Lake in the Clouds (61 page)

“Did he recognize your sister?”

Gabriel swallowed so hard that Lily thought he would start coughing, but the moment passed. “Yes, he did. I can see his face still, the shock in it and the disappointment. He had eyes the color of cornflowers, and they were filled with tears to see what I had wrought. On that morning he made it his Concern to lead me away from such worldly indulgence.”

Lily sat up straighter. “Your father wouldn’t let you draw? But why not?”

“What I saw as a gift, he saw as a trespass on Divine law. He was a good man, Friend Lily, and I wanted to please him but I could not forget what it felt like, to put those simple lines down and to see my sister there in them. When I was sixteen I left my father’s house to make my own way in the world. He died the following year.”

“That’s very sad,” Lily said, thinking of her own father and mother and remembering quite suddenly that there might be news, now, about when they would be home again.

“It is sad indeed, but I did not tell thee the story to see thee weep. Thou asked if I never use color, and here you have the answer. I have lived a willful and disobedient and often selfish life, but in this one thing I have stayed true to my father’s hopes for me. I draw the world as I see it, but in the shades of gray that are my birthright. So I cannot teach thee how to put color on paper. But there is a secret I have learned over the years, and I will share it with thee.”

Lily waited while Gabriel paused, different expressions moving across his face, doubt and weariness and other things she could not name. His thumb ran gently along the pencil.

“The more that is taken away, the more clearly will thou see what is left behind. It is true of Magnus sleeping there in his disguise
of fiery fur, and it is true of worldly possessions, and it is true of the human heart.” And then Gabriel let out a small, dry laugh, something Lily had never heard from him before and it startled her greatly.

“When thou hast learned to value what is left behind, then thou wilt be ready to find another teacher, one who can teach thee about color.”

Lily’s mouth felt very dry. She said, “Do you think I will ever come so far?”

“I have no doubt of it, Lily. None at all. Now I think that thou should have another look at Magnus, thou hast missed the angle of his ears.”

The cat had turned over in his sleep and was splayed on his back with his belly to the sun and his paws stuck straight up. It was a silly sight, but Lily could not find it in herself to smile or even to do as she had been told. She felt as she did after she had eaten too large a meal, filled up now with words and sleepy, in need of quiet so that she could make sense of the things Gabriel had told her. There were so many questions—she wanted to know where he had gone at sixteen and how he had earned his living, who had taught him as he taught her now—but they would have to wait until she had thought it all through.

She said, “You look very tired. Shall we stop for today?”

He reached out a hand and let it rest on her shoulder, something else he had never done before. “There is all eternity to sleep, Lily. Ah, here is Friend Curiosity.”

She was coming up the slope toward the cabin with a basket over her arm, walking like a girl so that her skirts swirled around her legs and snapped back again. Curiosity in the best of moods, well pleased with the world.
Her son has a son,
Lily remembered and it saddened her not to be able to share such good news with Gabriel.

“Dinnertime,” Curiosity called. “Come away now, Lily, and let the man eat in peace. Bump on the way up from the barn.”

Then she stopped in front of them and opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Her expression had gone very quiet and empty, but there was a sharpness there, some surprise that did not sit well. Lily followed the line of her gaze to Gabriel, who had lifted his face up, his eyes narrowed against the sun under the fringe of gray hair and the
broad brim of his hat. His skin was very white, and his eyes were rimmed with red.

“Gabriel Oak,” she said, her voice a little hoarse. “What have you done?”

He blinked at her slowly. “We have had a good morning, Friend Lily and I.” He produced a grin that lifted only one side of his mouth and made him look like a boy. Something had passed between them that Lily did not understand and was not meant to understand, except that Gabriel had somehow got the best of Curiosity.

She had the crease between her brows that meant she wasn’t about to be charmed, not even by Gabriel Oak.

“I’m ready,” Lily said, uneasy and unsure if she were somehow to blame for whatever had so displeased Curiosity. “I’m ready to go now.”

“Hold on just a minute,” said Curiosity. “How much did you take, Gabriel?”

“Enough, I think.” He was still smiling, but not quite so broadly.

Curiosity sucked in one cheek and let it go again, and then she let out a great breath. “Well, then, we’ll just set here with you a while longer.”

She silenced Lily’s question with a quick flick of her fingers. “We got a matter to settle.”

Gabriel blinked at her, sleepy and content. “I made a promise, did I not?”

Curiosity didn’t answer him. She said, “Lily, have you done any drawing in that book your mama gave you yet?”

Lily shook her head.

“Time to get started then. Open it up, now. I’ll stand right here while you work. Don’t worry none, I ain’t going to look over your shoulder. Take his likeness as best you can.”

“You want me to draw Gabriel?” Lily’s voice rose up in surprise, wavering a little at the end.

“I do.”

“But I’m not—”

“Friend Lily,” Gabriel said softly. “I made a promise that I cannot keep without thy help. Wilt thou help me?”

“Yes,” Lily whispered.

“Concentrate on this task before thee. It is within thy power.”

The more that is taken away, the more clearly wilt thou see what is left behind.

Lily studied Gabriel. His skin shimmered damp in the sunlight so that for a moment it seemed that she could see through it to the skull itself. The great hollows of cheek and temple, the line of his nose, the deep cleft above his lip where sweat shone in the sun like dew in the curve of a leaf.

“Will you take off your hat?”

He did as she asked, and she began to work, linked circles and then caught the shape of his deep-set eyes, turned up a little at the corners where the wrinkles were deepest. The color didn’t matter to her pencil but she could not overlook it either, eyes as blue as her own—like flag lilies, like cornflowers—but fever bright, and brighter still, like window glass reflecting a bloodred sunset. His usual kind expression was there too, but lost a little in the heat of his fever. He wasn’t watching her or anything at all, his gaze was fixed in the distance while he waited for her to do this thing he had asked of a little girl. Younger now than he was when he drew his sister Jane and found out the truth about himself.

Panic clenched, rose up from her belly like a fist to lodge in her throat. She put down the pencil to flex her fingers and then she felt Curiosity’s hand on her shoulder, as sure and calm as her mother’s. The fear left her, ran away down her back and disappeared into the ground like a strike of lightning.

The more that is taken away.

Lily let her pencil work. All the rest of the world went away while it moved on the paper, putting down Gabriel’s bones, circles within circles and the planes between them. The beginning and the end of him. And then she was finished, a simple drawing, nothing more than lines meeting and parting and meeting again to build a likeness of her friend.

“A little too broad in the chin,” said Lily. “And the ears aren’t quite right.”

“Shhhh.” Curiosity leaned down to look, her eyes moving quickly over the paper.

“Now see,” she said finally in her softest, sweetest voice. She smelled of linen in the sun, of cinnamon and the color of her own skin. “Now see what you made. Wouldn’t your grandmother be proud?”

Curiosity was looking at Gabriel Oak when she said it, and
Lily would remember her expression for a very long time to come, sad and happy at the same time and satisfied, above all things.

In the evening when there was still no word from Three-Crows or Daniel or anyone else, Lily opened Gabriel’s book, working the knots in the string with fingers that trembled a little. When she was done the book sat before her with its warped boards and blackened face like a great horny toad ready to leap.

She turned over the front cover, curious first and foremost about what kind of book it might be, and read with considerable effort:

The first flush of surprise and disappointment lasted only a second, until Lily looked at the inside of the cover she had set aside. The handwriting was old-fashioned and hard to read but the familiar name was there: she put her finger on it and whispered the words to herself aloud as she read, something her mother would not like but it seemed the only right way, to say the words out loud from the page.

Below the faded ink Gabriel’s father had put on the paper, he had made marks of his own: a whole world of faces, men and women and children, some laughing, some serious or concerned or distracted. Beneath each he had written a few words:
Sister Jane, aged 18; Aunt Catherine, with her cat Theobold; Brother Thomas, lost to a fever aged 23; Mother in contemplation; Great-grandmother Clarke; Father.

Josiah Oak was an old man in the drawing, with sunken cheeks and deep lines around his mouth, pain lines Hannah would call them, but there was nothing bad or cruel in his expression,
no matter how Lily studied him, looking for a man who would send a son away because he wanted to draw. He had died so long ago and still Lily could know him a little, from the set of his jaw and the look in his eyes. This was the way Gabriel had seen his own father. The bones of him.

Lily turned the pages carefully, afraid that if she made any sound at all what she had in front of her might disappear. She saw now what Gabriel had meant her to have. Not the book, or what the book had to say—the printed words were long and complicated and did not interest her—but for the world inside it. Gabriel had drawn in the white spaces and sometimes along the edge of the words, trees and cabins and a clump of fireweed, a child with a scarred face, an old lady with a sour look that reminded her of the widow, two Indian boys playing a game with dice, one of them laughing while the other scowled.
Seneca camp,
he had written below them.

Most of the drawings had something noted, sometimes just the name of the place where the drawing had been made and a date.
On the Delaware, spring 1749. Meg Brewster of Philadelphia. Mr. Leonard, Barber, 1750. A tree struck by lightning, Marysville.

“I’ve been talking to you for five minutes, girl. Have you gone pure deaf?”

Lily looked up at Curiosity, who stood fists on hips in front of her. “Gabriel gave me this,” she said, her hands spread over the pages. “I don’t know why.”

Curiosity’s expression softened.

“Do you know why he would give me this?”

One corner of her mouth twitched a little, not in laughter at all but as if she were trying to decide what to say. “It’ll come to you in time, child.”

When she had carried Lily into the kitchen and deposited her, she stood back. “Tomorrow you can put some weight on the ankle,” she said. “Walk around the garden a little.”

Just a few hours ago this good news would have driven everything else out of Lily’s head, but the book in her lap was so heavy, and her fingers kept moving back there, tracing the cracks in the leather.

Curiosity didn’t seem to notice; she had already turned her back to talk to Daisy, who was washing fiddlehead ferns from the basket in her lap. Lily thought of asking them to light a candle—it was far too dim in the kitchen at dusk to read
anything—the urge to open the book was that strong. She had not even come to the first of the papers that were layered between the pages.

“Strangest wedding I ever heard of,” Daisy was saying to her mother. “Wasn’t nobody there except the preacher and his wife. The widow caught herself a chill, so they say, and stayed in bed. Her only child and she wouldn’t stand there and watch him be married. Anna did go on about it.”

Lily sat up a little straighter, her hands stilling on the book.

Curiosity said, “I keep thinking of Martha, rest her soul. She would be pleased to see her Jemima settled so well.”

Daisy let out a soft grunt of disapproval, started to say something, and then she cast a glance in Lily’s direction and stopped herself. “One thing for certain, I never saw a man so blank faced on his wedding day. Kuick looked like he was walking in his sleep.”

“It all happened right fast,” Curiosity said dryly.

“Dolly will have some news to share. She coming today?”

Curiosity shrugged. “I expect Jemima will make her work till full dark, though she’s unlikely to get her full wages.”

Lily didn’t like to ask questions when they were talking for fear that they would just stop, but now she couldn’t hold back.

“Dolly Smythe is leaving the widow?”

Daisy looked up from her basket with the smile that reminded Lily of her own mother.

“She is. The new Missus Kuick don’t care to have Dolly scrubbing her floors or working her loom.”

“That suit me just fine,” said Curiosity. “I’ll be glad of the extra pair of hands, I surely will. The only question I got is, I wonder how long it’ll take for Becca to give notice, just her and Cookie taking on all the housework alone while Jemima lays abed.”

And then the two women exchanged glances and Curiosity closed her mouth up tight. All week Lily had been listening to Curiosity and Daisy worry over the changes at the Kuicks’, but they were far too mindful of her sitting in the corner and always stopped short of the things Lily most wanted to know about.