Fire Along the Sky (12 page)

“Deny it,” he demanded, and kissed her again before she could say even a single word.

“Deny it,” he said again, more fiercely. Luke in a temper, and because he wanted her; it was more than she had let herself hope for, so soon.

“I canna.” She shook her head feebly from side to side. “I cannot deny that I want you, Luke Bonner. Can you deny that you love me?”

He smiled against her mouth, turned his hip with the grace of a dancing master and then in one strong thrust he locked himself inside her.

“Finally,” he said hoarsely, spreading one hand beneath her to lift her hips. She opened her mouth to welcome him but he kissed her and closed the circle, belly to belly and mouth to mouth.

Later, when the fury had passed, Luke picked her up. They were both naked and slick with sweat, speckled with straw.

“Take the lantern,” he said, crouching down so she could snatch it by the handle, and then he carried her out of the barn toward the rushing of the waterfall.

“Somebody will see,” she said against his neck. She knew she should be concerned but could not find it in herself. Everything in her throbbed, every nerve, and what else was there to know?

“We're just soaking your bumps.” He was grinning in the way of a man who has got what he wanted, which both infuriated her and made her want to give him more.

With the lantern set on a plane of stone they slid into water so blessedly cool in the slick heat of the night air that anything she might have wanted to say was lost in a sigh of contentment.

For a long while they did nothing but float together in the water, paddling quietly or clinging to the mossy rocks to exchange kisses. Then Jennet remembered the question she had asked, but that he had not bothered to answer.

“You never did say,” she scolded him. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the waterfall, and he was ever a man to take advantage of such things.

“What?” He put his head back to wet his hair again and then shook himself like a dog. “What did you want me to say?”

She began to swim away but he caught her up and then he subdued her while she struggled, and when she was exhausted and could do no more than let him hold her he said it, against her ear. “I love you, Jennet Scott, and well you know it. I've loved you since you were a girl with dirt on your face, I loved you the day I left Scotland and every day since.”

“And?”

“And?” he asked in mock outrage. “Is that not enough? Don't be greedy, girl.”

“And?” she said, pinching him mercilessly until he yelped and snatched at her flying hands.

“And on the day the war ends I'll marry you. You harpy.”

“The war could go on for years and years,” she said into his ear, so he would hear her and the rest of the sleeping world would not; what she was about to say was hard, even for the brazen wanton she had just proved herself to be.

He went very still. “It could.”

“So I have an idea.”

He nodded, though Jennet felt the muscles in his arms tense. “Go on.”

“Handfasting. You know the old custom, for a year and a day.”

Luke was very quiet. “And? What happens in a year and a day?”

Jennet heard her voice going very rough. It was irritating to have her own voice betray her, but she pushed on. “In a year and a day we meet, right here.”

“Just like this?” His hand slid over her bum and slipped between her thighs.

She pinched him again and he caught her hand and bit it, lightly. “And then, what happens in a year and a day when we meet here?”

“If you have changed your mind, or if I have changed my mind, then we part peacefully from one another.”

“I've waited ten years for you, Jennet. I can wait ten more, if I must.”

“Then you're far more patient than I,” she said testily. “For I'll not pace away what's left of my youth counting out empty days and wondering. Hear me weel, Luke. I'll not wait more than a year and a day.”

He frowned at her. “And if neither of us have changed our minds in a year and a day?”

“We marry.”

“And if I don't come on that day?”

“Then the assumption is you've released me from my promise and I'm free to bestow my favors elsewhere.”

“Ah.” A shadow passed over his face. “And would you?”

She bit back a smile. “Finally.”

He frowned at her, inclined his head, and his arms tightened around her. “Finally? Finally what?”

“I'm thinking of Thunder,” she said, leaning back in his arms to study his expression.

“My horse.”

“Aye, your horse. All the care and grooming and worry for a great bloody beast, and when Dugal Montgomerie offered you three times what any animal is worth—”

The muscles in his cheek jumped. “What's mine is mine.”

“Aye. And here am I, the happiest of women because you value me as highly as your horse.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “All this by way of promising that you won't go off with Dugal Montgomerie.”

“Or anyone else,” Jennet said. “Should you keep the terms of the handfasting, of course. Luke Bonner. Or Luke Fraser or Scott or whichever name you've settled on. What is it to be, may I ask? So I can have my initials sewn into my linen.” She tried to look serious, and failed.

“I'm using Bonner for the time being,” he said, studying her face. “If that suits you.”

“Very well,” she said. “I'll take it, in a year and a day.”

He brushed her wet hair back from her face. “This feels like a trap.”

Jennet studied his expression by the light of the lantern reflected on the water. There was some worry there, but more resignation.

“Och, nae. It's just the opposite.”

“It feels like a trap,” he said again. He studied her face as she studied his. “But if you're in need of a promise, Jennet, then fine and good.”

“You'll marry me in a year and a day whether or not the war is over?”

He was looking at her intently. “In a year and a day I'll come back here and we'll settle it then. That's as much of a promise as I can give you. Will you be satisfied with that?”

It was very late and the moon was long gone, but Jennet had never felt more awake in her life. He was leaving tomorrow and she would not see him for a very long time, perhaps all of the winter and spring and through the summer, but he would come back to her. And he would marry her then, she would see to it.

“Aye,” she said. “I will.”

Then he was towing her toward the falls and through the rush of water to the cavern behind, cool and dark. The lantern light wavered thinly through the curtain of the falls so that she could make out his face, but she had to shout to be heard.

“What are we doing here?”

“Sealing the bargain,” he shouted back. There was a little ledge of rock and he pulled himself up on it and held out his hand for her.

She paddled away and treaded water. She could not deny that she wanted to go to him, but more than that Jennet needed simply to look. With the light flickering on his wet skin he was like an illustration out of the great book of myths in her father's library, a grinning messenger of the gods come to teach her a lesson or play a trick on her.

She said, “You'll be very tired on the morrow, and you've got a long way to travel.”

“Come to me now,” he said, curling his fingers at her. “Come, hen.”

It made her laugh out loud to hear him call her hen, as if they were old dears married thirty years. She came closer and closer still, but not quite close enough.

She said, “There's only room for one to sit there.”

Quick as a snake he leaned forward, snatched her wrist and lifted her out of the water as if she weighed no more than any other fish that might swim into his net.

“What are you doing?” A stupid question if ever there was one, but he grinned at her, this new grin she had already come to recognize and appreciate.

“Why, Jennet Scott,” he said, pulling her into a straddle over his lap so that they were face to face. “What else would I be doing but once again proving you wrong?”

Chapter 7

Late September, Paradise

In the cool hour before dawn Elizabeth woke with a start and realized two things: her husband was gone, and a white owl was perched in the jack pine outside her chamber window like a lost child huddled into a blanket.

A bird and nothing more, she told herself. Feathers, beak, eyes that shone like lanterns. She would not entertain dramatic notions or talk of omens; this was her home, not a theater or one of the novels that her cousin sent her from the city.

Nathaniel was gone to hunt or check his traps or both. She would see him before long, coming into the glen with a brace of grouse or a turkey or with a doe draped around his shoulders and he would smile and hold up a hand in greeting when she came out on the porch.

Her husband was gone and so were Daniel and Lily, but Nathaniel would be back in a few hours and they would not; not today or tomorrow or even next week. Lily was in Montreal living a life Elizabeth could imagine with little trouble. She led a day-to-day existence something like the one she herself had led at the same age, when she still lived at Oakmere with her aunt and uncle Merriweather. Elizabeth had been an orphaned cousin of little means or beauty but great ambitions and imagination, but Lily was far richer in every way.

There had been one letter from Lily, if it could be called a letter at all. When the string was cut a whole sheaf of drawings had unfolded in Elizabeth's lap, each with words scribbled along the margins. Houses and shops and lanes, a market square crowded with people, a butcher's errand boy clutching a piglet while he argued with a soldier three times his own size, Wee Iona asleep in front of the hearth with her knitting in her lap, Luke bent over his ledgers. By piecing the drawings together it was just possible to extract the story of Lily's first days in Montreal.

But there was no word thus far from Daniel and Blue-Jay, who had disappeared into the war, doing things Elizabeth would not, could not, let herself think about.

She made herself look out the window only to find that the owl was gone. Some of the tension ran away from her like water wrung from a cloth; she was relieved and irritated at herself too. Elizabeth had started to think that perhaps superstition crept into a woman's mind as she got older and could no more be willed away than the lines that dug themselves into the corners of the eyes and mouth.

She sat up in bed and was thankful for the common things: the crackle of the mattress, the feel of linen against her skin, the smell of wood smoke and pinesap and her own body. The ache in her belly that only food would quiet; the fact that her fingernails needed trimming and her hair washing. Things to anchor her to this world, the one in which she must live and move no matter where her children might be.

Enough light had seeped into the dark that she could see Nathaniel's imprint in the bed beside her, the long fact of him, his weight and shape. He had left a single hair behind, a long dark hair on his pillow like a line of writing in a strange language.

Autumn had settled down over the world and the evidence was everywhere to be seen. Every day another wash of color in the forests, each more insistent than the last; the first geese vaulting themselves into the sky in the shape of a giant wing; the first squash and pumpkins ready for harvest. But even without those things Nathaniel's absence said the same thing to her, and said it more loudly.

Now that the hunting and trapping season had started she would wake every morning alone, because they were no different, really, than the beaver or the squirrels or any of the animals in the forest who must make themselves ready for the snows. Every year it was the same and every year she must struggle anew and struggle harder not to be resentful of the work that took him away from her while she slept.

Overhead Elizabeth heard stirring followed by a good thump and the sound of Jennet's laughter. She had fallen out of the bed again, as she did most mornings, dreaming herself back to her wide bed at Carryckcastle. While Elizabeth dressed she listened to the sounds of talking, too muted to really make out what Jennet and Hannah were saying, but musical and pleasing as the singing of thrushes.

They were women well versed in the sorrows of the world, but together they worked some kind of magic on each other. In this house they were become girls again. Jennet and Hannah and Gabriel and Annie; Elizabeth thought of them as four children, brimming with surprises and promise and distraction. When Hannah and Jennet had more serious things to discuss, something that Elizabeth knew must happen, they did that out of her hearing. Whether out of concern for her state of mind or simply for privacy she did not know, but Elizabeth was thankful for the wall they built between herself and melancholy.

Today when her part of the housework and fieldwork was done she would sit down at her desk. First she would finish the essay she was writing for the editor of the
New-York Spectator,
which must go with the next post to the city. In six or eight weeks it would come back again in smeared newsprint. When that obligation was met she would write a letter to Lily, and one to Daniel.

Elizabeth finished with her hair and went out to start breakfast. At the door she paused to look back at the bed, and for a moment she wished she had left it unmade, at least until Nathaniel was home again.

When Luke went back to Canada and left Jennet behind she had two things to sustain her: his promise, and her own natural curiosity.

Every day Hannah must wonder at her cousin, at her enthusiasm and a courage that often bordered on the reckless. At home in Scotland she had roamed far and long, and no threats or punishments had ever been able to curb her curiosity or her determination to see it satisfied. Age had not tamed her, and loss had only taught her to be bold in seeking out what she wanted for herself.

When Hannah pointed this out to her Jennet had an answer, as she did for most things.

“Because I have no bairns,” she decided after some thought. “It's the raising of bairns that teaches a woman the meaning of fear.”

They were sitting on Eagle Rock after an afternoon of helping with the corn, both of them sweaty and in want of a swim but still unwilling to move out of the breeze. Beneath their bare feet the rock was warm and all around the forest was a sea of burning color, almost too bright to look at.

Jennet said, “You've never asked me why it is I bore Ewan no heir. In Carryck the old women decided long ago that I'm barren.”

“And do you think you're barren?” Hannah asked.

Jennet lay back suddenly and put an arm over her face. “I wished them away, the bairns. I told them to stay away, that I couldna be a mother when I didna ken how to be a wife.”

One part of Hannah, the woman who had trained with Richard Todd and studied O'seronni medicine, that part of herself did not believe that it was possible to wish unwanted children away. In the months she had worked in the poorhouse in the city she had seen too many women hollowed out with children they did not want and could ill afford, women not thirty years who looked fifty or more, who greeted the birth of a fifth or sixth or seventh child with cold indifference or plain fury.

“You think I'm daft,” Jennet said.

“No,” said Hannah. “I was thinking about the time I spent working in the sick wards at the poorhouse.”

“Tell me about it,” Jennet said, settling in for the story.

So Hannah told her something she had rarely told anyone at all, about the dissections she had watched, what she had learned from those women who had died heavy with child or in childbirth or of fever soon afterward. Women whose bodies were claimed not by families but by doctors ravenous always to know more, men who stood around in bloodied shirtsleeves, their heads bent together over flawed wombs, the smell of pipe smoke intertwined with blood and decay while they pointed and prodded and argued. Misshapen wombs, withered or lopsided or torn, diseased in ways she would not tell Jennet or any woman for the dreams those words would conjure.

When Hannah had finished talking about what she knew and what she could not know, no one could know, about the bearing of children, Jennet said nothing for a long while. One of her hands lay lightly on her stomach, fingers curled. There was a blister on Jennet's thumb, perfectly round and pulsing with rich blood. Hannah was taken with such deep affection and sorrow that her throat swelled with tears. But instead of weeping she forced herself to go on.

“But this is only one kind of medicine,” she said. “And it comes from men who only know how to look in one way, with a knife. My Kahnyen'kehàka grandmother and great-grandmother and aunts would laugh at such blindness.

“They taught me that it is possible to will away a child, to keep it waiting in the shadow lands. They taught me the songs to sing to keep a man's seed from taking root. They showed me how to make the tea that washes the child away before it is a child at all.”

Jennet was studying her, but Hannah did not let her ask the question. “Yes,” she said. “I have drunk the tea, three times.”

“But you loved your husband,” Jennet said quietly.

“Oh yes, I did. I do still.”

“Then why?”

Hannah pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs.

“After our son was born, Tecumseh called on Strikes-the-Sky to travel with him,” she said. The familiar names had a strange taste on her tongue, but she went on. “I followed the men as they went from village to village, recruiting warriors from all the tribes to join the battle to hold the land. With my son on my back I followed them. Everywhere people were desperate for food, for clothes, for weapons to defend themselves, for hope. The things I saw—the things my son saw when he was still a baby—they were worse than the poorhouse could ever be.”

She paused to sort through her thoughts, and in the silence she counted the birds in the sky.

“Go on,” said Jennet. “Please.”

“Late one summer the army burned all the crops, and so when the winter came many of them starved, youngest and oldest first, as it always is. Their empty bellies swelled and then they died. All my medicines, the things I had spent so much time learning—none of that meant anything at all.”

Hannah forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it for three heartbeats.

“That winter was the first time I drank the tea that sends a child back to the shadow lands.”

And later,
Hannah might have said,
later when the fighting started in earnest I wanted no other child. Foolish woman that I was.

Jennet drew in a shuddering breath. “And is there a tea to do the opposite, when a woman wants a child?”

Hannah sent her a sidelong glance. “There are medicines to encourage a child, yes, and songs to summon one. You will ask me when you are ready, and together Many-Doves and I and you will prove the old women in Carryck wrong.”

At that Jennet smiled, and leaned forward, and pressed her forehead to her cousin's cheek, damp with perspiration and tears and hope.

“I'm ready now,” she said. “If only your stubborn brother would come back for me.”

Jennet was determined to learn everything she could about living in the wilderness, so that when Luke did come back he would find her a worthy wife. No one was safe from her quest; she sought out strangers to ask questions with such complete sincerity and interest that no one ever thought to deny her. Whatever resentment there may have been in the village—and there were some young women who were not happy to learn that this interloper from Scotland had snatched Luke Bonner for her own—it disappeared in the face of Jennet's resolute goodwill and generosity. Jennet was in love and the world was not strong enough to resist her; it must love her back.

She had her favorites: Curiosity was one of them, Joshua Hench, Curiosity's son-in-law and a blacksmith, was another. She made fast friends with the children, who competed for the honor of teaching her the things they knew and showing her their secret places.

In short time she had learned how to make biscuits, how to forge a nail, how to grind corn into the finest meal by hand, how to distinguish between the tracks of raccoons, fox, dog, cats of different kinds; she had thrown herself into the harvest without hesitation and laughed when Hannah insisted on treating the scratches and blisters that resulted. She knew where the children went to search for arrowheads and she took lessons in skinning rabbits, loading a rifle, and walking a trail with the quiet watchfulness that was the true sign of an accomplished woodswoman.

On a Sunday in the late afternoon Hannah and Jennet set out together for the village, the tarot cards tucked safely into the basket Jennet carried with her everywhere. Almost everyone had asked for a reading, once it was understood that she asked nothing in return except answers to her endless questions. When she came back to Lake in the Clouds it would be full of the things she had gathered, from pinecones to mushrooms to spent bullets, but at the moment it was empty and light enough to swing.

When they left the glen Jennet raised her head and sniffed the air, her nose wrinkling.

“A frost tonight,” she said, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. Jennet's eyesight was only average, but her sense of smell surprised and impressed everyone.

Gabriel had made a game of testing her by covering her eyes and passing ever stranger items under her nose: a rusty nail, an apple stem, corn husks, a piece of cherry wood, a scrap of fur from the old pelt the dogs slept on. Only rarely would she be unable to put the right name to a scent, and thus far Hannah had never known her to mistake a change in the weather.

For her own part, Jennet seemed to take this talent of hers for granted. She made announcements and then moved on.

“You did say we could go by way of the marsh?”

“A half hour more won't make a difference,” Hannah agreed. In truth she was just as happy not to go by the bridge under the millhouse, as Jemima Kuick would no doubt be keeping watch, as she did most evenings. Her biweekly visits to the widow were bad enough as it was. Jemima stayed in the shadows but she hovered like a spider over a web.