Fire Along the Sky (55 page)

Simon stayed close behind. For a white man he walked well, without a lot of extra movement or noise. Her uncle Runs-from-Bears liked Simon, and no doubt this was part of the reason; he had little patience with any man who lumbered through the forests like a cow. Except for Gabriel all her people liked him, though they tried to keep it to themselves.

And I like him too,
Lily admitted to herself. She liked his dry humor and calm good sense and the way he talked to his elders, respectful but not fearful; she liked what he had made of himself. She liked the smell of him and the dimples he had hidden for so many years, and the strength in his arms and hands and the way he couldn't hide what he was feeling when he held her. She was aware of him just behind her, down to the shape of the shadow he threw when they passed through a patch of sunlight.

Her father had asked her, as no one else had dared, if she loved Simon Ballentyne, and she had told him the truth: she didn't know. She still didn't know, not really. For a long time she had believed herself in love with Nicholas Wilde, but now that felt to her like a dream only partly recalled.

He'll ask now where we're going,
Lily told herself, and determined that she would turn around and go home when he did. But Simon kept his questions to himself and followed her, and she pushed on until every breath burned and she cursed the awkwardness of her skirts.

Birds called in the trees and a squirrel screamed a warning at them; there were tracks in the mud that she might have pointed out: a deer with a fawn, bobcat, quail, bear. Lily took her hairpins down as she walked and put them in the pocket she wore around her waist, shook her head so her hair flew free. Because she felt like it; because she knew that he liked her hair.

They crossed a corner of the Todd pasture that fell away in a slope from the woods. Off in the distance they could see Black Abe tending his charcoal pits, a small figure moving in and out of the smoke. The path went back into the woods, darker here on the east side of the hill that separated this property from Old Judge Middleton's. Lily admitted to herself that she had a destination: her grandfather's abandoned house and farm, on a low hillside that backed onto the endless forests. Whether or not Simon would realize where they were going, that she didn't know and didn't really care, as long as he kept following her.

The house and land belonged to Ethan now, part of his inheritance from his stepfather, but no one in Paradise would ever think of this place as anything but Judge Middleton's homestead.

She said as much to Simon when they had reached the porch. “I hardly remember him,” she said. “But the few memories I do have are all to do with this house.”

“It's been empty a very long time,” Simon said. He was looking at it with his carpenter's critical eye.

“Uncle Todd always saw to it that his property was well looked after,” Lily said. “I don't know what will happen to it now that he's gone. I don't think Ethan thinks much about it.”

She saw Simon's mouth twitched at the corner. “Maybe he can rent it to Stiles for his meetinghouse.”

Lily gave him a hard look and then she went to the door and let herself in without giving him the satisfaction of rising to his bait.

Simon stood on the porch as if he could not quite make up his mind where he wanted to be. Lily said, “He wasn't really my grandfather, you know. Judge Middleton, I mean.”

And she walked away, farther into the house. She had been raised by storytellers, and she knew some tricks when it came to drawing her audience along, oh, yes. As she disappeared through the door at the end of hall she heard Simon's step behind her.

The kitchen was dim and cold: the hearth hadn't seen a fire all winter, and the flagstones felt damp even through Lily's winter moccasins. There were mouse droppings in the corner and cobwebs in the great cavity where the fire should have burned.

“Isn't it sad?” she asked Simon as he came through the swinging door. She pointed with her chin at the empty hooks and trivets in the hearth, the bare dish cupboard, the dust on the mantel.

“No one wanted the table,” Simon said.

“Too big to get out the door. It was built right here, by Curiosity's husband, you see. So she wouldn't let them break it up for firewood either.”

She ran her hand over the oak planking, traced a gouge with her finger.

Simon said, “Are you going to tell me the rest of it, or will you play at games for a while longer?”

Lily pushed out a breath and turned to him. He stood across the table from her, looking at her in his disapproving way down the slope of his nose. No sign of his dimples at this moment. She wasn't in much of a smiling mood herself, she realized.

She said, “It's only my theory, of course. I have no proof. But I think Gabriel Oak is my grandfather.”

Doubt and curiosity flickered across Simon's face. “The man who taught you how to draw?”

“Yes,” Lily said. “There are a lot of small . . . facts, I suppose you'd call them. If you look at the drawings in the book he left me, you'll see the resemblances. When you put it all together, it seems obvious.”

If Simon was shocked, he didn't let it show. “And what does your mother think of this theory of yours?”

Lily shrugged. “I've never had the courage to ask her about it. Maybe she suspects, I'm not sure. There's not much that my mother misses. Curiosity knows, of that much I'm pretty sure. Someday I'll ask her.”

Simon frowned at her. “You brought me here to tell me about your grandfather?”

She hesitated. “I wanted you to know that you aren't the only one with family stories that are best left untold. But mostly I brought you here because I could not stand to be in the village even one moment longer.”

There was a moment's strained silence between them, and Lily realized Simon was thinking of Nicholas.

She said, “I brought you here because I didn't want to listen to talk about the meetinghouse.”

“You know your father won't let Stiles have it,” Simon said. “And he can't just take it. It belongs to your cousin Ethan, after all.”

Lily blinked at him. “But there will be a lot of arguing. No doubt the Reverend Stiles will get into a philosophical discussion with my mother. He will quote the Bible to her and she will quote it back and throw in Thomas Paine and others he won't know, and he'll be affronted and she'll dig her heels in, and my father will have to intercede. I couldn't bear the idea, not just now.” She leaned forward and stemmed her hands on the table.

“Simon.”

“Aye?”

“Did I understand what happened back there? Did Jemima really do what they say she did?”

He had been very tense, but his shoulders sagged a bit now. “Aye, I fear so.”

She turned suddenly and went to the oak mantel that spanned the hearth. The oven built into the bricks stood open, filled not with bread but an abandoned nest.

“Nicholas will have to leave here,” Lily said. “Or hire himself out. Or starve.”

To her back Simon said, “Aye. Are you sorry?”

The word took her by surprise, and she laughed. A harsh laugh, a small explosion of displeasure and unhappiness wound into a knot.

“I suppose I'm sorry for what he's lost. He had such dreams for the orchard, and it's been stolen away from him.”

To that Simon wisely said nothing at all. After a moment Lily said, “And I'm angry. At Jemima, and at him.”

“He'll get his divorce now, if he goes back to the courts.”

Lily turned and saw that Simon had not moved at all. He stood just where he had been on the other side of the table, his hands at his sides, his expression carefully, purposefully blank.

“You hadn't thought of that?”

“No,” Lily said, flushing. She hadn't thought of it, but Simon doubted that: she saw it in the way his eyes met hers and then lowered. She said. “It doesn't matter, anyway.”

“You could have him then, if you still want him. No doubt your cousin would give you this house to live in. He could start over.”

Surprise left Lily wordless, just for a moment. There were many things she might have said, all rushing through her head at once, but only one thing that she must say, just now. That Simon was waiting for her to say: that she had no more interest in Nicholas Wilde, and were he free to marry. It was what she should say, what she wanted to say, but somehow it wouldn't ring completely true. Nicholas had been too long a part of her life to dispose of him so easily.

“Ah,” Simon said. A small sound, no more than a sigh. He turned then, and started toward the door.

“No,” Lily said. “Don't go.”

He was angry, she saw it in the set of his shoulders.

“And why should I stay? I don't care to hear your apologies, Lily, or your explanations. You want your apple man, then have him.”

He was through the swinging door before she could stop him, but Lily flew after Simon and caught up to him in the hall.

“Simon,” she said. “Don't be foolish.”

That stopped him in mid-stride, though he didn't turn to her.

She said, “I can't love somebody I don't respect.” Her voice came out much softer than she intended, with a crackling quality. Suddenly Lily felt a little dizzy, and she reached out for the wall, pressed her fingers to it to find her balance.

“What is it you're saying?”

Irritation flooded through her. “You know what I'm saying. After the ice storm, you know exactly what I'm saying.”

He turned abruptly and advanced on her with such contained fury that she backed up in alarm until she bumped into the wall.

“Don't play with me, lass. Tell me now, do you still love Wilde?”

He was glowering down at her, his dark eyes narrowed in anger or pain or some strange combination of both. Something small and warm blossomed in Lily to see those things: clear evidence of how important she was to him, that he wanted her. And she was ashamed to have pushed him so far.

She said, “I will always be fond of him. But no, I can't say that I love him. Not anymore.”

Simon bowed his head over her and put a hand on the wall near her head. He leaned into her then, the great width and fact of him blocking out what little light there was in the cool dark of the hall.

“And?” he said, his gaze hard and unflinching.

What she wanted to do was grab him by the ears and kiss him, but he was so close that she would have to struggle to raise her arms.

“And what? You want me to say that I love you. I could say it, Simon, but I don't know what it means. I like you, I respect you. I think about you all the time—”

“That's lust,” he said sharply.

“Yes,” she said, her voice creaking a little with the effort to maintain her composure. “Lust enough to burn down the world. Will you kiss me now, or must I beg?”

A sound escaped him as he bent to her, a gasp that a man might make as he died, full of desperation and hope. The last thing she saw before his mouth touched hers was a flash of his dimples, and then there was nothing in the world but the taste of him, his textures and smells and the fierce wanting that rose up between them.

“You do love me,” he said, pressing himself to her. “Even if you're afraid to own it.”

“Have it your way,” Lily said.

“I'll have you any way I can get you.” He laughed against her mouth and held her pinned to the wall, kissed her into senselessness and she kissed him back, deep kisses and passionate, the kind of kisses that she dreamed about and that woke her, trembling and covered with sweat. His kisses, and no one else's.

When he pulled away she let out a sorrowful sound.

“Shall I carry you up the stairs?” he said. “Or will you walk?”

“Up the stairs?” Lily echoed stupidly, her gaze fixed on his mouth.

“Aye, up the stairs. There must be a bed in the house someplace.”

“No,” Lily said, her hands wiggling their way beneath his mantle, pulling at his clothes impatiently. “All the chambers are empty.”

He must have lost track of the conversation then, for he lifted her up to kiss her again and they went on like that for a long time, and then Lily was being danced down the hall between kisses, trailing bits of clothing. The kitchen door swung to let them through and swung shut again and then Simon lifted her and she found herself on the table with him standing between her knees, her skirts already half raised.

“Just the right height,” he said, fumbling with his own clothes.

For what?
Lily might have asked, out of an odd and truly perverse modesty, but he was showing her that, pulling at her clothing and his own and then sinking into her, hard and impatient, moving into the very heart and core of her in the middle of the deserted kitchen. On a table.

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered, pausing for a moment, his breath coming harsh. He held her down with his weight and the thrust of his hips, the absolute fact of him inside her, joined to her, his mouth on hers, wet and warm, the touch of his tongue. He pulled her hips forward and seated himself in her more firmly and Lily could have drifted away into death just then and gone gladly, as long as he went with her, just like this.

“Holy God,” he muttered, his face buried in the crook of her shoulder.

She gasped. “And you call me a heathen.”

“My grumfie, my love,” he whispered against her mouth. “We'll be heathens tegither, the twa of us.”

Much later, on their way back to the village, Lily dragged her feet a little, in no hurry to be among people again. She asked herself how she could ever pretend to be her mother's rational daughter, how she had ever thought herself to be that person. She was learning astonishing things about herself that she could hardly share with anyone except Simon.

“I am a little ashamed,” Lily said to him. And then: “You have a wicked grin, Simon Ballentyne. Don't let my mother see it on your face or she'll know what you've—” She paused, and cleared her throat. “What we've been doing.”

That made him laugh. “As if we could hide it.”

“Well, we should hide it,” Lily said, a little irritated with him but most of all with herself: she wanted him to kiss her again, but she didn't want to ask for it, and what a wanton thing she was. “It's unseemly, with all that's happened.”