Lake in the Clouds (14 page)

She said, “What is this about?”

But Liam seemed not to hear her, he was so focused on Nathaniel. He said, “I know what you did to my brother.”

Elizabeth felt Nathaniel tense, just as she felt the skin rise all along her spine, as if Billy Kirby himself had walked through the door.

Billy Kirby. She did not often think of him these days, but once he had been around every corner. Billy had been younger than Liam was now when he locked the new school-house with Hannah asleep inside and set a torch to it. Billy Kirby, as blundering and single-minded and short-tempered as a bull. The last words he had ever spoken to Elizabeth directly were the thing she remembered most clearly about him.
We’ll find that mine,
he had told her in a soft, easy tone.
And then we’ll find you dead in your beds.

“Billy fell off the north face when he was running from the search party,” Elizabeth said hoarsely.

Liam looked hard at Nathaniel. “Is that what happened?”

Nathaniel let out a harsh breath. “So that’s what’s behind all this. Not the slave. Your brother.”

Liam straightened, and the blank expression left his face. He said, “You’re wrong. I’m after a murderer, that’s all. When I get her I’ll take her back to stand trial, the way my brother would have gone to trial if—” He paused and swallowed so that the muscles in his throat convulsed. “I’ll set out for Johnstown first thing in the morning and be back by nightfall with that court order. You better know that if she’s gone, I’ll track her into the bush. If you make me.”

“Liam,” Elizabeth said quietly. “Should you find this unfortunate woman, do you really think that a runaway slave has any chance of a fair trial?”

Liam picked up his rifle. “At least she’ll get one, which is more than my brother got on that mountain. But that’s something you’ll have to ask your husband about. One more thing,” he said, turning to Nathaniel. “You ain’t asked, but I want to say that I didn’t take anything when I left here that don’t belong to me. I ain’t a thief.”

Nathaniel said, “It’s not what you took that concerns me. It’s what you told.”

Liam’s head reared back as if he had been struck, and patches of red appeared on his face and neck. He said, “No matter what you think of me, I wouldn’t break a confidence. Especially not one that would put—” He paused. “Put your children in danger.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” said Nathaniel. “Do we understand each other?”

Liam looked down at the floorboards between his feet while he thought. This was Nathaniel Bonner who stood across the room, a hand curled easy around the barrel of his long rifle. A man he had looked up to, once upon a time. To underestimate him would be the last stupid mistake he ever made.

“We’re starting to,” said Liam. “I suppose that’ll have to do for now.”

The boys were quiet on the way home, offering nothing in the way of explanations or excuses for their poor behavior, unsettled less by the punishment that was coming their way than Elizabeth’s deep silence. They had all felt the sharp side of her tongue on occasion; it wasn’t pleasant, but anybody who knew the woman would prefer a furious lecture to the kind of anger that settled deep in the bone and had to be carved out, word
by word. Walking behind his wife, Nathaniel studied the line of her back for an idea of what was to come. He could almost feel his son doing the same thing.

Daniel threw a look in Nathaniel’s direction, his brow drawn together hard. He was generally a patient boy, but he didn’t tolerate his mother’s unhappiness any better than Nathaniel did; he expected his father to fix whatever was wrong, and to do it immediately. There were things beyond fixing, but that was something Daniel had yet to learn.

Nathaniel thought of the conversation ahead of him, and a wave of both weariness and anger rose up hard and bitter in his throat. Old wounds once opened were hard to close again.

“Curiosity’s here,” Elizabeth said as they came up the last stretch toward Lake in the Clouds. “Run ahead and make your apologies for inconveniencing everyone so,” she told Daniel. “Blue-Jay, your mother will be looking for you.”

When she turned to Nathaniel, her expression was gravely still. “We will discuss Liam later, when the children are in bed.”

Anger crawled up his back, but he shrugged it away. “We’re going to spend the night under the falls, you and me.”

“Under the circumstances—”

“Boots. Curiosity’s here to spend the night and my father will keep watch. There’s no good reason to change our plans.”

He watched as she considered arguments and discarded them, the tilt of her chin increasing with her irritation.

“I need a quarter hour,” she said finally.

“I’ll go ahead,” Nathaniel said, letting her go. “Don’t make me wait too long, Boots.”

By the time Elizabeth left the cabin it was full dark. Hawkeye followed her with his rifle to hand, and she made no protest. The panther at the schoolhouse was a clear reminder that she could not overlook, no matter how much she would have liked the time alone to think. The simple fact was that she could not manage a musket, the basket she carried over her arm, and the pierced tin lamp all at once, and she needed Hawkeye.

They crossed from the glen into the trees in an easy silence. The light of the lamp picked out touches of color on the forest floor, the first of the season’s anemones peeking up from among drifts of pine needles and damp leaves. They pressed up
the mountain through stands of birch and sugar maple that gave way gradually to beech and hemlock, Hawkeye matching his pace to Elizabeth’s as if she were the elder of the two. At the point where they came to the backbone of the mountain, Elizabeth paused to catch her breath and he paused with her, but he seemed content to wait for her without talking, and no wonder: he had come home to have the twins hurl themselves at him with stories of the day’s adventures, and he had heard Hannah’s and Elizabeth’s in turn. With all of that echoing in his head, he must be as glad of the silence as she was.

The sky opened up for them at the top of the ridge. Overhead a three-quarter moon was almost lost in cloud, and Hawkeye stood for a moment with his head thrown back to study the heavens. His white hair, tied at the nape by Lily with a piece of blue ribbon, reached halfway down his back.

He said, “Rain tomorrow. Do you smell it?”

Elizabeth did not, but neither could she doubt Hawkeye’s almost infallible feel for the weather, nor ignore the simple joy he took in the sky overhead and the night itself. The breeze moved on her cheek and Elizabeth turned toward it. There was comfort in its touch.

When they started out again, Elizabeth realized that she felt more at peace than she had all day. She had been holding on to her agitation, afraid that her father-in-law would try to talk her out of it, afraid to let go and unsure why she should fear such a thing. And she found that Hawkeye had tricked her with his silence, and let the mountain and the night sky do his work for him, bringing her the calm she had resisted.

When they came out of the wood, Nathaniel was waiting for them. He took the basket from Elizabeth and they stood on the table of rock with the river thrumming deep in the ground, rushing underfoot to the spot a hundred yards below them where it exploded into the air and tumbled over boulders as tall as a man to the lake below. Down in the glen the cabins were lost in darkness, marked only by the faint spark of a candle at one window. The smell of wood smoke came to them, finding passage out of the caves through cracks to tell her that Nathaniel had laid a fire.

Hawkeye put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder. The lamp picked out high brows and cheekbones and for a moment they looked more like brothers than father and son.

“You heard?”

Hawkeye nodded. He said, “We’ll take care of things tomorrow while Kirby’s in Johnstown. You two go ahead now, put all this behind you for tonight.” He turned to look directly at Elizabeth. “Can you do that, daughter?”

Elizabeth tried to smile and failed. She said, “I can try.”

And hoped that she spoke the truth.

She had made the scramble down to the caves too many times to count, but still she was glad that Nathaniel went before her to hold out an arm at the worst spots. He walked with the lantern held high so she could watch her footing, but she found it hard to look away from the way the light cascaded down over his hand and the broad turn of his wrist. No matter her mood or the number of years she had spent with him, the sight of Nathaniel’s hands still pleased her in a way she could hardly explain to herself.

He stopped suddenly and she careened into him with a soft whooshing sound, caught up from falling by his arm locked around her waist. The lantern light lit half his face to show her his curiosity and earnestness, as if he expected her to protest his touch.

“That’s better,” he said, dipping his head forward to kiss her, a quick stamp of the mouth. Before it could turn into anything more, Elizabeth leaned back to look at him more directly. “What’s better?”

“I thought you might take some wooing, and here you are throwing yourself at me.”

Elizabeth snorted softly and pulled as far away as she could on the tiny plateau tucked into the cliff. Then she handed him the basket, turned, and climbed up through the cleft in the rock face into the caves.

The waterfall that formed the far wall sent such a wave of icy air through the cave that Elizabeth automatically pulled her cloak more closely around herself. By the light of the tallow candle set on the floor she ducked through the narrow passage to the next cavern and the warmth of the fire Nathaniel had laid for her.

Once they had used this place to hide all their furs and valuables and even themselves, back in the days when some in the village had been set on forcing the Bonner’s off Judge Middleton’s mountain. In the last few years Paradise had been
too much occupied with other kinds of troubles to worry very much about their neighbors, but the caves under the falls were still a safe haven, a secure spot known to no one outside the family. Except Liam Kirby, whom they had once counted as one of their own.

I wouldn’t break a confidence that puts your children in danger.

A shudder ran up Elizabeth’s spine.

Nathaniel was leaning with one shoulder against the mouth of the cave, watching her.

She said, “Do you think if we hide Miss Voyager here Liam will keep his word?”

Moving closer to the fire, Nathaniel crouched down to warm his hands. His expression was very calm and utterly serious, and Elizabeth wished suddenly that she could take back the question she had asked and put aside this conversation. But it was far too late for that.

“The boy wants two things and he cain’t have them both,” said Nathaniel slowly. “I suppose it depends on which one he wants worse.”

“I suppose you are talking about Hannah,” said Elizabeth. “But Liam is no longer a boy, he is a married man.”

Nathaniel looked up at her, one eye squinted shut. “That don’t stop him wanting what he wants, Boots. You know that. Married or not, he feels like he has a claim on her.”

Elizabeth bristled. “Your daughter is not a belonging, Nathaniel. You should not speak of her that way.” And she turned to the task of setting out the supper she had brought for him, unwrapping cornbread, cold venison, apple cobbler made with the last of the fruit stored from the summer, and a piece of Anna Hauptmann’s strong yellow cheese.

“I don’t look at her that way, and you know it. But it ain’t me we’re talking about.”

“Liam is not like that.”

“Not like what?”

She turned toward him furiously. “Like those trappers who take Indian women for convenience and then abandon them to go home to their wives. Putting them and the children they bear aside like—worn-out moccasins.” Her whole face contorted, as if she had bitten into something sour.

Nathaniel took the bread she thrust at him. “Never said Liam was like that.”

“But you implied it,” Elizabeth said firmly, passing him the venison. “Whatever else Liam has become, he would not have the temerity to make such a request of Hannah. And if he did—” She paused, her mouth pressed hard together. “If he did, then she has been raised to know her own worth. Our Hannah would never give herself so cheaply. You know that to be true.”

Nathaniel nodded. “I do. But there’s more than one truth here, and you cain’t deny it. Liam still wants her. I think it took him by surprise, to tell you the truth, but there it is.”

“And just how do you know this?”

“It’s in the way he looks at her,” Nathaniel said, meeting her eye. “The way a man looks at a woman he cain’t get out of his head. The way I look at you, Boots.”

Elizabeth pushed out a sigh. “So Lily wasn’t the only one who followed her sister down the mountain this morning. I should have known.”

Nathaniel saw her struggling, trying to resolve the half of her that was angry at him for following his daughter with the half that was glad he had done so. He said, “I look after my own, and you wouldn’t want it any other way.”

She gave him a tired smile. “Yes.” And then, “Now what?”

Nathaniel finished the last of the venison while he thought, and Elizabeth was content to let the silence stretch out between them. She knew that when he spoke again he would get to the heart of the matter, put words to those things she suspected but that needed to be said anyway.

“He wants her, and it’s the wanting that’s getting in the way of the reason he came home in the first place,” Nathaniel said finally. “Which ain’t a runaway slave—she’s the excuse.”

She sat down across from him. “For what is she an excuse?”

“Revenge,” said Nathaniel. “I don’t expect he calls it that, though. It’ll look more like justice from his point of view.”

“You learned a lot about Liam in that short time you spoke to him.”

“I see what I see.”

The fire whispered between them while she studied his face and he studied her in turn. He could see the question there, in the set of her jaw. What he wanted to do was to draw her down into the nest of pelts he had spread out on the floor for her and hold her there until she could not even remember
her own name, much less Liam Kirby’s. But he had been with Elizabeth long enough to know that she would fight any attempt to be distracted until she said what she needed to say.