Lake in the Clouds (75 page)

It wasn’t a question, but Lily nodded anyway. The thought of Daniel’s painted face that day at Eagle Rock came to her, and with it a rush of affection.

“Then pay no mind to Mr. Gathercole. You remember that your best weapon in any argument with your brother right now is your mind. Someday down the line he’ll come around to realize that he needs to use his head before his muscles, but right now it’s your advantage. You understand me?”

The funny part about advice was this: the better it was, the harder it was to remember when a person needed it most.

To her brother Lily said, “She’ll be suspicious if it’s always you. She’s used to having me follow her around the village.”

He frowned, because he didn’t like the argument but he couldn’t counter it either. “I could tell her I’m interested in medicine.”

“Are you?”

Daniel lifted a shoulder in an absent way. “I could be.”

Lily said, “I’m going with her today. I can’t stop you if you want to come along but then it will look strange tomorrow when it’s your turn. You decide for yourself.”

It turned out that Lily didn’t need to fool Hannah into letting her come along when she visited patients, because by the third day people had begun to ask for her. Word had traveled that Lily could draw a good likeness, and it seemed that everybody in Paradise wanted to see themselves on paper.

Her mother made her a new sketchbook, this one bound so that it could lie flat while she worked; her father gave her a penknife and spent time teaching her how to best whittle the pencils Gabriel Oak had left her without wasting any of the precious lead.

All of this combined with the fact that Hannah was spending more time every day talking to Strikes-the-Sky put Daniel in a bad mood that no words could counter. Then Runs-from-Bears decided to take the boys into the bush for a week of tracking.

“What about Jemima?” Lily asked him while he was getting ready to go. “I thought it was your job to protect Sister from Jemima Kuick.”

The look on his face, confusion and guilt and anger, made Lily sorry to have spoken.

“Sister has Strikes-the-Sky,” Daniel said crossly. “She doesn’t need me now.”

Which made Lily feel even worse, because there was some truth to it. Hannah was so busy with the doctoring and the vaccinations and with Strikes-the-Sky that she seemed to be moving away even when she stood at the hearth stirring soup and talking to the other women about the garden or work around the house or who was sick in the village.

Between her chores, going around the village with her sister, and Uncle Strong-Words, Lily shouldn’t have had time to feel alone. But she hadn’t thought about what it would be like to have the boys gone while Curiosity and Galileo were away in Albany too. She said as much to her father, who put down the trap he was fixing and pulled her onto his lap.

“Things have been mighty unsettled this summer,” he said.

She snuggled closer to push her face against his buckskin shirt, better than any silk. As a little girl she had sometimes sat on his lap and chewed on the fringe on his shirt when her mother wasn’t looking. Lily wished now she were not too old for such things.

He said, “It’s no wonder you’re anxious. I am too.”

Her father made her no promises about everybody coming home soon safe and sound, but Lily felt better anyway.

“Yesterday I drew a likeness of Mrs. Cunningham that made her laugh out loud.”

When her father was in a teasing mood his left eyebrow cocked up at an angle, as it did now. He leaned down to tickle her with his beard stubble until she shrieked. “Did you make her look like a queen with rubies and diamonds in her hair?”

“No.” Lily struggled to get away, without success. “I drew her likeness, her real likeness, the way I see her.”

“Including the wart on her chin, the one with three hairs as long as cat’s whiskers?”

Lily narrowed her eyes. “Well, maybe I didn’t make the hairs as long as they really are … but she liked it anyway. She said she didn’t know she looked so much like her own mother, and she gave me a piece of maple sugar as big as your thumb.”

“Well then,” said her father. “I better have a look at this drawing of yours.”

“Wait,” Lily said, and he drew up. “I wanted to ask you something else.” She gathered her words together and then let them out in a rush.

“Why does Hannah argue so much with Strikes-the-Sky? I thought she was starting to like him a little at least, but they do as much arguing as they do talking like normal people. One minute everything’s fine and then she gets mad at him and he laughs and she stomps off.”

“I don’t suppose you heard what they were arguing about.”

“Clothes.”

“Ah.”

“You see,” Lily said with great seriousness, “Strikes-the-Sky believes that Sister shouldn’t wear O’seronni clothes ever, not even when she goes to see people like the Gathercoles. He says if they want her help they should accept her for what she is.”

“And your sister said?”

“She says that it’s none of his business if she wears doeskin or calico or walks around buck naked—she said that, really—and that she wouldn’t be shamed into or out of any kind of clothing at all. She said he was arguing for the sake of arguing and that if he
wasn’t,
why then he was stupider than she thought not to see the obvious. Then she called him a name and slammed the door in his face.”

“Did she? And what did she call him?”

Lily squinted. “She called him a pigheaded jackass. In
English.”

“Oh ha.” Her father gave her a sour smile and put her off his lap with a thump. “In your sister’s case that kind of talk is called courting.”

“That’s what Mama said too, when I asked her.”

“She’s the expert,” said Lily’s father. “You can take your mother’s word for it.”

“Maybe I should be paying attention for when I’m older,”
Lily said. She paused once again. “Do you think that Sister was right, was he arguing just to argue? To get her mad?”

“I’d say that he’s arguing for the sake of courting,” her father said. “Now what about that sketch you were going to show me?”

Every other day Hannah’s rounds took her to the Wildes’ farm, so that she could check the progress of Nicholas’s vaccination blisters and change his sister’s dressing. Eulalia had caught her arm on a nail and the wound wasn’t healing the way it should, something that worried Hannah enough to talk to Richard Todd about it.

While she recounted the treatments she had tried without success Hannah wondered how much the doctor was really taking in, as he was in the middle of making adjustments to the draw on the reverberating furnace.

Then he shot her an impatient glance. “Sounds like the wound might need cauterizing. I’ll have a look at her tonight at the trading post.”

It was the eighth day since the first batch of vaccinations—both the ones in the trading post and the ones she had done at home with virus material brought from the city—and tonight the village was supposed to gather for the next round. By Hannah’s calculations, if everything went according to plan, she’d have virus from fifteen recently vaccinated patients, which meant that working with the doctor they might be able to do as many as sixty more today. If that many people showed up who were willing. Hannah wished again that Curiosity were home; her help would be much missed.

“Might as well look at Mrs. Gathercole’s sore throat at the same time,” Richard added, interrupting Hannah’s calculations.

She thought of pointing out that Mrs. Gathercole, whose sensibilities were so easily upset, might not wish to be examined in a public place. The look on Richard’s face as he crouched in front of the furnace made it clear that he wasn’t interested in Mrs. Gathercole’s sensibilities or any other kind of interruption, and so she simply gathered her things together and left.

Lily was waiting for her, her dark head bent over her sketchbook. One plait had come undone and the curls flew around her head in the breeze.

“Where are we going first?” She skipped along behind, putting her book and pencil into the pouch that hung from a string
looped around her neck and shoulder. Many-Doves had sewn the pouch from moccasin leather and Pines-Rustling had done the beadwork, and Hannah had never seen a child more pleased with a gift.

“The Wildes’ place,” Hannah said.

“But I’ve drawn both of them,” Lily said without any rancor at all. And then: “There’s always that old dog of theirs, the one with the chewed-off tail and one eye. Maybe I can get him.”

“Do you think you’ll ever get tired of drawing?” Hannah asked, and then bit back a laugh at Lily’s expression, both thoughtful and resentful.

“Do you think you’ll get tired of medicine?”

“I hope not,” Hannah said.

Lily nodded as if she had proved a point. “You won’t, and neither will I. No more than Daniel will ever get tired of the endless forests and hunting and trapping and all of that.”

At the Wildes’ the door stood open, but there was no reply to Hannah’s call.

“There they are.” Lily pointed. “In the orchard.”

With a few exceptions—the most obvious being the doctor, the preacher, and Axel Metzler, who kept the tavern—the men in Paradise made their living hunting and trapping, and left the crops and the raising of children and animals—pigs, chickens, goats, and the occasional cow—to their women. In this, Elizabeth sometimes pointed out quite sharply, men of all colors were equally stubborn. There was one way to divide things up on the frontier, and one way only: men’s work was in the endless forests, in the marshes, or on the lakes; women planted corn and beans and squash, cabbage and kale in the rich soil near the river and tended it while their babies slept nearby in the shade.

But Nicholas Wilde seemed to be made of other stuff. He hunted for meat and he set a few traps for the furs they needed for their own use, but most of his effort went into the orchard he had started when he came to Paradise five years earlier on a wagon crowded with apple-tree saplings. The men of Paradise had laughed right out loud. Then the Wildes built a little cider mill and produced their first batch of applejack. Just that easily the jokes and comments and wonderings about Nicholas Wilde’s manliness stopped.

Axel Metzler had said it for all of them: a man who could grow apples that produced such a strong and tasty jack deserved some respect.

After that, the men listened good-naturedly when Nicholas Wilde talked about being the one to come up with the perfect eating apple. Everybody knew that apples were for pressing, but if Wilde wanted to eat them too, that was all right with the men of Paradise, as long as he kept his priorities straight.

Hannah and Lily found Nicholas and his sister in the middle of the orchard with its neat rows of small trees, twisted branches heavy with fruit just beginning to move beyond green. They were both so involved in examining fruit on a tree just five feet tall that they didn’t look up.

“What’s this one called?” Lily asked straightaway.

“Come from seed off the graft of a Snow on the Seek-No-Further,” said Nicholas. He was working with his sleeves rolled up and Hannah could see even from a few feet away that the vaccination blisters were at their peak. She just hoped that he didn’t break one by accident, as happened more often than she liked.

He took no notice of her examination, as he was busy talking apples with Lily. “Don’t have a name yet. Probably never will neither. Looks like another spitter to me.”

“That’s an apple too hard and sour to press or eat,” Lily explained to Hannah with great seriousness. All the children spent a lot of time in the Wildes’ orchard in the fall, and Nicholas would talk about his trees to anybody willing to listen.

Eulalia said, “If you can give us ten minutes we’d greatly appreciate it.”

Her face was flushed and her upper lip and forehead were wet with perspiration. Hannah feared that it was not the sun but a fever that gave Eulalia such color, but she nodded. “We’ll wait back at the cabin.”

On the way Lily kept pausing to point out trees. “That one’s called Spitzenburg, it’s President Jefferson’s favorite. Those there are Ribston Pippins. Nicholas grows those for cider. That’s Maiden Blush, the earliest of them all. Tasty too.”

“Are those the yellow ones—”

“Eulalia brought us some of those last fall, yup. You see that tree with a hump there? That’s my favorite, Duchess. The apples are a greeny yellow color with red stripes. And all those
trees over there—” She made a great sweep of her arm. “Those are the ‘maybe trees.’”

They had reached the cabin, and Hannah sat down on the porch step with Lily just beside her. “I suppose I should ask what you mean by ‘maybe trees.’”

Lily folded her arms around herself and rocked back and forth, pleased for once to know more than her formidable older sister, and to be able to share that knowledge.

“Did you know that an apple tree never ever breeds true? Every time you plant a seed you never know what’s going to come of it except it won’t be a copy of the tree it came from.”

“Like people,” Hannah said, and Lily tilted her head to one side in surprise. She let out a laugh. “Like people, yes. Maybe that tree there won’t produce anything but tiny spitters no bigger than a knuckle, or maybe it’ll put out big red apples better than the Duchess and the Spitzenburg both. That’s why I call them ‘maybe trees,’ because maybe one of them will have that perfect apple that will make the Wildes a fortune. When they find that perfect apple they’re going to call it Paradise. Look, here comes Eulalia. She looks sick.”

“Yes,” said Hannah, all thought of maybe trees and perfect apples banished instantly. “She does.”

The wound on Eulalia Wilde’s right forearm, four days old, was tender to the touch and inflamed all around with a bright red halo that was twice the size it had been two days ago. Worse still, red streaks reached out, moving toward her hand in one direction and her shoulder in the other.

“You should have sent for me,” Hannah said mildly, because to show her alarm would only make things worse. “Or you might have gone to see Dr. Todd.”

Eulalia had gone very pale under skin tanned dark from working in the sun. She said, “I washed it out with that medicine every day, the way you showed me. Didn’t do much good though.” She sucked in a breath as Hannah began to probe the wound with gentle fingers. Her brother put a hand on her other shoulder and cast Hannah a questioning glance.