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Come, come, my love!
—John Clare
Flame glared at her father as he cooked fish over a campfire. The moon reflected into the Mississippi River on one side of them; the shadows of the forest were on the other.
“How could you do this?” Flame asked, her eyes flaming angrily as she glared at her father. “How can you think you can get away with it?”
“I swore that I would never allow you to live with a ’breed,” Colonel Russell said flatly, slowly turning the stick on which the fish had been skewered, the fire browning it.
He gave Flame a cold, menacing stare. “And did you think I would allow myself to be penned up in prison like some mad, raging lunatic? A dog?” he grumbled. “I deserve better after all I have done for my country.”
“Yes, you’ve been a dedicated soldier,
but you got too power hungry,” Flame said, scratching a mosquito bite on her left arm. “If you had been allowed to start an Indian war in the Minnesota Territory, the government would have done more than court-martial you. You would have been shot by a firing squad.”
She swallowed hard and her eyes wavered. “Just like you planned for White Fire,” she said, tears swimming in her eyes at the thought of how White Fire must feel now that he knew that she had been abducted.
“He deserved to die,” Colonel Russell said in a hiss. “He is a worthless son of a bitch. I don’t know how I was ever stupid enough to hire him as my interpreter. I should’ve known that would backfire on me.”
He glowered at her. “And it did,” he said dryly. “It brought you two together.”
“No matter what you would have done, whether you hired him or not at the fort, we would have found ways to be together,” Flame shot back heatedly. “I have loved him since I was ten. I would have searched for him forever until I found him. The Minnesota wilderness was the first place I would look. If I hadn’t found him there, I would have sought him everywhere.”
“I raised you better than that,” Colonel Russell said. He pinched off a piece of the fish and took a bite, to see if it was cooked thoroughly enough.
He licked his fingers. Then he glared at Flame again. “I raised you with class, baby,” he said, his teeth clenched. “Class. Not to be manhandled by a ’breed. Especially not to live in a damn rickety cabin. You were used to so much more than that.”
“And now what do I have?” she taunted. “A father who is wearing rags, no shoes, and who is hunted by the cavalry?” She laughed. “Yes, you’ve done quite well for yourself, Father,” she mocked. “It’s laughable.”
“How can you show me such disrespect when it was I who gave you so much through the years after I married your mother?” he said. “You weren’t born yet. She tricked me. I’m not your father.”
Flame was so stunned by what he had just said, about him not being her real father, she found it hard to comprehend it. Even her mother had betrayed her by never having told her that he wasn’t her father.
Then so many things began to make sense to her: How she had so often felt a strange sort of detachment from this man. How she had often wondered how she could be related to someone who was so evil, so cold-hearted and depraved.
She, on the other hand, had always had good feelings, so much compassion for everyone.
So had her beloved mother. Yes, it was all falling into place now, yet knowing it didn’t make it any easier to understand. To accept, yes. But not to understand.
“You aren’t my father?” she finally said.
“Everyone thought your father died of natural causes, but, in truth, I hastened his death after I saw your mother and wanted her,” Colonel Russell said, laughing throatily. “When your father got pneumonia and was placed in the hospital at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis, I just so easily slipped a pillow over his head and—”
“Don’t say any more!” Flame cried, feeling as though she might throw up from the vision evoked by his words. She scrambled to her feet and slowly backed away from him. “You are even more sick than I thought,” she said warily. “How could I have ever had any feelings for you, and I did, when I was a child?”
“But of course you would,” Colonel Russell said, laughing. “I was your ‘daddy’, wasn’t I? Daughters worship their daddies.”
“I never worshipped you,” Flame said, her voice catching. “I thought I loved you, yet I doubt that I ever did. How could I love someone like you? How could my mother?”
“It was so easy to sway her into loving me,” he said, laying the cooked fish on a rock.
He rose slowly, then inched his way toward Flame. “I was so gentle and kind to her while she was getting over the death of her husband,” he said, cackling. “Why, darling, I swept her clean off her feet. She married me two months after your father was buried.”
“Lord,” Flame gasped, her hands at her throat.
“Just the same as I’m going to sweep you off your feet once you’ve gotten over the shock of hearing all of this,” he said.
He quickly grabbed her by an arm and yanked her to him. “Darling daughter,” he said, “when we reach Canada, you will become my wife.”
