Lake in the Clouds (23 page)

He stepped back, but his eyes were fixed on the white flesh, the dark of her nipples. “No,” he said. “No.”

She reached out and touched him, ran a finger down the front of his breeches as she had seen Isaiah Kuick do not half an hour ago. He jerked, clasped her hand to stop it, held it still. Sucked in breath between teeth clenched hard.

“But think, Liam.” His gaze was fixed on her breasts, and he still held her hand against him. She could feel his flesh stirring, his breath on her skin. “Nobody will ever know.”

She freed herself, turned her back to him as she raised her skirts high. “You don’t have to look at my face,” she said, feeling the chill air on her bare flesh. “You don’t have to look at me at all. You can pretend I’m … somebody else.”

He was silent as she went down on all fours with her skirts rucked up around her waist, her knees spread to expose her sex, her forehead bedded on her crossed arms. Then she heard him groan and he was behind her, loosening his breeches. When he knelt between her legs she felt him shaking, felt the heat of his damp flesh, the soft and hard of him. But he hesitated and she held her breath, understanding somehow that at this moment the wrong word would ruin everything.

He said, “I cain’t marry you if you get with child.”

“Why, that’s all right,” said Jemima, rocking her hips backward, brushing against him and feeling him jerk. “That don’t matter none, Liam. I’m going to marry Isaiah Kuick, anyway.”

He cursed and came to her, leaning forward to grasp a breast in one hand while he supported himself with the other, shoving and prodding to part reluctant flesh, pushing hard and harder still while Jemima bit her forearm to keep from crying out. With a curse he let go of her breast to grasp her buttocks, angling her hips up and spreading her flesh with his fingers to ease his way. Now when he thrust, once and then again, she could not hold back her scream; one last thrust and with that he tore her flesh and seated himself deep inside her.

“Damn you,” he groaned. “Damn you to hell.”

In spite of the pain she smiled to herself. Wiggled and clenched at him with every muscle until he groaned again and gave in to it. She welcomed the invasion and the burn and the pull and push, his strong hands, his roughness, his teeth pressing into the tender flesh of her neck as he worked his hips, thrusting as if he wanted to climb inside of her. Jemima clenched her teeth against the roaring pain and rocked her hips to meet him, heard him grunt in surprise and pleasure and then the trembling overtook him and he emptied himself inside her in hard little jerks.

He was gasping and muttering to himself,
damn you damn you damn you.
But he was still hard, his flesh trembling wet.

Jemima wiggled and flipped over on her back. She lifted her hips and wound her legs around his waist to pull him back inside her. She would keep him on top of her all night, use her
hands and her mouth if she had to, put what she had learned from the sodomites to good use. Make him forget Hannah Bonner and the nameless wife, milk him like a cow, make him spill his seed until he was dry.

After tonight he would never forget her, would never dare ignore her again. When Liam Kirby walked past her he would remember this, remember the way they had been joined in sweat and blood and seed and sin.

One way or another she would marry the widow’s only son, but it would be easier if she was with child. She tried to count the days in her head but the heavy heat of Liam rutting inside her got in the way; he pushed her legs apart roughly and then, still not satisfied, he put a hand under her right knee and lifted it, pressed it to her shoulder so that she was splayed open to him. With the next thrust he touched a spot so deep inside her she must cry out again, in pain and surprise and approval. He covered her, pressed her into the hay with his weight, threatened to split her in half, and she gloried in it; put her hands on his buttocks and pressed him home.

If he didn’t get a bastard on her this time, she would seek him out again, and how could he refuse? Then Isaiah would claim what Liam had put inside her as his own, or he would pay the consequences.

By the time Jemima made her way home the moon had set and a frost had come down, so that she needed to take the handrail on the bridge or risk falling. She was limping a little, her thighs raw and bruised and sticky, and deep inside a burning itch. Her shoulders and breasts and belly stung where he had marked her with his teeth and the scrape of his beard: she had driven him hard, and he had paid in kind. Every muscle hurt, but for once in her life Jemima Southern was satisfied. She had come to the wedding party to get the best of one of them, Liam Kirby or Isaiah Kuick, and now she had them both. Them, and Hannah Bonner too.

Jemima was thinking about how to sneak into the house so that no one would hear her when she remembered that it didn’t matter. She could do as she pleased; she would be the mistress soon enough.

It wasn’t until she had dropped her clothes and crawled naked and stinking of barn and man into her bed that two
things occurred to her. The first, the most surprising thing, was that she liked the act of fornication. She liked everything about it, but most of all she liked the power it gave her, the way it turned a man twice her size into a child. She liked the act, but she would have to do without it because she could make Isaiah Kuick marry her, but he would never come to her bed. The kind of power she had over him had nothing to do with what was between her legs.

The second thought was not so much of a surprise but it rankled. She had rutted all night with a man who had never called her by name. He had used every opening she offered him and turned his face away when she tried to kiss him. When he emptied himself into her, once, twice, three times, there was nothing in his face of joy or even release, nothing beyond a wordless fury and loathing, for himself, for her.

Pretend I’m someone else,
she had told him, but he couldn’t forget who she was. Who she wasn’t.

For a moment Jemima lay very still, and then she rolled over onto her side, pulled her knees up to her chin to hold all she needed of Liam Kirby deep inside her, and went to sleep.

In all the rushed preparation for the journey into the endless forests, Elizabeth had never let herself think too hard about what it would mean to walk away from her children and not know when she would see them again. In the course of comforting Lily and Daniel she had managed somehow to convince herself that this journey would require no more than a fortnight. A fortnight, she had explained more than once, would go by very quickly; such a short separation was neither sufficient nor rational grounds for despair.

For the first half-day the exhilaration carried her along. They walked in single file, following Nathaniel on a Kahnyen’kehàka path that he seemed to know very well, in spite of the fact that for very long periods of time Elizabeth could not make it out at all. And yet she was surprised at how easily it all came back to her, the rhythm of this kind of walking, unrestricted by skirts and the fuss of her everyday clothing. For the first time in a very long time she wore a Kahnyen’kehàka overdress and leggings. She had put her hair in simple plaits, and in spite of the pack she carried she felt completely unencumbered.

Mid-April was a good time in this part of the endless forests, most of the spring mud gone and the true heat of summer still a month or more in the future. It was true that the weather was unpredictable. Patches of snow sometimes many inches deep were easy to find, but night frosts were a small price to pay for
freedom from the true scourge of the forests. Elizabeth preferred walking cold to the blackfly that came in clouds to invade ears and nose, cuffs and collars, and leave hundreds of painful welts behind. There was nothing to do about the black-fly beyond bear grease and pennyroyal ointment, cures almost as bad as the wrong they were meant to counter.

But the cold could be conquered. Each of them wore winter moccasins lined with fur and laced all the way up the lower leg. Across their packs they had strapped capes lined with marten and oiled buckskins.

Elizabeth had left her school and her students behind, but the habit of teaching she could not put down. She wanted to point things out to Selah, things that she could not know but must learn if she was to spend a season in the bush. The hardwood canopy had just begun to fill in with touches of the palest green; in a few weeks the trees would be in full leaf, and the forest would be lost in cool shadow. Much of what they could see now would be hidden.

Firebirds lined the branches of a white ash like a row of candle flames; overhead a logcock drummed for a meal in the trunk of a dead oak. Moles and mice were busy in drifts of decomposing leaves, but they saw little other wildlife, in part because the three of them—or two of the three of them, Elizabeth corrected herself—were not silent enough; in part because many of them were just rousing themselves out of the stupor of winter.

This bit of forest she knew quite well; it was close enough to home to be within the range of Hannah’s constant search for medicinal plants, and Elizabeth liked to go with her whenever she could spare the time. On those outings she had learned most of what she knew of the forest—she could name the trees and most of the plants and their uses—but it was also a rare opportunity to talk to her stepdaughter without interruption. Elizabeth had come to depend on Hannah not only for her help with the children and the house, but also for her conversation, much in the same way she looked to Curiosity and Many-Doves.

They had parted this morning in great haste, even before first light. Hannah had been on her way down the mountain to start the long journey to the city, nervous and ill at ease. There had been no opportunity to talk to her alone about
what had happened when she left the kitchen with Liam beyond the simple facts that needed to be shared.

And still it was very clear that something had happened between them, something had been said or done that had marked Hannah. Elizabeth had the idea that if she should come face-to-face with Liam Kirby today she would see that same thing in his face. Exactly what it meant, Elizabeth could only guess, and none of the rational explanations provided any comfort at all.

By mid-morning they were out of territory she recognized, passing into a half-mile-long stretch of sugar maple, moccasins sinking deep into moldering leaves covered with winged seed keys that crunched underfoot. With every breeze more seed keys twirled down from the maples to bury themselves in the forest floor. Where an old tree had fallen and rotted, seedlings spread out in round islands, the tallest in the middle and the shortest around the edges, like an odd peaked cap.

Elizabeth took real joy in the spring forest, but she must keep all of it to herself, because it was dangerous to talk on the trail. Voices carried far in the woods and it could be that Liam Kirby or Ambrose Dye had already started out after them. Hannah’s news about the link between Dye and Selah had come as a shock, but there was nothing to be done about it except press on. At the last minute Nathaniel had slung an extra horn of powder around his neck and taken the sack of bullets that Hawkeye pressed on him.

He had every weapon he owned on his person, his rifle slung across his back, a knife at his side, his tomahawk tucked under his belt to lie flat against his back. To these he added a knowledge of the bush that neither Liam Kirby nor Ambrose Dye nor any other blackbirder could match. The journey would be long and bring its own dangers, but Selah Voyager was by far safer walking behind Nathaniel Bonner than she had been in Paradise.

And if the story Liam Kirby had told Hannah was true, Selah Voyager would defend herself and her child, if that should be necessary. Not that Elizabeth could ask. A man who killed to defend himself and his family might be eager to tell the tale, but women were different. A woman who killed in self-defense or anger did not share her story lightly. This Elizabeth knew from experience.

They paused at midday to eat, and because Selah Voyager’s condition required it. Not that she had asked, or even seemed to need to rest. The younger woman walked hard, spoke seldom, and never complained. Elizabeth imagined that she was as eager to get to the relative safety of Red Rock as they were eager to see her settled, most preferably before she brought her child into the world.

Now she squatted easily with the great thrust of her belly serving as resting place for a piece of cornbread while she finished her portion of dried venison. She ate quickly and neatly, concentrating on that task and no other.

Then the surface of her belly contorted and the bread leapt away like a live thing, as if her child had known exactly what it was, and had rejected such a meal. It was a comical sight, and they all laughed out loud. At that moment Elizabeth remembered with complete clarity what it felt like to be so full with child toward the end of her pregnancies, how the twins and then Robbie had governed her every movement, every waking and sleeping moment, every thought.