The Endless Forest (61 page)

Martha began with the table that served as Daniel’s desk, piled high with stacks of books.
Geography Made Easy: A Short but Comprehensive System. More Speedy Attainment of the Latin Tongue. A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Tongue. Practical New Grammar. The Schoolmaster’s Assistant, a Compendium of Arithmetic Both Practical and Theoretical. The Natural Sciences. The Art of Writing. Sketches of the Principles of Government
.

The books not related to teaching were more scattered and had been much more thoroughly read. Kant’s
Anthropologie, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, M’Fingal, Moll Flanders, Tom Jones
. She was surprised to see that together they had enough novels to fill an entire shelf.

There were dictionaries and grammars for Latin, German, and French. In general there were a lot of books in French; she found a dozen of them on the worktable, of all places, under a pile of shirts that needed mending. She sat down to look through them, her pulse picking up a notch.

Descartes, Toussaint, Voltaire, Balzac, Rousseau, Diderot, and a French grammar and dictionary. Dry as dust, all of them. No sign of the Lady of Leisure.

While she dusted and arranged all the books she had found, Martha considered. There were three possibilities, as she saw it. She could confront Daniel directly and insist that he either produce the book or confess he had made the entire story up out of whole cloth; she could continue to search; she could simply put it out of her mind.

She tied up her skirts so they wouldn’t be in her way when she climbed the ladder into the attic to look through the boxes she had seen up there.

Ethan had plans to open up the attic into a sleeping loft, but that was further down his long list of improvements. For now it was nothing more than a raw floor with slanting walls that needed diligent dusting and sweeping. Moreover, it was tremendously hot even in May despite the open vents at either end.

The trunks were lined up in a row. Martha lifted the lid on the first
box and dropped it as soon as she realized what she was seeing were packets of letters, all tied with serviceable string. She was curious, but the idea of reading someone else’s mail—even her husband’s—that she would never even consider. The letters were Daniel’s, and Daniel’s alone.

The second box was full of clothing carefully folded. She made a note to herself to ask him about these things, and then she went to the third and last box.

She hesitated, because a question had come to her, one she should have considered first. What was she going to do with the Lady of Leisure once she found her?

Daniel, look what I found in the attic
.

Daniel, is this the book you were telling me about?

Daniel, your French Lady of Leisure’s memoirs were very instructive. Would you care to join me in our room on our very broad, very high, very chaste bed so we can discuss them?

The sensible thing to do would be to walk away.

With one quick movement Martha lifted the lid.

It was almost a relief to see that the box was empty; she could put this nonsensical crusade aside. Except that there was a single piece of paper at the bottom. She picked it up.

In Daniel’s hand, a single sentence written in ink as black as his heart:
I know what you’re looking for
.

Outrage and laughter and embarrassment vied for the upper hand while Martha sat there looking at the message Daniel had left for her. Then she heard a familiar voice calling.

“Martha!” Birdie yelled. “Where are you?” And then Hannah’s voice: “No need to shout, little sister.”

“Maybe she forgot we were coming,” Birdie said.

And she had. Martha had forgot completely about Hannah dropping by with her Chinese needles. She asked herself if she was mean enough to enjoy the discomfort the treatment would cause Daniel, and decided that she was not.

But he didn’t need to know that.

Daniel came in, sweat-drenched and bare-chested, to find two of his sisters sitting with Martha.

She looked to be in a fine mood, which might mean she hadn’t been up to the attic yet, or another possibility: She wasn’t looking at him because she was mad and didn’t want to show it.

It had been a calculated risk. The truth was, he liked Martha in a temper, because arguments led to lively discussions where she let her guard down. The note was supposed to make her just that mad and no madder.

That whole line of reasoning had required exactly as much time as Birdie needed to propel herself across the room like a spinning top.

“I knew you’d keep your word!”

“Your faith in me is much appreciated,” Daniel said dryly. He took a towel from the washstand and began to wipe himself down while Birdie held center stage.

“Can I explain it to you? Hannah, can I explain to him?”

“Go right ahead,” Hannah said, looking up from a thick stack of closely written papers.

Birdie held herself very straight and still, as though she were reciting in front of a class.

“The idea is, bad things get caught up in you and can’t find a way out. And these needles, they make holes—tiny little holes—for the bad to come out of. So you’ll feel better.”

“Like a lightning rod,” Daniel suggested, and she scowled at him.

“Not like a lightning rod. A lightning rod is there for the lightning to grab on to. A lightning rod fools the lightning into staying away from trees and people and houses. This has got nothing to do with grabbing on; it has to do with letting go. Helping the nerves let go. Isn’t that right, Hannah?”

“In the essentials.” Hannah had opened her bag on the table and was taking out bits and pieces and lining them up. To Birdie she said, “I will need water.”

Birdie shot outside and soon the sound of the pump working came to them. Daniel found himself standing there, unobserved, while Martha talked to Hannah about what she might need, whether the bed or the table or perhaps even the floor would be the best place for Daniel to stretch out.

Daniel took the opportunity to open the carved wooden box Hannah had brought with her. Some twenty needles on a bed of silky green velvet overlaid with white silk. Thin needles as long as a finger, with small ivory grips at one end. Tucked into the velvet that lined the inside
top of the box was a folded piece of paper that turned out to be a diagram of the human body. The writing was in Arabic and English printed very small in a neat hand.

“Daniel?” Hannah called again, and he turned to her.

“As soon as Birdie gets here with the water—” she pulled a jar of soft soap from her bag, “we can all wash and begin.”

There was no arguing with Hannah when it came to washing before she treated someone. She and everyone else in the room would wash three times. Hands were then examined and if there was dirt beneath the fingernails or if the fingernails extended at all beyond the nailbed, that person would have to clip their nails and start again. She was unrelenting on this point, which she had learned from Hakim Ibrahim when she was very young.

Daniel had once asked her to explain the reasoning to him in more detail, which had resulted in a visit to the small building that had once been Richard Todd’s lab. Hannah had brought her microscope out into the daylight and then had him examine all sorts of things from pond water to spit until he conceded that yes, there were beings smaller than the human eye could perceive and yes, it made sense to be as free as possible from such things when she was trying to fix something.

People who came to her for help gave in to her demands soon enough and few even remarked about it anymore. Except for Jennet, who made a needlepoint banner to frame and hang in Hannah’s workroom:
Evil resides beneath the fingernails
.

In some things Hannah had no sense of humor, but she had smiled and allowed Jennet to hang the needlework.

The plain truth was, the citizens of Paradise had good reason to trust Hannah. If you listened to her and did as she told you to do, there was a pretty high chance that you’d eventually get up out of bed and go on about your business. But the respect she had in Paradise didn’t extend beyond its borders.

“Are you thinking of Nut Island?” Hannah asked, bringing him up out of his thoughts with a jerk.

“That was the last time you operated on me,” Daniel agreed.

“This isn’t an operation,” Hannah said. “But I hope it will do you some good anyway.” She turned to Martha.

“You are very quiet. Does the idea of this particular treatment bother you?”

Martha pursed her lips and Daniel had to resist the urge to laugh out loud. She was mad, all right.

Before Martha could answer Daniel said, “Just don’t let her get hold of those needles.”

“Oh?” Hannah raised an eyebrow, glancing back and forth between them. “I gather you’ve given your new wife reason to be angry.”

“Why do you jump to that conclusion?” Daniel said, vaguely affronted.

“Because she knows you,” Martha said.

Hannah said, “Martha, if you’d rather not stay—”

Martha gave a short laugh. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

W
hen Birdie came along with Hannah on a call, she spent the whole walk home peppering her with questions. Why one kind of fever tea over another, how quickly a bone would knit, when a baby might be born, what Hannah heard when she put her ear to someone’s back, and what those sounds meant.

But today Birdie was lost in her thoughts. She was working herself up to ask a big question, and Hannah thought she knew what it was going to be. And then Birdie surprised her.

“Can we go home the long way?”

There was a question within the question that Hannah heard quite clearly.

“You want to see how the beaver are coming along?”

There was a line of beaver dams at the far end of Half Moon Lake, an arc that stretched more than three hundred feet and was as tall as a man in some places. All of that had been destroyed in the flood, and Birdie had been worried about the beaver as much as she worried about her
neighbors. Despite the assurances of her father and brothers and uncles and cousins that the beaver would rebuild.

“Not the ones trapped in the dens,” she had said darkly.

Birdie was at the mercy of her imagination, as Hannah had been as a girl.

So they changed direction and started down the path that would end far from the village, where forest gave way to marsh and marsh to lake.

Hannah had work at home and this detour would cost them an hour or more, but she was glad to be in the forest where the heat—because it was unusually warm for May—gave way to cool shadows. The smells that rose with each footstep took her back to her childhood, when she had spent much of her time in these woods.

Birdie was still very quiet and her expression was grave.

“What is it?” Hannah asked. “Are you worried about Daniel?”

Birdie seemed surprised by the question. “No, not overmuch at any rate. Do you think the needles will do him any good?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “The treatment has to be repeated many times before we’ll be able to tell.”

“It was kind of disappointing overall,” Birdie said.

“Oh, really?” Hannah tugged on the younger girl’s plait. “Bored, were you?”

“Not bored. But you hardly put those needles into him at all. Just the very tip. Not even a drop of blood.”

“You look distinctly put out,” Hannah said. “But it would have been a strange way to try to relieve him of pain, sticking a dozen two-inch-long needles into him.”

“But it would have distracted him for a while at least.”

Hannah laughed. “He wouldn’t sit still for that.”

“He would,” Birdie said. “If Martha asked him.” After a long moment Birdie said, “I’m glad they got married.”

“So am I.”

“They were fighting before we got there.”

Hannah stopped and Birdie turned to face her.

“What makes you think that? What did you think you heard when you were at the water pump?”

Birdie could produce a look of dry disbelief that exactly mirrored
their father’s. “Nothing,” she said. “It wasn’t anything anybody said. It was the look on Martha’s face. Or maybe, that she wouldn’t look at him. You didn’t see that?”

Hannah thought for a moment. “I did. But it doesn’t mean that they’re fighting. Married people disagree.”

“You can say that again. Don’t laugh, you know it’s true,” Birdie said. “You and Ben get into arguments all the time.”

“And we get out of them again.”

“Yes,” Birdie said, her mouth twisting. “I know how you do that too.”

In her surprise Hannah gave a full laugh, but Birdie wasn’t at all put out.

She said, “Daniel likes getting Martha a little mad. He was thinking about it all the time you were putting those needles in.”

“Are you in the habit of reading Daniel’s mind?”

“Sometimes,” Birdie said quite seriously.

Hannah said, “Are you worried about Lily? You know she is doing very well. If we can keep her in bed, I think she will come through this pregnancy with a healthy baby.”

“Lots of women don’t,” Birdie said.

That was true, of course, and Hannah didn’t try to deny it. They had lost a mother and baby just months ago.