Fire Along the Sky (6 page)

At that Jennet laughed out loud. “You don't know me very well, cousin, if you think you'll hear such a thing from me.”

Lily pressed her mouth together and her brow drew down so that for one moment Jennet was amazed at how much she looked like Elizabeth.

“They think I'm a child crying for the moon who will be distracted with a bit of maple sugar.” Lily's gaze followed Simon as he moved through the dance. “But they are wrong. I won't be distracted.”

“Of course you must study, as talented as you are,” Jennet said. “But you do realize that there are teachers in places other than New-York City? There might even be someone suitable in Johnstown, and that is not so far away.”

Lily let out a sharp laugh. “By my mother's reckoning it is as far as the moon.”

Across the dancing circle a young woman had marched up to the men gathered around the Bonners and begun to lecture them with her hands on her hips. They could not hear what she was saying over the fiddles, but from the embarrassed grins of the men it had something to do with their very bad manners.

“I see there's more than one lass in Paradise who kens what she wants,” said Jennet.

“That's Lydia Ratz,” Lily explained. “She's fond of dancing. And other things. Your Simon Ballentyne should dance with Lydia, she'll . . . distract him.”

All the other single women had turned their attention in the same direction. Now that they had the opportunity they studied Luke cautiously, in the way of those who are taught to guard their good names and virtue if not their hearts. At Carryck, in Montreal, here in Paradise, and everywhere in between Jennet had seen it again and again. Young and old they fixed on Luke in a crowd, as they would fix on Daniel, as they had once fixed on Nathaniel. Granny Iona had told her the stories.

Two young girls no more than ten came to stand just at the edge of the dancing. One was dark of complexion and hair, while the other was freckled and had long plaits that flashed like polished copper in the firelight.

“The little one is Callie Wilde,” Lily said, following Jennet's gaze. “The redheaded girl is Martha Kuick.” She put her mouth directly to Jennet's ear. “I expect Hannah must have written to you about the Kuicks.”

Jennet knew just enough of the girl's story to make her want to hear the rest, but before she could think how to ask, Elizabeth came to fetch her away to meet still more people: Nicholas Wilde, who owned apple orchards, and with him his housekeeper, a tiny woman as wizened and dark as a dried blackberry, and his hired man, who was, Jennet was told, though her eyes said such a thing was hardly possible, the housekeeper's son. He was as large as she was small, with a quick smile and even white teeth and hands like great leather mitts, in which he held his hat when he bowed his head and said a few words of greeting.

The housekeeper's name was Cookie and her son's, Levi, and they had taken the last name Fiddler upon gaining their manumission papers.

Cookie reminded Jennet of old MacQuiddy, who had run Carryckcastle for fifty years, and thinking of MacQuiddy put Jennet in mind of all the messages she had yet to deliver from Carryck. She went back to find Hannah, only to discover that her cousins were gone.

In their place sat Gabriel, who yawned widely enough to show her his tonsils, and passed on a message: Hannah had been called away to see Uncle Doctor Todd (a strange formulation, Jennet noted, but said nothing), and Lily had disappeared in the direction of home.

“Will you ride home with me and Mama to Lake in the Clouds?” he asked between yawns. “We'll show you the firefly meadow.”

Jennet cast a glance back at the men, and saw that Luke was watching her. She felt his gaze at the base of her spine, as sharp and probing as a knife.

You'll come to me, this time.

It was a sentence she had repeated to herself every day since the
Isis
weighed anchor in Canada. The moment she saw Luke on the dock two things came to her clearly: she had been right to make the journey, and she must let him find his own way to her. She saw the truth of this every time she laid out the tarot cards, and with it came a calm understanding. He would come, in time. She knew it in her bones.

Elizabeth was walking toward them, an empty basket over her arm. Gabriel hopped down from the table. “Are you coming?”

“Aye,” Jennet said. “I am.”

Hannah knew the Todd house as well as her own, even in the dark. For a moment she stood in the kitchen taking in the familiar smells of tallow and toasting cornmeal, cinnamon and yeast and drying herbs, and when her eyesight had adjusted she made her way into the hall. Richard Todd stood in the open door of his study backlit by candlelight, waiting for her.

For a long moment she could find nothing to say. The doctor had always been a big man, broad and hard muscled, but quick of foot and graceful in his movements. He had lived among her mother's people, who gave him the name Cat-Eater for his ability to strike silently and for the fact that he shied at nothing, would do almost anything to reach a goal he had set for himself.

The man standing in front of her had lost as much as fifty pounds; the whites of his eyes were the color of poorly tanned doeskin.

“Hannah Bonner,” he said, and she was relieved to hear that his voice had not withered away with the rest of him. “I hear that your husband ran off and left you and never came back. You did right to come home.”

Then he turned and went back into the study, moving as if every step rattled the marrow in his bones.

Hannah took a deep breath and followed him.

Ethan was sitting at the desk, with a sheaf of papers before him and a quill in his hand: another boy turned into a man while she was gone, but something was different about Ethan that had nothing to do with the passing years. Another story to hear, more loss or loneliness or frustration.

Suddenly Hannah was overcome with weariness; she would have liked to simply walk away, but she could not, not when she saw the way Richard held himself. Pain had a posture of its own; it sat in the spine and across the slope of the shoulders and bowed bone.

“I wondered if you would come without being summoned,” he said. “But I see the party was too much for you to resist.”

She had not seen him in ten years, but he had lost none of his sharp tongue.

“Ethan.” Hannah nodded in his direction and ignored Richard completely. “It is very good to see you.”

“What, no word of greeting for your old teacher?” Richard had turned his back to her to pour himself a glass of port. “I am cut to the quick.”

Hannah came forward into the light. “Curiosity told me you had not improved in the niceties. She also said that you are ill.”

He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I expect you want to talk about your dead son and missing husband as much as I want to talk about my health.”

“The dead cannot be helped,” Hannah said, hearing the irritation in her own voice but not trying to hide it. “The sick are another matter.”

From the desk Ethan said, “He wants you to diagnose him from twenty paces, cousin. It's a test he puts to every doctor he comes across.”

“And how do his colleagues meet that challenge?”

“Poorly, for the most part,” Richard Todd said, turning to face her. He held up his glass in a toast. “But then they were not trained by me. What do you see, my girl?”

“It is your liver,” Hannah said in as neutral a tone as she could manage. “I expect there's at least one palpable tumor, most probably more, in your abdomen and chest as well. You're taking laudanum for the pain, I can smell it. You need quite a lot of it.”

He grunted in satisfaction. “You see how well I trained her, Ethan? She not only sees in the dark, she sees through skin and bone. Not to say anything of that sense of smell.” He raised a glass in her direction.

From the darkened hallway came the sound of Curiosity's sharp laugh, the one she reserved for people who might deserve some sympathy but who would do best without it. “You didn't train her all by yourself, Richard, and you sure as sugar cain't take any credit for her nose.”

He squinted in Curiosity's direction and waved his free hand dismissively. “After I'm dead you can take all the credit, Curiosity, and there will be nobody left to correct you. Well done, Doctor Bonner. Well done indeed.”

Hannah was surprised at the satisfaction his approval brought to her, the thrill of the words from a man who had not often thought to praise.

She said, “Shall we talk about treatment? My first advice would be to empty that bottle into the pig trough.”

“Advice he has heard before,” Ethan said dryly. The expression in his eyes, something between resignation and sorrow, told Hannah more than anything that had been said thus far.

“Advice I will continue to ignore.” The doctor's voice lifted and wavered just short of breaking. He fell into a chair so heavily that the glass rattled in the windowpanes.

When he spoke again he had regained control of his voice. “You came just in time. Tomorrow you'll go on rounds with me, and then I wash my hands of this godforsaken place, once and for all.”

“And where will you go?” Hannah asked. “Back to Johnstown? You prefer the medical treatment you get there?”

“The only journey I have left to make is to my grave,” Richard Todd said, taking a last swallow from the glass and wiping his mouth on his cuff. “Hopefully before the last of the laudanum runs out.”

Chapter 3

In the rising heat of a new day, Nathaniel Bonner sat on the edge of his bed and thought of waking his wife. She would come to him happily if he reached for her, but for the rest of the day there would be shadows underneath her eyes and a slowness to her speech.

A curl of hair lifted in the breeze from the open window and swept across the curve of her cheek. There was little gray in her hair, but age had touched her in other ways. The faint lines between her brows had become a crease, and the flesh at her jaw was softer, just as all of her was a little rounder and softer and prettier.

He could wake her just to tell her all this—as he had told her many times before—because it gave him pleasure to see her blush. She would hush him and grumble and point out that it was the height of silliness for a woman of her years to make any claims on beauty. But it would please her nonetheless, and she would come to him flushed with embarrassment.

It was more than twenty years since Elizabeth had left England but many of the ideas she had been raised with still trailed along behind her like ragged tail feathers. That women did not age into beauty was one of her ideas; that children could be kept safe from the world was another. Even the losses they had suffered had not convinced her to let go of that second idea.

This particular day ahead of them would be a hard one. All of the children were home at once, which pleased him more than he knew how to put into words. But each of them carried their own bundle of problems, some he had never imagined.

Luke, for one. Luke and Jennet. Elizabeth had pulled that idea out of thin air and put it down in front of him, trouble wrapped up in a pretty ribbon. Nathaniel had lived too long among sharp-eyed women to discredit out of hand what his wife had to say, especially in matters of the heart. So he watched for himself and saw the truth, like words springing to life on the page when a candle is lit in the dusk.

There was a connection between the two of them, but it had nothing to do with new love. Instead of the shy smiles and questioning glances, Luke and Jennet circled each other warily and sparked like steel on flint. It was an old love, a knotty one with deep roots, one that had survived Jennet's marriage and long years of separation, and it explained why Luke had never brought home a bride. What Nathaniel didn't understand was why his oldest son was holding back from the inevitable. Because he wanted Jennet, of that much Nathaniel was sure.

He would have to raise the subject, and soon. But maybe not today.

The bigger problem, the one that couldn't wait, was Daniel.

Elizabeth was fond of saying that if Nathaniel had his way, he would build a wall around Paradise and burn every newspaper at the gates, and she wasn't far from right. The boys were wild at the idea of a war and they couldn't be held back for much longer.

The old way, the way of all the tribes and the way Nathaniel himself had been brought up, was to send a young man off to his first battle under the wing of a father or uncle or older brother. But Elizabeth would not hear of it, and truth be told Nathaniel had trouble remembering why he had ever been eager to go to war.

It was Luke who had presented them with the first glimmer of a real solution, one they could all live with. Late last night he laid it out to Runs-from-Bears and Nathaniel: Daniel and Blue-Jay would leave here with him and head northwest. Luke knew where to find a man called Jim Booke, a Yorker born and raised, with a small band of militiamen under him, loosely attached to Benjamin Forsyth's company of riflemen. Booke and his men moved back and forth along the river, keeping track of the British on the other side, who liked to send raiding parties into New-York. If the boys were the marksmen that Luke claimed they were, Jim Booke had declared himself willing to take them on for a provisional nine-month commitment.

With any luck the war would be over by then. Luke said this last part without looking the men in the eye.

“They'll be far safer with Jim Booke and his men than they would be in that sorry excuse for a navy,” he added. “There's no man who knows the river better.”

“A smuggler, was he, before the war?” Nathaniel had asked, and Luke grinned at him.

“And will be after, unless they call off the embargo.”

That had satisfied Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears both, and Elizabeth as well.

“Nine months,” she echoed when Nathaniel told her all this. And then: “He'll be home in the spring.”

Now Nathaniel watched his wife sleep, at peace in the world of her own imagining, where she had only to speak the words to end a war and bring her son home.

He touched his forehead to hers to breathe in the scent of her and left the room without a sound.

Runs-from-Bears was already climbing up out of the lake under the falls, shaking himself so that the water flew off him in sheets. Then he waited in the sun while Nathaniel swam the length of the lake and came to join him on the broad expanse of rock where they met every morning to discuss the coming day. They had been doing this since Many-Doves took Runs-from-Bears as her husband and he came to live on Hidden Wolf. When they were both on the mountain they met here, no matter what the weather.

“We must let them go.” Runs-from-Bears started the conversation in mid-thought. He spoke Mohawk, as they always did when they had important matters to discuss. “They must test themselves as we were tested at their age.”

There was no blood tie between the two men but they had fought side by side as young men and brought up their families the same way. Over the years friendship had grown into partnership, one with no name but just as strong a bond as brotherhood.

“Elizabeth is reconciled,” Nathaniel said. “At least she thinks she is.”

Bears let out a soft sound, an acknowledgment.

Nathaniel said, “Many-Doves has given her permission?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “She knows she cannot stop them. And even she has heard of Jim Booke.”

“We survived our share of battles,” Nathaniel said, mostly to himself. “And they will watch each other's backs.”

In the light of the new morning he studied Bears, still lean and heavily muscled and as quick as the son he was about to send off to fight yet another white man's war, this one even stupider than the last. On one thigh Runs-from-Bears bore the pucker of a healed bullet wound; a scar as wide as a man's finger and shiny pink arched across the expanse of his chest like a ribbon. There were a dozen more scars, each with its own story. Nathaniel rarely bothered with mirrors, but he knew that he looked much the same.

“I've been trying to remember what it was like at that age,” Nathaniel said. “Wanting to go to join the fighting that bad.”

“Like an ache in the balls,” Runs-from-Bears said, and Nathaniel snorted in agreement.

Bears said, “They are waiting to hear our decision.”

“They will have to wait a little longer,” Nathaniel said. “There's somebody else I have to talk to first.”

“Lily.”

“Aye.” Nathaniel ran a hand over his face.

Runs-from-Bears was looking at him with an expression that Nathaniel knew very well, one that said he had advice to offer but knew it would not be welcome.

“Go ahead, say it.”

“You know she'll find a way to get what she wants,” Bears said.

Nathaniel got up with a groan. “That's exactly what I'm afraid of.”

Hannah woke when she heard her father leaving the cabin for his morning swim under the falls, and then she lay perfectly still, listening. Jennet slept deeply, her back turned to Hannah. Lily was watching her. Hannah felt the blue of her eyes like a cool hand.

“Little sister,” she whispered across the room. “Do you hear the mockingbird calling?”

It was the question she had used to wake Lily as a child, and now it brought a smile to the beloved face, true and sweet. When Hannah closed her eyes she could call forth the picture of Lily in her first minute of life, wide-eyed and curious, bloody fists waving. Even then she had been at odds with the world. Her Mohawk girl-name had been Sparrows, for her size and quickness and the way she must argue, even with her own kind.

For the moment, though, she was at peace, this little sister who had grown into a woman while Hannah was in the west.

“Many-Doves will be looking for me,” Lily said. “It's already time to go down to the cornfields.”

There was a watchfulness about her as she said this, a waiting. Hannah recognized it for what it was.

“Not this morning,” she said. “This morning you and I must show Jennet the mountain and the village too.”

“I thought you had to go visit patients with Uncle Todd,” Lily said.

“I do, but that won't take long. You can come along, both of you. And then you can show her the meetinghouse.”

“What about Many-Doves?” Lily asked, hardly able to contain her smile.

“I will tell her,” Hannah said. “And we'll all go to the cornfield this afternoon to help.”

Jennet sat up suddenly, clutching a blanket to her breast like a child. She blinked in the morning light and then a smile transformed her face.

“I feared it was all a dream,” she said, leaning over to hug Hannah. “And that I would wake with Ewan snoring next to me.”

She colored even as she said it, a sudden blush that reached even her earlobes. “Och, I'm as wicked a lass as was eer born, Lily. Pay no mind to the things I say. I must say a rosary for Ewan's soul, puir wee mannie as he was.”

“Did you not love your husband then?” Lily asked and she sat up and slung her arms around her knees.

Jennet's mouth puckered. “He was a good man, and harmless enough.” Her Scots was already giving way to English, like sleep that could be rubbed from her eyes. “I wish I could say that I loved him. My father promised me on his deathbed that I would learn to do just that. But I never did.”

“I would never marry on my father's command,” Lily said firmly, though she cast an apologetic glance at her cousin.

“Who will you marry then?” Jennet asked playfully. “You've already said you won't have Simon Ballentyne.”

“When she was little she intended to marry Blue-Jay.” Hannah was hoping that Lily might flush a little at such teasing and take pleasure in it, but instead she went very still.

“Blue-Jay has a woman at Good Pasture.” There was nothing of disappointment in Lily's face or tone. “You know her, sister. Long-Hair's youngest daughter. They are well suited.”

“Are they? Why has no one told me?”

Lily shrugged. “You haven't asked a lot of questions since you came home.”

“Och weel, we'll make up for that now.” Jennet laughed and hugged her knees to her chin. “Does your twin have a woman at Good Pasture as well?”

Lily wrinkled her nose. “Daniel? What sane girl would want him? All he thinks about is going to war.” She flung herself up out of bed, her fingers working to loosen her plait. “Enough talk of marriage. Maybe I'll sail the seas, instead. Like your old friend the Pirate.”

Jennet let out a laugh. “Perhaps we should go looking for Mac Stoker. What an adventure that would be, the three of us. We could call on Giselle and take her along with us. A ship of pirate women, not to be trifled with.”

Hannah threw back the blanket and got out of bed. “There's adventure enough in Paradise today.” She yawned and stretched and then yanked the blankets from her little sister's bed with a grin.

Richard Todd was waiting for Hannah in his study. The draperies had been drawn against the sun and the air was thick with tobacco smoke, brandy fumes, and the sticky sweet smell of laudanum. He looked over Hannah's shoulder to Jennet and Lily and managed an elaborate but not very sincere frown.

“I see you've brought your ladies-in-waiting.”

Ethan sent them an apologetic look from the desk. “He means to say good morning.”

“Do I?” Richard snorted.

“Aren't you coming with us today?” Lily asked Ethan.

“No, he isn't,” answered the doctor for him. “There's work enough right here for him. He prefers a quill to a lancet anyway, don't you, Ethan my dear?”

When they were outdoors Hannah said, “You are fortunate he loves you so, or he would not put up for so long with such treatment.”

Richard Todd sent her a sidelong glance. In the sunlight the yellowish cast to his skin and eyes was more pronounced, the pain lines around his mouth deeply carved. “Put up with me?” He stopped to look around himself at the farmstead and pastures and the forests that he called his own. “When I'm dead he'll have a fortune in land and every penny I've put aside. Not that he wants it. He'll hand it over to you as soon as I'm gone and close himself up with his books.” He cleared his throat noisily. “He has nothing to complain about.”

Hannah gave up the argument for the moment, long enough to stop and talk with Curiosity, who pressed a napkin folded around three hot biscuits into her hand.

Curiosity said, “You going to come back and sit with me when you done with the calls today?”

Richard sent the two of them an impatient look. “If we ever get to the calls in the first place—”

But she cut him off with a hard look and a flick of her fingers. “I wasn't talking to you,” she said firmly. She took Hannah's elbow and steered her away. “Come on back now, you hear me? And bring the girls with you. I got a pie in the oven.”

In the end Hannah and Richard started off alone, as Lily and Jennet had disappeared back into the house. They would catch up, and Hannah had things she wanted to say to Richard out of their hearing.

He used a cane now, and leaned heavily into it with each step. When they had gone a few steps he said, “Spit it out, girl, before it chokes you.”

“I didn't come back here to take over your medical practice.”

“No?” He raised a brow at her. “Why did you come home then?”

Hannah ignored the question. “Curiosity will manage very well, when you decide to step aside.”

Richard glared down at her. “Well, first off, missy, Curiosity isn't so young anymore either, in case you haven't took note. Second of all, there are two patients in this village she can't do much for. They'll be your responsibility, unless you decide to run off. Again.”