Fire Along the Sky (51 page)

“The day will come,” Jemima said. “My day will come, you wait and see.”

Curiosity said, “Don't talk foolish.”

Then Jemima smiled. It was a smile that would stay with Elizabeth for the rest of the day and into the night; for its cold honesty, and the weight of its promise.

Chapter 30

Dear family,

It is two weeks since I removed the bullet from my brother's side, and so I write to tell you that the wound is healing and there is no sign of infection. He is stronger every day. The rest of the news is not as good. The damage to the nerves in his shoulder must be considerable, for the pain is constant. For the most part he refuses laudanum because, he claims, it clouds his mind, and there are others more in need than he.

The truth is, he has no use of the arm and will not, I fear, for a long time to come. Still he exercises it to keep the muscles from wasting, which Curiosity and my aunt Many-Doves will approve.

He sends the following messages: to his mother, that he is well tended and fed; to his father, he is sorry to have lost the good rifle he was given when he turned twelve; to Gabriel, that maple sugar is worth the work; to his cousin Annie, that he is trusting her to keep an eye on Gabriel lest he drink all the sap before it can be boiled into syrup; to Curiosity, that he is glad of the warm socks she knit for him from the wool of her own good sheep; to his twin Lily, that he has a painting she did of a sleigh moving over a snowy field, sent to him by our brother Luke, and how proud he is of her. And more, that he has learned to approve of Simon Ballentyne, and hopes that she does the same.

Blue-Jay is in good health. He is sent out into the garrison with the other able-bodied men to work, every day. Thus it has been possible for him to see my uncle Runs-from-Bears and they have talked. Because we are only allowed to be with the prisoners from sunrise to sunset, the same hours that he must work, I do not often have the chance to talk to him, but I make sure that he receives his share of the extra food that my brother Luke sends now twice a week.

The spring takes a hard toll on the prisoners. This week three men died of smallpox, two of brain fever, two of pneumonia, another three of their wounds, one when he was crushed by logs while on work detail, and one drowned while trying to escape. In the garrison hospital they have had more deaths still, most from smallpox and typhoid.

Of these twelve prisoners who died, the men have been most affected by the death of a young soldier. In all his time here he never roused himself to tell his name, and so he goes to an unmarked grave. I think of his poor family, and mourn for them.

Jennet writes her own letters, but I will say here what a good help she is to me, both as a surgeon's assistant and as a friend. I do not know how I should manage without her. The prisoners and the soldiers all love her for her kindness, for her good humor, and most of all, I think, for her stories. Luke is less pleased with her for she still refuses to travel on to Montreal. I understand his concern but I would be loath to lose her companionship.

From Luke you will have the rest of the news you must be waiting for.

Your loving daughter
Hannah, also called Walks-Ahead by the Kahnyen'kehàka, her mother's people, and Walking-Woman by her husband's. Written in her own hand the fifteenth day of March 1813.

Dear Father and Stepmother,

I would like to write to you that my brother and cousin will be home in a few weeks' time, but in good conscience I cannot give you false hope. Hannah and Runs-from-Bears agree that he is not strong enough to travel, and may not be for another month or more. You will see that it would be foolish to try anything before he has regained his health. I wish I had better news to share, but I will remind you that Daniel is improving, and for the moment at least is out of harm's way.

There is another matter I need to bring to your attention. I hope that my father might have some knowledge of a man who is now resident at the Nut Island garrison, and is in daily contact with Jennet. I have some suspicions about this person that I have not yet been able to either prove or dismiss on the basis of information available to me. My grandmother has suggested that my father may know more—though she will not say exactly why she believes this—and so I will describe the man here.

He calls himself Father O'Neill, a Catholic priest, and he calls himself an Irishman though he does not speak with the accent. He is a man close to fifty years old, strongly built, six and a half feet tall, graying black hair, blue eyes. His reputation is as a fighting priest. He roams from company to company hearing confessions, saying mass, and joining in skirmishes with great relish. Somehow Jennet gave this priest the idea that she was a Protestant, but open to conversion. She claims in her letters to me that while she is listening to his sermons she is also convincing him to see that the prisoners get the things they need. There is no harm in it, she says, and I am not to worry.

Except for this: my grandmother, who knows of every priest who has ever set foot in Canada, knows nothing of this man. In fact no one had ever heard of him before the start of this newest war, nor is there any record of his arrival. He appeared out of thin air, and I suspect he is up to no good.

I asked Runs-from-Bears to watch this man as well as he might from the followers' camp, and from him I have a little more information. The priest is missing the lobe of his left ear, a fact that is usually hidden by his hair, which he wears loose. He walks like a woodsman, and when Runs-from-Bears gave an owl's hunting cry in the middle of the day, he looked up suddenly and with suspicion, as would any man who had lived for a longer time in the great forests.

For obvious reasons, I cannot go to Nut Island. Neither can Hannah leave, and Jennet will not. I am uneasy at the bone about this man's real intentions; I pursue this matter in whatever way I can. Of course should there be any trouble Runs-from-Bears will see to it that Hannah and Jennet are brought to safety, and that fact alone allows me to pursue this matter less aggressively than I might otherwise.

If indeed you know anything of this man, the courier will wait for an answer from you before he leaves Paradise.

Your loving son
Luke

Chapter 31

“Now I seen some mighty messes in my time,” said Curiosity, shutting the kitchen door behind her with a thump. “But I don't think I ever seen the likes of us.”

The dozen people who had braved the storm for Richard Todd's burial—the last of three—stood in their best clothes, dripping icy water and mud onto Curiosity's scrubbed floor.

Elizabeth's plans for Dolly Wilde and Cookie Freeman had fallen nicely into place, but on the way from the meetinghouse graveyard to the Todds', the storm had come down on them.
The best laid plans,
Abe had observed, and Nathaniel finished the verse for him in the Scots he had learned from his mother:
must gae agley.

All Elizabeth's careful plans had to be abandoned. Instead of readings and speeches and the singing of hymns, there had been a rushed prayer before they broke and ran for cover.

Only Black Abe, Nathaniel, and Simon had stayed behind to fill in the grave. Nicholas Wilde, who had come to all three gravesides alone—to Elizabeth's relief and disquiet both—had disappeared as quietly as he had come.

There was a strange humming energy in the room. It was the storm, Elizabeth told herself, and the morning's work, and the fact that everyone had been watching to see if Jemima would come to make trouble. Callie and Martha stood trembling and stunned, but Annie and Gabriel were barely able to sit still.

“You look like you jumped into the rain barrel,” Annie said to Gabriel, almost in admiration. “And then rolled around in the dirt.”

“Mama, Abe told you the weather was turning,” said Daisy Hench to Curiosity. She was already busy at the hearth with kettles and pans, and Lily went to help her. There was a great ham stewing in pot liquor, and from the oven built into the hearth wall came the reviving smell of fresh bread.

Curiosity only sniffed. “You Callie, you Martha,” she said in her gentlest voice. “Fetch the good sugar crock, would you please? A day like today call for as much hot sweet tea as a body can hold.”

Soon the whole kitchen was in movement: a stack of toweling appeared, clothes were hung up, heads were rubbed dry, and cups of tea were passed from hand to hand.

Elizabeth watched Curiosity set Callie and Martha one task after another, and she saw, too, how some color came into Martha's pale cheeks, and the vacant look left Callie's eyes.

She was standing with Daisy at the big cutting board, wound in fragrant steam from the ham on its platter. “Your mother is a wise woman,” she said.

Daisy ran the carving knife over the whetstone. “Sly too.” She grinned. “You watch, she'll coax smiles out of those two poor lambs before dinner is done.”

Though she didn't like the dining room and rarely used it, Curiosity had decided that the mourners would get their dinner there today. There were fifteen of them gathered around: five Henches, Curiosity, Callie and Martha, Simon, Abe, and four of the Bonners, along with Annie.

Curiosity said, “Ain't this a sight. I wonder what Richard thinking just now, looking down at us.”

Next to Elizabeth Nathaniel made a humming sound. She put a hand on his leg to quiet him, and he took her hand in both his own.

“Now I'ma talk a bit, words I was going to say over his grave.” Curiosity grinned. “Before the weather made us all cut tail and run.” Her glance ran around the table as if she expected an objection and knew just what to do with it should she find any. After a moment she cleared her throat.

“Richard was a troubled man,” Curiosity started slowly. “But he did some good. In the end I think he did more good than bad, and may the good Lord give him the credit he got coming. Cain't nobody deny but he had his share of sorrow and more. Times I thought it would get the best of him. He struggled, he surely did, and sometimes he misstepped, but there ain't nobody—not at this table nor who ever walked this earth—but can say the same.”

“Amen,” murmured Black Abe.

“So I'll ask the Lord to be merciful, and grant the man some rest.”

She sat down abruptly, and there was a small silence. Then Elizabeth stood. She said, “I am glad to have known Richard Todd, in spite of all our early difficulties. He took on our Hannah as his student and taught her well. She would be here if she could, to pay her respects.

“Ethan should be here too, and so should Richard's uncle Bump. But even in death Richard had a—I suppose I must call it a compulsion—to hold the people who care most about him at a distance.”

Her voice began to waver. Nathaniel squeezed her hand and picked up where she had left off.

“There's something we ain't said, but need to. Most men wouldn't have left an old shoe to a black woman or a Mohawk girl, but Richard Todd left this house to Curiosity and his medical practice to our Hannah. He never did care what other people thought, and I appreciate that about the man. Whatever history there was between us, he wiped the slate clean.”

From the far end of the table where Gabriel sat next to Abe came a sharp double rumble. Gabriel clapped both hands over his belly and sent his mother a sheepish look.

“Sorry, Mama,” he said.

Abe ducked his head. “It do smell awful good, Miz Elizabeth.”

The laughter came and went easily while dishes were passed and passed again. Rain rattled the windows in their frames and the wind made the trees that ringed the house creak and scream, but the food was hot and plentiful and there was an endless supply of hot tea laced with milk and sugar. Elizabeth felt suddenly very sleepy, but then Curiosity raised her voice again.

“I got a letter,” she said. “Abe brought it with him when he come from Johnstown. I was waiting for the right time to read it aloud to everybody at once. From Bump.”

“Your Bump?” Simon Ballentyne asked Lily, who sat across from him.

“Why, he ain't
her
Bump,” said Gabriel, his brow drawn down in outraged disapproval, as if Lily had tried to claim the pies sitting on the sideboard for herself alone.

“That's not what he meant,” Lily said to her brother. “And you know it. Simon, if you mean Mr. Bump who called on me in Montreal, yes.”

Elizabeth caught Simon's eye, and smiled. It seemed that for today, at least, Lily had decided that she could afford to put aside her irritation with them both.

Gabriel was of a different mind. He studied Simon for a moment and then said, “How'd you get that bruise between your eyes?”

“I was wondering about that myself,” said Nathaniel. There was a telltale quivering in the muscles of his jaw, and Elizabeth pinched him under the table.

“Did you fall?” Gabriel asked. “Did you run into a tree?”

“You're mean,” Annie said to Gabriel.

“I should rather say he is being rude,” Elizabeth corrected Annie. And then: “My, listen to that rain. And it feels to me as though the temperature must be dropping.”

“Dropping fast,” Nathaniel agreed.

Black Abe glanced up from the pile of ham and potatoes on his plate and nodded. “A hard freeze coming.”

“Mrs. Bonner,” Simon said. “I don't mind answering the boy's question.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes and groaned inwardly, but still she could almost feel the triumphant look that her youngest child shot at her.

Gabriel said, “Well, then, how did you get it?”

Lily's gaze was fixed on her fork, but her color had risen a few shades at least. Simon started to speak and she raised her face and shook her head at him sharply.

She said, “Gabriel. He did not fall, or run into a door or a tree or a fist. That's all you need to know.”

There was a moment's strained silence and then Curiosity said, “There's this letter, still, if you done poking at the man, Gabriel.”

That got the boy's attention as nothing else had. He ducked his head and allowed that he would like to hear it, pardon him please, and could somebody pass the ham, he was still some hungry.

When the bowls and platters had made another journey around the table Curiosity took the letter out of her bodice and unfolded it. From her apron pocket she took a pair of spectacles and put them on carefully, wiggling her nose like a rabbit until she was satisfied with the way they sat.

Elizabeth, who knew Curiosity as well as anyone, saw the slight tremble in her hands and sat up, interest giving way to fresh anxiety. She had put the letter down on the table and stood over it, her head at an angle, her whole posture putting Elizabeth in mind of a bird eyeing a worm whole, alert and alive and eager.

“‘Dear Curiosity,'” she began to read.

I find myself on the far side of the great lakes. As of yet I have still not found my nephew Samuel, who is called Throws-Hard by the Kahnyen'kehàka, or any of his children. However, I have spoken to an elderly sachem by the name of Elk-in-the-Snow, who has given me some reason to believe that I must continue this journey farther into Canada. It seems these old bones are not done yet with adventuring, but I do not complain. Indeed, I believe I owe my nephew Richard thanks for making me stretch both my legs and my mind.

Now for the rest of my news, of a surprising nature but a joyful one. In this place I have come across an old acquaintance of mine and someone much closer to you. After many days and nights of conversation I have permission to tell you that your son Almanzo is here, that he is well, and that he regrets to the bottom of his soul the pain he has caused you by his long silence.

He had cause. Not sufficient cause, he now has come to see, but to him it seemed so at the time. It has to do with the death of Hannah's husband, Strikes-the-Sky. More than that I cannot write down here. It is Almanzo's place to tell that story, for Hannah's sake, and for his own, and for yours.

I have told him of his father's death, and he is much shaken but now more determined to come home to you.

Thus this news: your son should be with you in Paradise a week or ten days after you receive this letter. It is time to butcher the fatted calf, Curiosity my dear.

Your true friend,
Cornelius Bump

“My God,” Daisy said, and she pressed her hands to her mouth. A great sob escaped anyway, and then a laugh, and then half the room was crying and laughing together. Chairs were pushed out of the way as people made their way to Curiosity, who had read the last part of the letter with tears streaming down her face.

“I'ma feed that boy up good,” she said between sobs. “And then I'ma beat him black and blue. Or maybe the other way around.”

Lily wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. She caught her father's eye and saw many things there: happiness for Curiosity, whose son had been restored to her. Resignation and some relief at the news that confirmed, finally, that Strikes-the-Sky was dead. Confusion and worry and doubt too, all those things wound together.

Simon just looked somber, and a little confused. “It's a long story,” she told him. “I'll tell you sometime.”

“You can tell him this afternoon, daughter,” Nathaniel said. “If he's still planning to call on you.” It was more a question than a statement.

Simon said, “Aye, I am.”

It was the look the men exchanged that caused Lily to flush with embarrassment and irritation. She said, “I am going to the meetinghouse,” she said. “There is some work I must finish.”

“I'll call for you there at four,” Simon said. “And see you home.”

“Cobbler for supper,” Nathaniel said. “From the last of the dried apples.”

Elizabeth, who had been listening but staying out of the conversation, drew in a sharp breath and then turned away.

“Another long story,” Nathaniel told Simon. “But not one you'll ever hear.” He was grinning in the way that men sometimes grinned at each other, when there was a woman at the heart of the matter.

Lily bit her lip. She had promised herself that she would cause no trouble today, for Callie's sake and Martha's. But there was a limit to even the best of intentions, and she slipped out of the room before she found herself standing on the other side of it.

Inside the meetinghouse, with the woodstove stoked and her wet boots set in front of it and her hooded mantle draped over a chair to dry, Lily sat down to lose herself in work. The storm robbed most of the light out of the afternoon and so she soon had to stop and light the candles. Any other time she would have simply given up for the day and gone home, but she did not like the idea of climbing the mountain in the driving rain. She might have gone to see Joshua Hench at the smithy and borrow a horse, but with her poor luck she would most likely find herself mired before she got very far.

Lily blew out all but one of the candles and found an old blanket that she had wrapped her canvases with. It smelled of dust and camphor and cloves, but it was warm around her shoulders. She settled on the floor near the little stove, and fell to sleep without thinking much about it at all.

When she woke, sometime later, many things occurred to her at once: there was a cramp in her neck; the fire still burned in the oven, but the room was much colder; and the storm had stopped. In its place was a strange twilight glow that filled the room.

The mantle she had spread out to dry felt good when she wrapped it around herself, so good that she might have gone right back to sleep. But the golden-red twilight would not be ignored, and so she padded over to the window in her stocking feet. At first she did not quite understand what she was seeing.

One of the things Lily remembered most clearly from the little time she had spent with her uncle and aunt Spencer in Manhattan was the chandelier that hung in their front hall. As a child she had been so enchanted by the way it caught light and spun it into colors that she sat under it for long periods of time, just watching. Aunt Spencer had taken note, and when they left for home she pressed a small package into Lily's hand: hard and uneven in shape, wrapped in a piece of silk and tied with a ribbon.

Inside there was a note: “To hang in your chamber window.” The crystal was one of Lily's most precious possessions.

Now she saw a world that looked as if it had been carved from the same clear, many-faceted substance. One part of her mind told her very primly that what she was seeing was nothing more than the results of a sudden freeze on the heels of a hard rain. The other part, the part that was an artist, was not satisfied with such a simplistic answer.