Fire Along the Sky (60 page)

Lily wanted to draw the scene: Lizzie Cameron listening so hard that all the muscles in her face drew into a knot of concentration as she tried to follow what Elizabeth meant her to understand. Jane Cunningham's little bow mouth with its pale chapped lips pursed in disapproval: she liked the Bonners well enough and was glad of the work, but could not countenance women discussing politics at the dinner table. Lily's father watching all this, amused with it, prone to tease a little. Gabriel sincere and playful at the same time. Lily's mother, pale of complexion, circles under her eyes, worn thin by weariness and the demands the child was making on her, but happy.

Lily liked the noise and laughter and scolding for a number of reasons, but most of all she liked being able to disappear into the crowd and hide in plain sight. If they asked her she gave them some detail of her morning, but mostly the others were happy to carry on without her. Today Lily would have had a good story to tell, about Mr. Stiles and his plan to preach to her while she drew, but she came into the kitchen to find it almost empty, and only two places set at the table.

Her mother said, “I wanted to have a little time with you, daughter, so I sent them all away.”

Just that easily she forgot about Mr. Stiles and Justus Rising and even Manny with tears on his face; she forgot about everything but Simon and the last time he had put his hands on her—yesterday, in the cool of the forests. She could see him still if she closed her eyes, a halo of gnats circling his dark head and his expression so very severe with wanting.

“No need for alarm,” said her mother. “I've no complaints to make.”

Now Lily was very confused, but she forced her face into a calm questioning and took up the loaf of bread to cut slices.

“What did you want to talk about then?” Focusing on the gleam of the knife, the feel of the handle in her hand.

“Money.”

Lily sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

Her mother said, “You know that my aunt Merriweather left me a bequest when she died.”

Lily could not say where this conversation might be going, but there was some small alarm bell ringing in her head. She nodded, because her mother was waiting for a response of some kind.

“It is quite a lot of money, actually. An annuity of two hundred fifty pounds a year. It has been sitting in the bank in England and gathering interest these eight years.”

Lily said, “But you can't get to it just now, then. With the war.”

“Not just now, no.” Her mother sat across the table, her calm eyes seeing far too much, understanding things Lily could not put down even if she had all the paper and paint in the world. “But the war will not last forever. And then I would like you to have it all. I shall have the bequest transferred to your name.”

A soft sound came from her own mouth. Lily pressed her fingers to her lips. “I don't understand.”

“Then let me explain.”

When she had something important to say, Lily's mother was in the habit of turning her head and lowering it until her chin almost rested on her chest. When she was a little girl it had seemed to Lily that her mother was listening to someone only she could hear, and that only if she paid very close attention.

She spread her hands flat on the table and took in a deep breath. “Just before I was to marry your father, my aunt Merriweather gave me the same gift I am giving you now. She offered me money and the opportunity to use it to my own ends, without interference.”

She paused a moment. “What she really gave me, of course, was a choice. Between the opportunity I had always wanted—the one I came here to realize—and life with your father.”

“Did you choose well?” Lily asked, her voice sticking a little in her throat.

“Yes. I chose well. I would change nothing, even if I could. So now I am giving to you what my aunt gave to me, something very simple: the opportunity to choose. You may wait until the war is over and claim the income. With it you could live very comfortably in Manhattan, or in England or even on the Continent. Many painters spend time in Rome, and you could do that too, if you are careful with your expenditures.”

Lily met her mother's eye. There was nothing unusual in her expression; she might have been explaining a difficult passage out of some scientist's treatise on fossils. No anger, no malice, no joy. A waiting, as if she were a vessel waiting to be filled: with cool water or vinegar, that much was up to Lily.

“You don't want me to marry Simon,” Lily said. “Is that it?”

“That is not it, absolutely not.” The first color rose in her mother's face. “Understand me now, daughter. If you choose to marry Simon and go to live with him in Montreal, you will have my blessing. How could I do any less, given my own history?”

“But you are hoping that I'll go off to Europe.”

“Some part of me hopes for that, yes. But another part hopes just as sincerely that you will not. I do like Simon, and I respect him. I think he would be a good husband to you.”

“If I marry, what happens to the money?”

A smile flickered in the gray of her mother's eyes, touched the corner of her mouth. “It is yours, whatever you decide. It will give you some measure of security. A married woman should have that, though the law doesn't see it thus.”

“And my father agrees with this?”

“Haven't you guessed?” Lily's mother asked. “It was your father's idea to start with.”

Such a clever husband, Elizabeth thought, who could find a way to put a wife's worries to rest and secure their daughter's future in such a simple, elegant way.

Now, sitting at the table while Lily wiped the few dishes, Elizabeth found herself smiling, pleased with him and herself too, and most of all with Lily, who had taken this offer in the spirit it was meant. No doubt there would be many more days of uncertainty in which she would question herself closely, but for the moment Elizabeth felt truly peaceful.

Of course, it remained to be seen how Simon would react. She had set him many small tests in the weeks since he came to Paradise, all of which he had met with a curious combination of intelligence and thoughtfulness and something she could only call native intuition. This newest test would tell most about him.

Most men would take offense; certainly men raised as he had been. In that world, the laird's word was law and women made a place for themselves in the shadows. Simon might be outraged at the idea that Lily would want to make her way in the world without his protection or the protection of any man at all.

Over the years Elizabeth had come to the conclusion that even reasonable men had a good dose of the apostle Paul brewing in their bellies, and needed very little provocation to spew him forth.

Her own husband, her calm and reasonable and unflappable Nathaniel, confronted with a similar charge so many years ago, had balked like a mule. Offended, yes, and threatened, and those two things together had loosened the tight control he kept on his temper. In the hours before they were wed they had argued so intensely that she remembered much of it word for word all these years later.
Damn your father and damn your aunt Merriweather and most of all goddamn to everlasting hell your know-it-all Mrs. Wollstonecraft.

She had wondered many times if her aunt Merriweather had ever known the chaos that had been wrought with her gift of independence. Most probably not; she had been far away in England, with no real understanding of the place where Elizabeth had chosen to make a life for herself or the challenges she faced.

Now, watching her own daughter, Elizabeth knew exactly what she had started. Lily must go to Simon with this newest challenge, and they would work it out between them. Or they would not. She had a sense that Simon would see this newest and most serious challenge to his courtship as a puzzle to be solved, and if he trod lightly—if Lily understood well enough how to let him do that—they would come to an agreement.

“He's the kind of man who won't swaddle her,” Nathaniel had said, when they were talking this whole delicate business through. “He'll make sure she has what she needs and then he'll stand back and wait his turn.”

Elizabeth trusted her husband's intuitions, but more than that, she knew he was talking about more than food and clothing and a sound roof over Lily's head.

There was a knock at the kitchen door. Elizabeth got up from the table.

She said, “I'm away to take my nap, now, Lily. Please make my excuses to your Simon.”

Chapter 36

With the arrival of the warmer weather the war woke like a bad-tempered bear, and with that, Hannah began to dream more and more of Strikes-the-Sky. Quiet dreams that left more questions than they raised, and stayed with her and followed her through the day as she went about her work.

Her husband never said very much to her, or if he did the memory of the words themselves faded in the morning light. It was a mystery and frustrating; if he had things to tell her she wished he would do it. She had questions she wanted to ask him; mostly, she wondered about the boy, who never showed himself.

When she mentioned the dreams to Jennet, she got a thoughtful silence in response.

“I never dream of Ewan,” her cousin said finally, a little wistfully. “The truth be told, I can hardly remember his face. It was all so long ago, a hundred years at least, in a faraway place where fairies romp in the wood.”

“That's a fine state of affairs,” Hannah said. “Your husband has disappeared altogether and mine is around every corner.”

“If I were still at Carryckcastle no doubt it would be the same for me,” Jennet said. “I ran away from everything familiar, but you're back in the middle of it all.”

That was a fine bit of reasoning, and Hannah had to agree that it made sense. She hadn't ever thought to find herself anywhere near any war, ever again, but now they often woke to the distant stuttering of artillery fire. Traffic on the river grew more frantic day by day: boats and ships, canoes and barges and bateaux of every size, all bearing supplies or troops or munitions, soldiers and sailors swarming like ants before a storm. Wounded men were brought to the garrison over land and water both, though most of these Hannah never saw. To her the garrison hospital was as big a mystery as ever; she had never been invited inside, and what she knew of the doctors who worked there she had second- and thirdhand from guards and the other women in the followers' camp.

Not that she had any real interest to be included in that brotherhood, she told herself. She saw the results of their work in the number of graves that were dug, and that was more information than she cared for already.

The prisoners were almost more than Hannah could handle, even with Jennet's good help and Mr. Whistler there to handle the heavy work. There had been no deaths in the stockade for two weeks, which must of course please her, but every day brought two or three new men, mostly militia, mostly young, all hungry and worn down to cartilage and bitterness.

It was true that Hannah could count on basic provisions now: the men were not well fed, but neither did they lie awake at night with cramps in their empty bellies. There was a steady flow of the essential medicines and other supplies that Luke sent around various corners. The worst of it now was the heat, the flies, and the crowding. For the first there was no cure at all; for the second, a limited amount of relief in bear grease and ointment; and for the last nothing except the hope of escape or, for some, death.

In the evenings, after a long day in the stockade, Hannah and Jennet sat down to eat a simple meal with Runs-from-Bears and Sawatis. Every day she felt them watching her closely, waiting for her to say the words they needed to hear: Daniel was well enough now to travel. Except she couldn't say that, and could not say when that day might come with any certainty.

It was not her uncle's way to worry about what could not be changed; instead he went off in his canoe and came back with bundles of herbs and roots and tobacco, all put together by Many-Doves who was in a well-hidden camp two miles downriver.

The truth was, Blue-Jay was strong enough to travel, and if not for Daniel, they would have spirited him away weeks ago. When she was very tired, the part of Hannah that was more Bonner than Kahnyen'kehàka worried about that, about the sacrifice her Mohawk family was making for her white half brother. The other, stronger part of her always stopped her before she suggested to Runs-from-Bears that he should take his son and leave this place.

It was her job to heal Daniel, and she must put all her powers of concentration in that alone; there was no time for guilt, Hannah reminded herself, and even less for self-doubt.

On a morning so damp and warm that it made her think of steaming bread, Hannah went to the stockade before first light, leaving Jennet asleep on her pallet. Over the weeks they had worked out which of the men were willing to let her in before the rest of the camp followers, in exchange for a few coins—another one of Luke's many contributions. When she was too tired to stop herself, Hannah wondered what would become of her brother if it ever became public knowledge that the grandson of the erstwhile lieutenant governor of Lower Canada was pouring so much money and effort into the care of the American invaders.

Hannah rose from her pallet and walked to the fort in quiet desperation, as a sister but mostly as a doctor, perplexed and undone by her own failure. She went to sit next to Daniel in the crowded pungent dark of the stockade and listen to his breathing, in the hope that somehow he would reveal to her the one thing she wanted most to know: how to save his life.

For all her life, Jennet had been a sound sleeper and possessive of that state. She could not be depended on to rouse herself; that Hannah did, most mornings, by shaking her or, when that failed, by flicking cold water on her face.

Now that Hannah had got in the habit of rising before first light to go to the stockade, Runs-from-Bears had taken over the job of waking Jennet, which he did by the simple expedient of sticking his head into the shack and letting out a shriek that made her jump to her feet.

In some part of her sleeping mind Jennet, struggling reluctantly toward a waking state, realized that Runs-from-Bears had forgotten about her. The piece of stretched doeskin that covered the single small window was glowing with sunlight, which meant that she had opened her eyes and was lying on her side; which meant that she was awake, and without prodding.

Hannah's pallet was empty, and more than that: someone was crouched behind her. Jennet held herself very still and closed her eyes.

It was not Runs-from-Bears or his son or any other Indian; the bear grease that they used to protect themselves from the flies was far too distinctive to miss. Jennet's heart kicked into a rapid gallop while her mind raced. A dry clicking in her throat she swallowed down only with great difficulty, and her ears ringing in alarm. She opened her eyes because she could not bear the dark.

A man's shadow passed the window and then another, and with them voices. Runs-from-Bears and Sawatis, talking easily together. She wondered if she could call an alarm quickly enough to save herself from whatever or whoever it was—a man, she told herself, no wolf, no dog—who had found his way here. A soldier, most likely; for weeks Hannah had been warning her that she flirted too much with them all, made light of the moon eyes they threw her way. A soldier would have a weapon. And if he did, why was he waiting?

Runs-from-Bears was talking again, something about the river and the wind. Mohawk was a fearfully difficult language but Jennet recognized some words, now, and was trying to learn more.
Andiatarocté,
she heard: tail of the lake, their name for Lake George. They had no idea that she was here, or that she was not alone.

She forced herself to breathe normally and, in one quick movement, made ready to roll away from the pallet.

A hand stopped her, clamped firmly on her waist; before she could scream another hand covered her mouth and without thinking she put her teeth to work even as she opened her eyes and saw Luke's face.

“Christ Almighty!” he hissed, and jerked his hand away. “That's a fine welcome, girl.”

Jennet pushed herself back and away, pulled her knees to her chest and blinked at him. “Luke.”

“What's left of me. You've got teeth like a beaver.”

“Well, why didn't you announce yourself?” Jennet asked, and then, to her horror, she heard herself giggle. The shock, she told herself, and the relief.

“That's it, laugh.” He was trying to look angry, and failing. “First you attack me and then you laugh at me. Call me a fool but I was hoping for a different kind of welcome.”

“I thought you were here to ravish me.” The words were said before she could stop them, and then she really did laugh. “I mean, I thought you were a stranger here to do me harm.”

Luke was busy wrapping his hand with a handkerchief—she had managed to draw blood, it seemed—and Jennet reached out and took it away from him. “Let me do that. And now tell me what you mean by sneaking in here and disturbing my sleep, Luke Bonner.”

“It's good to see you too, girl.”

He grinned this time, his familiar and beloved smile spreading across his face. The cool gray of his eyes grew warmer as they moved down her length. Her breasts pressed against the chemise that was her only nightdress, and he liked that; she watched his eyes go drowsy with arousal. Jennet made herself concentrate on his hand, the three small teeth marks oozing blood.

“Of course I'm glad to see you,” she said, almost prissily.

“How glad?” His free hand was on her arm, pulling her closer.

“As glad as I was to see you the last time you came,” Jennet said. “Until you started in being bothersome.”

“Bothersome, is it?” Luke leaned forward and put his mouth to her ear. “That's a new word for an old business. Come, hen, have you no better way to welcome me after a month of keeping to your lonely bed?”

Jennet let herself go to him then, moving into his arms and against him, her heart racing again but now for a good reason.

She said, “Hannah will be waiting for me in the stockade.”

Luke bore her back down to the pallet, laughing quietly against her mouth. “So she will,” he said. “And all for naught. There's some ravishment needs to be taken care of, first.”

They had such a noble and reasonable agreement: Luke would stay away from Nut Island for everyone's safety, and as soon as Hannah had settled in, Jennet would come to him in Montreal. Except that Hannah's work had never lessened and Jennet could not leave her, and so one day they had come back to the followers' camp in the evening to find him waiting there with Runs-from-Bears, deep in a discussion about how to get the prisoners out of the stockade, off the island, and over the border.

He had looked up at them as they came in and smiled as if it were nothing unusual that he would come to take his tea in this tiny shack. Jennet had been shocked and angry and pleased beyond measure to see him, and that night Hannah had taken her pallet to sleep somewhere else, anywhere else; Jennet had never thought to ask, later, where she had gone. Nor could she find it in herself to be discomfited by that. If anyone understood it must be Hannah.

Luke had come to try to get her to leave, of course. He had some ideas about Father O'Neill that first made Jennet laugh out loud and then made her angry. And wasn't it just like Wee Iona's grandson to see a great conspiracy behind every Roman collar, she asked, and did he hear himself, how he sounded more jealous than worried for her welfare?

But he hadn't risen to her goading. Instead Luke insisted that she write him a report every day on what the priest had said and done and who he had spoken to, and Jennet had asked him if he wanted her to spend more time with the good father, or less?

In the end it turned out that he had risked coming to Nut Island not only because he was worried about the priest, or even because he had letters and medicine and soap and lovely white-flour rolls with fresh butter, but because of a passion he could no longer control. And how could she stay angry at that? He had kept her flat on her back for most of the night, alternately arguing with her and making love to her, sometimes both at once.

In the morning he had slipped away again, never discovered by the guards or anyone else, as he had promised. And left her behind, because she insisted, and when he was gone how she had struggled to hide her disappointment. In him, in herself.

And here he was again, so beautiful that he took her breath away. Already the spring sun had begun to turn his hair lighter and his skin—covered now with a keen, sweet sweat—was darkening.

When she could breathe again, Jennet became aware of the sounds of the camp all around them: women's voices and children, the business of cooking and eating and getting ready for the day. No doubt they had made themselves heard, which should embarrass her unto death but Jennet could find no energy for that particular exercise. Later, of course, the women would want to know which of the men from the fort she had finally let into her bed; that would take a bit of handling, of course.

Luke turned on his side, his great strong hand on her shoulder, dark against light, his thumb stroking. Then he said, “Come with me to Montreal. We'll spend a month in bed. I want to see if I can make you screech like that again.”

She smacked him smartly and then rubbed her cheek against his hand. “You shouldn't ask, and you know it. I canna leave your sister.”

He nodded, as if she had given him the answer he expected and not a word more.

“And I don't screech.”

“Like a panther in the night.”

“Tell me this,” Jennet said. “First I was a beaver and now a panther. Why is it you must always think of me as some four-legged beast?”

“Now there's an idea,” he said, and flipped her over neatly. Jennet scrambled away from him, laughing and kicking and tumbling, until her back was against the wall and he held up his hands in surrender.

She could not keep the question to herself any longer, and so out it came in a hiccup: “How long can you stay?”

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, as sweetly as a boy. “I'm already gone, girl.”

Her face twitched with disappointment, but she managed a small smile and saw the same things in his face that he must see in hers.

“Tell me about Daniel first,” he said.

Jennet thought about what to say while she pulled her chemise to rights. “He's in terrible pain. The damage to the nerves in his arm and shoulder, says your sister. Not that you would ever hear it from him, understand. There's never a word of complaint from him, but you can see it on his face, what it's doing to him. As if somebody had used a knife to carve it into him.”