by Sara Donati
“Even you can’t build a cabin in the middle of winter,” Richard pointed out.
“No, but I can cut the logs and lay the foundation and the chimney. I’ll roll the logs after the first thaw. I’ll need to borrow a team, when it gets that far. And I’ll take half the wage up front.”
“That’s a very good offer, Judge,” remarked Richard Todd. “I would take him up on it, otherwise you’ll be dependent on Billy Kirby to build for you, and you know what a poor job he’ll make of it.” Richard looked pointedly at the crooked doorsills and window sashes.
“Done and done,” said the judge with a sigh. “If costs can be kept to a minimum.” He was relieved to have two sticky matters resolved at once. Elizabeth would have her school; his debt to Hawkeye’s son would be eased.
“You’ve got your eye on that woman,” Hawkeye said to Nathaniel when they were finally on their way.
Nathaniel shrugged. “And if I do, what’s to come of it?”
His father laughed softly. “She’s fine to look at, sure enough. And smart. Smarter than her father and brother put together, I’d wager.”
They were making their way up Hidden Wolf, walking the horse the judge had lent them. The doe was strapped over the mare’s back, and the dogs trotted along behind wearily, glad to be headed for home, but still, with short bursts of enthusiasm, setting off after any sign of a rabbit.
Nathaniel took his time answering. He knew his father approved of Elizabeth; he wouldn’t be bothered talking to anybody he didn’t like, and he had found plenty to discuss with her. He had a weakness for women with tongues quick enough to match his own.
“She’s content to remain a spinster, she says.”
Hawkeye grunted. “Well, look at her menfolk. If those are the only husbands she’s ever seen at their work, who could blame her?” Then, with a sideways glance: “Todd will have her if he can get her.”
Nathaniel’s shoulder was aching; he rubbed it with the heel of one hand. “If she brings the land along with her, he will,” he agreed. “But it don’t look as though she’ll be easily got. She calls herself a spinster, and proud of it.”
“You had a conversation with her about her spinsterhood right quick, I’d say.”
“She’s the kind that provokes me, I won’t deny that.” The mare threatened to lose her footing and Nathaniel chirped to her calmly. “Maybe I scairt her off.”
“Or got her interested.”
Nathaniel nodded. “There’s that possibility.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes.
“It would solve some problems,” Hawkeye pointed out.
“If she brought Hidden Wolf into the match, it would.”
Hawkeye grunted. “I saw you looking at her, and it ain’t the land that got your attention. You looked at her like you looked at Sarah, once upon a time. Now don’t get that face on you. Sarah’s been dead five years. She wouldn’t have begrudged you a new woman.”
“You trying to marry me off to the judge’s daughter? Right now, with Chingachgook on his way here with a proposition that’s going to make every white man in this valley howl?”
Hawkeye shrugged. “I don’t deny the timing’s bad. But there’s some things can’t be ignored, and that woman is one of them. You best keep your wits about you, or Todd will beat you to it.”
They were silent for a while as they scrambled up a steep slope, urging the horse along behind.
“Can’t see a woman like that scraping hide and hoeing corn,” Nathaniel said.
“True enough. But there’s others to do that work. She’s a schoolteacher.” Hawkeye said this last in a respectful tone. It was something Nathaniel had never understood about his father, his willingness to believe absolute good of any schoolteacher—until evidence to the contrary came to the front.
“Well, say for a minute she decides she’s interested and I make her an offer. The judge wouldn’t like it. Nor her brother,” said Nathaniel.
Pausing to catch his breath, Hawkeye turned to look out over the village tucked into the elbow of the mountain. The evening was coming fast; long shadows of deepening dark blue moved down over the forest, reaching over the snowy fields to curl fingers around the scattered cabins and barns. Half Moon Lake glittered softly in the last of the evening light like a silver hand mirror thrown down carelessly on a rumpled white coverlet.
“Her daddy is white,” Hawkeye said quietly, as if he and his son were not; as if they were of a different universe. “He thinks he owns the sky. The sky won’t give him much of an argument, but that daughter of his will. He don’t know what’s coming his way.” He shook his head and grinned. “That’s a strong-willed woman, Nathaniel, and some men would run in the other direction. Richard Todd will, when he figures her out.”
“Not if she brings the mountain to the match, he wouldn’t run. Not if she had two heads and a tail.”
Hawkeye drew up suddenly, a hand to his chin. “Aye, you’re right. But if she’s half as smart as I think she is—and set against marriage to boot—she won’t let herself be auctioned off like that. And”—Hawkeye grinned now, his face a mass of wrinkles—“it weren’t Richard Todd she was starin’ at with her eyes all shiny, every opportunity.”
Nathaniel inclined his head but said nothing.
“Your ma was strong-willed like her …” Hawkeye paused again, and when he spoke there was a loss in his voice that Nathaniel knew well. “You won’t be sorry for it, in the long run. Although she’ll tire you out in the chase.”
“I haven’t made up my mind to take up the chase.”
“You tell yourself that,” Hawkeye said, laughing softly. “See if you can make it stick. I don’t think you can.”
IV
Although she went to bed dispirited and unhappy about the possibility that her plans might be met with her father’s reluctance rather than his help and goodwill, Elizabeth awoke on Christmas Eve morning refreshed and with her resolve restored. It was very early, the sun just coming up over the mountains, and the deep cold of the night had not yet begun to loosen; nevertheless Elizabeth could not stay in her bed, so she washed and shivered her way into her clothes, and ran down the steps to the kitchen.
Standing in the doorway, she was greeted by a blast of warm air from the hearth where a crowd of pots hung from a complex assortment of cranes and trivets. The whole room glowed with the reflected firelight in copper and pewter swaying from hooks in the ceiling beams. Against the far wall, baskets of flax and carded wool waited by a spinning wheel, and next to that a young girl worked a loom with the quick and automatic motions of the practiced weaver.
Another young woman stood at a rough wooden table peeling potatoes while Curiosity kneaded dough, her dark skin dusty with flour to the elbows. She looked up to see Elizabeth standing there and grinned.
“An early riser! Yes, I knew it, an early riser. You must be hungry. Breakfast won’t be for a while yet but come sit down and Daisy here will do her best. Daisy is my second oldest. Daisy! Say g’d day to Miss Elizabeth. Over there that’s my Polly on the loom. And that there is Manny, just on his way out now to see to the firewood, weren’t you, sweet thing?”
Manny was a strapping youth with a wide grin, but Elizabeth barely got a good look at him before he disappeared at his mother’s bidding. She turned her attention to Daisy, who smiled at Elizabeth without a bit of shyness. She was slightly built but wiry, not quite so dark as her mother, but with a great abundance of hair tucked up into her cap. On one cheek there was a red birthmark in the shape of a flower, and Elizabeth realized that this must be the source of her name.
Daisy wiped her hands on her apron while she considered Elizabeth.
“Biscuits and honey, that should tide you over. And fresh milk.”
“That sounds lovely,” Elizabeth said, “but I would like to take a walk first—”
“A walk in this cold weather before you have good food in you?” Curiosity shook her head.
Uncertain, Elizabeth glanced out the windo
w. It had begun to snow, and the sky was leaden.
“Paradise ain’t going no place, before you have some breakfast,” Curiosity stated, and in response Daisy began to butter biscuits.
There was a high stool at the table and Elizabeth took it, waiting for Curiosity to protest that she should eat in the dining room, but there was no such complaint; Curiosity went back to her bread dough and Daisy to her potatoes. The rhythmic thump of the loom made a nice counterpoint to the steady hiss of the fire in the hearth.
The biscuits were delicious and the milk was fresh; Elizabeth realized suddenly that she was very hungry indeed and she worked her way through the plate quickly. Her appetite and appreciation were not lost on Curiosity, who set her dough to rise and poured Elizabeth more milk. Elizabeth thought of asking Curiosity to sit and eat with her, but she realized that the older woman had probably been up for hours and had eaten long ago, and that she had many hours of work ahead before she would find time to sit down again. Elizabeth was thinking about Curiosity when a back door opened in a flurry of snow and Galileo came in, stamping and whooshing with the cold.
“My Lord!” he said, dumping his load of firewood onto the hearth. “But what a weather. Good morning, Miss Elizabeth!”
Elizabeth returned his greeting but he had already turned to address his wife.
“And I suppose you still need those supplies, and I suppose I still have to hitch the team and go down to the village in this snow.” He shook his head.
“And I suppose snow is nothing new and I suppose it’s Christmas Eve and I suppose you don’t want me serving up beans and pickled cabbage for dinner, do you?” Curiosity answered in staccato. But they were grinning at each other, and Daisy did not seem in the least perturbed, so Elizabeth assumed that this tone was an everyday one.
“Are you going into town?” she asked Galileo. “May I come along?” She had already slipped down from her stool. “Please do wait, it will only take me a minute.”
It barely seemed worth the effort of hitching the team, for the sleigh brought them into the village in just a few minutes. Elizabeth wished that she had walked, for the village fairly flew by: scattered cabins, the church of raw wood, its windows shuttered and the little steeple without a bell. The parsonage stood off to the right, a somewhat finer building of board and shingle rather than logs, but small and with only a few window sashes. To the far left, a finer house of fieldstone and brick; no doubt it belonged to the doctor. There were a smokehouse, stables, and blacksmithy. She noted, although she tried not to, that each cabin had a dooryard cluttered with stacked wood, farm tools, and dark icy patches where dishwater had been tossed. Here and there laundry had been hung out and shirts and trousers and sheets seemed to be standing sentry, frozen into awkward contortions. There were few people to see: outside a cabin of squared logs a woman wrapped in shawls drew water at a stone well, an old raccoon cap on her head and a baby strapped to her chest with a leather belt. Down at the edge of Half Moon Lake, surrounded with tree stumps like beard stubble, there were men out on the ice fishing with nets. Boys pushed a ball with long sticks, shouting and tussling.
Elizabeth was both relieved and disappointed: relieved to see people carrying on with normal lives such as she had known in England, and disappointed that everything was so familiar. The village was, if anything, shabby, and the buildings, while solid, were plain. The trading post was a log building like the rest but with a long, deep porch, empty now, and tiny glass windows on either side of the door. There was nothing picturesque about Paradise. It was hewn too rawly from the forest, it sat too awkwardly on the shores of the lake.
What a terrible prig you are, she sniffed at herself. You’ll have to do better than that, my girl, if you intend to teach school here.
Watching Galileo tie the team to the hitching post, Elizabeth realized with a start that the people in this place would have children, and that she must convince them to send those children to her school. And more, there was no way to be introduced to them, except to do it herself. She had never in her life taken up a conversation with a person to whom she had not been properly and formally introduced, with the exception of servants and shop clerks. Almost paralyzed with worry, she watched as Galileo solved her problem by stepping into the room behind her and calling out: “Good morning. This here is Miss Elizabeth Middleton, the judge’s girl.”
Elizabeth tried hard to keep up with the hands that were thrust at her, the questions and good wishes. Confronted with the friendly curiosity of a roomful of people, Elizabeth was ashamed of herself for her less-than-generous thoughts about the village.
A woman of substantial height and breadth pushed easily through the small crowd to grasp Elizabeth by both shoulders and peer into her face. Elizabeth tried not to pull away from this unusual form of greeting, and focused instead on a pair of curious blue eyes on either side of a nose so small and dainty that it seemed it had somehow wandered onto the wrong face.
“Well, aren’t we glad to see you!” she said for the fourth or fifth time, shaking Elizabeth a bit. “Aren’t we all!”
Then she stood back and inclined her head hard to the right. “You’ll have caught not a single name in all this commotion. I’m Anna Hauptmann. This was my husband’s trading post until he took the putrid sore throat and died. Lost my three oldest, too. That was four year ago and I been running things ever since. Do some farming, as we all do here. D’you like cheese? You’ll want to try mine, it’s worth the trouble, if I do say so myself who shouldn’t. My folks come over from the Palatinate back during King George’s war. That’s my father over there. Däta!” She shouted so loudly at an old man asleep in front of the hearth that Elizabeth jumped.
“Däta, pass auf! No, don’t you bother yourself about niceties, Miz Middleton, he’s a solid sleeper, is Pa. Däta!”
This time the whole room jumped, but the bony shoulders of the old man hunched over his clay pipe continued their gentle rise and fall without a tremor.
“Miz Hauptmann—” Galileo called softly, and just as quickly as she had claimed Elizabeth’s attention, Anna turned away and fought her way behind the counter between barrels and boxes. With a little fold of concentration on her forehead she began to gather things together in response to Galileo’s polite and low-voiced requests.
There was a lot to look at: the ceilings were hung with hardware of every kind, from stirrups to a plow, barrels and boxes piled everywhere. On one wall a profusion of hand-painted signs crowded together, and Elizabeth looked them over with great wonder and amusement. Trust in the LORD your GOD, read a prominent one, surpassed in size only by Wonder Full is the MERCY of the Savior, surrounded by more earthly sentiments: No Papper Notes but Pigs Took in Trade; 1£ = $3 & 50 NY; Good Strong Vinegar; No Cofee Til Spring; Turlington’s Balsam of Life and Daffy’s Elixer in Stock Permanent. And a very large one done in severest black letters: NO spitting and that means YOU! In English, Dutch, German, and French. Elizabeth marveled at the translation of both the meaning and the sentiment.
In the time it took her to read through the placards, Elizabeth felt the room fall silent around her. She knew that they were looking at her, and so she straightened her shoulders and turned to meet them. The group of men sat around the hearth on makeshift stools, and in their center two young children huddled by the fire, one with a corncob doll, the other with a penknife and piece of wood. Anna was the only other woman; the others were all men of various ages, clearly farmers here to share news and the heat of the hearth on a snowy winter morning. She introduced herself to each of the adults, making a conscious effort to mark their names and faces: Henry Smythe, who had a tic; Isaac Cameron, who, while young, was losing his hair and who had a mouthful of poor teeth; Jed McGarrity, so tall he stooped and had the largest hands Elizabeth had ever seen on any human being; and Charlie LeBlanc, younger than the rest, who was missing both his upper front teeth and whistled when he talked. He avoided her gaze, blushing furiously as he shook her hand. Only Moses Southern seemed to give
her his hand reluctantly, scowling at a point on the ceiling as he muttered his name. He was about sixty years old, his face crackled and roughened to the consistency of bark. The cold weather had turned his already substantial nose into a great red radish, and when she smiled at him he flushed a deeper shade.
Elizabeth turned to the children.
“And who have we here?”
“My two youngest!” said Anna. “Henrietta and Ephraim, they might tell you if they could find their tongues. Children! Come forward. A curtsy, please, Miss Henrietta. Ephraim, have you forgot your bow?”
“Have you had any schooling?” Elizabeth asked them in a kindly tone as she took their hands in turn. The children, both with sleek brown hair and placid eyes in pale faces, shook their heads, and then turned as one toward their mother.
“Nope, never had the opportunity,” Anna answered for them. She laughed. “Too bad, ain’t it, that you didn’t bring a schoolmarm along with you from England.”
“But I did,” Elizabeth said, and smiled. “I am a teacher.”
One of the farmers cleared his throat loudly, but had nothing to say in response to Elizabeth’s statement. Even Anna Hauptmann seemed struck speechless.
“I am a teacher,” she repeated, glancing around at them. “I plan to start a school as soon as space can be made ready.”
“Well!” Anna said, her surprise ebbing to make room for enthusiasm. “Well, I never. The judge’s daughter. A school in Paradise!”
“I suppose you expect folks to pay tuition,” Moses Southern rumbled, not meeting her eye.
“I hadn’t thought about that yet,” Elizabeth said. “But of course the fee would be very small, and payable in goods—”
One of the men looked relieved at this, and Elizabeth went on, encouraged.
“I was hoping,” she said, glancing at each of the farmers as she did. “I was hoping to get together a list of all the children who are of school age, so I have an idea of the supplies I’ll need, and if I have enough books.”