Lake in the Clouds (15 page)

“He thinks you threw Billy off the mountain.”

Nathaniel chewed slowly and swallowed. “Seems that way. What do you think, Boots?”

She spread her hands over her skirt and pushed out a long breath. “I know that you did.”

And what was there to say to that? Her composure robbed him of whatever explanation he might have offered, and so he said nothing at all.

She cleared her throat. “I have always known, I think. Although perhaps at first I denied the idea when it presented itself. I cannot say exactly how I knew, except that—” She paused. “When you brought his body home, there was something in your manner. Not guilt,” she added quickly. “Perhaps it was relief.”

The kind of relief he felt right now, to have this out after so many years. Nathaniel nodded. “That’s pretty much how I felt.”

She nodded. “Did you ever think of telling me what had happened?”

“Didn’t see any reason to burden you with it.”

Elizabeth gave him that look she reserved for a particularly poor excuse, part amusement and part disappointment. “You know me better, Nathaniel Bonner.”

He knew her well, yes. He knew the way she set her mind on a problem and took it apart with logic; he knew that she would not let go until she was satisfied logic could take her no farther. His sensible Elizabeth, who could quote the bible and Greek philosophers and men who had lived their whole lives writing about worlds they knew only from other men like themselves. Elizabeth had once been like them, and she was still like them in some ways. There were things she did not understand, would never understand.

Billy Kirby’s face, bruised and bloody, and the sun rising in colors of fire behind him. The wilderness all around, and somewhere deep in the endless forests Hawkeye living a solitary life, because of Billy Kirby. Broken bones and new graves. The stink of wet ash, and burned flesh. The inconsolable weeping of women. Everything in the balance because of this man who stood before him on a rocky ledge, a
man who would lock a child into a schoolhouse and put a torch to it. Behind him the chasm, and a cocksure smile on his face that lasted until that last moment—too late—that he understood, finally, what he had brought upon himself.

“Well, then,” Elizabeth said, bringing Nathaniel out of his memories. “There is really only one question left. Liam might have suspected what happened between you and Billy, but he could not have known, unless somebody told him. Someone was nearby that morning, clearly. But who could that have been, and why did that person never accuse you?”

Nathaniel brushed the bread crumbs from his lap. “Because whoever told Liam what happened on the mountain wanted him to run off.”

“So he could get the gold.” Her head tilted in surprise, all the tension leaving her for a moment while she considered the logic of it.

“Looks that way. Don’t suppose anybody would be in a hurry to admit such a thing. Now that we’ve solved that puzzle—” He closed a hand over her ankle, cupped the swell of her calf in the palm of his hand. But she was so wound up in this new mystery that she took no note at all.

“Who could it have been? That much Liam could tell us, if he cared to.” She pulled away gently and got to her feet to walk the length of the small cave, her arms folded around herself. The light of the fire sent her shadow up the wall and it jittered with every step she took, her head bowed down with her chin to her chest.

She stopped. “Do you think Richard might have had something to do with it?”

Nathaniel got up, but when he put his arms around her there was a stiffness in her, an unwillingness to let go of this riddle.

“Boots,” he said against her hair. “I ain’t about to share you with the Kirby brothers tonight, nor with Richard Todd. Not tonight or any other night, for that matter.”

She put back her head to look at him. He traced the fine lines at the corner of her mouth with his thumb, cradled her head in his hand and leaned down to kiss her, pulling her up to meet him with his arm around her waist, testing her weight and the shape of her. When he let her mouth go her heartbeat
had quickened under his palm, but the distance was still there in her expression.

It was a challenge he had faced many times, but one he had never tired of, could not imagine tiring of: winning Elizabeth. Making her forget everything but him and herself; forcing her to put away the rest of the world.

“Do you remember—”

“No,” he said, his mouth at her ear, feeling her shiver at his touch. Moving his mouth down her neck until she shuddered and sighed.

“No more questions, not tonight. No children, no school-house, no Paradise. This is our time, Boots. Let’s not waste it.”

And so Elizabeth let herself be drawn down, putting everything aside to focus on her husband’s face, his beloved face so severe and intense as he worked her buttons and ties, his fingers clever and strong and knowing as he undressed her. She wondered if the candlelight was as kind to her as it was to him, giving back to her the man she had come to know in this very cave, the touch of him, his smells and the look in his face when he was with her, that look that was hers alone.

They came here every spring to remind themselves of that time, to remember where they had started. She had come to him against all good reason and logic, back in those days when she thought of herself as a revolutionary because she wanted to teach school. And how surprised she had been at what Nathaniel had to teach her. About herself, about the very nature of desire and the limits of reason.

He loosened her hair and was spreading it out over the furs, every pull of his fingers sending small shock waves through her.

“What are you thinking about?” He kissed the spot under her ear and blew on it, and she shuddered.

“You. And me. Us.”

“That’s better.” He had a wicked smile he saved for times like this; she tasted it on his skin. He was dressed still and she was not. She might have pointed this out to him but his mouth was warm and busy and distracting. She tried to turn toward him but he caught her, held her pinned at the shoulders and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat.

“Much better.”

“Nathaniel?” She needed the sound of his voice, telling her
those things she had never heard from another human being, never wanted to hear from anyone else. He could spin a web with his voice, tangle her in his words and the images he drew with them. Tell her what he was doing, and why, and make her talk in turn.

He pulled away and frowned at her, in concentration and fierce determination and something else, some possessiveness so bone-deep that it claimed the very beat of her heart. He frightened her a little like this and he excited her too, but when she started to tell him that he stopped her with his finger on her mouth, shook his head so that his hair moved around his shoulders.

“Listen,” he whispered against her mouth. “Listen.”

From the edge of the woods where Hannah had stopped to scrape the mud from her moccasins, she watched Gabriel Oak and Cornelius Bump make their way toward the outbuilding that served as Dr. Todd’s laboratory. Behind Gabriel was his own small cabin, made available to him in partial payment for his services as village clerk and Dr. Todd’s secretary. Gabriel was tall and straight, but very frail; even from a distance his poor health was evident in the way he held himself, as if he were about to fall any moment and sure of a broken bone when he did. Everything about him was drawn in shades of gray and black: the fringe of steely hair that showed under the broad rim of the low-crowned hat; the ancient black coat that flapped around him with each brittle step; the ashen cast of the skin stretched tight over high cheekbones.

His companion was Gabriel’s age, but half his size: Bump was a small hill of a man, bent almost double. His upper and lower halves seemed to have sprouted as afterthoughts from the hump that was his upper spine. He wore a long jerkin of pale yellow over a homespun shirt of deep indigo; his brown breeches were patched with squares of buckskin dyed turkey red. The fringe of hair that sprouted straight as wire from under his knit cap was the color of clabber sprinkled with pepper. His head, overlarge for his size, jutted up from between the twisted framework of his shoulders. His whole body undulated
with the force of propelling himself forward; he reminded Hannah of a rainbow trout flexing its way upstream.

She was about to call out to the two men when Gabriel Oak stopped suddenly and, bending forward, began to cough into the kerchief he pulled from his sleeve. A consumptive cough had a sound all its own, as if his lungs were fighting to free themselves forcibly from their cage of ribs. In the past year Curiosity and Hannah had tried every remedy known to them, but Gabriel’s cough had defeated them, as they had known from the beginning that it must. There was no cure for consumption but the grave.

And still Richard Todd had taken on the case, to everyone’s surprise. Generally he seemed content to leave the care of the villagers to Curiosity and Hannah while he worked in his laboratory, but he had made an exception in the case of the old Quaker gentleman. Hannah had the idea that a friendship had taken root between Richard and Gabriel; whether the doctor admitted it to himself or not, it was clear to everyone else that he depended on Gabriel Oak for more than the maintenance of his household accounts and correspondence. And he had known Gabriel since he was a boy.

Presented with all these facts, Curiosity only sniffed. She had her own theories about the relationship between Richard Todd and Gabriel Oak, but was not willing to share them, just yet, although sometimes Hannah had the sense that the older woman would be glad to get whatever it was out in the open.

Gabriel Oak had spent years wandering the frontier and the endless forests, appearing in Paradise sometimes as a tinker, sometimes a preacher, most often as a traveling clerk, accepting payment from those who could not put their own words on paper; often he performed all three services in a single visit. No matter what work he did during any visit, he spent much of his time drawing. Sometimes Bump had been with him, and sometimes not. He had disappeared for longer periods during the Revolution and made only occasional visits after that until he and Bump showed up in Paradise in the fall of 1800 and declared that they had come to stay.

When the fit had passed, Gabriel folded his handkerchief—blood bright—and put it back into his sleeve. Hannah waited until they had closed the laboratory door behind them, and then she followed.

The most obvious thing about the laboratory was the pure stink of it. In between visits Hannah tended to forget how very bad it was, but even in the cool of a spring morning it made her eyes water: the sulphur reek of rotten eggs, distilled urine undercut by ripening manure, and other smells harder to identify. Stink was never hard to find, especially not after a long winter in crowded cabins. But the laboratory smells—sour, sharp, bitter in turn—left a metallic taste high in the back of the throat so strong that the mouth watered and the urge to spit was almost irresistible.

A good airing would have helped, but the doctor would not allow Bump to do more than keep the floor swept and his equipment clean. Hannah suspected that Dr. Todd was using the stench to keep idle visitors—and Curiosity Freeman—away. And still Hannah tried to interest Curiosity in the experiments. She recited the useful chemicals that were to be won from urine or dung: hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, nitrates, hydrochloric acids; but the older woman remained unconvinced.

“Stench is stench.” She would wave a hand before her face, just remembering. “The only thing me and the good doctor agree on is the fact that I don’t belong in that laboratory of his.”

Hannah’s own discomfort with the odors lasted only until the current project had caught her interest. There was another kind of magic here and it had its own language; it was something she intended to learn. If the doctor’s sour moods and impatient manner were the price she had to pay to spend time in this place, that was something she was willing to do.

The laboratory was carefully thought out. Everything had a purpose and no space was wasted: racks hung from the rafters crowded with drying herbs wrapped in cheesecloth, and wall shelves were lined with neat rows of pans and vessels in copper, iron, earthenware, bronze, and glass, all shining in the light of a dozen candles in sconces backed with a mirror of polished brass so that the laboratory was bright with reflected light no matter the time of day or weather. One table was full of the tools needed for the experiments: mortars and pestles in a variety of sizes, fermentation vats, tongs and spoons and scales, covered muffles and sample plates. The other table was lined with glass jars and pottery crocks carefully labeled: vitriol, nitrous acid, acid of sea salt, lime, lye, sulphur, mercury,
bismuth, antimony, zinc, arsenic, cobalt. Baskets under the tables were filled with raw materials: ore, dried dung, and charcoal enough to keep the furnaces fed for the day.

There were three furnaces: the smallest conical in shape, a large melting furnace, and the real wonder and heart of the laboratory, the reverberating furnace, built to the doctor’s specifications by a mason who came all the way from Johnstown with a wagonload of specially fired bricks. He had needed two teams to draw the sleigh, and a week to complete his work. Joshua Hench had needed another week in the smithy to make the doors and stacks and fittings.