Falconer's Quest
Falconer’s Quest
Copyright © 2007
T. Davis Bunn and Isabella Bunn
Cover design by UDG Design Works
Cover photographer: Steve Gardner, Pixel Works Studio, Inc.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners.
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Printed in the United States of America
Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0358-9 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0358-4
Hardcover: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0359-6 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0359-2
Large Print: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0360-2 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0360-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bunn, T. Davis, 1952-
Falconer’s quest / T. Davis Bunn, Isabella Bunn.
p. cm. — (Heirs of Acadia ; 5)
ISBN 978-0-7642-0359-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-7642-0358-9
(pbk.) —ISBN 978-0-7642-0360-2 (large-print pbk.)
1. Acadians—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—Fiction. I. Bunn, Isabella. II. Title.
PS3552.U4718F35 2007
| 813'.54—dc22 | 2006038409 |
T. DAVIS BUNN is an award-winning author whose growing list of novels demonstrates the scope and diversity of his writing talent.
ISABELLA BUNN has been a vital part of his writing success; her research and attention to detail have left their imprint on nearly every story. Their life abroad has provided much inspiration for plots and settings. They live near Oxford, England.
By T. Davis Bunn
The Gift
The Book of Hours
One Shenandoah Winter
The Quilt
Tidings of Comfort & Joy
The Great Divide
The Presence
Winner Take All
Elixir
The Lazarus Trap
Heartland
S
ONG OF
A
CADIA*
The Meeting Place The Birthright
The Sacred Shore The Distant Beacon
The Beloved Land
H
EIRS OF
A
CADIA†
The Solitary Envoy
The Innocent Libertine
The Noble Fugitive
The Night Angel
Falconer’s Quest
Table of Contents
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February 1836
John Falconer made it through the days in very small steps.
Ada’s illness had come with the first winter storm, which gripped the Carolinas for eleven days with fierce winds and hard-slung ice. Falconer had sat at her bedside, hands knotted on the coverlet, and stared at the beloved face. Ada looked as white as the snow now gathering on the window ledge. His lips felt stiff as he whispered first her name, then prayers he scarcely heard himself utter. He bowed low over his clenched fists, finally breaking the room’s tense silence with a groan.
In just a year and a half, Falconer’s heart had been so altered he could scarcely recall a time before Ada’s love filled his days and warmed his nights. Eighteen months earlier, he and Ada had stood before the bishop in their Moravian church and said their vows. Young Matt had stood proudly at Falconer’s side, delighted in his new father and overjoyed by his widowed mother’s newfound happiness. Falconer touched Ada’s face, with its sheen of perspiration, and wished his physical strength truly counted for something. If only he could wrest back the days now gone, peel back time, and have her smile at him once more.
And then Ada had passed with the storm. Everything had been so impossibly swift. The illness, the decline, the passage, all in less than two weeks. No one knew precisely the cause. She had slipped away from them, gentled into a slumber that did not end. The elders gathered, called it a tragic wonder, and murmured to each other how she had been so softly called home. Why was it that one so crushed, but still so strengthened, by the ferocious winds of life was now gone from them?
Telling young Matt was the most wrenching task Falconer had ever set for himself. The two clung to each other, rocking slowly back and forth. Though Matt’s grief drenched Falconer’s shirt, Falconer found himself unable to weep. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, for he had scarcely eaten or slept since Ada’s illness had begun. He had known men who were hard stricken in the heat of battle and felt nothing until the dire threat was gone. But for him, even after it was over, the only thing that touched him at all was his son, not of his flesh but certainly of his heart. Falconer spent uncounted hours holding Matt and letting the boy weep for the both of them.
They buried Ada on a wet Tuesday morn, a fiercely cold day in February so dark the chapel bell’s tolled regrets were echoed by the sky and the wind. The community of Moravians, who had known Ada all her life, shared the ceremony and the profound sorrow with stoic but no less genuine understanding, watching Falconer and Matt with eyes full of sympathy and questions. What would happen to them now?
The day after the funeral, Falconer shuttered the inn he and Ada had run and accepted the invitation of her uncle and his family. Together with Paul and Sarah Brune and their children, the two mourners might slowly find comfort in the sharing of an impossible burden.
Impossible that a woman so full of life, love, and goodness could be stricken and lost so swiftly. Impossible that Falconer could know the blessing of home and family for scarcely a year and a half. Impossible that he was expected to nurture a boy who had lost both blood parents and now had only a wounded sailor for a guardian.
The spring was slow in coming. He and Matt worked the Brune farm and prepared the land and tended the animals. Falconer, dressed in the simple homespun of the Moravian community, did the work of three men. He allowed his beard to grow in dark and rich. The good North Carolina earth worked into his hands, and the physical labor toughened him in ways the sea never had. The work and the good people proved a strong and healing balm. But what saved Falconer, what kept him rooted to the world and the day at hand, was his son.
The dogwoods finally bloomed a month and more late. The pear and apple orchards added their own white fragrance to the hills and the softening breeze. And suddenly the winter was gone. The entire world leapt into rebirth. The farming valleys were alive with the bleating of newborn lambs and the mothers’ chucklings. New shoots rose from what had been empty furrows. The sun rose higher and stronger, and the men shucked their coats and worked in shirtsleeves. The entire community reveled in the hope of spring.
Evenings, when the sun dipped and the Brune family gathered upon the porch to watch the westering sun and the daily promise of glory to come, Matt nestled next to Falconer on the porch swing. It was an uncommonly wet summer, and the day’s rain clouds dispersed in bands of copper and gold spread across the Salem valleys. Eventually Matt would sing, his voice at first small and fragile, but as the summer progressed, stronger, more confident.
Sometimes Sarah Brune joined in, her alto adding a lovely harmony to Matt’s pure, bell-like melody. The young lad sang his favorite Moravian hymns, many of them in their original German. That did not matter in the least to Falconer, who spent the evening hours thus, his earthstained fingers stroking the boy’s fine blond head, listening to the promise of peace cloaked in sunset and song.
In July, the church elders came and spoke with him about the Moravian community’s only inn, still in disuse after all these months. They carefully talked of widows in Salem who needed a good man. They gently challenged him toward finding hope in spite of the world’s woes. Falconer stood with them, nodding and accepting their words, trusting their wisdom. But in truth, what occupied his mind was the sudden realization that he had never wept. As he watched their horse-drawn rigs return to the village, he wondered if he would ever feel anything else besides this pervasive numbness.
That night as they sat on the porch, Falconer, his voice low, asked Matt if he wanted to return and reopen the inn. Matt buried his head in Falconer’s chest. Falconer did not raise the subject again.
Two days later Falconer went alone into Salem. He met with the elders and arranged for a young couple who had helped with the inn’s chores to take over as innkeepers for him. While he discussed the list of duties with them, townspeople approached Falconer, appearing as though drawn from the sunlight and the summer heat. Although they saw him and Matt every Sabbath, they took his visit with the elders as a sign. Even without Ada’s sanctioning presence, they quietly welcomed him fully into their fold.
August arrived with a blistering heat, and the rains subsided. The deep-blue dome of the sky presided over an increasingly parched land. Falconer shared the community’s fear of a lost harvest. They all began stocking what they could for a long winter of grumbling bellies. Breakfasts were reduced to grits and fatback, noon fare became biscuits and whatever fruit they found lying upon the ground, and the evening repast might be a simple stew from a farm animal no longer able to feed. The Brune house garden was harvested and replanted, and every dawn Matt joined the other children drawing buckets from the well to water the vegetables by hand. Falconer ate his simple breakfast to the dry squeaking of the well handle, paired with his silent entreaties for intervention from the Almighty.
Falconer found the Sabbath worship a time of both peace and confusion. He was glad he had never felt a need to become angry with God. Why this had not happened, he could not say. As he sat and listened to the community choirs join in song, or bowed his head in prayer, he felt the faintest glimmers of divine peace enter his wounded breast. On the homeward journey, though, Falconer stroked his beard and wondered if he would ever waken from his largely empty inner state.
The first week of September, after six scorching weeks without rain, the skies darkened. The wind whipped up clouds of precious earth and flung them in billowing waves across the valley. The dry leaves of corn and wheat and tobacco rattled in thirsty anticipation. Shriveled apples and pears dropped like nature’s drumbeats upon the parched earth. And then the rain came.