"We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over." - The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
The harsh summer sun made Alice's head swim.
The invisible path in front of her melted from tall grass to thin trees and more thin trees, giving the impression of stretching as far as the eye could see. She had never missed the easy predictability of the streets in London so desperately: two streets down to Grosvenor Square took her to cousin Eugenia's, a coach ride of perhaps an hour's time, if that, took them down to Saint James' Park.
She'd loved the park so, rambled all through it like a child just a few months ago. Like a tiny wilderness, she'd thought, and had wondered aloud how much she'd love to know the real one.
The Alice she'd been then seemed so naïve now.
She'd wanted to be braver today: walk faster, last longer. But the wilderness stretched on and on, and her body, unable to know just what to prepare for, had simply given up on her, dragging her down almost as much as her mud-drenched skirts.
And the memories. God, the memories.
They'd struck less as the exhaustion took her over, but Alice knew they were lying in wait. Striking like a thunderbolt, they'd appear: the vivid moment when a screaming, half naked man took a still-breathing, struggling, living soldier by the hair and cut a crimson-red circle off his head. The din of their attackers, nearly animalistic, barely drowned out by the mighty bang of the muskets, filling the air with sulphurous, faintly pungent smoke…
She wished, for the hundredth time, that she had the courage to tell Cora about her near delirious recollections. But the complaints, for the hundredth and one time, sounded feeble in her own mind. Cora, who'd been on military campaigns, Cora, who'd field-trained under Mr. Phelps…Cora, who shuddered, but never looked away from the carnage. She'd look at her and see, again, a lost little girl who'd thought America was a slightly larger, slightly more populous garden.
The thought left Alice feeling almost as lonely as the distance of her companions currently did.
She and Cora had been close as girls – even with how much more serious, more practical Cora was. While Alice went off on her flights of fancy and read Gulliver's Tales and Robinson Crusoe, Cora, who'd once enjoyed them with her, seemed to find the world of fantasy stifling. Alice wondered now if that was what had taken her sister to follow Papa on campaigns, an ache to touch the real world behind the polished, tame little dollhouse that was Portman Square.
Alice had wanted that too. She'd simply expected the real world to be…a little softer.
She looked up. Dappled by the sun filtering through the endless trees and the summer heat, Cora's periwinkle blue riding habit, far ahead of her, looked as unfamiliar as the rest of the scenery. Duncan's red coat, a distance from her sister, looked much more vivid. Mr. Poe was invisible.
Dimly, Alice wondered if the red of their coats was what had made the soldier sitting ducks, if their three new companions dressed as they did for concealment. And then the red and the blue and the interminable ocean of green and brown seemed to blend like oil paint on an easel, and the ground rushed up at her.
Her arms caught her, but just barely. When she looked up, blur-Cora and blur-Duncan were gone.
For once, their disappearance didn't fill Alice with icy dread. Instead, she was full of the same sad, sobering resignation she'd felt the first time Cora had left with Papa: she had been ten, and as she'd slipped into her nightgown on the first night, she had realized the only person who she'd ever trusted with her nightmares was now hundreds of miles away. Alice would have to bear them alone, if they came on that night or any of the others. There was no "or".
A hand appeared at her elbow, and Alice, still on her knees, turned to look at the young Indian in the eye through the tendrils of hair that continued to escape her braid.
He didn't pull her up immediately. Instead, he waited for some sign on her part before guiding her up. Alice was sure he had more than enough strength in just his hand to set her on her feet without breaking into a sweat, so the gesture must have been for her benefit.
Probably believes I'm terrified of him, she thought, with a hint of regret.
The exhaustion and the pall of resigned sadness that seemed determined to trap her in its depths made her feet into leaden weights. But she started, slowly, to drag them forward, and her silent sentry matched her pace.
Alice turned to the man, who'd once again put his hands to his musket. "You're keeping an eye on me, aren't you?"
"Yes."
It depresses her, somewhat, that even this man who'd known her for less than three days had already discovered her weaknesses. "I'm sorry."
"What for, miss?"
"For slowing us down. For putting us all in danger last night, when I tried to crawl away." Another thing, one that had been slowly chafing at her thoughts, fell out of her lips before she could ponder on it: "For yelling at you about the horses. So…" So silly, so childish.
There was a brief silence. Then: "You didn't know."
"No. I was…scared." In looking away in shame, Alice briefly lost track of her heavy feet and she stumbled again. The man, alert this time, stopped the fall by righting her with a sure grip on her shoulder.
"We can take a break-"
"No!" Her vehemence surprised even herself.
The man turned to look at her full in the face for the first time since the incident with the horses. His eyes were soft – Alice thought there was something about their color, like she wanted to trust him more every time she glanced at them. "I'm…tired. Of-of being a nuisance." The words trembled with a hint of tears; Alice longed to let them come, if only for the spent relief that always came when she was done, but after a moment she fought to hold them back.
The man looked at her pensively. Then he shifted the grip on his musket, holding it with one arm and leaning it against his shoulder; he offered her his free arm, easy as breathing. "Catch up faster."
Alice hardly needed to be told twice: she wrapped her arm securely into his.
Her weight seemed trifling to the sheer strength of him, and Alice felt tiny and fragile. But as they took their first step together, and Alice realized her leaden feet were much less of a bother this way, she felt reinvigorated instead.
And they took off.
The repetitive scenery seemed to blur, this time from their speed; Alice was soon out of breath again. She braced for another gentle suggestion to rest, but it never came, and the man's apparent faith in her urged her to withstand just a little longer. When she was truly spent, she squeezed his elbow, the one her hand was tucked into and said "stop, please", to which her companion slowed to a standstill.
Eager to continue, Alice took great gulping breaths and gathered the folds of her heavy skirts in her other hand – then a thought hit her, and she looked up at the man.
She hadn't asked for his name, after hours and hours of walking in his shadow, and Alice could curl up small for her rudeness. "What is your name?"
"Uncas."
"Pleased, Mr. Uncas. I'm Alice."
His face moved minutely, but Alice knew him too little to understand what it meant. Amusement? A sneer? "No Mr. Just Uncas, miss." His voice seemed faintly amused to her. Was it strange to be called 'mister' amongst these people? Duncan called the man called Magua simply Scout, now that she thought of it…
(The memory of his cold eyes, the sight of the wildly screaming, half naked men, multiplying dizzyingly as they burst through the trees threatened to overcome her; she forced it down, fought; a stray thought bobbed to the surface of her mind: Duncan had been so harsh, too harsh to Magua, was that the reason why he wanted to kill them? But why Cora, then? Cora who was always so kind?)
…Alice breathed.
"Miss?"
"…I'm sorry." She didn't explain why she was sorry, and he didn't press her. The persistent thoughts relented after a moment, and Alice felt herself again.
She wondered if it would be too forward of her to suggest that Uncas also call her just Alice – it seemed an absurd bit of distance to maintain, to insist on formality from someone who'd already looked into the very center of her fragility. The right moment slipped through her fingers as she pondered, and Alice reluctantly opted not to recapture it. "Uncas." She smiled at how easily the name came to her lips: short, sonorous and memorable. "Uncas, let us advance."
They paused and started again several times. Upon each new break, Alice was relieved both by the progress they made with Uncas bearing part of her weight and the way Uncas didn't try to fuss over her. He was patient, never rushing her moments of rest and never seeming irked by having to help her.
They caught up to the group more quickly than Alice had anticipated. Cora, up ahead with Mr. Poe, was looking back as they approached with a concerned smile; Mr. Poe hardly spared them a glance, and the elder Indian, whose name she hardly dared pronounce for all the peculiar g sounds in it, was out of sight.
Duncan, however, was frowning ever so slightly as they approached. Alice couldn't begin to imagine what the matter was for a moment. Then she looked at the scene through Duncan's eyes, and remembered who the man on her arm was; or rather, what he was.
It had been a difficult discovery for Alice, how firmly entrenched the idea of whom to call "man" and whom to call "savage" was to the much-loved soldier who'd doggedly pursued Cora for years now. Alice noticed his harshness towards Magua: Duncan was a strict superior, that she knew, but there had been something that reeked of scorn to his manners. He'd also never once addressed Uncas so far, even after it'd been revealed that he spoke English well: she and Cora were wary, speaking when spoken to, but Duncan, with all his characteristic directness, always looked and directed his questions only to Mr. Poe.
Though it shamed her now, she could admit to herself that she'd come into these lands with all sorts of exotic ideas. But she always called the people here men (red men, oh she could cringe!), never savages or redskins - because Alice never forgot that she was, to polite society, something of a savage too.
She and Cora might have gone through the strictures of boarding school in England, through the same Classics and the same sums. They might have worn the same dresses, taken the same tea and wandered the same pretty ballrooms. But they were also the daughters of a Scot. Brave and honorable though Papa was, the Munros that came before her scraped out their living in the Highlands much closer to the present than polite society was inclined to forgive.
Edmund Munro came from the barren, empty hills where men wore kilts, where uprisings against the Crown were hatched. Papa might have chosen England over Bonnie Prince Charlie, but there were days when the red coat he wore so proudly seemed to not matter to those around him – like he's a child, playing pretend…or a feeble old man to be tolerated, Alice thought with dawning horror. His superiors always called him The Scotsman, instead of Colonel, when he wasn't present after all.
His Scottish roots ran deep. It showed in small details: how he'd let them fill their heads with thoughts of adventure, how they'd always had the freedom to speak their minds about everything. How they'd constantly, unwittingly broken the little taboos English society had erected for women.
And now, it seemed, it showed in how they embraced the wild people of the Americas. Fellow savages, after a fashion. Cora insisted on calling Mr. Poe…well, Mr. Poe; Alice, meanwhile, had had to run into Duncan's disapproving eyes to remember she was supposed to shun the man beside her.
"Alice." Duncan hurried to her side. "We were wondering where you'd gotten off to." He seemed intent to pretend there wasn't someone else with her. He came down the rise of the hill their companions had already scaled and stopped at Alice's other side, jutting out his elbow close to her free hand.
She was supposed to politely dismiss Uncas, she knew, now that her rightful protector was here.
"Gotta keep going. We'll make the fort only just before dawn tomorrow at this pace." Alice realized Mr. Poe was looking at the three of them. Something in his gaze reminded Alice of one of her harsher schoolteachers, waiting for her to choose the wrong answer. Cora glanced over her shoulder at the scene, her mouth half parted, as if ready to defuse the situation by choosing the outcome in Alice's stead.
Her nerves peaked. What happened next was neither rebellion nor conviction: taken back abruptly to examination days at boarding school, Alice simply blurted out an answer.
"It's alright Duncan." Everyone around her froze for a second, as if they'd been at a play and she'd said the wrong lines – which, Alice mused, she had. "You should stay at the front."
Duncan gave her a long, lingering look. There was something of shock in his eyes, and perhaps a little betrayal. Alice knew he was taking Cora's increasing intimacy with Mr. Poe quite hard, moreso after her sister had turned up in the woodsman's vicinity this morning – perhaps his wariness of Uncas was not as it had been with Magua. Perhaps he was simply experiencing the pain of being discretely shunted aside.
But the thought didn't change her mind. Alice met his gaze calmly, if not firmly, until Duncan turned away. His movement unfroze the scene, and she and Uncas started up the hill. By the time Duncan was only just getting a foothold on the final rise, Uncas had long since delivered her to the top.