Lake in the Clouds (67 page)

Anna squinted in the direction of the hearth, where the widow Kuick had claimed the good rocker for herself. “Left her servants and the blacks at home. No sign of her son either, but she takes Jemima with her everywhere. Like one of them little dogs rich folks keep on their laps all the time.”

“I wonder if it was the free tankard of ale or the idea of seeing Richard take off his shirt that got the widow to come down and rub shoulders with the rest of us,” Nathaniel said.

Anna laughed at that loud enough to make people turn around. Elizabeth could not hide a smile, but she elbowed her husband in the ribs for good measure.

It was strange to see the widow here. Elizabeth could go for months without seeing her at all except at church services; she doubted that the lady had ever put foot in the trading post before. She sat there now with Mrs. Gathercole to her left on a low stool, like a lady-in-waiting. The minister’s wife looked ill at ease and flushed in the crowded room, one of Anna’s doughnuts balanced untouched on her knee. Curiosity had mentioned just recently that Mrs. Gathercole expected another child late in the year.

As did Jemima Southern. Jemima Kuick, Elizabeth corrected
herself, looking at the young woman who had once sat in her schoolroom and caused no end of trouble.

She stood alone in the crowd in her fine silk dress, her breasts almost spilling out of the bodice. Where her husband might be was a question no one would dare ask her. Marriage had done nothing to mellow Jemima’s temper or sweeten her expression, and Elizabeth was sorry to see it. She would have wished Jemima well for her mother’s sake, as Martha Southern had been a good woman, as sweet as her daughter was sour. It seemed that Jemima had found a mother-in-law like herself, unwilling to be pleased, always ready to find fault.

The widow took no note of Jemima’s unhappiness nor of Mrs. Gathercole’s discomfort. She sat straight backed and disapproving as any queen thrust unexpectedly among her lowest subjects, her gaze flicking from one unwelcome sight to another.

Mariah Greber came up so that Nathaniel had to squeeze aside. She had her infant son in one arm and the youngest of her girls on her free hip. The girl presented herself to the world as a great tangle of hair and a mouth opened in a high-pitched howl.

“Can you stop up this gal’s mouth with one of your doughnuts, Anna?” Mariah shoved the child over the counter. “Otherwise I’ll have to drown her like a kitten and be done with it. I’ll pay you just as soon as I can find Horace; he’s over there someplace with Axel and the trappers. All I can say is, thank the good Lord Dr. Todd will stand no more than one measure of ale to a man.”

Anna took the girl with a sympathetic cluck and Mariah disappeared in the direction of the trappers who stood with their heads bent together and shoulders hunched while they talked. The men who spent their lives in the bush were a solitary bunch and rarely came into the village, but news of free ale moved fast in the bush and was enough to make any of them walk ten miles.

The group parted and she caught sight of a big man in their center, a man with the expression of a slow child, dull and confused.

“Good God,” she said, truly taken aback. “Look, Nathaniel. Dutch Ton, but with a clean face.” She craned her head to see if she hadn’t imagined the old trapper. “He hasn’t been in the
village for three or four years at least. I always forget how big he is until I see him again.”

“He wouldn’t be here now if he hadn’t let me scrub him down with lye soap and a long-handled brush,” said Anna, holding a cup of cider up to Charity Greber’s pouting mouth. “There never was such a stench. Sticks to him like mud to a hog. Why, he had so much rancid bear fat in his hair and beard it took four soapings and half a gallon of turpentine to get rid of it all. I said to him, Ton, it ain’t the bear fat that keeps the black-fly away from you, it’s the pure stench, so I did, said it plain. But he just smiled. Then I burned his clothes and sold him a new set to wear. I expect he’ll wear them till they fall to shreds on his back and then he’ll wrap himself in an old bear pelt until he can find his way back here.”

“I wonder if he’s introduced himself to the widow,” Nathaniel said. “I’m sure she’d like to make his acquantance.” Anna put her head back and laughed.

All the windows and doors stood open to the evening breeze, and children ran in and out, darting between legs and under tables. Cornelius Bump had climbed up on a barrel of salt fish to get a view of the room and he waved in Elizabeth’s direction, his round head bobbing.

Many-Doves and Runs-from-Bears stood near the door, and with them Joshua and Daisy Hench and Curiosity and Galileo. As if they dared not come in any closer to the widow Kuick. Elizabeth pointed this out to Nathaniel and he raised his head to look just as the twins wiggled their way through the crowd to them.

“Pretty much everybody’s here but the Todds and Hannah,” said Daniel, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement. “Should I run and fetch them?”

“No need,” said Anna, pointing with her chin at the door. “Here they are now.”

In spite of all she had heard from Hannah and Curiosity about Kitty’s condition, the sight of her was a shock. Elizabeth’s sister-in-law had always been slender and pale, but now she seemed as frail as a woman of eighty years. And yet there was an air of contentment about her: her complexion was good, neither too sallow nor too high, and she smiled warmly and
spoke to everyone who greeted her with real interest. She waved in Elizabeth’s direction and called out.

“You must come by tomorrow and see our Meg!”

“There’s a chance,” Curiosity had said to Elizabeth. “That baby might be just what she needs to help her pull through. As long as she don’t catch pregnant again.”

Neither of them had said out loud what they were thinking: how would Richard Todd take to the idea that Kitty could not provide him with the children he wanted? To thwart Richard was to ask for trouble; this Elizabeth knew from personal experience. She studied him, but for the time being nothing unusual was to be seen in his expression.

He stepped up on a crate in the middle of the room and the crowd went suddenly quiet.

They’re afraid of him.
Elizabeth knew that, but it always amazed her again to see the proof of it. He was an impressive figure, there was no denying it. Richard had always been a big man but middle age and sedentary habits had added layers that made him more substantial still; whiskey had roughened his complexion and shortened his temper. A cantankerous old man in the making, Curiosity said of him, and Elizabeth saw the truth of that in the way he looked over the people of Paradise, as if they were unruly children who had earned a caning.

He raised one hand to silence the whispering at the back of the room.

“Glad to see there’s enough common sense left in Paradise to get most of you here. Now I never have been a man for a lot of talk—” His head swung from one side of the room to the other, looking for somebody brave enough to disagree with him. Satisfied, he carried on.

“Let me call on the old folks here to start with. Many of you have lived through smallpox yourselves. Seen it kill whole families. I see faces here been carrying pox scars fifty years. Ain’t that so, Goody Cunningham?”

The old lady nodded. “That’s true. The pox took both my folks, and then it robbed me of what little beauty I called my own.”

Muffled laughter rose up from the back of the room where some of the older boys stood together, and Richard turned a sharp eye in that direction. The sound died away abruptly.

He said, “It’s been a long time since we saw smallpox in Paradise. Too long. The young ones don’t know enough to be afraid of it and the middle-aged ones have forgot what it was like.”

“I remember.” Runs-from-Bears spoke up, his deep voice carrying through the room. “I remember watching my four brothers burn up with fever and die.”

Richard paused again, and Elizabeth thought how good it was that the widow Kuick was behind him and he could not see her expression, outrage and disgust and plain disbelief.

He said, “Last summer the smallpox was in Johnstown, and this summer it could well be knocking on our door. Except now there’s less reason to fear it, if you’ll do what needs doing and not make a fuss about it.

“You all know Hannah Bonner. Born and raised right here in Paradise, and she’s been in every one of your houses at some time or another, bringing you tea for your fevers or looking after your sick children. The grown-ups here will remember that both her grandmothers were rare healers in their own ways. For the past five years Hannah’s been apprenticed to me and I think enough of her to have sent her down to the city to learn how to do these vaccinations against the smallpox.

“Now let me say one more thing before I ask her to explain all this to you. You’ll pay attention to what she’s got to say and you’ll ask civil questions or you’ll answer to me. When she’s done explaining I’m going to roll up my shirtsleeves and let her vaccinate me right here for you to watch. She can vaccinate four people today, and I’ll be looking for volunteers. Those of you who never had the pox all need to be vaccinated, most especially the children.”

He looked around the room once again, as full of fire as any preacher. “Let me say this. If you don’t let the children be vaccinated out of superstition or for some other fool reason, then it’ll be on your own heads. I warned you.”

Hannah stepped up on the crate next to Richard’s. She was wearing one of the gowns Kitty had bought for her in the city, saffron-colored calico with clusters of red flowers and flowing vines. It was cut modestly over the breast but still it showed her figure to advantage. Standing next to Richard she looked tall and slender and serious with her hands folded in front of her, and Elizabeth felt herself near tears for no good reason at all. At
her back she felt Nathaniel shudder, too, with the shock of a daughter turning from child to woman before their eyes.

Then Hannah smiled, such a warm and true smile that everybody in the room relaxed and smiled back, even old Isaac Cameron, who was easily the gruffest man ever put on the earth. Everybody except the widow Kuick and Jemima.

Hannah said, “I’m glad to be back home—”

From the back of the room Lily called out, “Well, it took you long enough!”

There was a murmur of laughter.

Hannah said, “Ethan, will you come up here, please?”

Richard got down from his crate and Ethan hopped up in his place.

“By God, that boy looks like his daddy,” said Anna. “As if Julian was standing right there, Lord have mercy on his troubled soul.”

Hannah helped Ethan pull his shirt over his head so that he stood before them with the linen clutched to his bare chest. He was browned by the sun, muscled in the way of young boys, sleek and unselfconscious and beautiful.

Hannah turned Ethan in a circle for the room to look at. “If you look closely you’ll see that on each arm Ethan has a single blister. He was vaccinated eight days ago, the morning we left the city and started for home. It takes eight days for the blister to get to this stage, when it’s ready to be lanced. What I’m going to do is to take the clear liquid from his blisters and rub a little of it into small cuts on the doctor’s arms. Ethan, tell the folks here about your health for the last eight days.”

The boy looked up at her as if the request mystified him. “Why, I’ve been fine, you know that, Hannah.”

“No fever?” called out Missy Parker.

He shook his head.

Charlie LeBlanc stepped forward. “Now you tell us, boy, did it hurt when she cut you and rubbed that cow juice in?”

Ethan’s chin tilted up. “It ain’t cow juice, it came from a man called Mr. Jonas down in the city, from his blisters. And it didn’t take much, just a little scratch. Nothing to get worked up about.”

There was a snort of laughter from among the trappers.

Richard said, “Tom Book, if you got something to say, then say it.”

“All right then,” said the trapper. He had a dirty bandage over one eye and a crust of blood on his nose, and he blinked in the way of a man who has been looking at the bottom of an ale tankard for far too long.

“Let me see if I got this right,” he began in the slow and arduous way of the truly intoxicated. “You’re claiming that you put cowpox on that boy, and now he’s never going to get sick hisself with smallpox.” He snorted again and a bubble of blood appeared at his nostril. “It don’t make sense no matter how you look at it. People ain’t cows.”

“It might not seem to make sense right now,” Hannah said, “but I can tell you this. Nobody who’s had this cowpox vaccination has ever come down with smallpox, though others around them have. Hundreds have been vaccinated here and in England. It’s like this: your blood gets a taste of the pox—any kind of pox—and then it has what it needs to fight the sickness off after that. Folks here who had smallpox a long time ago, none of them have ever had it again, isn’t that so?”

Gertrude Dubonnet said, “I nursed my brothers through it back in sixty-nine and caught it myself. Never come down with the pox again after that.”

“That’s why we only need to vaccinate people who’ve never had pox,” Hannah said. “I was vaccinated as soon as I got to the city because I’ve never had it.”

There was a lot of restless shifting in the room now, men’s voices low and uneasy.

“Enough talk,” said Richard. “Let’s get on with this. Who’s going to come up here now and stand next to me? Who’s as brave as this boy?”

“I am!” called out the twins in one voice. They pushed their way to the middle of the room, with Blue-Jay and Kateri close behind. The Hench children followed, all four of them. Then the room went completely silent and nobody moved at all.

Richard crossed his arms and looked out over the crowd, his expression darkening. “Horace Greber, why don’t I see any of your children up here? You think the pox won’t like the look of them? What about you, Charlie? Jock? Jan Kaes, you got young grandchildren who need to be vaccinated.”

There was an uneasy shifting and murmuring, and then Greber cleared his throat. “You said three or four vaccinations
today, Dr. Todd. Got more there than you can do already as it is.”