Fire Along the Sky (57 page)

“Goodwife Bonner,” he said, inclining his head. “I've come to speak to you about your school. I've heard some disturbing rumors—rumors I might not have believed, had I not seen the evidence myself, on the way up here.”

Elizabeth drew in a deep breath, but he pushed on without waiting for her.

“Madam, I understand that you are a rationalist. That much was clear from our discussion yesterday. But I would never imagine that you would go so far as to endanger the souls of children with your foreign notions.” The Bible opened across a spread palm, and he began to riffle through pages.

“In Paul's letter to—”

“Mr. Stiles,” Elizabeth said curtly, and he frowned at her interruption.

“You are here to tell me that girls need no schooling at all, and that it does the lesser races only harm to be taught above their stations. In any case, you are quite sure that white children should not be taught in the same classroom with black children or Indians. Now if I have anticipated your concerns, I'll bid you good day.”

All the color had drained out of his face while she spoke. His skin was like window glass, a book for the study of blood flow. He could not keep his temper to himself, and in this odd fact Elizabeth found some kinship with him. She had never learned the trick of making her face go blank, of hiding what she was feeling.

“You mock me.” His voice trembled slightly, and he blinked repeatedly.

“No, sir. I just have no interest in listening to your thoughts on education, on the mixing of races, or on the place of women. I know everything you are going to say. Permit me to spare you and myself the time and effort. I will teach my school as I see fit, and I will take no direction from you, sir. When I hire a new teacher, as I plan to do this summer, I will make sure that that person is of a like mind with me, and willing to suffer your disapprobation. And one more thing, before I take my leave from you and go home to my dinner. You are a Calvinist, Mr. Stiles, and as such you will find yourself very much alone here on the frontier.”

His mouth, which had been hanging open, snapped shut like a turtle's. Elizabeth watched that happen again while she got up from her spot on the porch and brushed her skirts into order.

“I see I have my work cut out for me,” he said. “The devil has put down roots here.” He clutched his Bible to his chest and rocked it like an infant.

Elizabeth didn't like the way he was looking at her, as if her complexion were as transparent as his own; as if he could see through skin and bone to the thoughts in her head. Uncharitable, most of them, bordering on the irrational.

“I've been called far worse in my time, sir, and with less effect.”

She had turned and started up the path when he found his voice.

To her retreating back he called, “There's something else I know, Mrs. Bonner, something you may not realize just yet.”

Against her better judgment, Elizabeth turned.

Mr. Stiles studied her for another moment, and to Elizabeth it looked as if his nostrils, fine curved and overlarge, were twitching.

He said, “Pardon me for such a personal observation, madam, but you are with child. Two months, or so. A daughter.”

Elizabeth could count on one hand the number of times she had swooned in her life, but she knew herself to be dangerously close to that just now. There was a buzzing in her head, anger hot and bright, but stronger still, fear. She closed her eyes and opened them again, and saw that Mr. Stiles was watching her closely, with great interest. As a boy might study a bug caught under a piece of glass.

He touched his nose with one finger. “It's a gift, or a curse, depending on your point of view.”

Very softly Elizabeth said, “You're saying you can smell whether or not a woman is with child?”

“I smell many things,” said Mr. Stiles. He turned his head south, toward the village, a full two miles straight downhill. “Someone is making lye soap,” he said. “A plough is breaking ground. A fawn dropped this morning, about a quarter mile that way.” He pointed with his chin, and then sniffed again, the nostrils trembling. “The smelt are running.”

His gaze shifted back to her. “I can smell a quickening child. I smell disease in the bone, in the blood. There's a woman in the village, I don't know her name, she has a growth in her breast, no bigger than a beechnut, but growing.” He touched a spot on his own chest as if the disease were his own. “Most of all I smell sin. It stinks like lye, Mrs. Bonner. I was put on this earth to rout it out.”

Elizabeth's heart was thundering hard, but she forced herself to breathe in and out evenly, once, twice, three times. The expression she presented to Mr. Stiles was distant, superior, disapproving; Aunt Merriweather, dealing with a dinner guest who could not hold his wine, a vaporous woman, her nephew's latest gambling debt.

“How very inconvenient for you, sir. And if you pardon me, I wish you good day.”

He made no move to stop her; he didn't call out after her with more predictions or Bible verses. Elizabeth walked steadily and without pausing until she came to the strawberry fields, and then she stopped, and sat down.

When the idea of another child had presented itself a few weeks ago, she had rejected it out of hand. Her courses were not as regular as they had once been, after all: she was forty-nine years old this month. If things went on as she thought they would, she would most likely be a grandmother sometime in the next winter.

And she was with child. With the warm sun on her back, Elizabeth bowed forward to press her forehead to her raised knees, bit her lip until she drew blood and had forced her mind to clear.

A rabbit crouched in the grass a few feet away, twitching, its soft gray-brown pelt trembling. She had lined the cradle her children slept in as babies with rabbit skins.

“I can't,” she whispered, and the rabbit blinked at her, another frightened creature, sympathetic and powerless. “I can't, but I must.”

The evidence was all there, if only she looked at it calmly. Her weariness, the soreness in her breasts, the lack of appetite. Nausea in the evenings, like a knotted fist in the belly, a little more yesterday than the day before; more to come.

In the almost twenty years of her marriage she had conceived six times. Twice she had miscarried in the first months, but she had borne five healthy children: the twins, Robbie, Gabriel, Emmanuel. Robbie had been stolen away by typhoid at three, and then Emmanuel, last born, had come too early and never caught on to the habit of living, slipping away from them before he had learned to hold his head upright. Nathaniel had carved their graves out of shallow soil and rock.

Not again, she had promised herself then. Never again a small grave. She would put all of her energy into raising the three who were left to her, giving them the best of herself, making them strong. From Many-Doves she had got tea and advice, and from Curiosity, more of the same. What they had not given her, could not give her, were promises.
Nature finds a way when she got a mind to,
Curiosity had warned her.

What Elizabeth wanted now was to have Nathaniel with her. She would say the things out loud that she could not keep to herself:
I am too old for childbirth; I am too old to raise another child; I cannot bear another loss.

He would look at her and hold her and stroke her hair but he would not make her promises either, even out of pity.
We've managed worse, Boots, you and me.

But Nathaniel was gone today, and so Elizabeth got up and brushed off her skirts, and straightened her shoulders, and turned back downmountain. If she could not have Nathaniel, she could go to Curiosity.

A daughter.
One part of her laughed at the whole idea that Mr. Stiles should be able to smell the child growing in her womb and know it for a daughter. Most likely, she told herself, he suspected that she wanted another daughter. And there was an appealing symmetry in the idea that her last child should be a daughter, as her first had been. Mr. Stiles might be a divining Calvinist, a marble prophet, or he might be nothing more than an observant man, and a devious one.

But he had known a truth that she had not quite admitted to herself. No matter how little she liked the idea, he had been given a formidable gift and tremendous burden.

Elizabeth thought of Jemima Wilde, who had gone away and conjured Mr. Stiles to take her place. A Calvinist among lapsed papists and godless Yorkers, rationalists and Kahnyen'kehàka women doctors, freed black women who owned property and made their own decisions. A fine joke indeed.

Crows called from the jack pines on the ridge. In their raw voices Elizabeth heard Jemima's satisfied laughter.

Curiosity said, “A late child ain't the worst thing, Elizabeth. My Jason didn't come along until I was fifty, and he was the sweetest thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't give up those few years we had him, not for anything.”

Elizabeth studied the pattern of roses on her teacup and said nothing at all, because she did not trust her voice, or the things that might come out of her mouth.

“A girl.” Curiosity laughed softly to herself. “Just when you about to get Lily settled. The Lord got a sense a humor, that cain't be denied.”

“If Mr. Stiles is right,” Elizabeth snapped suddenly. “I don't see why he should be. More likely he is a charlatan with a sharp eye and a knack for saying the right thing.”

She might forbid herself the luxury of tears, but her voice trembled, and Curiosity heard that.

“I heard stranger things than a man born with a nose like a bloodhound,” Curiosity said, pulling out a stool to sit beside Elizabeth. “And I ain't heard you tell me he wrong about you being with child. I see it in your face, anyway, Elizabeth.”

With one long, bony finger she traced the skin under Elizabeth's eyes. “You always do show the mask earlier than any other woman I ever knowed. You sick in the evenings like usual?”

Elizabeth nodded.

“The child settling in good and solid.” Her eyes narrowed a little, in concern and understanding. “It wear you down, I know it.”

They were silent together for a long moment while Elizabeth thought of the months to come, of discomfort and weariness and of childbed, and the chances that she might not survive it. But if she could get through all that, if she could hold on, there would be another young voice in the house, a new light in the world, Nathaniel's child and her own. If she lived long enough to raise it up.

“I'll be right there with you.” Curiosity was reading her mind, in the same way Elizabeth could sometimes read Lily's mind, or Hannah's. There was no need to list her fears; Curiosity knew them, every one.

She said, “I got something I want you to think about.”

Elizabeth raised her head. Curiosity would be eighty years old in the fall. Every year was carved into her face but her eyes were bright and full of life.
Manny is coming home,
Elizabeth remembered.
Her son is coming home.
That was right and good, and the tears that Elizabeth had been holding back began to leak over her face.

Curiosity wiped her cheek with one thumb. “You worried about Daniel,” she said. “But listen to me now, Elizabeth. Right this minute you got to be thinking about you, what you need here and now. I'm thinking it would be good to have you living nearby, at least until this little girl you carrying come along. And I'm getting too old to be rushing up that mountain when I get the idea I want to see your pretty face.”

“This house is filled to bursting,” Elizabeth said, surprised out of her melancholy.

“Well, I wouldn't want you
that
close,” Curiosity said.

Elizabeth hiccupped a laugh, and then another, and then they were laughing hard.

Curiosity said, “I was thinking of the judge's place, standing there empty so long.” She looked at the kitchen door, propped open to let in the spring breeze. “If you and Nathaniel are of a mind to humor an old woman, I'm hoping you'll move into the village for a while at least.”

Elizabeth couldn't remember the last time Curiosity had asked for any kind of favor, and this odd request, so unexpected, put her off balance for a moment. It made perfect sense in many ways, but even had it not, Curiosity had asked it of her and that alone meant that she must give it serious thought.

“Many-Doves wants to go to Good Pasture,” Elizabeth said. “So she can be closer to Blue-Jay and Daniel. She hasn't said it in so many words, but I think she's only staying at Lake in the Clouds for me.”

“Well, then.” Curiosity smiled and folded her hands on the table in front of her.

“I don't know what Nathaniel will say.”

Curiosity gave her a half-smile. “I do. You ask him right and that husband of yours would haul the moon out of the sky for you, and you know it. Especially in your condition.”

“It would mean letting the fields lie fallow this year,” Elizabeth said, mostly to herself. “But there is enough money in the bank to buy what we need, certainly.” And in that moment she realized that she had already made the decision to leave Hidden Wolf.

Deep in the night, the moon already set, Nathaniel let himself in and stood in the middle of the common room, and listened.

He had built this house with his own hands, and he knew every board and joint. The sounds it made in the wind were as familiar to him as his wife's voice, and its smells as comforting. Wood smoke and beans simmering, wet wool drying, cornbread, lye soap. He breathed in deep and caught, just barely, the scent of his youngest son, though he could not say how he knew it for what it was.

At the bottom of the stairs he paused, thought of going up to check on Gabriel and Lily and then stopped, feeling Elizabeth before he turned to see her, standing at the open door of their chamber. With her hair loose around her shoulders and her shawl gleaming in the night shadows she might have been one of Jennet's witchy women, or the spirit of some well-meaning woman, long gone.

But it was Elizabeth's face and no one else's: heart shaped, with wide-set eyes. If he told her now how fine she looked to him she would blush and turn away, pleased and disbelieving still, after all these years.