The Endless Forest

by Sara Donati

  “You what?”

  “As women wi a speck o sense talk of sic things before the travail starts,” she said with a hint of her old spirit. “Mind me, man. Will ye do as I ask?”

  “No,” Luke said. “Because you’ll come through this. You will come through this.”

  “Ordering me aboot,” Jennet said. “As ever. I will do my best, but ye mun promise.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “Then leave me tae my work. But kiss me first, before ye go.”

  It was a full minute after Luke had closed the door behind himself before Elizabeth could trust her voice enough to speak.

  “What do you need me to do?” she asked Hannah.

  “Talk to me,” Jennet said, answering for her sister-in-law. “Tell me the story of the first time ye saw Luke.”

  Hannah turned suddenly. She said, “Oh, I can do better than that. Look Jennet. I found this letter you wrote me more than twenty years ago when Luke first came to stay with you at Carryck.” She pulled it from her apron pocket. “I think it would make you laugh to hear your first opinion of the man who got you on your back—”

  “Hannah!” Ma sounded truly shocked and so was Birdie. Curiosity laughed out loud.

  “Oh, I hope you do want to hear it,” Curiosity said. “Because I surely do.”

  When the next contraction had passed, Jennet blew a damp hair out of her face and agreed that, yes, it would divert her to hear that letter read aloud. Elizabeth opened it and adjusted a candle.

  She read:

  “Now that your half brother and his mither have settled in at Carryckcastle, I suppose it’s time I keep my promise and write and tell what there is to say. Truth be tolt, tis no an easy task. Ye’ll want to hear guid tidings, and there’s little comfort in the tale I’ve got to tell.

  “He’s a slink mannie, is Luke. Tall and braw and bonnie, and slee as a fox. Cook calls him luvey and bakes him tarts wi the last o the pippins. The Earl bought him a mare the likes o which ye’ll no see in all Scotland, as black as the devil and that smart too. The lasses come up the brae—”

  Jennet drew in a long gasping breath in response to something Curiosity was doing. Then she said, “Go on, please.”

  “The lasses come up the brae for no guid reason but to sneiter and bat their eyelashes at him, and then run awa when Giselle catches sight o them. Even my mother smiles at Luke for all she looks daggers at me and makes me wear shoes….”

  The scream started low and spiraled up. Elizabeth dropped the letter and positioned herself behind Jennet to support her shoulders, and it took all her strength to steady her.

  Hannah was talking to everyone at once. Just a moment more and Yes, see here and Curiosity, do you and Take a deep breath.

  It was not meant for her, but Elizabeth took a deep breath even as Jennet went limp in her arms.

  “It’s all right,” Hannah said. “She’s just fainted. Curiosity?”

  “Just another inch, and—there. Jennet!”

  Jennet stirred, and Elizabeth took a rag from the bowl beside her and ran the cool water over the younger woman’s mouth.

  “Wake up now,” Curiosity said. “It’s time to have this baby. The next contraction you got to push for all you worth.”

  Jennet nodded wearily, leaned forward with Elizabeth’s help, and took the rope made of braided linen and tied to the bedpost.

  “It’s starting,” Hannah said. “Now.”

  Jennet heaved a deep breath and pushed, and with that brought a son into the world.

  Much later, when spirits were high and Luke had come in to sit with his wife and youngest child, Elizabeth remembered the letter. She found it under the bed and held it out to him.

  He looked up from his examination of the infant’s crumpled red face. “What is that?”

  “Read this aloud to her,” Elizabeth said. “I think you’ll both appreciate it.”

  Luke began to read, almost reluctantly at first, and then with growing interest. When he had reached the point where Elizabeth stopped, Hannah and Curiosity turned toward him to listen.

  “I must be fair and report that Luke is a hard worker and there’s naught mean-spirited in him, but he’s an awfu tease and worse luck he’s guid at it, in Scots and English both. I’ll admit that he’s no so donnert as he first seems, for all his quiet ways. It would suit me much better were he witless, for my father has decided that since my guid cousin kens French and Latin (taught to him by his grandmother in Canada, he says, and what grandmother teaches Latin, I want to know?) I must learn them too, never mind that I speak Scots and English and some of the old language too, having learned it from Mairead the dairy maid. But the Earl would no listen and so I sit every afternoon wi Luke, no matter how fine the weather. And just this morn I heard some talk o’ mathematics and philosophy, to make my misery complete.

  “He’s aye hard to please, is Luke, but when he’s satisfied wi my progress, he’ll talk o Lake in the Clouds, and then it seems to me that he misses the place, despite the fact that he spent so little time wi ye there. And he tells outrageous stories o trees as far as a man can see and hidden gold and wolves that guard the mountain and young Daniel catching a rabbit wi his bare hands, and then I ken that he’s a true Scott o Carryck, for wha else could tell such tales and keep a straight face all the while? But my revenge is this: I wear a bear’s tooth on a string around my neck, and he has nothing but the scapular my father gave him when first he came and took the name Scott.

  “I’m sorry to say that I canna like your brother near as much as I like you. But tell me this, as you’re as much my cousin as is Luke, do ye no think it’s time for me to visit ye in Paradise? Perhaps the Earl would let me come, if your grandfather were to ask him.”

  Luke put the letter down and laughed out loud. Then he leaned over and kissed Jennet soundly.

  “I had no idea you started your campaign to leave Scotland so early,” he said. “Or that you were scheming even then to get away from me. That’s one trick you’ll never master.”

  “I didn’t mean it, even then,” Jennet said. “But then you knew that.”

  “Of course I did,” Luke said. “Of course.”

  67

  Jim Bookman was a good neighbor and a respected magistrate, well liked except by those who would not or could not stay out of trouble. Bookman wasn’t afraid to use his fists or his weapons; and he was all too willing to drag troublemakers off to the small gaol he kept, nothing more than a lean-to built up against his cabin. In the Red Dog the regulars liked to tell stories about Bookman’s militia days, and they often debated what he would do were he to come face-to-face with a crime that called for hanging. Some thought he would string up the offender without a qualm or hesitation, while others claimed he would restrain himself and drag the culprit off to Johnstown. He was a law-and-order type, for all his years on the frontier and in the bush.

  Daniel and Blue-Jay had served under him in the militia and they had seen him fight, but they kept those stories to themselves, out of simple respect and because the conversations at the Red Dog amused them.

  Uz Brodie, who served as Bookman’s unofficial sheriff and stand-in, had fought in the same war, but on the other side of the border. A fact that nobody seemed to remember at all, which was all you needed to know about him, Daniel’s father had said more than once. There wasn’t a British bone in the man’s body, and he was quick to help a neighbor.

  The idea that these two would have the running of the hearing was the only thing that could keep Daniel’s worry within bounds. And still he was preoccupied enough that Martha had to call his name more than once.

  They were picking strawberries, so fragrant and full of juice that their hands were stained a deep red.

  “The idea is to have something to take to Jennet,” Martha reminded him. “Which means you should stop eating every berry you pick.” She was short with him, and had been since she woke. When Betty came to start the day’s chores Martha had found it hard to speak even a
whole sentence, though Betty brought the news that Jennet was safely delivered of a son.

  “They’ve named him after his father,” Betty said. “Luke Alasdair Scott Bonner. And why a boy needs so many names, that I’ll never understand.”

  At that Martha just walked away.

  Betty was a Ratz and so she knew more about short tempers than most; in fact, Daniel realized, she probably didn’t recognize Martha’s temper for what it was. In any case she went about her business as cheerfully as ever.

  Part of the problem was that Martha didn’t want to go to the hearing at Lake in the Clouds; she had made that clear enough. She had also made it very clear that she would go, no matter how many logical reasons Daniel offered to stay away.

  He picked up his pace, and resisted the urge to remind her that they needn’t visit Jennet and her newborn today either. Tomorrow would be soon enough, or the day after.

  The trick, his father had told him, was to know when to let a woman be mad because she had a right to it. This was one of those times.

  They saddled the horses and by ten they were crossing the bridge into the village. It was a perfect summer’s day, not yet hot enough to be uncomfortable, and it seemed that everyone was out of doors. A good number of those were cleaning up after the Fourth of July party, laughing and talking among themselves as they worked. When Martha passed they paused and then dropped their gazes.

  So word had spread, then, as they had known it must. He wondered how many of them would come to Lake in the Clouds this afternoon. Baldy and Missy O’Brien would be the first through the door, no doubt. Set on getting their names on the record and making as big a fuss as possible.

  Sometimes you have to settle in and wait. That was another piece of advice from his father. What he hadn’t said was, sometimes a man didn’t have a choice.

  What Martha wanted, what she needed most of all, was an hour alone with Curiosity. By the time they got as far as Downhill House, she had worked up the courage to say as much to Daniel, only to discover that she had worried about his feelings for nothing. He was neither hurt nor rejected; on the contrary, he was distinctly relieved. Why she should be irritated with him because she had failed to offend him, that was too confusing a question for the moment.

  Instead she turned her attention to Jennet and her new son, and said all the things that were required of her. She stopped just short of pronouncing him a beautiful child, and Jennet caught her hesitation.

  “He looks like a crabbit auld man,” Jennet volunteered. “With his bald pate and empty gums and that scowl. You’d think he was the one who did all the work.” She had a whole slew of unflattering things to say, but every word was spoken in so soft and caressing a tone that the baby only blinked at her, entranced already.

  After the little people had been congratulated, Daniel went off to find Luke, and Martha was finally free to seek out Curiosity.

  She found her in her garden, sitting on a low stool and pulling up the first of the carrots. Curiosity smiled her slow smile, the one that said she had been expecting you and she knew why you had come even if you didn’t know yourself.

  In the bright sunlight Curiosity looked her age, and more. Her face was as lined as a map folded a hundred times too many, and there were deep hollows in her cheeks. She looked as tired as Martha had ever seen her, a thought that made the knot in her belly pull tighter. Jemima might be dying, but Curiosity could not.

  Martha said, “Are you unwell?”

  “Help me up,” Curiosity said, holding out one arm. “Let’s you and me talk a while.”

  It took all her self-control to contain herself until Curiosity was settled in the kitchen, and then Martha asked the question again. It earned her only an amused shake of the head.

  “I’m as well as any old woman who spent most of the night at a difficult birthing. Were you wanting to talk about my health? I thought me not.”

  “You heard, then. About last night.”

  “Oh, ayuh, I heard. Nathaniel told me early this morning when he came by to see his newest grandbaby.”

  “He told you about the—” Martha hesitated, and Curiosity sent her a sharp look.

  “About the hearing. Yes, he did. Come on out with it, girl. Say what’s on your mind.”

  “I don’t want there to be a hearing,” Martha said. And in a rush of words she could not have stopped, she said all the things she had been holding back.

  “What good will it do? What earthly good? She won’t admit to anything, and she’ll do her best to draw blood. She’ll be gone within a week, Hannah says. Can’t Levi be satisfied with that?”

  She drew in a long hiccupping breath and realized that her face was wet with tears. Curiosity held out a handkerchief, and Martha took it. Then she bent forward and put her forehead on her knees, and she let the tears come.

  Some minutes later the kitchen door began to swing open and Curiosity made it close again with a single well-aimed shoo! Then she put a hand on Martha’s shoulder and she lowered her voice.

  “You been keeping this all pent up inside you because you afraid what people will think if you let it out. That they’ll think you want to protect your mama, and she don’t deserve to be protected. But that ain’t what got you tied up in knots, is it? You ain’t worried about Jemima’s well-being. You thinking about the last hearing, when you was just a girl. Where they made you sit up there in front of God and man and tell what you knew with your ma looking at you. Ain’t that so?”

  Martha nodded.

  “That was a terrible thing to do to such a young girl, and everybody knew it. They did it anyhow, and all for nothing. Jemima walked away. That must sit like a rock in your belly still today. So it ain’t no wonder that you cain’t abide the idea of another hearing.”

  “What am I going to do?” Martha said. “I can’t stay away and I’ll die if I have to sit there and listen. When they were talking about it last night nobody stopped to ask me. Nobody thought to ask me, and I couldn’t make myself say anything. Levi has a right to know what really happened to his mother, but she won’t leave it at that. You know she won’t.”

  Curiosity made a comforting sound deep in her chest.

  “All last night I was awake wishing she would die right then. Put a stop to everything. Make it all stop. Curiosity.”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should have gone someplace she’d never find me.”

  “I expect it feel like that to you,” Curiosity said. “But you all twisted up in your mind just now. And no wonder.”

  Martha let out a raw laugh. “You’re going to say that you can’t tell me what to do.”

  “Why, no,” Curiosity said. “I’ma tell you exactly what you have got to do. You are going to that hearing. You have to go and hear whatever it is people need to say, your ma included. Because no matter how bad it might be, not being there would be worse. Not knowing is the worst thing of all, because until you know you cain’t put a thing done and let it go. That’s why Levi wants this hearing, and that’s why you have to go too. So you can start to put it all away from you. So you can be free.”

  “I thought I was free,” Martha said.

  “I know you did,” Curiosity said. “You married into a good family, and you got a good man. A strong man. And you was thinking it would be enough to turn your back on what used to be.”

  “You told me this day would come,” Martha said. “But I didn’t really understand what you were saying.”

  “I hoped this day would come,” Curiosity said. “It’s a gift your ma is giving you, and she don’t even know it. She is handing you a key, but you got to be brave enough to take it.”

  Martha felt light-headed and weighed down all at once. “I just want it to be over.”

  “And it will be,” Curiosity said. “Soon enough it will be behind you and you can get on with your life.”

  —

  Because she would have it no other way, Nathaniel took Elizabeth
to talk to Magistrate Bookman about the hearing.

  “I don’t know what you want from the man, Boots. He’s honest, you know that, and he won’t promise you anything.”

  She had on her most resolute look, the one that said she would brook no contradiction. It was not something he saw often. It was not something he wanted to see today.

  “I won’t ask him for promises,” she said. “What I want to do is to make sure he has the official record of what happened at the first inquest. You know what kind of fabrications and exaggerations he will have heard over the years.”

  It was a reasonable enough idea, but Nathaniel had the sense that she had other plans she wasn’t ready to talk about.

  They found Bookman at the Red Dog, surrounded by people who weren’t afraid to ask the most outlandish questions and keep asking them, though they knew they’d never get an answer. When Bookman looked up and caught sight of Elizabeth and Nathaniel Bonner he stopped the talk with a wave of his hand and got up.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said. “A man can’t hear himself think with all this yammering.”

  Missy O’Brien’s face began to twitch in anger, but that didn’t seem to bother Bookman. Instead it seemed to Nathaniel that the magistrate got some satisfaction at having riled her.

  Once outside Bookman turned down a lane that ran between two open pastures, so that they could be seen by anybody who happened to come out of the Red Dog, but not heard.

  For once Elizabeth dispensed with all niceties and came right to the point. She took a thick pile of papers tied with a string out of her basket. The handwriting on the topmost sheet was easily recognizable as Ethan Middleton’s.

  “What’s this?”

  “The full record of the original inquest into Cookie Fiddler’s death.”

  For once Bookman looked taken aback. “O’Brien told me all records had been lost in the flood.”

  “Which is true, no doubt. But I had a second set made at the time. My husband thought I was being overly fastidious—Nathaniel, you must admit you didn’t see the need—but I doubted Mr. O’Brien’s ability to keep such records safe. You must correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect he offered you his memory of the proceedings as fact.”