The Endless Forest (57 page)

She said, “I will visit, I promise.”

“Good,” Susanna said. “I should like that very much.”

“In case you’re not hearing us plain enough,” said Runs-from-Bears, “you’re at home here. The mountain is your place now, and Lake in the Clouds is where you come if you need help.”

“Thank you,” Martha said. Her voice wavered and broke, but no one was rude enough to take note.

“Don’t get too excited,” Annie said with a half smile. “Most of the time we’ll put you straight to work.”

As tired as she was, it still took Martha a good while to fall into a deep sleep. All the things that had happened in one day, so many it would take her a long time to sort them all through. Her wakefulness rose and fell on the night breeze. A tumble of faces and conversations swelled and receded, and followed her into sleep.

E
than had a mantel clock, a pretty thing of polished cherry wood with delicate hands to point out the time.

On her first night in this house Callie had hardly noticed the chiming. It certainly hadn’t kept her from her sleep, but then, she reckoned to herself, she had been bone weary and overwhelmed, a word she did not like to use in relation to herself. She could never afford to let her guard down or give in to fear. And she didn’t need much sleep; she never had.

She counted the soft chiming of the mantel clock at ten, at eleven, and now at midnight.

Ethan slept soundly; she could not see him in the darkened room, but she could hear the steady rise and fall of his breathing. Of course, Ethan had a clear conscience and nothing to really worry him. He had land and money and the respect of everyone in the village; he had an education, and freedom to do as he pleased. Ethan had lost his father and mother long ago, and his stepfather as well; he had no brothers or sisters to look after and worry about.

Yesterday Callie had believed the same of herself; she was alone in the
world but for a stepsister who had once been her best friend but who had grown distant and unfamiliar. Today she had a brother. A half brother, it was true, but still, a human being of her blood. Her father’s son. A handsome boy, with bright eyes and a good smile, strongly built and quick. Somehow or another, he had survived Jemima, where their father had not. She had broken Nicholas Wilde like a dry twig over her knee, but the boy—the boy was made of stronger stuff.

When the clock chimed half past midnight, Callie got out of bed. By touch she found her clothes and in a matter of minutes she was closing the house door behind herself.

It was the kind of night she liked best, full of wayward breezes and sudden smells. The sky overhead was crowded with stars that lit her way from the porch steps to the path, from the path through the kitchen garden to the lane. It felt good to be barefoot after a day in shoes; the earth was still vaguely warm, reluctant to give up the last of the previous day’s sun.

Every window at the Red Dog was dark, including the one that had been her own just a few nights ago. Where Jemima slept next to her most recent husband.

Most likely the boy would be in the little parlor that opened off the bedchamber, on a trundle bed. Jemima would want him nearby, within reach. She guarded her possessions closely, no matter how she had got them.

Finally Callie turned away, speaking harsh words to herself, words like patience and fortitude. Words a preacher might use, standing in front of his congregation. She had no use for preachers or churches, but she knew the value of self-control.

She headed for the orchards almost without thought, her feet taking her where she needed to be. The only place she could really think; the one place she belonged. The idea that her home was now a small house on the Johnstown road was too ridiculous to credit. She would come back to the orchards. Ethan would rebuild the house and she would live there, with or without him.

She was sorry, suddenly, that she hadn’t taken the time to talk to Levi before she went to Johnstown with Ethan. What had she been thinking, to go off without a word and leave him to care for the animals and everything else? She had been able to run away and escape Jemima because Levi was there to look after things.

She had let her time be taken up with far less important things, visits with neighbors who came to satisfy their curiosity and wish them well; an awkward conversation with the Thicke sisters about how she wanted the meals to be handled and the washing to be done. Things that had never interested her, and would never interest her: she had given them a free hand and the distinct impression that she didn’t care to be asked about any of it.

Through all that, she had meant to come to the orchards, but time had slipped away and then came word from Martha: The boy was at the schoolhouse.

She forgot about everything else. This was what she had wanted, a chance to see the boy without Jemima nearby. She had been so wound up in the idea of a brother that she had never given a thought to Levi, who would have an opinion on this matter. Levi’s history with Jemima was as bad as her own.

Levi slept as little as she did, and so Callie took a chance. She ran most of the way and stopped when she was near enough to see a thin ribbon of light around the one shuttered window of Levi’s cabin. She called, and in a moment the door opened.

He came out on the porch and stood there quietly, looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” Callie said. “I should have come yesterday. I’m sorry.”

He said, “Let’s go set.”

When she was a girl he would have invited her to sit right there on his little porch while they talked about work to be done, but that had stopped when she turned sixteen. Wasn’t seemly, he told her. People might get the wrong idea. It seemed silly to her still today; his mother Cookie had raised her, and Levi was much like an older brother. Then Cookie died, and Levi’s brother went to Johnstown and married there, but Levi had stayed behind to work the orchards. How anyone could think badly of him was a mystery to her. He was a big man, that was true, and his skin was very black, but he was also acknowledged to be one of the hardest-working men in a hundred miles, generous, soft-spoken, and so good with animals that folks came to him with sick cows and goats and horses.

They sat on stumps just outside the cider house double doors, as was their habit. It took a lot of weather to chase them inside.

“It was a sudden thing,” she told him. “We decided to do it so Jemima couldn’t make a claim on this place.”

Levi was quiet for a long time.

She said, “It doesn’t change anything. As soon as I can rebuild the house, I’ll be moving back here. There’s money for that now; we won’t have to wait. And oh, there’s a whole wagonload full of supplies coming. Wait ’til you see.”

When he turned his head to look at her, she could make out nothing untoward in his expression.

“Mister Ethan is a good man,” he said finally.

Callie sighed with relief. “Yes, he is.” She let her eyes wander over the saplings, though that very act made her heart race with fear.

“How is it?”

She didn’t need to be specific; Levi knew exactly what was on her mind.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll tell you this for sure, there ain’t an apple tree in all God’s creation better looked after.” And then, more softly: “Won’t be many days now before she blossoms.”

The apple blossom days had always been her favorite, second only to the harvest and far better than any holiday. This spring she had been hoping for fruit from three of the Bleeding Hearts; sometimes she could forget, for a little while at least, about the true depths of her loss.

“Did you tell your husband about the Bleeding Heart?”

She started to hear Ethan called her husband, but more disturbing still was the knowledge that she had not even considered telling him the secret. Could not imagine telling him.

“I didn’t,” she said. “And I won’t.”

“Why not?”

She looked Levi directly in the eye. “I suppose I’m being superstitious, but I want to keep it between the two of us. Does that seem odd to you?”

“No,” Levi said. “That make perfect sense to me.” His expression relaxed a little, and Callie had the urge to leave things just where they were. But she couldn’t, in good conscience.

“You know about Jemima.”

There was the slightest stirring from him. A tightening of muscles that came and went almost instantly. As seldom as this subject came up over the years, Levi’s reaction was always the same. He went from quiet to silent, and nothing could make him talk about Callie’s stepmother.

“I’m sorry to have to say any of this, but do you remember, was she pregnant when she went away from here?”

In the silence she knew that they were both reliving those few difficult months when Levi had lost his mother and Callie had lost everything.

She cleared her throat. “She brought the boy back here. He’s here. I saw him, Levi. I talked to him. I think—I know that he’s my half brother. When you see him, you’ll know it right away too.”

Levi stood very slowly, his arms hanging straight at his sides. He said, “I got no interest in seeing that woman’s child, and neither should you.”

Callie stood too, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her hands. “Levi, he looks like my father. He
looks
just like my
father
, and—”

“Miss Callie,” Levi interrupted her. “Let me tell you plain and you listen to me now. She playing games with you. She want you to let that boy close so she can get close her own self. Don’t you be took in. Don’t let her do it.”

Levi turned without another word and walked away into the dark.

M
artha had always considered herself a composed person, not easily overwhelmed by stressful or demanding situations.

It was a characteristic that she valued in herself and in others, but over the course of the next ten days, she came to believe that she had overestimated her skills. She was a new bride in a new household, teaching for the first time and dealing with the sudden and unwelcome reappearance of her mother and the boy who was supposed to be her brother. It was a great amount to deal with all at once, but long conversations with Daniel and the rest of the family had been helpful. It would not be pleasant when she finally had to face Jemima, but she could manage, when the time came.

Except it didn’t. A week after Jemima had first come to Paradise, Martha had still not seen her, nor had she had any other kind of communication. Every day she went into the village to teach, fully expecting to come face-to-face with her mother. Every day her mother stayed away.

There were reports of her. Mr. and Mrs. Focht ate their meals in the
common room at the Red Dog, and went walking every day after dinner and supper both. Young Nicholas was often with them. They spoke to no one. Becca conducted all business through the Fochts’ servants, who were utterly polite and efficient.

All of this made Martha supremely uneasy, but there was more.

Oddly enough, she saw nothing of Callie either. There were a dozen excuses, but in the end it was impossible to deny the truth: Callie was avoiding her.

If not for Daniel’s calm support, Martha thought she might have given in to anxiety and gone into hiding as Callie had. But she was newly married, and married into the large and complex Bonner clan, which turned out to mean that she had no opportunity to indulge in worry and self-pity.

She had a household to manage, something she had not thought about at all. Within a day she had to laugh at her own temerity. A house on a mountainside more than two miles from the nearest neighbor—and uphill miles, at that—had nothing to do with a town house on Broadway with a dozen servants and daily calls by the butcher and baker and dairyman. To her immense relief, Daniel seemed to realize what would be required before she did, and so he arranged for Betty Ratz to come up from the village every morning, bringing new bread and a bucket of milk with her. While they were teaching, Betty cleaned and washed and kept an eye on the puppy, who was too much of a distraction to take into the classroom every day.

Teaching turned out to be not quite so hard as she had feared, but those five hours from nine to twelve and one to three drained her of every ounce of energy. She was always ravenously hungry and ate until she was satisfied, and still the waistband on her skirts was looser. It was all the walking up and down the mountainside, she told Daniel.