Lake in the Clouds (20 page)

Now, looking down at his own dogs, Liam thought of the morning Billy had brought home his first tracker, a young dog won in a game of cards from a voyageur passing through in the spring. Liam had wanted to call her Ginger for the color of her eyes, but Billy said who the hell did he think he was, Adam in the garden? Animals didn’t need names; they worked or they showed up on the table.

Below him Treenie gave a soft bark of welcome, and Liam was startled out of his daydream. A man was coming toward him, lurching toward him, his back buckled like a cat’s. Bump.

The little man stopped. He craned his head and his whole body turned with it as he peered up into the tree, his face as round and white as a new cheese.

“Curiosity sent me,” he said. “You best come on in and join the party, says she. Says you can’t avoid her forever.”

Liam was glad to be sitting in the dark, where Bump couldn’t
see his face. He should have known Curiosity would have taken note of him sitting out here; nothing got past the old woman.

“Kind of her to offer,” he called down. “But I’ve got business to attend to.”

Bump was scratching Bounder behind the ear, talking to the dog in a low, soft voice. Bounder was the biggest of the dogs, more than half the little man’s height, but he rolled right over and showed his speckled belly.

“Did you hear me?” Liam called down, louder. “I ain’t coming in, you can tell her.”

The old man paid him no mind, scratching ears and sweet-talking until the dogs wiggled around him like puppies. Liam let out a bark of his own, all irritation, and swung down to the ground.

“I said—”

“I heard you. My back’s bent, but my ears work just fine.”

Bump cocked his head at him, looking hard. Liam had the uneasy sense that the little man could see right through him. He hitched a breath, pulled himself in tight.

“Then you’ll tell her I ain’t coming.”

“Curiosity?”

“That’s who sent you, ain’t it?” And suddenly Liam thought of Hannah. Maybe the Bonner’s had gone into the house while he was half-asleep and thinking of Billy.

Bump was wiping his hands on a kerchief knotted around his wrist. “You’ll have to tell her yourself,” said he. “I’m on my way to see to Gabriel. Can’t leave him alone for long.” But he stood there anyway, studying Liam.

“What? What is it?”

“You do take after your ma,” he said. “I can see her clear as day in your face.”

Hannah was gone just as suddenly as she had come, and Curiosity too, to be replaced by the shadowy figure of his own mother, dead of a fever when he was no more than four. “You knew my ma?”

“Met her once or twice,” said Bump. “Right here in Paradise, shortly after the war, that was. There was a sweetness to young Moira, and she passed it on to you. Don’t see none of your pa in you, though. But I expect that’s to your credit.”

An insult and a compliment, wound up so tight together that there was no way to respond that wouldn’t sound foolish
from one direction or another. But it was too late anyway: Bump had already turned away, hitching his way back toward the cabin he shared with Gabriel Oak.

“There ain’t nothing sweet about me,” Liam called after him. “And I ain’t afraid of Curiosity Freeman either.”

All around him the dogs whimpered in sympathy, but Bump never even slowed down.

The party had all the markings of trouble; Nathaniel saw that as soon as he came in the door of the old homestead.

The hall was crowded with trappers, just out of the bush with the winter’s haul, on their way to Johnstown and Albany. They were eager for liquor and female companionship both, but they would find too much of the first and not enough of the second. A trapper coming into the village after months alone in the bush would argue about anything, wager a pelt on the speed of a drop of rain moving over window glass, pull a knife without second thought.

And there was Isaiah Kuick standing in the open doorway of the judge’s old study with a tankard in his hand, half an ear turned toward Andy Peach’s long complaint about the poor quality of other men’s peltry. It wasn’t often he saw Kuick in the village, and he had never before seen him in his cups.

From inside the study Nathaniel could hear men’s voices raised in laughter and argument both; the air around the door was thick with tobacco smoke and spilled ale. He stepped in to raise a hand in greeting, answered the usual questions and asked the same, turned down a game of cards and the half-empty bottle of schnapps on its rounds. No doubt there would be trouble before the night was through. The question was, who would throw the first punch.

By the look of her, it could well be Jemima Southern, who stood stoney-faced next to the food tables, watching the dancers as if she wanted nothing more than to knock each of them to the ground. She was the only single woman not in the dance, but it wouldn’t be for lack of a partner. There were men all around, men so lonely for company or eager to let loose that any of them would have gladly stood up with Jemima and her sour face for a dance or two. The fact that she stood there alone meant something, but Nathaniel couldn’t
think what, except that even a wedding party wasn’t enough to shift the girl’s mood.

The dancers moved up the room at a pace fast enough to make the glass in the window sashes rattle while Reuben and Zeke made the fiddle bows fly, coming to the end of “The Fisher’s Hornpipe.” They stood on upended crates at the far end of the room, two brothers talking with the instruments in their hands. They were the finest fiddlers for fifty miles or more, but it wasn’t often that folks got a chance to hear them. The widow charged a full dollar to lend them out to play for an evening, and she sent her overseer along to make sure that they finished promptly at midnight. After that she charged fifty cents an hour. To discourage excess, she said, but nobody was fooled: Lucy Kuick took to coin like a fox to a rabbit.

Dye was sitting in a corner watching the room and the fiddlers both, his expression sullen as a January sky. Right next to him was Liam Kirby, talking into the man’s ear. Every once in a while Dye would say a word, and Kirby would nod or shake his head, but his eyes were fixed on Hannah, who was dancing with Claes Wilde.

There had been lively conversation around the table at Lake in the Clouds, the twins speculating at great length on whether or not Liam would be at the party. Hannah had endured the conversation without comment, but Nathaniel wasn’t surprised to see the boy here; Liam could no more stay away from Hannah than he could cut off his own right hand. Anybody could see the way he watched her move, the way a man watched a woman he considered his own, even if he hadn’t said the words out loud yet, even to himself.

He wondered how long Liam would stay in Paradise once Hannah had left for the city. Wondered if he would forget about the runaway, forget about the wife he had left waiting for him, about his own brother and the mountain and the revenge he had been dreaming about now for so many years, forget about everything to follow Hannah. Nathaniel had to hope that pride would keep the boy from making such a mistake.

“Nathaniel,” said Axel, coming up just behind him. “You’re looking thirsty.”

He accepted the pewter mug from the older man and sniffed.

“Punch too. You’ve been busy.”

“Ja, that’s so.” Axel laughed. “But a daughter don’t get married
every day. She’s been alone a long time, my Anna. Too long. Don’ she look pretty?”

Anna was circling around Jed in the last figure of the dance, and she did look pretty. She was a big woman, but she moved with great agility and smiled so openly up into her bridegroom’s face that Nathaniel felt the pull himself, remembering Elizabeth’s expression at their own wedding party.

Reuben called out the next dance, “Love in a Village,” and Anna put back her head and laughed.

He clapped Axel on the shoulder. “Jed’s a lucky man. Now where have the rest of my people got to? Should have been here an hour ago.”

“Oh, they’re here. The little ones in the kitchen with Curiosity last I saw ’em and your Hannah—you must have seen her, standing up with Claes Wilde? That put a twist in a few handkerchiefs, I’ll tell you.” He cast a nervous look in Liam’s direction. “I expect you’ll hear about that from Hannah. And Elizabeth—she’s just around the corner there, keeping Kitty company.”

Chairs had been lined up along one long wall for those who weren’t dancing. Kitty sat like a queen with her feet propped up, wrapped in a shawl with a rug over her knees in spite of the heat from the hearth and so many people crowded into the room. Richard sat to her left, his attention focused on the bottom of his tankard; Elizabeth was on her right, deep in conversation with Dolly Smythe, her head bent at an angle.

All Kitty’s attention was on the dancers. Nathaniel had seen Kitty dance in every condition: fevered, swollen with child, barely out of mourning; dancing was to Kitty what the school-house was to Elizabeth, and to see her sitting so quietly while the music played said more about her health than any doctor’s explanation. It made him sad for her in a way the lost child had not. For the first time he was glad that Hannah would be going with Kitty to New-York City.

Elizabeth caught sight of him, and raised a hand in greeting. She rose, smoothing the skirt of her good silk gown, and started to make her way across the room.

“The sun rises in her face when she catches sight of you,” said Axel. “Jed ain’t the only lucky man in the room tonight, Nathaniel Bonner.”

“Aye,” said Nathaniel. “I cain’t argue with you there.”

He wanted the chance to talk to Elizabeth in private, but the twins had heard of his arrival and came out of the kitchen to find him, dragging along Ethan for good measure. They had a story to tell, and they would not leave something so important to Elizabeth, who was likely to leave out all the best bits of the drama: how Liam had come in looking dark as a storm, that he had asked Hannah to come outside to talk to him in private, and the sharp words that had fallen between them in this very hall with half the village listening.

“He called her bullheaded, and she told him to go bird hunting if he didn’t care for the party,” finished Lily.

“And then she went to dance with Claes Wilde though she’d turned him down already.” Ethan added this thoughtfully, as if he wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

Daniel said, “Liam’s still there, Da. I don’t think he’s given her up yet.”

Nathaniel caught Elizabeth’s gaze over the heads of the children.

“Your sister is very capable of dealing with Liam Kirby,” said Elizabeth.

Daniel’s expression was doubtful, and Elizabeth leaned forward to speak to him directly. “We are here to make sure she is safe. Are you all finished pulling taffy, then? Or have the other children taken over?”

It was a fine tactic, and they hurried away without further thought for their sister or Liam.

“That explains Jemima Southern,” said Nathaniel. “I never saw such a sour face. Is it Kirby or Wilde she’s begrudging Hannah?”

“Both of them, I think,” said Elizabeth. She put a hand on Nathaniel’s forearm and went up on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, her breath stirring his hair. “Is everything in order?”

He nodded. “She’s ready. Are you nervous?”

“A little. I’ve been thinking about the last time I left this house in the dead of night …”

He slipped an arm around her waist. “That took a good end, didn’t it? You went away a single woman and you came back a wife. And with child, too.”

She tensed a little, in irritation and pleasure both, at his teasing and began to turn away, but he pulled her back, put his mouth against her temple.

“Maybe we should go upstairs and have a look at your old room,” he whispered. “Never did get to call on you there, back then. Or maybe just out to the barn?”

She sputtered with laughter. “Shoo,” she said, slapping at his shoulder. “If you’re so full of mischief you can just as well work it off on the dance floor. That’s ‘Barrel of Sugar’ they’re starting up.”

Nathaniel had never cared much for O’seronni dancing, the formal turns and stiff little hops, skipping like children and winding around in set patterns. Touching hands and bowing, and woe to the man who misstepped. This kind of dancing was nothing like the driven measure of Kahnyen’kehàka dance, the thunder of hundreds of feet drumming the earth under a watching sky. But then there were advantages to taking Elizabeth out on the dance floor: the way her eyes flashed with pleasure, and the color that rose in her cheeks. He could no more deny her the dance than he could raise a hand to her in anger.

They moved down the line, passing Becca Kaes, her hair loosened from its pins and tumbling down around her shoulders, Missy Parker laced so tight into her stays that she breathed like an overworked bellows, Obediah Cameron as confused as ever, looking to his brother Ben for instruction but getting it instead from Kitty, who called out from her chair:
Left, Obediah, left.

At the end of the line Elizabeth smiled and put her hands in his. They circled around Becca and Ben, close enough to the fiddlers now to see how sweat had soaked Zeke’s shirt, how Reuben fiddled half bent over, the instrument cradled like a child. The overseer had tilted his chair back against the wall, watching the crowd through slitted eyes.