by Sara Donati
Yesterday Callie had believed the same of herself; she was alone in the world but for a stepsister who had once been her best friend but who had grown distant and unfamiliar. Today she had a brother. A half brother, it was true, but still, a human being of her blood. Her father’s son. A handsome boy, with bright eyes and a good smile, strongly built and quick. Somehow or another, he had survived Jemima, where their father had not. She had broken Nicholas Wilde like a dry twig over her knee, but the boy—the boy was made of stronger stuff.
When the clock chimed half past midnight, Callie got out of bed. By touch she found her clothes and in a matter of minutes she was closing the house door behind herself.
It was the kind of night she liked best, full of wayward breezes and sudden smells. The sky overhead was crowded with stars that lit her way from the porch steps to the path, from the path through the kitchen garden to the lane. It felt good to be barefoot after a day in shoes; the earth was still vaguely warm, reluctant to give up the last of the previous day’s sun.
Every window at the Red Dog was dark, including the one that had been her own just a few nights ago. Where Jemima slept next to her most recent husband.
Most likely the boy would be in the little parlor that opened off the bedchamber, on a trundle bed. Jemima would want him nearby, within reach. She guarded her possessions closely, no matter how she had got them.
Finally Callie turned away, speaking harsh words to herself, words like patience and fortitude. Words a preacher might use, standing in front of his congregation. She had no use for preachers or churches, but she knew the value of self-control.
She headed for the orchards almost without thought, her feet taking her where she needed to be. The only place she could really think; the one place she belonged. The idea that her home was now a small house on the Johnstown road was too ridiculous to credit. She would come back to the orchards. Ethan would rebuild the house and she would live there, with or without him.
She was sorry, suddenly, that she hadn’t taken the time to talk to Levi before she went to Johnstown with Ethan. What had she been thinking, to go off without a word and leave him to care for the animals and everything else? She had been able to run away and escape Jemima because Levi was there to look after things.
She had let her time be taken up with far less important things, visits with neighbors who came to satisfy their curiosity and wish them well; an awkward conversation with the Thicke sisters about how she wanted the meals to be handled and the washing to be done. Things that had never interested her, and would never interest her: she had given them a free hand and the distinct impression that she didn’t care to be asked about any of it.
Through all that, she had meant to come to the orchards, but time had slipped away and then came word from Martha: The boy was at the schoolhouse.
She forgot about everything else. This was what she had wanted, a chance to see the boy without Jemima nearby. She had been so wound up in the idea of a brother that she had never given a thought to Levi, who would have an opinion on this matter. Levi’s history with Jemima was as bad as her own.
Levi slept as little as she did, and so Callie took a chance. She ran most of the way and stopped when she was near enough to see a thin ribbon of light around the one shuttered window of Levi’s cabin. She called, and in a moment the door opened.
He came out on the porch and stood there quietly, looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” Callie said. “I should have come yesterday. I’m sorry.”
He said, “Let’s go set.”
When she was a girl he would have invited her to sit right there on his little porch while they talked about work to be done, but that had stopped when she turned sixteen. Wasn’t seemly, he told her. People might get the wrong idea. It seemed silly to her still today; his mother Cookie had raised her, and Levi was much like an older brother. Then Cookie died, and Levi’s brother went to Johnstown and married there, but Levi had stayed behind to work the orchards. How anyone could think badly of him was a mystery to her. He was a big man, that was true, and his skin was very black, but he was also acknowledged to be one of the hardest-working men in a hundred miles, generous, soft-spoken, and so good with animals that folks came to him with sick cows and goats and horses.
They sat on stumps just outside the cider house double doors, as was their habit. It took a lot of weather to chase them inside.
“It was a sudden thing,” she told him. “We decided to do it so Jemima couldn’t make a claim on this place.”
Levi was quiet for a long time.
She said, “It doesn’t change anything. As soon as I can rebuild the house, I’ll be moving back here. There’s money for that now; we won’t have to wait. And oh, there’s a whole wagonload full of supplies coming. Wait ’til you see.”
When he turned his head to look at her, she could make out nothing untoward in his expression.
“Mister Ethan is a good man,” he said finally.
Callie sighed with relief. “Yes, he is.” She let her eyes wander over the saplings, though that very act made her heart race with fear.
“How is it?”
She didn’t need to be specific; Levi knew exactly what was on her mind.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll tell you this for sure, there ain’t an apple tree in all God’s creation better looked after.” And then, more softly: “Won’t be many days now before she blossoms.”
The apple blossom days had always been her favorite, second only to the harvest and far better than any holiday. This spring she had been hoping for fruit from three of the Bleeding Hearts; sometimes she could forget, for a little while at least, about the true depths of her loss.
“Did you tell your husband about the Bleeding Heart?”
She started to hear Ethan called her husband, but more disturbing still was the knowledge that she had not even considered telling him the secret. Could not imagine telling him.
“I didn’t,” she said. “And I won’t.”
“Why not?”
She looked Levi directly in the eye. “I suppose I’m being superstitious, but I want to keep it between the two of us. Does that seem odd to you?”
“No,” Levi said. “That make perfect sense to me.” His expression relaxed a little, and Callie had the urge to leave things just where they were. But she couldn’t, in good conscience.
“You know about Jemima.”
There was the slightest stirring from him. A tightening of muscles that came and went almost instantly. As seldom as this subject came up over the years, Levi’s reaction was always the same. He went from quiet to silent, and nothing could make him talk about Callie’s stepmother.
“I’m sorry to have to say any of this, but do you remember, was she pregnant when she went away from here?”
In the silence she knew that they were both reliving those few difficult months when Levi had lost his mother and Callie had lost everything.
She cleared her throat. “She brought the boy back here. He’s here. I saw him, Levi. I talked to him. I think—I know that he’s my half brother. When you see him, you’ll know it right away too.”
Levi stood very slowly, his arms hanging straight at his sides. He said, “I got no interest in seeing that woman’s child, and neither should you.”
Callie stood too, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her hands. “Levi, he looks like my father. He looks just like my father, and—”
“Miss Callie,” Levi interrupted her. “Let me tell you plain and you listen to me now. She playing games with you. She want you to let that boy close so she can get close her own self. Don’t you be took in. Don’t let her do it.”
Levi turned without another word and walked away into the dark.
47
Martha had always considered herself a composed person, not easily overwhelmed by stressful or demanding situations.
It was a characteristic that she valued in herself and in others, but over the course of the next ten days, she
came to believe that she had overestimated her skills. She was a new bride in a new household, teaching for the first time and dealing with the sudden and unwelcome reappearance of her mother and the boy who was supposed to be her brother. It was a great amount to deal with all at once, but long conversations with Daniel and the rest of the family had been helpful. It would not be pleasant when she finally had to face Jemima, but she could manage, when the time came.
Except it didn’t. A week after Jemima had first come to Paradise, Martha had still not seen her, nor had she had any other kind of communication. Every day she went into the village to teach, fully expecting to come face-to-face with her mother. Every day her mother stayed away.
There were reports of her. Mr. and Mrs. Focht ate their meals in the common room at the Red Dog, and went walking every day after dinner and supper both. Young Nicholas was often with them. They spoke to no one. Becca conducted all business through the Fochts’ servants, who were utterly polite and efficient.
All of this made Martha supremely uneasy, but there was more.
Oddly enough, she saw nothing of Callie either. There were a dozen excuses, but in the end it was impossible to deny the truth: Callie was avoiding her.
If not for Daniel’s calm support, Martha thought she might have given in to anxiety and gone into hiding as Callie had. But she was newly married, and married into the large and complex Bonner clan, which turned out to mean that she had no opportunity to indulge in worry and self-pity.
She had a household to manage, something she had not thought about at all. Within a day she had to laugh at her own temerity. A house on a mountainside more than two miles from the nearest neighbor—and uphill miles, at that—had nothing to do with a town house on Broadway with a dozen servants and daily calls by the butcher and baker and dairyman. To her immense relief, Daniel seemed to realize what would be required before she did, and so he arranged for Betty Ratz to come up from the village every morning, bringing new bread and a bucket of milk with her. While they were teaching, Betty cleaned and washed and kept an eye on the puppy, who was too much of a distraction to take into the classroom every day.
Teaching turned out to be not quite so hard as she had feared, but those five hours from nine to twelve and one to three drained her of every ounce of energy. She was always ravenously hungry and ate until she was satisfied, and still the waistband on her skirts was looser. It was all the walking up and down the mountainside, she told Daniel.
“Is that what you want to call it now?” he asked, and ducked before she could swat him.
She really did need to get more sleep, she told herself every morning. But then when she climbed into bed at night her body responded to Daniel’s without hesitation. That was another, newer kind of hunger that could hardly be stilled. She would catch sight of Daniel talking to a student, and her whole being flushed with need so that she had to turn away and use all her powers of concentration to remember what four times four made.
The children were very good at distracting her. They were full of stories that erupted with no warning. Martha knew she should be teaching them about self-discipline and the rules of polite discourse, but they were so earnest and their stories often so funny that she found it hard. She would only be in the classroom for a few weeks, after all, and the children did seem to be learning something.
Or at least, most of them were learning.
Young Nicholas Wilde fit into the class seamlessly, as biddable and sincere and cheerful a student as she could imagine, but clearly one who might never learn to read or handle calculations beyond the simplest sums. The blessing was that he didn’t seem to see this as a lack in himself, and maybe it was for that reason that the others resisted teasing him for sitting every day with the most basic primer, each time approaching it as if he had never seen it before.
The only reaction Martha had witnessed happened during morning recess when Pete Ratz asked Nick why he couldn’t read at his age. Adam had stepped in immediately to ask why Pete couldn’t throw a ball, and that had led to a competition, one that ended with Nicholas and Henry tied for first place.
The Bonners didn’t like to lose. When it did happen they were gracious in defeat; even the little people had learned that lesson early because their parents and grandparents would tolerate nothing less. But then, Martha suspected, it was easy to be gracious when they so seldom lost.
They had taken Nicholas in as their own, and that was as much protection as any child could hope for.
As tired as she often was, Martha could not even retreat to the empty apartment at the back of the school to sleep during lunch recess, because one of the Bonners was sure to drop by to bring her something or pass on an invitation or ask a question or simply talk. Lily, still confined to her bed, sent notes that Birdie delivered every morning and then waited to hear read aloud. Within days the whole lower class had joined in and the reading of Lily’s letters had become a morning ritual. When Lily heard about this, she started illustrating her notes, so that Martha found herself holding up a sketch of the raccoon who had got his paw stuck in a bottle, or Amelie wrinkling her nose over a bowl of porridge.
The work in the village had finally been finished, which meant very little to her until the afternoon when she and Daniel came home to see that the Bonner men had started building a stable behind their house and would start on the extension to the house itself once she told them what she wanted.
If I only knew, she told her new father-in-law, who laughed and went back to sawing. The next day Ethan brought her a dozen drawings to consider. She might want an addition of one larger room or two smaller ones, a bigger workroom along the rear of the house, or set off at a right angle. Should they dig a bigger cellar? It would be difficult but not impossible. Or would she rather have a springhouse?
Martha took the plans out on the porch to look at them only to discover Gabriel, waist-deep in a hole that would eventually be a well and then, with luck, have a pump, so that she didn’t have to go as far as the stream for water.
“Ethan has got some idea about putting a pump right in the kitchen,” Gabriel told her. “Sounds crazy, I know. You’ll have to be careful or he’ll rebuild the whole house around you.”
On Sunday morning Martha woke very late to the sound of Daniel’s knives thudding as they found their targets. She felt a twinge of irritation, that he should need so little sleep when she felt as though she could spend the whole day where she was in the cool shadows with a breeze washing over her. She had wondered if she would be able to live in such an isolated place and found that she loved the quiet.
She would drift back into sleep if she wasn’t careful, and they were expected at Uphill House for supper. Really she should get up and wash her hair. And she was hungry. All good reasons to get out of bed, but she was so comfortable and more relaxed than she could remember being for a very long time.
Maybe she did drift off again, because she woke to find Daniel standing beside the bed. His hair was tousled and his shirt wet with perspiration, but it was his expression that concerned her.
“What is it?”
“Jemima,” he said. “And her husband. I told them to wait on the porch. Should I send them away?” His tone solidly neutral; he wanted this to be her decision.
Martha pressed her face into the pillow slip for a moment and then slowly, she sat up.
“I think it would be best to get this over with.”
Daniel nodded grimly. “That’s my take on it too.”
“Give me ten minutes,” Martha said.
Daniel said, “Take twenty. They can wait.”
He waited on the porch with their unwelcome, not entirely unexpected visitors, his gaze fixed resolutely on a point in the middle distance. They made no attempt to talk to him and had nothing to say to each other, which alarmed him, oddly enough.
Daniel was patient; he could wait just as he was for hours, as he had done often enough when hunting. He wondered if Jemima had changed so much that she could do the sam
e. She had always been short-tempered and impatient, unable to keep her tongue or her opinion in check. Now she simply sat with her gloved hands folded in her lap and her gaze fixed on her own shoes. There was a look of concentration on her face which struck him as preoccupied.
Time passed and the day grew warmer. Daniel closed his eyes and listened, breathing deeply to find that point where his feelings could be stored away. His job here was to provide support for Martha, which meant he couldn’t lose his temper.
By the time she came out onto the porch, he thought he was almost there.
She was wearing a simple gown of sprigged cotton, and she had wound her hair around her head and covered it with a cap. He hadn’t ever seen the cap before, and decided that it must have come from Manhattan. Maybe from the same milliner who had sold her those awful hats she liked so much.
Daniel stepped up beside her and took her hand. Her skin was clammy.
Jemima and her husband rose.
There was a long moment’s silence while Jemima studied her daughter from head to foot, as if to reassure herself that this was indeed the girl she had borne and raised up. Now a corner of her mouth twitched, whether in satisfaction or distaste was impossible to say, though it made his hackles rise to think she might be finding fault.
Martha’s tone was even. She said, “You wanted to talk to me?”
Jemima drew in a deep breath. “Yes. It is good to see you so healthy and happy.”
She didn’t rise to the bait, and Daniel was glad of it.
“What is your business here?” Martha asked. Her tone still steady and remarkably cool.
“I come to ask a favor of you,” Jemima said.
It was the last thing Daniel had been expecting, but Martha didn’t seem surprised. She said, “Why do you think I would be inclined to do you any favors? You abandoned me to the care of others without a word, and then you appear out of nowhere in Manha—”