mean … forever?”

  Annabelle chose her words with care. “What other choice do we have? The oxen have disappeared, and we can’t carry our goods with us.”

  “Then let’s leave it here. We can walk back to the trading post, and maybe someone will come along and take us with them.”

  “What if the man with the red beard finds out about us? Right now, he doesn’t know we exist. He never saw us, either in the trading post or behind the wagon, remember? I think he believed Mother and Papa were traveling alone.” The knot of fear clenched her stomach again. “If he finds out we saw the murder, though, he’s bound to try to kill us before we can tell anyone.”

  Richard’s lower lip began to tremble. “But if we join another wagon train, they’ll protect us.”

  “Maybe. But who would want to take on the burden of two orphaned children? They’d probably split us up, give you to one family and me to another.”

  This caused both of them to grow silent. They had met families on the trail who had been separated this way.

  After a few moments Richard tried again. “If we push on to the Willamette Valley ourselves, we can start our own homestead. Just like Papa planned to do.”

  “How can we homestead without the wagon or oxen? Without the plow, tools, seed bags?”

  Richard’s shoulders slumped.

  Annabelle did her best to sound cheerful. “Like you said, Papa was looking for a place to farm, wasn’t he? So what’s wrong with this valley? There’s plenty of room for crops, trees to build a cabin …” She flung out her arm around her. Golden morning sun shone through quivering leaves of aspens, and tall grasses waved in a gentle breeze. “You heard those bad men say they were leaving these parts, so we’ll be safe here.”

  And in addition to everything else, Annabelle thought, this valley was her parents’ final resting place. How could she and Richard go away and leave them behind?

  Although Richard didn’t look convinced, he nodded.

  Annabelle eyed the heavy thatch of pines that clung to the slopes. “We don’t have time to construct a real cabin, at least not right now,” she said regretfully. “We must focus on getting in food for the winter and building some sort of shelter as quickly as possible. Come on, Richard. Let’s get started.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon building a clumsy lean-to from fallen branches, daubing it with mud from the creek to plug the worst of the holes. When they finished, Annabelle surveyed it, pulling a patchwork quilt closer around her shoulders against the cool breeze. Winter was approaching rapidly. Her mother’s fear of being caught by a snowfall had not been a foolish one.

  “It looks like a lodge,” she said ruefully. “A beaver lodge. But it should provide enough shelter for us, at least until we can build a real cabin.”

  It did look like a sort of beaver lodge, or an oversized wasp’s nest that had somehow gotten stuck against the side of the mountain. It wasn’t much, not big enough for either of them to stand, and with barely enough room for the piled-up boxes and barrels. A rug hung over the opening, to serve as a door. Still, the structure should keep out the snow that was sure to fall soon and provide some sort of refuge from wild animals.

  She had heard strange sounds the previous night, wolves or lumbering bears not yet hibernating. Although so far they had not seen any predators, the sound made her blood run cold. Maybe they should have pushed on to the Willamette Valley after all, she thought.

  Then Annabelle remembered the human predators lurking below. No. She would much rather face the dangers of the wilderness.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of hard biscuits, Annabelle arranged their few pieces of intact furniture and moved in the last of the kegs and barrels that hadn’t been destroyed by the bandits. That was when she noticed that Richard had disappeared. This was not unusual. Back home in Philadelphia, he sometimes left without a word to anyone, reappearing after her parents had searched for hours. Sometimes they found him feeding a stray dog, or just sitting along the river bank, gazing at the busy street. She would have expected him to have better sense here, however.

  Just then a shot echoed from across the valley, and her heart stopped. The bandits!

  Annabelle hurried outside to search for Richard, uncaring if she was seen. Halfway across the meadow, she gave a deep sigh of relief when she saw his small form approaching, holding their father’s shotgun in one hand, as tall as he was. A dead rabbit dangled from the other.

  He held up the weapon, face shining with pride. “Papa showed me how to load this,” he called. “First, you ram down the powder, then pour in the ball. I got the rabbit with my first shot.”

  Annabelle looked at her brother’s face and swallowed her urge to scold him. When they got back to their lodge, she found a knife, cleaned the rabbit, and roasted it over coals the way she had seen her mother do it on the trail. After the meal, she drove two nails inside the opening to the shelter and hung up the shotgun.

  “Don’t touch it except for an emergency,” she told her brother. “Remember, we don’t know how long we’ll have to make the ammunition last.”

  Richard nodded, but nothing could erase the look of pleasure from his eyes.

  That evening, Annabelle wrapped an arm around her brother while they shared the fire’s warmth. They had made it this far, she thought gratefully, but things were going to get much worse. If they were to survive, they’d need a more secure shelter than this rude bower of sticks and mud constructed against the cliff wall like a wasp’s nest. Next spring they would build a real cabin—that is, if they were still alive. There were stands of good, straight pine at the other end of the valley they could use.

  Richard and Annabelle spent the next few days supplementing their stores with basketsful of crab apples and wild cherries they found while exploring the valley. After stuffing themselves, they spread the rest out to dry, and filled every container they could find to the brim. Next they cut as much firewood as possible and stacked it next to the hut, preparing for a long winter. Annabelle had no idea if it was enough. She could only hope so.

  The next few days the weather held. The children’s feet and hands turned pink and shriveled in the freezing water as they built a dam, but the resulting pool, quiet and deep, made the effort worthwhile. They fashioned fishing poles with twine and hooks saved from the mess left behind by the bandits, and, using worms Richard dug for, they dangled the lines into the green depths. Richard caught the first fat, speckled trout. They fried it that night over the fire and ate it greedily, shoving the hot white flesh into their mouths along with the small bones. It was their first cooked meal since the rabbit, more than a week ago.

  Then it happened. Low clouds moved in, the sky turned gray, and the few remaining dead leaves skittered off the trees. The high Oregon valley assumed a grand and forbidding aspect it had lacked before. Annabelle and Richard scurried to bring the last of their dried food into the beaver dam before the first delicate flakes of snow began to fall. They tied the weathered canvas wagon cover to pegs driven into the ground to protect the tall mound of dry grass they had gathered for the cow, Millie.

  For days the snow fell uninterrupted, piling in higher and higher drifts, preventing them from going outside. Boredom drove Annabelle to the trunk, where she pulled out the old family Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the books on farming, and their forgotten textbooks. By the uncertain firelight they read for long hours. From time to time Annabelle lifted the heavy rug that covered the shelter’s opening to see if there were any sign of the snowstorm relenting. But the large flakes conti
nued to drop until, by the fifth evening, the drifts stood four feet high. Their cramped shelter kept out the worst of the cold, but the makeshift walls could not shut out the sound of the wind, so piercing and mournful that it made her heart tremble.

  When Richard looked up from his book, she told him, “Don’t worry, it will stop soon.”

  He nodded and went back to reading. After a moment, though, he looked up again. “Annabelle?”

  “What is it?”

  “Why did Papa and Mother have to die?”

  She gulped. “I don’t know. I think it has something to do with God punishing sinners. And maybe God needed them in heaven.”

  “We need them, too.”

  She looked down at her hands. “I know.”

  “I miss them.” His voice sounded small.

  “So do I, Richard.” She hugged him. “So do I.”

  At last the snowfall stopped and, wrapping herself up in a shawl, Annabelle grabbed a shovel and dug a path to bring in more firewood from the tall stack outside. When the weather improved, they chopped more firewood and hauled water from the creek, until it froze over. After that, they kept buckets of snow in the cabin, thawing the snow by the fire. The days stretched out dull and uneventful, and, with little to do except keep the fire burning, she dug in the trunk for their schoolbooks. They might as well make use of their time.

  More and more often she found herself questioning their decision to stay up here in the mountains instead of pressing on to find a community that would take them in. It was so quiet, so isolated, that at times she felt they did not even exist. Annabelle thought she would have gone mad with loneliness had Richard not been there. If only he would speak more! Entire days often went by without him saying more than a few words, and it seemed he was growing more withdrawn than ever.

  Worse, as the weeks went by, their food supply, which had looked so plentiful in the fall, dwindled faster than expected. Although she did not tell Richard her fears, she wondered if they could eke out their provisions until spring came. At night, when the wind whistled through their makeshift shelter, they huddled together, too cold to talk.