Fire Along the Sky (48 page)

Lily's voice came hoarse. “We could just elope and get married. You did.”

As if she hadn't spoken at all, Simon said, “Mrs. Bonner, I agree to all your conditions.”

At that Lily let out a muffled scream and ran back up the stairs. Her chamber door slammed with such force that the braids of corn hung to dry overhead swayed gently back and forth.

“Things are getting back to normal around here,” Nathaniel said, not trying to hide his satisfaction. “I haven't seen Lily in such a temper in a long time. The spring and summer promise to be right lively.”

That earned him one of his wife's sharpest looks. She got up to go to Lily, leaving the two men in front of the fire.

“I know my uncle caused you a great deal of pain and trouble,” Simon said to Nathaniel. “And I understand that you need time.”

Nathaniel laughed. “You got a lot to learn about the Bonner women, Simon. It wasn't Angus Moncrieff that brought all this about, though it gave us a shock, I'll admit that.”

“It wasn't?” Simon glanced up the stairs.

“Hell, no,” Nathaniel said. “Elizabeth just wants to keep Lily close as long as she can. Maybe you can understand that, given the situation with our Daniel. And you being connected to Moncrieff gives her an excuse to make all kinds of demands she wouldn't make otherwise. You played right into her hands, son.”

“She's not angry?” Simon sat back, looking not so much confused as intrigued.

“Oh, no,” Nathaniel said. “You'll know when she's got a temper on her, there's no mistaking it.”

Simon ran a hand over his eyes. “And you, you aren't concerned about my connections to the Moncrieffs, then?”

“Oh, I'm concerned.” Nathaniel yawned. “I'll be keeping watch, Simon. You can bet on it.”

Chapter 29

That very evening Nathaniel went down to the village with Simon to see to his lodging, and it was five full days before Lily saw him again. Five days in which she barely knew what to do with her frustration and anger, all made worse by the fact that no one seemed to see her side of things. Her first hope had been her father, but he had only laughed at the suggestion that she was being ill used.

“You can always send the man back to Montreal,” he had told her after listening to Lily explain just how wrong this whole situation really was, how unfair, how demeaning. “Just tell him there's no hope, you've made up your mind. Then you'll be shut of the whole mess.”

Curiosity was no better. “Didn't I tell you your ma would wake up and take note? That Elizabeth, I got to hand it to her. She got you trussed neat as a Christmas turkey. Now this is what I'm wondering: if your Simon don't seem to mind, why are you struggling so hard?”

It was a question Lily did not like to contemplate, because there was no clear answer except the obvious: her mother had joined forces with Simon, and she could not prevail against the two of them. It was childish and petty of her to resent that, but she did. While she was trying to think of a way to admit that to Curiosity that didn't sound quite so terrible, the old woman was watching her with the expression that meant she pretty much understood what was going on without being told.

Without any warning she put a thin arm around Lily's shoulder and hugged her, hard. “What is it exactly that you want that they ain't giving you? When you got an answer to that question, child, then you halfway home.”

Twice Lily sat down to write a letter to her cousin Jennet, who must understand what no one else seemed to want to see, and twice she gave it up as a bad job. She threw the paper in the fire, and took some small satisfaction in its burning. Her mother, who used every scrap until it could be used no more, would be outraged.

Except it seemed that Lily had lost the talent of rousing her mother's anger. Elizabeth, relieved now of her worry for her son and nephew, was infused with an almost otherworldly energy and unshakable goodwill. When she was not teaching or doing housework, she was down in the village, consulting with one person or another about the new schoolhouse or writing to everyone who might have an opinion on the undertaking. Her letters to Ethan and her cousin Will alone made the post rider's stops in Paradise worthwhile.

“I thought she didn't like the idea of a new schoolhouse,” Lily said to her father, who had looked surprised at the idea.

“What she didn't like was Richard Todd's part in it. But she got over that and I'm glad to see it. She needs the distraction. Your brother's on her mind a lot, and you are too.”

No doubt that was true, but Lily, feeling contrary, decided that she would not take part in the schoolhouse plans; she had her own work, after all, and must get back to it. She made this announcement over supper and got only agreement: more frustration, and guilt too; she knew how childish she was being, but not how to stop.

She would not ask questions about Simon or the schoolhouse project, but then she didn't have to. Gabriel and Annie took great pleasure in bringing her a daily report on the particulars: what Curiosity had fed Simon for dinner, how long he had sat with their mother and Peter Dubonnet over plans, how he had come to an agreement with the Camerons about the hauling of timber, how he had helped old Missus Hindle with her lambing, what each and every resident of the village thought of him. All of which, it seemed, was positive, something that annoyed Gabriel so much that Lily was a little discomfited.

“Because I'm put out with him doesn't mean you have to be,” she told her little brother. “You might like him, if you gave him the chance.”

“Do you want me to like him?” Gabriel had demanded, and Lily was honest enough to admit that she did. “At least be fair,” she said. “Give him a chance.”

“Even Missy Parker likes him,” Annie told her.

“Missy Parker likes anybody in britches,” Gabriel said, in the worst of moods. Their mother would have scolded him, but Lily could not.

She took more comfort from her aunt, who seemed to be the only person in the world with nothing to say about Simon, good or bad.

Many-Doves said, “You must make up your own mind what it is you want.” And: “Help me with this doeskin.”

For Many-Doves it was that simple. Curiosity had said the same thing, of course, but once Many-Doves had spoken she rarely repeated herself.

In the end Lily couldn't stay out of the village, and so she went. Not to see Simon or hear about him—she stayed away from Curiosity's kitchen and the trading post, the two places she was most likely to find him—but to sit in the old meetinghouse with her breath billowing cold around her and look at her own work covering the walls. All the years of her girlhood up in plain sight for anyone to examine. The world looked very different to her now.

The next day she got her father's help to haul what she would need to the meetinghouse: firewood and kindling, buckets and tools, and all the materials she had brought back with her from Canada. She spent a satisfying morning arranging it and then stood back to consider the neat row of pigment pots, the crocks filled with the things that she would need to mix her paints.

What she wanted to do next was to bring her mother here to see it all. Her mother would ask sensible questions, thoughtful questions that made her think, and they might spend the whole day talking about color and shadow and shape.

Instead, Lily loosened the ties on the book she had carried around with her since Gabriel Oak had given it to her just before he died, and sat in a pool of cold sunshine while she studied the work he had done so long ago, before she was born; before her mother had been born. Gabriel had given her this record of his life for safekeeping, and more than that: he had put a pencil in her hand, and shown her the magic of it.

Standing between the stove and a single glass window, Lily began by sketching the things she saw: the Ratz boys dragging a sledge piled high with firewood, a tabby cat perched at the very top. Hardwork Greber trudging along, bent almost double with the weight of filled buckets. Goody Cunningham with her new granddaughter strapped to her chest, squinting into the sun. A wolf at the edge of the clearing, watching the hens that pecked and strutted around the Hindles' well.

And then, when Lily was just starting to lose herself in the work, Jemima Wilde walked past the window, her head wrapped in a bright blue shawl, her cheeks chapped apple red with the cold. There was a bruise on her jaw, faded to yellow.

She walked straight-backed, head held high, baskets over both arms. The mud was ankle deep and treacherous, and Jemima's mouth was clamped tight in concentration.

Even wrapped against the cold her thickening waist was plain to see, and more than that: how it suited her, to be with child. Ripening fruit, heavy and full of promise. The pencil in Lily's fingers trembled and she put it down, but she could not look away.

Jemima was too concerned with getting where she needed to be to have looked in Lily's direction.

You must make up your own mind what it is you want.

Lily drew in a sharp breath, the small sound filling the empty meetinghouse.

As a younger girl she had sat here with her mother and listened to sermons, first from timid Mr. Gathercole and then from a long line of visiting preachers, none of whom stayed in Paradise very long. Some of them were good men and dull preachers, others made a great lot of noise but no sense at all, but none of them had suspected their sermons had been carried up the mountain to Lake in the Clouds, where Elizabeth Bonner had engaged her children in their dissection, as a person would take apart a gun to examine its parts and find out how it worked. Rarely had any of those preachers been lucky enough to have his sermon survive Elizabeth Bonner's close scrutiny.

Strive to favor the rational over the subjective as you select one course of action among those available to you.

Jemima was almost to the trading post now, balancing baskets as she lifted a foot high and set it down again. From here she could have been anyone, any woman on her way to buy pins or cornmeal.

With a sigh, Lily let her breath go and with it went, quietly, quickly, all the anger she had been holding in reserve for somebody truly deserving. For Jemima, who had finally appeared and presented herself as nothing but another woman who had done her best to pick wisely from among those few poor choices available to her.

Even after Jemima was gone, Lily stayed just where she was for many long minutes.

One of the surest signs of spring in the village of Paradise was the arrival of Black Abe, the hole digger. He came to dig any kind of hole people might need: privies and wells and sawyer's trenches. One of the most important services he performed in Paradise was to dig the long, deep trenches for charcoal burning, which was his primary occupation.

But most of all, when Black Abe came to Paradise it meant that it was time to put all those who had died in the coldest months to rest. He would dig as many graves as they needed, each of them a perfect hole six feet deep with straight sides that looked to have been plastered in place. The digging of a proper grave was an art, and one that Black Abe had mastered. The men of Paradise were satisfied to leave the spring digging to the strange old man.

Black Abe had come over from Africa on a slave ship when he was a young man. How and when he had won his freedom was a story he told willingly in a hoarse, high singsong, but never in the same way twice. Sometimes the ship was called the
Santa Maria
and sometimes the
Cornwall;
sometimes he had been bought by a Dutch farmer from Long Island and other times he had gone to a one-eyed silversmith in Philadelphia. The number of his wives and children shifted like the clouds overhead, and the number of his own years with them. But he could tell anybody who wanted to know the names of every person who had been buried in one of his graves, and the day it was dug.

He was a small man, a wiry twisting of muscle, black as the coal he burned, with great wide hands and feet that had never, as far as the people of Paradise could tell, known shoes. He always arrived in Paradise on foot, leading his mule; he would leave that way too, but nobody had ever been able to figure out just where he went. Even Curiosity, who was the oldest woman in the village now and whose memory was as sharp as flint, knew very little about Black Abe. Or at least there was not too much she was willing to share.

His first stop was always Curiosity's kitchen door, where he was received with her warmest welcome, a substantial meal, the winter's news, and the promise of work. The kilns and ovens in the doctor's laboratory consumed more charcoal than all the other families of Paradise put together and only slightly less than Joshua Hench's forge. When he was done at the doctor's, he would move on to the blacksmithy, where Curiosity's daughter Daisy would take over feeding him.

In the chamber they shared on the second floor of the doctor's house, Callie and Martha watched the weather and calculated when Black Abe might appear. They wondered if he would stay, once the graves were dug, or if he would be sent away: Doctor Todd was dead, after all, and Hannah was gone away to Canada and Jennet with her. Even Ethan, who had never really liked working in the laboratory, was living in Manhattan with his uncle and aunt Spencer while he studied at the college. They took the question to Curiosity, who fixed her gaze on them and laughed out loud.

“As if I could send that old African away before I got him fed up good and proper,” she said. “He'll come, don't you worry, and he'll stay until the buttons on his breeches pop.”

Then one wet, warm morning the girls came down to the kitchen and found Black Abe at the table, bent over a plate of eggs and ham and cornmeal mush, deep in conversation with Curiosity and Lucy and Simon Ballentyne too. Curiosity hummed as she poured out coffee.

To the girls Black Abe said, “Don't count on spring just yet, children. The winter still setting in my bones.”

Looking hard into her porridge Callie said, “Then is it too early for you to dig—” And her voice faltered.

“Oh, Lord,” Curiosity said. She came over to put a hand on Callie's shoulder. “Of course not. Why, me and Abe was just talking about it. He'll get started this very day on those graves, won't you, Abe?”

The old man said that he had been planning on exactly that, and wouldn't it be a help if Callie showed him just where her mama was meant to rest, and Cookie Fiddler too, and wasn't that a shame about losing two such good women. He offered the same kindness to Martha, whose grandmother Kuick must also be laid to rest, and found that the girl was too frightened of her mother to make any such suggestions.

Callie looked at Martha's flushed face and tear-bright eyes and wondered if she looked like that: frightened and relieved; eager to get it done, and wanting to run away at the same time.

Curiosity squeezed her shoulder. She said, “You girls got to get on to school, now.”

On the way they stopped at the blacksmithy to tell Daisy about Black Abe, and then they did the same thing at the trading post. At school the other children asked questions until Miz Elizabeth got their attention by putting a whole twenty lines from the Constitution on the board for them to learn by heart.

On the way home at dinnertime the girls saw that the meetinghouse windows had been propped open and so they stopped there too. Mostly they were shy of bothering Lily Bonner while she worked, but the news that Black Abe had come was enough reason.

Unlike the rest of Paradise, Lily seemed to have no questions to ask about Martha's mother or Callie's father, which meant that the three of them got along just fine. If Lily held any grudges about the way things had turned out she kept them to herself, and more than that: she seemed happy to see them. She showed them her work and sometimes found scraps of paper for them to draw on, and told stories about anything they could think to ask her. They were kindhearted girls and they liked Lily and appreciated her attention, so they never compared her storytelling to Jennet's.