Lake in the Clouds (3 page)

“Glad to make your acquaintance.” Nathaniel’s tone was easy, but his expression was equal parts concern and interest.

Hannah said, “We came up the west way, Da. She’s chilled through and I want to get her inside.”

“Better see to it, then.” He was looking hard at Hannah, reading what she had not said from the set of her shoulders and her guarded expression. “We’ll follow directly.”

Selah Voyager drew herself up to her full height. “Mr. Bonner sir, I am grateful for your help.”

Nathaniel managed a smile. “Don’t know that I’ve been any help to you, but you’re welcome on Hidden Wolf.”

Hannah put out her arms, pointing with her chin to Elizabeth’s bundle. When she had taken it and walked on with Selah, Nathaniel pulled his wife closer to examine her face.

“Another stillbirth?”

She nodded, leaning into him.

“I feared as much when you were so long. Kitty’s out of danger?”

“Curiosity thinks she will survive, but the child was too small. We said we would bury her next to the others, and then on the way home—” Her voice went suddenly hoarse.

Nathaniel took her by the arm. “You’re so tired your knees are wobbling. You can tell me what there is to tell sitting down as well as standing.”

The high valley was an oddity, a triangle cut into the side of the mountain at sharp angles. At its far end a waterfall dropped into a narrow gorge; at the widest point two L-shaped cabins stood among blue spruce and birch trees. Three generations of Bonner’s lived in the east cabin, nearest the falls, and in the other, slightly to the west, lived some of Nathaniel Bonner’s Mohawk relatives by his first marriage.

Nathaniel and Elizabeth came out of the woods into the cornfield on the outer apron of the glen. The smell of the earth waking to the spring sun was strong in the air; the stubble of last year’s corn crunched underfoot. At the edge of the field a single stunted pine tree had fought its way up through a spill of boulders. Nathaniel sat there and pulled Elizabeth down to sit in the vee of his legs, the back of her head resting on his shoulder and his arms around her waist. Her hair smelled of lavender and chalk and ink, of the tallow candles that had burned all night in a birthing room crowded and tense enough to make her sweat. That was one story she did not have to tell: he had heard others like it too often.

The sound of the waterfall and the children’s voices echoed against the cliffs, coming to them in fits and starts: Lily and Kateri scolding, and the boys’ laughter in response. Elizabeth was content to be quiet and let him talk, so he told her what had passed while she was in the village, about Hawkeye and Runs-from-Bears going out to walk the trap lines and the fox Blue-Jay killed with his sling shot when it came after the hens. Matilda Kaes had stopped by with five yards of linen, in lieu of cash payment for her grandson’s tuition at Elizabeth’s school, and Daniel and Blue-Jay had brought a world of trouble upon themselves by eating a pan of stolen cornbread soaked with maple syrup from the last tapping. Nathaniel wondered to himself why, if the boys had made up their minds to eat themselves sick, they hadn’t let their sisters in on it, an oversight which had sent Lily and Kateri straight to Many-Doves to report the larceny.

Elizabeth laughed a little at that picture.

Nathaniel said, “You make a man work mighty hard for a smile, Boots.”

She twisted in his arms so that he could see that she was capable of smiling, or trying to. They had lost many things in the last year that could not be replaced, and Elizabeth’s easy smile
was not the least of them. Her sorrow was as clear as the gray of her eyes.

In August a putrid sore throat had come down on the village out of nowhere. Richard Todd and Curiosity had known straight off what they were dealing with, but it took some weeks before the rest of them came to understand. Even after Hannah read them an extract from one of her books, there was no way to really take in the nature of the beast she called
malignant quinsy
—not until he saw it in the throat of his youngest son.

Hannah made him look, and to this day he wished he had refused. He would no more be able to forget the membrane growing in the soft tissues of the throat than he could forget the boy it had choked to death. Nathaniel thought of the disease as a living thing, a stranger come among them to steal, quick and cruel and unstoppable.

When it was done, not one family had escaped. At Lake in the Clouds they had buried two of their own: Hannah’s grandmother Falling-Day, and cradled against her chest for safekeeping, Robbie Bonner, just two years old. Nathaniel still expected to hear the boy’s voice whenever he opened his front door.

She said, “Kitty’s little girl never even took a breath, Nathaniel. At least we had Robbie for a short while.”

“Too short,” he said, sounding angry, because he was and always would be. Angry at himself, for letting the boy slip away. The truth was, Nathaniel could not make Elizabeth put down her grief any more than he could put aside his own.

Down in the village the church bell began to toll. Elizabeth started, and sat up straight.

Nathaniel said, “Of all the things that Lucy Kuick brought to Paradise when she bought the mill from John Glove, that damn bell is by far the most aggravating.”

“It was Mr. Gathercole who brought the bell,” Elizabeth reminded him, yawning.

“And who sent for Gathercole?”

“Mrs. Kuick, yes. I see your point. But it was time, Nathaniel. It is a full two years since Mr. Witherspoon moved to Boston, and people are glad to have a minister.”

“Not me. Not one with a bell, anyway.”

That got a smile, at least. She ran a hand over his cheek. “Are you going to complain about this every Sunday for the rest of your life?”

“If that bell is all there is to worry about then I’m a fortunate man, Boots. Are you going to tell me about that young woman, or not?”

She inhaled sharply and let it go again, resigned. “She’s a runaway, I think.”

“I figured that much just by looking at her,” Nathaniel said. “What else do you know?”

Elizabeth recited the story in her calmest voice, and only the way she worked the fabric of her skirt between her fingers gave away her concern.

“She has a bijou.”

“A bijou?”

She nodded. “An African bijou, like the one Joe had when we found him in the bush.”

“Not the same one.”

“No, but it is similar in design. She showed it as if she thought we’d recognize it. I believe Almanzo must use it as a password of sorts, to let Curiosity know that the person before her was sent by him.”

Nathaniel rubbed a hand over his face, trying to order these ideas in his head. “You’re guessing that they’ve been running escaped slaves up here for a while, but that don’t make much sense, Boots. You know as well as I do that a stranger can’t keep hid in Paradise, especially not one with black skin. You think Curiosity’s putting them up at the old homestead?”

“That’s not very likely,” she conceded. Her father’s home stood empty since his death, but it was far from abandoned. “People come and go there so often, I can hardly imagine it would be a suitable safe haven.”

“Something’s going on, that’s for certain. I just hope Galileo and Curiosity ain’t got mixed up with escaped slaves.”

“Nathaniel—” she said tersely, but he squeezed her shoulder hard to stop what was coming.

“You don’t need to lecture me about slavery. I don’t like it any more than you do, and you know that well enough. But this might mean a lot of trouble coming our way. What do you think Curiosity was going to do with that girl after she met her at the old homestead?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said shortly. “But Hannah does.”

“By Christ, I hope you’re wrong,” Nathaniel said, pulling
her closer to him, feeling her weariness and agitation at odds with one another. “But we better go find out.”

Wrapped in her muslin shroud, Kitty Todd’s stillborn daughter was so small that Hannah could hold her in one palm and feel the shape of her skull, the curve of her spine, the legs tucked up against the chest no wider than a man’s thumb.

Kitty had rallied enough just before dawn to deliver her, feet first, into Curiosity’s strong hands. The child, far too early and small even for that, could not be persuaded to take a single breath: gone before her mother ever held her, or saw the color of her eyes.

Kitty would not be strong enough to come up the mountain for the burial, but others might. If Richard Todd got home in time—if he didn’t drink himself into a stupor out of anger and grief—he would bring Ethan to watch while his half sister was laid to rest tucked between the graves of Hannah’s grandmothers: Cora Bonner, who had come from Scotland to make a life for herself on the New-York frontier, and Falling-Day, once clan mother of the Wolf longhouse at Trees-Standing-in-Water. No doubt someone would read something from the bible over his daughter’s grave, but for now she was Hannah’s responsibility.

She laid the child into a basket and covered her with a blanket, singing a Kahnyen’kehàka death song under her breath. One part of her, the part that was endlessly curious about O’seronni science and medicine, asked why she was taking the time to sing to a dead child when a sick woman waited. The other part of her, far more patient, took comfort in sending the little girl on to the next world with that simple melody in her ear.

When she returned to Selah Voyager, she found that the journey had taken a heavy toll, filled her lungs so that they rattled with every breath. She was quiet while Hannah examined her, out of fear or weariness or relief or all three. Or maybe she had no questions, maybe she preferred to know nothing of Paradise, thinking it just another stop on the journey. Headed for a safer place, and that not far off now. Hannah could offer that comfort, tell her how close she was, but she hesitated to share knowledge she was not supposed to have at all.

For her part, Hannah was curious. She wanted to ask about the city, how she had met Manny Freeman, what kind of life
she had left behind, if she had walked the whole way, and how much she knew about the place where she was going. But she could wait; she would put aside her questions while she attended to her patient’s needs. Patience was the hardest lesson, but she had had good teachers in her grandmothers.

On both sides Hannah was descended from healers. It was what she was born to, the only thing that really interested her. She had had good training from the women around her. One white grandmother, one Indian, and Curiosity Freeman. O’seronni medicine and Kahnyen’kehàka, each with strengths and weaknesses; then Elizabeth came to Paradise and brought Cowper’s
The Anatomy of Human Bodies with Figures Drawn After Life
and Thacher’s
American New Dispensatory,
books that raised more questions than they answered. Finally she had studied for a few months with Hakim Ibrahim, a ship’s surgeon who had showed her another kind of truth in the small oval lens of a microscope and more books, these ones ancient, with sinuous, musical names: Ibn Sina’s
Al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb.

All of her teachers hovered near while Hannah treated Selah, taking note of her breathing and the smell of her sweat, how dull and dry her tongue and the whites of her eyes. She listened for a long time with her ear against the smooth brown back, and did not like what she heard. In spite of the liquid in her lungs—or maybe because of it—she was in need of water above all other things, or the fever would overtake her and pull her out of this world and into the next one.

Selah submitted to Hannah’s treatment without question. She murmured thanks for the basin of hot water and soap, accepting dry clothes and a blanket with a small smile. She drank the bowl of broth that was put into her hands and swallowed Hannah’s fever tea; it was powerfully bitter, but she made no complaint.

Her eyes moved everywhere over the edge of the tin cup, from the shadows at the far end of the common room to the worktable near the door, crowded with bullet molds, a dismantled rifle, traps in various stages of repair. Under the open window, the ink pot on Elizabeth’s desk glinted indigo in the sun. Neat piles of paper were held down with rocks, and within reach of her chair were both a crowded bookcase and a churn. Braids of onion, corn, and squash hung from the rafters along with bundles of herbs and roots: just one part of
Hannah’s apothecary, and as important to her family’s well-being as the tending of the cornfield.

But it was the furs that seemed to interest Selah Voyager most. Some pelts still hung on the walls in stretchers, but most had been tied into bundles and piled along the wall, away from the hearth. The whole winter’s work—beaver, fox, fisher, marten, muskrat—waiting to be loaded into the canoes and taken to Albany. To this young woman who was raised to believe she would never have the right to claim anything as her own—not the clothes on her back nor the child she carried—it must look like a treasure beyond reckoning.

Hannah picked up a fisher pelt and put it in her lap.

“Makes a good pillow,” she said. “Let me show you where you can sleep.”

Selah stroked the fur like a living thing in need of comfort, her fingers long and thin and dusty black against the rich deep brown pelt. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out.