Wilderness Run (3 page)

“Home,” Bel said.

“But where is your darling cousin?” Mary Ruth's question drifted faintly back as the sled picked up speed. Apparently, the driver had no interest in his charge's conversation.

Bel pretended she didn't hear Mary Ruth and stared instead at Laurence's house as she passed it. A French château-style with long awnings on the second story, it never looked more like a fortress than in that moment, when the crimson brick absorbed the day's last light. Only the awnings diminished this vision. Completely unsuited to Vermont's heavy snows, they sagged and dented each winter under the white weight, and each spring, Laurence's mother stubbornly tried to beat them back into shape.

In contrast to the ornate proportions of George's mansion, Daniel had designed Greenwood during his wife's pregnancy to be a stately but simple expanse of brick and wood. Greenwood had only one decoration in its two stories and gabled attic: the peculiar windows, set into the walls, each with a small arch above and a lip below for Faustina to plant boxes of flowers. These delicate decorations looked like lashes and every window a feminine eye that peered out on the elms in the front yard and the garden behind. Greenwood was always cool inside, summer and winter, and smelled faintly of the cedar doors from Lebanon that Faustina had installed in the upstairs closets to keep the moths out.

The sled swept over the crest of the hill as Bel scuffed through Greenwood's open gate. Johnny Mulcane, the tall, gruff hired man, was standing on the porch roof, sweeping the snow from it. His silhouette loomed across the lashed windows, the broom brushing wide arcs of white down onto the yard. Johnny acknowledged Bel with a tight little nod as she passed. Ever since she had evangelically tried to teach him to read a few summers before, he had grown silent and cold in her presence. She remembered pressing her small hand over his, trying to reveal the triangle of the letter
A,
the first of the alphabet, like a small pointed house, an Indian tepee—the way her tutor explained it. Before she got to
B,
Johnny Mulcane had retracted his hand and lurched off to the garden, his shoulders bowed. The half-finished
A,
spindly and large, had remained on the copybook, embarrassing Bel when her tutor checked her progress the next day. She stoically did not confess its author.

As she reached the kitchen door, the entrance that she and Laurence took out of lifelong habit, Bel looked back one last time, hoping to see her cousin. A snowy cascade swept across her sight, blurring the street beyond. She thought she glimpsed the two of them, boy and slave, creeping through the dusk, their backs bent together, heads propelled forward like dogs searching for a scent. But when the air cleared, this vision vanished, and the tip of Johnny Mulcane's worn boot appeared at the edge of the roof. She knew he must be watching her, but Bel did not look up at the beardless, balding man who always wore the same wrinkled gray trousers that bagged about his legs and smelled of something dark and foreign. She missed Laurence with the suddenness she felt after receiving one of his letters from Boston, when she realized it would be months before she saw him again.

The kitchen door opened just as she was about to twist the brass knob. Grete appeared in the threshold, ruddy, fair, and obstinate in posture, as if she were always being buffeted by a strong wind. If Mary's official domain was the linen closet, Grete's was the kitchen, and she ruled over it with wooden spoons and the heavy shields of bread dough she thumped on the counters.

“So,” Grete said, deepening the vowel so that it bore both the sound of discovery and the grief that such discovery was not pleasing at all. “Where is the Laurence?”

“He's coming,” Bel said quickly, wishing she had prepared some excuse. “One of his old friends wanted to have a snowball fight, and I was cold, so I came home.” She peeked guiltily up at Johnny Mulcane's boot, as if he might somehow contradict her testimony, but the cracked black sole was gone and she heard the scraping sound of his broom resuming its arcs. Johnny was collectively shunned by Mary and Grete, who had determined long ago that he had some Indian blood, which made him unworthy of their Irish and German attention.
Not to mention the fact,
Mary hissed to Grete one day when she thought Bel wasn't listening,
that he ain't God-fearing like the rest of us. I tried to get him to go to church with me, and the man said no, outright no, like I had insulted him.

Grete widened the door slightly to allow Isabel passage into the interior. A wave of warm rich air swept out, making Bel suddenly ravenous. Grete's mother was from Germany, and she had been brought to the United States by Faustina's own father, who had cultivated a taste for all things German, particularly his table. Isabel grew up with the pungent beef of sauerbraten, the pounded crispness of schnitzel, and clouds of cream cakes on Sundays, when her mother enforced
Kaffee
in the late afternoon. Grete was an excellent, if disgruntled, cook, whose burly shoulders and pinned blond hair were far more formidable than the lines of soldiers a local general commissioned every year to practice on the town green.

Grease crackled in the skittle on the claw-legged stove. Bel entered the dry heat of the room and paused, her cold cheeks stinging.

“You are too late for cakes,” Grete announced dramatically. The cook used the word
cakes
indiscriminately for all sweets. She jostled past Bel and began to crack eggs into a bowl. Bel watched the yolks slide from their shells, top-heavy and bright. She did not want to leave the kitchen until Laurence came back. She wanted to tell him, wanted to say she was sorry, or wrong, or both. When was the last time she had opposed her cousin? She couldn't recall refusing him anything, especially now, when they saw each other so seldom.

Grete began whisking the eggs, muttering about the people who always invaded her kitchen at exactly the wrong time, people who had no respect for those who worked, day in and day out, to keep others comfortable.

“People,” she concluded with a grunt, as if the very word were enough to disgust her. Her white apron shook as she swept past Bel, holding the whisked yolks, and began to pound pieces of pork flat with one of Johnny Mulcane's mallets.

“May I have some hot chocolate?” Bel asked, hoping to stall until Laurence arrived.

“If you fetch the milk.” Grete brought the hammer down on a pink slab. Bel sighed. Grete always managed to persuade someone else to retrieve things from the cramped, unheated pantry, where she kept the perishables in winter.

Soon after Bel headed in the direction of the pantry, Laurence stormed in. “Where's Bel?” he asked, his voice like a plucked string. Bel ducked past the jars of canned peaches, cucumbers, and cabbage and into the yellow room. As she poured the milk from a metal pail into a pot for the stove, she heard Grete's rumbling retort. The liquid looks like melted bone, she thought, remembering the hard, fleshless fingers of the slave.

Laurence's reflection flared across the jars behind her, his head made long and spoon-shaped by the curve of the glass, his shirt still radiating cold air from outdoors. When she set the pail down and raised the pot in front of her chest, Bel's wrist shook and the milk sloshed against the sides. Her cousin stood just beyond the pot, wearing a tense, exultant expression. She could see the tiny hairs spoking between his eyebrows, and smell his sour, boyish breath.

“I'm sorry.” The words swept out of her.

“Are you?” he said, almost in the same instant. “He came with me anyway. I've got him hidden under the last bridge. Behind the hemlock tree.”

Bel imagined the green spray of branches, the runaway crouched behind them, his knees clutched against his chest. She couldn't remember his face, just the burlap hat, the newspaper sticking in his frizzy black curls.

“Will you help him?” Laurence pushed closer to her. The milk spilled against the coat she still had not taken off, making a stain. Laurence's eyes were deep brown, chipped with almond lights.

Grete's hammering increased, the
pound-pound-pound
shaking the floorboards beneath them. Bel swayed against the shelves, while Laurence remained still, unaffected by the mild vibrations, gazing at her. She nodded, finally, letting her chin dip toward the white liquid and then raising it. She shoved the milk pot at Laurence, making him step back. A splash of white fell with a smack against the floor.

“I will if my mother will,” she added faintly, and the thought immediately reassured her. Her mother would tell them they were right to save him.

“Of course she'll help.” Laurence said quickly, but he was staring at Bel as if he were seeing her for the first time. Bel stared back. A fleck of dirt was stuck to his lower lip, and she reached up to brush it away. His red mouth closed around her finger, gently holding it a moment before he let go.

The hammering stopped, and they both blushed and looked down. When Laurence still did not move, Bel pushed the pot ahead of her again, this time slowly, so nothing spilled.

*   *   *

Just after the two young Lindseys emerged from the pantry, Mary appeared in the doorway, her hands fisted on her hips.

“Laurence, were you out that whole time without a coat?” Mary had the near-translucent skin of a true redhead, and an entire constellation of freckles now darkened with worry at the sight of Laurence's blotched face.

“No, I forgot it at a friend's house.” He tried to act nonchalant, but a shiver cracked his sentence in half.

“On a night like this? Oh, sar, your mother will be worried sick!”

“If you tell, I'll say I saw you go meet Nicky in the coach barn the other night,” Laurence threatened. Nicky, Mary's longtime beau, was a blacksmith. He came to take her for walks on Sundays in the summer and fall but showed no signs of interest in marriage. At this threat, Grete emitted a hoarse, unfriendly chuckle and set Bel's pan of milk onto the stove.

“Laurence! You wouldn't. It's not true.” Mary attempted to stare him down.

“I would. And it is.”

“Well then, I suppose I'll just tell them that you're finally home,” Mary snapped at Bel, who was an easier target than Laurence. Bel nodded, preoccupied, her finger still tingling from the light pressure of Laurence's lips. She rubbed it against her dress, trying to erase the sensation.

“Tell them also that I have made Mrs. Lindsey's favorite dish,” commanded Grete, ushering Mary out the door with a wave of her wooden spoon. Laurence gave Bel a confident nod at the mention of her mother. The milk in the pan puckered and began to boil. Grete whisked it off the metal surface and stirred a dark syrup of sugar, water, and cocoa powder into it, staining the white liquid in quick swirls. The chill of the pantry had made Bel realize how fast the temperature was dropping outside, but Laurence seemed unperturbed, as if her allegiance in the matter was all that he had sought. After the cook handed a cup to each of them, brown and hot, Bel gulped hers too quickly and scalded the back of her throat without even tasting the sweetness.

Chapter Three

“Do you know that when the Little Giant was an infant, his father was holding him in his arms, sitting by the fire with his friend James Conant?” began George Lindsey as he sawed into Grete's schnitzel. “And the good Dr. Douglas had a heart attack just then and nearly dropped his son into the hearth. Conant barely managed to save little Stephen from the flames, but his father was dead.”

“Perhaps that is what stunted his growth,” murmured Faustina, who had favored Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas's taller challenger for the famous Senate race.

Laurence, at the other end of the table, laughed a short, humorless bark. In his restlessness, he had already spilled his water glass twice, and he fidgeted in a damp huddle, trying to catch Bel's eye while the adults droned on.

“That's quite a story, George,” encouraged Pattie Lindsey, the dull, pretty socialite who had bestowed on Laurence his straight blond hair.

Instead of acknowledging her, George glanced sharply at his brother's wife but could not meet her lowered green eyes. “It does not seem in your good heart to jest about someone's height, Faustina,” George said, finally mastering the schnitzel.

“I only jest about Stephen Douglas. There I draw the line,” Faustina said.

Bel folded her hands into fists, making the nails bite hard into her palms. How long would her uncle talk before they could get her mother alone? Faustina and George always argued about everything: the railroad lines, politics, and especially the issue of slavery. George teased Bel's mother for her subscriptions to the abolitionist papers, and in turn she defiantly recited word for word Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, the Vermont constitution, and any other official document that talked of human freedom. They were like two spring robins, always chasing and pecking at each other.

“We saw the most cunning thing today in
Frank Leslie's,
” Lucia interposed, talking mainly to her mother. “Tell them, Anne.”

“It was a Druid's cape,” pronounced Anne, touching her piles of dark blond hair. Bel didn't think either of them was especially pretty, but somehow their many attention-seeking mannerisms worked on the boys their age. Aunt Pattie was always bragging about their list of callers.

“It has a darling little hood, and it drapes down the back with a fringe,” Lucia added.

“A green fringe, like the forest,” said Anne solemnly. “That's what Frank Leslie said.”

“Well, and would it enable you to make the trees do your bidding?” asked Daniel.

“Oh, Uncle Daniel.” Lucia giggled, shooing him with a braceleted wrist. “We would have to own one to know that.”

“I was thinking it might save us thousands of dollars if the trees could just cut themselves down,” Daniel concluded, and Pattie and her daughters laughed enthusiastically. “Would you like one for Christmas, too, Isabel?”