The Bride of the Wilderness by Charles McCarry

Author:Charles McCarry [McCarry, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action & Adventure, Crime, Epistolary, Espionage, Fiction, Historical, Mystery & Detective, Thriller
ISBN: 9781453232521
Google: aKDLMTC7qUoC
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-11-21T23:00:00+00:00

17

Almost as soon as he laid eyes on Thoughtful Pennock, Oliver realized that her father’s will had been a mistake. This strange girl who had the manners of an Indian and the voice of an old man was John Pennock’s natural daughter, for whom he had searched the Indian villages until he died. Nobody, least of all Oliver, could possibly believe that the old soldier would have willed his possessions to a nephew by marriage if he had known that his own kidnapped child was alive.

Yet it seemed that Pennock may have known all about Thoughtful. She herself knew that Pennock had been looking for her. He had even come to Two Suns’s village on the Saint Francis River, and she had seen him there.

“He came to the actual village where you were being held captive and did not find you?” Oliver said. “How can that be?”

Fanny translated. As was her way, Thoughtful answered what she regarded as a lie embedded in the question rather than the question itself.

“Captive?” Thoughtful said to Fanny. “Nobody ever wants to go back to the English, doesn’t he know that?”

“No. That’s not what he wants to know. How did it happen that your father didn’t find you if he came to your village?”

“He did find me. But he did not see his daughter.” “How do you mean, Thoughtful?”

“He looked at me, standing as close to me as Oliver is now, but naturally he saw an Abenaki, not an English girl.”

Oliver listened to Fanny’s interpretation of these words. “Pennock didn’t notice an Indian with red hair and freckles?” he said. “Very mysterious.”

“Not to Thoughtful’s way of thinking,” Fanny said. “Magpie was there,” Thoughtful said. “She saw me too.”

Oliver waited a day or two before questioning Magpie about this episode. To divert any suspicion Rose may have had about his purposes—he had not told his wife that he was thinking about renouncing his inheritance—Oliver asked Magpie to guide him to the big firs that Captain John Pennock had mentioned in his will.

He and Magpie set off at dawn, walking up the river with Oliver’s land, meadows and forest and mountains, lying all around them as far as the eye could see. It took the better part of the morning to arrive at the grove of firs. Not even the monumental oaks of the eastern forest had prepared Oliver for the reality of these trees, which were not European firs, as Pennock had thought, but North American white pines. None of the hundreds of pines was less than one hundred feet high. Some individuals, rising 250 feet into the sky, had trunks that six people holding hands could not have encircled.

After walking through the fragrant grove for half an hour or so, gazing upward at his magnificent, useless trees, Oliver sat down gratefully beneath one of them and pulled the corks out of the two-spouted pottery canteen filled with ale that he had brought along for his midday thirst. Magpie had brought a small chicken for his lunch.

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