Fire Along the Sky (21 page)

“I'm sorry it took me so long,” she said. What she should say, what she wanted to say, was so much more complicated that Hannah had no words. But it didn't matter, Curiosity was glad to see her.

“Why, child,” she said, catching Gabriel as he launched himself at her. “No need to apologize. Here you are, and ain't the two of you a sight for sore eyes. Don't know who I'd rather see at my door on the shortest day of the year.” She was looking at Gabriel, but talking to Hannah.

“I should have—” Hannah started, and Curiosity held up a palm to stop her.

“Never mind that. You here now. Richard been asking for you.”

“And what about me?” asked Gabriel, tugging on Curiosity's arm. “Did he ask for me?”

“Why don't you set here for a minute and catch your breath before you start with your everlasting questions,” Curiosity said, steering him toward the bench by the hearth.

“I'm not out of breath,” Gabriel said, drawing himself up. “I'm never out of breath.”

“Lord bless you, boy.” Curiosity laughed. “Then let me catch my breath. Set there. Churn some, if you got so much energy needs using up. In a little bit the gingerbread will be coming out of the oven and you can see if I did it right this time.”

“Gingerbread for the Christmas party?” Gabriel drew up, such hopeful expectation in his face that both Hannah and Curiosity laughed out loud.

“Yessir,” Curiosity said. “Yes, indeed, for the party. But I can spare you a taste, I reckon. Just now, though, I got things to talk to your sister about.”

“He can't hold on much longer,” Curiosity said once they were in the hall with the door closed behind them. “Don't hardly know how he made it this far.”

Hannah said, “Opium.”

“It's the only thing that helps at all,” Curiosity said. “The only thing he can keep down, anyway.” She straightened her shoulders with an effort. “He'll hold on for those fireworkds he sets such store by and then he'll let go. The damn fool.”

“In the trading post I heard that the lawyer was here. Mr. Bennett?”

Curiosity nodded. “Come in yesterday midday and sat with Richard for an hour. Come out with his hands full of papers and went straight back to Johnstown, didn't even stop to take dinner. Next thing Richard say, he want to talk to you and Ethan together. You might as well go right in, get it over with.”

“Where's Jennet?” Hannah asked.

“I sent her over to the Wildes' place with some tea for Callie.”

Jennet was out tending to the sick, then, while Hannah had been sitting at Lake in the Clouds mending socks and reading newspapers. She blinked away this image, but not before Curiosity read it off her face.

“Go on now, see Richard. He's waiting on you, girl.”

Richard lay in the exact middle of the feather bed, covered by only a sheet. Ethan sat on a chair, a closed book on his knees.

Ethan said, “I just gave him a full dose. In a minute or two he'll be able to talk to us.”

Richard's eyes, red rimmed and watering, were alive with pain as sharp as broken glass. He blinked at her and blinked again, and every breath was followed by a shallow gasp.

Across the bed Ethan met her gaze, but they said nothing. There was nothing he could tell her that she could not see for herself.

The part of Hannah that was still a doctor and always must be noted that Richard's neck and arms were withered to almost nothing, but his abdomen was swollen, barrel shaped and ripe as a nine-month pregnancy. In his prime he had been a big man with fair skin and a head of thick red-gold hair, mostly gone now. His skin was the color of singed parchment, such a deep yellow that it was almost brown. Everything about him was yellow: the whites of his eyes, the palms of his hands, even the beds of his fingernails.

Hannah pulled the second chair up beside him and sat, folded her hands in her lap and waited.

The clock on the mantelpiece had stopped. The only sound was the fire hissing and rumbling to itself, the wind in the trees outside the windows, and Richard's breathing, in and in and out, hitching and uneven. Hannah could almost feel him coming alive as the opium pushed the pain back and back. There was a clicking sound in his throat. Ethan offered him water and he sipped from the cup.

“Well, then,” he said. “Let's get this over with.”

He spoke in stops and starts, his voice hoarse but purposeful, punctuated with wheezing gasps. “I want you to hear this from me before the will's read out. I'm leaving my medical practice to Hannah and the house and farm to Curiosity.”

Hannah was surprised, but Ethan was struck dumb. He opened his mouth and then closed it again, looked at Hannah for help, but got none.

“You're surprised,” Richard said. His voice was as thin and weak as old thread but there was considerable satisfaction in it.

“I don't need the house,” Hannah said. “And I don't want the practice.”

Richard's eyes narrowed. “Then burn it all down,” he said, his fingers fluttering on the coverlet.

Hannah bit back the things she might have said.

“I don't mind, Hannah.” Ethan's concern was for her, which both touched and aggravated Hannah. And Richard too, by the expression on his face.

Richard grunted. “You'll get all the rest of the land, here and in Albany. And most of the money. There's a lot of it.” His voice left him and he swallowed convulsively.

There was a small silence, broken by the sudden trill of Gabriel's laughter from far away.

“No more tenants. When the leases expire don't renew them. Let this place fade away. God knows it was a mistake to settle here in the first place.”

Then Richard managed a smile, just one side of his mouth drawing up to show bloody gums.

Ethan glanced at Hannah again.

“Don't look at her,” Richard said. “She can't tell you what I'm thinking.”

He coughed, just once; a cough that could have been muffled in a lady's handkerchief but must have felt to him like a hot blade. Hannah watched him swallow the pain, and she remembered that he had lived among her mother's people for much of his boyhood. The lessons he had learned there were still with him, even now. Especially now.

His gaze flickered to Hannah and fixed. He said, “A long time ago your father promised to bury me at Lake in the Clouds, next to Sarah.”

Hannah was more surprised at this than she had been at the gift of the house, but she managed to keep it from her face.

“I've changed my mind,” Richard said. “I want to be buried next to Kitty. I owe her that much.”

Ethan turned his face away but not before Hannah caught a flicker of satisfaction in his eyes. This request at least had pleased him, though Richard did not seem to care what any of them thought.

“One last thing,” he said, his voice worn down by exhaustion to a whisper. “A question for you.” He was looking at Hannah. “And I want an answer.”

She wanted to walk away, to turn around and close the door behind herself and never come back into this room until Richard Todd was beyond asking questions. Until she was safe from him and his need to understand things she could never explain to anyone. He wanted to know about her son and Strikes-the-Sky; for all these months he had been worrying at her, determined to extract an answer, like a splinter dug into muscle. Now he would have his answer, because he was dying; because she could not deny him. She wondered briefly if he had decided to leave the house and practice to her just so he could call her here to ask questions.

He said, “What did your mother tell you about me when you were a girl?”

The words would not order themselves in Hannah's brain; they made no sense, though she worked through them once and twice and three times. “My mother?”

“Your mother. Sarah. Sings-from-Books. What did she tell you about me?”

He was looking at her intently, his breath coming fast and shallow. If she were to put her hand out and touch him she would feel his pulse shiver and jump.

Once Richard had tried to claim her as his own daughter. Her grandmother Falling-Day had told her the stories, because, Hannah realized now, she had known this moment would come. Sooner or later, Falling-Day had said, Richard would try to take her away from Nathaniel. All these years he had been waiting for this chance, this dying man, who wanted to claim her as his own blood.

She could feel pity and compasion but she could not lie, not about something so important.

Hannah said, “She never spoke to me about you as anything but a friend and neighbor.”

After a moment he nodded, and turned his head away.

Curiosity came then and Hannah went out into the hall without another word. At the top of the stairs all her strength ran away, leached from muscle and bone like water from a wrung cloth, flowed down and away so she staggered and would have fallen, if not for Ethan.

They sat side by side on the step, neither of them able to talk at first. It was cold in the hall, so cold that their breath mingled white and damp in front of them. Looking straight ahead Hannah could see out the hall window, a perfect rectangle of cold sunlight, and into the colder world beyond.

“He isn't my father, you know. No matter how much he wants that to be true.”

Ethan took her hand in both his own and simply held it. It was a kind gesture and a brotherly one.

He was weary and sad and quiet. Not quite twenty years, but right at this moment Hannah could see the old man he would be someday. Just as she could close her eyes and see him as a newborn, ruddy faced and wide-eyed and so small that they had feared for his life. Ethan was quiet and solitary and lonely to the quick; his mother had been like that, unable to settle on happiness, unable to take nourishment from the best things around her.

Hannah was glad of his hand, of its warmth and firm grip and the things it meant, the comfort he was offering and asking for, all at once. The truth was, Ethan was smarter than his mother had been, and there was a generosity to him that was all his own. People talked to Ethan Middleton, opened up their secrets to him without thought or concern, because he knew how to listen, and when to talk.

Born to another family he might have made a Catholic priest, Hannah thought to herself wearily. A man who heard confessions and passed out forgiveness like sweets to a repentant child.

She said, “I thought he was going to ask me about my son. About what happened to Makes-a-Fist.”

But Ethan had nothing to say, even to this: her son's name, spoken out loud for the first time since— She stopped herself then, unwilling to pursue the memory. When she looked at Ethan his expression was so completely calm, so empty of curiosity or calculation, that she had the urge to pinch him, just to hear him make a sound.

The clock in the downstairs hall chimed four, and Hannah was surprised to realize that they had been sitting like this for more than an hour. In the snowfields outside she imagined the shadows stretching out and out, seeping into the forests, like ink poured across paper. The shortest day of the year, Curiosity had said. The darkest, the coldest. And yet there was something comforting about the still fields and the dark, something promising. A snowfield was like a bed, white and smooth and inviting: come and lay your head. Lay your head and sleep. A glittering soft death, a sliding away without noise or pain.

She said, “My son drowned. It was a day a lot like this one, in the winter dark. He fell through the ice and drowned.”

Ethan's breath came in a short, sharp burst. He squeezed her hand, and waited.

Headed back to the Todds' place in the late afternoon with only Ethan's dog Big for company and protection, Jennet decided that she liked the world like this. The cold had loosened its grip for the moment at least, overhead stars burned bright in a clear sky, and at night the snow was beautiful. Right at this moment she was happy, and why should she not be, Jennet reasoned to herself; next to her skin she carried the five letters that had come from Luke since he went away, and all the people she loved best in the world were healthy and accounted for.

With the last post there had been letters from Scotland, from Montreal, and from Daniel and Blue-Jay, who were not, as Elizabeth had fretted, sleeping in snow caves every night but in farmhouses and cabins as they made themselves available. Lily was applying herself to her studies and enjoying the winter season, though it seemed from Luke's own letter that perhaps she spent as much time being courted by Simon Ballentyne as she did at her work.

This news bothered Nathaniel more than it did Elizabeth, who was glad to know that her daughter was taking advantage of the things the city had to offer. Jennet, who knew a little about Montreal and more about Simon Ballentyne, kept her thoughts to herself and did not offer to read Luke's latest letter out loud. To her he had written more explicitly about Lily's behavior. Jennet had the idea that he wanted her to pass on information he scrupled to write directly, but in this she would not comply, no matter how slyly he maneuvered for her to take up this unpleasant task.

As Jennet saw things, the real concern was not Lily, or even Daniel or Blue-Jay, who were in true mortal danger, but Hannah. And she seemed to be the only one who was worried.

Outwardly Hannah seemed well enough: she did what was expected of her and more, but every day she seemed to be a little more removed from the world, a little more inward turned and unreachable. Jennet had talked to Elizabeth and Nathaniel and Many-Doves about this, trying to put her worries into words and failing. With Curiosity she had had only a little more success.

“The winter sets hard on her,” Curiosity had said when Jennet finished with her awkward recitation of her concerns.

“Yes,” Jennet said. “Harder than it should, I think.”

At that Curiosity had looked thoughtful. After a long moment she said, “She lost a child.”

She did not say,
You can't understand,
but Jennet flushed with color anyway, as if Curiosity had reached over and slapped her hand. “I know that. I know she lost her son.”

The older woman looked up from the work in her hands and there was something in her expression, some kindness that lessened the sting. “You know and you cain't know. Not really. And I pray to the good Lord that you never do. She lost her boy and her man both, and it will be a long time before she find her way back again.”