Lake in the Clouds (45 page)

She gave him a dry smile. “I am happy to compromise. Kitty, I will come home at midday tomorrow and give the party my full attention if you will promise to rest the half day beforehand, and the whole day after.”

Kitty hesitated. “Will you let me choose your dress for the party?”

Hannah thought of the three gowns she had brought with her, any of which would suit. There was little havoc even Kitty could manage with such limited resources. She nodded.

After a week Hannah’s daily routine was well established; she arrived at the Almshouse at seven, worked with Dr. Scofield
or Dr. Savard for most of the morning in the Kine-Pox Institution office and then in the wards. If she was asked, she assisted in the apothecary until it was time to accompany Dr. Simon to the New-York Hospital to see how his other patients were progressing. Every day Mrs. Douglas gave her bread, cheese, and cold meat tied up in a napkin, and every day Hannah forgot about it until Cicero came to get her so that she could join the Spencers for dinner at four.

The doctor kept her so busy that there was little time to spend with Ethan, and even less to worry, not even about Manny. There was no time for homesickness either, although she sometimes wondered whether her father and Elizabeth had returned yet from Red Rock and if there might soon be a letter with news from home. Certainly her days were too busy to spend any thought on Liam Kirby, his whereabouts, his wife, or his mother-in-law.

No matter how firmly she put these things from her in the daylight hours, in the night she often woke from dreams that faded away almost immediately, leaving behind vague images of Virginia Bly standing at the doorway of the Bull’s Head.

“Will it be much longer, miss?”

Hannah realized that the young man standing in the doorway of the pharmacy had been waiting while she daydreamed over the mortar and pestle. She focused her attention on the task at hand. By the time she had sent him on his way with ointment for his mother’s shingles, it was almost noon and time to go. The people who were still waiting outside the pharmacy door she must leave to Mr. Jonas, the Almshouse apothecary, who would dose children for worms and dispense headache tisanes for the rest of the day with short temper but great efficiency.

Dr. Savard came in just when Hannah was beginning to worry that Mr. Jonas had forgotten her.

“Are you here to take over?”

“Most certainly not. Mrs. Sloo sent me to find you.” He scratched in a distracted way at the bristle on his chin. “She’s asking you to come by and lend a hand with a new inmate. Damn me if that ropemaker with the broken foot hasn’t given me lice.”

Dr. Savard’s easy profanity had increased every day that Hannah had known him. Whether this was a sign of his approval
and a compliment, or an indication that he didn’t take her seriously, she had not yet decided.

“Mrs. Sloo asked for my help?” She hung the leather apothecary apron on its hook and smoothed her skirt. “I am surprised. I haven’t seen her since my first day here.”

“She’s seen you, of that you can be sure. There’s an Indian come begging at the door, doesn’t understand English.”

He was examining the creature he had drawn from his beard with one corner of his mouth turned down in resigned disgust.

“Mrs. Douglas checks my head every evening and goes through it with a fine steel comb. Perhaps that would help.”

The doctor squinted at her, his brows drawn together. “But of course, what a good idea. I’ll have my housekeeper tell the butler to send my manservant out to buy a steel comb.”

An early lesson Hannah had learned was never to argue with Dr. Savard when he turned to sarcasm. She picked up her bag.

“I’ll stop to see Mrs. Sloo on my way out.”

He drew up to his full and considerable height. “On your way out? Feeling the need for a stroll along the promenade? Or perhaps you’ve an important meeting with the mayor?” He crossed his arms and lowered his chin. Like a bull pawing at the ground, Hannah thought, a bad-tempered bull looking for somebody to charge. Any other time she might have risen to the challenge as her arguments with Dr. Savard tended to be instructive, but today there was no time.

“Dinner with some friends of my cousin’s,” said Hannah. “I promised to attend.”

“Let me guess, the mayor and the head of the city council.”

“No,” Hannah said. “But I believe the mayor’s nephew will be there.”

“Ah, dining with Senator Clinton, is it? Fine company for a doctor’s assistant from the backwoods.”

Hannah had been goaded by men with far sharper tongues than Dr. Savard; someday, she promised herself, she would tell him so. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning at seven.”

“That’s all right then,” he said, returning to the finger-combing of his beard stubble. “I wouldn’t want to keep such riches all to myself.”

“I can’t decide if she’s deaf and dumb or if she never learned a civilized tongue.” Mrs. Sloo jerked her head over her shoulder toward a shape huddled in a corner of the waiting room. “But the child is dead a day at least. Maybe you can get it away from her. Tell her we’ll give it a decent Christian burial and that we’ll feed her before she goes back to wherever she came from.”

Mrs. Sloo folded her hands in front of herself and gave Hannah her sternest look. “She can’t stay here, tell her that. There might be a bed in the bridewell for her tonight if they aren’t too crowded. And you’ll want to be quick about it; Mr. Spencer’s carriage is waiting for you out on the street.”

She might have been fifteen or thirty or a hundred. A young-old-ageless woman not quite alive and nowhere near dead; she looked at Hannah with eyes dark as blood and hard as bone, and the arms around the silent bundle in her arms tightened.

“Food.” The word whispered in English, like a secret between friends, a password.

“The only word she knows, or admits to.” Mrs. Sloo’s toe tapped impatiently.

Hannah ignored her to focus on the woman. She was wrapped in a torn blanket coat, and her head wobbled slightly, as if her neck could not quite bear the burden. Hannah thought of the body that had once been Mr. Johns on the dissection table, his muscular throat laid open to the knife, the stark white of tendon, the dark blue of stilled blood, the red muscle, yellow fat, the
color
of him.

“Let me see the child.” Hannah whispered too, chilled by the disapproval that radiated from Mrs. Sloo.

The woman looked at her blankly, but the flexing in her arms meant something.

Hannah touched her own chest and named herself formally, in her own language.
I am Walks-Ahead, daughter of Sings-from-Books of the Kahnyen’kehàka. We are the People of the Longhouse, Keepers of the Eastern Door, the Mohawk of the Six Nations of the Hodenosaunee People.

The woman blinked at Hannah as if she twittered rather than spoke. She tried again in her grandfather’s language, naming him and his father and grandfathers of the Mahican.

Nothing.

“Maybe she’s from one of them tribes to the south,” said Mrs. Sloo behind her, as if she might have said
a different breed of dog.
“Try one of those.”

In her amazement Hannah turned to look up at the little woman, mounds of flesh topped by a perfectly round head, the row of curls, the tiny mouth pursed in distaste.

“What tribes do you mean?”

The older woman flapped her little hands in front of herself. “What do I know? Gibberish is gibberish. Never mind, I’ll get Moroney to help. Should have done that to start with.”

Agnes Moroney, with hands like warped washboards, a woman with the strength and the understanding of a man; Hannah had seen her toss a drunken and contentious tanner into the street with a flick of her wrists.

“No,” Hannah said, turning her back. “Leave her to me. This is a medical matter.”

A huffing came from behind her, the sound of offense taken and stored carefully away, and still Hannah waited until Mrs. Sloo was gone. There would be a day of reckoning, oh yes, but she could not worry about that now.

“Food,” said the woman with the dead baby, still whispering.

“Yes,” Hannah said. “Come with me, I will give you food. Away from here, in a safe place.”

The dark eyes blinked again. After a long moment punctuated only by the wailing of a hungry child on the other side of the wall, the woman nodded.

She would give them no name, not even after she had eaten her fill at the kitchen table. Mrs. Douglas was busy with preparations for the dinner party, and so Hannah served her, cornbread spread with beef fat, venison pie, spring onions, pickled cabbage, currant tart. Whatever she put on the table, the woman took to herself quickly and neatly, stopping now and then to suck her fingers clean and wipe them on her blanket coat.

Peter observed this ritual with rounded eyes but kept his silence, in part because Ethan seemed to find nothing unusual about the visitor’s table manners and in part because Mrs. Douglas sent him a series of very pointed looks to remind him how any guest in the Spencer house must be treated. Hannah knew that if she gave him any encouragement he would ask
questions, and so she said nothing at all and simply watched the visitor.

For her part the woman took no note of the boys or the cooks or the coming and going of tradesmen or of anything but the food before her and Hannah, who sat across from her at the table. She ate with one hand because she still held her child against her chest under the blanket.

When she was finished she rose slowly and pushed the plate a little away from herself. There were some crumbs at the corner of her mouth, and a trembling there that touched Hannah more than anything she could have said.

“There is a bed for you here, and fresh clothes. If you want them.”

The woman gave her no answer, but when Hannah left the room, she followed.

At three, when the stranger was soundly asleep with her child in her arms, Hannah realized two things: she had broken the promises she made yesterday evening to Kitty, and she had an hour to get ready for the dinner party. She was standing in the hall outside her bedroom thinking through these things and wondering where to start trying to make amends when Amanda appeared. She was wearing an evening gown that shimmered deep indigo and her expression was distracted, but she stopped in front of Hannah and looked at the closed door.

“How is she?”

Hannah lifted a shoulder and spread out a hand in a question of her own. “She’s asleep, finally.”

“She hasn’t—”

“No, not yet.”

Amanda closed her eyes briefly and then opened them again.

“I’ll send Suzannah in to sit with her. You must come now, Kitty is waiting for you in her room.”

For once Hannah was unable to hide her exasperation. “I suppose I must listen to yet another lecture about the importance of millinery.”

Amanda straightened suddenly, and new color came into her face along with a flicker of something severe in her eyes. For the first time Hannah saw a little of her mother in her, Aunt Merriweather’s sharp eye and sharper temper.

“Hannah Bonner,” Amanda said. “That is most unkind of you. It is true that Kitty can be very trying at times, and I understand that her silliness—I suppose that is the only word—about shopping and parties is irritating to you. But you know her too well to think so poorly of her, Hannah. Who understands better than Kitty what that woman is suffering? Do you think she would put a visit to the shops above that? Kitty spent an hour this afternoon cutting cloth and sewing a shroud for that child.”

Hannah had drawn back in surprise and alarm. “I didn’t mean—”

“You did mean.” Amanda’s chin trembled, and her usual soft expression came over her features. “You have been working very hard and this must affect you very deeply—” She looked at the closed door again, lost in her own thoughts.

“It was very kind of Kitty to make a shroud.”

Amanda nodded. “It helps her to keep busy, I think. She spends so much time thinking about the little girl she lost, you know. Now will you do something kind for her?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “Of course.”

Amanda had a sweet smile, and it brought Hannah great relief. “Go to her then, she’s waiting, and let her dress you. It will give her a great deal of joy. I will follow as soon as I’ve spoken to Mrs. Douglas about our visitor.”

“Miss Whitmore has made some adjustments in the shoulders and the bodice based on your own clothing,” said Kitty, one knuckle pressed against her chin as she studied the gown that had been spread across her bed. “I think this will serve very well. Hannah, you must put it on right away so that she can make sure of the fit.”

Hannah looked from Kitty to Amanda and to the seamstress, who was busy rummaging through her workbox, her mouth bristling with pins.

“I can’t wear my own green silk?” She tried to say this as gently as possible, but Kitty’s chin came up as if she had been challenged to a duel.

“You promised that you would let me choose your gown.”

“I did, but—”

“And I chose this one. This is too fine a party for you to wear Miss Somerville’s cast-off green silk. The color never
suited your complexion anyway.” She looked down at the heap of pale silk in shades of ivory and cream and pale yellow with as much affection and satisfaction as she looked at her son. “It will give me great pleasure to see you in this.”