Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

  “Did my father say when—”

  “Tomorrow, at first light.”

  “Then we know when Lily will be back,” Hannah said. “She won't let Daniel go without trying to talk him out of it again. What I'm less sure about is Jennet, and how she'll react.”

  Curiosity was rattling cake pans with a vengeance, but she paused to look at Hannah over her shoulder.

  “She ain't going back to Montreal?”

  “She says not,” Hannah said. “But I expect Luke could change her mind.”

  Curiosity snorted softly. “Those two put me in mind of porcupines in mating season. They don't exactly mean to hurt each other but they don't seem to know how to get the business done without some bloodshed neither.”

  It was an image that made Hannah laugh out loud, and one that stayed with her for the rest of the day while she looked, without success, for her sister and her cousin.

  “You should have waited.” Elizabeth looked up from the quill she was sharpening; she could not hide her irritation or her worry, and neither did she care to. “It might have gone better if you had come to fetch me, Nathaniel.”

  Her husband sat on a low stool leaning forward with his elbows propped on his knees and his hands dangling. He looked up at her with his head cocked, an expression that meant he was calculating how much of an argument he wanted just at this moment. He could say what they both knew to be true, that the conversation with Lily might have been worse too, especially if Elizabeth hadn't been able to hold her tongue. But Nathaniel had never been cruel, and he was worried about his wife almost as much as he was worried about their troubled daughter.

  “I made a promise to her, Boots. I kept it.”

  The penknife slipped and she put her thumb to her mouth to still the welling blood.

  “I been thinking about your aunt Merriweather a lot lately,” Nathaniel said. “We never gave her much credit for telling the future, but she was mighty good at it. She promised you that Lily would give us a run for the money, didn't she?”

  Elizabeth blew out an exasperated breath. “Her exact words were ‘she'll lead you a merry chase,' I believe. But I do not think I was quite so much trouble to my aunt and uncle . . .”

  Her voice trailed off suddenly and was replaced by a reluctant half-smile, one that Nathaniel was relieved to see.

  “You needn't give me that look,” she said dryly, winding her handkerchief around her thumb. “I take your point. In spite of all the concern I was to them at Lily's age, their concerns were unfounded. Things did turn out in the end, though not exactly as Aunt Merriweather had hoped at first. Nathaniel Bonner,” she said, her tone sharpening suddenly. “Do you ever tire of being so irritatingly clever?”

  “It ain't cleverness, Boots.” He got up and brushed one hand over her hair while he reached for his rifle with the other. “I don't suppose there's much either of us could say or do anymore—good or bad—that would surprise the other one.”

  “Is that true?” Elizabeth frowned. “I'm not sure I like being so predictable.”

  Nathaniel laughed. “Wait until we get the youngsters sorted out before you hatch any plans about surprising me. We got our hands full as it is.”

  Elizabeth's smile faded away, and she looked out the window toward the falls. “You really think I shouldn't go look for her?”

  Nathaniel said, “Right now she wants to be left alone,” he said. “And then she'll need to talk to Daniel. In the meantime I need to have a word with Luke.”

  “It's a complicated business, this raising of children,” Elizabeth said. “It's almost a relief, knowing there won't be any more of them to bring up and worry about.”

  “You sure of that, are you?” He raised a brow at her, and she blushed in spite of her resolution not to. “Reasonably sure,” she said, and blushed again. He laughed at her over his shoulder on his way out the door.

  “Don't feel obliged to prove me wrong!” she called after him, but he did not hear her, or chose not to.

  Nathaniel found Luke sitting alone in the spray of the falls, his hair still dark with water and his expression unreadable. A strange thing, that his firstborn should be the most mysterious of his children, but Nathaniel had never seen or known about the boy until he was already on the brink of manhood.

  He had a good memory, and he prided himself on the fact that where many men seemed unable to tell their children one from the other he could summon pictures of all of his own as newborns, both the ones still living and ones who had not lived long enough to get to really know. Red-faced and screaming or wrinkled and curious about the world, each of them had come into the world showing signs of the person they would grow into.

  Over the years three women had borne him eleven children, and five of those had survived. Of those, four were grown and ready to start families of their own. Gabriel, the youngest one, was the sweetest of them all but wild at heart; Gabriel would keep them hopping into old age. Sometimes Nathaniel woke in the deep of the night sure that he could hear the beat of the boy's blood through walls and floors. He knew the four younger children well, but Nathaniel could read Gabriel's mind just by looking at him sideways.

  For Luke, for his firstborn, he had no such talent. He told himself it was because he had got to know him too late. They itched at him, all those missing memories, like a wasp sting in a hand left behind on a battlefield.

  Now Luke was watching Nathaniel, as Nathaniel had watched his own father for all his life, reading mood and thought and intention from the set of Hawkeye's jaw or the flickering of an eyelid. No doubt he was as big a mystery to the boy as the boy was to him, but somehow that was little comfort.

  “Tomorrow,” Luke said when Nathaniel was close enough. “We'll set out tomorrow.”

  “And here I was thinking we didn't know each other well enough.” Nathaniel sat down close enough to talk without shouting over the noise of the falls but not close enough to make the boy uncomfortable. He rested the butt of his rifle on a convenient rock and leaned into it.

  “Or maybe you read everybody's mind that easy.”

  Luke snorted. “That would be a useful talent, but it's one I can't claim for myself.”

  “You're too modest,” Nathaniel said. He brushed the wet from the falls out of his eyes. “I bet if you concentrated real hard you'll guess my next question.”

  Luke gave him a sharp look, one edged with curiosity and irritation both. “If it's Jennet you're worried about there's no need. I'm planning to talk to her tonight and settle some things.”

  Nathaniel raised a brow. “Reading minds again.”

  Luke shrugged. “More Elizabeth than you. She watches me when Jennet's nearby.”

  “That's true, she does. And I did come to talk to you about that very thing, but I can't claim I was especially worried about Jennet. She's got what she wants.”

  Luke squinted at him. “And that would be?”

  “You. Tied up nice and neat, just waiting to tire yourself out struggling. You might as well give it up now, son.”

  Another man might have taken offense, but Luke was too much like his grandfather. Hawkeye hadn't been a man to expend energy on a battle he couldn't win, and neither was Luke.

  “I always meant to marry her when she was free,” he said after a while. “But I couldn't admit that while she was married to a man her father picked out for her. It got to be a habit, I guess, keeping it to myself.”

  “Time to break the habit,” Nathaniel said. “She'll be a good wife to you, though I expect you'll tangle more than most.”

  Luke didn't bother trying to hide his grin. “I'm counting on it.”

  Gabriel came out of the house on the far side of the lake and stood on the porch. He had made himself a toy rifle out of a branch and he had a crow in his imaginary sights. Nathaniel watched the boy stalk his prey. Next summer he would be big enough for a rifle of his own, and the thought struck Nathaniel that this would be the last child he would teach to track and shoot until some grandchildren came along, o
r he managed to prove Elizabeth wrong about the size of their family.

  He said as much to Luke, who began to get dressed by pulling his shirt over his head.

  “Well, then I guess I better get busy and give you some grandchildren,” Luke said.

  “You don't much like the idea?”

  “It's not that, not exactly.” Luke ran a hand through his hair to get it out of his face. “It's got more to do with where to bring them up once I've got them.”

  This surprised Nathaniel, but he managed to keep his tone even. “I thought you were settled in Canada.”

  Luke hesitated. “‘Settled' is a strange word, but maybe it fits. I've got a house, I've got land and a business and friends. I was born and raised there. But I don't feel like I need to stay there, and I don't call myself a Canadian.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose with a knuckle. “Don't know if I want my children to either.”

  Nathaniel said, “That's the first I heard of this. What do you call yourself, if not a Canadian? A Scot, like your grandmother?”

  Luke shrugged. “She brought me up not to think of myself as anything. Not Canadian, not a Scot, not French, not American.”

  “Not an Englishman either,” Nathaniel said. “Not if I know Wee Iona.”

  “Not an Englishman,” Luke agreed. “Never that.”

  He did in fact have an English grandfather, but Wee Iona would not speak his name, had not spoken it even on the day she learned of his death.

  “I never did hear the story how it was that Iona Fraser ever let Pink George get a child on her without slitting his throat,” Nathaniel said. “I always thought Robbie MacLachlan would tell me before he died, but I missed that chance.”

  “I'm guessing that's a story she'll take to her grave,” said Luke.

  “You don't think your mother knows?”

  Luke's mouth jerked at the corner. “I'll ask her, the next time I see her.”

  Giselle was a topic they rarely discussed; Luke, out of loyalty, and Nathaniel because he knew her so little.

  “So what do you call yourself?” Nathaniel asked. “If not Canadian?”

  “Iona always said I could choose my own place and name when I was old enough. She thought it was a gift she was giving me, and I thought so too, at first.”

  He looked at Nathaniel straight on, something he rarely did. “You don't call yourself American.”

  “No,” Nathaniel said. “I don't think of myself as an American.”

  “But you pay taxes to the American government.”

  “I pick my battles,” Nathaniel said. “And my wars too. Is that what this is about, the new war?”

  Luke nodded. “I put the question out of my mind for a long time, but a war makes a man take sides. The only conclusion I can come to is that I won't do anything to help the British.”

  “Will you do anything to hurt them?”

  He got a shrug for his answer. “Haven't got that far yet in my thinking. What I do know is, I'm a fortunate man but it'll take a lot more than good luck if I want to hold on to what I've got.”

  “And Jennet is one of those things.”

  Luke took a deep breath. “She's the most important of them.”

  Chapter 5

  When they were younger, the boys had built a fort in the woods, an elaborate construction of rocks and cast-off boards and interwoven branches that they were always improving. In the winter it fell prey to the snows, to bears and foxes and wolves. Every spring they repaired it.

  In their day Daniel and Blue-Jay and Ethan never allowed Lily or any of the girl cousins into the fort. But now Gabriel and Annie had claimed it for their own and made up new rules. They liked Lily, who drew them funny pictures and sometimes brought them apples or maple sugar, and so she could come and sit with them in the fort and listen to their stories.

  She walked the mountain for most of the afternoon before she went to the fort where the children were waiting for her. It was where Daniel would come looking, and because she could not avoid him forever she sat down to wait for him. Lily felt the chill of the approaching storm on the nape of her neck, and in the lengthening shadows she saw the coming of an early dusk.

  Annie caught sight of Daniel first. She flung herself out of the fort and ran at him, climbed him like a tree to take a seat on his shoulder where she held on to his head and balanced precariously. As Lily had once done with Runs-from-Bears; that memory came to her now bittersweet.

  Gabriel stood too, but kept his distance. “Is it true you're going off to war tomorrow?”

  Daniel nodded. “It is.”

  “And my brother too,” Annie said, thumping Daniel companionably on the head. “So you can keep each other out of trouble.”

  “That's the way of it,” Daniel agreed. His gaze had never left Lily's face. She felt it like a touch.

  “Sister's pretty mad,” Gabriel said, as if Lily were not there at all. “I don't know if you can talk her out of it this time, brother.”

  “He's got to try,” Annie said. She swung down from Daniel's shoulder and landed with a thump.

  She produced a hopeful smile and turned it on Daniel full force. “Can we stay and listen?”

  He looked out over the valley and the bowl of the sky brimming with storm clouds. Heat lightning flickered in the distance. “Better get home before the rain comes,” he said.

  And when the threat of rain did little to move them Daniel said, “There's a prize for whoever gets back to Lake in the Clouds first.”

  They were gone in a flash. Daniel stood right where he was for a full minute and then another.

  Finally he said, “I don't know why you have to make this so hard, sister.”

  His expression was almost comical: outrage and righteous indignation and confusion. If he were closer she might slap him. Her throat cramped closed.

  “I'd like your blessing.”

  As if he were hungry and she were refusing to feed him. Lily blinked back tears.

  “You can't have it,” she said.

  “I'm going anyway,” he said. “I've got to go.”

  “No, you don't.” She kept her voice as quiet and calm as she could; it was the only way to make him listen. “You're going because you want to. It makes no sense to put yourself in harm's way like this.”

  “Not to you, maybe.” He looked away, the muscles in his throat working. “Just the way you do things that don't make sense to me. But I ain't ever tried to stop you.”

  Words like cold water, like diving into the lake under the falls at first light: a revelation. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, and what came out shamed her.

  “I don't know what you mean.”

  The hardest thing, the one thing she had not counted on: her brother's sympathy and understanding.

  “It's only a matter of time before somebody else figures it out, Lily. I think Ma half suspects now.”

  “I don't know what you mean.” Her voice creaked like an old lady's.

  “You're headed for heartbreak,” he said.

  “And you're headed for an early grave.” The words choked her but they did their work: he jerked as if she had reached across the ten feet that separated them and struck him. They looked at each other like that for three heartbeats.

  w“I have to go, sister. I wish I could make you understand.”

  “So do I,” she said, and turned away.

  I may never see you again. The unspoken words trailed behind her like smoke.

  Lily ran, her skirts kilted up through her belt; she ran until her breath came ragged and her lungs were on fire, and then she pushed, dug herself into the pain and ran harder. The rain came first in stuttering waves and then it steadied and in a matter of seconds she was soaked to the skin.

  There were two ways into the village without a boat: she could take the long way around the lake through the marsh or she could go over the bridge.

  It's just a matter of time before somebody else figures it out.

  She hesitated for a moment, her fa
ce turned up to the storm.

  What did it matter anymore? She went the quicker route, still running until she came to the bridge where she stopped. Beneath her feet the wood thrummed with the running river, a living thing that would take her away from here if she let it.

  She stood under the pulsing sky, arms outstretched, and then she began to make her way across the village by the way of back lanes. At the edge of the Wildes' orchards she paused to watch the trees, leaves snapping and fluttering in the wind. Apples thumped to the ground with each gust. The darkening storm had taken all the color out of the world but the lightning brought it back in quick bright pulses.

  Then a double fork of lightning lit the sky with a million candles and showed her everything: the neat rows of trees, the cabin at the far end of the orchard, its windows shuttered against the storm. Smoke drifted up from the chimney to be caught by the wind and scattered.

  The barn door stood open just wide enough to show her the man standing there, his arms at his sides. When the light was gone Lily closed her eyes and saw him still, burned into her flesh.

  She wrapped her arms around herself and walked on, the sweet smells of wet grass and bruised apples rising up like a cloak. At the barn door she stepped into cool darkness, gooseflesh pebbling her wet skin.

  Nicholas was waiting for her. The lightning showed him white and blue and white again: more ghost than man, until he came forward and stopped, close enough to touch her if he wanted. If he dared. She imagined she could hear his heartbeat, slow and steady. Such a strange thing, that a heart could keep on without faltering for so many years, undeterred by loss. Lily put her hand on her own chest.

  Light flickered on his face: planes and circles and intersecting lines drawn on the fragrant dark. Simple geometry that arranged itself into something extraordinary. When she was still a girl, long before they had stumbled upon each other in the way of man and woman, she had put down his likeness on paper many times.

  On the day he married Dolly Smythe she had drawn them together. He had still been in mourning for his sister but his expression had been clear and full of hope. And why not? Dolly was the kindest young woman in all of Paradise, sweet and hardworking both, and she had been in love enough for both of them. And a farmer needed a wife.