Lake in the Clouds (13 page)

“She went on down to the village to see where your brother got himself to. I expect she hope to find Liam too. And your little sister will be busy for a while, trying to talk Joshua into giving her that panther’s head. Unless Hawkeye decide to come home, we got plenty of time for you to tell me about what happened this morning.”

Hannah covered her face with the wet cloth and breathed in pungent vinegar, tasting it on her tongue and in the back of her throat and all the way down to the knot in her stomach. When she looked up again, Curiosity was still chopping onions, with tears streaming down her face.

She said, “Selah has been asking for you.”

Curiosity let out a rough laugh. “You telling me you ain’t ready to talk about Liam?”

Hannah drew in a deep breath to steady herself. “I don’t think I ever will be.”

“It’s true, then? He’s after our Selah.”

Hannah nodded.

Curiosity’s jaw worked hard. “Never thought that boy would turn out such a disappointment, but then I expect neither did you.”

“No,” said Hannah. “I didn’t.”

There was a long silence interrupted only by the steady contact of knife to wood. Finally Curiosity said, “Do you think there’s any chance of talking sense to him?”

Hannah felt tears push up hot into her throat. She swallowed them back down again so that she could talk.

“I truly don’t know. My father has gone down to try. I suppose we’ll know more when he gets back.” She paused, and so did Curiosity.

“What is it?”

“Liam says the woman he’s after is wanted for murder. Her owner caught up with her at Newburgh, and she put a knife in his throat.”

Curiosity’s gaze fixed on the knife in her own hand, the sheen of the blade and its curve. She put it down and brought
the cutting board to the hearth, where she let the mass of onions slide into the simmering pot. Then she sat down in Elizabeth’s rocking chair and leaned back to look at Hannah. The lines that bracketed her mouth seemed to have dug deeper into the muscle in the past few days.

She said, “We got to move her along as soon as we can.”

Hannah spread her hands on her knees. “It will be four or five days at least.”

Curiosity stood so suddenly that the rocker jumped in place; she stretched out a hand to still it. Her expression was troubled, but she managed a grim smile. “Let me go see what I can do to speed things along,” she said. And just as suddenly, she turned back toward Hannah.

“I near forgot. Richard say to tell you, he’s going to try that Dr. Beddoes’s cure on Gabriel Oak tomorrow morning, and he’d be glad of your help, if you care to come along. Don’t know as it will do the poor man any good, but you could do with a few hours away from this cabin.”

“Yes, I could,” Hannah said, feeling suddenly more awake than she had all day.

“I thought you might want to have a talk with Richard while you’re at it,” said Curiosity.

It was unnerving, how she saw through even Hannah’s simplest plans, but it was also comforting. It was rarely necessary to pretend for Curiosity, who understood something Hannah had never been able to explain to her father: over the past few years, she had developed a working relationship with Richard Todd, a man who had once been the Bonners’ worst enemy.

Shortly before dusk, Joshua started down the mountain leading his packhorses, their panniers filled to the brim with the remains of Dubonnet’s hogs and the panther pelt. His three children trailed along behind, casting longing looks back toward Lily and Kateri. The girls stood in the path, each holding on to a panther ear so that the head swung gently between them. Lily had plans for the panther’s skull, but that was something Elizabeth would have to deal with later. Right now she was worried about Daniel and Blue-Jay, who had not yet come back from the village.

Elizabeth sent the girls on their way home, changed out of her everyday walking boots into the moccasins she kept under her desk, and hitched up her skirt to knee length by pulling the hem through a leather belt. Then she started down the path the boys had taken. It was far steeper than the main trail, but it would get her to the village a quarter hour ahead of Joshua, who would most certainly draw a crowd eager to hear the story of Dubonnet’s pigs and the panther.

This slope of Hidden Wolf was so densely wooded that the only way to walk it was in the Kahnyen’kehàka fashion, with toes pointed inward. Elizabeth drew into herself just as all around her the forest was drawing in for the night. She had come to these woods too late in life to ever really learn the trick of moving through them silently; as she passed by, bird-song faded and rose again. For the first time this year she heard
the warbling of finches, but there was no time to sit and wait for a glimpse of them.

The creatures who foraged by day were settling into burrows and nests, and where the canopy of trees allowed the sky to show itself, blue was deepening to gold and copper and bloody red. With every footstep the smell of moldering leaves rose up, high and sharp.

At the spot the children called the Dirt Slide, Elizabeth lost her balance and would have fallen if a white pine sapling had not been within reach. Subdued, she slowed her pace. To break a bone and be stranded here until someone found her would complicate things. So she came to the village muddy, with a stinging welt across her cheek, sticky with pine resin. In sight of the trading post Elizabeth stopped to catch her breath, careful not to lean against the wall of the church, newly whitewashed by Mr. Gathercole himself.

The sound of cow bells came to her on the wind, and somewhere closer by a young child’s wailing punctuated by the steady bite of axe into wood.

From this corner she could see almost all of Paradise. No matter how often Elizabeth came to the village, she was always reminded of the winter morning she had first seen it, in part because it had changed so little since that day while she had changed so much. What a surprise it had been to her, this awkward little place, log cabins and tree stumps and fields always threatened by the forests that surrounded them. In the years she had called Hidden Wolf her home she had come to believe that Paradise could never evolve into the place she had first imagined; there would be no lawns or parks or cottages or high streets; it could not be England, nor even Boston or Albany. The forest was constant and endless and patient above all things; it only tolerated the village, perched here as if on a cliff that must someday give way.

If she had not known that it was a Monday, the washing hung to dry outside every cabin would have told her so. Chickens scratched among woodpiles and in garden plots that would stay unturned for another three or four weeks, until the last danger of frost had passed. Each spring it seemed unlikely that this narrow valley along the west branch of the Sacandaga would feed and clothe them all: people, horses, oxen, cows, hogs (minus two, Elizabeth reminded herself), goats and chickens, cats and
dogs, and one bull kept in a fenced pasture on the edge of the forest, at the eastern edge of the village.

As if the animal population had read her thoughts, a tremendous braying erupted from around the corner of the church and a tomcat tore past Elizabeth in a ginger blur. The dog pack followed closely, but at the last moment the tom managed to leap to the top of the woodpile stacked against the tavern wall, and from there to the roof, where he stood with every hair raised and his back in a perfect buckle. The dogs leapt into the air again and again, as if they might sprout wings by pure force of will. Elizabeth recognized the two loudest, who belonged to Horace Greber; the others were unknown to her.

Except that one of them had left the pack and turned toward her. A red dog.

Treenie. She said the name out loud, summoning the red dog out of her past and into the muddy turmoil in front of the tavern.

The door cracked open and Elizabeth caught her breath. For who else could it be, but Robbie MacLachlan. He would come out of the door and call his dog; she was sure of it, just as she knew with complete certainty that Robbie was dead almost eight years now, and buried in a graveyard thousands of miles away. And even so the sound of his voice was very real to her, strangely high for such a big man, singing softly:

The door opened all the way and a young Robbie stood there, tall and broad in the shoulder, straight of back. A full head of hair glinted not white, but mahogany in the last of the sunlight. The man spoke a word and the dogs gave up their baying and retreated, reluctantly.

Then he took a step in her direction, Treenie at his heels, her great flag of a tail wagging. Elizabeth went down on one knee and Treenie came to her, put her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder, and made a contented wheezing sound. She smelled of lake water as she had the first time they had met, deep in
the endless forests. Now there was white threaded through her coat and her muzzle.

She had last seen the red dog on the Christmas day she had been so big with the twins that she could barely move, when Robbie had left Hidden Wolf for the long journey north to Montreal with Treenie beside him. Where she had been shot by a redcoat, according to the men who had been there that day: Robbie, Hawkeye, and Nathaniel, who appeared now in the door of the tavern, behind this man who was a stranger and no stranger at all.

“Treenie,” she said softly. “How can this be?”

“She came home that summer,” said Liam. “Just walked out of the forest one morning, when I thought I’d never see any of you again. So I took her with me. I hope you can forgive me that much.”

Axel’s tavern was nothing more than a shed built onto the side of the trading post with a few tables and a high-backed settle in front of the hearth. It was very cool and dim, and gooseflesh rose up on Elizabeth’s arms when she stepped inside. Axel had made himself scarce, and she was glad of it. Now that the initial shock of this reunion was over, she could smell the tension in the air as plain as spilled ale.

Liam stood on the other side of the room, watching Nathaniel closely. She imagined that the guarded expression on his face must be very much like her own, and that made her very sad. Liam had been one of her first students, a cheerful boy in spite of the fact that he lived with a brother who had beat him badly at the least provocation. He was bright in all things that did not have to do with the written word, hardworking, and devoted to Hannah. Elizabeth wanted to find some trace of that boy in the man who stood before her, but Selah Voyager and her child stood between them, and her safety could not be compromised for any reason.

Elizabeth said, “I did not mean to interrupt your discussion. I am looking for Daniel and Blue-Jay.”

Nathaniel pointed with his chin toward the door that opened into the trading post. “They’re under orders to set still until I come get them.”

Elizabeth knew very well that she should go, take the boys home and leave this to Nathaniel, but she could not, not yet.
The red dog snuffled at her hand and she said, “Have you seen her, Nathaniel? Treenie? Robbie was so sure she was dead, and so were you.”

“She had a bullet wound in her shoulder,” said Liam. “Mostly healed by the time she got back here. I found some salve that Many-Doves left behind when they left and I used that. Seemed to help her some.”

Nathaniel had never learned to use words to hide behind, but Elizabeth had been raised as a gentlewoman in an English home where uncomfortable silences must always be filled with conversation. “And she’s been with you all this time?”

His face relaxed a little. “My captain took a liking to her. She’s been all the way to China and back again.”

Elizabeth’s head came up sharply. “You went to sea?”

He looked a little surprised, and perhaps disappointed. “Didn’t Hannah tell you?”

“There wasn’t time this morning to say very much,” said Elizabeth.

“But enough,” Liam said, and he turned his head to look at her. “You know why I’m here.”

Elizabeth studied his face for a moment. She said, “I know why you claim to be here. Have you seen Curiosity?”

Liam’s mouth set itself into a firm line. He looked as if he had something to say, but then he just shook his head.

Nathaniel said, “Maybe you want to head home, Boots. We’re just about done here.”

“Are we?” Liam’s head came up sharply. “I’d say we just got started.”

“Let me set you straight then.” Nathaniel’s voice dropped dangerously low. “You want my permission to hunt for a runaway slave on our property, and I gave you a plain answer. We don’t allow any hunting on the mountain, and I ain’t about to make an exception in this case.”

“The law sees this different than you do,” said Liam. “If I have to I can go to Johnstown and get a court order.”

“You do that,” said Nathaniel. “And then I want to be there when you show it to my father.”

Liam paled very slightly, but his jaw set itself even harder. “I’m not thirteen anymore, you cain’t scare me with that kind of talk.”

Very slowly Nathaniel said, “You’ll know when I mean to scare you, Kirby.”

In the strained silence that followed, Elizabeth forced herself to speak. She said, “Won’t you let this go out of friendship, Liam?”

He shook his head. “I cain’t. This has to do with murder.” And he looked so pointedly at Nathaniel that Elizabeth had to wonder what had passed between them before she came into the discussion.

Nathaniel said, “As far as I can see, it has to do with trespassing and nothing else. So let me say it plain for the last time. If I find you on the mountain—”

“You’ll throw me off.”

Elizabeth drew in a breath, but Nathaniel didn’t flinch.

“I’ll put you off. Make no mistake.”

His posture had changed, and Elizabeth saw that something new was in the room between these two men, something far more serious than anything that had gone before. There was a fury between these two that she wouldn’t have imagined, something that went deeper than missing gold or betrayed confidences.