Lake in the Clouds (36 page)

The captain looked at Hannah with eyes squeezed almost shut, and then he took his pipe from his mouth and pointed it at her.

“Miss Bonner, you say. Nathaniel Bonner’s girl, ain’t you?”

When Hannah agreed that she was, he opened an almost toothless mouth and laughed. “Why, now ain’t that something. I fought beside your grandfathers and your great-grandfathers, too, in the war against the French. Better men you’ll never find. You tell Hawkeye that Jos Nedele is still on the water and that he sends his regards. You won’t remember this, but I saw you once, must be more than fifteen years ago, down in Johnstown. You was sitting up on Hawkeye’s arm like a little bird. How is he?”

“Very well,” said Hannah. “A little restless, these days.”

“That’s old age,” said the captain, chewing thoughtfully on his pipe stem. “It takes some men that way. The years pile on and little by little an itch starts deep in the bone. Got to keep moving, or die trying.” He sucked noisily on his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke out over the rail. Hannah started in surprise at the smell: not the sweet smoke of white men’s tobacco, but the bitter-sharp oyen’kwa’onwe of her mother’s people. It was a smell so distinct that it summoned men long in their graves: Sky-Wound-Round and Chingachgook, Stands-Tall and all the rest, men as real to her as the captain himself.

“I’ll tell you what, missy. You set down to table with me this evening. I’ve got stories you’ll want to hear, about them days when the three of us fought together, me and Hawkeye and Stands-Tall. This young fellow here, he might like to hear about what happened at William Henry, when we got overrun by the Frenchies and the Huron.”

Ethan accepted the invitation with all the good manners he had at his disposal, but when they had left the captain and walked on, Hannah saw the confusion in his face.

“Hannah,” he said. “I’ve heard those old stories a hundred times, and you must have heard them a thousand. Doesn’t he know that?”

“I suppose he does,” she said. “But that’s not the point. My mother’s people say that the most precious thing an elder can offer you is a story. No matter how many times you hear it, there will always be something new to learn. If you know how to listen, that is.”

Ethan said, “But the stories I really want to hear nobody will tell me. My mother won’t talk about the night my father died, and my stepfather won’t tell me about the years he spent with the Kahnyen’kehàka at Good Pasture, and Curiosity, why Curiosity has a million stories and she’ll tell ten a day if I ask her, but she won’t tell me what I want to know either.”

He was studying Hannah’s face closely, as if she might be the person to give him what he needed, the stories he must have in order to make sense of his family and world. He was not old enough to understand that it was not her place to give him what he was asking for. That was Kitty’s right, and responsibility.

Hannah said, “Sometimes the most important stories are the ones we have to wait for the longest.”

Ethan nodded reluctantly, and Hannah saw the day coming when his questions would not be so easily evaded.

Hannah had last passed through New-York City with her family on the long journey home from Scotland. She had been eager to start up the river that would take them most of the way to Lake in the Clouds, so eager that she had found it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

Her clearest memories were of the departure itself. A lighter had rowed them to the middle of the river where the schooner
Nut Island
was anchored, and they had boarded her at midday. For the rest of the afternoon Hannah had stood at the rail with Hawkeye, looking back at the Manhattan shoreline, remarkable primarily for the fact that it was so quiet. There was nothing to see at the wharves but a few storehouses and a tavern called the Pig and Whistle, fishing dories and farmers’ carts, and beyond that farmland and forested hills. Now and then they had caught a glimpse of a country house through the trees, but soon there was no sign of a city at all.

It was hard to believe that in the years between that journey and this one so much could change. Once they had passed Harlem Cove, timber gave way quickly to acre upon acre of
fields where farmers were busy with spring plowing, then fine houses with lawns running down to the water, and suddenly a forest of masts, spires, and great warehouses three and four stories high.

The sailors began to work the sails, maneuvering the
Good-News
to her place among dozens of ships, small and large, that were nosed up to the piers like men crowded around a table. The wharves crawled with men of every shade of color from bone to obsidian, humping great boxes and puncheons and bales, loading and unloading wagons, rolling hogsheads, and every one of them seemed to be shouting, sometimes at nothing at all. Men more formally dressed waved quills and carried ledgers as tall as a two-year-old, bellowing orders and threats. Cages of chickens, ducks, and geese were piled as high as a man, horses stamped and snorted, and pigs and dogs alike roamed the wharves, adding to the stink and the noise. Most strange of all were the hundreds of workers who were dumping barrow after barrow of refuse and stone into a long stretch of water cordoned off by wooden poles driven into the river bottom.

Hannah watched until she was forced to accept what her eyes and her rational mind told her: the men of the city had taken it upon themselves to seize the sea, to turn water into land, and they were succeeding.

Standing at the rail with Ethan on one side and Kitty on the other, Hannah could find no words at all for what she was feeling, not so much fright or revulsion or even confusion, but the simple knowledge that she did not belong here, could never belong in a place like this.

“Isn’t it glorious,” Kitty announced, clasping her hands together hard, as if to contain the urge to throw out her arms in an embrace of all Manhattan. “Have you ever seen a city so alive, Hannah? Have you ever seen anything so exciting?”

Yes,
Hannah wanted to say.
I have seen a mad dog snapping at its own tail.
But she kept this thought trapped with a tight smile.

Ethan put a hand on her arm, as if he had heard what she could not bring herself to say:
This is no place for me.

“Look,” he said calmly. “Aunt and Uncle Spencer.”

“Oh, how good of her,” said Kitty, her face radiant with satisfaction. “Amanda is come to meet us. I can hardly wait—”
She stopped in mid-sentence, and both Ethan and Hannah turned to her to see that she had gone very pale.

“Mother?”

Kitty looked at Ethan as if he had asked her a puzzling question, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted into Hannah’s arms.

“Your mother was just overcome by excitement. Tomorrow morning she’ll be impatient to go out shopping, Ethan, wait and see.”

“But she was bleeding,” whispered the boy.

They were standing in the hall outside Kitty’s room in the Spencers’ fine home on Whitehall Street. Dr. Wallace, Amanda’s personal physician, and the famous Dr. Ehrlich had been summoned even before the Spencers’ carriage had left the wharves, and both men were waiting when they arrived at the house. Kitty, conscious but disoriented, had disappeared into her room with them in close attendance, along with Amanda’s housekeeper, a black woman called Mrs. Douglas.

“She was bleeding,” Hannah agreed, because she could not deny what they had all seen: Kitty’s skirts spattered with blood. “She was bleeding, as all women bleed, once a month.”

No doubt Kitty would faint all over again to hear Hannah offer this particular explanation to a young boy. Worse, it was not the entire truth. Healthy women of childbearing age bled, but not like this.

Ethan’s desperate expression softened a bit. “All women?”

“Yes,” said Hannah firmly. “All women who are old enough to bear children, for a few days every month. When we are home again you must ask your stepfather, and he’ll explain it to you. But it is a private matter, one not discussed in company.”

Lily and Daniel both would have argued with Hannah about this. They would want to know why such an interesting fact as monthly bleeding should not be discussed with anyone who could provide an explanation. But Ethan knew his mother, and he understood without being told that to raise this topic with her would bring consequences neither of them wanted to contemplate.

Downstairs in the foyer a door opened, and Hannah heard
Will Spencer speaking to one of the maids. Then Peter’s voice rose up to them, breathless and eager.

“He’s looking for you,” Hannah said. “You might as well go along, I’ll call you when you can see her. I promise.”

Ethan hesitated one more moment, and then ran along the wide hall and disappeared down the stairs, leaving Hannah to collapse onto a chair.

Her head was throbbing and she was trembling, from hunger but also simple exhaustion. Hannah made herself breathe deeply, once and then again, and when she opened her eyes she noticed the painting on the opposite wall for the first time. A pheasant draped across a table as if waiting to be plucked and cleaned; a carved crystal decanter filled with wine the color of blood; a bowl of apples, pears, peaches. A single orange.

Hannah closed her eyes again and saw before her a wide, flat basket filled with figs, apricots, dates, smooth-shelled nuts. Hakim Ibrahim holding out an orange to her, the first orange she had ever seen. It had looked to her like a small sun caught in the web of his fingers, his skin the color of earth mixed with ash. In her own hand the orange was heavy, dense, smooth to the touch. The Hakim took another and showed her how to open it, thrusting his thumbs into the skin so that the juice showered the room with its scent, light, sweet, and still faintly sharp.

That morning they had been talking about another woman who lost a child, a Scotswoman, long dead now. A melody came to Hannah unbidden. A song the Scotswoman had sung standing at the rail in a sweet, low voice.

The Hakim had eyes as dark as her own and a high brow creased in concentration under a neatly folded red turban. He was not like O’seronni doctors she had known; he never hurried,
and when he had thought through a problem he presented his reasoning along with his conclusions.

What had he said about the Scotswoman?
She is not yet healed from her loss, either in mind or body.

“You are very far away in your thoughts, Hannah.”

It was Will Spencer’s familiar and friendly voice, but she started anyway, jumping up from her chair, catching a hand against her heart as if to calm it.

“Oh dear,” said Amanda. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

The idea that Amanda Spencer might frighten anybody at all made Hannah smile.

“I think you must have been dreaming,” said Will.

“Yes,” said Hannah. “I was. I was dreaming about Hakim Ibrahim. He used sandalwood oil in a case like Kitty’s, to quiet the womb. I had forgotten that until just now.”

Amanda’s sweet smile faltered a little, and Hannah reminded herself where she was. Amanda Merriweather Spencer, Lady Durbeyfield, had probably never before heard the word
womb
spoken in mixed company, but she was too well trained a hostess and far too kind to let her dismay show openly.

Hannah said, “Forgive me, I was thinking out loud.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” said Will Spencer. “We would all be thankful to have the Hakim here for Kitty, isn’t that so, Amanda? We owe him a great debt. Sandalwood oil, you say? I believe it would be possible to locate sandalwood oil here in the city. I will send out some inquiries.”

Amanda put a small hand on her husband’s arm. “There is time for that tomorrow,” she said firmly. “Right now I am going to show Hannah her room, so that she can collect herself. We dine at four, so you have an hour.”

Will nodded, a little reluctantly. “Very well, then. Until then.”

Hannah was sorry to see him go. As a girl she had come to like and admire Will Spencer for his honesty and his interest in her life. In her experience there were few Englishmen who were able or willing to really talk to a young girl; there were fewer who would bother with a half-breed. Will always reminded her of Elizabeth when she first came to Paradise, as open to the world around her as anyone who had been raised
among the Kahnyen’kehàka. It was so rare a thing among the O’seronni that at first it had been hard to trust, in both of them.

Sometimes it seemed to Hannah that Will Spencer and her stepmother Elizabeth might be the same person in two selves, twins born to different mothers. It was something she had discussed at length with her grandmother Falling-Day and her aunt Many-Doves, but never with either Elizabeth or Will. They were too English to understand that such things were possible.

“Here we are,” said Amanda, opening the door to a room two doors down from Kitty’s. “Ethan is right next to you, you see, in case he calls for you in the night.”

The room was large and airy and beautifully furnished, exactly what Hannah had expected of the Spencers. While Amanda spoke of baths and tea and anything else that Hannah might need or want, she saw that her trunk had been brought up and her things put away.

“I hope you will be comfortable here. We are so glad to have you with us,” Amanda finished.

The words of a lady raised to run a mansion or a manor, but there was nothing artificial about the way they were said. Hannah knew that it was her turn to say something equally well bred, to compliment her hostess and thank her for her hospitality, but before she could think exactly what might be expected, Amanda surprised her by leaning forward to take her hands.

She said, “I know this is very strange for you, Hannah. The city must be overwhelming, and I imagine you are thinking of home with great longing. But we are glad to have you here, for as long a visit as you can manage. Please let us do what we may to make your stay a happy one.”

Hannah opened her mouth to say something, anything, of gratitude. Amanda squeezed her hands again. “Never mind,” she said. “There is nothing that needs to be said. We are family, are we not? You are my own cousin Elizabeth’s beloved stepdaughter and as long as you care to stay with us you must think of this place as your own home.”