Into the Wilderness (45 page)

She
nodded, avoiding his gaze, and went off into the woods. Fumbling with the ties
on her unfamiliar clothing, Elizabeth lectured herself sternly on the need for
flexibility and self—reliance in new and challenging situations.

When
she came back to them, the men were already eating. Runs-from-Bears handed her a
hunk of corncake studded with nuts and cranberries and a piece of dried
venison, which she accepted thankfully. Nathaniel was staring into the wood and
seemed not to notice her. She sat cross—legged on the ground with her head
bowed while she chewed, willing her eyes to clear of tears. They ate in silence
and Elizabeth wondered miserably if they would ever talk again. When
Runs-from-Bears got up and walked into the wood, she did not watch him go.

She
felt Nathaniel's hand on her shoulder.

"Come,"
he said softly. "Come, you must be thirsty."

A few
paces into the woods there was a small spring that erupted from a tumble of
boulders, pooled and then ran away in a stream back toward the river.

Nathaniel
lifted her chin with one finger. "I'm sorry," he said tersely.

"What
are you sorry about?" Elizabeth asked, jerking her head away. "You
haven't done anything." She knew how terribly bitter she sounded, but she
was too unhappy to dissemble.

"You're
ill at ease and I ain't helping much," he said. When she didn't deny this,
he smiled.

"Don't
have much excuse for it, though. Except things was pretty tense, and I'm quiet
when I'm worried."

He
crouched and leaned forward to drink from the spring, and then, wiping his
mouth with his hand, he gestured for Elizabeth to take her turn. But his hair
was bound back in a tail and hers was not; it swung forward and caught the
water, spraying her with droplets. Concentrating, Elizabeth tried again with
her head at another angle.

Nathaniel
watched her grow furious with herself for her clumsiness. Knowing the danger of
touching her, he hesitated but then caught up her hair to hold it for her while
she drank. The heavy silkiness of it filled his hand and caught his fingers,
revealing the slender white back of her neck. That sight made everything in him
clutch in a fist of urgency and lust and protectiveness.

She
managed it with his help and gurgled a little laugh, turning to him with water
flashing in her eyelashes. Then she stopped, her own face suddenly mirroring
the look he knew she must see on his own, the wanting, the tension of not
enough time for wanting.

He
dropped her hair as if it were on fire.

"Now
you know how to drink from a stream," he said hoarsely.

"Nathaniel,"
she said.

She
put her chin up at that angle that meant he had better listen. If it weren't
for the fact that the sun was rising and that back in Paradise people might
already be aware that she was gone, he knew he would take her right here. The
stunned look on her face said that she would have him, and gladly.

She
cleared her throat.

"They
can't possibly be after us yet," she said. "Curiosity won't let them
near my room until nine, at the earliest." There was a little catch in her
voice, something strange in the way she related this. He met her gaze steadily
and she blushed.

"Your
brother knows you're gone," he pointed out.

"Yes,"
she said. "He does. But he can't exactly tell them that, can he?
Nathaniel." She paused, and then that lift of her chin again. "It
wouldn't hurt you to talk to me a little, you know. It won't make them move any
faster, and it would be .. . a comfort. This is hard for me, if you hadn't
realized."

"I
realized," he said, less gently than he intended. "And you're right,
it won't make them move any faster but it might make us slow down some."

Her
face clouded at this, and Nathaniel swore softly to himself even as he watched
his hand lift of its own accord. It slid through the tumbled hair and his
fingers found the nape of her neck, holding her there. She closed her eyes and
swayed toward him. Nathaniel met her halfway, dipping with his head to tilt her
face up to him. He caught her mouth briefly, and then let her go.

"Tonight,"
he said. "Tonight we'll talk. Once we're wed. That is," he said, with
the first full smile he had been able to summon up since she had come sprinting
through the night to Lake in the Clouds. "If we don't find better things
to do."

They
were back on the water by mid—morning. The men paddled hard, and the canoe
moved through the twists and turns of the Hudson with an agility and elegance
which Elizabeth soon took for granted. Even the patches of white water came and
went without causing her much concern; it wasn't until later, when Mrs.
Schuyler asked about this stretch of their journey, that she came to realize
how much she had assumed.

But
it was hard to pay attention to anything but the incredible beauty of the river
and the lands which bordered it, the mountains in the grip of spring. A good
four weeks early, Nathaniel pointed out. And the warm weather was their good
fortune. Elizabeth thought of this journey with the added burden of a snowfall
or heavy rains and she said a silent prayer of thanks.

She
saw things she had never imagined; a moose with impossibly long legs walking
nonchalantly into the water to browse the new shoots, swallows careening and
dipping by the tens and hundreds, a doe heavy with fawn frozen at the edge of a
marsh, a line of turtles on a partially submerged tree trunk, their knobby
shells glowing gray—green in the sun. A bear cub on its own, gnawing at a
flyblown carcass of a fox on the shore. Elizabeth pointed this out to
Nathaniel.

"Wolverine,"
he corrected her. "Or some call them forest devils." She looked again
and saw the long, bushy tail.

There
were rich smells, the water itself and sun on fertile mud and acres of
wildflowers in blossom. At the river's edge, willows trailed pale fronds in the
water where dragonflies hovered.

And
there was Nathaniel to watch, in front of her. He had taken off his shirt in
the heat of the sun. At first she looked away, the vestiges of aunt
Merriweather's training still strong enough to make her start at his nakedness.
But of course she must watch him, this man she had held in her arms just a day
ago. This man she would hold tonight. She was at complete liberty to look at
him to her heart's content. A little self—consciously, knowing that this would
not escape the attention of Runs-from-Bears, Elizabeth settled in to make a
thorough study. The way his muscles contracted and then relaxed, the shape of
each of them as they rolled and flexed in his shoulders and upper arms, the
easy, knowing grip of his hands on the paddle. She had time and ease now, to
study his tattoo. Like a long bolt of lightning it looped around his left side
and up his spine. The rhythmic swing of his hair hid it and then revealed it
again where it disappeared into his hairline at the nape of his neck.

The
force of her staring finally caused him to glance over his shoulder, to catch a
look on her face that she would have preferred not to share, at that moment. He
grinned at her and made a comment to Runs-from-Bears. There was a low grunt, of
agreement or laughter, Elizabeth couldn't tell. She decided not to ask for a
translation.

Gradually
she began to take in signs of habitation. A gaudily colored duck building a
nest in the wreck of a canoe half—hidden in reeds. At a distance, two men
fishing in a marsh. Smoke rising from a cabin peeking out of a grove of pine
trees. A canoe paddling upstream, slowly, the boys in it nodding to them in
passing.

It
was on the last portage that they first ran into the trapper. He was a small,
wiry man with a battered coon cap too large for his head and grime and tobacco
juice worked into every crease on his face. He nodded at them from under his
canoe, his eyes sliding in a disinterested way past Elizabeth to move greedily
over the furs that Runs-from-Bears carried. Elizabeth imagined she saw
Nathaniel shift the weight ever so slightly. He was dressed again, his chest
crisscrossed with leather thongs and a wide leather belt around his waist that
supported a long knife in a beaded sheath, a bullet pouch, and a tomahawk
tucked flat to the right of his spine. His rifle was slung easily across his
shoulder pack, his powder horn under his right arm.

When
the man was long gone, Nathaniel stopped, settling the canoe on the ground and
then entering into a long conversation with Runs-from-Bears that Elizabeth had
no chance of following at all.

"What's
wrong?" she asked.

But
Nathaniel was hefting the canoe again, and he didn't speak until he had it
balanced where it belonged.

"Bad
luck, to run into him," he said. "We'll have to move faster."

Elizabeth
glanced back to where the path disappeared into the wood. "Who was
that?"

"Dirty—Knife,"
said Runs-from-Bears with a disgusted shake of his head.

"To
the Kahnyen'keháka he's Dirty—Knife, but he goes by Claude Dubonnet
otherwise," said Nathaniel.

"Peter
Dubonnet's father? My student Peter?" Elizabeth had never seen the man
before; he had been in the bush, trapping, all winter.

"Aye,"
said Nathaniel quietly. "And headed for Paradise, no question."

"But
why didn't he speak to you?" she asked, mystified.

"Because
he's Dirty—Knife," said Bears. Elizabeth saw that there was no further
explanation forthcoming.

"Oh.
Well." She knew she should be alarmed, but instead there was vague sense
of disconnection. Claude Dubonnet would be in Paradise this evening and tell
them who and what he had seen.

"We
knew they'd be coming sooner or later."

"This
is too soon," Nathaniel said. "And they know we didn't head for
Johnstown."

"Can
we be in Albany by morning?"

"It
would be better if we could get this settled today," Nathaniel said.
"We'll have to stop in at Saratoga, hope that the Schuylers have come up
early, given the warm weather."

"The
Schuylers?" asked Elizabeth, with growing alarm. "Do you mean Major
General Schuyler and his wife? Catherine?"

He
nodded.

"My
father speaks of Philip Schuyler quite often, Nathaniel," Elizabeth said.
"He considers the general a trusted friend."

Runs-from-Bears
grunted, a dismissive sound.

Nathaniel
didn't seem worried, either. "I don't doubt he tells himself that,"
he said. "But I have a feeling the Schuylers'll be glad to see us."

Once
back on the water they moved fast on the strong spring currents of the Hudson.
In just two hours of winding waterway, they came to the juncture where the
river joined the Fishkill, quickly passing what looked to be a small abandoned
fort on the north shore of the smaller river. Here the white water was enough
to buffet them hard, but Elizabeth's anxieties were focused elsewhere. On the
west side of the river she could see the rising smoke of a small settlement
just beyond the trees, and then there was a cleared path up through woods to a
setting that reminded her of the England she had left behind. Not the narrow
and grimy streets of London, or the wild, unrestrained countryside of Scotland
where she had gone walking with her cousins, but the England of her growing—up
years, clipped and tended, the England of afternoon visits and whist tables and
musicales. It took her breath away to see that world appear suddenly on the
banks of this wild and unpredictable river.

There
was a fine wooden house, Georgian in style but of modest size. Near it were
neatly fenced outbuildings of many types; she saw two barns, and at some
distance, the steeple of a small church. Placid, fat cows grazed lazily on the
pasture which was surrounded by forest. Beyond that, a man with a span of oxen
turned soil in a wide expanse of field. In a garden behind the main house, women
worked with hoes. Children ran back and forth in a game involving a ball; she
could hear their shouting above the river. Then the canoe was at the bank, and
there was nothing left to do but to get out and go up to the manor house with
Nathaniel on one side and Runs-from-Bears on the other, just as she was, in
Kahnyen'keháka overdress and leggings, carrying Many-Doves ' wedding dress of
finest white doeskin carefully embroidered with beads and quills in the pack on
her back.

"Nathaniel!"
cried a voice before they had climbed all the way up the bank. "
Sakrament,
if it ain't Nathaniel! And
Runs-from-Bears!"

In
front of them had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, a huge man dressed in
rough work clothes. He clenched an old pipe in one corner of his mouth while he
talked, but managed to bellow quite impressively all the same over his
shoulder. "You there, Johnnie! Go on and tell 'em in the house, Nathaniel
Bonner has come to call and Runs-from-Bears with him, and young lady just to
put the sugar on top!" As if to verify the importance of this errand, he
lifted his wig off his head completely, revealing a pate as creamy white and
bare as the moon, and set it down again with a determined tug. Then he grinned
and stuck out one reddened hand in Nathaniel's direction, lurching forward at
the same time to intercept him.