Fire Along the Sky (15 page)

“Your menfolk are as protective of you as any of mine are of me,” Jennet said now to Hannah, deeply satisfied that it should be so. As they had not yet started up the mountain proper the horses could still walk side by side and she turned to look at her cousin's profile.

Hannah was often in a subdued and sometimes melancholy mood when she finished with a patient. Now she looked up at the sound of Jennet's voice with a start, as if she had forgotten where she was altogether. In the swaying light of the pierced tin lamp she carried, the bones of her face cast shadows that made her look more spirit than breathing flesh and blood.

Jennet was afraid for her suddenly and did not know why, or if there was any comfort she might offer.

Then Hannah said, “I didn't mean to practice medicine again. Ever again.”

Jennet considered all the things she might say or questions she might ask, and she discarded them one by one. They went on in the soft warm night, through a world of sounds: night birds and creatures that hunted in the dark, the wind in the trees and leaves fluttering to earth. In time the horses began to climb, muscular sides clenching, sure of foot and eager to be home.

A half hour passed and then another and then the sound of the falls at Lake in the Clouds came to them. Once in a while Jennet caught sight of Nathaniel just ahead of her on the path, but she had the unsettling notion that if she were to turn around she'd find that Hannah was gone, hiding herself until she had sorted through memories she had locked away but could not always govern.

But she was there still, and she spoke when they were in view of the cabins. “Thank you, Jennet,” she said.

“You've no cause to thank me,” Jennet said, relieved and shaken too, though she could not say just why. “I was happy to be what help I can.”

“No. Thank you for not telling me how I should feel. Have I told you about the village the whites called Prophet's Town?”

The question was so unexpected that Jennet drew up and turned to her cousin. “You know that you haven't,” she said. “But I'd like to hear about it. Did you live there?”

Hannah made a sound in her throat. “From the day it was founded until the day it was burned to the ground,” she said. And then, before Jennet could think of what to ask: “It was a dream, and it did not last.”

They stayed a few minutes in the common room talking with Elizabeth and eating. Usually Jennet loved this quiet time in the evening when the whole family sat together. Elizabeth would read aloud from a book or play or newspaper, and they talked about the strangest combinations of things,
King Lear
and the squash harvest, political intrigues in Washington and London and how much more wood the men needed to put up for the coming winter.

Tonight Jennet was impatient with the talk and unable to concentrate on anything but the promise of hearing at least some of Hannah's story. She was afraid that the mood would have left her by the time Elizabeth put out the lamp and they all went to their beds.

On the stairs Hannah stopped and looked over her shoulder at her father and stepmother. “The night air is cool,” she said. “Leave your window open.”

It was such a strange request that no one could think of what to say, but as soon as Jennet closed the door of the chamber she shared with Hannah behind her, she understood.

Hannah went to sit by the open window with her back to the room, and Jennet.

“In the old days the village was called Ket-tip-pe-can-nunk,” she began in a clear voice that must travel on the night air. The tone was familiar to Jennet and strange too, filled with anger and sorrow in equal measures.

“It was a beautiful place, on the river the whites call Wabash. Tecumseh and his brother chose it to build a new town where all the Indian tribes would come together.”

“Tecumseh?” Jennet asked, the strange name sounding light on her tongue.

“A Shawnee warrior,” Hannah said patiently. “A great warrior. His name means Panther-in-the-Sky.” When Jennet had no more questions, she went on. “Our son was four years old when my uncle Strong-Words and Strikes-the-Sky both swore allegiance to Tecumseh and we went to join him on the Wabash.”

She was silent for so long that Jennet felt herself sliding toward sleep, only to be startled awake when Hannah took up her story again.

“Tecumseh's brother had a vision of a place where all the People lived in the old way, free of influence of the white man, free of alcohol. It was hard work to convince other tribes but by the winter of eighteen ten there were more than five hundred warriors in training. Many of them brought their families. Sometimes I would hear five languages in five minutes walking from one place to another, and not understand any of them. The village was crowded and food was a problem. It was not always peaceful, but those were good years.”

Hannah made a sound that might have been a laugh; it made the flesh rise all along Jennet's back. Jennet said, “As when the clans came together against the English. They can put aside old grudges and rivalries for only so long.”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “It was like that.”

“You were the only doctor?” Jennet ventured.

“Oh no. There were healers who came to us from many tribes, but never enough, just as we never had enough medicines or even corn husks for bandages. I was busy all day with the sick, and Strikes-the-Sky was busy with the young warriors or with Tecumseh, in the middle of discussions and negotiations.

“But we were content. I was doing what I wanted to do, working among my own people and learning everything I could about medicine from any healer who came to the village. I vaccinated hundreds against the smallpox.

“We stayed because my uncle and my husband had real hope in Tecumseh.”

Hannah's voice had taken on a new rhythm, as if by telling this story she found herself talking to the people she was describing, lost to her now. She recited bits from Tecumseh's speeches and again Jennet could not help but think of Scotland, where men had fought for hundreds of years to loosen the hold of the English, all for naught. Something had always gone wrong, and most usually the flaw was to be found in men of lesser understanding or courage.

Hannah would tell that part of the story too; Jennet could feel her nearing it and she was weary, suddenly, of such stories. She would have turned away from this one if it weren't for the fact that it was Hannah telling it.

“In the fall of eighteen eleven Tecumseh and some of the warriors left to visit villages and I stayed behind with my son. There were many new people in the village who needed to be vaccinated, that was the excuse I gave. It was the first time Strikes-the-Sky and I were ever really apart since we were married.”

She was pointing with her chin out the window. “Right here, at Lake in the Clouds. There, on that spot.”

For a long time there was silence and Jennet thought of her own wedding, something she rarely did. The images came to her as dull as tarnished copper: Ewan's blameless face, twitching with anxiousness; her mother pale in her mourning clothes, summoning a trembling smile whenever Jennet caught her eye. The clansmen like a wall all around her, impenetrable. Even her brother had been subdued.

Hannah's voice dropped to an almost-whisper. “I kept my son with me, and the men rode off at dawn in the rain. That was the last time I saw my husband.”

In her surprise Jennet found it hard to keep her silence. “I thought he died in battle, the one your father told me about—”

“The whites call it the Battle of Tippecanoe. But no, Strikes-the-Sky wasn't there. I wish he had been. If Tecumseh hadn't been away and taken the best minds with him, things might have turned out differently when the whites decided to attack the village.”

“What went wrong?” Jennet asked.

“Tecumseh's brother.” Her voice had soured. A shivering moved Hannah's shoulders, like a woman taken suddenly in a fever.

“He was no warrior, but he believed himself to be equal to the decisions that had to be made, and no one had the courage to challenge him. When it was all over close to four hundred warriors were dead, my uncle and his eldest sons and so many others, young men and old. I knew them, every one.”

Jennet couldn't really imagine what Hannah was telling her, and she didn't really want to. But her cousin went on, as if she could simply not stop the flow of the story.

“Harrison's men burned the village to the ground and all our hopes with it. We ran,” Hannah said. “We ran for our lives and we dragged the wounded and the children behind us. And that is as much of the story as I can tell you, for now at least.”

She got up from the chair and shut the window firmly. Then she went to her bed, where she laid herself down fully dressed and crossed an arm over her face.

Jennet wanted to know so many things: where Strikes-the-Sky had died, and how, if not at the battle of Tippecanoe; what exactly had gone wrong, and what had become of the man people called the Prophet. And the most important question, the one that might never be answered at all: what had happened to Hannah's son, the boy whose name she never said aloud? Had he died in the battle, or its aftermath?

Instead she said, “Cousin, what happened tonight to make you need to tell that story?”

It seemed at first as if Hannah would not answer. Then she said, “When they brought my uncle Strong-Words' body home, he was missing both of his arms. They had been chopped off at the shoulder, very deliberately. The next day we all went to the battlefield: his wife and daughter, my son and me. To find his arms so we could bury him properly. But we failed. Some white man carried my uncle's arms away with him.”

In the dark Jennet found she could hardly swallow, so rough and swollen was her throat.

“Sometimes,” Hannah said, and her voice crackled like spring ice. “Sometimes in my dreams I see my uncle swimming in the lake in the clouds, armless and sleek, like an otter. That was his boy-name, you know. Otter. In my dream he puts his head up out of the water and even sleeping I can smell the battle on him. There is such terrible sadness and disappointment in his face. I carry it like a stone around my neck.”

Hannah turned her face to the wall. Just when Jennet thought that she had gone to sleep, Hannah sat up and began to rock in the bed, her arms around her knees.

“I was happy,” she said. “I want you to know how happy I was. I want you to know about Strikes-the-Sky, what kind of husband he is, what kind of father he was to our son. He is a good man.”

“I know that already,” Jennet said, shocked above all things that Hannah spoke of her husband as if he might still be alive.

Satisfied, Hannah lay down again. “If I can find the words to make him real again,” she said. “Then I will tell you his stories.”

It was not her uncle that came to Hannah in her dreams that night, nor her husband or even her son, though the boy was most likely to show himself when she was unsettled by memories. Instead a white man came to find her. She had never learned his name, though he died under her scalpel while she fought to save his life.

An Ottawa chief called Sabaqua had taken the soldier as a prisoner early in the fighting. Though wounded himself, Sabaqua and another warrior called Shabbona had brought the prisoner in on horseback just past dawn. Sabaqua claimed the soldier for his own; he would bring him to his wife to take the place of the son who had fallen in the battle.

But Hannah took one look and knew that Sabaqua could not have this white soldier for a son. He was a young man in his prime, strong and straight, but there was a wound in his side that pierced his liver and one leg was crushed; there was nothing any healer could do for him.

And still she tried. She packed the wound in his side and dug deep into the flesh of his leg to stop the bleeding, and while she worked the man alternated between screaming and talking. It was so long since she had spoken English it was possible, at first, simply not to understand him. But then the words had begun to order themselves in her mind and she could not ignore them anymore.

He told her about his home in the Indiana territory and his sister and his father, talking to her as if she were an old friend, someone he had grown up with, and not an Indian woman covered with great gouts of his blood. There was an urgency in him as he entrusted her with his memories as they faded out of his mind and heart.

And all the while he talked there were more wounded coming in: men of her own tribe, her own family, her husband's. Men she knew well, whose children she had helped into the world, whose sons had played with her son. Warriors who had a chance of surviving their wounds and perhaps living to fight another day. If she would only turn away from this dying man with skin darkened by the sun to a shade that would be always and forever nothing less than white.

Many of the men she had failed to save came to her in the dark of night; some to talk to her about matters of no importance, others to say nothing at all. In this dream the white man without a name smiled at her, reached out a bloody hand and touched her cheek with one finger. His wounds had shifted from his leg and side to his chest, where a single bullet had carved out a hole over his heart.

The white man opened his mouth and spoke to her not in his own voice, but with her husband's.

Take care of the boy,
Strikes-the-Sky said through the dead white man.
Save the boy. My brothers will raise him to be a warrior.

I failed,
she told him.
I tried to save him but I failed. He's in the shadow lands. He is yours to look after, now.

Look after the boy,
Strikes-the-Sky said again.
You must save the boy.

Chapter 8

Montreal

In an attic room on the top floor of her brother's home, Lily Bonner worked in the last light of December afternoon. Her breath hovered damp and white around her head, and her skin was flushed with cold. The woolen cloak she wore to start with lay forgotten in the sawdust and wood shavings.

She carved, her movements sure and quick, quicker with the waning light. With all her concentration fixed on the block of cherry wood on the worktable, Lily coaxed the lines of a flowering tree into revealing themselves.

Now and then Lily paused in her work to study the branch propped up as a model on the deep windowsill. On the low table beneath the window there was a neat row of woodcarver's tools: chisels and knives and blades, gifts from her brother, who made such things appear before she could even think to ask. Each tool was wrapped in a rag, tucked and folded in precise angles, damp with oil.

She had started work with the rising of the sun, moving from one task to another: three hours with one teacher, two hours with another, the rest of the time at an easel or drawing table or in the attic with the wood. After dinner she had taken her daily walk through the city.

Every day she understood a little more of the French spoken all around her by farmers and tinsmiths, shop clerks and milkmaids. Often Lily thought of her mother's classroom and wished that she had been less impatient with the things she had been given to learn, French among them.

Today she had found the courage to try her luck when she bought a penny bun from an older woman with kind eyes, her red cheeks roughened by pox scars. To her surprise Lily found that she could answer when the old woman asked after Luke and Iona, something that pleased her very much, even if it was strange to be reminded that even in this great city everyone must know her face and name and her family history. Long before she came to stay here people had been telling stories about her father and grandfather—breathless ones, sometimes funny, always exciting, and so far as Lily could tell, they were all true, at least in spirit.

As a little girl she had listened to the stories and wished for her own adventures. Then Gabriel Oak began to teach her how to draw and those wishes had been replaced by very different ones. For so long she had wanted just what she had been given: teachers and tools and time to work. Freedom from the endless, mindless jobs: spinning, grinding corn, wiping dishes. No children to plague her with questions and stories and excursions into the forests. At home much of November would be taken up with spinning tow for wicks and candle dipping, Lily's least favorite of all the endless household work. No doubt they were dipping candles in Montreal too, but it had nothing to do with her, not here. This is what she wanted, Lily told herself. Everything she asked for.

It was almost four; time to change and go down to the dinner table, where food and drink appeared magically, carried up the stairs from the basement kitchen. There would be company, as there always was; her brother was known throughout Canada for his conversation and the generous table he set. There were stories about him too, though they were not told in his hearing. Lily heard snatches wherever she went, and gathered those bits and pieces to take back to Luke. When they sat together on Sundays she would bring them out and quiz him:
Is it true that?
and,
How did you come to?
and,
Where was it you came across?

But at the dinner table she kept her questions to herself in front of company. His friends or business acquaintances were many and always welcome, and some of them had got into the habit of bringing wives and daughters and most especially marriageable sons along to meet Lily. All of Montreal was curious about her, this girl raised in the wilderness who came to study art. Nathaniel Bonner's daughter, with paint stains on her fingers.

She did not mind keeping silent and watching. In these weeks Lily had learned a great deal about her brother during his dinners. He was clever and quick and opinionated; he was never directly cruel, though he did not suffer fools. Most of all, he liked a good argument.

Wee Iona sat at the head of the table and said very little; she never volunteered an opinion and seldom gave one, even when asked directly. Lily had come to like Iona, though she was still shy of her and unwilling to ask questions, even when they were alone. From the first day she had known that Iona would be her only ally in this household, the person who would stand up for her when Luke overstepped, as he was wont to do.

The younger men who came to Luke's table watched Lily closely when they thought she didn't notice, and sometimes when they knew that she did. They talked to her of art and Montreal and things she must see, people she must meet. They loved the city and wanted her to love it as well.

Lily knew she should be pleased with all this attention, but she found it unsettling. She wanted to do what was expected of her—what she expected of herself—to fall in love with Montreal: the shops and lanes and hidden corners, the odd houses with their tin roofs, the beauty of the fields and hills and the people. It was a city of artists, of painters and miniaturists and engravers and woodcarvers and goldsmiths. Many of them had fled France during the Terror and settled here; all of them were eager for any student, even a female student, as long as the tuition was paid promptly.

This is everything you wished for,
she told herself sternly as she put away her tools. She sucked at a cut on her thumb and tasted her own blood, as salty as tears.

At night she often dreamed of home, of her mother and her father and the lake under the falls. The dreams were bright and quick, gone when she woke no matter how determined she was to hold on to them. She dreamed of her brother, her twin, sleeping in snow with his rifle cradled in his arms as he had once cradled a pet raccoon. She dreamed of Nicholas, the look on his face when she turned away from him that last day when she was in such a hurry to be gone to this new life.

She dreamed of her sister Hannah. Hannah sitting by the banks of the lake under the falls. Hannah frozen in place with eyes like marble.

“You will ruin your eyes working in the half-light,” Iona told Lily when she came down to the dinner table. Iona's own eyes were filmy with age, and still she seemed to see everything and understand more. When Lily passed the old woman reached up and stroked her cheek with such kindness that she drew a sharp breath.

Just that simply she realized that no one had touched her since she came here. Her hands, yes. Men held her elbow on an icy street, or took her gloved hand while she climbed into a sleigh. French women kissed her cheek fleetingly, a touch of breath and perfumed skin. Luke never touched her at all.

She missed her mother's cool hand on the back of her neck; Gabriel's weight in her lap; Annie's fingers in her hair. Many-Doves' habit of pressing her shoulder whenever she was nearby. The brush of Daniel's arm, of Blue-Jay's, her father's hug. Nicholas Wilde's breath on her skin, the taste of him.

When I happen to see Nicholas in the village he is very drawn and pale, though he greets me politely and asks after you and your brother both. Yesterday when your father took your newest drawings into the trading post to show, Nicholas spent a long time looking at them.

Lily kept this most recent letter from her mother folded and tucked inside her bodice. Because Nicholas could not write to her and she could not write to him, her mother's letter was the only evidence that he was still in the world. With a wife whose health seemed to be improving.

From her spot at the head of the table Iona was watching her, and for one moment Lily had the uneasy feeling that the old woman was reading her mind.

“She's lost in her thoughts,” Luke said to his grandmother. “I don't think she heard you.”

Lily said, “Of course I heard her. You're right, I must take better care of my eyes.”

“I'll have more candles sent up for you.” Luke sent a pointed look to the woman who was circling the table with a platter of meat and repeated himself in French.

Jeanne, Lily reminded herself. Her name was Jeanne or maybe Jeannette; none of the servants spoke English, and she hadn't tried very hard to talk to any of them except Ghislaine, who was her own age and friendly.

It was hard to know how to talk to the servants, as she had never had any before. Now she was in her brother's household, and he never hesitated to say the words that sent them running for whatever he thought she might need. He was never cruel or even thoughtless, and they adored him, every one.

This was the way Lily's mother grew up, in a household where young ladies were waited upon, their needs anticipated, their wants indulged—within reason. Lily had imagined that life with wonder and longing.

What a contrary creature you are.
She could hear her mother's voice, ripe with frustration. Lily was coming to see the truth of it.

The table was crowded, and her brother's attention had already moved on to another discussion. Mostly the guests were men he did business with, French and Scots and Irish. A few of them were English born, and now called themselves Canadian.

They talked of the war as men of business must: prices going up and profit with them, the difficulty of moving merchandise, how hard it had become to get the products people wanted most and needed least. The streets were full of soldiers and sailors and officers in uniforms as gaudy as peacocks, but none of them were at this table to join in the discussion, and never would be; Iona would not allow it. Lily was thinking of excusing herself when Simon Ballentyne caught her eye.

“Would you care to take a walk?” he said to her in a clear voice, meant to be heard by all. “There's a full moon rising this evening.” This deep in winter the night came quick and left reluctantly: they could get up from the dinner table and go out into the dark.

The men around the table went silent. Luke was waiting for her response with an unreadable expression, but Iona would have none of his brotherly bluster.

“Och, aye. Go on. The fresh air will do you good, child. Your complexion will suffer with you sitting inside all day.” After so many years in Canada Iona's English was still full of the Gaelic, softly rounded and sibilant.

They were looking at Lily expectantly, each and every one of them. Some of them calculating out the benefits of the match, others thinking of their own sons. Her father might be a backwoodsman but her brother was one of the richest men in Montreal, and he would see to it—how could he not?—that his sister had a fat dowry. The only thing that held some of them back, Iona had explained to Lily, was the confusion about her religion. Was she Catholic, or Protestant, or did she worship trees like the Indians she had grown up with?

Ghislaine had told her about this topic of conversation, not to give offense, but to make Lily laugh. She said, “Tell them I was raised as a rationalist.” It pleased Ghislaine, the odd English word, and she carried it off in her pocket like a sweetmeat.

Now Lily wanted to go to her chamber, but more than that she needed to confound her brother. To Simon Ballentyne she said, “I'll get my wraps.”

They walked for half an hour in the cold, talking of nothing in particular: the new snow, the moon, the news from New-York. She recited what she could remember of her letter from home and Simon grunted low in his throat and said nothing that might reveal his thoughts or tell her what she wanted to hear: her brother was safe.

“You miss your people,” he said, as he might say
you're fevered
or
you've cut yourself.

“I didn't think I would,” she admitted, almost relieved to have the idea out of her head and in the world. “Don't you miss your family?”

The question surprised him, she could see that. He said, “I've no wish to see Scotland ever again.”

There was a story here, of course; one he would tell her, if she were to ask. If she didn't, he would keep his peace. Simon Ballentyne was a rare man, one who was neither put off nor unmanned by a refusal and able to bide his time.

At the banks of the St. Lawrence they stopped to watch the rising of a wafer-thin moon, bruised with shadow. The river was normally crowded with ships and boats of every kind, some of which were the property of her cousin the earl far away in Scotland. The few that remained were iced in and the rest were gone now to warmer seas: the world was such a large place, almost too big to fit inside her imagination. Lily shivered thinking about it.

“You're cold,” said Simon. “We should turn back.” From his voice she could hear that he did not really want to go back, just yet.

“I'm not so very cold.” Lily wrapped her cloak more tightly around herself. “It's beautiful here.”

“Aye,” he said gruffly. And then: “Are you thinking of the sweetheart you left behind?”

A bold question, but Lily couldn't find it in herself to be offended. Her mother would rebuke such impertinence with a few well-chosen words, but the truth was, Lily was weary of deception and she had the idea that she could talk to Simon Ballentyne. He was strong and quiet and competent, and young women turned their heads when he went by and blushed prettily.

The silence drew out between them. Lily thought of telling him the truth.
I love a man who has a wife.
To say those words out loud was such a strange thought that she might have laughed.

“What makes you think I left a sweetheart behind?”

“It's plain to see you're heartsick, and fair green with it.”

A flush crawled up her neck, irritation but mostly panic; the impulse to share her secret with him left her just as suddenly as it had come.

“I left no sweetheart behind.” When he said nothing she looked at him and saw things in his face she couldn't quite read. Anger, or disappointment.

She said, “You don't believe me.”

“You don't believe yourself.”

“Very well,” Lily said, hugging herself and rocking back and forth on her heels. “Believe what you like.” Then her anger got the best of her anyway.