Lake in the Clouds (11 page)

When she had disappeared into the trees, Liam sat down and bent forward to cross his arms over his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his breathing to slow. Every word she had said echoed in his head as loud as a gunshot.

Hannah. Oh, Christ.

One of the dogs pushed against his leg and nuzzled into the
crook of his arm. Liam slung an arm around her neck and put his face against the fur that smelled of lake water and mud.

“So tell me, Treenie, do you think that could have gone any worse?”

She nuzzled him again and made sympathetic noises.

Liam sat up again and looked around himself. There was something on the stones, white and square: a letter. Hannah had left a letter for him.

It was a good while before he could make himself move and then Liam sat for a longer time looking at the handwriting.

The handwriting of a young girl, slightly rounded and uneven. A letter from the Hannah that used to be, the one that was gone now, replaced by a woman he had never imagined. She looked so much like her mother, and it occurred to Liam that the dead did come back to life and walk the earth, in the form of the children they had left behind. On the few occasions he ever saw himself in a looking glass he could see his father’s face just beneath his own, and when Hannah looked at herself there was Sarah. Men had fought over Sarah.

Clouds passed overhead and sent shadows across the paper. Liam was cold and then warm again. It was Elizabeth who had taught him to read, back when she first opened her school; at this moment Liam wished she had never bothered.

He broke the wax seal and unfolded the paper, ran his palms over the creases to smooth it on his knee.

A sound came from deep in his chest, something wound so tight that if he let it go completely it might fill the world. Liam ran his hand over the paper again and again. If he had waited another month, even a week, maybe this letter would have reached him. All these years it had been waiting here for him.

He tried to remember back to the days before he walked away from the mountain, but it was so long ago that the boy he saw in his mind’s eye was a stranger to him. Impatient and angry, lonely and wanting to move, to go, to be anywhere else but the empty cabin at Lake in the Clouds.

Liam folded the letter and put it in his pack, slipped his rifle sling over his shoulder, and set out for the village.

Just when Jemima Southern had given up all hope of finding an excuse to go to the village in order to get a better look at Liam Kirby, Isaiah Kuick realized that he was out of tobacco. Normally it would have fallen to Reuben to run this errand, but the boy had been sent down to the mill to scrub down the overseer’s lodgings, and so Isaiah did something out of the ordinary: he came into the kitchen.

Jemima was more than willing to put down her mending and take the coins, not from his hand but from the table where he put them. Without his mother in the room, Isaiah seemed unwilling to even look at her. Whether this meant she was a temptation to him or that he truly disliked her Jemima did not know, but for once she had something more interesting than Isaiah Kuick to consider. While he and Cookie discussed when Ambrose Dye might be back from Johnstown with the slaves who had been gone for the winter, Jemima contemplated which path to the trading post would give her the best chance of running into Liam Kirby. Otherwise he might leave Paradise before she ever had a chance to talk to him.

Once out of the house, she picked up her skirts and trotted, but she crossed paths with no one but old Mrs. Hindle, bent almost double under a load of deadwood and arguing loudly with herself. Jemima made a wide circle around her without slowing down.

The trading post was the logical place to find a traveler, but
today there was just shiftless Charlie LeBlanc and Obediah Cameron, half-asleep in front of a game of skittles. Anna stood behind the counter sorting through a box of buttons, but seemed glad enough to see Jemima come through the door.

“Tobacco, is it? Fond of his pipe, is Isaiah Kuick. Now why is it he don’t come down here himself? Shy, is he?”

She was looking at Jemima out of the corner of her eye. Information about the widow’s son was a rare commodity, and one that Jemima would spend wisely. She considered how she might tell Anna what she wanted to know in return for news of Liam, but it was a tricky business; she could easily give away more than she got.

Jemima had just decided to keep silent when the door opened behind her and Anna let out her high shrill laugh.

“Liam Kirby!” She put down the button box with a rattle and came out from behind the counter.

Her screeching would have annoyed Jemima to the point of leaving, but then nobody could ask an impertinent question like Anna so she stepped back to watch and listen, fitting herself into the corner between dusty crates of Turlington’s Balsam of Life while Anna walked right up to Liam to put both hands on his shoulders.

“Look at you. Ain’t you a sight.”

Liam was big, but then so was Anna; she barely had to look up to shout into his face.

“Grown into a man, and not hard on the eyes neither. Your hair’s come in right dark, ain’t it? And those fine blue eyes you got from your ma, Lord rest her. She was a handsome woman in her youth, and you take after her. Took you long enough to stop in and see old friends. Suppose you heard about me and Jed getting married, two old fools that we are. Next Saturday. You stay long enough and we’ll fix you up too. You come home to claim a bride?”

He flushed his irritation for the world to see, from the neck of his shirt to his hairline, an answer just as clear as words on a page and one that made Jemima’s stomach lurch into her throat.

“Cain’t say that I have.” He removed himself from Anna’s grip gingerly. “A man ain’t allowed more than one, according to the law. I’m here on business.”

“Now there’s some news. Liam Kirby married. I expect
there’s more to tell, it’s been near ten years.” Anna pointed to a stool. “Sit yourself down over there by the fire—Charlie, you’ll grow roots in front of that skittles board if you don’t take care. Make some room now, Liam’s come to call and he’s got stories to tell. You remember Charlie, Liam, but what you don’t know is he finally found hisself a wife. Married Molly Kaes but the bloom is off the rose, plain enough. He spends more time in front of my fire than he does his own.”

“Now Anna—” Charlie began, but she cut him off.

“That there’s Obediah Cameron, you’ll remember him when he had hair. And here comes Miss Wilde—I’ll be with you in a minute, Eulalia—she’s a new face to you, but then we’ve got lots of them in Paradise these days. Keeps house for her brother. I expect you saw the Wilde orchards on your way in. Have you ever seen so many apple trees? Jemima Southern there—did you recognize her? All grown-up and thinking she can hide herself in plain sight. In service at the widow Kuick’s since she lost her folks to the quinsy. Bought the mill from John Glove, did the widow. You look like you swallowed your tongue, Jemima. Got nothing to say to Liam Kirby? If I recall correctly you were sweet on him at one time.”

Hot words rushed up and Jemima would have let them fly right in Anna’s face if it weren’t for the way Obediah’s ears perked up. The Camerons liked gossip only slightly less than a tankard of ale, and Jemima must make sure that he got no ideas about her and Liam that might make their way back to the widow.

“Liam,” she said as coolly as she was able. “Good to see you.”

“Ain’t it though?” Anna beamed at him. “It’s too bad you got yourself a family, Liam. If our high-and-mighty Jemima here didn’t claim you first, my Henrietta is just about right for picking. She’s in service in Johnstown, a clever girl if there ever was one and pretty too. If I do say so myself who shouldn’t.

“Now I done enough talking, it’s time you sat down here and told us what there is to hear. Obediah, go fetch my father, will you, he’ll want to hear this too.”

“Why don’t I just step into the tavern to see Axel—” Liam suggested hopefully, but Anna flapped her hand at him.

“Oh no, I ain’t about to let you go that easy. Let Pa come to you. He’s right spry for his age, though his bones do creak.”

Liam sat reluctantly. He looked to Jemima as unhappy a man as she had ever seen, almost as unhappy as she felt inside herself. He had a wife, and the only joy to find in that was the idea of telling Hannah Bonner that the one white man who might have married her was taken.

While Anna and Charlie LeBlanc argued over Liam’s head about exactly when it was that Judge Middleton died and how long ago the Kuicks had come to Paradise, Jemima began to work out for herself how she would deliver the news. So intent was she on this that she didn’t realize that he was trying to talk to her until he raised his voice.

“Say there, Mima,” Liam said. “Is it true Ambrose Dye is still running the mill for the Kuicks?”

“It is.” She would have left it at that, but Anna could not.

“Ambrose Dye?” Anna echoed. “What do you want with a man like that?”

“You lost enough at cards to the man back when he first showed up here.” Charlie laughed. “I’m surprised you’re looking for him.”

“As if the widow would let one of her people hang around the tavern playing cards,” Anna snorted. “And to tell the truth, he don’t seem to want our company anyhow. Bone dry and as solemn as they come. He’s gone to Johnstown just now, to fetch home the men the widow hires out over the winter. No doubt he’ll start up the millrace just as soon as he gets back. Gets more out of that mill than Glove ever did.”

“He’s a good miller,” Charlie agreed. “But he’s strange, is Ambrose Dye. Quiet as a dumb man’s grave.” He leaned toward Liam and lowered his voice. “Folks say he’s part Indian.”

Anna snorted. “If he was part Indian he wouldn’t be working for the widow. Red skin makes her twitch, you know that.”

“He is part Indian,” Liam said. “One of his grandmothers was Abenaki. He’s called Knife-in-His-Fist up on the Canada border.”

Anna let her mouth fall open so wide that Jemima could count her back teeth. “Why, the woman does anything in her power to make Hannah Bonner’s life a misery. Ain’t that so, Jemima?”

Jemima frowned at Anna, but she spoke to Liam. “Dye’s been gone since last Thursday. And if he was here he wouldn’t
take kindly to you calling him a redskin. Neither will the widow.”

Liam shrugged. “I know what I know. You ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.”

In her irritation Jemima could not keep her mouth shut as she knew she ought. “I doubt Dye’d be any help to you with the slave you’re after, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Liam’s head swiveled toward her in a slow arc. “What do you know about the runaway I’m looking for?”

“Nothing,” said Jemima. “But I know Ambrose Dye.”

And she turned her face away, hoping Liam wouldn’t read more into that statement than she meant him to. For once she was glad of Charlie’s need to put himself in the middle of every conversation, because he took up cheerfully where she left off.

“Dye’s a strange one,” he continued. “Seems right mild when you meet him, but from what folks say—why, if he were to come across a runaway no doubt he’d hang him high and leave him for the crows, just to make a lesson of it for the other Africans.”

From the other side of the room there was a genteel fit of coughing from Eulalia Wilde, and Anna marched off to see to her needs, leaving Jemima standing there between Charlie and Liam.

It wasn’t often that Jemima found herself at a loss for words, but for once she couldn’t just come out and ask what she wanted to ask directly:
Where did you go, and do you have that gold?
Just as she was unable to look Liam in the face and tell him that she had hoped he might come back someday and see her for a woman instead of a little girl. Take her out of Paradise and make her mistress of her own place.

Isaiah Kuick would be the better catch, but her chances of getting him seemed slimmer every day. There were other men, but Jemima would hang herself before she married poor. And here was Liam Kirby with an expensive rifle, looking as though he had made something of himself in the world. She had often imagined him coming home to Paradise, but it had never occurred to her that he might be married. Instead she had spent a good amount of time working out just how she could turn his attention from Hannah Bonner to herself.

She said, “You went off without a word, Liam. Thought maybe a panther got you.”

He smiled then. “Were you worried about me, Mima?”

“Hannah Bonner, more like. Won’t she be disappointed to hear about your family down there in the city.”

The little bit of friendliness that had begun to open up in him disappeared just as suddenly as it had come. He looked at her coolly.