The Wilde Flower Saga: A Contrary Wind (Historical Adventure Series) Read online

  THE WILDE FLOWER SAGA

  A Contrary Wind

  by

  Marilyn M Schulz

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY: MarilynMSchulz.com

  Contains:

  Volume I: A Contrary Wind

  Volume II: Trouble the Waters

  Volume III: In the Sea Unshaken

  ~~~

  THE WILDE FLOWER SAGA: A Contrary Wind

  Copyright © 2010 by Marilyn M Schulz

  ~~~

  Cover Art:

  Ships on a rough sea

  Artist Johannes Christiaan Schotel

  (1787, Dordrecht – 1838, idem)

  Cover background pattern provided by: grsites.com

  (Use of the image does not imply endorsement by providers)

  * * * * *

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  * * * * * * * * * *

  The Wilde Flower Saga

  Volume I: A Contrary Wind

  * * * * *

  Nature, with equal mind,

  Sees all her sons at play,

  Sees man control the wind,

  The wind sweep man away.

  - Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1822-1888)

  If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

  Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

  True courage is like a kite; a contrary wind raises it higher.

  John Petit Senn (1792-1870)

  ~~~

  CHAPTER 01 - Cargo Ashore

  Early spring, 1795

  Somewhere off the southern coast of Britain

  The large rowboat was straining back with every pull of the oars. The man would not lend a hand to help. He didn’t trust them; he would not turn his back. He took another pull from his flask instead. The French sailors looked at him with resentment, and he slipped it inside his pocket again.

  One called, “We drop them here.”

  The others struggled with their cargo: a sealed barrel and a large wooden crate. They were still a good distance from the shoreline.

  The man said, “Are you sure this is right?”

  “Of course, I have been here many times before,” the sailor replied. “Both in the leaving and the taking.”

  Spoken like the experienced smuggler he was.

  “But what if it sinks before land fall?”

  The sailors all laughed. They had made their bets—some for, some against. Such things were not their concern anyway. For them, this was a waste of time and not nearly as entertaining as the guillotine.

  But then, those were more interesting times for such men, particularly at the beginning. Violence was encouraged; it was revolution in France, after all. Things were more uncertain now. Royalist sympathizers were fighting back, though most factions were isolated, separate and unorganized.

  And for the Republicans now in power, they were fighting amongst themselves. The newness of their freedom was wearing off like the shine off a new coin. No one liked the drudgery of day-to-day governing. Better to blow something up, burn something down, or watch the blade chop off someone’s head.

  At least there was finality in that.

  Still, this was not Paris, and they were now more interested in the payment than the politics. That too could be in jeopardy, so the sailor reassured anyway, “I have seen this before, believe me. The currents are strong here this time of tide. We cannot get closer; it will pull us in also. One will sink, eventually, but the other will make it to shore.”

  Then he added under his breath, “Probably.”

  “Probably?” the man repeated skeptically.

  One will sink? When? How far from shore? Which was which, were they sure?

  The sailor spoke in his native language then to the others in the boat. The man understood well enough, but they didn’t have to know that. The sailors all laughed, it made his skin crawl. He was hoping they wouldn’t decide to dump him in the drink as well.

  He said, “Payment is waiting on the other side, I don’t carry it with me now.”

  The sailor-smirks turned into a frowns. Clearly they understood that well enough. It seems they had secrets of their own. As the crew rowed away from the shoreline and toward the fishing boat waiting on the horizon, the man watched the barrel and crate float along.

  The barrel didn’t sink all the way, but it was riding lower than the crate. He hadn’t meant for it to end this way, but that had not been his decision. They always got carried away in the heat of the interrogation. He had warned them that this could happen, that they should use more subtle tactics. But he couldn’t watch them all of the time, and the worst had happened at last.

  Now those secrets were dead along with the body packed up in the barrel like salted fish. There had been opportunity, even in that, though he had to point out that secrets could still be passed back the other way. It made him useful to the Republicans, which is probably why he was kept alive.

  Still, the price had been high for their impatience: The names of the co-conspirators in France were carried to the grave.

  “Not a grave, burial as sea, so to speak,” he mumbled.

  But I don’t care about that, he thought, I want to know where he hid his treasure. There had to be a description, a location, maybe even a map.

  Maybe she knew, maybe not. He had convinced the Republicans that she would find the Royalist traitors in France if she had the chance. He hadn’t mentioned the treasure, and they had come up with this plan on their own: turn her loose; watch her movements. In this, she was lucky, given the alternative, floating there alongside her.

  Near shore, someone would find her. He hoped.

  It was a foolish plan; too many chances; too many what-ifs. What if they got caught in the British blockade? What if no one found her in time? What if she got away from anyone trying to follow?

  What if she forgot it all just like before?

  Of course, the French had their spies everywhere. But would she lead them to the Royalist counter-revolutionaries as he had promised? Would they capture her again? And what after that?

  When his benefactors were done with her, then he had his own plans. If she survived this part of the journey, that is. The crate bobbed in the sea, bouncing off the barrel a few times with a rhythmic dull thudding that soon got on his nerves.

  He asked again, “Are you sure it won’t sink?”

  The sailor spit into the wind, and the man ducked down to avoid the spray. The sailors all laughed, but their leader said only, “Cork.”

  They had put cork in the crate as well, so that it wouldn’t also become a coffin. But there was another race too, and he was running out of time. His spies in the prison had told him of her nightmares—screaming, sometimes calling out at night. They wrote the words down, fragments and notions that made no sense to any other.

&n
bsp; But he knew what they meant.

  How long before she remembered it all?

  He would have to make sure she didn’t.

  In their brutality, his French Republican allies may have also dug his grave. He didn’t care what the sailors thought now. He pulled the flask out again and took another long drink.

  In the crate, a heavily drugged woman was unaware of her fate and was now fitfully dreaming of another place and a time years before . . .

  * * * * *

  Spring, 1774

  Senlis Family Compound on the northwestern frontier

  British Colony of New York

  Little Katie heard the owl last night and wasn’t it still perched outside her window this morning? But she didn’t need the owl to tell her, she had felt it in her bones for some time now: Someone would die this day.

  The bird had glared at her with huge yellow-green eyes before it silently drifted away on wide speckled wings. In the dim early light, Katie could see the shredded remains of last night’s kill still hanging from the predator’s fierce talons. Some other little girl might have felt sorry for the prey, but Katie knew this was the way of Mother Nature—the owl had to kill to survive.

  In the kitchen, her four brothers had already eaten and were now gone. Katie was glad, she didn’t want to speak in front of them. They were ignorant about such things and would only make fun. Katie said, “Mama, I saw an owl outside my window this morning.”

  ”I just swept in here not two days ago, you’d think we live in a pig sty,” her mother said with her hands on her hips, not really paying attention.

  “Mama, did you hear me, I—“

  “There, take the last piece of gingerbread,” her mother said, handing the cake to Katie and pushing her towards the door. “And don’t go bothering your brothers. I have no time for squabbles.”

  Usually her mother loved to listen to the stories Katie learned from the natives who passed through on their way back and forth from trading. Her mother found the native remedies were often quite useful, but seldom took advice in these spiritual things.

  “Not yet,” Katie whispered as she walked onto the porch.

  With Mary it was different, but her mother had already sent their house servant to the trading post. Katie suspected it was more because Mary was underfoot this morning than for any real need. Her mother was in a cleaning frenzy. Mary called it nesting—the instincts of a woman soon to give birth to child number six.

  In any case, Mary never argued over a trip to the trading post. She very much liked the British officers who now passed this way more often than before. They stopped to have tea and port with Master Standish, the man who ran the post.

  Mary claimed Master Standish had been one of their own, but forced into business so close to the wilderness in order to avoid his creditors back in the city. It wasn’t a topic that ever came up with visitors of any importance or rank. They were gentlemen, the housemaid claimed, and didn’t discuss such ordinary things.

  Mary’s absence was probably for the best, Katie decided, as the maid was always spooked by talk of native ways. She would cross herself in the Catholic way and say “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” over and over again.

  All the same, sometimes Katie's mother wrote of the native practices in her medicinal journal, the one with drawings and rhymes about flowers and herbs. However, magic and superstitions were noted in the traveling book, the one her mother kept about people she had seen all over the world. In that book were customs and ceremonies too from places with fanciful names:

  Ceylon, Zafar, Hispaniola, Tierra del Fuego.

  But her mother would not be writing anything today, even though the owl had come to say it was both a good day to be born and a good day to die. The owl had told Katie, not her mother. There had to be some omen in that as well, but Katie wasn’t sure whom to ask.

  Her mother started singing, one hand to the washing and one hand to her baby-wide belly. Maybe her mother didn’t need the owl to tell her anything.

  Katie sat on the porch and took a bite of her gingerbread, but decided to keep the rest until she found her brothers. All four were older and given too much to teasing, so cake always tasted sweeter when they had no cake of their own.

  No doubt they were off pestering some trapper bound for the deep frontier. Or they were making more work for the stableman or the carpenter or his wife. The folks around here were given to spoiling her brothers, in Katie’s estimation. Didn’t she know that well enough from six full years as their sister, come early next week on her birthday.

  Katie heard a whoop and headed for the noise. Over a small rise and down on the clearing that served as the settlement’s village green, the boys were playing a game with long sticks and a make-shift ball made of rolled-up hide and twine.

  A few native boys had joined in the game, and Katie knew the old native man watching from the edge of the clearing was their grandfather. The man wore buckskins and a trading-post blanket over his shoulder: a gift from her mother.

  He looked unusually stern today. He only nodded in response to Katie’s wave. Had he seen the owl last night too? He was a wise man many winters old, her mother claimed, a man of spirits and native medicine. Mary called him a pagan witch who was clearly the Devil’s spawn. But he was respected around here all the same, and the carpenter was walking towards the old man with his hand held up in greeting.

  Katie sighed and ate the rest of her gingerbread. It was one thing to tease her brothers, quite another to be rude to a guest. She licked her fingers to catch even the hint of spices still left, then yawned in the warming spring sunshine.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the sweet unexpected colors, and her smile widened in anticipation:

  The flowers were blooming! Bees and butterflies were hovering nearby.

  “Flutter-byes!”

  It’s what she had always called them, having not got the term quite right when she first learned. Her brother’s teased her about such things, and now she did it just to annoy them. It was always better than letting them figure out how to tease her on their own. Then she got snakes in the face, and bugs down her neck, and broken bird’s nests that would make her cry.

  She ran down into the little ravine and up the other side to the patch of ground the sun always found first in the morning. Southern exposure, her father called this side of the buildings, but she knew for a fact their family settlement was north of the river. They were in the northern part of the New York colony, and they were indeed in North America.

  She knew because she had looked in her mother’s traveling book about that. She couldn’t read very well, only a few words and phrases. Enough to know it said north time and again, so how could they be anything south? But her father wouldn’t lie about a thing like that; her father didn’t lie about anything. He said he’d be home from the sea in time for her birthday next week, and so she knew that he would.

  Katie spent some time gathering flowers, singing her little songs to coax them out and also to the flutter-byes. Her pinafore pockets soon overflowed, and when she had no room for more, she closed her eyes and put her face full into the blooms in her hands. It was like being touched everywhere by soft baby fingers, tiny and cool.

  Suddenly something brushed angrily against her nose. It was the biggest bee she had ever seen, too close and coming out double as her eyes crossed to see it.

  Katie squealed and dropped her flowers. As she fled toward the woods to escape, flowers fell from her pockets on the way. But of course the bee was long gone by then, and she felt a little foolish. Still, she rubbed at her nose glad she was safe. Bee stings hurt like the touch of a hot coal, and the stinky plaster her mother put on only added insult to the angry spot of injury.

  She turned to head back, but nearby, the bushes started to shake. She froze like a fawn, waiting, wondering. It was a lesson from the old native man about how animals survive in the forest. But Katie didn’t have the patience to stay still for long. She peered into the bushes
.

  A badger maybe, she mused, perhaps only a bird?

  I hope not a skunk, Katie thought with a hot rush of dread. Her forehead furrowed in concern as she took a deep, but silent gasp. No smell. She sighed in relief as the bushes parted just a little.

  It was only Ambrose, Master Standish’s adolescent son. Playing games when he should be doing his errands, she decided. Her brothers did not let him play their games anymore; they would have nothing to do with him. He was a bit older and much larger than them; still he had to cheat to win.

  "Why do you sulk there, Ambrose? Come, Mother will give you some tea. Real tea like a guest, I am sure, not the kind she gives to those who are ailing.”

  He didn’t respond, and she had no patience. “No? Well, suit yourself. I will not play your silly games."

  Katie walked back to where her flowers had fallen and started to gather them again. She would tie them together with a ribbon and hang them in the sun to dry, then put them among her linens.

  She said, more to herself than to Ambrose Standish nearby, "Wild flowers smell so much sweeter than those grown in a garden. Mama says wild flowers don’t care where they grow, and Mama wouldn’t lie about a thing like that."

  She knew he was listening, but she couldn’t tell if he was watching her, for his eyes were very dark and hard to fathom. He wasn’t really shy; he just watched things instead of joining in. Like a snake watching a mouse, she decided, and he knew things too. Lots of things and some were not so nice and should have been private.

  But Katie already had enough of him. There was a pretty little rock. She bent over to examine, then slipped it into her pocket. One never knew just what was magic and what was not.

  And what is that over there? Part of a shell, it was robin’s egg blue. Very nice, but she left it there and looked overhead, trying to find the nest. She closed her eyes to listen very hard, because sometimes you could hear the little baby birds chirp.