The Endless Forest (24 page)

Having Lily and Simon at home meant more to do in the household, which put the maids in a justifiably sour mood. Elizabeth solved the problem by asking if one of the other LeBlanc sisters might like to come to work.

That brought her the first faint glimmer of a smile. Matilda would start tomorrow, at the same wages as her sisters.

The Bonners were one of the few families in Paradise who paid with coin rather than bushels of cabbage or ells of cloth, and cash was always welcome. They had four LeBlancs working for them—Joan and Anje in the house, and Sam and Carl in the stable and garden. It was why the girls stayed on, Elizabeth knew very well. They had the best places in the village and would keep them, no matter how offended their sensibilities might be.

When Elizabeth could put it off no longer, she got dressed to go down into the village. Adam and Nathan had been waiting for this, as it was their turn to go with her. She started off with the boys to either side of her, hindered by the mud and distracted by their antics. There was a long story about a honeycomb, the Savard cousins, Curiosity’s kitchen cat, and a wager. The story bounced back and forth between them, and Elizabeth grabbed what she could as it sped by.

“I believe you’ve just confessed to larceny and gambling. And beyond that, you’ve given away your very advanced and frightening grasp of the principles of hucksterism.”

The boys frowned at each other. Elizabeth could almost hear their thoughts: Grandmother Bonner had started to talk like a book, and so early in their outing too.

Adam said, “If you mean we cheated the girls, I guess we did.” Adam had a talent for the truth. Sometimes when she was talking to him, she remembered the stories she had heard about the father who had abandoned him before he was born, how strange the ways of nature when a seed from such a poor tree thrived and grew into something straight and strong.

“It wasn’t much of a wager,” Nathan said. Even at the end of a long winter his hair was almost white-blond. In their physical selves the two boys could hardly be less alike, but in mind and deed they were cut from the same cloth exactly.

Adam did his best to change the direction of the conversation by pointing out a towhee perched on a pine branch, raccoon tracks, the remains of a squirrel that had run into a dog and never run away again. He talked until Nathan worked up his courage to ask a question.

“Our folks won’t let us do anything or go anywhere since the flood. We haven’t even been to Lake in the Clouds yet. Why is that? The flood was so long ago.”

“To your way of thinking it was a long time ago,” Elizabeth said. “But you must think of those who still do not have a roof over their head. It won’t be much longer before school starts again.”

Nathan’s smooth face scrunched into thoughtfulness, and it made him look very much his mother’s child.

“What worries you so?” she asked him. And then, after a silence: “You needn’t tell me if it’s a secret. As long as no one is in danger, you needn’t tell me.”

“Is it a danger to make Aunt Birdie mad at you?” Adam asked, and Nathan flashed him a warning look.

“If it is, something is very wrong,” Elizabeth said.

The boys exchanged another glance, and then Adam spoke up. “Why doesn’t Birdie want to be in the same classroom with us? She’s only five months sixteen days older than Nathan, so why shouldn’t she be in the same classroom?”

For the rest of the walk into the village they discussed the family generations, where Birdie stood in relationship to her own brothers and sisters, and what it was like to be stuck between them and her nieces and nephews. By the time they had come to the Red Dog, the boys seemed much less agitated and more thoughtful. Elizabeth sent them off to say hello in the smithy and then to go watch the men building the new
bridge, with firm directions on where they may go and where they may not.

The boys were off before the last word was spoken and Elizabeth turned toward the schoolhouse, trying to organize her thoughts and not getting very far. Both subjects she wanted to discuss with her son were difficult, and both were important. As she walked up the steps to the schoolhouse door, she was surprised and a little ashamed to realize she was holding her breath.

But Daniel wasn’t in the school. She walked from classroom to classroom to the apartment in the back that he had so vehemently denied Martha—the rooms swept and scrubbed now, and free of all traces of mud.

On the lane she asked Friend Emma Michaels, but Emma hadn’t seen Daniel and neither had any of the others Elizabeth stopped. In the shell of the new trading post the noise of hammering was so loud that she had trouble getting anyone’s attention. That gave her a moment to study the improvements.

There had been a large hearth and a Franklin oven, but those things were gone now. The men who had gathered here to exchange news and opinions about everything from crops to presidents had already begun to migrate to the Red Dog, but now they would have no choice. So many memories tied up with the old trading post, most of them good, some of them so funny that she smiled even now when they came to mind. It occurred to her for the first time that the only gaol Paradise had—Anna’s pantry, as they still called it—had been lost with the rest of the trading post. She wondered if they’d build another one, and where. It was a question she wouldn’t put to Tobias Mayfair, who was very difficult to draw into conversation even on topics as uncontroversial as the weather.

It was odd that the Mayfairs should be living here in Paradise for so long but still did not understand—or care to understand—the most basic of facts about their neighbors. They would build a larger and better lit and cleaner trading post, but their business would decline because they made no place for men to sit and talk. But maybe that was what Mayfair wanted; he might be hoping to bring in women, with pretty fabrics and ready-made clothes. The younger women showed little interest in spinning and weaving, after all, but just as much interest in fashion as their mothers and grandmothers before them.

The new sign, freshly painted, was propped against the wall to dry. In
strong black letters it declared the place to be Mayfair’s Mercantile. Anna could have told him, if she were still alive, how fruitless it was to try to rename things in Paradise. She herself had tried to call the trading post an emporium, but had to give it up as a bad job when Magistrate Bookman asked her what she meant, if she was declaring all Paradise an empire or just her piece of it.

When Elizabeth finally had the attention of one of the Mayfair sons—which one she could not say, there were so many of them—and he had gone around to ask, she learned that Daniel had been seen in the early morning, but not since.

Elizabeth stood in the soft spring sunlight and considered. Daniel might be helping Callie or working with Ethan; he might have gone to call on one of his student’s families, or he could have gone home to the small house he had had built for himself in the strawberry fields, an hour’s walk up Hidden Wolf. A walk she would not have hesitated to undertake even a few years ago. A walk she would have enjoyed, because it was her favorite time of year in the endless forests, when small things woke up and reached out. If you stood very silent for long enough, you could hear it happening, like the whispering a butterfly made working its way out of a cocoon.

She read herself a short sermon: The smells of spring were in the air, and the light had a buttery color that was particular to this time of year. The walk would do her good, even if Daniel was not at home. Why, she could continue on to Lake in the Clouds and visit with Susanna, who was always glad of company, most especially company of women who had been married longer than she herself. It had been a long time since her last visit, when the snow was still deep and the cold unyielding.

Or she could go home again, and see how Lily was faring. If she had found a way to be comfortable in mind and body both.

The letter she carried crackled as if encouraging her to hurry along.

Don’t be a coward
.

She said this to herself aloud, and then she turned toward the lake, where most of the men—including some of her own—were trying to get the new bridge finished. People had had enough of waiting to be ferried across the river. Even fifteen minutes in the company of Willy LeBlanc was daunting, for the boy was as garrulous and distracted in conversation as his father. To Becca’s credit, he was a much harder worker. As were all the LeBlanc children.

“Boots, if you were any deeper in your thoughts you’d drown.”

Nathaniel grabbed her shoulders before she walked directly into him, and then he kissed her and let her go.

“You look less than happy to see me,” she said. “I suppose because I was lost in my thoughts.”

For years he had been trying to impress upon her the importance of paying attention to her surroundings, especially in spots such as this one, where trees cut off the view of both the lake and the village center. When she was first in Paradise she had heard many stories of panthers—or painters, as the woodsmen called them—attacking the unwary. Then she had seen it for herself, and thus should be all the more cautious, but still over the years the fear had faded.

She could try to make this argument to her husband, but it would get her nowhere. Primarily because he was right.

“I’m turning into a forgetful old lady,” she said. “But I will try harder. Where are you going?” She cast a pointed look at the empty bucket he carried.

“Nails,” he said. “If Joshua has got the new batch done. And what about you, Boots? Why are you wandering in the woods? Never mind, let me guess. You’re looking for Daniel.”

He was grinning at her. A long strand of steel gray hair was caught up in the simple silver hoop he wore in his ear, and she reached up to smooth it. Nathaniel took the opportunity to grasp her hand and raise her wrist to his mouth.

“Ow!” Elizabeth pulled away, laughing. “You nip like a bull calf. And don’t you dare start, I won’t have one of your conversations here in the open.”

That made him laugh. “You are looking for Daniel, ain’t that so?” With the heel of his hand he pressed the spot between her breasts and was rewarded with the crackle of paper before she could slap his hand away.

“I knew you were up to something when Hannah brought that letter and the two of you shut yourself up with Curiosity.”

“And how do you know it has to do with Daniel? It could be Lily or anyone else.”

“Because I know that look,” Nathaniel said. He let a long breath go and pulled her to him with one arm. “And because there’s a lot of talk about a box that came all the way from India, addressed to our Hannah.”

It would do no good to deny any of it, and so Elizabeth looked around herself and then lowered her voice. “I promised Hannah I would talk to Daniel before I told you or anyone else.”

His brow folded down, and then he inclined his head. “Fine then, Boots. But don’t make me wait too long.”

“The sooner I find the boy, the sooner you’ll hear for yourself.”

Nathaniel turned to look over his shoulder into the woods. “You don’t hear him?”

“I hear hammering and geese but I don’t hear—” She stopped and concentrated. And there it was: the sharp, abrupt sound of a knife penetrating wood.

Nathaniel nodded. “He’s been at it an hour at least. Give him a reason to stop, he won’t fight too hard.”

W
hen he was agitated and ill at ease, Daniel worked with his knives.

At just nineteen he had taken his rifle to war to make a name for himself, as his father and grandfather had done before him. He came home with an arm that could not support the weight of a book, much less a long gun. It took a year for him to accept that he wouldn’t ever be able to handle a rifle again, and another year before he turned all his effort and attention to throwing.

He started with the tomahawk that belonged to his great-grandfather Chingachgook, practicing every day until his good arm shook and he couldn’t make a fist anymore.

One day he came upon a doe and without giving it much thought he threw and killed her with one clean blow to the neck. He had to hold the doe’s head down with one boot to wrench the blade from the spine where it had lodged.

Once he had mastered the tomahawk Daniel began working with smaller blades. Now he had a half dozen different weapons of all sizes and types, some of them of his own design, forged in the smithy. He
carried five or six blades with him at all times, as he would have carried his rifle.

Daniel was proud of the fact that he hunted for his own table, cleaned and cooked what he brought down. Rabbit and squirrel, grouse and turkey, ducks, and once a wild swine. He left the larger game for the most part, because he couldn’t get it home on his own and disliked the waste of field dressing. The skins he brought to Annie for curing, and paid her for her help.

Now a knife came as easily to hand as a fork or spoon. Daniel tested the weight of the heavier hatchet before he let it go. It made the
whoop-whoop-whoop
sound of an eagle flying overhead, and then it severed a witch hazel branch as thick as his good wrist.