by Sara Donati
Look, Curiosity had called, holding up first one and then the other to examine by the light of the rising sun. Look what you made!
The day had been filled with visitors and good wishes, the demands of her own body, the simple needs of the infants. She was tired to the bone, but still Elizabeth looked. She lay on her side, watching the babies sleep. Her children, and Nathaniel’s.
“Boots,” Nathaniel said from the chair before the fire. “You think too hard.”
“I can’t help it,” she said, stretching carefully. “Look at them.”
He put down the knife he had been sharpening and came to her. She had seldom seen him look more weary, or more content. Crouched by the side of the cradle with his hands dangling over his knees, he studied the small forms.
“You did good, Boots, but you need your sleep. They’ll be looking for you again before you know it.”
She nodded, sliding down into the covers. “Yes, all right. But you’re tired, too. Come to bed.”
Now Elizabeth’s attention shifted to Nathaniel. She watched as he shed his buckskins, thinking what she must always think, and always keep to herself: that he was as beautiful to her as these perfect children. The line of his back, the way his hair swung low over the wide span of his shoulders, the long tensed muscles in his thighs, even his scars, because they told his stories. When he lay down beside her she moved closer to his warmth instinctively. But instead of drifting to sleep, she was caught up in his wakefulness.
In the year they had been together she had at first been amazed and then slightly resentful of Nathaniel’s ability to fall instantly to sleep—it was a hunter’s trick, a warrior’s skill as important as the ability to handle a gun. But not tonight.
“Now you are thinking too hard,” she said to him finally. “I can almost hear you.”
He sought out her hand. “You knew about the twins. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She hesitated. “Falling-Day thought you would worry overmuch. So did I. After what happened to Sarah—” Elizabeth looked into the cradle. Hannah’s twin brother had died in Nathaniel’s hands. Sarah had borne him one more son, and he had buried that child, too, in his mother’s arms. It was inevitable that he would think of those losses, even on this joyful day.
He said, “I should have been here.”
“Nathaniel—”
“You must have been scared, when the storm came down.”
He was determined to hear it, and so she told him.
“Yes,” she said. “But soon after the pain started in earnest and I had little energy for anything else. And no choice, as you had no choice. But we managed, did we not?”
He made a sound in his throat that was less than total agreement. Elizabeth brought his hand up to rub against her cheek.
“Shall we name them for your father, and my grandmother? Daniel and Mathilde. Would that please you?”
“Aye, it would. And it will please Hawkeye.” He turned to her, but his thoughts were far away. Gently, he fit his face to the curve of her neck and shoulder. He smelled of himself: honest sweat, leather and gunpowder, woodsmoke and the dried mint he liked to chew.
“You’ve been thinking of Hawkeye a lot today.”
She felt the tension rise in him, coming to the surface of his skin like sweat.
“What is it? Tell me.”
“There was a letter down at the tavern for me,” he said, his voice muffled. “From Moncrieff. He’s in Montréal.”
She waited, slightly tensed now. “Moncrieff found your father?”
“Aye. In the garrison, under arrest.”
Suddenly very much awake, Elizabeth sat up and winced as her sore muscles protested.
“Somerville’s men took him for questioning,” Nathaniel continued. “There’s rumors about the Tory gold.”
“Oh, Lord.” With a glance toward the cradle, Elizabeth folded her hands before her. “Tell me all of it.”
Nathaniel recited the letter; he had had nothing to do in the long hours of the whiteout but to read it again and again, and the words came to him easily.
When he had finished, she lay back down. “You’ll have to go.”
“You believe Moncrieff, then?”
She raised a brow. “I doubt he would make up such a thing. To what end, after all. It is true that we do not know him well, Nathaniel, but in this much I think he can be trusted.” She paused. “We both know that you cannot leave Hawkeye locked up.”
Nathaniel let out a hoarse laugh, but his look was troubled. “I can’t leave him in gaol, and I can’t leave you here alone. And you can’t travel.”
Elizabeth shifted to a more comfortable position. “It’s true that I don’t like the idea of your going so far, right now. But I don’t see you have any choice.”
In spite of the seriousness of their situation, Nathaniel grinned. He caught the plait that fell over her shoulder to her waist and gave it a good tug. “You’re the one with the talent for breaking men out of gaol.”
She flicked her fingers at him, but color rose on her cheeks. “Do you have any idea how we could possibly get Hawkeye out of a military garrison?”
“I’m sure something would come up,” he said. “There’s money enough, and money opens more locks than keys ever will. But I’m not about to leave you here alone with two new babies.”
“Of course you must go. Moncrieff and Robbie cannot do it without you. Your father needs you.”
“Boots,” Nathaniel said wearily. “My ma always told me never to cross a woman in childbed, but—”
“A wise woman,” interrupted Elizabeth. “Most excellent advice.”
Deep in the night, Nathaniel brought first the girl child and then the boy to her for nursing as she could not yet manage them both at once. Curiosity had come to the door at the first hungry cries, but seeing that Nathaniel was attending to Elizabeth’s needs, she nodded and slipped back to the bed she was sharing with Hannah in the sleeping loft.
Yawning widely, Elizabeth sat up against the bolsters and watched her son’s small face. He tugged so enthusiastically that she had to bite back a small cry. Nathaniel sat beside her, his gaze fixed on the boy. Mathilde was on his lap, newly wound and already asleep.
Elizabeth said, “I wish that you did not have to go, Nathaniel. But I cannot be so selfish. You will never rest easy here, knowing that your father needs your help. Someday you may call Daniel to you the same way, and I expect that he will do what he must to come. I trust that he will.”
The candlelight lay like gold on the baby’s cheek. Nathaniel touched the tender skin with one finger. “You need me, too,” he said hoarsely. “It ain’t right to leave you, Boots.”
“You will come back to me, will you not? To us?”
“Aye,” he said, his breath warm on her skin. “Never doubt it.”
News traveled fast in Paradise. The next morning Judge Middleton stood at the foot of his daughter’s bed and demanded the whole story while he kneaded his tricorn between his hands; he reminded her of nothing so much as one of her students with a guilty conscience. Looking at him now, she could not help marking the likeness to her brother. Julian had had the same high coloring and handsome features, and the same propensity for self-indulgence.
The judge cleared his throat repeatedly. “I am sorry to hear of Hawkeye’s troubles, but I can see no reason for you to be alone on this mountain in the middle of winter. Come home with me. There’s room for all of you.” But he could not quite meet Elizabeth’s eye.
She concentrated on the child in her lap, and at length her silence forced him to the heart of the matter.
“Curiosity can look after you there as well as here,” he said gruffly. “Better.”
The simple truth was, the judge feared that Nathaniel’s journey would cost him his housekeeper. Elizabeth was disappointed, but she knew that to argue this with her father would not be worth the effort. She said, “I will not leave Lake in the Clouds, but I will talk to Curiosity.”
Greatly relie
ved to have this conversation over, the judge spent a few minutes admiring his grandchildren.
“I think both of them will have your mother’s coloring.” Carefully the judge picked up Mathilde and examined her face. “She has your mother’s chin, too, but then, so do you. You do resemble your mother so, Elizabeth.” He narrowed his eyes at her, as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Both of you so independent. It is your curse, and your blessing. I fear this little girl will carry on in the same vein.”
“I hope that she will,” Elizabeth said, somewhat taken aback by this uncharacteristic thoughtful turn in her father.
He passed the baby over. “Life might be easier, if you would allow it.”
“Life would have been easier for you, too, if you had stayed in Norfolk.”
He smiled at that, and suddenly they were easier together than they had been in some time. Then Curiosity’s voice came to them from the other room, and the judge grew flustered. In no time at all, he had rushed out with the excuse of a meeting in the village.
“That man,” Curiosity muttered when Elizabeth recounted her conversation with the judge. “Botherin’ a woman in childbed with his little man-pains. It’s a good thirty years me and my Galileo been free, and I ain’t about to start jumpin’ when he snap his fingers. Ain’t my girls as good at housekeepin’ as me?”
Elizabeth agreed that they were.
“Polly right there with nothing to do but feed the man, and Daisy not far off, either. I’ll tell you plain: he can just eat their cooking a while longer. Askin’ me to walk away from his only daughter new delivered ’cause he bored. No wonder he run off before I could have a word with him.”
Elizabeth buried her smile in Mathilde’s fragrant neck, but Curiosity’s fury was not yet spent. She had brought in a bucket of hot water for the hip bath, and she tapped an impatient melody on the tin as she muttered to herself. Then her head snapped up and she grinned at Elizabeth. “We’ll send Martha up to the house to look after him. That’ll do the trick.”
Martha Southern was a widow with three young children, and Curiosity had recently had the idea that the judge watched her with an oversolicitous eye.
“You make me laugh, Curiosity. You will find an opportunity to matchmake even in this.”
“You begrudge the judge a young wife?”
“Of course not.” And then in response to Curiosity’s raised eyebrow: “If I were to worry about this at all, it would be that Martha might deserve a better sort of husband, after Moses.”
Curiosity put her fists on her hips. “The judge might be a good enough husband, with the right kind of wife. And Martha alone, with three little ones. If it ain’t the judge, it may well be Charlie LeBlanc, and he ain’t got a hiccup to call his own.”
She poured the second bucket of hot water into the tub and then produced a cake of soap from her apron pocket. “Come on now, let’s set you to soaking some of them sore spots away. Got some of the soap that Merriweather woman left behind. You’ll smell like a tavern maid lookin’ for a cosy man, but I suppose that don’t matter none. Quick, now, afore the men come back and let the cold air in.”
“Where’s Nathaniel?” Elizabeth asked, climbing carefully out of bed.
“Out in the barn with Liam,” Curiosity said. “Talking man talk.”
Once, Nathaniel could have been ready for this trip north in an hour. With the buckskins on his back, a supply of no-cake and dried venison, all the powder and ammunition he could carry, he would have simply started walking. But these days he and Liam were the only men at Lake in the Clouds, and that made leaving even harder.
“Firewood alone will keep you busy,” Nathaniel said, repeating something he had said before and that Liam knew anyway. But the boy didn’t seem to mind hearing it all again: Liam was a good worker: dogged, and thorough. Book learning was a chore for him, but he could track a buck all day and never lose the trail, and Nathaniel had never heard him complain, or seen him walk away from a task, no matter how dirty. They had taken Liam in last fall when his brother Billy died, and the boy worked hard to earn his place at Lake in the Clouds.
“You call on Galileo or Jed to help out if things get too much for you,” Nathaniel said. “I already had a word with them about it.”
“I can manage,” Liam said. He squinted out into the snowdrifts beyond the barn door. “How long do you think you’ll be?”
There was the question that gnawed. Nathaniel pushed out his breath in a cloud.
“If the rivers don’t break up before time, four weeks. If they do, and the rains come early, six. I’ll stop at Kayenti’ho on my way north, let Falling-Day and Many-Doves know what’s happened. They may send Runs-from-Bears this way, once they hear.”
A small flickering in Liam’s pale eyes. “I can manage the work,” he said, his voice cracking.
“I know you can,” Nathaniel said, remembering what it was like to be fourteen: raw and untried and dead curious about the world, resentful of being led; afraid to move on alone. “Listen to me now, Liam. If Bears comes this way, that don’t mean I don’t trust you. I do. I wouldn’t leave Elizabeth now if I didn’t.”
The boy looked down at his oversized boots. When he raised his head again, there was a shimmer in his eyes.
“Don’t know why you should.”
Nathaniel put a hand on the bony shoulder. “You look in the mirror and you see your brother. But I’m here to tell you that I knew him better than you did, and you ain’t nothing like Billy.” For a moment Nathaniel struggled with a set of memories he could not share: the brother that Liam had only suspected, but would never know, if it could be helped.
He said, “Would I leave my wife and children in your care otherwise?”
Then he walked away, letting the boy sit with that for a while. Nathaniel busied himself hanging the deer he had shot and cleaned this morning; when he looked up, Liam’s face was splotched, but dry.
“I’ll do my best by them.”
“I know you will.” Nathaniel wiped his hands on a piece of sacking. “I’ll be leaving at sunrise, but there’s something to do this afternoon first, and I’ll need your help.”
In winter, Hidden Wolf was mean-spirited: quick to punish any misstep, and unforgiving. Nathaniel focused on the wind, feeling the mountain talking to him through the web of his snowshoes. Liam followed closely. They had things to discuss but it wasn’t wise in such a wet cold, the kind that would settle in the chest if you gave it the chance.
They walked uphill through stands of beech and maple and birch. All around them pine and hemlock were heavy armed and dragging with snow. Grouse startled and fussed as they passed; overhead the squirrels whirred and screeched at them, flinging beechnut shells. There was plentiful evidence of the wolf pack that roamed the mountain. They didn’t hide the remains of their prey: small game, mostly, but they had feasted recently on a young buck, leaving nothing behind but gnawed bone, a sprouting two-point rack, and a tattered hide.
Nathaniel made a wide berth around a hump that another man might have climbed right over, an elevation that looked like nothing more than a downed tree covered with snow. He pointed out the vent hole and the faint mist of rising breath to Liam.
“It’s there for the taking if things get lean.”
Liam looked around himself, taking his bearings. Later in the season he would almost certainly come back here to brush away the snow and put a bullet through the bear’s eye. The hard part would be getting the carcass back to the cabin.
On the backbone of the mountain they were met by a merciless wind that wanted nothing more than to send them flying out over the forests. Moving carefully on the exposed ridge, they made their way to a small plateau where a few boulders provided a windbreak. There they stopped to take off snowshoes and strap them to their backs, and then they started down a cliff face. Liam grabbed at stunted juniper to steady himself on the way down, catching himself easily when he began to slide. Nathaniel saw him taking his bearings again; the boy wasn’t lost,
and could find his way back to Lake in the Clouds alone if need be.
When he had Liam’s attention, Nathaniel pointed out a spalt in the cliff face that might have been nothing more than shadow. Without any explanation, he reached up and pulled himself into the mountainside.
The rushing wall of water that formed the outer boundary of the cave sent a wave of cold right to the bone. From a store of wood stacked against the far wall they lit a fire, and then a torch.
“I didn’t imagine it like this,” Liam said as he warmed his hands. “I thought it would be bigger.” His eyes kept moving to the long line of wolf skulls wedged into a crack in the far wall.
Nathaniel disappeared into the shadows at the back of the cave. There was a dragging sound, and a thump, and he appeared again, wiping his hands on his leggings.
“It is bigger,” he said. “Come have a look.”
He had rolled away a good-sized boulder to reveal the next cavern. The torchlight danced on barrels and baskets and neatly bundled pelts. Hung from pegs driven into fissures were long ropes of dried corn and squash: provisions enough to take seven or more people through the winter. It was dry and quieter here, but cold.
“This is how you managed, last winter,” Liam said, mostly to himself. Some of the men in the village had been set on driving the Bonners and their Kahnyen’kehàka family members off the mountain, resorting to thievery when intimidation got them nowhere. They had raided the cabin in the fall, finding less than they expected in the way of winter stores. Billy had been at the heart of that trouble, and where Billy went, Liam had gone, too.
Nathaniel saw all this moving on the boy’s face, anger and shame and the regret for his part of what had happened. But it was Liam’s battle and he could not fight it for him, so Nathaniel went to work.
“Lend me a hand with this.” He gestured with his chin to the largest of three old chests, squat and battered. Nathaniel kept his voice easy, but he watched Liam from the corner of his eye, saw the flicker of interest and surprise.
The chest was heavy, and they put it down with a grunt near the fire in the front cavern.