The Endless Forest (23 page)

“You don’t have to teach,” Daniel said, looking directly at Martha. “Unless you want to. I’d be glad of the help.”

In her surprise, Elizabeth did not know where to look. She wanted to see how Martha was reacting, but more important was her son.

Daniel had his father’s ability to hide what he was feeling, the deepest emotions—anger, fear, hate, love—behind a personal dignity. He was doing that now, but for once she could see what it cost him, the tension in his back and jaw. And if Martha should reject his—what was it exactly he had offered her?

Nathaniel said, “Well, there you are then, Martha. Daniel’s made you a proposal, and you’ll have to make some decisions about what you want to do. Now will you sit down and finish your supper? You could use some meat on your bones, girl.”

There was a tone Nathaniel used when he wanted to put an end to a discussion, and it was in his voice now. All around the table his children picked up spoons and applied themselves to soup that had gone cold.

Slowly, awkwardly, interrupted conversations came back to life. Jennet and Hannah were talking about the children, and the fact that Adam was in need of new clothes as he had already outgrown those handed down to him by his brother a few months before. Ben was talking to Luke about the quality of the winter’s furs and the market in Manhattan, whether the call for beaver pelts had let up any and if so, what other fur would bring the best price. Ethan asked Nathaniel about the hardware for the bridge, and whether they should send to Johnstown.

But there were islands of silence around the table. Birdie focused on her food, sniffing once in a while until Elizabeth handed her a fresh handkerchief. Martha ate, lost in her thoughts, and at the other end of the table, Daniel did the same.

Ethan said, “Aunt Bonner, you are very quiet.”

“I was just thinking,” Elizabeth said. “I hope you and Martha will come down to the village with me when we are done here. I’d like to present Ben’s plan to Lily and Simon.”

Birdie looked up, all eagerness restored to her face. “But how will Lily get here?” she asked. “Simon will break his back carrying her up again.”

“Hardly,” Hannah said. “But we’ll find a way.”

Nathaniel leaned into Elizabeth so their shoulders touched, and put one hand on her knee. A companionable gesture, a reminder that he was beside her, as he always was and would always be.

He said, “I guess there are enough of us to carry her on our shoulders, like a queen on a throne.”

An image flashed through Elizabeth’s mind’s eye: six men carrying a box on their shoulders. She shuddered so that Nathaniel looked at her, concerned.

“Oooh.” Birdie was saying. “Like one of the Roman ladies who never put a foot on the ground.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, her voice hoarse. “Exactly like that.”

I
n a day’s time, when it had all been accomplished and Lily was safe at home, Elizabeth found herself alone in the kitchen with Jennet. Jennet looked around herself to make sure she wouldn’t be overheard, and asked a question Elizabeth had been waiting for.

“I havenae seen Daniel, not since all this moving about was decided at the supper table. Have you?”

Elizabeth had not. Daniel made himself scarce through all the tumult of moving Lily up and Martha down to the village. She told herself that he stayed away because if he could not be of help—and he could not carry anything over a certain size—he would rather not watch others do that work. But there was something else, something wrong.

“Do ye think his shoulder is paining him?”

Elizabeth touched her skirt and heard the comforting crackle of paper. The letter was addressed to Hannah, but it fell to Elizabeth to share what it said with Daniel.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Though I doubt it. If the pain were bad
enough to send him to ground, he wouldn’t be around at all, and Daniel has been spending most of the day at the schoolhouse.”

Jennet pushed out her lower lip as she thought. “I thought he would come to see Lily as soon as she put foot over the threshold—oh aye, but ye ken what I mean. It’s been a full day and no sign of him. Are they at odds again?”

The little bit that Elizabeth knew she would not volunteer, nor did she want to talk about her suspicions. Because she did have them, and they had to do with Martha Kirby.

“Do ye ken if he’s been by to see Martha?”

That their minds had moved along the same series of questions did not surprise Elizabeth, but neither did it move her to talk about what she could not know for sure.

More to herself than to Jennet she said, “The only sensible thing to do is to ask Lily directly. If—when her mood settles.”

“Aye,” Jennet said. “I can do it, if ye like.”

There would be some advantages to having Jennet take on this conversation with Lily in her current fragile mood. Especially if Lily was fretting over the idea of Martha Kirby and her cousin Ethan.

There was nothing between Ethan and Martha, but there might be something—given time and opportunity—between Martha and Daniel.

Of all the Bonners, Lily was the one who was most vehement about Jemima. There were reasons for Lily’s animosity, certainly. But Daniel had the same history with Jemima, and he was far more detached when the subject came up. Certainly he did not look at Martha and see Jemima, while it seemed that Lily could not or would not distinguish between daughter and mother.

In the end, none of it was Lily’s business, just as Daniel had had no business meddling when she had first shown an interest in Simon Ballentyne. Such personal matters should remain personal, and Elizabeth must trust her adult children to make reasonable choices. She would not follow her father’s example. Judge Middleton had wanted Elizabeth to marry Richard Todd; her refusal and his interference had set a series of events in motion that ended badly. Nathaniel had lost his grandfather Chingachgook and Jemima her father.

To Elizabeth it seemed that any hope for Jemima had gone to the grave with Moses Southern. Since that day she had blamed the Bonners,
and her hate for them had grown to encompass everything that stood between her and the things she believed were owed her.

But once there had been hope for her. As a young girl in Elizabeth’s classroom she had been surly and uncooperative in that first year, but toward the spring she had begun to take pleasure in her small victories. She was very good with numbers and she had a beautiful singing voice. Unfortunately she also had a sly way that made her unpopular with her classmates.

Just lately Elizabeth had been thinking a great deal about that first winter and spring in Paradise, how very different it had been from her imaginings. Elizabeth found that she was protective of her younger self, that woman on the verge of thirty who came to teach in a wilderness school with such earnest and naïve goodwill. At sixty she could see many things that had been unclear still at forty or even fifty.

Often these days she had the sense of herself nearby, watching. In those moments she had the strong urge to speak to her younger counterpart in encouraging words. She would use the same tone she did when Lily and Hannah needed comforting.

The future is mysterious and frightening to you now, but in the end all will be well. There will be great happiness and great sorrow, you will have a family, you will find yourself capable of things you cannot now imagine. But you will persevere, and one day you will look around yourself and know that your life is good and that you are, in spite of all your early doubts, happy
.

“Elizabeth?”

Jennet touched her wrist, and Elizabeth startled up out of her thoughts.

“Pardon me,” she said with a small laugh. “Woolgathering.”

“We were talking about Lily. Whether I should approach her and try to find out what’s got her upset.”

Elizabeth nodded. “I think she would respond more openly to you. You are sensible and you understand her condition. I remember the affinity I felt for other bearing women when I was increasing.”

“Women going off to battle together,” Jennet said with a grim smile. “Ye neednae fash yersel, I’m not easily put off and should she throw paint pots at my head, as was once her habit.”

Elizabeth was content to leave it at that, but she reminded herself that Lily was not sick. She was with child, a condition that was always
dangerous but natural nonetheless. She herself had had a difficult delivery with Birdie, and with less experienced midwives she might well have died. Now Many-Doves was gone, but Curiosity would be there, and Hannah, and Friend Molly Noble, whose skill and experience Curiosity and Hannah respected. And Simon. She would have Simon, who had loved her from the beginning though she fought her own emotions and strove to deny the attraction. Sometimes with words, and sometimes with paint pots.

Jennet said, “I was wondering—”

“What is it?”

“I was wondering about Martha Kirby. She’s a different lass already from the one who left Manhattan with us, is she no?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “She is come back to herself.”

“Do ye think she’ll start teaching come Monday?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. The question confused and even irritated her. She must not interfere in her children’s lives, but neither could she look away, no matter how much trouble they made for themselves.

“Ye think it’s a good idea?”

Elizabeth gave her a tired smile. “It’s too early to know,” she said. “But I think it might work out quite well.”

“Aye, weel,” Jennet said. “I admit I’m more than a wee bit curious. Were Daniel to walk in this minute I’d come out and ask him.”

Elizabeth said, “Maybe I will be able to put the question to him today. I have to speak to him on a different matter, and the subject could come up.”

“He’s aye fond of her,” Jennet said.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “He is fond. And more than fond.”

Jennet was frowning as she wrung her cloth in the water basin.

Elizabeth said, “Come out and say it. Are you thinking of Martha’s connections?”

“I am,” Jennet said. “And so must you. Does the idea of sharing grandchildren with Jemima—what is her name now? Wilde, is that right?”

“As far as we know, yes. I can’t remember at this moment how she signed her letter to Martha.”

“Would she no be within her rights to demand to see her grandchildren?”

Elizabeth thought about that for a minute. Then she said, “I have nine grandchildren, soon to be ten—” she inclined her head to Jennet’s middle. “And not one of them is related to me by blood. But they are my grandchildren. I could feel no different about them if I had given birth to Luke and Hannah. Do you feel differently about Adam than you do about your other three?”

Jennet and Luke had taken Adam in as a newborn just before they started home from New Orleans. Nathan had been no more than six or seven months old and so the boys had no understanding of themselves as anything but brothers. One towheaded and the other dark, they had slept forehead to forehead for years. Lily had done many studies of them as infants, in just that pose.

For some reason Elizabeth had never been able to work out for herself, even those people who refused to recognize blacks as human beings would smile and coo at an infant, no matter what color. And so it had been with Adam, who had been a beautiful child. But that was changing. He had shot up in the last year; he was tall for his age, well built, strong. In his birth state of Louisiana he would be someone’s possession, already working in the fields. He’d know nothing of books, and most likely even less of kindness. It hurt even to imagine it.

“Aye, when you put it that way—” Jennet turned her head as if she were trying to hear a voice far away. “Were Adam’s faither to rise from his grave tae claim him, I wad put a knife in his heart rather than let him touch the boy.”

Elizabeth said, “Jennet, someday he will fall in love and want to marry. What if the girl’s family forbade it because they knew Adam’s father for the scoundrel he was?”

“But they couldn’t know,” Jennet said, flushing with irritation. “So far as the world kens, Adam is Luke’s son.”

Elizabeth held her gaze, and Jennet closed her eyes briefly. Then she said, “Aye, aye. I take your meaning. It’s the color of his skin that will cause him heartache. Martha’s situation has naught to do with color, but to be turned away for her mother’s sake—aye. But Elizabeth, Adam’s father is deid and can do the boy no direct harm. Jemima is alive, and stirring in whatever hidey-hole she found for herself.”

It was an image that stayed with Elizabeth for the rest of the day.

—

She was determined to find Daniel and have a discussion with him before the morning passed, and so Elizabeth hurried through the long list of decisions and directions she dealt with every day. She talked to John Henry, the husband of Curiosity’s granddaughter Solange, who was come to start double-digging the vegetable garden. She wrote a little in her current letter to her cousins in Manhattan to ask for some French bean seeds she had been wanting to try, and a new pair of shoes for Birdie. She spoke to the LeBlanc girls about the meals for the next days; how salty the ham had been and if the remainder should be put to soak, how long the store of potatoes and carrots might last, or if more would have to be purchased, if there were enough eggs to make custard for everyone, or if they would make do with stewed dried apples and leave the rich eggs and cream to Lily and Jennet.