The Endless Forest (76 page)

“I’m just looking for Callie,” Daniel said. “Seems like the women are wanting to have one of their tea parties where men aren’t welcome. You should go along too.” It was a pure lie; he knew without being told that there was something bad going on and that Curiosity would not want her daughter and granddaughter drawn into it. But Hannah had given him no details, and most likely she had done that because she didn’t want him telling anybody anything. He managed what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but Daisy saw right through it.

She said, “You’d break into a sweat if I took you up on that, that’s plain. You come fetch me if need be. You know you don’t have to ask.”

Solange was looking around herself, and then called out. “You there, Markus! Come on over here, baby.”

Solange’s oldest boy had been running in the footrace and his clothes were soaked with sweat, but he was smiling too.

Daisy said, “You go find Miss Callie, and tell her Daniel is looking for her. Where you want to meet her, Daniel?”

“Send her up to your mother’s,” Daniel said. “That’s where I’m headed right now.”

“You planning on joining that tea party by force?”

He produced a grim smile. “If needs be,” he said. “You know I will.”

—

It was Richard Todd who had built himself the small laboratory at the edge of his cleared property, about a minute’s walk from the kitchen door. It was as well equipped as any laboratory in Manhattan or Paris or London, with a reverberating oven that had been hauled upriver by keelboat and then over land at huge expense.

Hannah had inherited her uncle Todd’s practice and his laboratory too, but while she made use of it for her medical papers and books and medicines, she balked at calling it anything but her shack.

Daniel knew his uncle Richard would find it amusing that Hannah shunned the scientific research that was his only real interest. He had found everything funny in the last years of his life, even those things that caused sincere trouble to others. He was a difficult man but a good doctor, and he had trained Hannah well.

As he came around the corner of the house Curiosity shared with Hannah and her family, he saw that the door stood ajar. Hannah leaned against the doorframe, a large open book in her hands that she was studying intently.

Curiosity appeared beside her and waved her cane at Daniel in a way that said very clearly that he had other places to be and if he hadn’t figured that out for himself, she would show him good and proper. It would take a stronger man than he was himself to challenge Curiosity brandishing her cane, but Martha was there and Martha might need him. He’d stay as close by as Curiosity allowed. Now he went a little closer, if only because he knew it would make her laugh, and Curiosity’s laugh was a kind of medicine all on its own.

“Just in time,” she called to him as he came closer. “Go on and fetch me the biggest jug from the springhouse, would you be so kind?” There was a glint in her eye that he dare not ignore, but Daniel came still closer and looked over Curiosity’s head to see Martha, who lifted her shoulders at him; whatever was causing such turmoil, she hadn’t been told yet either.

“Nothing wrong with her,” Curiosity said, thumping the ground with all the menace of an angry billygoat. “Nothing wrong with any one of your folks. Now fetch me that jug, will you?”

It was one of Curiosity’s oldest tricks, and still there was no avoiding it. Daniel fetched the jug and then was sent on a half dozen other errands. Curiosity didn’t want him to join them, but she did want to know where he was, and she was inventive when it came to errands.

First she wanted her fan, which might could be in her parlor or mayhap in the kitchen and praise God, wan’t it too hot to sit without one? Then, in possession of her fan, she realized that everybody could use one and she sent him back to look in the bureau below the looking glass in the front hall, in the cabinets under the stair, and a half dozen other places.

Daniel started with the last place she mentioned, but she had anticipated him; it took ten minutes to find the fans. It was like being caught up in a conjurer’s spell. By the time he had fetched fans, handkerchiefs, and a particular book, and filled the water jug three times, Callie and his mother had arrived.

Curiosity met him at the door again. “You can see for your own self, nobody in trouble here. So go on now, wait over at the house.”

Once again Daniel considered challenging such a dismissal, but a lifetime of experience told him it would be no use. Then he looked up and saw the rest of the men coming toward him.

Now and then Daniel had the strange idea that his father could smell trouble. It was less than rational, but then again his father had a way of showing up where he was needed, even if folks didn’t know they needed him yet. This time he had come with backup. In the three quarters of an hour since Daniel came up from the village, his father had rounded up Luke, Ben, Simon, and not far behind them Gabriel, Blue-Jay, and Runs-from-Bears.

All together they made an army that few men would challenge.

Simon called out first. “What’s gone wrong?”

Daniel recognized Simon’s expression for what it was: worry for his wife.

“No trouble with Lily or Jennet.”

They stopped at the edge of Curiosity’s garden, where the smell of herbs in the sun filled the air, and waited for Daniel to reach them.

“Hannah wouldn’t tell me anything,” he said before they could ask. “All I can say is that she was agitated, and we aren’t welcome in there while they’re talking.”

“That’s not like Hannah,” Gabriel said. And: “I’m low on powder; can I get some of yours, Ben?”

It was their way, to get ready for the worst, but this time Runs-from-Bears raised a brow. “I don’t recall being so quick to prime my rifle at that age, do you, Nathaniel?”

“Huh,” Luke said, winking at Gabriel. “I seem to remember a story about a battle at William-Henry when you two were hardly older than Gabriel. You volunteered, as I recall.”

“And at Saratoga,” said Ben.

“Then there was Crown Point,” said Simon. “Not to mention—”

Runs-from-Bears held up a hand in surrender. “True enough. But unless I’m losing my eyesight I don’t think I’ve seen a redcoat or a scalp lock around here for more than thirty years.”

“Hold on,” said Ben. “What kind of trouble are we talking about—talking trouble or shooting trouble?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said. “Except that Hannah went looking for Martha and Callie first.”

The men looked at each other. “Sounds like Jemima,” said Blue-Jay. “I think I’ll check my powder after all.”

They laughed on the way back to the house, but it was an uneasy laughter. Daniel checked his knives, and tried to imagine what could have put his sister Hannah into such a state.

When Birdie saw her father and Ethan set off on the hillside path she went and looked for the rest of the men, and at that point she realized that she had been tricked. Every one of them was gone, and she was pretty sure she knew where they were.

It was her own fault; she should have known better than to trust Daniel, who was inscrutable as inscrutable could be. Now all the grownups were headed home, and that meant somebody was in some kind of trouble.

She took five minutes to locate all the little people and another five to remind them what was expected of them as Bonners. The three oldest boys got mad at her, as they always did when she was looking out for their best interests. She didn’t particularly care just at this moment. She was too busy thinking about what could be so wrong that everybody headed uphill at the same time.

It could be Lily, but as soon as the idea came to her she dismissed it. It was way too early for Lily’s baby, and the grown-ups weren’t quite moving fast enough for that kind of emergency.

Birdie slipped quietly through the crowd and into the woods behind
the trading post. She waited a while to make sure the boys weren’t following her, and then she started uphill.

If her father didn’t know she was following, he couldn’t send her back. In fact, he hadn’t said anything about her staying put. He hadn’t said anything to her at all about what she might and might not do this Fourth of July afternoon. Birdie filed that fact away in case she needed to defend herself.

She was a good runner, sure-footed and fast, but she had already run three races and she knew she wouldn’t be able to catch anybody up. At the fork in the road she had to come out of hiding to see which way they had gone, home or to Curiosity’s.

The most recent tracks were on the path that led up to Curiosity’s, which put her mind to rest about Lily. And still when she got to the edge of the clearing, she was out of breath and hot enough to keel over. She knew better than to rush right in; she’d sit where she was until she had come up with a plan.

A good plan was crucial. Without a plan she’d get caught before she could figure out what was going on, as had happened in the cloakroom at the schoolhouse. A well-laid plan was built on good information; that was something she had learned from her father and mother both, and they were experts. In their long-ago youth they had both got themselves into bad trouble and then planned their way out again, and more than once.

Birdie approached the house from the blind side, and then walked around it pausing to listen at every window. She had started to wonder if maybe the grown-ups had gone on to Uphill House when she heard the sound of her father’s voice in the kitchen.

The kitchen was hard. There were two windows on one wall, and there was the door that went out to the kitchen garden and pasture and outbuildings. Anybody standing at the windows could see her, and anybody in the garden or pasture or outbuildings could see her at the kitchen door. Birdie changed direction and stood for a minute with her back against the wall, considering.

Were the women in the kitchen too? If all the Bonner men were there, it seemed unlikely that anybody else would have room.

Birdie considered. She could go in the front door, but it was next to impossible to do that without making a floorboard creak, and Da would
hear her. Ma claimed he had roused out of a deep sleep more than once at the sound of a step in some other part of the house. His hearing was as good as his eyesight, and he was known for his eyesight for a hundred miles around, and more.

There was a trellis on the far wall, where Curiosity had trained morning glories to climb. People mostly didn’t come around that side of the house because it wasn’t convenient—another word from her notebook—which made it perfect for Birdie’s purposes. She would climb the trellis to the window that opened into the girls’ room, and then she could sit in the upstairs hall and hear everything. As long as the kitchen door was propped open, which it always was in the summer to let the breeze through.

As long as the little people didn’t come home before time, she’d find out what there was to know with the least possible fuss and then she could decide what she needed to do.

“It’s not like you to be so jumpy,” Curiosity said to Hannah.

Elizabeth was thinking the same thing, but she resisted the urge to agree aloud with Curiosity. Whatever was happening, Hannah must be left to tell them in her own way. Curiosity knew that too, but just now she seemed to have forgot. They were all jumpy.

Martha and Callie exchanged confused glances, and then Callie spoke up. “Is this about Nicholas?”

“No,” Hannah said. “It’s about Jemima.”

The name drew a spark. “What about her?” Callie snapped.

“She’s here. At the Red Dog.”

Curiosity drew a deep breath and closed her eyes. “Lord God be merciful.”

Elizabeth put a hand on her shoulder, and Curiosity covered it with her own.

“Let me tell it from the beginning,” Hannah said.

Callie began to pace up and down the room, and when she finally came to a stop it was to interrupt Hannah.

“She wanted you to examine her? It must be some kind of trick.”

Callie’s anger was plain to see, but Elizabeth was more worried about Martha, whose expression was studiously blank.

“It isn’t a trick,” Hannah said. “She is sick.”

“With
what?”

Hannah looked at Curiosity, and the older woman nodded her encouragement.

“I don’t know if it has a name. She has had episodes on and off for the last year. Swelling and severe pain—” She touched her own abdomen where it met the breastbone. “When the pain comes she can’t hold down food or water. Laudanum gives her little relief. The nausea is so severe that she dry-retches for minutes at a time. Coughing or sudden movement makes the pain worse.”

“I thought she looked on the thin side. What about her stool?” Curiosity asked.

“Full of fat and the stench is—I’ve never come across anything as bad.”

Curiosity nodded. “Rash?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “A very strange rash. It surrounds her navel in a circle. It reminded me—” She broke off.

“Like a bad spot on an apple,” Curiosity finished for her.

Callie made a sound deep in her throat.

“What,” Martha said, her voice coming so rough that she had to swallow, “what are you thinking?”

Hannah turned to the anatomy book that lay open on the worktable and picked it up to hold it in front of herself like a teacher in the classroom.

“You see these digestive organs tucked up against the liver? The gallbladder, the ducts that empty the bile, the pancreas, the stomach itself. The simplest explanation for what is wrong with Jemima would be gallstones that are blocking the bile ducts.”

Callie’s face crumpled. “You did not call us here to tell us Jemima has a bellyache.”

“No,” Curiosity said. “She called us here to tell us Jemima is dying.”

The silence drew itself out, and Elizabeth watched Martha. Her posture, the set of her shoulders, the tension in her jaw, none of that changed appreciably.

Very quietly Hannah said, “I said the simplest explanation would be gallstones, but her condition is far worse.”

“You said these episodes come and go,” Callie said. “Why is this one different?”

“Malignant disease progresses until it can’t be ignored any longer. It
is interfering with basic bodily functions and soon her organs will begin to fail entirely.”