Lake in the Clouds (30 page)

Nathaniel shook his head, and tried very hard to bite back a smile.

“I hope you are not laughing at me, Nathaniel Bonner,” Elizabeth said severely.

“It would never occur to me to laugh at you, Boots. You amaze me, is all.”

She pursed her lips, only slightly appeased. “But?”

“But let me ask you this. You know the navy is all over the water. I doubt we can get past Grand Isle or Lamotte without being boarded at least once, maybe twice. You don’t think a dozen black Quakers would make them a little suspicious?”

“It will not,” she said, a little tenser now. “What could be more reasonable than former slaves converting to the Quakerism that brought them their freedom?”

“And what are you going to do about the manumission papers the law will want to see?”

Elizabeth’s jaw tightened. “Very simple,” she said. “I will write them myself.” And she swallowed so hard that he could see the muscles in her throat flexing.

Nathaniel put his arm around her and drew her back to him.

“You’re talking about counterfeiting the papers. Manumission papers and travel papers both, for all of them.”

“I believe
counterfeiting
is the term, yes. Or perhaps
forgery
would be more appropriate, although I must admit I am not sure of the distinction between the two. And of course fraud and grand theft. We will be breaking any number of laws of the state of New-York and the United States and most probably Canada as well. But I have come to a conclusion. The mere fact that a law exists does not provide a moral reason for obeying that law. And I can see none in this case.”

“You’ve thought this through.”

“Yes, of course. I’ve been thinking about it for a good while, ever since your youngest daughter reminded me that laws are only as good as the men who write them.”

He kept silent for a minute, trying not to laugh out loud, in delight and defeat, both.

She said, “Go on, then, Nathaniel. Just say what you have to say. Tell me why it won’t work and why you think I have to go home without you.”

“Oh, it’ll work,” he said, pulling her onto his lap. She struggled a little, and he held her tighter. “I think it’ll work just fine if Mudge is willing to go along with it. And I expect you’re right about him. Smuggling’s in his blood.”

She relaxed a little against him. “But?”

“No buts,” he said, running a palm up her back. “It’s just sometimes you still surprise me. If there’s a man to be broke out of gaol, it’s you I’d come looking for, but I never thought of you as a forger. Next thing you’ll be suggesting we rob a bank or two on the way home.”

“Have your fun at my expense.” She tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her go.

“Or maybe some fur smuggling.” He smiled against her neck. “Just to keep you on your toes.”

“Will you be serious for one moment?”

“I’m dead serious, Boots. I think it’ll work. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t see another way to do it.”

She relaxed suddenly and completely. “You’re not just saying that?”

He shook his head. “Ah, Boots. The war would have been a year or more shorter if they had had you as a general. If you
had been born a man, that is. Which I’m glad you weren’t, all things considered.”

He wanted something different from her now, but her thoughts were far away from him, moving out through the forests. Her mood was shifting from determination to contemplation and from there to sorrow.

“You’re thinking about Splitting-Moon,” he said.

She nodded. “This is the least we can do for her. And for Selah, and for the rest of them. They’ve been through enough. Two weeks more away from home is a small sacrifice in comparison.”

Nathaniel looked at the darkening sky and thought of the dangers of the journey ahead of them, of Splitting-Moon sitting unaware under the blaze of stars, of Daniel and Lily safe on Hidden Wolf. They were surrounded by familiar things and by family and friends, as safe as children could be in the world. The other two had grown beyond his reach and his protection: Hannah somewhere in the city making her own way; Luke, farther still, across the wider water. For them he could do less, or nothing at all.

But they would do this thing for Selah and Manny and their child, for Splitting-Moon and Elijah and their son, for Galileo and Curiosity and all the others.

“We’ll start tomorrow,” he said.

She made a humming noise deep in her throat, acknowledgment and acceptance and worry all at once.

“Let’s go to the hot springs now.” Her voice soft and hesitant at his ear, all her defiance and daring gone. He had married an English spinster who would commit larceny in the name of a cause she found to be just, but in the light of day she still could not talk about the things they did together when he took her to their bed. Hardheaded and tenderhearted, she was no mystery to him but always a puzzle, his rebel of a wife who blushed like a schoolgirl when he told her plain what pleasure she was to him.

In the new dark with all of the color draining out of the world he could not see this particular blush, but he knew it was there. He traced it with the tip of a finger, up from her collarbone over the soft skin of her neck and the crest of her cheek, claiming it and her for himself. Elizabeth in all her furious wanting, his alone.

The Great Lake had many names and faces, but in simple fact it was nothing more than a very large body of fresh water, an inland sea bordered on one side by the endless forests of the New-York frontier and on the other by the Green Hills of Vermont. The water that some called Champlain and others only the Great Lake narrowed on its lower end into a ribbon that twisted and twined its way south. These were the facts; this is what Elizabeth told her students year after year.

But of course it was not really the truth, not the whole truth of the lake; standing on the bluff above the protected cove known as West Haven, Elizabeth must acknowledge that to herself. As far as she could see the world was water, a deep and turbulent jade near the shore and jet at its heart, where the storm was already hard at work. A bony finger of lightning touched the horizon and then crackled in satisfaction. Another storm, the third in two days. As if the spirit of the lake had been sitting at Captain Mudge’s table when they made their plans and set itself against such foolishness.

Elizabeth wrapped her borrowed cloak tighter around herself and rocked back on her heels with the rising wind, lifting her face to the spray of lake water, mixed now with the warmer rain. She could not stand here much longer, or she would draw attention that they had worked so hard to avoid. Behind her was not only Captain Mudge’s home, but the village of Mariah, smaller than Paradise and made up mostly of fishermen and
sailors and their families. But the nearest neighbors were far too close for comfort, and Elizabeth had no doubt that they were all very curious about what was going on in Captain Mudge’s house. And here she stood at the lookout, a Quaker missionary lady without the sense to come in from the rain.

In the house they would be sitting with the captain at the round table in his little parlor, Nathaniel and Elijah and Splitting-Moon marking three points on the compass with Captain Mudge the fourth, true north. Splitting-Moon would sit with her hands resting lightly on the table in front of her, her head cocked to one side as if she were studying the painting of a shipyard that hung over the hearth, listening intently while they went over maps and charts inch by inch and waited out the weather. Splitting-Moon spoke only a little English and Captain Mudge no Kahnyen’kehàka and so the conversation would move in stops and starts while Nathaniel or Elijah translated. Sailors and soldiers and Kahnyen’kehàka medicine women could be patient, or at least they knew how to hide their worries, a talent that Elizabeth had never possessed in abundance.

And so she stood in the storm, looking down at the captain’s schooner
Washington
where it lay at anchor in the cove along with a handful of smaller fishing vessels that rocked in the wind, testing their ropes like dogs eager to be off to the chase. Tomorrow they would board the
Washington
and start north for Canada, a strange thought, the very strangest, for Elizabeth had once vowed never to set foot in Canada again.

She turned back to the house and caught a flash of movement from the corner of her eye. For a moment she paused, trying to make out a familiar dark shape in the deepening shadows of dusk and storm. Nothing. He would show himself when he was ready, and not before.

The path to the house led through a neatly laid out orchard, apple and pear trees all shivering in the wet. She kept her gaze fixed on the ground, unsure of herself in borrowed shoes that pinched at the heel, and wondering if giving up her moccasins as Mrs. Emory insisted hadn’t been one precaution too many. Jode took her by surprise, appearing out of a tangle of raspberry canes without a sound.

“Ah.” Elizabeth caught a fist against her chest in surprise and relief both. “Jode, we were worried about you.”

Captain Mudge’s sister had managed to find some kind of
clothing for all of them over the course of their first day in Mariah, but Jode stood before her now as she had first seen him in the bush, in nothing but breechclout and leggings, with summer moccasins on his feet. And she was taken again, as she always was, by his elegant and vibrant beauty, lithe and powerful, with skin not black or brown or any shade that could be named, because it seemed to shift with the light, sometimes more copper and then ochre or cinnamon. In the misting rain the skin of his scalp glistened some color that could not be named at all, shaved smooth in the fashion of a Kahnyen’kehàka warrior with a single roach of hair slicked down with bear grease at the crown. His Kahnyen’kehàka name was Leaping Elk, and it fit him well.

The muzzle of an old rifle stuck up over his shoulder, and his chest was crisscrossed with wampum and carry-straps hung with powder horn and bullet pouches. In the faltering light the carved handle of his knife gleamed the yellow of old bone in its beaded sheath. The neighbors might raise a disapproving eyebrow over Elizabeth standing in the rain, but the sight of Jode hung about with weapons would evoke a very different reaction.

He was looking at her with vague distaste, and Elizabeth realized she had been startled into speaking English. She repeated herself in Mohawk, and then hesitated. “Won’t you come into the house and eat something?”

“I don’t need to be fed by you,” he said. “I can hunt for myself and the others.”

“Of course you can,” Elizabeth said shortly; it would do no good to try to placate him with gentle words, and even less to let herself be drawn into an argument. “Do you not worry that you might be seen?”

He looked at her down the bridge of his nose, an expression as gracefully disdainful as her aunt Merriweather had ever produced. The truth was that if Jode did not choose to be seen no one would see him. He had come into the bush as a little boy with his mother, and he remembered almost nothing of the life they had led before on a farm outside Albany. At eighteen, he was the youngest of those who had survived the fever, and he was by far the angriest of all the escaped slaves, caught up in his grief for his mother. The boy wanted nothing more than to care for the family he had left, but they must leave the endless
forests and everything he held familiar. The one thing he could hold tight in his fist was his own anger, anger enough to burn down the world.

They had been traveling together for four days, and every day Nathaniel seemed surprised that Jode had not yet disappeared back into the bush to make his own way.

“Will you at least come and speak to Splitting-Moon, so she doesn’t worry about you?”

The impassive expression wavered for just a moment, the dark eyes flicking toward the house and then back to Elizabeth. Nathaniel was wrong to worry about Jode disappearing; where Splitting-Moon went, there would he go.

“Tonight, I will come,” he said. And slipped away into the dark.

Elizabeth had not yet decided what to make of the captain’s widowed sister. At first appearance Mrs. Emory looked like any other woman of late middle age, a solidly built woman with an open expression and a busy way about her. Her hands were as small as a child’s and always full of some kind of needlework. Her son and his wife had taken over the mission she had run with her husband, and her whole joy in life seemed to be sending barrels to them filled with clothing, religious pamphlets, and dried fruit. Even after so many years in the heat and sun of the Guinea coast, she still seemed to think that a good pair of breeches or a skirt could magically transform a man or a woman into the most perfect of beings: a civilized Christian sure of not only a heavenly reward, but happiness on earth.

What Mrs. Emory lacked in reason and understanding, she made up in gentle goodwill, and Elizabeth was thankful that she had opened the door to so many unexpected visitors of three different races without any hesitation. Elizabeth’s concerns about this scheme of hers simply disappeared when she discovered that Mrs. Emory had no patience with slavery, and neither did she seem to care very much about the legalities of the task they had been asked to take on. She would leave the laws of man to her brother, but the challenge of food, clothing, and medical attention for so many she saw as a personal assignment sent her way by her departed husband.

But there was a price to pay, because Mrs. Emory was also
given to a furious curiosity that she could not contain. She met Elizabeth at the door to take her wet cloak, ticking like a mantel clock in her dismay.

“I thought I’d have to come out after you, Mrs. Bonner, did I not? In this cold rain, too, and without your tea. And what were you doing so long in the rain? Mr. Quincy has been asking for you, wanting you to read the bible. And of course Mrs. Bonner will read to you, said I to him said I, as soon as she’s come in from the weather but now he’s gone off to sleep, fevered still, poor man, although Miss Uffa is much improved, is the Almighty not merciful? So many years in the bush without the comfort of his Word, but deliverance came to them as surely—”