Lake in the Clouds (81 page)

Even Richard understood, but Elizabeth’s expression was equal parts frantic need to be away and concern for the situation at hand.

To Hannah Elizabeth said, “Send for one of us when you are ready to come home to Lake in the Clouds. Do you understand me?”

It took a moment for Hannah to make sense of the warning.
The mill,
she remembered suddenly.
The robbery. Manny Freeman. Ambrose Dye.
It seemed very long ago and very unimportant. But she nodded anyway, because it made no sense to give Elizabeth new cause for worry. “I will send word.”

With an impatient toss of his head Richard said, “We have to visit every family in Paradise. God knows how far it’s spread already. It may be full dark before we’re done. She’ll sleep at the house where I can call on her if I need her.”

Irritation and indignation flickered in Elizabeth’s eyes, and Hannah was almost glad to see evidence that she was not completely overwhelmed by her fear.

“Hannah will come home to her family to sleep in her own bed,” she said, looking Richard Todd directly in the eye. “Or, if she chooses, she will stay here in the village. She is not an indentured servant to jump at your bidding, and I will thank you to remember that.”

“Christ save me from the Bonner women,” Richard muttered, turning away. “How Nathaniel lives with more than one of you I’ll never know.”

When Elizabeth came home, breathless and so overwrought that it seemed she would never be able to speak again, the men were gathered around the cold fire pit between the cabins. All the men: Strong-Words, Strikes-the-Sky Hawkeye with Lily in his lap. Runs-from-Bears with his two youngest. Ethan, Blue-Jay. Daniel. Nathaniel.

With such elation and fear all at once, Elizabeth wondered
if it was possible for a heart to shatter like cold glass dropped into boiling water. What she wanted more than anything else in the world and what she feared: all her people together here while in the village sickness took hold. Again. Like a snake uncoiling itself from a winter’s rest. This time it called itself by another name (different
names,
she corrected herself: scarlet fever and canker rash and strawberry tongue), but she was not fooled.

Daniel reached her first, his joyous expression replaced by hurt when she stepped away from his reaching arms. She had spent the day comforting sick children, wiping their faces, spooning tea and broth onto tongues swollen red and rough; how could she embrace her son? But he did not hear her warnings or did not want to understand them. He was enough of a boy to want his mother’s arms, and something small and tender broke in Elizabeth when she had to refuse him.

Nathaniel came running to scoop him up, a boy too tall to be held like the child he was and would always be to them.

“Let your mother get cleaned up,” he said. “And then we’ll sit together and talk.”

Nathaniel followed his wife into the cabin while the boys went to draw water for the bath she must have. She paced up and down while the buckets came and went and the cold water rose in the hip bath, refusing to wait for it to heat, refusing to speak at all until the task was finished and the door had closed behind them.

“Whatever it is, Boots, spit it out before you burst.”

Generally Elizabeth tended to underplay her worries, maybe because she thought if she could convince other people things weren’t so bad she’d start to believe it herself. But she was scared to the bone and whatever tricks she had to calm herself were no good at all: the story poured out of her while she stripped to the skin and climbed into the cold water. Young Eulalia Wilde dead, Molly LeBlanc down with childbed fever, the names of the children sick with canker rash: Joseph, Solange, Emmanuel, Lucy, Peter, Simon, Mary, Faith.

Not quinsy. She said it so often that he wondered if she even heard herself.

In the full heat of a summer afternoon she shivered and
shook, gooseflesh rising across her chest and arms. She asked for the common soap but he gave her one of the fine bars scented with lavender that her cousin had sent from the city. It slipped from her fingers once and then again until Nathaniel took it from her.

While he washed her back and rubbed soap into the sodden masses of her hair she talked and talked through chattering teeth and he listened.

When she had finally used all the words she had and he had finished rinsing her—more cold water—he helped her up, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her to their bed.

The last thing she murmured to him before she fell asleep was the thing he feared most. She said, “We have to go away from here. We have to take the children away from here. I’m so sorry, Nathaniel, I’m so sorry but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

For all the years since Elizabeth had agreed to be his wife and raise a family at Lake in the Clouds, Nathaniel had waited for the day she would have enough of such a rough life. There had been times when he could not keep this to himself and she had always laughed at him, hushed his worries with kisses or gentle ridicule or irritation. She missed nothing at all about England or the grand house where she had been raised; she wanted no finery or carriages; her books were better than theater or opera. She had her family, her friends, her school, more than she had ever imagined. What place had more to offer? she demanded to know. The only person in all of Paradise who would argue this point with her was Kitty Todd.

And still sometimes he saw something in her expression that he could not explain away. A yearning, a curiosity about the world. When Hawkeye spoke of going west she listened with eager eyes; when she read the papers from the city to them at night a new light came into her face. Nathaniel was not the only one to see this or even to point it out to her, but her shock was always genuine. The endless forests were enough of a frontier for her; she had no urge to take her children west, or anyplace else for that matter. All of them had been born at Lake in the Clouds and here their youngest child was buried; this was where they belonged.

Now Hannah stood on the cusp of leaving them, and Hawkeye would take that opportunity to leave them too. He
would follow his granddaughter west but when she settled with the Seneca he would walk on, walk west until he came to the end of the world.
An itch deep in the bone
was how he put it when they talked about it in the last few days.
Walk or die,
he had said in the language of his childhood, a language he spoke now only when he had things of the greatest importance to share.

Nathaniel had gone to Many-Doves with this, as he had gone to her mother before her when he needed that particular kind of wisdom. Many-Doves had once been his sister-in-law, but she would always be the daughter of Falling-Day and the granddaughter of Made-of-Bones; had she chosen to leave this place and go live among the Kahnyen’kehàka who had made a new home for themselves in Canada, she would be a clan mother by now, a woman with the sight, his mother would have said. A dream-walker.

At thirty she was beautiful still, so much like Nathaniel’s first wife that sometimes when he caught sight of her unexpectedly he felt a twist in his gut.
If Sarah had lived.
Sometimes the sentence presented itself to him, but he could not think beyond those few words. Could not think away the life he had now, because he wanted no other.

Many-Doves had listened to his worries, and when he was done she had taken some tobacco from the pouch around her neck and thrown it into the fire. While she watched it burn she said, “They will go, and you do not want to stop them, not in your heart. The time has come.”

A truth as hard as a hickory nut. And now another: sickness in the village, and Elizabeth in a restless sleep where she searched for a safe place to raise her children. A place that must exist, because she would have it so. Because she had such faith in him, that he could find that place.

Elizabeth woke to the sound of children laughing in the dusk.

She pulled a dress over her head and went bare-legged out to the porch to watch them under the falls. The heat of the day had begun to give way, and she was glad of the breeze on her bare skin.

The children—her own, Many-Doves’, Ethan—were shouting above the noise of the water, calling out dares to each other
in English and Kahnyen’kehàka. Their joy was as clear and palpable as the cool air that came off the falling water.

The men crouched around a new fire, deep in conversation. All of them turned watchful eyes to the children, calling out easy words of encouragement now and then. Other men—white men, Elizabeth corrected herself—would shout warnings, directions, commands. She herself had called out such things. Over time she had come to understand that her fear prevented nothing, achieved nothing useful.

Ethan climbed up on the boulder the children called Hump Nose, the highest point from which they were allowed to dive. From there he waggled both hands frantically in her direction until she raised her own hand in response.

He went into the water as naked and slink as mink, browned skin glistening and his water-darkened hair streaming behind him. Blue-Jay followed with a screeching whoop with his little sister close behind. Then Lily, her hair a wild fury trailing around her head, over her shoulders to the small of her back. Daniel stepped into place and paused to look out, naked but for a breechclout, fists on his hips. Surveying his kingdom.

What Elizabeth saw was this: Nathaniel’s face raised to watch his son, as he might watch the moon rising, unable to hide his wonder.

As if he heard her thoughts he got up from the fire and came to sit behind her on the porch, wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on her shoulder. She could not see his face like this but she didn’t mind, as long as she had his voice at her ear, low and sure.

“Feeling rested, Boots?”

“Nathaniel, about before—”

He hushed her with a shake of his head. “Look at Lily, she’s determined to make the biggest splash.” Their tiny daughter had rolled herself into a human cannonball, hurling toward the water with her arms wrapped around her raised knees. Water rose in a halo around her and the boys let out an approving holler.

Elizabeth leaned back and let out a sigh. “Why must she make a battle of everything?”

“Because she’s your daughter.” Nathaniel rocked a little, pulling her with him. “It’s in her nature.”

“I wanted to say about earlier—”

He shook his head again, more forcefully. “Wait, Boots. Listen.” He rubbed his face against her head.

“I know you’re afraid. I am too. I wish I could promise you that no harm will ever come to them, but I can’t. Here or anyplace else, I can’t promise you that. But I’m willing to leave Hidden Wolf, if that’s what it’ll take to make you rest easy. We could move deeper into the forests, or out onto the Mohawk. We could probably scrape together enough money to buy a little farmstead, maybe near German Flats or downriver from Albany a ways. No matter what we do, Many-Doves and Bears will stay here at Lake in the Clouds so it’s not like we couldn’t come back if you decide you don’t like it wherever we end up.”

His arms hummed with a fine tension, as if he feared she might try to pull away. Elizabeth opened her mouth but no words came to her. Because she could not make sense of any of it, not of his calm or his meaning.

“Nathaniel—”

“Hush for now, Boots. You think it over and when you know what you want, you let me know.” He started to pull away, but she wrapped her hands around his lower arm.

“Nathaniel. What about Manny? Is he safe?”

“For the moment,” Nathaniel said, and she knew from his expression that no matter what question she thought to ask him, he would give her no information. Because he was hiding the worst of it. What had happened to Ambrose Dye and what exactly Manny was up to, those were things he didn’t want to tell her.

But she did have something to ask, and she surprised herself with it. “You don’t trust me, do you?”

“I trust you with my life, Boots. You know that.”

“You think I’m too unstable to trust with the truth about Manny.”

Irritation moved across his expression. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Elizabeth.”

She said, “Tell me about Jode.”

“Ah, Christ.” He ran a hand over his eyes. “What’s there to tell that you haven’t guessed already?”

“What’s there to
tell?
To begin, let me ask: How is it that Jode is here in the first place? Manny must have gone north
looking for the Red Rock group, that’s the only way I can explain it to myself.”

“Well then you did guess it,” Nathaniel said flatly. “Manny went all the way to Good Pasture looking for his wife. It was Elijah who gave him the news about Selah. When he headed back this way, Jode followed him.”

“You’ve actually spoken to them then.”

Nathaniel said, “I spoke to them all. They’ll be headed west soon so we can all stop worrying.” He pulled away suddenly, and raised his voice over the rush of the falls.

“Children! There’s chores to do before dark.”

He left her to go back to the men around the fire, without even looking back. Afraid to look at her, in case she saw in his face what he thought he must keep from her; the rest of this business. The thought came to Elizabeth and ran up her spine in a shudder, as true as ice.

Most of the men were still out with the search party, Hannah discovered as they went from family to family, and all the women wanted news of what had happened at the mill. Richard, concerned only with examining everyone for symptoms of scarlet fever, grew more impatient with every visit.

“For God’s sake, woman,” he roared at Mrs. Hindle when she asked one question too many about the search party. “We’ve got eight cases of scarlet fever in this village and that boy sitting on your lap burning up with fever is one of ’em!”

Laura Hindle, ordinarily a plainspoken woman, first colored with indignation and then burst into tears, hugging her boy so hard that Hannah had to extract him before his mother caused some new harm.

When they left the Hindles’ small cabin, Hannah waited until she could be sure of her voice and then she said, “You’ll forgive me the observation, Dr. Todd, but you’ve got all the delicacy of an ox. Mrs. Hindle can hardly breathe for fear that Jock is lying out there in the bush scalped and his throat slit—don’t interrupt me, you know I’m right. In every one of those cabins the women and boys are listening to the wind in the trees and wondering if they can prime a rifle fast enough if the next war party comes for them. My uncle can’t come down the mountain for fear that somebody will shoot him in a panic.”