Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  “Promise me,” he said. “Promise me you won’t do that again.”

  Chastised finally and thoroughly, Elizabeth nodded.

  They stood like that for a moment, listening to each other breathe.

  “Don’t you want to know what he had to say?” she asked. “He gave me a message.”

  “Not now, not here,” Nathaniel said, letting her go. “He may still be around.”

  There was a fallen tree, its dark, crumbling trunk sprouting great layers of pale mushrooms like a scaly beard. On it, Runs-from-Bears perched nonchalantly. Elizabeth was glad to see him, but he spoke directly to Nathaniel. It appeared that Jack Lingo’s trail had been picked up and he was off the mountain, headed north.

  “Robbie’s on his tail, make sure he don’t swing back,” Bears concluded in English. Clearly for Elizabeth’s benefit, although he still didn’t look at her.

  They were silent for the rest of the walk back to the clearing. Elizabeth noted that neither of them put their rifles out of hand, and she wondered if Runs-from-Bears had told the whole truth. Something occurred to her.

  “What of Dutch Ton?” she asked. He glanced over his shoulder at her.

  “No sign of him.”

  Now that the first flush of agitation and fear was abated, Elizabeth began to shake. She pressed her palms hard together, spoke sternly to herself. Once at Robbie’s, she went immediately into the caves and to her cot, and she sat there while she was slowly consumed by trembling. Nathaniel came to her.

  “My face swells when I cry,” she said. “It isn’t a pretty sight.”

  “Pigheaded and vain, too,” he noted dryly. But he sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. She hiccuped a little and buried her face in his shirt.

  “He might have killed me?”

  He nodded.

  “But he was so polite.”

  Nathaniel waited, saying nothing while her trembling slowly subsided.

  “I will grant you that the things he had to say were … strange. But I never thought I was in real danger. He was so very apologetic about binding me.”

  “It was my fault for letting you go off on your own,” he said grimly. “I should have warned you about him. Now.” He wiped her cheeks with his hand. “Tell me what he had to say.”

  She drew in a wavering sigh. “He wants the Tory Gold,” she said. “And he’s convinced you’ve got it, hidden away. You and Hawkeye and Chingachgook. He described to me how he came upon it, although he cast himself in rather a different role in the story than Axel did in his telling of it.”

  Nathaniel grunted. “Aye, and so he would.”

  “He wears one of the coins around his neck. It is most unusual, I have never seen anything like it. A five-guinea gold piece, with George the Second in profile—”

  “Got a good look at it, did you?” He looked vaguely intrigued. Elizabeth described it to him in detail, down to the hole Lingo had punched through the sovereign’s temple in order to string the coin on a piece of rawhide.

  “A thousand of them would be an overwhelming sight,” she finished.

  “And a conspicuous one,” Nathaniel agreed. He was studying her hand, turning it this way and that in his own. “He had a message for me?”

  “He said, ‘Tell your worthy husband and his father and grandfather that the next time I will take what pleases me until payment is forthcoming.’ ” But he said it in French. A rather different French than I was taught, but that was his meaning.” She grimaced in her attempt to smile. “At the time I didn’t think it through, but I suppose that was a threat against my person?”

  “Or Hannah.”

  “Hannah,” Elizabeth breathed. “Oh, no.”

  “It ain’t a pleasing idea, that’s true.” He leaned back. “He’s getting impatient. Wonder what’s pushing him.”

  “He said he wants to go to France,” Elizabeth volunteered.

  Nathaniel pulled up short and saw that she was not joking. “He has never been out of the north country,” he said. “What would he want in France?”

  “To join the revolution, he said.”

  “Ha! The man never fought for anything or anyone but himself”

  She said, “I told him you didn’t have the gold. That if you had had such amounts of money you would have bought the mountain long ago.”

  He rewarded her with a grin and a hasty kiss. “And what did he think of that?”

  “It made him angry,” she admitted. “He didn’t believe me. He wanted to know how it was that you had managed to pay Richard off if you didn’t have any money. Monsieur Lingo is very well informed.”

  “And what explanation did you have for him?”

  She found the strength to meet his eye and she drew in a big breath. “I told him that you had the very good sense to fall in love with a well-to-do spinster and marry well.”

  “Is that what I did?” he asked, smiling broadly.

  Elizabeth nodded, her own smile more tentative. “Yes. I think so.”

  He pulled her close. There was a great deal of satisfaction and relief in his face. “And so I did. Very well, in fact. You see how well. No, don’t stop me.” He was tugging at her clothes impatiently, spreading his hands wide against her warm skin.

  “Did I say the right things to him?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Aye,” Nathaniel said, taking her hands above her head to lay her back against the cot. “You did, indeed. I’m well satisfied with you, Boots. Maybe it’s time I showed you that again, don’t you think? Would you be interested in another lesson in satisfaction?”

  In reply, she pulled him down to her, and buried her face in the curve of his neck. Speechless, for once, in the face of what he had to say to her.

  Later, his high spirits left him. While she slept out her adventure and what they had done together, he sat quietly and thought it all through, and his conclusions were not easy ones. Todd was too much on his mind, and had distracted him from other problems. The idea of Jack Lingo in a frenzy because he smelled money in the air was more than just mildly irritating. He had put his hands on Elizabeth, and had made threats, and thus intruded himself on a set of circumstances which were complicated enough already.

  They were expected in Albany, where Elizabeth would be asked to depose in a civil action being brought against her by Dr. Richard Todd for breach of promise. He was demanding satisfaction in the form of option to purchase lands included in her dower. Knowing he was out of his depth, Nathaniel had sought legal advice and found, to his immense relief, that she was not bound by law to appear. Mr. Bennett had been quite clear on this: she had not been formally served with summons papers, had she? When Nathaniel assured him that she had not, Bennett had shown his own relief and noted that it would be a very good thing indeed if the serving of such papers, on Elizabeth or on Nathaniel as her husband, proved impossible.

  Nathaniel had paid Bennett’s retainer and got out of Johnstown before Richard or his lawyers could find him. On the way north he had stopped briefly in Paradise to see his daughter and father, and to lay plans. Before leaving he had made sure to visit Anna Hauptmann, and to tell her in plain hearing of half the village that he was off to fetch his bride to Albany so she could testify on her own behalf and clear up these misunderstandings. The idea was to put Richard’s mind at ease, although it meant lying to Anna, which he didn’t like doing. She had always dealt fair with the folks from Lake in the Clouds.

  Tomorrow, Bennett would show up in court without his clients, and if all went well, Richard would be angry enough to set out into the bush to find Elizabeth and serve the summons himself. They would lead him on a chase for a week or so, enough time for Hawkeye to try to talk Richard’s witnesses out of perjuring themselves. It was not the best of plans, and there was all kinds of room for trouble, but it was all they could come up with on short notice.

  In the morning he and Elizabeth would go north, and Runs-from-Bears would go back to Paradise, where Hawkeye would be glad of his help in case Jack Lingo
made good on his threat and wandered in that direction. Not to mention Many-Doves, who had been directly displeased to see Nathaniel come home alone.

  When Elizabeth stirred and woke, Nathaniel would have to make all of this known to her. He hoped there was enough to satisfy her curiosity for the moment. With any luck, she wouldn’t ask those questions he wasn’t yet ready to answer.

  Late in the night, Elizabeth lay awake watching the guttering of a single candle near its end. She knew that she must give herself over to sleep soon, as reluctant as she was. Her body had adjusted well to these demanding circumstances, Nathaniel’s attentions, her own hungers, the increased work and physical activity, but she would need all her strength for what was ahead of them. Still she could not sleep, not yet. It would be hard to walk away from Robbie tomorrow, but the idea of going off into the bush with Nathaniel was very welcome to her. The rift that had opened between them today had not yet been healed.

  “Do you realize I’ve never spent a full day alone with you?” she asked.

  “It won’t be easy,” he said. “The terrain’s more than tough in places.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. It was more than that, but she was shy to tell him. She was proud of how much she had learned and how far she had come, and she wanted to show him those things. And if it kept Richard Todd at bay and gave them a chance to settle this business, she would be content. The solitude would give them time to learn to know each other. This thought made her aware of other things, of the heaviness in her limbs, and the fact that her lips were tender. She pulled hard on her plait, taken aback and made uneasy by how easy it was to become aroused, how easy to lose her train of thought when Nathaniel was near.

  “There will be time to talk,” she said out loud. There were so many things she didn’t understand and needed to know about. Questions slid into her consciousness and then out again, lazily.

  “You still don’t know how to swim,” he murmured.

  She stretched a bit and turned in his arms. Felt the weight of them around her, the solid strength of him an endless comfort.

  “Never mind,” he said, sifting through her hair, strand by strand, but in a distracted way. “There’ll be time for that, too.” There was an awareness about him when he was thinking hard, an underlying hum that she could feel in the rush of his blood. Elizabeth did not like having his thoughts elsewhere, not at this moment. She moved closer to him, bedded her head on his chest, and looked hard inside herself for words that would not come.

  His arms flexed and then relaxed again. He smoothed the hair away from her face and cleared his throat. “You’re thinking about Sarah,” he said. “But you’re afraid to ask.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “It wasn’t right of me, the way I flew at you today when you brought up her name.”

  “No,” Elizabeth agreed. “It wasn’t right.”

  “I ain’t exactly proud of what it is I’ve got to tell you.”

  “Tell me anyway,” Elizabeth said. “Or we’ll never get past this.”

  When he didn’t answer, she lifted her head to look into his face. “Nathaniel. I promise I’ll do my best not to judge you unfairly,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said. Then he cleared his throat, and began.

  “When Barktown burned, Sky-Wound-Round and Falling-Day took the younger children and they went north to Canada to winter with Falling-Day’s people, because there was no food. I wanted to go along with them, but Sarah didn’t. She had been trying to talk me into taking her home to live at Lake in the Clouds ever since we married, and it looked like the right time to go. I couldn’t argue with her anymore. Didn’t want to, really, not with the village wiped out the way it was.”

  Nathaniel turned a little so that he was lying on his side curled around Elizabeth’s length. In the flickering candlelight his features seemed more animated than they really were. She lay with one hand at rest on her abdomen, and he covered it with his own.

  “So we went home, and they took us in. Glad to have us, too. My ma especially had always wanted a daughter and she was pleased with Sarah. That’s what you have to understand about Sarah, she had the gift of making folks love her. There was a childlike quality to her when she was pleased that went to the heart, and I guess that would be the simplest truth: she had a girl’s way of looking at the world and she never learned to settle for less than that.” He paused. “Or to cope with more.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, now. She was a good worker and never shirked, but she could play harder than anybody I ever saw. Learned every song my mother knew in three months’ time, and my mother had an ear for a song. My mother, now, you’d have to understand that she was hard on her own kind, she demanded a lot. But Sarah won her over, and it was the music that built the bond between them.”

  “That’s how she learned Scots,” Elizabeth noted.

  “Aye. They sang together in the evenings.” His voice trailed off, and Elizabeth felt a deep sadness for him.

  “I remember my mother’s voice very clearly,” Elizabeth said. “And it’s still with me after all these years.”

  He had been staring toward the ceiling, but he looked down to Elizabeth. “You haven’t told me much about your mother.”

  “Another time,” she said quietly. “Go on, please.”

  “Well, let’s see. Sarah settled in at Lake in the Clouds real fast. Some in the village weren’t glad to see her and didn’t make her welcome, at first. But when she put her mind to it she could win over anybody. Sometimes I had the feeling that she felt obligated to prove to the world that she could be a Kahnyen’kehàka and a human being, too. The trouble started then, because I like the Kahnyen’kehàka way of life, and she didn’t. We were both young, you see. Young enough to think we could just decide what we wanted to be, that it didn’t take any more than that, the wanting.

  “It went on for a long time before I took real note of what was happening. She wanted to be called Sarah, and if I forgot and called her by her Kahnyen’kehàka name she would get pretty mad. I remember my mother asking once how the Mohawk keep raccoon out of the corn and Sarah just looked at her with a blank face, and then claimed she didn’t remember. And then one day she wouldn’t answer me if I spoke to her in Kahnyen’kehàka, and I suppose that’s when I couldn’t pretend anymore.

  “It was about that time, maybe three years since we had settled down at Lake in the Clouds, that Sky-Wound-Round took his people back to Barktown to rebuild it. Just after the war had quieted down, it was. Schuyler gave them safe passage—the Wolf and the Turtle and a few Bear clan, they went back to the Big Vly in the spring. It was the first Sarah had seen of her mother or her people in all that time. She was glad to see them, no question, but in the end she didn’t want to be there, in the longhouse.”

  “But you did?” Elizabeth asked.

  He said, “I did, at that time. You’re wondering why I wanted to give up my own place and take on her people when I had folks of my own, but I don’t know if I can explain it to you. I guess the only thing I can say is that the life suited me. And I was at that age where I didn’t want to be living under my father’s rule. Now, you might be thinking that we get along fine, and that’s true enough. But I was a son then and now I’m a father myself, and things look different to me.” He shook his head.

  “Sarah got what she wanted, in the end. Not so much because her will was stronger than mine—”

  Elizabeth made a small sound, and he grinned, reluctantly.

  “But because it wasn’t clear we would have been welcome, anyway. Or that I would have been.”

  “Wouldn’t have been welcome?” Elizabeth asked, surprised and more than a little insulted for him. “After all the time you had lived with them?”

  “That’s it, you see. Falling-Day had come back expecting to find her oldest daughter with a child at the breast and she hadn’t ever even shown the signs of starting one. The Kahnyen’kehàka take the business of getting children serious.”
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  “What did Sarah think of this?” Elizabeth asked, because it seemed the safest thing to ask and also because she was truly wondering.

  “I don’t think she much minded, to tell you the truth,” Nathaniel said. “She never held it up to me, never made any complaints. She wanted me, or she wanted Lake in the Clouds. Whichever it was that was more important to her, the result was we didn’t go back to the longhouse.”

  Nathaniel had been talking calmly, this story with all of its threads unraveling evenly. But there was a pause now, and Elizabeth thought that if she relieved him of the responsibility, he would just stop and turn inward. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and sighed.

  “Well, I was angry. Although I wouldn’t admit it to anybody, even myself. I didn’t like the way things were going, and I didn’t like Sarah much for keeping me there, and I suppose I blamed her for not getting with child, unfair as that was. So I started spending more time in the bush. Went farther afield every time I went out, and stayed away as long as I could. Spent the season up here trapping with Robbie the winter of ’82, didn’t get home until the spring. With a fine lot of furs to show for my trouble but with a hatful of guilt, too, for leaving Sarah alone for so long. Robbie had done some talking to me.”

  Elizabeth had an image that was very real to her, of a younger Nathaniel, moodier and ill at ease with himself, spending long evenings in Robbie’s company. She could well imagine that Robbie had talked to him, sparing him little truth, but doing it gently.

  “He sent you home to Sarah,” she concluded for herself.

  There was a grim look to Nathaniel’s smile. “That he did, with as much good advice as he could stuff into my head.”

  “But it didn’t work?”

  “It might have,” Nathaniel said. “I was willing to make some compromises at that point. But no, it didn’t work.”

  “Because?” Elizabeth prompted, gently.