by Sara Donati
Martha’s back straightened slowly. There was a look on her face that Daniel hadn’t seen from her before: a quiet but forceful anger.
Baldy was saying, “I’ll tell you, I thought you’d have the sense to stay away, after what your ma did. If they find you one morning with your throat slit, it won’t be a surprise.”
Daniel’s hand moved to the knife sheath of its own accord, and O’Brien took a step backward. “I didn’t say Jemima murdered anybody, did I? But she had her ways, yes she did.”
Martha put a hand on Daniel’s arm. “Don’t,” she said. “He may be a blowhard without an honest bone in his body, but he is right about Jemima.”
O’Brien’s mouth fell open to show his teeth, discolored and broken.
“And of course, you knew my mother better than most, didn’t you? You knew Jemima very well.”
There was a moment in which the only sound was the fire in the hearth and the hitch of O’Brien’s breathing. Daniel felt almost as surprised as O’Brien must.
Martha stood there, straight of back, head held high. There was a dignity to her that O’Brien could never touch, and even he seemed to know it. The old man backed away, clutching his hat and muttering under his breath. Then the door closed behind him and the air seemed to go out of Martha. She closed her eyes.
And so Daniel had leave to look at her. Really look at her. The hair that fell around her in a river of color, the sharp line of her jaw and cheek. Strongly marked eyebrows, like wings. Faint lines on her forehead at—how old was she? Nineteen? Twenty? She was pale, but there were shadows around her eyes, like smudges of faint blue ash. She was long of limb, and lithe, and the idea struck him just that easily that he could fall in love with Martha Kirby. That he was well on his way already, and didn’t know how to stop, or even if he wanted to.
20
The spring and summer in Paradise were anything but peaceful, most especially not at the Uphill House, nor the Downhill. Both of them were bursting at the seams with children and thus every day brought a selection of catastrophes small and large. Elizabeth was never happier. She had looked forward all winter to having Luke and Jennet come to stay.
Once or twice Luke had raised the possibility of building a house in Paradise—usually after a rainy day with all nine of the grandchildren together under one roof. It would be a sensible thing to do, he contended, as they spent a good half of their year here—but Elizabeth always found a way to dissuade him. Nathaniel liked having the little people nearby as much as Elizabeth did, and took her side. Jennet kept quiet during these conversations, but she was ready to jump in if things seemed to be swinging Luke’s way. She had no intention of taking on the running of another household.
And now Lily was come home, and Daniel had begun to spend less time alone.
The twins were her own, her firstborn. When Elizabeth first saw Lily standing on the dock with Simon beside her, everything in her had clenched very tight and then, finally, let go. Later she told Nathaniel it felt as if she had been roused from a deep sleep.
She loved every one of the children, but Lily had always been, would always be, the child of her heart. Through the winter Elizabeth had wondered what was bringing them home just at this time; if one of them was ill, or if there were problems between them. Or maybe, she told Nathaniel, it could be that they were homesick. All through the fall and winter she had asked questions that had no answers. Nathaniel listened in his own patient way, maybe because she was putting words to things he felt himself, but couldn’t express.
All those long days and nights of waiting, and then the week in Manhattan and the difficult journey home, in all that time Lily had not spoken of her condition to anyone. She had saved that news for Curiosity and Hannah. In some ways this was perfectly logical; Elizabeth herself had never talked about a baby on the way until the news announced itself to the world.
Elizabeth told herself that Lily simply hadn’t wanted to get her mother’s hopes up. But it did sting that she was not the first to be told. She must admit that at least to herself. She was more like her twin than she would ever admit: Lily would suffer in silence, even should it dearly cost those who loved her best.
The hours Elizabeth spent with Lily were the most important of the day. They talked, it seemed to Elizabeth, without pause, about everything but the child Lily carried, and the ones she had lost. They discussed each of Curiosity’s family members, and the possibility of sending her grandson Markus to a music conservatory in Paris or London. They never seemed to tire of talking about Birdie. They talked about Ethan and Blue-Jay and his new wife, and most of all about Daniel. When they were silent Elizabeth could almost see the words hanging in the air between them, but Lily did not speak them, and she must wait.
Finally Elizabeth took her frustration to Curiosity.
“I was wondering when it would wear you down,” Curiosity said by way of greeting. “Don’t look so surprised, Elizabeth. You never could hide anything you was feeling.”
But for the longest time they sat silently. The questions that she had come to ask were stuck in her throat, though they roamed around her mind freely enough.
She cleared her throat. “All right,” she said. “Tell me.”
Curiosity glanced up at her and then back down at the fleece she was combing.
“I told you already what there is to know about her condition. You think I’d try to hold anything back on you?”
Elizabeth kept her gaze on Curiosity and said nothing.
Curiosity said, “You cain’t take Lily’s trouble on yourself. It ain’t your fault. Something else I been wanting to say to you since she got home—this ain’t the time for you to get all fluttery on the girl.”
Elizabeth jerked up. “Fluttery? Fluttery? When have I ever been fluttery?”
“Now see,” Curiosity said, widening her eyes as if she were surprised. “I knew you was in there some place. Betimes I have got to poke you real hard to make you wake up.”
“I assure you, I am awake.”
“I ain’t so sure,” Curiosity said. “You going to lose your nerve when Lily need you most?”
“I haven’t lost my nerve. I just want to—”
“Fix things. I know you do. And you know you cain’t. What you can do you already doing. You go down there every day and sit with that little girl of yours, and you talk to her and read to her like you do for any of us when we feeling low. You make sure she has got good fortifying food, red meat to feed her blood. When she get restless you distract her.”
“But I’m running out of things to distract her with,” Elizabeth said.
“Far from it. Ask the girl to teach you how to draw.”
Elizabeth barked a short laugh. “Draw? Me?”
“Why not?” Curiosity shrugged. “It’s something she can do that you cain’t. It might help her to remember that her mama ain’t perfect.”
Curiosity had surprised her many times over the years, but for a moment Elizabeth was truly speechless.
“Perfect?” she said finally. “Lily couldn’t think—” She broke off, lost in her thoughts.
After a moment Curiosity said, “You brought six healthy children into this world. The ones you lost were carried off by illness ain’t nobody but the good Lord hisself could fix. Why, you had Birdie when you was almost fifty. There was a time Nathaniel only had to look at you crossways and you fell pregnant.”
To her consternation Elizabeth felt herself blushing.
“How old were you when your mama died?”
“You know the answer to that. I was ten.”
“You still think about her?”
“Every day.”
“You remember how it felt when you done something that disappointed her?”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. She remembered her mother’s voice and her hands and the set of her shoulders. Her features had faded and could only be called back by means of the miniature Elizabeth kept on the table near her bed. But she remembered snatches of conversations, and g
ames played and books read aloud in the nursery at Oakmere. She remembered her mother’s accent and way of speaking, how it had set her apart from everyone—from Elizabeth herself—and how she had tried to sound more like her. And she remembered how easily her mother could deal with Julian when he was frightened or moody.
“I remember a day in July just before she fell ill. It was very hot,” she told Curiosity. “I was wearing a new bodice and it was terribly scratchy, so I was out of sorts. And I—I was cruel to Julian. He came crying about something, and I shook him off, like a fly. And when I turned around I saw my mother standing there, watching. I remember her expression, very sad and disappointed. My stomach lurched into my throat, because I knew I couldn’t take back what I had done. Then she turned away from me and called Julian to her and took him on her lap to comfort him. I was in agony until she came to talk to me, and then I wept as much as Julian had.”
She paused. “Are you saying I need to let Lily weep?”
“Mayhap,” Curiosity said.
Elizabeth walked to the window and stood there for a moment.
“I’d much rather have Lily whole and healthy than have a grandchild. Curiosity.” Elizabeth inhaled very deeply. “Tell me, what are her chances?” The question that kept her awake long into the night.
Curiosity took her time, thinking it through. Elizabeth pressed her forehead to the cold windowpane.
“Lily had a hard time these last years,” Curiosity said. “From what she told, I have got to doubt whether she can bring a living child into this world. But we will do everything in our power to save Lily. You know that we will.”
“I can’t lose her,” Elizabeth said. “I couldn’t bear it.”
Curiosity left her chair and came to stand next to Elizabeth at the window. On the sill Curiosity’s hand looked frail, the skin as thin as silk tissue with age, the joints swollen. Elizabeth’s own hand was chapped from cold and wet, and the first faint old-age freckles were rising up out of her skin to remind her that she was sixty years old. When that thought came to her, she always had the urge to laugh at the absurdity of it.
“Listen to me now.” Curiosity’s voice was low, and the tone familiar. It was the voice she used when she was talking to a woman who had been so long in travail that she was close to giving up.
“Listen close. If that day come, if Lily has got to move on, you will do what you got to do. You be right there beside her to help her go, the same way you brought her into this world. The last thing she see should be the faces of the people who love her best. You know that you will be there to do for her. And she know it too, that’s why she came home.”
A shudder ran through Elizabeth, so that her whole body shook. “You think she expects to die?”
“No,” Curiosity said. “The girl come home because she want to live.”
21
Since Martha’s first eventful outing to the village, Curiosity seemed to find a reason to send her every day, sometimes twice.
Today she was supposed to take a pound of salt, a jar of tea, and a loaf of new bread to Joshua at the smithy. Joshua was Curiosity’s son-in-law and she was always sending little things over to him or to her daughter Daisy. The Hench family lived on the other side of the village up high on the hillside, with three married children in their own small houses in a half circle, like chicks to a hen. Curiosity had bought the land with her own money and then gifted it to her Daisy and Joshua, who had in turned divided it up among those three children who had married on in Paradise.
It had turned cold again, and Martha wore her warmest things. It was good to be out in the open, and she made it down to the village without falling even once. She might run into someone who wished her ill—Alice LeBlanc or Baldy O’Brien were the first names that came to her—but she would do everything in her power to maintain her dignity.
A flock of geese was coming toward her on the lane, waddling with a purpose, propelled by a young girl with a stick and a very serious expression. She dropped her head in shyness or uncertainty before Martha could greet her, much less ask her name. One of the Blackhouse girls, Martha thought, though she couldn’t be sure.
It was a beautifully clear day, and the air was clean and sharp. All around the evergreens were alive with the wind. The faintest smell of spring was in the air, a sweetness that meant the first flush of color was about to show itself, a green so tender that it verged on the color of April butter.
She would be here if it should happen tomorrow or weeks from now. For once that thought didn’t upset her. Martha still woke in the morning expecting to see her room in the house on Whitehall Street, but the disappointment that followed didn’t last through the day, as it once had.
The turn in her state of mind had come the very day she sent the packet with Teddy’s pearl ring and watched until the post rider disappeared.
And if the weather were to turn wintery again? Would her spirits survive that?
Blizzards in late April were not all that rare. As a girl she had feared such storms, because they kept her indoors with Jemima. As she had been the day that Callie’s mother walked past the kitchen windows, heading up the mountain and into a blizzard dressed as though she were going to see a neighbor on a Sunday afternoon in May.
A court of law could not find Jemima guilty of murder, but her neighbors had their own way of seeing things and an older, much bloodier understanding of the law. Jemima had not reached out to stop Dolly Wilde from walking into the storm, nor had she allowed Martha to go after her. A bullet would have been kinder, people had said.
Today there was no snow, but it might come. All around the forests seemed untouched, untouchable. Waiting for winter’s last breath.
As she came into the village proper the sound of voices and saws and hammers came up from the river. The building of the new bridge was something that interested everybody and there would be onlookers. No place for Martha, at least not yet.
As she passed the schoolhouse something caught her attention. Martha stopped to study it for a moment and realized that someone had painted a neat black line on the wall of the schoolhouse, about a foot in length and considerably higher than Martha’s line of sight. Six feet, four inches high, declared the writing below it. There was verse too. Her curiosity got the better of her and she went closer, up on tiptoe, to read it.
To this high point the flood water reached
when the hundred-year water breached
the banks of the mighty Sacandaga.
∼Anno MDCCCXXIV∼
Standing as she was, she sensed rather than saw someone coming to the window just above her and to the right.
Daniel, of course.
Martha held very still, studying the verse on the wall and waiting for him to turn away.
They had seen each other many times since the unhappy episode with Baldy O’Brien at the Red Dog. She always smiled and nodded; Daniel smiled and inclined his head. Quite often he ate his dinner or his supper at his mother’s table and sometimes stayed into the evening to sit in the parlor and talk. The evening visits were great fun. Every one of the Bonners was an excellent storyteller, and sometimes they would sing or Elizabeth would read aloud from books that her cousins sent her from England and Manhattan. Twice Simon had carried Lily all the way from the village so that she could sit with all her family at once. On those evenings every one of the Bonners did their best to make her laugh, Daniel most especially.
Martha found it was hard not to let her eyes follow him around the room.
At night these short meetings kept her awake and sermonizing to herself. Really, did she mean to make a fool of herself mooning over Daniel Bonner? What kind of weak-willed person was she? She had been engaged to marry Teddy just weeks ago and now her head was full of someone else. It would simply not do.
But still, if she heard Daniel’s name raised in a conversation she could not help but stop and listen. Sooner or later someone would notice, and her reputation would be compromised once and for all.
&nb
sp; And now Daniel Bonner was standing there watching her. Martha recited to herself a list of facts: He was ten years her senior; he was a veteran of the last war, and a schoolteacher. He was without the use of his left arm, but he managed well enough. He could have any unmarried woman he wanted. He was friendly but not overbearing, and she could not predict what he might say or do, from one moment to the next.
Most of all: He was a Bonner, and she was Jemima’s daughter, the granddaughter of Moses Southern, whose sins against the Bonners were too many and too awful to contemplate.
Now he stood there in the window, motionless. She determined to turn away, but instead stood there, looking at him from the corner of her eye. His shirt was plain homespun, soft with washing. The right sleeve was folded up neatly to just below the elbow. His weak arm was kept close to his side by a sling made of doeskin. His hair was shorn very short, and he was clean shaven.
From Amanda Spencer, Martha had learned that calm could be won by nothing more than deep breathing. Deeply and slowly, no matter how dire the situation. Now she took three very deep breaths and turned toward the livery to complete her errands.
“Martha!”
Another very deep breath, and she pivoted. Daniel had opened the window with its new glass panes and leaned out toward her.
She called out, rather than come any closer. She said, “I was just admiring your verse.”
“Not mine.” He looked like he was going to laugh at the idea. “That’s Birdie’s composition. Simon painted it for her.”
“With Birdie’s close supervision, no doubt.”
“Exactly. Where are you off to?”
Where was she off to? For a moment she couldn’t remember.
“Ah, the livery,” she said finally. “Curiosity sent me down to bring some things to Joshua. And then I was going to see Callie.”
“You never sit still.”
She looked away. “I like to be busy.” And: “I should be on my way.”