Author: Sara Donati
Category: Historical
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He loosened her hair and was spreading it out over the furs, every pull of his fingers sending small shock waves through her.
“What are you thinking about?” He kissed the spot under her ear and blew on it, and she shuddered.
“You. And me. Us.”
“That’s better.” He had a wicked smile he saved for times like this; she tasted it on his skin. He was dressed still and she was not. She might have pointed this out to him but his mouth was warm and busy and distracting. She tried to turn toward him but he caught her, held her pinned at the shoulders and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat.
“Much better.”
“Nathaniel?” She needed the sound of his voice, telling her those things she had never heard from another human being, never wanted to hear from anyone else. He could spin a web with his voice, tangle her in his words and the images he drew with them. Tell her what he was doing, and why, and make her talk in turn.
He pulled away and frowned at her, in concentration and fierce determination and something else, some possessiveness so bone-deep that it claimed the very beat of her heart. He frightened her a little like this and he excited her too, but when she started to tell him that he stopped her with his finger on her mouth, shook his head so that his hair moved around his shoulders.
“Listen,” he whispered against her mouth. “Listen.”
Chapter 8
From the edge of the woods where Hannah had stopped to scrape the mud from her moccasins, she watched Gabriel Oak and Cornelius Bump make their way toward the outbuilding that served as Dr. Todd’s laboratory. Behind Gabriel was his own small cabin, made available to him in partial payment for his services as village clerk and Dr. Todd’s secretary. Gabriel was tall and straight, but very frail; even from a distance his poor health was evident in the way he held himself, as if he were about to fall any moment and sure of a broken bone when he did. Everything about him was drawn in shades of gray and black: the fringe of steely hair that showed under the broad rim of the low-crowned hat; the ancient black coat that flapped around him with each brittle step; the ashen cast of the skin stretched tight over high cheekbones.
His companion was Gabriel’s age, but half his size: Bump was a small hill of a man, bent almost double. His upper and lower halves seemed to have sprouted as afterthoughts from the hump that was his upper spine. He wore a long jerkin of pale yellow over a homespun shirt of deep indigo; his brown breeches were patched with squares of buckskin dyed turkey red. The fringe of hair that sprouted straight as wire from under his knit cap was the color of clabber sprinkled with pepper. His head, overlarge for his size, jutted up from between the twisted framework of his shoulders. His whole body undulated with the force of propelling himself forward; he reminded Hannah of a rainbow trout flexing its way upstream.
She was about to call out to the two men when Gabriel Oak stopped suddenly and, bending forward, began to cough into the kerchief he pulled from his sleeve. A consumptive cough had a sound all its own, as if his lungs were fighting to free themselves forcibly from their cage of ribs. In the past year Curiosity and Hannah had tried every remedy known to them, but Gabriel’s cough had defeated them, as they had known from the beginning that it must. There was no cure for consumption but the grave.
And still Richard Todd had taken on the case, to everyone’s surprise. Generally he seemed content to leave the care of the villagers to Curiosity and Hannah while he worked in his laboratory, but he had made an exception in the case of the old Quaker gentleman. Hannah had the idea that a friendship had taken root between Richard and Gabriel; whether the doctor admitted it to himself or not, it was clear to everyone else that he depended on Gabriel Oak for more than the maintenance of his household accounts and correspondence. And he had known Gabriel since he was a boy.
Presented with all these facts, Curiosity only sniffed. She had her own theories about the relationship between Richard Todd and Gabriel Oak, but was not willing to share them, just yet, although sometimes Hannah had the sense that the older woman would be glad to get whatever it was out in the open.
Gabriel Oak had spent years wandering the frontier and the endless forests, appearing in Paradise sometimes as a tinker, sometimes a preacher, most often as a traveling clerk, accepting payment from those who could not put their own words on paper; often he performed all three services in a single visit. No matter what work he did during any visit, he spent much of his time drawing. Sometimes Bump had been with him, and sometimes not. He had disappeared for longer periods during the Revolution and made only occasional visits after that until he and Bump showed up in Paradise in the fall of 1800 and declared that they had come to stay.
When the fit had passed, Gabriel folded his handkerchief—blood bright—and put it back into his sleeve. Hannah waited until they had closed the laboratory door behind them, and then she followed.
The most obvious thing about the laboratory was the pure stink of it. In between visits Hannah tended to forget how very bad it was, but even in the cool of a spring morning it made her eyes water: the sulphur reek of rotten eggs, distilled urine undercut by ripening manure, and other smells harder to identify. Stink was never hard to find, especially not after a long winter in crowded cabins. But the laboratory smells—sour, sharp, bitter in turn—left a metallic taste high in the back of the throat so strong that the mouth watered and the urge to spit was almost irresistible.
A good airing would have helped, but the doctor would not allow Bump to do more than keep the floor swept and his equipment clean. Hannah suspected that Dr. Todd was using the stench to keep idle visitors—and Curiosity Freeman—away. And still Hannah tried to interest Curiosity in the experiments. She recited the useful chemicals that were to be won from urine or dung: hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, nitrates, hydrochloric acids; but the older woman remained unconvinced.
“Stench is stench.” She would wave a hand before her face, just remembering. “The only thing me and the good doctor agree on is the fact that I don’t belong in that laboratory of his.”
Hannah’s own discomfort with the odors lasted only until the current project had caught her interest. There was another kind of magic here and it had its own language; it was something she intended to learn. If the doctor’s sour moods and impatient manner were the price she had to pay to spend time in this place, that was something she was willing to do.
The laboratory was carefully thought out. Everything had a purpose and no space was wasted: racks hung from the rafters crowded with drying herbs wrapped in cheesecloth, and wall shelves were lined with neat rows of pans and vessels in copper, iron, earthenware, bronze, and glass, all shining in the light of a dozen candles in sconces backed with a mirror of polished brass so that the laboratory was bright with reflected light no matter the time of day or weather. One table was full of the tools needed for the experiments: mortars and pestles in a variety of sizes, fermentation vats, tongs and spoons and scales, covered muffles and sample plates. The other table was lined with glass jars and pottery crocks carefully labeled: vitriol, nitrous acid, acid of sea salt, lime, lye, sulphur, mercury, bismuth, antimony, zinc, arsenic, cobalt. Baskets under the tables were filled with raw materials: ore, dried dung, and charcoal enough to keep the furnaces fed for the day.
There were three furnaces: the smallest conical in shape, a large melting furnace, and the real wonder and heart of the laboratory, the reverberating furnace, built to the doctor’s specifications by a mason who came all the way from Johnstown with a wagonload of specially fired bricks. He had needed two teams to draw the sleigh, and a week to complete his work. Joshua Hench had needed another week in the smithy to make the doors and stacks and fittings.
It was a neat square brick structure that served both as a kiln and a boiler, with holes for the placement of alembics and the other vessels, all but one covered now. Behind a small metal door with sliding vents was the special compartment that reached the high temperatures needed for sintering, with its own stack to guide the comb
ustion gasses outside. To one side a round glass receiver sat like a small world on its own specially built table, and on the other side a woolen rug hung over a roller in a filled water butt. Richard Todd was not moved by stink, but neither was he so foolish as to tempt fire.
When Hannah came in he was hunched over the big leather-bound logbook where he recorded all of his experiments. To her greeting he only shrugged a shoulder.
“You’re late.”
The very first lesson Hannah learned in his laboratory was that it made no difference how she responded; to talk at all was to invite a lecture.
Instead she greeted Gabriel Oak who had taken his usual place on the patient’s chair. She handed her cloak to Bump and took from him her leather work apron.
“Friend Hannah.” Gabriel tried to rise, but at Bump’s glowering stare he sat again and contented himself with a smile. At close range his complexion had the consistency of wax, all the stranger given the startling blue of his eyes and the intelligence there. “Did you leave your family in good health?”
Gabriel Oak could not be coaxed to talk about himself, but he seemed genuinely interested in the well-being of the villagers. Before Hannah left, he and Bump would have asked for news of the twins and listened with great attentiveness to any story Hannah could think to tell.
“I did, thank you.”
“If you’re done distracting the patient,” said Dr. Todd, pushing himself out of his chair, “we’ve got work to do here.”
Gabriel Oak’s morning ended in an exhausted sleep on the cot in the far corner, but not before he took both of Hannah’s hands in his own and thanked her in a whisper.
“If you are breathing easier that is thanks enough,” she said, pressing a damp cloth to his forehead. “Now you should sleep.”
But he was stubborn, this old man, and he squeezed her hands as tight as he was able. “Will you greet your father and Friend Elizabeth and the others on the mountain for me? And give the little ones this, it is nothing very much.”
He pressed a piece of folded paper into her hand.
“I will, of course.”
He closed his eyes then. While he was drifting off Hannah studied his face, took note of the sound of his breathing. Then she got up slowly and worked the muscles of her shoulders.
It was her usual practice to discuss the experiment with the doctor; he noted down her observations when they differed from his own, and often he would challenge her to volunteer a conclusion. These were the discussions that Hannah looked forward to, but today she had a patient of her own waiting at home. Curiosity would not return to her own work until she could pass Miss Voyager into her care.
Bump had begun his work of cleaning up the laboratory, and Richard Todd was at his standing desk, recording the morning’s work. Both of them were concentrating and took no note of the way her stomach growled.
Hannah took her cloak from the wall and hung the leather apron in its place.
Richard looked up from his notes and frowned. “You aren’t going already.”
He had not put it to her as a question, but Hannah was determined not to be intimidated. “I must.”
He studied her for a moment, his jaw thrust forward. “Kitty asks that you join us for dinner. Her spirits are low, and I think a visit from you might do her some good.”
Hannah busied herself with her cloak so that he could not see her expression. This was an invitation she could not easily refuse; Kitty was not really her patient, but she was Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, and that made her family, of a sort.
“Unless you’ve got more pressing business.”
He had put on his spectacles for writing and now he lowered his head to look at her from over the curved lenses. As if I were a specimen in a sample dish, Hannah thought. Richard Todd liked to think himself difficult to read, but Hannah knew the look he got when he was on the trail of something that interested him.
“They are expecting me at home,” she said.
“Another hour won’t make a difference.” He picked up his quill again and dipped it in the ink pot. “Unless there’s something else on your mind.”
Hannah said, “If you want to ask me about Liam Kirby, it would be better to do that directly.”
Bump barked out a short laugh, but Richard wasn’t so easily startled.
“Liam Kirby doesn’t interest me,” he said, his eyes running over the page before him. “But I do have another matter to discuss with you. After dinner.”
Hannah considered. If the doctor had an errand for her, or a patient he wanted her to see, he would have said so straight-out. This was something else. She might be able to put aside his attempts to arouse her family loyalty or make her feel guilty, but curiosity was another matter.
“An hour.” She bit back the urge to ask any other questions; he had already returned to his logbook, and would have ignored her anyway.
Richard Todd’s fine home—the only building built of brick in all Paradise—stood on a little rise just west of the village. The house was like a dowager queen who had lost her way in the woods and settled down, ill at ease, among lesser, ruder beings.
Hannah found Kitty in the parlor, tucked into the settee with Ethan on a straight chair beside her. He was reading to her from his morning’s school lessons in his clear, high voice, but rather than falling asleep as she often did, Kitty was listening with her mouth pressed hard together in vexation.
“‘These Reflections made me very sensible of the Goodness of Providence to me, and very thankful for my present Condition, with all its Hardships and Misfortunes: And this Part also I cannot but recommend to the Reflection of those, who are apt in their Misery to say, Is any Affliction like mine! Let them consider, How much worse the Cases of some People are, and their Case might have been, if Providence had thought fit.’”
“What a very rational man was Mr. Robinson Crusoe,” said Kitty with a narrow smile. “And how shrewd of your aunt Bonner to give you that particular lesson to read just now.”
Ethan’s open expression clouded as he looked between the book and his mother. He was a compassionate child, and quick to sense unhappiness whether it was spoken plainly or not.
“But—”
“There is no time for a discussion right now. Greet your cousin and then go wash for dinner, Ethan.”
He came to Hannah with his brow still creased in confusion and greeted her formally, as his mother had directed. Hannah smiled at him and touched his cheek.
“You must go up to Lake in the Clouds later,” she said. “Lily could use your help with that panther’s head.”
He was such a sober little boy, but the mention of Lily made him smile. At the door he turned to his mother. “It was my choice. I chose Robinson Crusoe.”
Before Kitty could respond, he had closed the door quietly.
“I meant to imply nothing critical about Elizabeth’s teaching,” Kitty said, almost fiercely. Because of course she had meant to do just that, and her son had corrected her in his own gentle way.
Hannah came to claim the chair next to Kitty, where she could observe her more closely.
Curiosity was worried, and with good cause. There was a translucent quality to Kitty’s skin, as if this stillbirth had used up some vital part of her. She was still bleeding heavily, in spite of all the liver and leeks she had been fed since the birth, and even more worrisome was the low fever that came and went without warning or pattern.
Hannah would have liked to talk to Kitty about her symptoms, to ask about pain and even to examine her, but she knew that her questions would be turned aside with that combination of surprise and offense that was so particularly Kitty’s. Richard Todd might value Hannah’s assistance in the laboratory, and Curiosity could treat her as a healer in her own right, but to Kitty she would forever be Nathaniel Bonner’s half-Mohawk daughter. Not that she was directly cruel; that was not in her. But she was often thoughtless and self-absorbed, and many times the results were the same.
Now she was waiting for
Hannah to tell her what she wanted to hear: that Ethan had misunderstood her; that she had done no harm. The things she did want of Hannah were things that could often not be given.
Instead Hannah said, “Is your head aching today?”
Kitty’s expression softened with disappointment and guilt as she lay back against the bolsters. “You are heartless. Yes, I will admit it. I should not have said such a thing, but I am tired of being told how a lady bears her loss.”
Hannah stood to straighten the rug that had slipped from Kitty’s legs. “Richard said you were asking for me.”
Her whole expression shifted, as if Hannah had presented her with some unexpected gift. “Did he speak to you, then? You will come with me?”
“Come with you?” Hannah drew back in surprise and alarm as she realized what a neat trap had been set. Richard had sent her here to be drawn into one of Kitty’s schemes and she had walked right into it without any suspicion, or defense.
Kitty took no note of Hannah’s disquiet. “Yes, to New-York City. It has been years since I’ve been, and Cousin Amanda has been begging for a visit—”
“You don’t mean to travel so far in your condition?”
Kitty shook her head impatiently. “It is for my health that I must go. I have the opportunity to put myself in the care of Dr. William Ehrlich.” She said this name with great ceremony, as she might have spoken of President Jefferson or King George.
“I don’t know this Dr. Ehrlich,” said Hannah. “Is he a friend of Richard’s?”
Kitty pointed with her chin toward a letter that lay open on the table next to her. “There is his latest letter. Read it for yourself.”
Hannah picked up the paper, but she left it unread in her lap. “Is it worth going so far to consult with this man?”
Kitty turned her face away, and at first Hannah thought she would not answer. Her fingers plucked nervously at the rug in her lap. Finally she said, “Richard has been corresponding with him about my … condition. He has a genius for diagnosis, apparently, especially in cases such as mine.”