Dawn on a Distant Shore (4 page)

Elizabeth shifted to a
more comfortable position. "It's true that I don't like the idea of your going
so far, right now. But I don't see you have any choice."

In spite of the
seriousness of their situation, Nathaniel grinned. He caught the plait that fell
over her shoulder to her waist and gave it a good tug. "You're the one
with the talent for breaking men out of gaol."

She flicked her
fingers at him, but color rose on her cheeks. "Do you have any idea how we
could possibly get Hawkeye out of a military garrison?"

"I'm sure
something would come up," he said. "There's money enough, and money
opens more locks than keys ever will. But I'm not about to leave you here alone
with two new babies."

"Of course you
must go. Moncrieff and Robbie cannot do it without you. Your father needs
you."

"Boots,"
Nathaniel said wearily. "My ma always told me never to cross a woman in childbed,
but--"

"A wise
woman," interrupted Elizabeth. "Most excellent advice."

Deep in the night,
Nathaniel brought first the girl child and then the boy to her for nursing as
she could not yet manage them both at once. Curiosity had come to the door at
the first hungry cries, but seeing that Nathaniel was attending to Elizabeth's needs,
she nodded and slipped back to the bed she was sharing with Hannah in the
sleeping loft.

Yawning widely,
Elizabeth sat up against the bolsters and watched her son's small face. He
tugged so enthusiastically that she had to bite back a small cry. Nathaniel sat
beside her, his gaze fixed on the boy. Mathilde was on his lap, newly wound and
already asleep.

Elizabeth said,
"I wish that you did not have to go, Nathaniel. But I cannot be so
selfish. You will never rest easy here, knowing that your father needs your help.
Someday you may call Daniel to you the same way, and I expect that he will do
what he must to come. I trust that he will."

The candlelight lay
like gold on the baby's cheek. Nathaniel touched the tender skin with one finger.
"You need me, too," he said hoarsely. "It ain't right to leave
you, Boots."

"You will come back
to me, will you not? To us?"

"Aye," he
said, his breath warm on her skin. "Never doubt it."

News traveled fast in
Paradise. The next morning Judge Middleton stood at the foot of his daughter's
bed and demanded the whole story while he kneaded his tricorn between his
hands; he reminded her of nothing so much as one of her students with a guilty
conscience. Looking at him now, she could not help marking the likeness to her brother.
Julian had had the same high coloring and handsome features, and the same
propensity for self-indulgence.

The judge cleared his
throat repeatedly. "I am sorry to hear of Hawkeye's troubles, but I can
see no reason for you to be alone on this mountain in the middle of winter.
Come home with me. There's room for all of you." But he could not quite
meet Elizabeth's eye.

She concentrated on
the child in her lap, and at length her silence forced him to the heart of the
matter.

"Curiosity can
look after you there as well as here," he said gruffly.
"Better."

The simple truth was,
the judge feared that Nathaniel's journey would cost him his housekeeper.
Elizabeth was disappointed, but she knew that to argue this with her father
would not be worth the effort. She said, "I will not leave Lake in the Clouds,
but I will talk to Curiosity."

Greatly relieved to
have this conversation over, the judge spent a few minutes admiring his grandchildren.

"I think both of
them will have your mother's coloring." Carefully the judge picked up Mathilde
and examined her face. "She has your mother's chin, too, but then, so do
you. You do resemble your mother so, Elizabeth." He narrowed his eyes at
her, as if he were seeing her for the first time. "Both of you so
independent. It is your curse, and your blessing. I fear this little girl will
carry on in the same vein."

"I hope that she
will," Elizabeth said, somewhat taken aback by this uncharacteristic
thoughtful turn in her father.

He passed the baby
over. "Life might be easier, if you would allow it."

"Life would have
been easier for you, too, if you had stayed in Norfolk."

He smiled at that, and
suddenly they were easier together than they had been in some time. Then Curiosity's
voice came to them from the other room, and the judge grew flustered. In no
time at all, he had rushed out with the excuse of a meeting in the village.

"That man,"
Curiosity muttered when Elizabeth recounted her conversation with the judge. "Botherin'
a woman in childbed with his little man-pains. It's a good thirty years me and
my Galileo been free, and I ain't about to start jumpin' when he snap his
fingers. Ain't my girls as good at housekeepin' as me?"

Elizabeth agreed that
they were.

"Polly right
there with nothing to do but feed the man, and Daisy not far off, either. I'll
tell you plain: he can just eat their cooking a while longer. Askin' me to walk
away from his only daughter new delivered 'cause he bored. No wonder he run off
before I could have a word with him."

Elizabeth buried her
smile in Mathilde's fragrant neck, but Curiosity's fury was not yet spent. She
had brought in a bucket of hot water for the hip bath, and she tapped an
impatient melody on the tin as she muttered to herself. Then her head snapped
up and she grinned at Elizabeth. "We'll send Martha up to the house to
look after him. That'll do the trick."

Martha Southern was a
widow with three young children, and Curiosity had recently had the idea that
the judge watched her with an oversolicitous eye.

"You make me
laugh, Curiosity. You will find an opportunity to matchmake even in this."

"You begrudge the
judge a young wife?"

"Of course
not." And then in response to Curiosity's raised eyebrow: "If I were to
worry about this at all, it would be that Martha might deserve a better sort of
husband, after Moses."

Curiosity put her
fists on her hips. "The judge might be a good enough husband, with the
right kind of wife. And Martha alone, with three little ones. If it ain't the
judge, it may well be Charlie LeBlanc, and he ain't got a hiccup to call his
own."

She poured the second
bucket of hot water into the tub and then produced a cake of soap from her
apron pocket. "Come on now, let's set you to soaking some of them sore
spots away. Got some of the soap that Merriweather woman left behind. You'll
smell like a tavern maid lookin' for a cosy man, but I suppose that don't matter
none. Quick, now, afore the men come back and let the cold air in."

"Where's
Nathaniel?" Elizabeth asked, climbing carefully out of bed.

"Out in the barn
with Liam," Curiosity said. "Talking man talk."

Once, Nathaniel could
have been ready for this trip north in an hour. With the buckskins on his back,
a supply of no-cake and dried venison, all the powder and ammunition he could carry,
he would have simply started walking. But these days he and Liam were the only
men at Lake in the Clouds, and that made leaving even harder.

"Firewood alone
will keep you busy," Nathaniel said, repeating something he had said
before and that Liam knew anyway. But the boy didn't seem to mind hearing it
all again: Liam was a good worker: dogged, and thorough. Book learning was a chore
for him, but he could track a buck all day and never lose the trail, and
Nathaniel had never heard him complain, or seen him walk away from a task, no
matter how dirty. They had taken Liam in last fall when his brother Billy died,
and the boy worked hard to earn his place at Lake in the Clouds.

"You call on
Galileo or Jed to help out if things get too much for you," Nathaniel
said. "I already had a word with them about it."

"I can
manage," Liam said. He squinted out into the snowdrifts beyond the barn
door. "How long do you think you'll be?"

There was the question
that gnawed. Nathaniel pushed out his breath in a cloud.

"If the rivers
don't break up before time, four weeks. If they do, and the rains come early, six.
I'll stop at Kayenti'ho on my way north, let Falling-Day and Many-Doves know what's
happened. They may send Runs-from-Bears this way, once they hear."

A small flickering in
Liam's pale eyes. "I can manage the work," he said, his voice
cracking.

"I know you
can," Nathaniel said, remembering what it was like to be fourteen: raw and
untried and dead curious about the world, resentful of being led; afraid to
move on alone. "Listen to me now, Liam. If Bears comes this way, that
don't mean I don't trust you. I do. I wouldn't leave Elizabeth now if I
didn't."

The boy looked down at
his oversized boots. When he raised his head again, there was a shimmer in his
eyes.

"Don't know why
you should."

Nathaniel put a hand
on the bony shoulder. "You look in the mirror and you see your brother. But
I'm here to tell you that I knew him better than you did, and you ain't nothing
like Billy." For a moment Nathaniel struggled with a set of memories he
could not share: the brother that Liam had only suspected, but would never
know, if it could be helped.

He said, "Would I
leave my wife and children in your care otherwise?"

Then he walked away,
letting the boy sit with that for a while. Nathaniel busied himself hanging the
deer he had shot and cleaned this morning; when he looked up, Liam's face was
splotched, but dry.

"I'll do my best
by them."

"I know you
will." Nathaniel wiped his hands on a piece of sacking. "I'll be
leaving at sunrise, but there's something to do this afternoon first, and I'll
need your help."

In winter, Hidden Wolf
was mean-spirited: quick to punish any misstep, and unforgiving. Nathaniel
focused on the wind, feeling the mountain talking to him through the web of his
snowshoes. Liam followed closely. They had things to discuss but it wasn't wise
in such a wet cold, the kind that would settle in the chest if you gave it the
chance.

They walked uphill
through stands of beech and maple and birch. All around them pine and hemlock
were heavy armed and dragging with snow. Grouse startled and fussed as they
passed; overhead the squirrels whirred and screeched at them, flinging beechnut
shells. There was plentiful evidence of the wolf pack that roamed the mountain.
They didn't hide the remains of their prey: small game, mostly, but they had
feasted recently on a young buck, leaving nothing behind but gnawed bone, a
sprouting two-point rack, and a tattered hide.

Nathaniel made a wide
berth around a hump that another man might have climbed right over, an elevation
that looked like nothing more than a downed tree covered with snow. He pointed
out the vent hole and the faint mist of rising breath to Liam.

"It's there for
the taking if things get lean."

Liam looked around
himself, taking his bearings. Later in the season he would almost certainly
come back here to brush away the snow and put a bullet through the bear's eye.
The hard part would be getting the carcass back to the cabin.

On the backbone of the
mountain they were met by a merciless wind that wanted nothing more than to
send them flying out over the forests. Moving carefully on the exposed ridge,
they made their way to a small plateau where a few boulders provided a windbreak.
There they stopped to take off snowshoes and strap them to their backs, and
then they started down a cliff face. Liam grabbed at stunted juniper to steady
himself on the way down, catching himself easily when he began to slide. Nathaniel
saw him taking his bearings again; the boy wasn't lost, and could find his way
back to Lake in the Clouds alone if need be.

When he had Liam's
attention, Nathaniel pointed out a spalt in the cliff face that might have been
nothing more than shadow. Without any explanation, he reached up and pulled
himself into the mountainside.

The rushing wall of
water that formed the outer boundary of the cave sent a wave of cold right to
the bone. From a store of wood stacked against the far wall they lit a fire,
and then a torch.

"I didn't imagine
it like this," Liam said as he warmed his hands. "I thought it would
be bigger." His eyes kept moving to the long line of wolf skulls wedged
into a crack in the far wall.

Nathaniel disappeared
into the shadows at the back of the cave. There was a dragging sound, and a thump,
and he appeared again, wiping his hands on his leggings.

"It is
bigger," he said. "Come have a look."

He had rolled away a
good-sized boulder to reveal the next cavern. The torchlight danced on barrels
and baskets and neatly bundled pelts. Hung from pegs driven into fissures were long
ropes of dried corn and squash: provisions enough to take seven or more people
through the winter. It was dry and quieter here, but cold.

"This is how you
managed, last winter," Liam said, mostly to himself. Some of the men in
the village had been set on driving the Bonners and their Kahnyen'kehâka family
members off the mountain, resorting to thievery when intimidation got them
nowhere. They had raided the cabin in the fall, finding less than they expected
in the way of winter stores. Billy had been at the heart of that trouble, and
where Billy went, Liam had gone, too.