Captive (24 page)

“It is no hardship to say that I am engaged to the most beautiful woman in all the territory.”

“But—”

“Hush, please,” he said, and paused in their walk. “I know that your feelings for me do not include the desire to become my wife. Be content in knowing I am pleased with any service I might offer you.” He hesitated. “Or James.”

She stared at him in awkward silence, and he continued conversationally. “He saved my life once.”

“How?”

“At the Second Battle of the Withlacoochee. He fought; he had no choice. We were close to closing on a large encampment of women, children, and the Seminole aged. He had family behind him, and the soldiers might have crossed the river. A Creek commander was killed; no one ventured out into the water after that. But there were skirmishes up and down that day. I’d lost my musket, my knife, my powder. A big fellow had me by the hair, and James intervened, half killed the Indian. I don’t know what he told him at the end; I have tried, but I have not gained a good usage of either Muskogee or Hitichi. The brave returned to the battle, and James dragged me to safety.” He shrugged. “We have been friends since we first met, here in this house. Perhaps my most fervent prayer in all this is that I don’t meet him when we are both caught without a choice once again.”

“I’m glad that he saved your life,” Teela said quietly. “It was a life well worth saving.”

He started to speak, but they were both startled by a popping sound that seemed to come from down river. Far on the horizon, Teela could see as a dozen birds in their snow whites and beautiful array of colors burst from the trees and into the air.

“Gunfire!” John murmured. He started to move toward his ship.

“Wait!” Teela gasped, taking the basket with the baby from him. “Where are you going, what are you doing?”

“We’ve got to go down river!” John said distractedly.

“Wait! I’m coming!” Teela told him.

“What?” he demanded.

She was already running wildly for the house. Jeeves had come out to the porch. With a hand above his eyes, he was staring toward the area from which the shots had come.

Teela thrust little Ian—blissfully sleeping through it all—into Jeeves’s hands. “Don’t jar him too much now, Jeeves,” she said hastily.

She turned to run.

“Now, you wait a minute there, Miss Warren—” Jeeves began sternly.

But she had already spun around and was racing after John. An order had been called out; soldiers were un-knotting the ties that held the ship to the dock.

It was a small craft, Teela quickly discovered, but manned with two cannons on each side, complete with three tall sails as well as numerous oarlocks. She couldn’t tell how many men were aboard when she raced along the dock, just reaching the gangplank as it was being drawn in.

“Wait!” she shrieked again.

John, conferring with an officer, looked to see her racing aboard. He couldn’t stop her; she would have plummeted into the sea.

“Teela!” She had jumped onto the main deck of his sloop even as he spoke. “This is madness; you mustn’t come—”

“I have to come, I have to see—”

“But, surely, it is just a skirmish.”

A number of officers stood around them, some watching Teela with a certain amusement, others with curiosity. John pulled her close to him. “My fiancée, gentlemen, Teela Warren.”

“War zone is no place for a lady,” said a young, slim man with a Tennessean accent.

“Perhaps it is,” suggested another man. He was in a fringed buckskin hunting jacket, a clean-shaven man with slightly graying auburn curls queued neatly at his nape and a slouch hat pulled low over his forehead. He stepped forward, offering Teela his hand. “Warren’s
daughter, engaged to a commissioned lieutenant. Like it or not, boys, she might as well learn a few of the calamities of a soldier’s life. I am Joshua Brandeis, company field surgeon. If our boys are out there, a few of them may need patching up. If you’ve a stomach to give me a hand, then I say that you are welcome aboard!”

Teela took his hand with her eyes steady on his.

“Have you taken the Hippocratic oath, Doctor?”

“Indeed, young lady.”

“So what happens when a red man falls into your care?”

Joshua Brandeis paused for a moment, watching her. He shrugged. “Well, now, miss, it’s for sure that I don’t share your stepfather’s vision of this war. Whatever man comes before me, I am sworn to pluck a bullet from his flesh, tie a severed artery, splint a broken limb, pour sulfer on his wounds. Are you with me?”

“I don’t want her in a battle zone—” John began sternly, but Teela ignored him, her eyes still hard on those of Joshua Brandeis.

“I’m with you, Dr. Brandeis,” she announced firmly.

“Teela!” John said softly, spinning her around to face him. “If I can’t manage my own fiancéeAe, how will I ever manage to have my men listen to me?” he asked.

She replied very quietly. “You don’t let your men hear what you are telling me, and that way they will not know when I disagree.”

“Disobey.”

“John, for the love of God, I do not obey anyone. You have surely realized that by now. And I have to come with you now!” she said fervently, very close to him now. They were already moving swiftly down river, coming to the point where the shots had been fired.

“I promised to keep you safe.”

“What if James is out here?”

“There are hundreds of Seminoles—”

“What if he is among them?”

“What if he is? Will you watch him die?”

She exhaled softly. “John, please, I beg of you—”

“We are already there!” he said. He turned from her, calling out an order to disembark to his men. There was no dock, and the ship had to be kept in the deep-water center of the river. Dinghies were dropped swiftly into the water, and the men boarded them in disciplined military order.

John was among the first to go. Dr. Joshua Brandeis was at the rear with his surgeon’s leather bag slung over his shoulder. He looked back to her, reaching out a hand. “Coming?”

She didn’t hesitate. She ran to him, accepted his hand and then his help as he lifted her easily and set her into one of the dinghies, already being lowered down the starboard side. A quick leap and he had joined her along with the other eight men in the dinghy.

“Miss, keep your head low!” one of the men warned.

“Ah, now, you needn’t fear while you’re with us, miss. We’re a volunteer regiment, the remnants of a few different companies come together to serve good old John. We’ll let no danger befall you!”

“Thank you,” Teela told them. Then she cringed at another burst of gunfire. They were close now. The explosions that erupted with each fired bullet were deafening. She heard screams. Screams of pain, war whoops.

The dinghy scraped the bottom of the river. The men began to leap out, dragging the small boat high upon the grassy shore. Teela was left with Joshua Brandeis, who sloshed ashore just a bit more slowly, surveying the near landscape with a narrowed eye.

“Hurry along, now!” he told her.

Teela obeyed, leaping from the boat, sinking knee high in mud, struggling from it to reach more solid ground.

Bodies lay scattered about, nearly hidden by the tall grass. She gasped at the first one she came upon.

An Indian body. This warrior had dressed in his finery for battle. His shirt was a bright print; silver medallions in crescent shapes hung from his neck. He wore thighhigh
crimson leggings, and a fine, bright turban now trailed away from his head.

Dark brown eyes were open, glazed in death. He had not been caught by a bullet. He had been skewered through with a bayonet.

She stared at him in horror, fighting great waves of nausea. She suddenly heard a moaning and spun about nervously.

The warrior’s opponent lay just feet from him. He was young, skinny as a reed with wheat-blond hair. He was militia, wearing worn trousers and a plain cotton shirt and simple low black leather boots. Blood stained his shoulder. He clutched it and moaned again. His eyes, blue like the sky, opened on Teela.

“Help me!” he whispered. “Oh, Lord, I’m dying. There’s an angel in this hellhole!”

She knelt down beside him, startled as Dr. Brandeis pushed by her, kneeling in the tall grass as well.

“Bullet, son?” he asked, opening his leather bag.

“Yes, sir.”

“Musket fire?”

“A clean ball, sir, wedged right in, I’m certain.”

Brandeis ripped away the soldier’s shirt. “Bullet forceps!” he said to Teela.

She swallowed hard and delved into the bag. She hadn’t ever been present even at a childbirth, but when she looked among the instruments, the bullet forceps seemed obvious enough. She snatched it up quickly. Brandeis then asked her for a scalpel.

His orders came fast and furious. She held back the soldier’s flesh while Brandeis extracted the ball. She threaded a needle with silk sutures and sopped up blood as the doctor sewed a ripped artery. She washed the wound with whiskey, winced as the soldier screamed, treated the wound with sulfer, and sat back at last as Brandeis bandaged it with startling speed.

“They’ll be by for you in a minute, soldier. Miss Warren, come along!”

She was bathed in blood, she realized.

And she was numb.

But she followed. Brandeis was quick and thorough as they walked the shoreline. He could spot the fallen bodies—Seminole and white—very quickly where they lay. Teela paused over a brave once.

“That one’s dead,” Brandeis said bluntly. She sought a pulse anyway. Brandeis was right. They moved on.

Two soldiers had been hit in the limbs. One of the bullets had gone clean through the man’s flesh; one had lodged. One man was hit in the gut. Brandeis treated him with whiskey.

“He’ll not make the trip back to Fort Brooke,” he told Teela quietly as they moved away. She drew in a deep, shaky breath. He clutched her arm tightly. “Many of them will live! We keep looking. Do you understand?”

She nodded and followed him onward.

He was true to his word. He paused to help the wounded Indians as well.

Teela had heard sporadic gunfire several times when they first arrived, but she suddenly realized that she heard no more. The skirmish had come to an end. The dead and wounded lay within the tall grass, into the trees that stood twenty yards inland.

Teela stood after assisting with a tourniquet on a young private who would surely lose his foot. The young man tossed his head, his eyes opened upon her, and he tried to smile. He winced and looked at Brandeis. “We were just out on patrol, hoping to surprise a few Indians. We surprised them, all right. And they surprised the hell out of us. Oh, pardon me, ma’am. I ain’t dead, am I, Doc?” He smiled again. “No, I guess not. Your hair’s too red for an angel, right?”

“You’re not dead,” Teela assured him. She knelt down again, taking his hand. “You’re going to be just fine. Dr. Brandeis has set you up for the time being; they’ll take better care of you once they get you off the field.”

He nodded. “I’ll be fine.” His eyes closed.

“Whiskey is still the best cure I know,” Dr. Brandeis said, rising, already looking through the grass for his next patient.

Teela stood again. Her heart seemed to ache terribly within her chest. She still felt stunned, exhausted, overwhelmed. Her fingers were numb, her mind as well.

She arched her back, trying to ease the soreness there. Her eyes fell upon a patch of color in the trees directly ahead of her. Frowning, she started forward, hurrying more quickly with each step. There was a man there, a Seminole, down. His back was to her. He was clad in dark breeches and high doeskin boots. His cotton shirt was patterned. His black hair was thick and wavy.

A blood stain spattered his back.

She choked back a sob, running hard until she was almost upon him. She circled the body, falling to her knees before it, reaching down to move the hair from his face.

A breath exhaled raggedly from her. It wasn’t James. This warrior was of mixed blood as well; his features were very fine, his hair almost curly. He was sadly injured through the left shoulder, but he was breathing. A pulse ticked at his throat.

She turned, starting to rise, ready to call Dr. Brandeis.

She froze instead, the words dying on her lips.

James was there, moving to her from his stance beside the trees. He had been there all the while, watching her, his brown breeches and green patterned shirt blending cleanly with the earth and trees.

The breeze moved the trees as she stared at him. They seemed to chant and whisper. He was very tall there, straight, strong, silent. She ached to touch him. He seemed unbelievably powerful, as if he could defy the entire white army and stand against every Seminole warrior as well. Even his features seemed exceptionally strong, implacable, indomitable.

He came to where she stood, staring at her hard all the while. She couldn’t seem to move. She could only return his stare.

He didn’t touch her. He squatted down by the wounded warrior.

She moistened her lips. “Dr. Brandeis is very good. He tends the Seminoles as well as the whites—”

“Shush, and get down here.” He stared past her, a wary eye on the soldiers that still hovered on the shoreline. He carefully examined the warrior. The man awoke as James probed his wound. James quickly brought a finger to his lips. He said something to him in his language; the warrior nodded.

Teela threw her hand over her mouth, smothering a gasp as James reached into the warrior’s shoulder with his bare fingers, digging out the ball. She turned away, afraid she was going to be ill.

“You’ve got sulfer. Give it to me.”

She turned back, startled. She was still carrying the little glass sulfer bottle. She handed it to James, who liberally spattered it over the bullet wound.

The warrior hadn’t let out a single sound. She knew why he was quiet now. He had lost consciousness.

“Brandeis would have taken care of him!” Teela whispered. “He is a good man. They make good men even in the military!”

“I don’t deny that,” James said, ripping his shirt from his chest and fashioning a bandage from the torn strips. He still kept a careful eye on the soldiers near the shore. He expertly tied the cotton around the man’s shoulder and arm.