Lake in the Clouds

by Sara Donati

  “Mr. Spencer, sir!” A breathless voice hailed them from the dock, and they both turned toward it. It was Oliver, one of the Douglas grandsons employed on Whitehall Street. “Mr. Spencer, sir! Granny Douglas sent me to try to catch you up. Post come for Miss Bonner, just a few minutes ago.”

  Will raised a hand to wave the boy over. “Let’s have it then, Oliver.”

  The boy darted up the gangplank, dodging out of the way of a sailor with a barrel on one shoulder while a birdcage swung from his free hand, full of finches fluttering nervously. Breathless, the boy handed the post to Hannah directly. She thanked him while she shuffled through the letters.

  “Three at once.” Will could not hide his curiosity, but he would not ask the obvious question.

  “One from my stepmother.” Hannah held it up so that he could see the familiar hand. “They are finally home again, then.” She saw on Will’s face the same relief that she felt. Over the last two weeks she had been less and less able to pretend she was not worried about the long silence from her parents. At night all the things that might have delayed them in the bush marched through her mind like foot soldiers who would not be dismissed, even by sleep.

  She broke the seal and opened the folded sheet right there, because Will must have whatever news there was before they sailed.

  “‘Dearest Daughter,’” she read aloud. “‘Your father and I are returned home, both of us in the best of health, as indeed we found all the family to be, although your sister Lily is still not quite recovered from a badly sprained ankle.’”

  “Thank God,” said Will.

  Hannah continued: “‘We have brought with us Curiosity and Galileo’s grandson, a sturdy, vigorous child. His mother has left this world for the next, a report which must sadden you greatly. Indeed, we are all in mourning for her. Many-Doves has taken the boy to nurse alongside Sawatis.’”

  “Ah, Christ.” Will turned his face away.

  Hannah drew in a sharp breath and let it go again. Tears rose up in her throat, anger and frustration. Selah was dead, in childbirth or of a fever; or maybe—this thought came to Hannah and she could not put it away—maybe at the hands of the blackbirders who had frightened her so. Liam Kirby.

  Will’s voice startled her out of her thoughts. “Does she say how it came to pass?”

  Hannah scanned the rest of the letter. “No, nothing at all. Will, this will break Manny.”

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “He is stronger than that, Hannah. And there is his son, you must remember. Go on and finish so that I can tell Amanda all the news.”

  Hannah forced herself to focus on Elizabeth’s neat handwriting.

  “‘Curiosity and Galileo are eager for some word of their son, as you can imagine. We hope it is in your power to provide them with that comfort. Curiosity’s grief is tempered by her work in the village and in particular because she has been much occupied by caring for Reuben at the mill. The boy was badly burned in an accident and is not expected to live, though he continues on day by day in great distress. We are all eager to have you here as soon as it is possible for you to leave. Whatever news you bring us, good or bad, we will manage best together. Your loving stepmother Elizabeth Bonner.’”

  “Thank God we are away,” Hannah whispered when she had finished. “Or I would have to set out on foot.” Tears ran freely over her face, and she blinked them away.

  “Poor Curiosity,” she whispered. And then: “Can you get word to Manny? Can you ask him to come home to Paradise?”

  Will’s expression was so willfully empty that Hannah was reminded of Dr. Simon when a patient asked him a question that he did not want to answer, simply because it cost too much to say the words out loud.

  “Will,” Hannah said more loudly than she intended. “Is he dead?”

  “No!” He shook his head. “Manny is not dead.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “I have a good idea where he is,” came the reluctant answer.

  “Then can you get word to him? Tell him his parents need him.”

  “I can try,” said Will Spencer. “I will do my best.”

  It wasn’t until many hours later when all the goodbyes were behind them and the Good-News had begun her journey up the Hudson that Hannah remembered the other letters.

  Sitting on her narrow berth with them in her lap she could work up only vague interest in either letter. The one from Jennet was heavier, three or four sheets at least and the first word Hannah had had from her since her father’s death. No doubt it would not be an easy letter to read.

  The second letter was more of a surprise and a mystery too: it bore her name in Dr. Savard’s handwriting.

  “Go up on deck with your post,” Kitty suggested from her berth, hiding a yawn behind her hand. The baby slept contented at her side, the small mouth working thoughtfully.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course I am. Take advantage of the last of the sun. Esther and I can manage very well. And perhaps you could send Ethan down to me. He has bothered the captain long enough.”

  Hannah went gladly, not only for the sun but to be away from the irritation of the wet nurse’s silent but constant observation, something that was hard to ignore in the tight confines of the cabin.

  Kitty had hoped that she would be able to produce enough of her own milk to feed the child, something that might have been possible if she had persisted, but by the second day she had been so worried for the baby’s welfare that she interviewed the wet nurses Mrs. Douglas had found. The girl they hired was newly arrived from Germany; she spoke only a little English and seemed reluctant to share information about herself, but she had plentiful milk and unlike three of the other candidates Mrs. Douglas had found, she was willing to make the journey to Paradise and to stay until she was no longer needed—so long as she was properly paid.

  Hannah was able to bear Esther’s scrutiny only because it was mute; she asked no questions at all.

  When she had extracted Ethan from another of the captain’s stories—this one about a ghost ship that sailed the Hudson by the full moon—and sent him down to his mother, Hannah found a coil of rope that would serve as a place to sit with her post. From this improvised throne she could watch as the river narrowed and the mountains shrugged shoulders up out of the darkening countryside. The evening breeze wound around her, lifting the hair that strayed from her plaits to touch damp skin as tenderly as a mother.

  She reread Elizabeth’s letter first, looking for some clue about Selah. There was nothing at all, as if she feared that the information might fall into the wrong hands. Or maybe, Hannah told herself, she could not bring herself to put the words on paper, to give them that kind of power and permanence.

  Hannah considered Jennet’s letter for a long moment, measured the light remaining in the sky, and put it aside for tomorrow.

  The seal on Dr. Savard’s letter opened with a crack. Hannah unfolded two sheets of heavy paper and read.

  Dear Miss Bonner,

  First, my apologies that I was not present at the Almshouse to wish you a good journey home and the best of fortunes in your continuing medical education. May this short letter serve that purpose.

  Second, news of professional interest: today I vaccinated the two hundredth child against smallpox, a record of which Dr. Simon is deservedly proud. The child, a girl of seven years and recently arrived from Scotland, showed her teeth but did not use them.

  Third, your experiment on my person. I find that I cannot reject your hypothesis; the lower half of the wound is all but healed while the upper half still suppurates. This morning I treated the entire area with your concoction. It stung mightily, and reminded me of you.

  By way of payment for your valuable consultation and treatment, and as a token of my regard and respect, I enclose a copy of a document which will be of interest if not comfort to you and your friends.

  With best regards

  Your colleague

  Paul deGuise Savard dit Saint-d’Uze
t

  The second sheet had been copied out in his hand, with a notation at the top that read “Deaths 1801, July–September, Page 12.” Each line contained a name along with age, family status, place of origin, cause and date of death, as well as place of interment. Half of the entries listed unnamed infants who had died within their first month in the Almshouse; most of them were under four, and all of them had died of the croup. They were Irish, German, American, African; some of them had been born in the Almshouse. Some had been orphaned but most were recorded as abandoned, surrendered to the state, or indigent.

  She was the last entry on the page, as if Dr. Savard had run out of ink or time or perhaps simply because he had made his point. Connie Vaark, mulatto, two years of age, abandoned to the care of the city three months previously, had choked to death on the thirtieth day of September in the company of a dozen other choking children and was buried with the others, nameless, motherless, in a common grave in the African Burial Ground on Chrystie Street.

  Of course Hannah had known that Manny’s search might end like this. To anyone who had spent time in the Almshouse nursery these facts could be no surprise at all. Dead children were as common as crows, nothing more than facts to be recorded neatly on the page, black on white.

  Whatever news you bring us, good or bad, we will manage best together. Elizabeth had written those words, and Hannah trusted her stepmother. But how could such a thing possibly be true; how could she take this news to Curiosity and Galileo, to Manny, who had still to learn that his wife was dead. It would fall to her to explain, to help them see it for themselves how a child could be left to die in such a place as the Almshouse.

  Manny had asked this favor of her, but it was too much.

  The sun dragged bloody clouds down to the other side of the world over the edge of the Palisades. Standing at the rail, Hannah watched until her eyes teared.

  The wind toyed with Dr. Savard’s letter, tugged at it, folded it and spread it out again. When Hannah opened her fingers the two sheets sailed out over the dark water like wings, white on black.

  PARADISE

  Chapter 30

  When her parents had been gone for a week, Lily Bonner began to wake just before dawn in the hope and fear that they had come back in the night. While she could not wait to have her mother and father home again, Lily dreaded having to admit that she had failed to keep a promise: in seven days she had not written a single word in the little book her mother had left her.

  She started every day by taking it out and counting the pages. Inside the cover of fine doeskin, there were twelve pieces of paper that had been sewn down the middle to make twenty-four pages, bright white and bigger than her own hand. And she still could not make herself pick up a quill. For the first week she had considered just writing the most obvious things: Went to the Big Muddy today with Bears. Ground corn for a long time. Many-Doves is making a new pair of moccasins for Kateri and she let me do some of the beadwork. Helped Bump plant cabbage. Helped Many-Doves and Pines-Rustling plant beans and squash seeds around the corn plants.

  But to waste good sunshine and expensive paper to tell her mother things that she knew without being told, that just didn’t sit right. Lily wanted to write things that would surprise her mother, things she couldn’t figure out for herself, things to make her frown or laugh or ask questions that nobody could answer. She wanted the little book to be like the newspapers that Aunt and Uncle Spencer sent from the city. When a newspaper came, no matter how out of date it was, Lily’s mother would call them together in the evening and read aloud, and her face would go pink with eagerness. Lily liked newspaper evenings even when she didn’t really understand what she heard, because they made her mother so happy.

  She knew that the only way she was going to have any real news was if she spent time in the village, where grown-ups seemed willing to talk about just about anything in the hearing of a little girl who didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  With her mother gone, there was no school but there were still chores, more than ever now that the ground was warm enough to break and planting had begun. And the grown-ups had worked out a plan: the three older children would spend the first part of the day at Lake in the Clouds. When their chores were done and they had had their dinners, they could go down to the village if they wanted to, as long as they were within Curiosity’s calling range; they could explore on the mountain, as long as they stayed off the north face; or they could stay at home, in which case they were likely to be drawn into whatever extra work Hawkeye or Many-Doves or Runs-from-Bears could find for them.

  Lily figured out by the second day that Daniel had made some kind of promise—most probably to their father—to keep an eye on her. It was the only way to explain why he invited her to come along when he and Blue-Jay went off to catch frogs or shoot arrows or make some changes to their fort. Sometimes Lily agreed, mostly out of curiosity, but also out of concern. If it made her brother happy to think he was protecting her, she would let him. Lily thought that he might be lonely, but unable to admit it.

  Mostly Lily spent her time in the village. She always stopped by the trading post before going on to the Todds’ house, because it seemed to her that pretty much everybody except the widow Kuick found their way to Anna or Curiosity, every day. They came to buy or sell or trade, tobacco and eggs and linsey-woolsey and seeds and venison, to ask advice or help with sick animals or cheese that wouldn’t set or warping a loom; everybody left some news behind. Mostly it wasn’t very surprising news, but every once in a while there was something that might interest her mother, and Lily kept track of those things in her head.

  She could spend a half hour or so in the trading post, listening to the men who sat at the back playing cards or draughts or skittles. They were so busy talking that they didn’t pay any mind at all to who was nearby, but Lily could only stay so long before somebody would take note and ask her nicely what she needed and was she sorry she hadn’t gone along to the city with her aunt Todd or to Albany with her mother?

  It irked her that people really believed her mother would go to Albany and leave her behind, and it irked her even worse that she couldn’t tell them the truth, that she hadn’t. People were supposed to think that her mother and father were in Albany, and to give them any other ideas would be the worst kind of betrayal. Lily thought of Selah’s calm expression and the baby she was carrying and the urge to answer questions and even to be around people who would ask them left her cold. Then she would go off to Curiosity and Galileo.

  The kitchen at the Todds’ house was as much home to her as the hearth at Lake in the Clouds. She could stay as long as she wanted and ask questions if the urge came on her, or just listen. If the weather turned bad while she was there, Curiosity fed her and put her to bed, and nobody at Lake in the Clouds would worry about where she had got to. Except that she didn’t like to leave Daniel to sleep alone in the loft, and so she usually did go home.

  But of course there was no sitting idle in Curiosity’s kitchen; she would set Lily to carding wool or spinning or stirring the wash or polishing pewter, but she didn’t mind that, because the conversations in Curiosity’s kitchen were well worth it. It amazed her, the things grown-ups would say in front of a child who could keep her tongue and look bored. As if she were deaf, or too little to understand what it meant when a woman missed her monthly, or that Peter Dubonnet had got the sudden urge to go hunting when Baldy O’Brien, the hated tax collector, came in from Johnstown.

  So two full weeks after the wedding party Lily didn’t know what to think when Curiosity met her at the kitchen door and wouldn’t let her come in. Lily didn’t get more than a glance of the room, but she saw Dolly Smythe sitting at the table with her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking as if she had a fever.

  “There’s work in the garden,” Curiosity had said, in the voice that meant she wasn’t going to tolerate any discussion. “Make yourself useful, child.” And she closed the door.

  Curiosity often sent L
ily to help in the garden. Generally it suited her fine, because she liked being outside and Bump was almost always there to talk to. Bump was one of her favorite people; he called her “Miss Lily” and told her stories of his travels during the wars and the western frontier and the Indians he had lived with for a time, of a great warrior called Sky-Panther he had once seen, and of the early days in Paradise, when her grandmother and grandfather Middleton had lived up in the schoolhouse and her Granny Bonner had been alive.

  Now Lily hesitated, not exactly trying to hear through the kitchen door but wondering why Dolly Smythe was here. The widow wasn’t the kind of mistress to let her servants wander around the village to visit friends in the middle of a workday. It was possible that the widow had decided she didn’t want Dolly in the house anymore, although that was hard to imagine; Dolly was a hard worker and clever, and her manners never caused anybody to click their tongues, not even the old wives who watched the unmarried girls like cats watched their kittens, ready to use their teeth to make a point if they saw the need. Lily’s mother thought a lot of Dolly Smythe, and that was recommendation enough.

  There was no sign of Bump in the garden either, which was another mystery as he had hoed three new rows and left the basket with the twisted seed papers on the step of the shed. Lily stood in the middle of the kitchen garden smelling the good smell of warm sun on fresh-turned earth when she thought of Dr. Todd’s laboratory. Maybe that’s where Bump was, helping the doctor. With a glance over her shoulder at the closed kitchen door, Lily went around the shed to look in that direction.

  There was no smoke coming out of the chimneys, but she had just about made up her mind to go have a look anyway when Lucy Hench came up behind her.

  “You looking for Bump?”

  Lucy was two years younger than Lily, but she was tall for her age. She was what Curiosity called a simple soul, which meant that she wasn’t especially bright but she was kind and well-meaning, and in general Lily liked her a lot, although she could not play with her for more than an hour without getting bored enough to scream.