Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

  In a voice small and far away Manny said, “He looks like his mama. Like my Selah.”

  “Does he?” Lily leaned over to look at the drawing. “I never did get to take her likeness, I'm sorry to say. She was here for such a short time with us.”

  “It was a short time,” Manny said. “Too short.” Then he raised his head and looked at her. “I think of her every day.”

  “Of course you do,” Lily said. “How could you not?”

  Without warning Manny leaned toward her, and Lily had the odd and disquieting idea that he was going to whisper a secret in her ear. But he had nothing to say, not in words. Manny simply put his forehead against her brow, gently, lightly. She felt him tremble and then stop trembling.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  “Why, you're welcome.” Lily brought up a hand and patted him on the shoulder, as a mother pats a child who needs comfort but believes himself too grown-up to ask for it and would be mortified to know how very clearly he wore his need on his face.

  For that moment they stood just so, forehead to brow, her small hands patting. Lily made soft sounds, humming sounds in her throat; she had no singing voice but wished just now that she had, so that she might sing to him as Curiosity would.

  Then another sound, an indrawn breath, and Lily jumped in surprise.

  Justus Rising was standing in the open door, his mouth a perfect O of surprise and astonishment and delight. Lily saw that much before he dashed away, his heels kicking up dirt. And she saw something else, something more disturbing: a look flashed across Manny's face. She could not call it anger, no more than she could compare the weak flame of a tallow candle to a lightning strike.

  Most days she would wait for Simon to break at noon and they would walk together to their dinners: he ate at Curiosity's table and Lily went home to her mother's. But the morning's work had unsettled her and she started off with Manny. No sign of Mr. Stiles or Justus, and Lily was relieved and then angry at herself, to be so easily unsettled by the disapproval of a slow-witted boy.

  It might have been awkward walking together; most men could not suffer to be near a woman who had seen them in a moment of weakness as she had seen Manny, weeping for his father and sister. But Manny seemed to have forgotten the whole episode, or at least to have put it away for now.

  Lily's own mind was not so obedient; she could hardly walk this path without thinking of Simon. First she had run away from him in Curiosity's kitchen and now she had gone ahead without him to dinner. He would think her angry, or playing at games, when in reality she was disappointed to have missed him.

  And what a surprise that was. After Nicholas she had believed herself unreceptive to such things, but Simon had sneaked up on her, wooed her so efficiently that she had little way to defend herself. She had gone from liking him to falling in love with him in a long, slippery sliding motion, her heart and her body wound up in it so tightly that she couldn't say what part of the things she felt were love and what was lust.

  And here was the stand of birch trees where they often stopped, without discussion. Simon would catch her wrist and pull her to him and they would kiss until they were both breathless, with the birds flitting around them, buntings and cedarwings and sparrows. They would press together and move together until he broke away, flushed and at the point of no return. It was always Simon who stopped, and every time Lily was surprised and unsettled and frustrated by his self-control. Later, her irritation was replaced by other worries: that he would think her wanton. A strange word she had never really understood until now, the power and heft of it.

  When Lily got up the courage to ask him, to use that word, he had looked at her with such honest surprise that she had the first vague understanding that he was as lost as she was, as given up to it.

  Sometimes, when she was feeling the weather and the rush of her own blood with more intensity than usual, Lily would touch him in ways that she knew he could not ignore, and with those touches she would draw him deeper into the shadowy woods and they would make a place in a bed of new ferns, and come to dinner late, each making excuses to the faces around the table that no one believed.

  But now there was Manny, walking not with her but a little ahead, his eyes moving constantly as any good woodsman's must. It was his walk that made it clear how long he had lived among Indians, and how deeply he had gone into that way of life. Lily thought of Hannah when she first came home after such a long time away.

  She said, “You could write to Hannah, you know. My parents send letters and packets through my brother Luke, every few weeks.”

  “I haven't writ a word in more than ten years,” Manny said. Not an outright rejection of the idea, and that meant something.

  “It's not something you forget. If you've got a mind to write, that is.”

  He pushed a thoughtful breath out and pulled another in, and then he smiled a little. “Don't know that I've got much of a mind for anything at all these days.”

  “I've seen you helping Abe with the charcoal.”

  Manny shrugged. “He's got a restful way about him.”

  They were quiet the rest of the way until the fork in the path that would take Lily back home.

  He said, “I'll have to go see the boy.”

  Lily waited, watching his face for some sign of what he was asking. Then she saw that he hadn't really been talking to her, but to himself.

  Manny touched a finger to his brow and left her, and for a moment Lily watched him walking away.

  The Bonners ate their dinner in the kitchen as there was still no table in the dining room, Lily and her family and the women who came to help in the house and garden all crowded together. Gabriel entertained them all with his stories, and sometimes Lily's mother would read something aloud from the latest newspaper and there would be a discussion.

  Lily wanted to draw the scene: Lizzie Cameron listening so hard that all the muscles in her face drew into a knot of concentration as she tried to follow what Elizabeth meant her to understand. Jane Cunningham's little bow mouth with its pale chapped lips pursed in disapproval: she liked the Bonners well enough and was glad of the work, but could not countenance women discussing politics at the dinner table. Lily's father watching all this, amused with it, prone to tease a little. Gabriel sincere and playful at the same time. Lily's mother, pale of complexion, circles under her eyes, worn thin by weariness and the demands the child was making on her, but happy.

  Lily liked the noise and laughter and scolding for a number of reasons, but most of all she liked being able to disappear into the crowd and hide in plain sight. If they asked her she gave them some detail of her morning, but mostly the others were happy to carry on without her. Today Lily would have had a good story to tell, about Mr. Stiles and his plan to preach to her while she drew, but she came into the kitchen to find it almost empty, and only two places set at the table.

  Her mother said, “I wanted to have a little time with you, daughter, so I sent them all away.”

  Just that easily she forgot about Mr. Stiles and Justus Rising and even Manny with tears on his face; she forgot about everything but Simon and the last time he had put his hands on her—yesterday, in the cool of the forests. She could see him still if she closed her eyes, a halo of gnats circling his dark head and his expression so very severe with wanting.

  “No need for alarm,” said her mother. “I've no complaints to make.”

  Now Lily was very confused, but she forced her face into a calm questioning and took up the loaf of bread to cut slices.

  “What did you want to talk about then?” Focusing on the gleam of the knife, the feel of the handle in her hand.

  “Money.”

  Lily sat down and folded her hands in her lap.

  Her mother said, “You know that my aunt Merriweather left me a bequest when she died.”

  Lily could not say where this conversation might be going, but there was some small alarm bell ringing in her head. She nodded, because her mother was waiting f
or a response of some kind.

  “It is quite a lot of money, actually. An annuity of two hundred fifty pounds a year. It has been sitting in the bank in England and gathering interest these eight years.”

  Lily said, “But you can't get to it just now, then. With the war.”

  “Not just now, no.” Her mother sat across the table, her calm eyes seeing far too much, understanding things Lily could not put down even if she had all the paper and paint in the world. “But the war will not last forever. And then I would like you to have it all. I shall have the bequest transferred to your name.”

  A soft sound came from her own mouth. Lily pressed her fingers to her lips. “I don't understand.”

  “Then let me explain.”

  When she had something important to say, Lily's mother was in the habit of turning her head and lowering it until her chin almost rested on her chest. When she was a little girl it had seemed to Lily that her mother was listening to someone only she could hear, and that only if she paid very close attention.

  She spread her hands flat on the table and took in a deep breath. “Just before I was to marry your father, my aunt Merriweather gave me the same gift I am giving you now. She offered me money and the opportunity to use it to my own ends, without interference.”

  She paused a moment. “What she really gave me, of course, was a choice. Between the opportunity I had always wanted—the one I came here to realize—and life with your father.”

  “Did you choose well?” Lily asked, her voice sticking a little in her throat.

  “Yes. I chose well. I would change nothing, even if I could. So now I am giving to you what my aunt gave to me, something very simple: the opportunity to choose. You may wait until the war is over and claim the income. With it you could live very comfortably in Manhattan, or in England or even on the Continent. Many painters spend time in Rome, and you could do that too, if you are careful with your expenditures.”

  Lily met her mother's eye. There was nothing unusual in her expression; she might have been explaining a difficult passage out of some scientist's treatise on fossils. No anger, no malice, no joy. A waiting, as if she were a vessel waiting to be filled: with cool water or vinegar, that much was up to Lily.

  “You don't want me to marry Simon,” Lily said. “Is that it?”

  “That is not it, absolutely not.” The first color rose in her mother's face. “Understand me now, daughter. If you choose to marry Simon and go to live with him in Montreal, you will have my blessing. How could I do any less, given my own history?”

  “But you are hoping that I'll go off to Europe.”

  “Some part of me hopes for that, yes. But another part hopes just as sincerely that you will not. I do like Simon, and I respect him. I think he would be a good husband to you.”

  “If I marry, what happens to the money?”

  A smile flickered in the gray of her mother's eyes, touched the corner of her mouth. “It is yours, whatever you decide. It will give you some measure of security. A married woman should have that, though the law doesn't see it thus.”

  “And my father agrees with this?”

  “Haven't you guessed?” Lily's mother asked. “It was your father's idea to start with.”

  Such a clever husband, Elizabeth thought, who could find a way to put a wife's worries to rest and secure their daughter's future in such a simple, elegant way.

  Now, sitting at the table while Lily wiped the few dishes, Elizabeth found herself smiling, pleased with him and herself too, and most of all with Lily, who had taken this offer in the spirit it was meant. No doubt there would be many more days of uncertainty in which she would question herself closely, but for the moment Elizabeth felt truly peaceful.

  Of course, it remained to be seen how Simon would react. She had set him many small tests in the weeks since he came to Paradise, all of which he had met with a curious combination of intelligence and thoughtfulness and something she could only call native intuition. This newest test would tell most about him.

  Most men would take offense; certainly men raised as he had been. In that world, the laird's word was law and women made a place for themselves in the shadows. Simon might be outraged at the idea that Lily would want to make her way in the world without his protection or the protection of any man at all.

  Over the years Elizabeth had come to the conclusion that even reasonable men had a good dose of the apostle Paul brewing in their bellies, and needed very little provocation to spew him forth.

  Her own husband, her calm and reasonable and unflappable Nathaniel, confronted with a similar charge so many years ago, had balked like a mule. Offended, yes, and threatened, and those two things together had loosened the tight control he kept on his temper. In the hours before they were wed they had argued so intensely that she remembered much of it word for word all these years later. Damn your father and damn your aunt Merriweather and most of all goddamn to everlasting hell your know-it-all Mrs. Wollstonecraft.

  She had wondered many times if her aunt Merriweather had ever known the chaos that had been wrought with her gift of independence. Most probably not; she had been far away in England, with no real understanding of the place where Elizabeth had chosen to make a life for herself or the challenges she faced.

  Now, watching her own daughter, Elizabeth knew exactly what she had started. Lily must go to Simon with this newest challenge, and they would work it out between them. Or they would not. She had a sense that Simon would see this newest and most serious challenge to his courtship as a puzzle to be solved, and if he trod lightly—if Lily understood well enough how to let him do that—they would come to an agreement.

  “He's the kind of man who won't swaddle her,” Nathaniel had said, when they were talking this whole delicate business through. “He'll make sure she has what she needs and then he'll stand back and wait his turn.”

  Elizabeth trusted her husband's intuitions, but more than that, she knew he was talking about more than food and clothing and a sound roof over Lily's head.

  There was a knock at the kitchen door. Elizabeth got up from the table.

  She said, “I'm away to take my nap, now, Lily. Please make my excuses to your Simon.”

  Chapter 36

  With the arrival of the warmer weather the war woke like a bad-tempered bear, and with that, Hannah began to dream more and more of Strikes-the-Sky. Quiet dreams that left more questions than they raised, and stayed with her and followed her through the day as she went about her work.

  Her husband never said very much to her, or if he did the memory of the words themselves faded in the morning light. It was a mystery and frustrating; if he had things to tell her she wished he would do it. She had questions she wanted to ask him; mostly, she wondered about the boy, who never showed himself.

  When she mentioned the dreams to Jennet, she got a thoughtful silence in response.

  “I never dream of Ewan,” her cousin said finally, a little wistfully. “The truth be told, I can hardly remember his face. It was all so long ago, a hundred years at least, in a faraway place where fairies romp in the wood.”

  “That's a fine state of affairs,” Hannah said. “Your husband has disappeared altogether and mine is around every corner.”

  “If I were still at Carryckcastle no doubt it would be the same for me,” Jennet said. “I ran away from everything familiar, but you're back in the middle of it all.”

  That was a fine bit of reasoning, and Hannah had to agree that it made sense. She hadn't ever thought to find herself anywhere near any war, ever again, but now they often woke to the distant stuttering of artillery fire. Traffic on the river grew more frantic day by day: boats and ships, canoes and barges and bateaux of every size, all bearing supplies or troops or munitions, soldiers and sailors swarming like ants before a storm. Wounded men were brought to the garrison over land and water both, though most of these Hannah never saw. To her the garrison hospital was as big a mystery as ever; she had never been invited inside, and wha
t she knew of the doctors who worked there she had second- and thirdhand from guards and the other women in the followers' camp.

  Not that she had any real interest to be included in that brotherhood, she told herself. She saw the results of their work in the number of graves that were dug, and that was more information than she cared for already.

  The prisoners were almost more than Hannah could handle, even with Jennet's good help and Mr. Whistler there to handle the heavy work. There had been no deaths in the stockade for two weeks, which must of course please her, but every day brought two or three new men, mostly militia, mostly young, all hungry and worn down to cartilage and bitterness.

  It was true that Hannah could count on basic provisions now: the men were not well fed, but neither did they lie awake at night with cramps in their empty bellies. There was a steady flow of the essential medicines and other supplies that Luke sent around various corners. The worst of it now was the heat, the flies, and the crowding. For the first there was no cure at all; for the second, a limited amount of relief in bear grease and ointment; and for the last nothing except the hope of escape or, for some, death.

  In the evenings, after a long day in the stockade, Hannah and Jennet sat down to eat a simple meal with Runs-from-Bears and Sawatis. Every day she felt them watching her closely, waiting for her to say the words they needed to hear: Daniel was well enough now to travel. Except she couldn't say that, and could not say when that day might come with any certainty.

  It was not her uncle's way to worry about what could not be changed; instead he went off in his canoe and came back with bundles of herbs and roots and tobacco, all put together by Many-Doves who was in a well-hidden camp two miles downriver.

  The truth was, Blue-Jay was strong enough to travel, and if not for Daniel, they would have spirited him away weeks ago. When she was very tired, the part of Hannah that was more Bonner than Kahnyen'kehàka worried about that, about the sacrifice her Mohawk family was making for her white half brother. The other, stronger part of her always stopped her before she suggested to Runs-from-Bears that he should take his son and leave this place.