Author: Sara Donati
Category: Historical
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/sara-donati/page,15,44722-lake_in_the_clouds.html
Elizabeth sat back. “Is that so? And what exactly is it that I want?”
“You know the man cain’t deny you a thing,” said Curiosity. “All you got to do is ask him, and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.”
It was easier than she imagined, so easy that Elizabeth wondered if Curiosity hadn’t presented her plan to Nathaniel first. Together they would take Selah Voyager to Red Rock; Hawkeye would stay behind to keep an eye on Lake in the Clouds. Selah Voyager was so obviously relieved when they told her that Elizabeth wondered at herself; she should have known that the girl would be frightened, and would want a woman with her.
The plan sat well with everyone but the twins. Daniel had gone off to voice his discontent to Many-Doves; Lily had not yet given up the fight.
“It ain’t fair,” she repeated, sitting straight-backed in her outrage. Elizabeth tried to focus on the hair she was plaiting, as temperamental and untamable as the child herself.
“Perhaps not,” she conceded. “But it is necessary. You know we would not leave you behind otherwise.”
Lily would certainly have had more arguments to offer, but she was trying to listen to the men talking in the next room. Little Lost, they heard clearly, and the Prophet. Runs-from-Bears asked about weapons and Lily sat up straighter. Elizabeth was torn between wanting to listen and feeling the need to distract a daughter with an overly active imagination.
She said, “When I go to Johnstown in September, you will come with me, if you like.”
Lily said, “I would rather go to Albany.”
“When you are offered a gift it is right that you say ‘thank you’ before you find fault with it, Lily.”
“Thank you, and I’d rather go to Albany.”
Elizabeth secured the plait with the hair ribbon that had been found after much searching, wound around a bundle of twigs.
“I will consider taking you to Albany—”
Lily tensed expectantly.
“—if you will make me a promise.”
The narrow shoulders sagged. “I know what you want. It’s always the same thing, Ma. You want me to be helpful and cheerful and not to argue.”
“Of course,” said Elizabeth. “But there is something else as well.” She went to the shelf on the wall and took down a small book of blank pages she had sewn together. Then she sat down next to her daughter on the edge of the bed and put it in her lap.
“I should like it if you wrote a little every day about what happens while we are gone,” she said. And seeing Lily’s wary expression she said, “Just a few sentences. So that when we come home we can see what you’ve been up to.”
Lily cast her a thoughtful expression out of the corner of her eye. “That’s a job for Daniel, Ma.”
“Ah,” said Elizabeth. “But then we’d have only your brother’s side of the story.”
This made an impression. Lily stroked the paper with one finger where Elizabeth had inscribed her name on the cover: Mathilde Caroline Bonner.
She had been named for Elizabeth’s mother. She has Caroline’s chin, her father had announced, when he first saw Lily. I fear she will carry on in the same vein.
Her father had feared the women he loved: his sister, his wife, his daughter; he had feared their sense of themselves and their independence. In the past few years, watching her own daughter at odds with the world, Elizabeth had finally begun to understand the nature of such fear.
Lily was studying the paper in front of her with a kind of gentle curiosity that was absent when she picked up her slate at school.
She said, “May I use your pen?”
Elizabeth bit back a smile. Trust Lily to negotiate better terms for herself at every turn.
“You are not satisfied with a quill?”
“There’s no flow to a quill, Ma. Makes me feel like I’m scratching in the dirt, like a hen.” Lily’s expression was so furious and intense that Elizabeth was reminded of her as a toddler, howling at the moon when her schemes proved too ambitious, for even at that age her mind had been so nimble that the rest of her had trouble keeping up.
Nathaniel had brought Elizabeth her pen as a gift when Robbie was born. It was a huge extravagance, but it was also something she had wanted for a long time and Nathaniel hadn’t forgotten. A pen was a wondrous contrivance that held more ink than a quill, never needed to be sharpened, and sat easily in the hand. Hers was made of mahogany inset with carved ivory. The shaft tapered down to a delicate nib of copper and silver, and required careful handling. The children were no more allowed to take up their mother’s pen than their father’s rifle.
The distinction, Elizabeth admitted to herself, was that the men had begun teaching both twins how to handle weapons a year ago. Daniel showed all the signs of becoming as good a marksman as his father and grandfather before him, but Lily was too short still to handle a long rifle.
Elizabeth reached over and pulled her daughter into her lap. For a moment Lily resisted, and then she collapsed against Elizabeth’s breast.
“I don’t want you to go,” she mumbled.
“I know, I know that.” And stopped herself from making promises she could not keep.
“If you have to go then Hannah should stay,” Lily said more clearly.
Elizabeth rocked her daughter and stroked her head, and said nothing. Lily knew very well that Hannah must go to the city. She had listened to all the discussions, and then consoled herself by writing a list of things she wanted her sister to bring home with her. No doubt Lily would have happily gone without sweets and hair ribbons and her own skinning knife if it meant keeping Hannah at home while Elizabeth was away, but there was more at stake.
Elizabeth must go with Selah Voyager, and Hannah must go to New-York City if the children were to be vaccinated against the smallpox. Not even to comfort the daughter would Elizabeth consider letting that opportunity pass.
After a few minutes, Lily pulled away and rubbed her eyes hard.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll write something every day. But when you come home, then will you let me practice with your pen?”
“Every evening, if you like,” said Elizabeth.
Lily put her hands on her mother’s face and looked at her solemnly. “You’ll be gone in the morning, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, drawing in a sharp breath and letting it out again. “We’ll be gone in the morning.”
Chapter 10
By the third day of roaming Hidden Wolf with a warrant tucked into his shirt, Liam Kirby had to admit to himself that the two things he wanted most were not going to happen: the dogs could find no trace of the runaway, and the Bonner men weren’t going to be provoked into a confrontation.
Sitting in an elm at the edge of old Judge Middleton’s homestead in the drizzling rain, Liam looked down at his dogs, sound asleep around the trunk of the tree. They were good trackers every one, but by the time he got back from Johnstown the trail was cold and the rain had done its work. Or maybe, the thought came to him reluctantly, maybe the woman who had put a knife in Hubert Vaark’s throat wasn’t on the mountain anymore. She might be dead, or maybe Nathaniel had moved her north while Liam was busy talking the magistrate into giving him a warrant. Or maybe she was still sitting in the caves under the falls, just waiting for him to tire of the chase.
From his perch in the elm, Liam had a clear view of the path that came up around the hill and the house itself, every window in the lower floor filled with light. The faint sound of fiddles tuning up came to him, undercut by the trill of a pennywhistle.
People had been trickling up from the village for an hour, most of them on foot. Some he recognized: Peter Dubonnet and his sister, the Camerons, Charlie LeBlanc; others were strangers to him. There was no sign of the Bonners, not yet.He had been walking their mountain for three days, and never seen any of them.
What he had found on Hidden Wolf was something he had never missed, or thought to look for: his own boyhood. Deep in the bush on the north side of the m
ountain the last ten years were wiped away like a frost in the June sun. Every familiar tree and beaver pond dragged him back a little further to a place he didn’t want to go. Streams where he had fished, the spot where he had set his first trap, the stump of the first pine he had felled. The Big Muddy, where Billy had taught him how to carve the castoreum gland out of the sopping beaver carcass, laughing at him when he gagged on the stench. Another spot, better hidden, where he had showed him the fine points of poaching other men’s lines.
No saint, his brother Billy, but in all the years on the seas Liam hadn’t thought much about that side of him. Instead he had remembered Billy’s hands, as hard as boards, his fists even harder. He remembered the scar on his neck, the blue of his eyes, the way he would howl with laughter when he was on his way to being drunk. He remembered Billy at work. Whatever else he had been, Billy Kirby had never shirked a task. He was willing to put his hand to any work that paid, in coin or goods. When Billy died he left Liam alone in the world, without even a single blood relative.
Now, looking down at his own dogs, Liam thought of the morning Billy had brought home his first tracker, a young dog won in a game of cards from a voyageur passing through in the spring. Liam had wanted to call her Ginger for the color of her eyes, but Billy said who the hell did he think he was, Adam in the garden? Animals didn’t need names; they worked or they showed up on the table.
Below him Treenie gave a soft bark of welcome, and Liam was startled out of his daydream. A man was coming toward him, lurching toward him, his back buckled like a cat’s. Bump.
The little man stopped. He craned his head and his whole body turned with it as he peered up into the tree, his face as round and white as a new cheese.
“Curiosity sent me,” he said. “You best come on in and join the party, says she. Says you can’t avoid her forever.”
Liam was glad to be sitting in the dark, where Bump couldn’t see his face. He should have known Curiosity would have taken note of him sitting out here; nothing got past the old woman.
“Kind of her to offer,” he called down. “But I’ve got business to attend to.”
Bump was scratching Bounder behind the ear, talking to the dog in a low, soft voice. Bounder was the biggest of the dogs, more than half the little man’s height, but he rolled right over and showed his speckled belly.
“Did you hear me?” Liam called down, louder. “I ain’t coming in, you can tell her.”
The old man paid him no mind, scratching ears and sweet-talking until the dogs wiggled around him like puppies. Liam let out a bark of his own, all irritation, and swung down to the ground.
“I said—”
“I heard you. My back’s bent, but my ears work just fine.”
Bump cocked his head at him, looking hard. Liam had the uneasy sense that the little man could see right through him. He hitched a breath, pulled himself in tight.
“Then you’ll tell her I ain’t coming.”
“Curiosity?”
“That’s who sent you, ain’t it?” And suddenly Liam thought of Hannah. Maybe the Bonner’s had gone into the house while he was half-asleep and thinking of Billy.
Bump was wiping his hands on a kerchief knotted around his wrist. “You’ll have to tell her yourself,” said he. “I’m on my way to see to Gabriel. Can’t leave him alone for long.” But he stood there anyway, studying Liam.
“What? What is it?”
“You do take after your ma,” he said. “I can see her clear as day in your face.”
Hannah was gone just as suddenly as she had come, and Curiosity too, to be replaced by the shadowy figure of his own mother, dead of a fever when he was no more than four. “You knew my ma?”
“Met her once or twice,” said Bump. “Right here in Paradise, shortly after the war, that was. There was a sweetness to young Moira, and she passed it on to you. Don’t see none of your pa in you, though. But I expect that’s to your credit.”
An insult and a compliment, wound up so tight together that there was no way to respond that wouldn’t sound foolish from one direction or another. But it was too late anyway: Bump had already turned away, hitching his way back toward the cabin he shared with Gabriel Oak.
“There ain’t nothing sweet about me,” Liam called after him. “And I ain’t afraid of Curiosity Freeman either.”
All around him the dogs whimpered in sympathy, but Bump never even slowed down.
The party had all the markings of trouble; Nathaniel saw that as soon as he came in the door of the old homestead.
The hall was crowded with trappers, just out of the bush with the winter’s haul, on their way to Johnstown and Albany. They were eager for liquor and female companionship both, but they would find too much of the first and not enough of the second. A trapper coming into the village after months alone in the bush would argue about anything, wager a pelt on the speed of a drop of rain moving over window glass, pull a knife without second thought.
And there was Isaiah Kuick standing in the open doorway of the judge’s old study with a tankard in his hand, half an ear turned toward Andy Peach’s long complaint about the poor quality of other men’s peltry. It wasn’t often he saw Kuick in the village, and he had never before seen him in his cups.
From inside the study Nathaniel could hear men’s voices raised in laughter and argument both; the air around the door was thick with tobacco smoke and spilled ale. He stepped in to raise a hand in greeting, answered the usual questions and asked the same, turned down a game of cards and the half-empty bottle of schnapps on its rounds. No doubt there would be trouble before the night was through. The question was, who would throw the first punch.
By the look of her, it could well be Jemima Southern, who stood stoney-faced next to the food tables, watching the dancers as if she wanted nothing more than to knock each of them to the ground. She was the only single woman not in the dance, but it wouldn’t be for lack of a partner. There were men all around, men so lonely for company or eager to let loose that any of them would have gladly stood up with Jemima and her sour face for a dance or two. The fact that she stood there alone meant something, but Nathaniel couldn’t think what, except that even a wedding party wasn’t enough to shift the girl’s mood.
The dancers moved up the room at a pace fast enough to make the glass in the window sashes rattle while Reuben and Zeke made the fiddle bows fly, coming to the end of “The Fisher’s Hornpipe.” They stood on upended crates at the far end of the room, two brothers talking with the instruments in their hands. They were the finest fiddlers for fifty miles or more, but it wasn’t often that folks got a chance to hear them. The widow charged a full dollar to lend them out to play for an evening, and she sent her overseer along to make sure that they finished promptly at midnight. After that she charged fifty cents an hour. To discourage excess, she said, but nobody was fooled: Lucy Kuick took to coin like a fox to a rabbit.
Dye was sitting in a corner watching the room and the fiddlers both, his expression sullen as a January sky. Right next to him was Liam Kirby, talking into the man’s ear. Every once in a while Dye would say a word, and Kirby would nod or shake his head, but his eyes were fixed on Hannah, who was dancing with Claes Wilde.
There had been lively conversation around the table at Lake in the Clouds, the twins speculating at great length on whether or not Liam would be at the party. Hannah had endured the conversation without comment, but Nathaniel wasn’t surprised to see the boy here; Liam could no more stay away from Hannah than he could cut off his own right hand. Anybody could see the way he watched her move, the way a man watched a woman he considered his own, even if he hadn’t said the words out loud yet, even to himself.
He wondered how long Liam would stay in Paradise once Hannah had left for the city. Wondered if he would forget about the runaway, forget about the wife he had left waiting for him, about his own brother and the mountain and the revenge he had been dreaming about now for so many years, forget about everything to follow Hannah. Nathaniel
had to hope that pride would keep the boy from making such a mistake.
“Nathaniel,” said Axel, coming up just behind him. “You’re looking thirsty.”
He accepted the pewter mug from the older man and sniffed.
“Punch too. You’ve been busy.”
“Ja, that’s so.” Axel laughed. “But a daughter don’t get married every day. She’s been alone a long time, my Anna. Too long. Don’ she look pretty?”
Anna was circling around Jed in the last figure of the dance, and she did look pretty. She was a big woman, but she moved with great agility and smiled so openly up into her bridegroom’s face that Nathaniel felt the pull himself, remembering Elizabeth’s expression at their own wedding party.
Reuben called out the next dance, “Love in a Village,” and Anna put back her head and laughed.
He clapped Axel on the shoulder. “Jed’s a lucky man. Now where have the rest of my people got to? Should have been here an hour ago.”
“Oh, they’re here. The little ones in the kitchen with Curiosity last I saw ’em and your Hannah—you must have seen her, standing up with Claes Wilde? That put a twist in a few handkerchiefs, I’ll tell you.” He cast a nervous look in Liam’s direction. “I expect you’ll hear about that from Hannah. And Elizabeth—she’s just around the corner there, keeping Kitty company.”
Chairs had been lined up along one long wall for those who weren’t dancing. Kitty sat like a queen with her feet propped up, wrapped in a shawl with a rug over her knees in spite of the heat from the hearth and so many people crowded into the room. Richard sat to her left, his attention focused on the bottom of his tankard; Elizabeth was on her right, deep in conversation with Dolly Smythe, her head bent at an angle.
All Kitty’s attention was on the dancers. Nathaniel had seen Kitty dance in every condition: fevered, swollen with child, barely out of mourning; dancing was to Kitty what the school-house was to Elizabeth, and to see her sitting so quietly while the music played said more about her health than any doctor’s explanation. It made him sad for her in a way the lost child had not. For the first time he was glad that Hannah would be going with Kitty to New-York City.