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  Falconer’s Quest

  Copyright © 2007

  T. Davis Bunn and Isabella Bunn

  Cover design by UDG Design Works

  Cover photographer: Steve Gardner, Pixel Works Studio, Inc.

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owners.

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Paperback: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0358-9 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0358-4

  Hardcover: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0359-6 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0359-2

  Large Print: ISBN-13: 978-0-7642-0360-2 ISBN-10: 0-7642-0360-6

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bunn, T. Davis, 1952-

  Falconer’s quest / T. Davis Bunn, Isabella Bunn.

  p. cm. — (Heirs of Acadia ; 5)

  ISBN 978-0-7642-0359-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-7642-0358-9

  (pbk.) —ISBN 978-0-7642-0360-2 (large-print pbk.)

  1. Acadians—Fiction. 2. North Carolina—Fiction. I. Bunn, Isabella. II. Title.

  PS3552.U4718F35 2007

  813'.54—dc22 2006038409

  * * *

  T. DAVIS BUNN is an award-winning author whose growing list of novels demonstrates the scope and diversity of his writing talent.

  ISABELLA BUNN has been a vital part of his writing success; her research and attention to detail have left their imprint on nearly every story. Their life abroad has provided much inspiration for plots and settings. They live near Oxford, England.

  By T. Davis Bunn

  * * *

  The Gift

  The Book of Hours

  One Shenandoah Winter

  The Quilt

  Tidings of Comfort & Joy

  The Great Divide

  The Presence

  Winner Take All

  Elixir

  The Lazarus Trap

  Heartland

  SONG OF ACADIA*

  The Meeting Place The Birthright

  The Sacred Shore The Distant Beacon

  The Beloved Land

  HEIRS OF ACADIA†

  The Solitary Envoy

  The Innocent Libertine

  The Noble Fugitive

  The Night Angel

  Falconer’s Quest

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Looking for More Good Books to Read?

  Chapter 1

  February 1836

  John Falconer made it through the days in very small steps.

  Ada’s illness had come with the first winter storm, which gripped the Carolinas for eleven days with fierce winds and hard-slung ice. Falconer had sat at her bedside, hands knotted on the coverlet, and stared at the beloved face. Ada looked as white as the snow now gathering on the window ledge. His lips felt stiff as he whispered first her name, then prayers he scarcely heard himself utter. He bowed low over his clenched fists, finally breaking the room’s tense silence with a groan.

  In just a year and a half, Falconer’s heart had been so altered he could scarcely recall a time before Ada’s love filled his days and warmed his nights. Eighteen months earlier, he and Ada had stood before the bishop in their Moravian church and said their vows. Young Matt had stood proudly at Falconer’s side, delighted in his new father and overjoyed by his widowed mother’s newfound happiness. Falconer touched Ada’s face, with its sheen of perspiration, and wished his physical strength truly counted for something. If only he could wrest back the days now gone, peel back time, and have her smile at him once more.

  And then Ada had passed with the storm. Everything had been so impossibly swift. The illness, the decline, the passage, all in less than two weeks. No one knew precisely the cause. She had slipped away from them, gentled into a slumber that did not end. The elders gathered, called it a tragic wonder, and murmured to each other how she had been so softly called home. Why was it that one so crushed, but still so strengthened, by the ferocious winds of life was now gone from them?

  Telling young Matt was the most wrenching task Falconer had ever set for himself. The two clung to each other, rocking slowly back and forth. Though Matt’s grief drenched Falconer’s shirt, Falconer found himself unable to weep. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, for he had scarcely eaten or slept since Ada’s illness had begun. He had known men who were hard stricken in the heat of battle and felt nothing until the dire threat was gone. But for him, even after it was over, the only thing that touched him at all was his son, not of his flesh but certainly of his heart. Falconer spent uncounted hours holding Matt and letting the boy weep for the both of them.

  They buried Ada on a wet Tuesday morn, a fiercely cold day in February so dark the chapel bell’s tolled regrets were echoed by the sky and the wind. The community of Moravians, who had known Ada all her life, shared the ceremony and the profound sorrow with stoic but no less genuine understanding, watching Falconer and Matt with eyes full of sympathy and questions. What would happen to them now?

  The day after the funeral, Falconer shuttered the inn he and Ada had run and accepted the invitation of her uncle and his family. Together with Paul and Sarah Brune and their children, the two mourners might slowly find comfort in the sharing of an impossible burden.

  Impossible that a woman so full of life, love, and goodness could be stricken and lost so swiftly. Impossible that Falconer could know the blessing of home and family for scarcely a year and a half. Impossible that he was expected to nurture a boy who had lost both blood parents and now had only a wounded sailor for a guardian.

  The spring was slow in coming. He and Matt worked the Brune farm and prepared the land and tended the animals. Falconer, dressed in the simple homespun of the Moravian community, did the work of three men. He allowed his beard to grow in dark and rich. The good North Carolina earth worked into his hands, and the physical labor toughened him in ways the sea never had. The work and the good people proved a strong and healing balm. But what saved Falconer, what kept him rooted to the world and the day at hand, was his son.

  The dogwoods finally bloomed a month and more late. The pear and apple orchards added their own white fragrance to the hills and the softening breeze. And suddenly the winter was gone. The entire world leapt into rebirth. The farming valleys were alive with the bleating of newborn lambs and the mothers’ chuckl
ings. New shoots rose from what had been empty furrows. The sun rose higher and stronger, and the men shucked their coats and worked in shirtsleeves. The entire community reveled in the hope of spring.

  Evenings, when the sun dipped and the Brune family gathered upon the porch to watch the westering sun and the daily promise of glory to come, Matt nestled next to Falconer on the porch swing. It was an uncommonly wet summer, and the day’s rain clouds dispersed in bands of copper and gold spread across the Salem valleys. Eventually Matt would sing, his voice at first small and fragile, but as the summer progressed, stronger, more confident.

  Sometimes Sarah Brune joined in, her alto adding a lovely harmony to Matt’s pure, bell-like melody. The young lad sang his favorite Moravian hymns, many of them in their original German. That did not matter in the least to Falconer, who spent the evening hours thus, his earthstained fingers stroking the boy’s fine blond head, listening to the promise of peace cloaked in sunset and song.

  In July, the church elders came and spoke with him about the Moravian community’s only inn, still in disuse after all these months. They carefully talked of widows in Salem who needed a good man. They gently challenged him toward finding hope in spite of the world’s woes. Falconer stood with them, nodding and accepting their words, trusting their wisdom. But in truth, what occupied his mind was the sudden realization that he had never wept. As he watched their horse-drawn rigs return to the village, he wondered if he would ever feel anything else besides this pervasive numbness.

  That night as they sat on the porch, Falconer, his voice low, asked Matt if he wanted to return and reopen the inn. Matt buried his head in Falconer’s chest. Falconer did not raise the subject again.

  Two days later Falconer went alone into Salem. He met with the elders and arranged for a young couple who had helped with the inn’s chores to take over as innkeepers for him. While he discussed the list of duties with them, townspeople approached Falconer, appearing as though drawn from the sunlight and the summer heat. Although they saw him and Matt every Sabbath, they took his visit with the elders as a sign. Even without Ada’s sanctioning presence, they quietly welcomed him fully into their fold.

  August arrived with a blistering heat, and the rains subsided. The deep-blue dome of the sky presided over an increasingly parched land. Falconer shared the community’s fear of a lost harvest. They all began stocking what they could for a long winter of grumbling bellies. Breakfasts were reduced to grits and fatback, noon fare became biscuits and whatever fruit they found lying upon the ground, and the evening repast might be a simple stew from a farm animal no longer able to feed. The Brune house garden was harvested and replanted, and every dawn Matt joined the other children drawing buckets from the well to water the vegetables by hand. Falconer ate his simple breakfast to the dry squeaking of the well handle, paired with his silent entreaties for intervention from the Almighty.

  Falconer found the Sabbath worship a time of both peace and confusion. He was glad he had never felt a need to become angry with God. Why this had not happened, he could not say. As he sat and listened to the community choirs join in song, or bowed his head in prayer, he felt the faintest glimmers of divine peace enter his wounded breast. On the homeward journey, though, Falconer stroked his beard and wondered if he would ever waken from his largely empty inner state.

  The first week of September, after six scorching weeks without rain, the skies darkened. The wind whipped up clouds of precious earth and flung them in billowing waves across the valley. The dry leaves of corn and wheat and tobacco rattled in thirsty anticipation. Shriveled apples and pears dropped like nature’s drumbeats upon the parched earth. And then the rain came.

  The entire Brune family raced about the muddy front yard. Falconer stepped off the front porch and tilted his head to the sky. He felt a hand slip into his and looked down at Matt. The boy’s hair was matted to his forehead and turned so pale it looked silver. Falconer felt his face stretch in unaccustomed lines, the action so foreign it took him a long moment to even recognize it as a smile. The rain had washed away the impossible distance, and Ada appeared once again to Falconer in the clear eyes, in the upturned face, in the rain that poured in pewter rivulets over his head. Ada was still there. She had not completely left him.

  Falconer swept the boy into his arms. Matt’s own arms came up and around Falconer’s neck. The two stood in the rain without speaking. The boy’s cheek rested upon Falconer’s beard as they watched the Brune family dance and laugh and frolic in the wet joy and the new hope.

  Two weeks later a stranger arrived, asking about Falconer. The Salem community counted Falconer as one of their own. None would give up information about a fellow Moravian without first making sure the attention was welcome. These were, after all, evil times.

  Some time earlier, the North Carolina capital had moved from the coastal community of New Bern to Raleigh. The stated purpose was to extend the government’s reach further inland. Even so, much of the state had fallen into administrative chaos. Brigands ruled many of the smaller Carolina roads. The Moravians were called enemies by the newly elected state administration, which disliked how the Salem community took in escaped slaves and formed a vital link in the Underground Railroad. And Falconer had done more than most to further this work. All the proceeds from his share in a Carolina gold mine had gone to purchasing slaves and spiriting them away. A plantation he had acquired in Virginia became yet another stop on the Freedom Train line northward. No, this was not a time to be open with an outsider—not until they had taken his measure.

  When word finally came to Falconer that a welldressed stranger was asking for him, he saddled his horse and rode into Salem town to his own inn. As he approached it, he saw the man, who turned out to be no stranger, seated on the very same bench Falconer had used for his own morning devotions when he and Ada ran the establishment.

  “Hello, Reginald,” he called as soon as he recognized his visitor.

  The owner of Langston’s Emporium, along with any number of other business ventures, squinted against the morning sun.

  “Falconer?” The man closed the Bible in his lap and stood.

  Falconer slipped from the saddle and roped the horse to the railing. Reginald Langston lost his footing as he stepped off the front stoop, his eyes round as he approached the taller man. “Is that really you?” he asked, his voice sounding shocked.

  “Have I changed so much?”

  “Have you…Don’t you see yourself in the mirror?”

  “The Brunes don’t own a looking glass.”

  Reginald stepped in close enough to grip Falconer’s wrist. His fingers did not come close to connecting. “As I live and breathe. It is indeed you.”

  Falconer accepted the other man’s handshake, realizing he was not the only one that had changed. Reginald Langston had always been ready with a smile and a laugh, large in girth and trusting in nature. Instead of the dark broadcloth suits preferred by most Washington men of stature, Reginald wore doeskin trousers tucked into boots of fine English leather, a soft brown traveling coat, and a waistcoat with gold buttons. But not even these fine clothes could mask the weariness and the worry in his gaze, or his features sagging with far more than the months since their last meeting. Falconer took note of the two armed men who shadowed Reginald, far enough away not to intrude, yet there and ready just the same.

  Reginald took a step back and said, “I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Ada. I only heard over breakfast.”

  Falconer directed a nod toward the packed earth. “I am sorry I did not write.”

  Reginald waved that away. “How long has it been?”

  “She left us in February.”

  “How are you, my man?”

  Falconer looked up. “Coping. Sometimes more than that.”

  “And the boy?”

  “He’s just gone ten. A strong, fine lad. He no doubt has kept me as sound as you find me.”

  “Might I pay my respects to your wife?”

 
“Of course.”

  Reginald ordered his men to stay behind. The two obviously were not pleased, but did as they were told. The day was harvest fair, a faint hint of breeze out of the north, not cool so much as comfortable. The village was empty of men and many women, as almost everyone used the good weather to bring in the crops. Even so, Falconer felt unseen eyes upon them as they proceeded through the village’s heart.

  At the gravesite Reginald said a silent prayer. Then, “She was an extraordinarily fine woman.”

  Falconer nodded and pointed at the weather-beaten cross beside her own. “I had her put to rest beside her first husband. I felt it was important for our boy.”

  “You amaze me,” Reginald said quietly. “Can we sit here for a moment?”

  The bench they selected was the same one where Ada had spent long, lonely days, staring at the cemetery and her first husband’s grave, before meeting Falconer. Ada had brought him here twice. The first visit had been upon the day of his return from jail, where he had been incarcerated for buying, then freeing, a group of slaves. She had told him of her own lonely struggle and the multitude of hours she had sat and yearned for what her heart could not even name. The second time was the evening before they were to wed. They had sat in this very spot for almost an hour. Then she had risen and smiled and embraced him. Falconer’s heart lurched as he remembered her arms around his neck, his whispered words in her ear. He sighed and almost imperceptibly shook his head.

  When Reginald finally spoke, it appeared to Falconer as a response to an unspoken question. “Were it not for my own dire need, I would not dream of asking anything of you now. One look is enough to know of your woes, my dear friend. But ask I must.”

  “Is it something to do with…with Serafina?” Falconer found it uncommon strange that he now had to search to recall the name of a woman whom he had dearly loved, though never claimed as his own.