Lake in the Clouds (6 page)

Galileo grunted. “She ain’t safe yet. At least we know now what brought Liam back to Paradise.” And to Nathaniel and Hawkeye: “Never meant to get you folks mixed up in this.”

Curiosity frowned. “They ain’t mixed up in it. Joshua will see the girl on her way tonight, and that’ll be all the Hidden Wolf folks ever saw or heard of her.”

Hawkeye cleared his throat. “That’s just about what I figured you’d say. But you ain’t heard all of it. Hannah says Miss Selah’s got a fever in her lungs.”

Curiosity and Galileo exchanged looks, and then Curiosity
straightened her shoulders and mounted her horse as nimbly as a twenty-year-old.

“It will set folks to talking if I go straight up the mountain, and that’s the last thing we need right now. Let’s hope young Liam don’t follow her trail to Lake in the Clouds. As soon as Mariah has delivered her child and I’ve checked on Kitty, I’ll be by.”

Galileo handed her the reins and patted her knee thoughtfully. “You ain’t had a full night’s sleep in two days, wife.”

She smiled down at him, a fierce kind of smile. “I’ll get there as soon as I may. In the meantime you all keep an eye on Liam Kirby until I have a chance to talk to the boy and set him straight.”

Hannah Bonner’s Day Book

A
PRIL
12, 1802. E
VENING
.

Warm and clear. First bees among the nimble weed. Black phoebes are come early this year.

Yesterday evening Elizabeth and I were called to Kitty Todd in travail and this morning at 4 of the clock she was delivered of a stillborn daughter. The afterbirth came cleanly. Curiosity’s good ointment and a bath of tansy, mugwort, chamomile, and hyssop gave the poor mother some relief.

Last night my aunt Many-Doves dreamed of bears in the strawberry fields.

Miss Selah Voyager has come to stay and brought a fever with her. A quickened pulse and rattling low in both lungs. She coughs but brings forth nothing. Her urine cloudy. Gave her an infusion of willow bark and meadowsweet for fever and an onion-and-camphor poultice to loosen the corruption in her chest. Dressed a wound on her leg with slippery elm. Her child moves cleverly but shows no signs of being ready to come into the world. I believe she will recover, if I can keep her quiet long enough and if the bounty hunters she fears can be kept at bay.

Lily Bonner’s father and grandfather went down to the village without her and so she devised a plan: this afternoon while all the women were wound up in the new troubles and the boys were busy trying to distract cousin Ethan from his sorrow, she would slip away to the lake and reappear in the evening with enough smelt to feed everybody. A supper of smelt fried in cornmeal would please her mother, impress her father, and best of all, irritate her brother.

It did not take long to find a piece of fishing net the right size, but Lily had to climb up on a barrel to get the canvas bucket down from its hook on the barn wall. She was finely built and small for her age—shorter even than her cousin Kateri who was a year younger. But she was quick and she managed on her own.

If it weren’t for the fact that Hannah was sitting on the porch with her daybook in her lap, Lily would have slipped away right then.

But her sister had that look that came over her when somebody was sicker than she thought they ought to be, as if it were an insult to her personally. It was a look she had a lot, even when she meant to smile, as she did now.

“Little sister, are you going to tote that bucket all by yourself once it’s full?”

Hannah’s voice carried like the breeze off the waterfalls, and sent a shiver right up Lily’s back. It made her jump to have
her mind read so easily. Sometimes it felt as if her forehead were made of window glass and every thought there was as plain as the words on a page.

She dragged the bucket over to the porch, and sat down on the step. “I’m strong as any boy.”

“Stronger,” said Hannah.

Lily sniffed. “The smelt are running, and everybody but me’s too busy to notice.”

“Where are the boys?”

“They went with Ethan to the fort.”

“Hmmm.” Hannah fanned herself with the blotter. “Maybe Grandfather will go with you to the lake when he comes back from the village.” Her sister was reading her mind again, but this time Lily did not mind so much.

She shifted so she could see into the daybook resting across her sister’s knees. Hannah often drew pictures to go along with her notes, but this page was filled only with her neat handwriting. Lily studied the page for a moment.

“Is that her name, Selah Voyager?”

Hannah nodded. “It’s the name she has claimed for herself.”

“Never heard that name before, Selah. Is it African?”

“I don’t know. You can ask her when she’s feeling better.”

“Is she going to die?”

“Someday,” said Hannah. “But not today, or tomorrow either. Why don’t you go over to Many-Doves and see if she’s got any soup left over for me? I haven’t eaten since this morning.”

Lily was already at her aunt’s door before she realized how gently her sister had weaned her away from her plans. She might have marched right back to tell her so, but Kateri was calling out to her and Lily could not resist being drawn into the half-circle of women around the hearth. Here was something more tempting than fishing: her mother sitting down and her lap empty, her knitting put aside for the moment. Lily stepped over Kateri to get to her, pausing to examine the face of Many-Doves’ youngest son, asleep in the cradleboard on her back. Pines-Rustling was there too, piecing new leggings for Runs-from-Bears while she kept an eye on Kateri, who hadn’t yet finished her part of grinding the day’s corn.
Pines-Rustling was a cousin to Many-Doves; she had come to visit three years ago, and just recently Lily realized that she never intended to go away. This suited her very well;

Pines-Rustling was generous with her many stories of the Kahnyen’kehàka at Good Pasture, and she had made Lily a pair of moccasins with the most beautiful quillwork. She admired them now as she climbed up into her mother’s lap.

“I was wondering about you,” said Elizabeth. She spoke Kahnyen’kehàka, except it came out with a strange rhythm and turned-around sentences, just the same way that Pines-Rustling spoke English. Only the children were truly comfortable in both languages, but in this cabin everyone spoke Mohawk. Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears had chosen to raise their family away from the Kahnyen’kehàka longhouses where they had grown up, but Many-Doves only let as much of the O’seronni world in as she found necessary.

Lily rubbed her face against her mother’s shoulder, wiggling a little to make herself a more comfortable spot. “Sister sent me, she’s hungry for soup.”

Many-Doves smiled without looking up from her sewing. “The visitor must be out of danger if Walks-Ahead has time to take note of her own stomach.”

Elizabeth tucked a stray curl back into her daughter’s plait. “It is very good of you to look after your sister.”

Lily wiggled like a puppy, pleased with this picture of herself as Hannah’s caretaker. She had always been a serious child, self-contained and earnest even in her play, but since Robbie’s death she had turned even more inward. She was often at odds with the other children, arguing with her twin and her cousins and then going off to play by herself. Daniel mourned Robbie too, but still he rose every morning to fling himself out into the world. Since their youngest had gone from them, Lily was truly content only here on the mountain, with her family around her.

Too much like me.
Elizabeth set her daughter on her feet and pushed herself up. “Let us take your sister her soup then.”

As soon as they were out of the door, Lily said in English, “What’s a bounty hunter?”

Elizabeth stopped. “Where did you hear that word?”

“Hannah wrote it in her daybook. That Selah Voyager fears bounty hunters.”

Her first impulse was to scold Lily for reading her sister’s daybook, but this was an old battle and one Elizabeth feared she would lose in the end. Lily intensely disliked sitting in the
classroom, but she would read whatever came her way, regardless of warnings and repercussions.

“A bounty hunter is a man who hunts down criminals or escaped prisoners or slaves and returns them for a cash reward.”

The small mouth pursed thoughtfully. “Did a bounty hunter come after Curiosity and Galileo, or Joshua Hench, or Daisy?”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “Curiosity and Galileo and Joshua did not run away from their owners. Each of them was bought out of slavery, and Daisy was born in freedom. They have manumission papers, you see, a legal document that declares the person in question is free.”

The small oval face went very still for a moment. “Do I have manumission papers too?”

She said this calmly, but Elizabeth saw the spark of real concern and fear in her daughter’s eyes. She sat down on the step and pulled Lily down next to her.

“You have no need of manumission papers. No one would question your freedom, Lily. You have nothing to fear from bounty hunters.”

“Or from kidnappers,” Lily prompted.

“Or from kidnappers,” Elizabeth echoed obediently, wishing again that the children weren’t always so eager to hear stories of what had happened to them when they were just a few months old.

“Everybody knows I’m free because I’m white,” Lily reasoned out loud. And then: “Well, then, why can’t we write a paper like that for Selah Voyager?”

Elizabeth pulled up in surprise. “That would be forgery, as if we decided to make our own paper money and claim it came from the government treasury. We don’t have the authority to write manumission papers for Selah, or anyone. The law would see that as theft.”

“But if one person can’t belong to another person, how can that be thievery? You can’t steal something nobody owns.”

It happened with increasing frequency that Elizabeth was taken aback and delighted by the clarity of eight-year-old logic. Now it took her a moment to collect a reasonable response, but Lily waited patiently.

“The problem is that somebody claims to own Selah Voyager,” she said finally. “And the law supports that claim.”

“Grandfather says that laws are only as good as the men
who write them,” said Lily. And then she leapt off the porch in a manner much more suited to her age, and let out a high hoot of laughter.

“Oh, look, Uncle got some turkeys!”

Runs-from-Bears stood at the edge of the woods with a pair of birds slung over one shoulder and a brace of rabbits over the other. With the flick of a wrist he tossed the rabbits to Hector and Blue, who grabbed up their reward and galloped away to eat under the fir tree that was their favorite spot. The dogs passed Lily as she ran toward Runs-from-Bears, her bare heels flashing white as they kicked up her petticoat to show the muddy hem of her shift.

She launched herself fearlessly, grabbing onto his free forearm. He swung her up and for one breathless moment Lily seemed to hang like a hummingbird in midair; then he caught her neatly and she came to rest on his raised forearm. Elizabeth had seen this trick too many times to count, but it still struck her as incongruous: her tiny daughter perched so nonchalantly on the arm of a Kahnyen’kehàka warrior. A stranger would have first seen his size, the weapons he carried, the face mangled by battle and pox scars and decorated with elaborate bear-claw tattoos; Elizabeth saw a man who had taught her to snare and skin a rabbit, how to walk quietly in the endless forests, how to greet an elder in Mohawk without giving offense, and too many other things to count. Runs-from-Bears had helped her through some of the most difficult times of her life; when she looked at him she saw a friend, and so did her daughter.

Lily was talking so fast and so earnestly that by the time Elizabeth caught up, Runs-from-Bears had heard all the news of the day.

“Will you come and meet Selah Voyager, Uncle?”

“I will,” said Runs-from-Bears. “When she is well again.”

Elizabeth said, “Run ahead now and bring your sister this soup, she is waiting for you.”

Lily swung down as she would have done from the branch of a tree, landing lightly. When she had accepted the covered bowl, Runs-from-Bears reached into his hunting shirt and took out a letter.