The Endless Forest (38 page)

“People will care,” she said. “People will say—”

He took her hand and squeezed it hard. “But I don’t care,” he repeated slowly. “We’ll go to a lawyer and see about getting papers drawn up, so you can keep what’s yours. Signed and witnessed. Let people talk then, we’ll know the truth.”

“Will that be enough to convince your sister?”

“She didn’t ask my permission when she married,” Daniel said, more calmly now. This, at least, he had thought through. “If she had, I wouldn’t have given it. And I’d have been wrong. Simon is right for her. Can you leave my sister to me?”

Martha’s gaze was steady. After a moment she nodded. “Yes, I think I can. I mean to. But there’s still the question of Callie.”

It was as if she had spoken a name completely unfamiliar to him, so confused was his expression.

“Callie? What about her?”

“She came to me—why, it was only yesterday,” Martha said. “She was very agitated, and she said some things—I wouldn’t care to repeat them. But she predicted this.” She lifted their clasped hands and let them fall.

His brow rose. “She did?”

“She said we’d be married before the summer was out. And she was so angry, Daniel. She said it was about the house, about the idea that she and I would build a house and live together there, but I wonder now if she isn’t in love with you after all.”

If he was feigning surprise he was a very good actor.

“Callie Wilde is not in love with me.”

“I don’t want her to be hurt,” Martha said.

“Nor do I,” Daniel said. “But this is between you and me and nobody else.”

There was something so focused and knowing in the way he looked at her that gooseflesh rose along Martha’s spine in one long unfurling.

“We will make our lives in this village,” Martha said. “We can’t pretend it doesn’t matter, what others think.”

“If I was a suspicious man,” he said, his voice low and sweet, “I’d wonder if you had your eye on somebody else. John Mayfair, maybe.”

She straightened. “Don’t be silly. I met him for the first time yesterday evening. It would take a great deal more than that to make me fall in love with him. Another evening, at least.”

His fingers curled into her waist and she shrieked with laughter and tried to pull away, but he had her where he wanted her. And, Martha admitted to herself as his hand moved to her breast and his mouth covered her own, she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

—

She had never swooned in her life, but a half hour later Martha thought she understood what it must be like. She was a stranger to herself, so given over to feeling that even simple language eluded her. Daniel wasn’t having that problem. Between long, deep kisses he talked to her in a low whisper, his voice muffled against the skin. The words themselves searing into flesh.

In the village he was known to be quiet, even severe, but the things he said to her were extravagant, opulent, full of images of herself, as he saw her. The color of her skin, the taste of it at the hollow of her throat. The shape of her lip and earlobe, the smell of her hair just behind her ear.

Her breasts. Somehow they had come so far. Somehow it had seemed imperative, and she had helped. In a frenzy to know the feel of his touch exactly there. And then the reality of it, his open palm moving over puckered flesh in a soft circle until she gasped and twisted, unable to get close enough. Wanting more. Wanting everything. He whispered to her, smiled against her mouth, touched her tongue with his own. His hand cupping her face while his beard scratched her throat and then the shock of his mouth closing over her nipple. Her body jerking in response to that slow suckling, as if he had taken her already. As if he had climbed inside her.

Daniel was the one to pull away. The cool air on her wet breast made her shiver; his absence was so absolute that she could hardly fathom it. He slid to the far end of the settle, breathing as though he had never tasted air before.

“What?” her voice creaked and wobbled.

“We could be married tomorrow,” he said.

“There’s the school to open tomorrow.” She shocked herself, and yet she couldn’t deny what she was feeling, and that was simple: She wanted more.

“Then by the end of the week,” he said. His eyes were wide open. Deep-set eyes the color of ivy, something in the expression: shock, or disgust? It struck her then, the truth.

“I’ve shocked you,” she said. “I’m—immoderate.”

His smile was completely unexpected, and then he laughed.

Martha turned away, sudden tears spilling over as she tried to put herself to rights.

“Martha.”

“How dare you, how dare you laugh at me.” The sob came up like a stone.

“I am not laughing at you.” He took her arm. She tried to pull away but she was already up against his chest, her tears seeping into his open shirt. The crisp dark hair against her cheek and the beat of his heart, these things robbed her of the urge to pull away.

“I am not laughing.” He said it again. “I’m happy. Martha. I’m happy. And let me make one thing clear to you, right now so there’s no mistake. There’s no such thing as immoderate, not between the two of us. You could never be too eager. I’ll prove it to you, when the time is right.”

After a moment she nodded, and then she pulled away gently and went back to trying to make some semblance of order out of her clothing. He was waiting for her to say something, but everything that came to mind was monstrously unladylike. She drew in a shuddering breath and stood.

“I need to tell you the rest of the story. About Teddy and his mother.” She made herself meet his eye, because this must be done and be done properly, if they were really to continue as they had started.

He nodded, his expression neutral. “Go on, then.”

“I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about this,” she said. “But I think you should know.”

“You trying to scare me off?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Go on, then,” Daniel said with a calm smile.

She tried to put the story together in some rational order. Mrs. Peyton’s parlor, the heavy velvet and damask draperies always drawn to protect the furniture. Mrs. Peyton herself, still in mourning though her husband was six years gone. Her mouth pressed and pursed until it was ringed with a rigid white line, her whole frame trembling with anger.

The words she had used. Wanton. Unworthy. A look of hatred so plain it must have been very close to the surface all the time Martha had known her. The many kind things she had said and done—it seemed none of that had been sincere.

I hope you are not breeding, my girl. If you are, my son will not own you or it. The wages of sin will be yours alone to bear
.

She stood up for herself, because Teddy did not. Standing in a shadowy corner, bent forward as if to study the pattern in the carpet, he said nothing.

I have never allowed your son such liberties
. She said it firmly, and promised herself that she would not cry or faint or show these people anything but calm. Mrs. Peyton had pushed her to the limit of her endurance.

Liar, she called her. And worse. Far worse.

But Martha held her ground. Swallowed down her own outrage and anger and terrible sadness and held her head high.

Martha told Daniel all of it, sitting just far enough away that he wouldn’t touch her. All the noxious memories of that last interview came pouring out of her.

Like mother, like daughter
. And:
No wonder you pretend that she doesn’t exist. No wonder you lie with so little effort
.

“But I didn’t,” Martha told Daniel. “I’ve never been able to tell a lie. Not because I’m an especially good person. I simply have no talent for it.”

While Mrs. Peyton talked Martha kept her gaze fixed on the hall table heaped with wedding presents, all topped by a silver bowl overflowing with calling cards and notes. The wedding of the season.

She finished. “She called me
degenerate.”

That word had struck harder than anything that came before, because it was not new to her. It was the word she had chosen, after many years of careful thought, to assign to her mother. And Mrs. Peyton hung it around Martha’s own neck, tied it with knots that might never be undone.

Daniel was shaking his head. “No,” he said. His tone calm and sure. “That word does not apply to you.”

“How can you know?” She wiped her wet cheeks with the back of her hand. “Wasn’t this—” She gestured at the settle with its flattened cushions. “Doesn’t this prove her point?”

He took her chin between his fingers and tipped her face up to him. “It’s a gift you give to me,” he said.

“One you don’t want?”

“Of course I want it. I want you. But I’ve pushed this hard. Maybe I’ve just overwhelmed you. Maybe tomorrow you’d wake up and know you made a mistake. I wanted to give you time to think it through before we—before we took this last step.”

“Is that what it is?” Martha drew in a deep breath. “Is that what you call it, a last step?”

His eyes scanned her face, and then he lowered his head and kissed
her. “And the first too. You have to know, Martha. I’m not one to jump to conclusions. I know my mind, and I know that I want you more than I want anything else in this life.” He drew in a sharp breath.

“Except for the use of your arm,” she said. “You can say that. You must be thinking it. Anyone would.”

“Except,” he said slowly, “for the use of my arm. That’s something else we need to talk about. But not right now.”

Right now he used his good arm to bring her up against him, and Martha went gladly.

B
irdie was up first on Sunday morning, even before her father. She dressed as quietly as she could and made her way downstairs into the silent kitchen, where she got right to work.

She brought in water, stirred the fire in the hearth and got a good blaze going, cut what was left of yesterday’s bread, and fetched butter and the last of last summer’s plum preserves from the cellar. When her father came downstairs the table was set and Birdie was just setting out a platter of cold bacon and cheese.

He didn’t look particularly surprised to see her. Late last night he would have heard Curiosity’s story from Ma, and he was quicker than most men when it came to figuring out moods.

“I want to go down to the village so I’ll be there when Hannah and the others come over the bridge,” she said. “I’ve done all my chores. I would have started the porridge too, but I can’t reach the big kettle. Can I go?”

Her da could look right through her, it seemed to Birdie. After a minute he said, “No farther than the bridge.”

Which was all the permission she needed. Before Ma or the little
people could appear and spoil her plan, Birdie flew out the door. She held her breath as she passed the Downhill House, for fear that she would be seen and hailed. Before she talked to anybody about last night, she needed to talk to Hannah.

Hannah was the one most likely to understand the dreams that had plagued her. Somehow Curiosity’s story had got all tangled up with the flood and other things and Birdie just didn’t know what to make of any of it. In some things Hannah was far more Kahnyen’kehàka than white, and reading dreams was one of them. She would take Birdie’s worries seriously.

As would her mother, of course. But she wasn’t ready to talk to Ma yet.

She was glad to be outside so early. The growing weather had settled in and the morning was very clear, so bright that it seemed as if she could see each pine needle and budding leaf. She did mean to ask Lily if there were names for all the different greens in the world. To Birdie it seemed impossible but somehow necessary. Without names it was very hard to recall the exact shade of the new leaves on the sugar maple, something she wanted to be able to do, though she couldn’t say why.

Birdie found a spot on an outcropping of rock where she could warm herself in the sun and see into the village as far as the bridge. As soon as she caught sight of the others she’d run to meet them, take Hannah’s hand, and pull her aside so they could talk the rest of the way home. Before she was overrun by little people who would be as happy to see her as Birdie was.

It was so good to be warm like this that she felt herself slipping away into sleep more than once, and then had to get up and run in place. A walk up the mountain would keep her awake, but Da had said she mustn’t, and so Birdie turned her back on the bridge and focused on the pastures and fields. Friend Blackhouse was crossing the Rountree’s pasture on the far side, carrying a rake over one shoulder and a pannier on his back. He was wearing a widerimmed straw hat against the sun, but it was Arthur Blackhouse; Birdie could tell just about anybody by the way they walked. Just the same way a person could name a bird, by the way it moved itself through the air. Shapes within shapes.

The planting would begin just as soon as there was no more chance of a frost at night. The best thing about this time of year was the smell of sunshine on newly turned earth.

The faint sound of horses coming toward town on the Johnstown road came to her. More than one horse, and the rumble of wheels. The only people who were away that Birdie knew about were Praise-Be Cunningham, who had gone to buy some lambs, and the Magistrate, who had taken off for Albany on a big gelding called Popeye. Whatever was coming, there were four horses or more, pulling something bigger than a flatbed wagon.