The wind blew through the trees, a soft susurrus of rustling leaves in the otherwise shadowy silence of the night. Alice slept fitfully, dozing at times, then waking with the smallest sound: the shriek of some nocturnal animal, the metallic click of a rifle being handled, Nathaniel quietly waking someone and then settling down to sleep as he finished the evening's first watch.
She could get no rest from the unbidden thoughts and questions that washed over her. Now that she had made her choice – and clearly she had made one – how would she begin to live? What sort of life could she make for herself here, with none of the comforts of home, all wild and foreign? Could she truly be happy in this place?
She was filled with the sudden desire to move, which often happened when sleep came uneasily to her. Getting to her feet as quietly as she could, she edged along the outskirts of their camp to the sharp bank of the river, the sound of the falls – a primal collision of rock and water – gradually increasing as she moved closer. It was so dark, only the barest moonlit crests of spray were visible. She sat down, arms wrapped around her knees, watching with fascination the play of light upon the water.
She did not even notice at first the nudge of moccasin against her foot.
As she looked up suddenly, she was confronted with a pair of shining brown eyes, which began to move closer and closer towards her as he lowered to a crouch.
"You shouldn't go far."
Her chest tightened; he was just so close.
With a hand to steady himself, Uncas sat down next to her, his long legs extending along the ground. They sat in a stilled quiet, the only noise the hushed rumble of water just beyond.
"Are you not going back to England, then?"
"No," she replied, shaking her head a little.
"Good."
She had not expected him to say such a thing. Nor did she know how to respond. As moments passed, the silence between them began to gnaw at her; she searched for something to say, if only to stop its advance.
"Thank you for the carving. It… it's beautiful."
He smiled a little and nodded, but did not reply. How could she get him to speak to her? All Alice knew was that she wanted to hear his voice, like a drowning man gasps for air.
"Where will we go now?"
He took a slow, even breath. She could feel the warmth of him beside her, the momentary brush of his arm against her sleeve.
"I'm not sure. We'll talk tomorrow, figure out where to spend the winter."
"Where were you all going before you found us?"
"West. Beyond the lakes."
"Why? What's there?"
What foolishness was coming out of her mouth? Did she even care?
"It's the western camp of the Delaware. My mother's people."
"Is she still there?"
"She died," he answered, his voice more distant. "A long time ago."
"Oh… I'm sorry."
He shrugged his shoulders a little, as if that was all he could offer her.
"So what would you all do, at the western camp of the Delaware?" she asked cautiously.
"Not much to do in winter. It's too cold for hunting." He looked over at her. "I'm supposed to get married."
Frozen water surged through her veins. In all the time they had been together, she had never imagined that he might have already formed an attachment with another. Was there someone waiting dutifully for him, some girl with long black hair like his?
"To whom?"
"I don't know."
A small relief, perhaps, but it still did not alleviate the bitter ache lodged deep in the center of her chest.
"Congratulations."
"I don't know that I will, though."
Alice turned up to face him, her soft brown eyes searching his.
"Why not?"
"Well, no respectable girl will be happy with the idea of sharing her wiquoam with a Yengeese brother-in-law and two white women.
"And I don't know that I want to." He smiled at her a little, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. "At least not with a Delaware girl. Too bossy."
Uncas picked up her hand from where it rested on her knee and held it between his palms. She was shocked first by his boldness, then by how warm his hands felt surrounding hers, his fingers threaded through her own. She had a brief impulse to pull away, but did not.
"Why did you change your mind?" he asked, his eyes centered on the pale blue veins running just beneath her skin, his thumb softly tracing along their path.
What could she tell him? She wasn't even sure she knew the answer herself; her heart was not quite so free with its secrets. She answered in a half-truth, offering only what she could say with certainty.
"I couldn't leave my sister. And there's nothing left for me in England."
He nodded, his eyes turning distant, unfocused.
"And you want to stay here with us?"
"If you'll let me," she answered quietly.
He looked straight down at her, and the world began to go soft at the edges. She lowered her gaze for a moment – the product of a lifetime of instilled modesty – but then glanced up again, losing herself in the bottomless dark pools of his eyes. Time slowed; a single heartbeat filled an hour, or a lifetime.
Slowly he moved a hand up towards her face, catching the rounded edge of her cheekbone with the tips of his fingers. It was all too much, she thought, as she began to tremble.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her towards him, enveloping her in a circle of solidness and warmth. So long ago, under a crashing waterfall, he had held her so, keeping her safe from the blood-soaked images that hacked their way across her thoughts. But even here, the true threat long past, she felt the same: secure, protected from the dangers of the world. For all her childish daydreams of a savior in a red coat with gold braid along the shoulder, how could she have known that it was in the arms of a savage that she would finally feel the safest?
"I don't understand…any of this," she whispered.
"Why do you have to?"
She tilted her head up towards his, shyly searching for his eyes through half-lowered lashes and finding them, full of tenderness and fire. She realized at that moment that she would be willing to forsake everything – all that she had, all that she had ever been given – simply to have him continue looking at her in the way that he was.
They moved towards each other purely by instinct, lips at first meeting tentatively, as if part of an opening salvo; but as their breaths grew heavier, Alice was filled with a fierce hunger, as if there would never be enough. The ground itself seemed to be falling out from underneath her, but she paid it no notice, as he was plummeting with her, arms tight around each other as they braced for the impact. She understood why she had run from him before – the unrelenting ache within her was so new, so terrifying – but at this moment she was no longer afraid.
She felt as if she had shed some part of herself, something heavy and confining, leaving her somehow different, lighter.
She laid her head across his collarbone, her face tucked into the warm hollow where his neck and shoulder met. Could she stay here forever, and never be found? She listened to the deep and even spacing of his breaths, a rhythmic movement that hypnotically echoed the reverberations of her heart.
"You should go back to sleep," he said eventually. "Long day tomorrow."
But Alice had already fallen asleep, her honeyed hair trailing against her shoulders and along her face, a faint beatific smile half-formed across the softness of her mouth.