Lake in the Clouds (4 page)

“Time enough later to talk,” Hannah said. “When you’re rested.”

“Will you send for Mrs. Freeman?”

“She’ll be here when you wake up.” Hannah prayed that she could keep that promise, for herself as well as Selah Voyager.

Jemima Southern, a single woman of nineteen years, as ambitious as she was poor, always started her week in the same way: at church, taking stock not of her own soul, but of the sins of her neighbors. After Mr. Gathercole’s sermon she lingered, not to share news or meet friends, but to gather bits of news like eggs warm from the nest and to hurry them to the widow Kuick at the mill.

It was late when Jemima was satisfied that the women had no more useful information to offer her. She started home at a trot, crossing the bridge with her back straight and her eyes downcast. If she raised her head, she would see her mistress sitting at her parlor windows.

When Lucy Kuick bought the mill from John Glove, she had proclaimed the house where he raised his family unsuitable for her own. A bigger and grander house had been built away from the noise of waterwheels, perched on the hillside that overlooked her property, as well as the lake, the river, the bridge that spanned it, and the village. From that vantage point nothing would escape her notice, not the names of the men who stood spitting tobacco juice into the bushes outside the trading post, nor the fact that Mr. Gathercole was still deep in conversation with Anna Hauptmann and Jed McGarrity on the church step. They might forget who watched them from the house on the hill, but Jemima could not.

If not for the widow Kuick, Jemima would have ended up
milking cows or serving ale when she lost her mother and brothers to the putrid sore throat. Instead she had a mistress who sat in the front pew at church services and went home to take up embroidery, as a lady was supposed to do. Jemima counted herself fortunate to have come into the service of a wealthy mistress, especially as the widow had two passions that Jemima shared: her unmarried son, and gossip.

Born and raised in Paradise, there was little Jemima did not know or could not find out, and nothing she scrupled to share. She was rewarded well for this skill. Of the three maidservants—she had begun service at the mill on the same day as Dolly Smythe and Becca Kaes—only Jemima had a tiny chamber to herself.

Now she came into the dim, warm kitchen and hung her cape on a peg near the door. She took off her pattens and left them there for Reuben to scrape clean of mud. There were some advantages for a servant in a household with slaves. Some advantages, and many disadvantages, most of them having to do with the woman crouched before the hearth, ladling cider over a ham.

Cookie, small and lean and skeptical in all things, was the only one of the seven slaves who was allowed to stay in the house overnight, sleeping on a pallet next to the kitchen hearth. Her Reuben went up to the mill to sleep and came back at dawn. The other men—her older sons Levi and Zeke among them—had been sent to Johnstown for the winter, hired out as laborers while the mill stood idle over the winter.

Cookie spoke without ever looking in Jemima’s direction.

“You took your time.”

Jemima came to the hearth to examine the pots of squash and yams drizzled with molasses. In another deep kettle, beans simmered in sauce glistening with pork fat. Cookie might be an irritation, but Jemima could find nothing to criticize in the food she put on the table. Her stomach growled loudly.

“Better get up there now, or you’ll go without no matter what your belly have to say about it.”

“You tend to your work and I’ll attend to my own.” Jemima left the kitchen at a comfortable pace devised to make Cookie understand that she had no authority over a free white woman, even one who happened to be a servant.

By the time she reached the parlor door Jemima’s calm had
fled. She paused to set her muslin cap right and smooth her skirt and saw—too late—flecks of mud on the hem. It would not go unnoticed, but right now the greater sin would be to make the mistress wait.

Lucy Kuick looked up from her needlework only long enough to examine Jemima as she curtsied, one corner of her mouth turning down. The widow had a soft voice with a crackling edge to it, each word bitten off like a wayward thread. “Took you long enough, missy. What news?”

Jemima kept her eyes fixed on the widow’s mourning brooch: gray hair woven into a knot and captured under crystal. She used the brooch with its black-and-white enameled lilies to keep her mind off Isaiah Kuick, who sat behind her in the corner. It was the widow’s pleasure to have her son read aloud from the bible while she worked on her tapestry. Jemima felt Isaiah’s eyes on her back as insistent as a hand; she focused harder on the brooch as she began to relate her news.

She was a good storyteller, with an understanding of how long she could hold off her audience and how best to keep their interest. She began with the smaller things: Anna Hauptmann was now set to marry the widower McGarrity on the following Sunday afternoon; McGarrity, who had been voted constable when Judge Middleton died, had arrested Peter Dubonnet for taking a buck out of season, a fact that couldn’t be disputed as Dubonnet had hung the meat to ripen in sight of God and man; Goody Cunningham had come to church in an old ozanbrig shift more suited to fieldwork than Sunday worship; Jock Hindle had got drunk on schnapps and spent the night sleeping on the tavern floor, where he was still. This was a great deal of news for so small a village, but the widow still had not had enough. Her needle jabbed impatiently.

“And Kitty Todd?”

Jemima took a deep breath and recited the details: a long labor, the names of the women who had attended her, the point at which the doctor’s man had been sent to Johnstown to fetch his master home from his business there—

“I suppose they sent the Abomination, that Bump.”

Jemima acknowledged that the doctor’s laboratory assistant had been sent on the errand. The widow was both horrified and fascinated by Cornelius Bump’s physical deformities, but for once she let that topic rest as Jemima continued on with
her story: a child normal in form but too small to live, a distraught mother, and the speculations on how her husband would take the news of another stillbirth. There were no confessions or revelations to offer, no drunkenness or heresy; Jemima did a bit of embroidery of her own.

“Kitty won’t last much longer, they say.” She served this conclusion in a whisper, and saw that she had gone too far: the widow’s head came up slowly.

“Are you presuming to know the will of the Lord?”

From his corner, Isaiah sighed his concern for her immortal soul while Jemima assured his mother that she presumed no such thing.

The widow’s gaze settled on the view while she considered. Jemima saw the line of her back straighten suddenly, the small thin face with its pointed nose and chin fixing on something in the distance. Like a good hunting dog, Jemima thought, and put that thought out of her head before the widow could have a chance to read it from her expression.

“And what of that stranger?” said the widow, stretching out an arm to point, her finger trembling slightly.

Isaiah stood abruptly and moved to the window, close enough to Jemima for her to smell him: dry and slightly dusty, as if he lived on a shelf next to his mother’s china figurines of shepherds and milkmaids. She forced herself to look out the window.

A man stood on the bridge looking up toward Hidden Wolf. Tall and well built, dark red hair tied in a queue, dressed like any hunter: buckskin leggings and overshirt, moccasins. There was a rifle in a sling across his back, a sheathed knife at his side, and a tomahawk tucked into a wide leather belt at his spine. At first glance nothing more than another trapper coming out of the bush. At this time of year sometimes as many as two a day showed up in Paradise, looking for a warm meal. They rarely stayed more than a night and left little more behind than the few coins they spent on beer or Axel’s schnapps. Jemima was about to say just that when the man turned.

“My God.”

The widow leaned forward. “Do you know that man?”

For once Jemima was less concerned with Lucy Kuick’s curiosity than her own. She studied the stranger as closely as the distance would allow, her heart beating so fast that she put a
hand there to still it. When he had called his dogs and walked off into the village, she took a sharp breath and let it go.

The widow leaned forward and pinched Jemima’s forearm so that she jumped. “I asked you a question.”

“Liam Kirby,” she said. “I hardly recognized him at first.”

“Liam Kirby?” Patches of color had appeared on the widow’s fallen cheeks. “I know of no Liam Kirby. A relation to Billy?”

“His younger brother, yes. He left Paradise some years ago. I thought—everybody thought he must be dead.”

“You see that he is not.” The widow picked up her embroidery again. “Go down to the village and see why he’s here.”

“An old beau come to claim our Jemima, no doubt,” said Isaiah, one eyebrow cocked.

Jemima blinked hard. “If Liam Kirby’s come back to Paradise, it must have something to do with the Bonners. With Hannah Bonner.”

Now she had the widow’s attention, and Isaiah’s as well. But how much to say to a lady who had taken an instant dislike to Hannah, or to that lady’s only son, who had done just the opposite? Isaiah’s interest in Hannah was well known to Jemima, and it prickled.

She searched frantically for something that would satisfy them both without giving away too much, not yet. Not until she had time to think this through herself.

The widow leaned forward to peer more closely at Jemima’s face, as if she could read things there no one else could see. “Explain yourself, girl.”

Jemima cleared her throat. “The Bonner’s took Liam in when Billy died.”

The widow reared back with her head. “Billy Kirby, who burned down their schoolhouse? Nathaniel Bonner took in Billy Kirby’s brother?”

Jemima nodded. If she could count on one thing only, it was the fact that the widow never forgot a story. The history of the Paradise school—most particularly Elizabeth Bonner’s role in it—was something that had interested her from the first. The widow could not abide the idea of a school where boys and girls sat in the same room, and she had tried to have it shut down more than once.

“They threw him out, no doubt.”

“No,” Jemima said. “That wasn’t it. When they went off to Scotland so sudden that year—”

The widow’s mouth contorted, and Jemima faltered for just a moment. She did not usually make the mistake of mentioning Hawkeye’s family in Scotland; nothing irritated her mistress more than the undeniable fact that a backwoods trapper and hunter had connections superior to her own. The surprise of seeing Liam had flustered her, but there was nothing to do but push on and hope she could distract the widow from thoughts of Scottish earldoms.

“And that’s when he just disappeared. Left one day without a word to anybody, and he hasn’t been back since. I always wondered—” She stopped herself.

Jemima had been going to say,
I always wondered if Liam would come back for Hannah one day.
But to provide that information would provoke both the widow and her son; worse, it would give credence to something she had wanted to dismiss from her mind. So she provided a different theory, one she liked a little better.

“Some think that Liam found the Tory gold and stole it from them, and that’s why he ran off.”

The widow’s displeased expression was replaced instantly with one that was equal parts derision and disbelief. “More absurd stories about the Bonners, as likely as snow in July. So this Liam ran off from them; I’d say that showed some good sense. And now he’s back. But why?”

Isaiah retreated to his corner. “I’m sure you’ll find out, Mother. In the end.”

“I don’t intend to wait that long.” The widow fingered her mourning brooch thoughtfully, and then her head swooped around toward Jemima.

“They’ll bury the child this afternoon, no doubt. Only right that I send you up to pay my respects. Say a Christian prayer over Todd’s daughter. If the good doctor will consort with heathens and papists it’s the best that he could hope for anyway.”

Jemima swallowed hard. She had been promised an afternoon off for the first time in three months, but to remind the widow of that would bring repercussions she did not like to contemplate. With a great sigh, Jemima nodded.

The widow bent again to her needlework, looking greatly satisfied with her plan.

Mid-afternoon, Nathaniel and Hawkeye went down to the village to fetch Curiosity. Hannah had banned everyone from the cabin while Selah Voyager slept, so Nathaniel left without asking her the questions she must know were coming her way. Hawkeye never saw the mysterious young woman, and only knew of her what Nathaniel could relate.

Nathaniel was glad of the chance to talk things through with his father. Age made many people impatient, but at seventy-five years old Hawkeye was as steady as the sky overhead, never in a hurry to judge and hard to rile.

Hawkeye listened without asking questions, but when Nathaniel finished he got to the heart of the matter without apologies.