Fire Along the Sky (18 page)

“There was no alarm raised while we were in the village,” Hannah said. “Before the storm or after. And no word from the Wildes that anything was amiss, not since Missy Parker has been going up to help with the widow. In fact, I've seen no sign of them for a week, at least.”

“Blessed Mary.” Jennet's breathing hitched once and then again. “The poor wee thing.”

“This is very disturbing,” Elizabeth said again. “But there is nothing to be done except wait for your father to come home and explain. Hopefully he will bring Nicholas and Cookie with him.”

They were standing around the trestle table with their heads bowed in the glow of candle and firelight. On the table was Dolly Wilde's body, not so much a human form but a poorly made wax effigy.

Hannah said, “It does sound as though she had a brain fever, from what you've told me. But I'd have to do an autopsy to be sure.”

Elizabeth's face contorted in horror even as Hannah was speaking. Her mouth opened and then closed with a sharp sound.

“Don't worry,” Hannah said. “I have no intention of cutting her open. I haven't attended an autopsy in years, and I don't have the right instruments.”

Or any at all,
she might have said. Once she had carried a full set of surgeon's tools with her wherever she went, beautifully crafted blades and probes that had been a gift from a teacher she had not heard from in years. Now she borrowed Richard's things when she could not do without.

“I see no evidence of violence done,” Hannah finished. “The cuts on her hands and face are mostly from pushing her way through brambles, I think. She must have lost her gloves or never had any; you see that all her fingers were badly frostbitten.”

Jennet had leaned in very close to study Dolly's hands, which were covered with cuts and scratches, some long healed and others still bright red. “She kept cats,” Jennet said, and smoothed a gentle hand over Dolly's hair. “A gentle-hearted woman, then.”

“She was, yes,” Elizabeth agreed, and the sorrow she had been keeping at bay for so long welled up fiercely.

“And she said nothing while she lived?” It was more a statement than a question, but Elizabeth answered anyway.

“No. She was convulsing for much of the time.”

“Then what of the inquiry?” Jennet asked. “When will it be?”

“Inquiry?” Hannah said, as if she had never heard the word before.

Jennet shot her a look that was surprise and irritation both. “Why, of course,” she said. “Someone is responsible for this. Justice must be done.”

Elizabeth wondered if she had seemed so superior and condescending when she first came here as a young woman, just Jennet's age and just as sure of the proper ordering of the world. By the look on Many-Doves' face, she thought she must have been.

She said, “Here on the frontier justice wears a very different face. As does compassion.”

“Compassion?” Jennet almost sputtered the word, and hot color shot into her cheeks. “Are you suggesting that they sent her out into the cold to die? Purposely? But that's, that's—”

“Barbaric,” Hannah supplied evenly. “You want to say it would be barbaric.”

“Well, yes.” Jennet drew up a little, less certain of herself now. She glanced uneasily at Many-Doves, who returned her gaze without blinking. More softly she said, “Do you think they might really have done such a thing? I know that she was a burden to them, but—”

“No one has suggested that her people turned her out,” said Elizabeth. “And to speculate is only to invite trouble.”

“Then there must be an inquiry, and I will attend it,” Jennet said, more calmly now.

“Certainly,” Elizabeth said wearily. “No one would try to keep you away.” She wiped the perspiration from her forehead and pressed her handkerchief to her nose, inhaling lavender water deeply. Outside Runs-from-Bears had begun to cut firewood and it seemed to Elizabeth that she felt each fall of the axe echoed in her own pulse.

Just then the faint sound of the village bell came to them through the clear winter air, and each of them turned toward the door. The sound of the axe had stopped; Runs-from-Bears would be counting, as each of the women counted to herself. Five tolls of the bell for a missing child.

A missing child.

Before any of them could think what to say, the chiming started up again. This time the bell tolled four times, then another four, then—Elizabeth would have thought she was imagining it if it weren't for the faces of the other women around her—three tolls and three again.

“But what does it mean?” Jennet asked, a wild note breaking in her voice.

“Two women missing, two men, one child.” Elizabeth heard Hannah answer from far away.

“The whole family?” asked Jennet, unbelieving. “The whole family is missing, and the servants with them?”

“Possibly,” said Elizabeth. “Or perhaps it is unrelated, other people have got lost in the storm.”

Even as she said the words she knew, somehow, that this was not the case. As they all knew.

“We had best look after her then,” Many-Doves said, drawing the sheet up around Dolly's shoulders. “It sounds as though there won't be anybody else coming to do it.”

Chapter 11

December, Montreal

The courier's knocking woke Lily at first light to a chamber so cold that the wool blanket tented over her face crackled, frozen stiff by her own moist breath.

Even huddled beneath blankets and comforters on a thick feather bed, there was no avoiding the clatter of Lucille's pattens as the old lady grumbled her way along the tiled corridor to answer the knock. She began her scolding litany even before she opened the door. The courier—either a very brave man or a foolish one—barked out a surprised laugh. For this he earned not the bowl of coffee and milk he must have been hoping for, but a curtly closed door.

Post at sunrise. It shouldn't surprise Lily anymore, really. Couriers came to her brother's door with astounding regularity, even with the port closed for the winter. At Lake in the Clouds they might get mail once every fortnight if the roads were good; in a muddy spring it could be much longer between deliveries. Here in Montreal it seemed that letters and packages and whole sledges came for Luke every day.

If Lily waited just a little longer Ghislaine, the youngest and friendliest of the servants, would come to wake her. Ghislaine would bring coffee and gossip and serve them both in generous portions while she opened the shutters and coaxed the embers in the hearth into new life. Ghislaine spoke a rustic English full of odd turns of phrase that she had learned from her American grandfather, a Vermont farmer, and they had come to an agreement: in the mornings they spoke English, in the afternoons, French.

It was a friendship based on mutual admiration but also, they were both very much aware, need. Ghislaine was Lily's only source for certain kinds of information about what was happening in the house and the town; in return Lily knew some old stories, shocking enough not to be told around a crowded hearth, that Ghislaine had never been able to prod out of any of the older servants. Lily knew these stories of the Somerville family and Wee Iona, because her father and grandfather and brother had had a part in them.

This grand house that belonged to Luke had once belonged to George Somerville, Lord Bainbridge, lieutenant governor of Lower Canada, a man no one had liked or mourned, dead of an apoplexy long ago. Lily told Ghislaine about the night that the Bonner men had escaped from the Montreal prison only to be caught up again here, in the secret stairway that, Lily and Ghislaine were both very sad to discover for themselves, Luke had indeed bricked closed when the house came into his possession.

Ghislaine longed to see Giselle Somerville, now more properly called Giselle Lacoeur for she had finally settled on a husband, late in her life. Lily would have liked to meet her half brother's mother as well, but Giselle had found a climate more suited to her temperament in Saint Domingue, and Iona was sure that she would never see her daughter in Montreal again. Not in the winter, at least, Luke had agreed. He knew his mother well.

Why Montreal cold should be so very harsh, that was a question Lily had been considering for some time. Over the weeks she had come to realize that it must have something to do with sleeping alone. In the winter nobody at Lake in the Clouds slept by themselves. Lily shared her bed with Annie and sometimes Gabriel, too, if Daniel happened to be away. They huddled together under the covers like kittens, their smells mingling together: milky sweet breath, sharp soap and wood smoke, pine sap.

She missed them, for all their pinches and giggling and pulling of the blankets and sneaking away of pillows. The truth was, even in the heat of summer Lily did not much like sleeping alone in a bed, and she did not have to: she could go with her blanket to lie under the stars or sleep under the falls, if the notion took her.

Before homesickness could dig in, Lily tried to remember what it was she had to do this morning. Was it Monsieur Picot, who clicked his nails against the easel and clucked his tongue when she displeased him, or Monsieur Duhaut, who was teaching her how to grind and mix her own pigments? Monsieur Duhaut was a strange man, morose one day and more morose the next; when his mood lifted a little he would stand too close while Lily worked and breathe onto her neck. She had spoken to Iona about him, and at their next lesson he had greeted her with such a studiously wounded expression that Lily was reminded of a dog caught stealing eggs; sorry not for the transgression, but for his clumsiness in being found out.

Suddenly Lily realized how quiet the lane outside her window was and she remembered that it was a holiday of some sort. What holiday she couldn't really say—the Catholics seemed to have so many of them—but soon the bells would begin to ring the mass. And, she remembered, more awake now, she had promised to go out with Simon to an all-day sleighing party. That made her heart beat faster, as a lesson with Monsieur Duhaut never could, though she was loath to admit it to herself. She had come to Montreal to study art, after all.

The virtuous thing to do would be to spend the day in front of her easel. But of course, she had promised.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Ghislaine called at the door even as it swung inward. She stood there with a tray held high, the steam rising up to make the hair at her temples curl. Ghislaine was a pretty girl and always seemed to be in motion; the whirlwind, Iona called her, but affectionately.

“Yesterday,” Ghislaine began straightaway. “Yesterday the youngest daughter of Pierre-Amable Dézéry dit Latour—Amélie, she is called—agreed to marry Gérard Berthelet, in the rue de l'Hôpital. Such a scandal, you cannot imagine. A daughter of the surveyor to the governor engaged to an apprentice joiner who suffers from—” Ghislaine stopped to search for an English word, her small mouth pressed together in concentration. “Early balditude.”

Ghislaine was vain about her own beautiful hair, and expected no less of others. When Lily pointed her lack of charity out to her, Ghislaine only flicked her fingers. “Pffft. Do not preach to me, Miss American Who Knows All. I haven't seen you spending time with the hairless. In fact, your sweetheart has so much hair that his head cannot contain it. It sprouts from his collar and cuffs.”

At that Lily could not help but laugh, though what she wanted to do was to correct Ghislaine: Simon Ballentyne was not her sweetheart. But it would not do to rise to the bait. Instead she swallowed her coffee, very strong and laced with sweet fresh milk, and with it the protests that would only start Ghislaine off on a tangent.

“I see you do not disagree,” Ghislaine said with a satisfied sniff.

“No,” Lily said, finally throwing back the covers. “I simply do not argue.”

At breakfast Luke watched her. Lily could almost see the questions pooling in his mouth, puffing out his cheeks, ready to spill:
What is it Simon Ballentyne wants from you?
and,
Have you written to our father or must I?

Lily applied herself to her porridge and refused to meet her brother's steady gaze. Iona gave her less room.

“Simon's a good man,” she said to Lily when Luke had excused himself from the table and gone off to see to the post. “But he's just a man, after all, lass. You mustn't forget that men are all weak willed when it comes down to it. It's the woman who must bear the burden, in the end.”

Down to what?
Lily might have asked, but this would be the worst kind of deception. She knew what Luke and Iona were worried about: that she would allow Simon too many liberties and end up with child, which would mean, in turn, that she would have to marry him and make a life here in Montreal. Or go home carrying her shame before her and admit to everyone that she had not been equal to the freedom she was given. As had been the case with Iona herself, and with Giselle too, both women having borne their children without the benefit of a husband. No wonder they were worried.

At this moment Lily understood, and she could promise Iona that she would be sensible. She could say the words, and mean them. The problem was Simon; could she say the same to him? When he put his hands on her face so gently and kissed her with such skill that the muscles in her belly fluttered with it, could she remember what was expected of her, or even more to the point: what she expected of herself?

The best thing, of course, would be to stay at home today. Just as Lily was forming this resolution in her mind she heard the jangle of harness bells flying past the door. The first sleighs on their way out of the city, on their way to Mount Royal or Lachine.

She went to Iona and leaned over her shoulder. The old woman smelled of herbs and tallow candles this morning, as she often did; there were fresh ink stains on her fingers that said she had been writing. But what? And why? She never sent a letter out with the courier. Iona did not speak of the things that kept her busy behind the closed door of her chamber, and Lily had never had the courage to ask.

She kissed Iona's soft cheek. “I will be sensible,” she said. “I am my mother's daughter, after all.”

“And your father's!” Iona called after her.

A suitable warning, of course, as Lily's father had spent a winter here when he was younger than she was now, and fathered a son on Giselle Somerville.

But Lily only raised a hand in acknowledgment and wouldn't turn back, not now, not with the sound of bells filling the lanes.

When Simon stopped the sleigh at the door Lily was ready in her layers of wool, wrapped in a hooded cape lined with fur. It was impossible to walk normally when she was bundled up like this, but then she only had to negotiate the few steps to the cariole.

It was a small affair, just big enough for two, and painted a bright red with green trim. The bridles were woven with ribbons to match, altogether too fine for the team of country horses: tough little beasts, shaggy coated, narrow of chest and half-wild but able to run for hours in the cold and then stand for even longer. They were spanned not side by side but nose to tail so that they could pull the cariole through the narrow lanes. For all their rough appearance they were clever things, and affectionate: once out of their traces they would follow Simon around like dogs and push their damp velvet noses into his pockets looking for maple sugar lumps and dried apple.

The sleigh came to a halt just as she heard Luke call her. He was holding a letter out as he came forward. “From your mother,” he said. “It was in among the others.”

Lily was thinking of leaving it for reading in the evening when Luke grinned at her, a teasing brother at this moment rather than a worried one. “Take it along,” he said. “Best to have Elizabeth along with you in that sleigh, in spirit at least.”

But he was looking beyond her when he said it. At Simon, Lily thought, and then she turned and saw the scarlet uniform coats. The sight of soldiers always seemed to take her brother by surprise, though the city was full of them.

When she turned back again, Luke's expression had changed, from playfulness to concern.

The reason she liked these rides so much, Lily told herself as she settled in, was that nothing was required of her in the way of conversation. Simon was busy with the horses; Lily's only job was to stay warm in the piles of buffalo hides and bear pelts and to enjoy the ride and the view. They rushed over the countryside toward the hill that all Montreal liked to think of as a mountain. Mount Royal, they called it, six miles away and a good place to go for a view of the city.

The sky was a clear, hard blue, cloudless, serene, the sun so bright on the snow and ice that Lily must squint.
The trouble with blue eyes,
her father would remind her, smiling to take the edge off the truth,
they let too much in.

A letter from her mother was tucked up Lily's sleeve but it was her father who came along on these sleigh rides. In all of the stories he told, Nathaniel Bonner never spoke of the winter he spent here; and still Lily could imagine him sleigh racing, wild to be off, to be moving. As he must run, sometimes, for the beat and rhythm and rush of wind on his face. Wolf-Running-Fast he was called by the Kahnyen'kehàka, or Between-Two-Worlds. The first name always seemed to Lily the better one.

There were ten sleighs altogether now: bright green, blue, yellow, red. Most of the party were known to Lily, friends of Simon's and her brother's, all younger men, all of them come out with a girl tucked in beside them. In the city young women vied for these invitations, Ghislaine had told Lily, as if she weren't properly appreciating the honor bestowed upon her by Simon Ballentyne, who could fill the spot beside him twenty times over.

Lily had asked about Luke, if he never went out with a sleigh and a girl beside him, and with that earned a surprised laugh from Ghislaine. Luke Bonner, it seemed, was above such things, too much a gentleman, far too seriously busy with all his many concerns.

And had this superior godlike brother of hers never had a sweetheart? Lily wanted to hear, unless of course Ghislaine simply didn't
know.
This brought a long recitation of the names and connections of those young ladies who had set their sights on Luke without success. Some had wondered if Luke was the kind of man who preferred the company of other men, but then of course Mademoiselle Jennet had come from Scotland and all was made clear. Ghislaine was looking forward to having Mademoiselle Jennet as a mistress; she
laughed,
and she made Monsieur Luke laugh too, a rare skill indeed.

The citizens of Montreal put a great deal of value on good humor, Lily had noticed that right away, and these sleigh parties were the very best example of their lighthearted playfulness.

The sleighs had been brought to a halt while the men made plans about the route and the women called out in English and French to each other, good-natured challenges and outrageous boasts calculated for laughter. The horses nickered and tossed their heads too, holding their own conversations.

Simon sent Lily a sidelong glance, his dark eyes alive with the challenge, as excited as a boy with his first bagattaway stick. He flicked the reins and they were off, caught up in the scream of the wind. Lily heard herself cry out with it.