Fire Along the Sky (68 page)

She and Simon had come deep into the forest to bathe in a little pond that Lily had always favored. It was cool here in the grove of beeches and white pine, as cool a place as there was to be found on an August afternoon, outside the caves at Lake in the Clouds.

Thinking of the mountain generally produced a wave of homesickness in Lily, but today the heat took even that out of her. This pond—as children they had called it the frog pond—was only a quarter hour's walk from their cabin. She could come here as often as she pleased, with or without Simon.

Her husband. Sometimes she said that word to herself, just to hear it. She had a husband; she was a married woman. An idea so very odd that it made her turn and hide her face in the blanket.

Not that she had any regrets, Lily told herself firmly. She had married a good man, a reliable man, a man worth loving. A man who made her breath catch in her throat and her heart gallop, who made her laugh. And if there
was
something missing, maybe it was something she didn't really need anyway.

Lily had been thinking about it for a long time now, and she had come to the conclusion that the tenderness she had felt toward Nicholas Wilde—something that was absent when she looked at Simon—had less to do with love than it did with pity. If Nicholas ever came back to Paradise, something Lily tried to imagine now and then, she had the idea that it would be far harder for him than it would be for her.

Simon worried about Nicholas, she could almost smell it at times when she caught him looking at her in a certain way. But he would not raise the subject, out of pride and most certainly out of fear at what she might say. And because he was wise enough to let sleeping dogs lie.

Lily raised her head from the blanket and watched Simon floating on his back like a log. A strangely dappled log, Lily observed. Stripped down, Simon presented an odd picture. He was darkly tanned on face and neck and arms, and since he had been working without his shirt—something he had hesitated to do at first—his back and chest were now almost as dark.

But from the waist down he was milk white, because he had refused to give up his breeks for a breechclout, even in the unbearable August heat. Lily teased him about this unmercifully, but he never wavered.

“I've shaved my beard for you,” he would say. “But I will keep the other bits I hold dear out of the public eye. I don't like the way Missy Parker looks at me as it is.”

His modesty surprised her and at the same time it was endearing. And it was true that women watched him. Lydia Ratz had stopped Lily in the village shortly before the wedding, not to ask about Stiles, as Lily had been dreading, but to voice an opinion.

“You never were mean, Lily Bonner, not like some. I hope you won't be the kind who won't let her husband dance with other women. He's a good dancer, is your Simon.”

“As long as it's only dancing you're talking about,” Lily had answered with her sweetest smile. “And dancing where I can see you, forbye.”

She used some of Simon's expressions, now and then, because they amused her and it irritated him, though he tried to hide it. They spoke quite a lot about his past in Scotland.

“Did you never wear a kilt, then?” she asked him, and realized too late that she had invited a history lecture. If she protested he would remind her that she was half Scots herself, and plough ahead with his story.

There were benefits to be had to letting Simon go on with these occasional lessons. While he talked of the indignities visited upon the Scots by vengeful England, including the banning of the kilt, she could watch him walking back and forth, the play of muscles in his throat, the broad turn of his wrist when he raised a hand to make a point.

Sometimes she wondered if being married had damaged her ability to reason. Certainly she found herself contemplating things so strange that she had no words to describe them. And neither was it necessary, she told herself firmly. There were other things in the world beyond the physical fact of her husband's presence, the mechanics of the male body, and the things they did together.

Important, interesting, engaging things. Except it was hard to keep her mind on any of them just now, in the first weeks of her marriage.

Watching Simon float, Lily wondered if she could make sense of her thoughts if she picked up paper and pencil and let herself draw what she was seeing. It was an idea that came to her quite often, and every time she was startled, as she was now, to feel herself blushing so fiercely that she felt it deep in her belly.

Lily sat up suddenly and pulled her chemise about herself. “It's getting late!”

Simon opened one eye and peered at her without changing his position. “Late for what? Are you lonely over there, Lily my love?”

“Late in the afternoon,” Lily said. “Late in the day. Late for tea, late for supper. Late because in case you didn't realize, my mother's threatening to make a cake.”

“I like cake,” Simon said, his arms moving through the water in long sweeps as he propelled his way to the bank.

“Not my mother's cakes,” Lily said. “Even the pigs have a hard time working up enthusiasm for my mother's cakes. The only person who ever choked down a whole piece—” She stopped herself.

Simon came to stand next to the blanket, shaking himself like a dog so that the cold water rained over her. She should scold him, but now that she had raised the topic of her brother all the playfulness in her had drained away.

“Your brother,” Simon said, falling down beside her. “Shall we talk of Daniel now?”

Lily grimaced. How many times had he asked the question in the last days?

“No,” she said briefly, turning away. “I can't talk about him without getting angry, and I don't want to be angry just now.”

Simon made a satisfied sound deep in his throat and knelt down beside her, leaning over to press a kiss to her cheek.

“Oh, look,” he said in his most innocent voice. “Your linen is wet through. Shall we hang it up to dry?”

Lily laughed and batted his hands away from her buttons. “You are insatiable.”

“And you,” he said, running a hand down her hip. “You are a liar if you're claiming you don't want me again. The proof is right here, if you'll just open—”

“Simon,” Lily said, slapping his hands away yet again. “Anyone could come by here, you know. This spot is known to the whole village.”

“In all the times we've been here nobody has ever come by,” he said. “Or maybe we were just too busy to notice if they did.”

That made her sit up again and clutch her gown to her breast. Lily's hair, half-wet still, clung to her face and shoulders and to the outline of her breasts, but it was her eyes that caught Simon's attention, filled to brimming with reluctant tears.

“Come now,” he said softly, pulling her down again to hold her. “He'll talk to you when he's able. You know he will.”

“He talks to me now,” Lily mumbled against his neck. “Except he doesn't say anything of importance.”

They were quiet for a moment in the cool of the forest shade, listening to the birds overhead.

“Why won't he talk to me?” Lily said.

Simon stroked her head and tried to think of something to say that would be both truthful and comforting. He had been looking for those words since the day Daniel had come home from the war, and he would continue looking, without success.

Because he hadn't come home, not really, not the way his sister expected of him. He had lost the use of his arm, maybe forever. He had left other things behind too, things that were harder to put into words but that sat plain enough for any man to see on his face.

“I'm his twin,” Lily said. “Who else understands him as I do?” Then she stiffened slightly and raised her face to look at Simon directly.

“We should have waited,” she said. “With the wedding, we should have waited.”

“Perhaps,” Simon said, thinking to himself that it would have made no difference at all; it wasn't his sister's wedding that weighed Daniel down, nor was it his mother's rounded belly or the fact that his family had moved off the mountain.

It did have something to do with Jennet, who had sacrificed a great deal—maybe everything—to win him his freedom. That weighed heavy on him and Blue-Jay both. If it weren't for their mothers, Simon had the idea, the two young men would have gone off already to join in Luke's search for Jennet. Simon felt the same way himself; she was the laird's sister, after all.

But Luke had promised to bring her home by the end of this very month, and they must be satisfied with that, though the days ticked on without word. In another week it would be September, and if they had no message by then, it would be next to impossible to keep the Bonner men in Paradise. The women would fight them, but nothing short of the end of the world would keep them from going after Jennet.

He said part of what he was thinking aloud. “Pray God Luke has found their trail.”

Lily gave him a sharp look. “Pray God he is on his way here with Jennet even as we speak.”

“Aye.” Simon rubbed his eyes. “But I fear it won't be as easy as that.”

“You blame yourself,” Lily said, with sudden understanding, and she saw Simon duck his head like a schoolboy. “But why? From everything I've heard—”

“He had everyone fooled. Aye.”

“The colonel and the garrison—”

“And Jennet herself and Hannah. Aye,” he repeated.

“But then how—”

“Because,” he said, forcefully, angrily. “Because I saw the man the last time I was on the island and I never looked at him hard enough. I took him to be the priest he claimed to be.”

This had never occurred to Lily. In all the talk about what had happened on Nut Island, he had been quiet, adding very little to the conversation.

“There's no cause for despair,” Lily said, wanting to comfort herself as much as Simon. “You've said yourself that there's no one in all of French Canada with better connections than Luke.”

To that he had nothing to say, and with good reason; it was a poor excuse for optimism, and they both knew it. On the way home it occurred to Lily that all three of her brothers were unhappy: Gabriel because he had not yet accepted the fact of Simon in his sister's life, Luke because his bride had been stolen away from him by a man who had posed a threat he had not been able to forestall, and Daniel, for reasons she did not like to list for herself.

“And my mother is making a cake.”

Simon seemed to have followed the tortuous path of her thoughts; he put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close as they walked. “A diversion that will lift her spirits, no doubt.”

“Even if it does mean sour stomachs all around.”

Simon slapped his stomach twice. “There was never a Ballentyne born who couldn't stand up to a wee piece of cake.”

“Good,” Lily said. “Then you can eat my portion as well as your own.”

“Blue-Jay looks contented,” Hannah said. “I think Teres will make him a good wife.”

“She'll make a better wife than a daughter-in-law, at least at first,” said Nathaniel.

They were sitting at Lake in the Clouds, close enough to the water to catch the cooling breeze from the waterfalls, but just out of the spray. Blue-Jay and Runs-from-Bears were in the water, and Many-Doves sat on a flat rock on the far side of the lake. Beside her was the young woman who had come with them from Canada, Blue-Jay's new wife, called Teres.

In many ways she was a younger version of Many-Doves; she had the same still beauty and serious way of looking at the world, but the similarities ended there. Teres was not so attached to the old ways as her mother-in-law, which delighted Annie and worried Runs-from-Bears.

“Ayuh,” said Nathaniel. “It will be a long winter up here on the mountain.” But there was more amusement in his expression than worry. Hannah supposed he was thinking of his own new son-in-law, and about Lily. Both families had adjustments to make.

“Everything's changing.” Hannah said it mostly to herself, but her father seemed to understand what she was unable to say more directly.

“That's the way of it,” he said. “You thinking of your little sister?”

“Of Lily, yes, and Blue-Jay, and the new baby coming, and Daniel.”

“Daniel will find his way, though it don't feel that way just now. And what of you?” Nathaniel asked, getting to the heart of it.

“I don't know.” She paused. “I don't know where I belong. How I fit in. It feels as though I've caught some kind of fever in the blood.”

“That's the war,” Nathaniel said. “Being caught up in it like you were. And it's Jennet.”

Jennet. Hannah drew in a hard breath and held it. Jennet, who was never very far from her thoughts, but whose name she could not say out of fear.

But there were other things that must be said, and if those words were to come to her, it could only be here, on this mountain where she was born and raised. They wouldn't be hurried, but that didn't matter: her father was a patient man and he would let his children lead their own lives.

His eyes were following an eagle circling overhead, but he was waiting for her, ready to listen, willing to understand.

She said, “I never read the letter that Manny wrote to me.”

He was waiting for the rest of it, and in the meantime there was nothing to read in the way he was looking at her. No disappointment, no expectations.

“Not so long ago it was all I could think about, but now—I don't want to know how he died.”

He rubbed a thumb along his jaw and then looked over his shoulder, toward the little graveyard where their people were buried.

“I always thought your grandfather would come back here to die,” he said. “To be buried next to her.” He looked into the shadows for a long moment, thinking of his mother, of the grandmother Hannah had loved so dearly and lost so young.

“But he never came. I expect he's gone now, but I don't know that for a fact. Sometimes I wake up at night wondering, and you know, daughter, I think maybe that's just what he wanted. He wanted me to think of him out there in the world someplace. It's a comfort to me, that much I got to admit. To think he might walk up the mountain some morning and be standing there when I wake up—if I live another fifty years, I'll still be wondering if maybe—” He paused. “If that's what he wanted, then it's the kind of gift a father can give to a son.”