I glance back the way we came and can scarce make out the path, though there’s a glint of the water in the Narrows. Black as mica. Other than that, it seems that if I squeeze between the brush and stone, it’s safe enough to shed the layers. Each petticoat a relief to lose, until I’m only in my overskirt and shirt, no longer stifling in all the material. The cool air from the undergrowth twists up my bare legs.
He takes the quiver and the folded clothes from me, then scrambles through the hedge. With a shift of my shoulders, and a wince at the tear of cloth along a shoulder seam, I just fit through the bushes and find myself in a small cave—a triangular space constructed from the collision of the boulders above. The space is quite long, with a pierce of sun at the far end. I can’t raise my head fully, but keep it cocked to the side, and sit down on a small rag rug that is gritty with fine silt.
Toby crouches in front of me. He lays the bow and the quiver of arrows near my hip. “This is the fort,” he whispers. The words don’t carry any farther than the space between us, the rock dampening the sounds rather than echoing them back as I would expect.
He crawls farther into the black and drags back a wicker basket, then tips back the hinged lid. He looks up at me with wonder, then digs into the crate and presents each item to me.
“What is all this?”
“It’s for when we need to hide.” He shrugs. “Or sometimes just to nap.”
“You and Alice?” My foot has gone to sleep; I shift it out straight.
A tin of yams.
Two tins of tomatoes.
A can of pudding. A square one of loose black tea.
Two mugs.
Can opener.
Four bottles of cider.
Two boiled-wool blankets.
He unbuckles a rucksack and removes a wallet. The leather is cracked and scored with Father’s initials. He unsnaps the coin case and takes care with removing the contents.
Three bullets.
He sets them in a line on the rug, closes the wallet, and gives it to me.
Then he reaches again and lays a small pistol at my knee.
A derringer.
Snub-nosed, the barrel engraved with vines. I stare at it, then pick it up by the wood grip. Turn the barrel to the wall and check to make certain the chamber is empty. “Where would she get this?”
He shrugs.
I think back to Father, to his adamance on keeping firearms from the house. Just a pistol locked to the top drawer of his bed chest. I’d only seen it used when his horse shattered a pastern. “You will watch,” he said. “There is no cruelty in mercy.”
His hand shook as he put the nose of the gun to the horse’s head. Then his hand steadied, and he locked his gaze with the animal’s and shot.
I shift the gun back to the rucksack. Push it to the bottom, under a soft wool scarf.
Toby takes up the wallet. Puts the three bullets to the case. “You can’t tell anyone. It’s only for emergencies. No one else can know. Now you know, but she said you were supposed to. In case.”
“She talked to you?”
“Yes.”
“Aloud?”
I can’t breathe. My stomach twists as I look at him. I reach to grab his sleeve. “What did she sound like?”
“Like Alice.”
“Did she talk to anyone else?”
He twists his arm until the shirt fabric pops free, then starts to pack everything away. “She didn’t get here the last time. We weren’t fast enough. Mama caught us and Alice got in trouble. And then Papa took her away. He said she would be back soon, but I knew it wasn’t the truth.”
“How . . .”
“She said you’d come and not to be afraid.”
“Not be afraid of what, Toby?”
“The Bad Ones. From the pond.”
I shake my head, so frustrated at Alice’s obsessions. “She thought they were in your room. You were escaping. Out the window.”
I blow out a breath. Alice thought she was saving him. By dropping him from a second-floor window. Alice was a danger.
He drops the crate’s top and slides it back behind a pile of stones. “You can’t tell anyone about the fort.”
“I won’t.”
He sits back on his haunches, rummaging in his trouser pocket for his knife, then holds the point to the tip of his index finger. “Blood swear.”
“Oh, Toby—”
But he makes a quick slice, curling his finger toward his palm to keep the small bead of blood balanced on the tip. “Blood swear.”
I shift forward on my knees and take the small knife. With an intake of breath, I cut my own, then hold it out to him. We touch fingers, then I pull back and blow on the cut to dry it. “That stings.”
He sucks on his finger, nods, shakes it in the air. “That’s so you remember it.”
Chapter Fourteen
We walk away from the fort along another path, this one well traveled, used to move a cart from the woodlot to the Runyons’. Brittle leaves and bark husks line the sides. Toby stomps through them and then runs to the other edge to do it again.
I press my thumb to my fingertip where we made the blood oath that Toby no doubt has now forgotten in the glee of crushing leaves. He runs ahead. Stops when he reaches a certain distance from me, looking back and waiting until I am closer before charging off to stamp and twirl again.
He stands at the fork in the path between the Runyons’ and our own house.
“This way,” I call and point down the way to the Runyons’.
We follow the stone fence, passing fallow land, then a low-slung barn for Abel Runyon’s dairy cows. The smell of slop and hogs comes as we trek past the central pens and round to the front of the farmhouse proper. It is solid plank wood, long and low, house flowing into barn.
I brush a leaf from Toby’s hair and knock upon the front door.
Essa Runyon answers, leaning one shoulder to the doorframe. She bounces Frederick Hiram up and down upon her hip and looks over my shoulder from the farmhouse steps to the road. “Something wrong with the sheep?”
“No, not at all. We were just, well, my nephew and I wondered if—”
“Ach, Freddie.” She winces, tugging her hair from his fist and then swatting his arm. “You know not to pull.” Then she looks at me, her eyes narrowed to near slits in her wide face. “Did you get where you needed?”
My skin flushes hot as I recall how she and her husband had found me stumbling along the road. “Yes. I did.”
“Good, then.” The baby’s bare legs swing round and kick into her thighs. She slides him to her other hip and looks down at Toby. “You’re Lydia’s little one.”
Toby snaps his attention from the baby to her.
I put a hand to his shoulder. “This is Toby.”
“I knew you when you were a mite. You still are on the smallish side, aren’t you?”
He fingers the grip on his bow. “I’m eight.”
“Well, you are, aren’t you. Been a long while since a Snow came for a proper visit.” Frederick sticks a finger to her ear. “Might as well come for a sit, then. Give me a conversation that’s more than blubbers and burps.” She pushes the door wider and ambles back inside. “You can leave your bow and arrow at the door.”
The kitchen, like the rest of the house, is dark wood with low ceilings of hewn beams. One square window with square panes lets in a modicum of light but no air.
Mrs. Runyon lowers Frederick to a rocker bed and pushes it with her toe. He wiggles his fingers and watches her with his black bead eyes as she opens an icebox and takes out a glass jar. “Got plum preserves.” I take it from her and give Toby a quick wave to take a seat on the bench.
She grabs a stack of plates from a shelf and sets them to the gingham tablecloth. “Hope you like biscuits.”
“Thank you.” I sit next to Toby, back to the window, wishing it open. “It’s been a hot summer.”
“As summers are.” She clatters the teapot on the stove, then opens the cast-iron door
to poke at the log. “We’ll have some coffee, then.”
Toby stares down at the baby. “He’s very large.”
Mrs. Runyon tips her head and barks out a laugh. “That he is.”
“We wonder, Toby and I, if you might still have one of your boys’ old bow and arrows. And if we may borrow them.”
She stretches her mouth in thought, then nods. “Going boar hunting soon, Toby?”
He frowns. “No.”
“They’d be on you before you got the arrow nocked.” Then she puts her palm to the table. “It’d be you I’d serve here instead of the hog.” Her laugh is broad and loud enough to stir the baby. He smiles, pink gums glistening, then shrieks and bellows. Essa clamps her mouth and stares at him until he quiets and sticks his thumb to his mouth to chew.
The room is almost too hot to sit in. Essa serves the biscuits, a heap for each plate, and then pours the coffee into our mugs. Toby’s looking both sallow and red. He picks at the biscuit in front of him and pushes the crumbs under his thumb and across the last of the preserves on his plate. Frederick is asleep, one finger to his cheek and his mouth moving with some dream. Essa leans forward, elbows on the table and cup in her hand, nothing fancy about her. She bites at her lip and pulls it through her teeth. She’s one of the plainest women I’ve ever met, but it suits her, as if she never wanted any fuss and bother.
“The boys?” I inquire. Tommy and Samuel. They would be fifteen and sixteen now. Lucky enough to have escaped the war.
She takes a drink of her coffee and puts the cup down. “Out at Widow Humphrey’s with Abel. She’s got those New Hampshire gilts he’s been eyeing. Good stock.”
“Hm. Yes.”
She stares at me and leans back in her chair.
I press my hands to my chest. “I confess I don’t know anything about pigs.”
“No. No, I think not. Not a Snow thing to be knowing about.” She takes another drink and studies Toby. “There’s rabbits out back. In the hutch. If you want to give them a visit.”
“Can I?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Just out and to the right,” Essa says.
He scrambles from the bench seat and is out the door. Frederick gurgles and arches his back, then smacks his lips and is quiet.
“Only time he sleeps. All night, I’ve got to walk in circles to keep him from shattering all our ear drums.” She toes the rocker again, and we watch him twitch his fingers, then settle to sleep. “None for you?”
“I couldn’t.” It is the easiest answer.
“Well.”
I smile at her, then return to watching the baby.
“Toby looks just like his mother. Dainty fine, like he’ll break.”
“He doesn’t remember her. That’s what Cathy says.”
“Mayhap what she wishes. But he was old enough. He’ll remember.”
“Yes.”
“Hard thing that. Such an accident. And Alice finding her. No one should go to the Narrows.” She squints at the small window and then drinks the last of her coffee in a gulp. “But your Alice was a good one with the boy. Never saw such attention. They weren’t near ever apart. Come by for the rabbits. Just wanted to pet them. Asked for a rabbit’s foot once. To give the babe. She was never without that boy. Abel saw them in the woods sometimes, and that boy’d be tied up tight to her like a papoose. And then . . . well, we had that fever come through, and the boy was sick, wasn’t he? Alice too.”
“I remember.”
“I think your brother was at wit’s end by then. Just one hard thing after another. Can’t fault him for finding another wife.” She blows a long breath through her nose. “Abel took over some medicine I’d mixed, and your brother was nice as could be and so grateful we’d stopped. Said we didn’t need to look in anymore, they were on the mend. And next time, that woman over there turns her nose at us. Tells us it’s not our concern.” She straightens in the chair. “And I’ve said more than brings good graces. It’s just . . . Lydia came often to look in on us and . . .”
“You were kind to bring the medicine.”
“Most people were afraid, you know.” She slides the biscuit plate closer to me; when I pass on another serving, she covers it with a cloth. “Thought if Alice touched them, they’d be touched the same. Can’t change old ways, can you?” She points over my shoulder to a small sketch tucked in a frame of braided twigs. “Alice drew that up there for us.”
I stand and move closer to the sketch. Essa, with the boys hanging off her lap, sitting at the same table we sit now.
“She gave that in trade for the rabbit’s foot. She’s made me too pretty there, but she got the boys just right.”
“Would you consider visiting me at the house? And perhaps ask the other women? It would mean much to me. To Cathy. We can all start anew.”
She lifts and drops a shoulder. “Well. I suppose we should. Would be Christian, wouldn’t it.”
The door swings open and thunks against the wall. Toby’s shoulders are hunched tight and his breath shallow.
“What is it?” Essa turns in her chair.
“They’re dead.”
The chair scrapes the floor as she stands. She rushes to the landing, then stops, a quick touch to his shoulder. “Stay and watch the babe.”
Essa holds her hand to her mouth and stares at the hutches. “I fed them this morning.” She spins around to take in the yard. One thin trail of blood in the dirt. As if the fox killed them all and only chose one for a meal. The rest lay tumbled atop each other, the red streaks on their fur already dry from the heat. She looks at me. “I just fed them.”
Toby’s arrow flies true and lands with a thunk in the straw. I clap, then shake his hand. “Elbow up. Does the trick, doesn’t it?”
“And thumb to cheek.”
“Yes. All clear?”
He nods from his perch on the front step, and I move across the driveway to the bale set to the stump of the old tree. Better here than across in the field: at worst he’ll only lose another arrow to the hedge rather than an arrow to a sheep’s rump. I tug the arrow free, cock it under my arm, and hop down from the stump, careful to keep clear of the roots that travel the yard. The arrow slips to the ground. Just as I bend to retrieve it, another arrow whizzes past my ear. I scramble away, turning just as it hits the bullseye. The shaft quivers and slows.
“Toby, stop.”
But his mouth hangs open and his bow is on the ground in front of his feet, just as I taught him.
“Well, look at that.”
My gaze snaps to Cathy leaning out a second-floor window.
“I haven’t lost my aim.” She rests her chin in her palm and gives a smug smile.
“You could have hit me.”
“I could have,” she says. “But I didn’t.” Then she grabs the frame and pokes her head out. “You need to practice from many angles, Toby. Did you see that?” Her cheeks flush and she lets out a light laugh. “I’m going to try again. So, stay clear. Stay clear!”
Another arrow flies from the window, a dark shaft against the bell of sky. It lands within a hairsbreadth of the first and is followed by a hurrah.
“Don’t move from the stairs.” I bound up and into the house. I catch Cathy moving from Toby’s room across to her sewing room. I take the stairs two at a time and round onto the landing. She leans the bow against the wall and sets three arrows atop a long table. Then she flicks back a linen curtain.
“What the hell are you doing?”
She glances over her shoulder at me and dips her hip like a coquette. But she doesn’t answer, just pulls up the window before grabbing an arrow and maneuvering the bow out the window. She nocks and aims. “Stay clear!”
By evening, Lionel has joined. A happy trio mangling paper targets. Lionel stands just to the side of Cathy, his hand caressing her arm, his whispers making her blush. Then his hand drops down her bodice and pauses on her backside before stepping away to let her shoot.
She is better than good. She is b
etter than Lydia. Showier, annoyingly so. Lydia was patient and quiet, never curtseyed nor flounced.
Lionel’s eyes are half lidded as he follows her movements. He smiles and swaggers near to her, then away, wooing and flirting. It takes Toby jumping and pulling his father’s arm to garner attention. But it is given extravagantly, with Lionel intent on every word his son says. A hand cupped to the back of the boy’s head and thumb circling a caress.
I wander the dining room, window to window, just out of view of the happy family in the yard. The sun is near to set, the sky a dusty purple as the last of the day burnishes the tips of the trees and the rusted weathervane on the old barn across. A pop of red bursts from a silver maple. A scarlet tanager. Cathy lifts and aims, following the arc of the bird as it crosses the yard and grazes the hedge.
I step to the glass and rap. She turns, arm and arrow still aimed to the sky. She says something I can’t hear and pivots away, releasing the arrow as she moves. It slices the outer edge of the straw and drives into the dirt, the acceleration enough to bury half the shaft.
She makes a pirouette, hand twirling, and bows deep before strutting to the arrow and then pulling and tugging like a mime before giving up. With a pout and drop of her shoulder, she places her palms together and pleads for Lionel to help. He gives her a kiss, leans to the arrow, and pulls it out.
Then he jogs to the windows, cupping his palm to the glass and peering in at me. “Come out,” he calls.
I pull up the window and spread my hands to the frame. “Best five out of ten at forty yards?” I ask.
“Make it sixty.” Cathy’s already measuring off the yards with long strides to the road. “Then we have a game.”
“I think we might be in trouble,” Lionel murmurs as he watches her mark the way. “Whatever you do, don’t make a bet.”
Chapter Fifteen
Cathy won’t let us forget she beat us. She swings her foot in church, fanning herself before turning to me with a twist of a grin and mouthing “I won.”
I smack the side of her thigh, point my nose to her psalm book. “You’re in the wrong place.”
Her eyebrow arches and drops. She flicks the fan and gives great attention to the sermon.
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