The Endless Forest (29 page)

“They’re going!” one of the boys called from the front porch.

“Not yet,” Hannah said, coming into the doorway. She was dressed for the walk up Hidden Wolf, but she carried a tray that she set down where Lily could reach it. Covered plates and bowls, and lovely smells.

“My share of the party?”

“There’s more in the kitchen.” Hannah’s gaze moved over her face and torso. Her doctor look, brow lowered to a sharp V. Lily didn’t like to think too much about what went through her sister’s head. The calculations she went through, every day, on Lily’s progress toward bringing this child into the world.

Hannah said, “We’re off in a minute.”

Elizabeth said, “Will you tell Gabriel and Annie that I expect them for supper next Sunday? And whoever else wants to come from Lake in the Clouds. Where is Daniel?”

“He’s gone ahead.”

“With Marrrrthaaaaaa,” called Isabel from the doorway in a long singsong that ended in a giggle.

“Silly geese,” Hannah said. “Martha is going to walk up with us.”

She kissed Lily on the cheek and smiled at her, but Lily found it hard to return the smile.

T
hey set out for Hidden Wolf when the first hint of dusk was in the air. They were on foot and everyone carried a basket or box. Ethan had a keg of cider strapped to his back, which was odd indeed. If Martha were to ask Lily to draw him like this and she sent the drawing to Manhattan, no one would recognize him. He had shaken off that other person, the city version of himself, and he seemed healthier if not happier for it.

The procession on foot was part of the ice-out tradition, Jennet told Martha. And in truth Martha didn’t mind the long walk. It would give her time to gather her thoughts and try to sort out exactly what was going on.

Callie had been gone not a quarter hour when there was a knock at the door, and Martha went to answer it with her heart in her throat. But it wasn’t Daniel, as Callie had predicted. Instead Ethan had invited her to Lake in the Clouds for the ice-out party. Ethan had accompanied her dozens of times before—to recitals and museums and receptions—and this invitation felt no different. Friendly, detached. She asked for a half
hour to get ready, and spent the whole time wondering where Daniel was.

She shifted the basket she carried over her arm. Again she wondered if she should have brought gloves, warmer boots, a scarf, and again she reminded herself that there was no cause to be so nervous. This was a party, after all, and she would be among friends. Certainly there would be pelts enough at Hidden Wolf to keep everyone warm, even if the weather should turn.

Up ahead of her on the path there was talk and laughter, but Martha moved more slowly. It had been such a long time since she had come this way, and with every new view she found herself stopping to look out over the river valley that ran away to the east. As the gloaming came over the mountains every tree seemed to be outlined with light, while behind her the shadows stretched through the woods like the gentle touch of a mother’s quieting. Thrushes and finches were settling down for the night while the nightjar and owl roused themselves. Grouse scratching in the underbrush, and the cooing doves, the bark of a fox. It was so beautiful, and somehow she had simply forgotten what it was like. What it was.

Hannah called her name and Martha hurried to catch up, casting a glance back over her shoulder. Still no sign of Callie. The full impact of the afternoon’s conversation had not hit her until an hour later. Then she sat, trembling hands folded tight in her lap, and tried to reason her way through what had happened and what she was feeling.

It was no use; there was no way to put a better face on what had passed between herself and the person she still thought of as a sister. The memory wouldn’t be denied or even put aside for very long. Martha pushed it down once again, Callie’s anger and hurt—there was nothing else but to admit that somehow, without thinking, she had caused Callie great hurt—and once again it rose to leave a sour taste in her mouth.

And something else. Something she had always feared but never felt before, with Callie. For the first time Callie seemed to be envious. The orchard was everything to her, but she envied Martha, and why, exactly? Did it come down to something as simple as money?

Liam Kirby had left her his considerable fortune. Before Jemima ran off, when she had thought of herself as Martha Quick, she had daydreamed about her real father coming to claim her. He would take her away from Jemima and she would keep house for him, and if he had no fortune she never would have missed it. Instead he had died in the war
and now she had his money instead, and with it came the Spencers, her guardians, and a new home in Manhattan. She had never asked for any of it.

She thought Callie understood that much. Callie
did
understand that much, or at least, she had once understood it. This was not the friend Martha had grown up with. Something was far wrong, and it had only partly to do with changed plans for a new orchard house. Martha determined that the only way to get to the heart of it was to sit Callie down and demand the whole truth, come what may. She would do that as soon as she got back to the village. In the meantime, she would not let the party be ruined because Callie Wilde had got her head full of foolish ideas.

She set herself that goal, and one more: She would see that the orchard house was built, whether or not she ever set a foot in it. Callie could protest; she might insist on paying back every penny, but she would have the house.

Once Martha put Callie out of her mind, she found herself just as wound up with thoughts of Daniel, who hadn’t joined the group for the walk up to Lake in the Clouds either. Whether this meant he wasn’t coming, or had gone ahead, that Martha couldn’t know without asking. Something she would not and could not do.

Out of sight Luke was telling a story about a trapper named Malone who had come into the Red Dog and tried to pick a fight, and how Charlie LeBlanc had made an effort to talk him out of it with liberal helpings of schnapps, and failed. Malone had just about got it into his head to take a swing at Ethan when Jim Bookman showed his face and things settled down.

Once the trappers had gone all the way to Johnstown or Albany to trade their furs, but now they came only as far as Paradise, where they got fair prices from Luke Bonner. But that also meant fistfights and sometimes worse, fueled by hard drink and short tempers.

Today Martha seemed to be overflowing with memories, things that hadn’t come to mind for years. Most likely, she told herself, it had to do with the fact that this was the path she had walked to school and home again, when home had been the big mill house that overlooked the river and the village. Martha had made herself look at it as they passed. Recently painted a light gray with white shutters, every windowpane polished, crisp white curtains. The brass door knocker winked in the late afternoon sun. A young woman with a baby in her arms stood at one of
the uppermost windows, a room that had been closed off when Martha was a girl. As most of the rooms had been. They had lived in the kitchen and two tiny chambers. In the deepest, coldest part of the winter they had sometimes slept on pallets by the kitchen hearth where some small amount of heat came from the banked fire. And still Martha remembered waking with her breath frozen on the blanket over her face.

It seemed all her memories of the house where she grew up were of cold. Drafty rooms with great damp splotches of peeling wallpaper, the smell of mice in dim corners. The casements that weren’t shuttered were boarded over because where was the money to come from, Jemima would ask out loud, to replace a dozen windowpanes? When Martha had nightmares, which was not so often in the last years, she always found herself in that house with its smells of cooking beans and cabbage, dust and lye soap. Chilblains kept her awake at night, listening to the sound of Jemima’s pacing.

Martha straightened her shoulders and tried to pay attention to the world around her. Not much farther to the cabin that had been Elizabeth Bonner’s school. Where she had taught her own children and almost everyone else as well. If you lived in Paradise, were under forty and knew your letters, you most probably had learned them from her. As Martha had, and both her parents. As Callie had too.

Martha paused and shifted the basket Curiosity had given her to carry. The smell of fresh cornbread and new butter made her stomach growl.

“Martha!” called Ben Savard. “Make tracks!”

It wasn’t safe to walk the mountain at dusk without a weapon. When darkness fell the big cats came out to hunt, and the first bears were about with empty bellies. Martha knew all that but somehow the danger didn’t feel real until she heard the tone of Ben’s voice. She picked up her pace and caught up to the others at the old schoolhouse.

For a moment it seemed that time had rolled backward yet again, because there were children sitting on the cabin porch or playing nearby. Then she recognized the Oxleys, who had so recently lost their home and mother both.

The children were telling stories to the unexpected visitors. Martha heard one of the older children politely offer tea and Ethan’s carefully worded refusal, always laced with easy good humor. He was very good with children. Good with everyone, really, able to put people at ease, though he himself never seemed to be.

Mr. Oxley came to the door, or Friend James, as they called him. A tall and painfully thin man, his cheeks so sunken he could not have many teeth. But when he smiled his whole face erupted into a landscape of wrinkles, and it turned out he did have teeth, though not so many of them as most.

They spent some minutes talking about the progress he was making rebuilding his own place near the river, how much help he had gotten and how thankful he was, and what a shame that Lily couldn’t join the party on such a fine spring evening. Hannah wanted to know how the children were getting on, who was doing the cooking, whether there was someone to take care of the littlest Oxleys and look to the endless list of chores a mother with five young children and a household must face every day.

“My second cousin Belinda is coming,” Oxley told them. “A widow with two children of her own, older boys.”

So the women gossiping in the village had been right. A man like this one must remarry quickly or lose his children. James Oxley had acted quickly, and Martha liked him for it. Callie’s father had not dealt so well with loss and disappointment, while Martha had never once seen her own father in the flesh.

Finally they walked in silence for a while. Martha wondered if the men were still thinking of the Oxleys or if their minds had gone on to other things, the evening ahead or the work that waited tomorrow, whether it would be necessary to go to Johnstown for supplies before long, the things that needed mending, chairs and traps, a hoe, shingles.

The women’s minds were still with the Oxleys, there was no doubt of that. Jennet had a look Martha had come to recognize, determined to accomplish something others told her she could not. The Oxleys wouldn’t want for clothes or food as long as Jennet had a say. Hannah kept her thoughts better hidden, but Ben must have known what was going on behind those dark eyes, because he leaned over and whispered something in her ear and she laughed and batted at him. With that the melancholy spell was broken and they began to talk again.

The woods thinned and then they were in the strawberry fields, a long narrow meadow that would be fragrant with fruit in the height of summer. As girls she and Callie had often played in the ruins of an old cabin right off the deer path that angled from one corner to the other, but even that had changed. A newer house stood where the old cabin
had been. This one was larger, and in the shape of an L with a porch across the front. Daniel Bonner’s place, then. She had known about it but never come so far up the mountain to see it on any of her visits. It hadn’t interested her enough then, but she was interested now. Her pace slowed as they passed so she could take in more details.

There was one old oak in the meadow, close enough to the house to provide shade in summer. Daniel had planted a few more trees to make a half circle that would protect the spot from the worst of the winter winds, once they had grown in. There was no garden unless it was on the other side of the small barn.

The house itself she recognized as similar to the ones Ethan had built on the Johnstown road. Not fancy or fussy, but pleasing to the eye. She had been expecting a cabin similar to the one she had grown up in: two rooms at the most, and just as many small windows to break up the squared log walls chinked with clay.

Martha was looking so hard that she walked right into Ethan, who had come to a stop on the path without her notice. He grabbed her shoulders before she could fall over.

Jennet said, “He’s gone ahead to Lake in the Clouds, or we might invite ourselves in.”

Her tone was unremarkable, but Martha was aware of the way the others were holding themselves, as if they were intruding on something private. Martha might have corrected them. She could have said there was nothing to be secretive about; she had no claim on Daniel nor he on her. If she felt some inexplicable urge to tell everything, all she could confess to was a few conversations. The only time he had touched her was to help her up out of the mud, and of course there was the episode with the hat—