The Endless Forest (16 page)

“I can do without,” he said. “I won’t have you worrying about that.”

She loved that hour before they fell asleep, when they talked about everything and nothing at all. Simon made her laugh with his stories, and she brought him up to date with the gossip brought to her by Birdie and Mrs. Thicke.

They rarely talked about the thing they thought about most, but sometimes Lily found the words rising up, wanting to be spoken. She said, “Curiosity thinks the summer will be very hot this year. I’ll melt into a puddle.”

“Nonsense.” He turned on his side to look at her, and put his hand low on her belly. “By fall you’ll be as round and plump as a blueberry.”

She had laughed as he meant her to, but the image stuck in her mind like a burr and wouldn’t be shook off until she took up paper and began to draw. She drew blueberry bushes and a foraging bear, blueberries spilling over a bucket into the grass, single berries in excruciating detail. All in pencil, because she had got the idea that the sharp smells of her paints might be unhealthy for the child she had already started thinking of as Blueberry.

Maybe it was superstition to think that smells might make the difference, but it made Lily feel better, and wasn’t that the whole idea behind such beliefs? She would take whatever help she could find. Because once she had taken childbearing for granted, foolish girl she had been.

She glanced at Jennet’s rounded belly and caught her eye, as well.

Jennet said, “I’ve been waiting for ye to ask, Lily. Midsummer, by Curiosity’s reckoning. So you’ll have some practice with newborns before your own comes along.”

“Unless the cold rain get the better of all of us,” Curiosity sniffed.

Lily caught Jennet’s half smile. Curiosity often got into a temper
about the weather. She held long lectures that seemed to be directed to a minor god directly responsible for the trouble that came along with a cold wind.

Jennet said, “Martha picked an unpleasant day tae go intae the village for the first time.”

Lily drew her knees up and turned toward Curiosity. “The first time? But it’s been weeks—”

Curiosity thumped the table piled high with baskets of thread and yarn so that they leaped. “Leave Martha be. She got enough on her shoulders; she don’t need you talking mean behind her back.”

That brought them up short. Jennet was the first one to find her voice. “But Curiosity, we like the girl. If we talk about her it’s no different from talking among ourselves about Mariah’s cough or Eliza’s nightmares—”

“Now see,” Curiosity interrupted her. “That’s the problem, right there. You think about Martha like she was a child. Maybe you ain’t noticed,” she said directly to Lily. “But some see her for what she is, a woman grown. Some have taken note, yes, Lord.”

Jennet looked intrigued, but the idea that was churning in Lily’s gut was not pleasant.

“Who are you talking about?” And, after a pause: “Ethan? Is Ethan seeing Martha in a—a new light?”

Curiosity shook her head and turned back to her knitting. “I’ma hold my tongue. Said too much already.”

“Too much about what?”

Jennet caught her eye and gave a small shake of the head, but Lily knew she had misspoken before she saw the expression on Curiosity’s face.

“I got nothing more to say.”

For the rest of the visit Lily’s thoughts circled back again and again to Martha Kirby. If it was true that Ethan was really interested in Jemima Kuick’s daughter, then that was Lily’s business. He was her cousin, after all. And so good-hearted that he would be willing to put aside all the things he knew of Jemima. And maybe that was right and good, because she knew nothing but good of Martha.

She knew more about Martha than anyone in the whole village except her twin. She could close her eyes and remember a hot summer afternoon when she had learned firsthand what Jemima could do.

She would have liked to talk about this, but Curiosity had declared the subject closed, and she would not change her mind. It wasn’t until much later that it occurred to Lily that Ethan might not be the one they were talking about. There were others who could have taken an interest in Martha Kirby.

And oh, how terribly complicated that would be. She hoped her brother had more sense.

E
than came up for supper and brought a note from Callie, just a sentence scrawled over a bit of newspaper:
What is keeping you?

Martha read it aloud and Ethan smiled. “Not one to waste words, is she?”

“Is she angry with me, do you think?”

“Oh, no.” Ethan ran his hands through his hair. He was muddy from helping in the village and in spite of a severe scrubbing, his hands were stained. This was not the Ethan she had known in Manhattan, but the younger version of himself she had known growing up here in the village with Daniel and Blue-Jay as his companions. The boys had seemed to possess some kind of magic, something that protected them from harm. Or so it had seemed to Martha.

He said, “If Callie were mad at you, she’d come right to the door and tell you so. The simple fact is that she’s been too busy trying to put things back together to come up here. Now she’s asking you to come down.”

“Then I’ll go tomorrow morning,” Martha said. A difficult lesson,
one she had learned imperfectly, was how to take criticisms—well deserved criticisms—with good grace.

At table the Bonners talked about affairs in the village, progress made or delayed, the difficulty of getting enough hardware, and the fact that in the next days the trappers would start coming out of the bush with the winter’s work. Luke would spend all his time in the Red Dog meeting with them and negotiating prices, and then the drinking would start. The worst of them would lose every penny made in trade at cards or dice.

Martha listened but she didn’t take part, and still she had the strong sense that someone was watching her. If she kept her eyes on her plate, the sensible thing to do, she never need know who.

In the morning Martha stopped in the parlor where Elizabeth was talking to Anje and Joan about the week’s dinners and what was left in the root cellar.

Elizabeth smiled at Martha as if the interruption were of no importance, but behind her back Joan scowled.

“I wondered if I could do any errands for you while I’m in the village. Is there anything you need?”

Anje said, “We are low on sugar, if there’s any to be had.”

“White or brown?”

The LeBlanc girls looked at each other and laughed, for which they got a very sharp look from Elizabeth. She explained, “It’s rare that we see white sugar here. When I go to Johnstown I bring some back, but mostly we use brown.”

“What do people eat in Manhattan, then?” Joan wanted to know. “Honey on your biscuits and white sugar in your tea?”

Martha felt her face flush warm.

“Joan,” Elizabeth began, but Martha put out a hand to stop her.

“I’ll hear worse, I’m sure, before the day is done. You can’t protect me from everything, though you are so good enough to try.”

Anje’s whole face twitched. Trying to hold back a laugh, Martha thought. Or a snicker.

“I will bring what sugar I can find.”

Voices followed her through the door and down the hall. The girls
and Elizabeth, back and forth. She must see about lodgings of her own. She had been a burden on the Bonners for long enough.

Martha remembered very well what the weather could be on the edge of the endless forests, and so she had dressed carefully: wool stockings and two underskirts and her thickest boots, along with a cape lined with fox fur with matching mittens, a muff, and a scarf that itched terribly but kept out the cold like nothing else. She had to leave her good bonnet on the shelf, and took instead the one of boiled wool lined with fur.

All that, and she was still cold. She hurried along as quickly as was safe, keeping an eye on anything that might cause her to lose her footing. Before she had reached the crossroads her skirts were heavy with mud to the knee, and she was breathing loudly. It was really very odd, that she should have been cold a half hour ago and now be dripping with perspiration. But none of that was important.

She should be thinking about Callie, who waited for her at the Red Dog.

“Why the Red Dog?” she had asked Ethan before they went in to the table.

“Because I wouldn’t let her sleep in the cider house, which is the only proper building left standing on her property.”

Martha saw something in his expression that she had never seen before, distress or unhappiness of some kind. Now she wondered if there was a connection. It had never occurred to her before, but why should Ethan not take an interest in Callie?

“Why hasn’t she started rebuilding?” Martha asked.

“Because she doesn’t have the money, and she won’t mortgage the orchards, and she won’t accept gifts. At least, she won’t accept them from me or Luke or Daniel or Nathaniel either, though we’ve all offered more than once.”

Martha said, “She might accept an offer from me. I could afford to build a house for her, isn’t that so?”

His smile was a rare sight. “You could afford to build a dozen houses and it would not make a dent in your account books.”

Every year she sat down with Will Spencer and Ethan to hear the report on what they liked to call her holdings or her investments, and every year she deliberately tried not to listen. She could not conceive of
such amounts of money. It only made her think of her mother, and what Jemima would do if she knew about it.

“I don’t know that Callie will accept your offer any more than she took mine,” Ethan said.

“Nor will we, unless I ask,” Martha said.

This conversation played itself over in Martha’s head as she walked carefully downhill, her skirts gathered tightly in one fist so she could watch her feet. The other way to the village—the one that went right by the Downhill House—would have been faster, but Martha was unused to muddy lanes and preferred the longer, not quite so difficult alternative.

She turned onto the Johnstown road, and then turned again in the direction of the village.

At the crossroads she let out a sigh of relief, when the worst was behind her. The main lane was heavily traveled and deeply rutted, but there was also a footpath that ran along it, hard-packed and secure. And just up ahead she could see the front door of the Red Dog and light shining from the windows.

This wasn’t so very bad, she told herself, and with that thought the earth beneath her left foot disappeared and her leg plunged up to the thigh in cold mud.

Even as it was happening the thought came to her: How had she forgotten about Big Muck, well known to every person with two good feet within fifty miles?

She scrambled backward and tugged, but Big Muck wasn’t having any. Her leg slipped down another notch, and her skirts began to follow. Martha yanked again, and this time Big Muck let go with a sound like a drawn-out and very wet kiss.

She found herself on her back, looking into the stormy sky. Lying prone on the lane while rain plopped into the mud and onto her face, Martha hiccupped a laugh. She raised a hand to her nose and recalled too late the sorry condition of her gloves.

This time the laughter came in fits and starts between bouts of spitting out mud and struggling to sit up. When she finally managed that small task she sat leaning back on her hands as though she was on a picnic in a meadow. Her skirts and mantle were caked with muck and dripping water. The muff was lost, probably never to be found. And down at the end of her left leg, five muddy toes.

Big Muck had sucked the boot off her foot and taken the stocking for
good measure. She wiggled her muddy toes and lay down again on the lane, and now the laugh came up from deep in her belly and she was helpless to do anything more than hold her sides.

“Got you but good,” a voice said over her.

Daniel Bonner. She closed her eyes, but there was no ignoring the fact that of all people, Daniel Bonner had come across her like this.

“Can’t remember last time somebody walked right into Big Muck. Maybe you’re the first,” his disembodied voice went on amiably.

“A dubious honor,” Martha muttered. There was still mud on her mouth, caked in the corners. And on top of all that, the rain was picking up its tempo.

“I came over to lend you a hand, but you look happy just where you are.”

That brought Martha up. “You were watching me?”

His broad-rimmed hat kept rain off his neck, but it also left his face in shadow and hid his expression. Martha suspected that he was smiling.

He said, “We had this very conversation just yesterday as I recall.”

The sound of a window being thrown open made them both look in the direction of the Red Dog. Callie Wilde was leaning out, and she did not look happy.

“Daniel Bonner, you help her up right this minute and don’t take no for an answer.” And then: “Martha! Come on in here, girl; you’ll catch your death.”

Daniel held out his hand. It was a big hand that was stained with ink and dirt too, callused and hard. Martha grabbed with one muddy glove, and he pulled her up and onto her feet. She wobbled for a moment and then her balance came back.