The Endless Forest (66 page)

For a few minutes they talked about the gardens and cornfields, who might have seed to share, and whether the early spring meant a longer or a shorter summer.

“But I do mean to come visit more often,” Susanna said. “It’s just that the days go by so quickly.”

“And the nights too, I’m sure.” Joan LeBlanc said under her breath. Elizabeth jerked around, but Joan had turned her back and was scrubbing the table.

If Susanna had heard Joan’s comment, she was giving no sign of it.

Elizabeth asked about Lily.

“Upstairs,” said Jennet. She arched her back and stretched. “Taking a nap with the weeest of the wee people.”

“You need a nap as much as Lily,” Elizabeth told her.

Jennet waved this suggestion off as if she were shooing away flies.

“When is the baby due?” Martha asked.

“That’s a matter of some debate,” Jennet said. “By my reckoning, early August. Curiosity insists July, and Hannah here is keeping her opinion to
herself. I think it’s odd they won’t take my word on it. I was there when it happened, after all. Och, Martha, I’ve embarrassed you. I apologize.”

Martha smiled to herself, and Elizabeth imagined she was enjoying the company of these women who she could now claim as sisters. They were, and would always be, a powerful force in her life. They would help her bring her children into the world, and stand by her when illness and misfortune struck, as she would stand by them.

She wondered, as she sometimes did since her last birthday, how many years were left to her, how long she would be able to watch Martha grow into her new life and family. Then she thought of Curiosity and took some comfort in that good example.

She said, “Martha, do you feel yourself come home?”

Everyone looked at her, as if she had said something out loud they never knew the words for. Martha’s smile softened.

“Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m feeling. I’m—” And she broke off.

“Pregnant!” said Joan LeBlanc. “I knew it!”

Martha turned very quickly, color rising on her cheeks. “I am not,” she said, with great dignity. “And if I were, it would be none of your concern. I would like an apology.”

Joan looked as though she had been slapped. Which she had, in a way. She mumbled something that might have been an apology and then something else about the parlor and slipped away, out of the kitchen.

Anje was worrying her lip with her teeth, her eyes wide.

“The lass is aye angry,” Jennet said.

“At me?” Martha said, clearly upset. “Why should she be angry at me?”

Elizabeth said, “She’s angry at everybody.”

Anje said, “Don’t send her off, please. It would only make things worse.”

“What things?” Annie said, her brow drawn down.

Anje looked at the door as if she wished she could see through it, and then she lowered her voice.

“She had hopes of one of the Sampson brothers. I think it’s hard for her to see all of you so—”

“Settled. Happy,” Susanna suggested. “I’m sorry for her loss.”

Elizabeth hadn’t thought very much about the Sampsons, and she felt a pang of guilt about that. But the three brothers had lived alone, and there had been no grieving family to look after.

Hannah said, “Which one?”

Anje looked confused.

“Which brother?” Hannah said.

“Oh,” Anje said. “I don’t know.”

“She didn’t confide in you?”

Anje lifted a shoulder. “She didn’t know herself. She would have taken any of them. She’s worried she’ll die an old maid.”

They were all quiet for a moment, because there was little to say. Ethan and Daniel and Gabriel had all married very quickly; the Sampson brothers were lost in the flood, and most of the other single men were Quakers, who married among themselves or went to Baltimore or Philadelphia to find wives.

There were no men for the younger women like Joan and her sisters to marry, which meant they must resign themselves to spinsterhood, or leave home to take up work in some bigger town. And that, in turn, meant that should one of them find a husband, she could never come back to Paradise, unless there was money to buy land.

“Ethan planned so carefully,” Hannah said.

“A few things did slip his notice,” Annie said. “And then of course one of the eligible men went and married a squaw.”

Elizabeth heard herself draw in a sharp breath. “Annie.”

The girl raised her brows. “I’m not making it up, Auntie. People say such things to me.”

“Who?” Jennet asked. “Who would dare to talk you to like that?”

Anje’s color drained away and she turned back to her work.

“It’s not important and I don’t want to say. If word got back to Gabriel—”

“Och aye,” Jennet said. “Better to avoid that.”

Simon was sound asleep, and Elizabeth took him from Hannah so she could put herself to rights.

Just at that moment the kitchen door swung open and Callie came in, a pulse fluttering in her neck and her eyes very large in her face. She said, “I can’t find Nicholas. I’ve looked everywhere.”

It took a good five minutes to settle her down and get the story, which was very simple, in the end. Callie had dozed off in the shade of the trees watching the games, and when she woke there was no sign of Nicholas anywhere.

“I checked the barn and stable and all the outbuildings,” she said. “I went over to your place, Hannah, and I checked there too.”

“But think, Callie,” Jennet said. “The boy makes friends so easily, there’s no cause for panic. Our lads go off for days at a time playing in the fort at Lake in the Clouds or exploring—”

“You’re thinking of Harper,” Martha said. “That’s what has you so worried.”

Just that simply Callie dissolved into tears. “If something happens to him, I couldn’t bear it.”

In her calmest voice, Jennet asked Callie an obvious question. “Did you see the other bairns? What did they have to say about Nicholas?”

Callie’s mouth crimped with irritation. “I wasn’t looking for them,” she said. “I was looking for Nicholas.”

There was a small silence in the room, and then Martha came forward and sat next to Callie.

“Callie,” she said. “The boy will be with the other children.”

With a studied slowness Callie raised her head and looked at Martha so coldly that Elizabeth’s throat closed for a moment.

“His name is Nicholas,” she said. “Why can’t you say his name? He’s your half brother, whether you like it or not.”

Martha closed her eyes and opened them again, and then she stood. “I’m going out to look for the children. When I find Nicholas, I’ll send him to you here.”

“There they are,” Hannah said from her spot by the window. “Don’t you hear them laughing? And Nicholas is there too. Callie? Nicholas is there.”

Callie got up and went to the door, where she hesitated for a moment. Then she turned and looked at each of them. She said, “I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m too attached to him. But he’s the only blood kin I have in the world. In my place you’d feel the same.”

Jennet said, “Callie, lass. What will you do when his mither comes to claim him?”

She heard the question, Elizabeth was sure of it, but Callie simply walked away, out of the kitchen and through the hall and front door, letting it close behind her with a sound as sharp as an axe meeting wood.

—

Despite the disconcerting episode in the kitchen, the rest of the afternoon went smoothly. Elizabeth returned to her spot under her apple tree and was glad when Martha and Susanna joined her. For a long time they spoke very little, half dozing in the shade while they listened to Jennet telling stories to the older children while Hannah and Annie finished in the kitchen. Over the next half hour they all drifted back together, sitting quietly in the shade to watch the game that ranged up and down from one goal to the other.

With a flick of his bagattaway stick Blue-Jay sent the ball flying and Gabriel leaped into the air to intercept it, as graceful as a deer. Elizabeth watched Nathaniel running, his long hair flying around him.

Martha said, “This will go on all day, won’t it? Unless somebody gets hurt.”

“Even then,” Susanna said. “When they are in the grips of the game, they hear nothing else.”

“Runs-from-Bears is as fast as any of the younger men,” Jennet said. “And Nathaniel is faster still.”

“They are a joy to watch,” Elizabeth said. “I have never tired of it, even after so many years.”

“I doubt that I will either,” Susanna said.

Martha turned toward her. “How did you and Blue-Jay meet? I don’t think I’ve ever heard the story. If that isn’t too personal a question.”

Susanna said, “There wasn’t very much to it. One day when we had been here a few months, Ben came to our Seventh-Day Meeting. Ben’s sister-in-law is a Friend, and he sometimes went to Meeting with her when he lived in New Orleans. He was homesick, I think. Blue-Jay asked to come along with him to see what it was like.”

She put her head back to study the boughs overhead.

“My father met them at the door and directed them to the back bench, though there were spaces enough at the front.” Susanna closed her eyes and then she sat up straight and looked directly at Martha. “Thou must understand. If Daniel or Lily or someone like thee came to a Meeting, my father would be gracious and welcoming, and room would be made at the front.”

“Oh,” Martha said, clearly unhappy to have raised the question.

“Yes, oh,” Susanna said with a grim smile. “I was shamed by my father’s lack of charity and fellowship. And so I went to sit with Ben and
Blue-Jay on the back bench. And that was the first time we spoke, though I had seen him before in the village. Thy expression, Martha. Have I surprised thee?”

“Yes,” Martha said, “a little. So that’s why you don’t come into the village? Because of the way your family treated the Mohawk?”

“Every day I pray for an opening,” Susanna said. “For a way to forgive my father and my mother too, for taking his part in what happened at Meeting. In the meantime, I have made my home with Blue-Jay at Lake in the Clouds, and I want no other.”

Martha turned her attention back to the game, which had not slowed down at all in spite of the afternoon sun. Backs and shoulders, knotty with muscle, glistening with sweat. Martha’s eyes tracked Daniel and Elizabeth was struck with the memory of the first days of her own marriage. The powerful hunger, the strangeness of it all.

To see Daniel playing was to see him truly happy. So much had been taken away from him, but here was one thing left from childhood that he could still do, even one-armed. He leapt into the air brandishing the bagattaway stick Hawkeye had made for him when he was a boy, and scooped the ball out of the sky into the net at its end. With a flick of his wrist he sent it flying again.

When Elizabeth looked at him she saw her firstborn son, who had come back to them when she had begun to give up hope.

Martha said, “I worry about being so happy.”

None of the others had anything to say to that, because they knew too well what she meant. Rather than give her false assurances, Elizabeth covered Martha’s hand with her own.

“Thank you,” she said. “For my son, I thank you.”

F
or Martha the last week of spring and the first of summer seemed to spin by like a top.

She learned to rise at first light, to have that quiet hour with Daniel. As soon as Betty came up from the village with fresh bread and new milk, the day would begin.

To Martha’s great relief school came to an end without any terrible missteps on her part, but the newly free hours were filled straight away. She helped Curiosity make soap and Lily organize hundreds of drawings and paintings accumulated over the years. The little people came to visit and she fed them all pancakes while they told her their newest stories. When Hannah went into the woods to find the herbs and roots and barks she needed for her medicinals, Martha came along and paid attention until things she had once known began to come back to her.

She helped Annie and Susanna in the cornfields at Lake in the Clouds, so that her hands blistered, the blisters broke and then came again until finally she had calluses enough to protect her, and the hoe felt solid in her hands. Though she wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, her
freckles multipled by the hundreds, much to Daniel’s interest and amusement. His own skin tone deepened until the green of his eyes stood out and took on a silver cast, so striking that she sometimes found herself unable to look away from him.

After Martha had watched her new husband shave himself a few times, an awkward process he had trained himself to do with one hand, she offered, hesitantly, shyly, to be taught. At first she thought she had offended him, but the next day he showed her how to sharpen the razor on the strop and to beat soap into a lather and then, step by step, how to scrape the stubble from his cheeks and chin, from his upper lip and finally from his jaw and throat. She loved his neck for reasons she couldn’t explain to herself, and running the razor down its length unsettled her in a way she would have found odd and disturbing, if she had not seen the same reaction on Daniel’s face.

Betty looked after the laundry and the cleaning, while Martha found other ways to look after Daniel. Sometimes she washed his hair out in the open, Daniel on a chair tilted back and propped against the pump while she rubbed soap into his scalp and then rinsed it. Water ran in rivulets over his arched neck and down his chest, and it often took all her concentration to stay focused on the job at hand. As if she had set him a challenge, Daniel took over the brushing of her hair in the evening. It was her turn to sit in the chair, and she found herself looking forward to it at odd moments during the day.