by Sara Donati
“I've been trying to remember what it was like at that age,” Nathaniel said. “Wanting to go to join the fighting that bad.”
“Like an ache in the balls,” Runs-from-Bears said, and Nathaniel snorted in agreement.
Bears said, “They are waiting to hear our decision.”
“They will have to wait a little longer,” Nathaniel said. “There's somebody else I have to talk to first.”
“Lily.”
“Aye.” Nathaniel ran a hand over his face.
Runs-from-Bears was looking at him with an expression that Nathaniel knew very well, one that said he had advice to offer but knew it would not be welcome.
“Go ahead, say it.”
“You know she'll find a way to get what she wants,” Bears said.
Nathaniel got up with a groan. “That's exactly what I'm afraid of.”
Hannah woke when she heard her father leaving the cabin for his morning swim under the falls, and then she lay perfectly still, listening. Jennet slept deeply, her back turned to Hannah. Lily was watching her. Hannah felt the blue of her eyes like a cool hand.
“Little sister,” she whispered across the room. “Do you hear the mockingbird calling?”
It was the question she had used to wake Lily as a child, and now it brought a smile to the beloved face, true and sweet. When Hannah closed her eyes she could call forth the picture of Lily in her first minute of life, wide-eyed and curious, bloody fists waving. Even then she had been at odds with the world. Her Mohawk girl-name had been Sparrows, for her size and quickness and the way she must argue, even with her own kind.
For the moment, though, she was at peace, this little sister who had grown into a woman while Hannah was in the west.
“Many-Doves will be looking for me,” Lily said. “It's already time to go down to the cornfields.”
There was a watchfulness about her as she said this, a waiting. Hannah recognized it for what it was.
“Not this morning,” she said. “This morning you and I must show Jennet the mountain and the village too.”
“I thought you had to go visit patients with Uncle Todd,” Lily said.
“I do, but that won't take long. You can come along, both of you. And then you can show her the meetinghouse.”
“What about Many-Doves?” Lily asked, hardly able to contain her smile.
“I will tell her,” Hannah said. “And we'll all go to the cornfield this afternoon to help.”
Jennet sat up suddenly, clutching a blanket to her breast like a child. She blinked in the morning light and then a smile transformed her face.
“I feared it was all a dream,” she said, leaning over to hug Hannah. “And that I would wake with Ewan snoring next to me.”
She colored even as she said it, a sudden blush that reached even her earlobes. “Och, I'm as wicked a lass as was eer born, Lily. Pay no mind to the things I say. I must say a rosary for Ewan's soul, puir wee mannie as he was.”
“Did you not love your husband then?” Lily asked and she sat up and slung her arms around her knees.
Jennet's mouth puckered. “He was a good man, and harmless enough.” Her Scots was already giving way to English, like sleep that could be rubbed from her eyes. “I wish I could say that I loved him. My father promised me on his deathbed that I would learn to do just that. But I never did.”
“I would never marry on my father's command,” Lily said firmly, though she cast an apologetic glance at her cousin.
“Who will you marry then?” Jennet asked playfully. “You've already said you won't have Simon Ballentyne.”
“When she was little she intended to marry Blue-Jay.” Hannah was hoping that Lily might flush a little at such teasing and take pleasure in it, but instead she went very still.
“Blue-Jay has a woman at Good Pasture.” There was nothing of disappointment in Lily's face or tone. “You know her, sister. Long-Hair's youngest daughter. They are well suited.”
“Are they? Why has no one told me?”
Lily shrugged. “You haven't asked a lot of questions since you came home.”
“Och weel, we'll make up for that now.” Jennet laughed and hugged her knees to her chin. “Does your twin have a woman at Good Pasture as well?”
Lily wrinkled her nose. “Daniel? What sane girl would want him? All he thinks about is going to war.” She flung herself up out of bed, her fingers working to loosen her plait. “Enough talk of marriage. Maybe I'll sail the seas, instead. Like your old friend the Pirate.”
Jennet let out a laugh. “Perhaps we should go looking for Mac Stoker. What an adventure that would be, the three of us. We could call on Giselle and take her along with us. A ship of pirate women, not to be trifled with.”
Hannah threw back the blanket and got out of bed. “There's adventure enough in Paradise today.” She yawned and stretched and then yanked the blankets from her little sister's bed with a grin.
Richard Todd was waiting for Hannah in his study. The draperies had been drawn against the sun and the air was thick with tobacco smoke, brandy fumes, and the sticky sweet smell of laudanum. He looked over Hannah's shoulder to Jennet and Lily and managed an elaborate but not very sincere frown.
“I see you've brought your ladies-in-waiting.”
Ethan sent them an apologetic look from the desk. “He means to say good morning.”
“Do I?” Richard snorted.
“Aren't you coming with us today?” Lily asked Ethan.
“No, he isn't,” answered the doctor for him. “There's work enough right here for him. He prefers a quill to a lancet anyway, don't you, Ethan my dear?”
When they were outdoors Hannah said, “You are fortunate he loves you so, or he would not put up for so long with such treatment.”
Richard Todd sent her a sidelong glance. In the sunlight the yellowish cast to his skin and eyes was more pronounced, the pain lines around his mouth deeply carved. “Put up with me?” He stopped to look around himself at the farmstead and pastures and the forests that he called his own. “When I'm dead he'll have a fortune in land and every penny I've put aside. Not that he wants it. He'll hand it over to you as soon as I'm gone and close himself up with his books.” He cleared his throat noisily. “He has nothing to complain about.”
Hannah gave up the argument for the moment, long enough to stop and talk with Curiosity, who pressed a napkin folded around three hot biscuits into her hand.
Curiosity said, “You going to come back and sit with me when you done with the calls today?”
Richard sent the two of them an impatient look. “If we ever get to the calls in the first place—”
But she cut him off with a hard look and a flick of her fingers. “I wasn't talking to you,” she said firmly. She took Hannah's elbow and steered her away. “Come on back now, you hear me? And bring the girls with you. I got a pie in the oven.”
In the end Hannah and Richard started off alone, as Lily and Jennet had disappeared back into the house. They would catch up, and Hannah had things she wanted to say to Richard out of their hearing.
He used a cane now, and leaned heavily into it with each step. When they had gone a few steps he said, “Spit it out, girl, before it chokes you.”
“I didn't come back here to take over your medical practice.”
“No?” He raised a brow at her. “Why did you come home then?”
Hannah ignored the question. “Curiosity will manage very well, when you decide to step aside.”
Richard glared down at her. “Well, first off, missy, Curiosity isn't so young anymore either, in case you haven't took note. Second of all, there are two patients in this village she can't do much for. They'll be your responsibility, unless you decide to run off. Again.”
He had given her the choice of a number of arguments. Hannah picked the easier one. “I hope you're not talking about the Widow Kuick,” she said.
“I am.” Richard grinned at her, all of his old combative spirit rising up so that blotches of color stained
his pale cheeks.
Hannah looked away, afraid that she would not be able to keep hold of her temper if she met his eye. “Jemima isn't about to let me treat her mother-in-law, and you know it.”
He laughed hoarsely. “I'll admit she won't like it much.”
“The Widow will spit in my face and die,” Hannah said.
“Then you'd be doing her a favor. She should be dead the last three years at least. I expect it's all that venom running through her veins that keeps her going.”
“Oh, something to look forward to.”
He was untouched by her tone. “Venomous though she may be, you won't hear her complain. She hasn't spoken a word since that night in the meetinghouse. When I saved you from hanging, let me remind you.”
Lily and Jennet were coming along the path now, swinging a basket between them. Jennet was ten years Lily's senior but at this moment, with the summer sun bright on her head of cropped blond curls and her cheeks flushed with running, she looked no more than seventeen. Hannah took a deep breath and then another.
“All right then,” she said finally. “I will offer my services.” And then: “And who's the other patient you're worried about?”
Richard lost his smile. “Dolly Wilde.”
It would have come as no surprise if Hannah had been thinking like the doctor she was trained to be. Since she had come home Hannah had seen Dolly only once, and at first she had not recognized her.
They had grown up together, sat next to each other in Elizabeth's classroom, picked berries together, and on the rare occasion that Dolly was free to play, they had spent that time together too. But the Dolly she had known held no resemblance to the woman who went by that name now.
Hannah tended to think that the things she had experienced during the wars to the west had robbed her of the ability to be surprised, but Dolly had proved her wrong. Hannah had crossed her path at twilight, a woman wandering through the village like a lost spirit. Her unbound hair was streaked with white and it floated around a face blank of all expression. And in her eyes Hannah saw something she had hoped never to see again: Dolly reminded her of men left to die of their wounds on a battlefield where they had fallen. The stunned, placid look of the almost-dead.
“You're thinking there's no treatment for dementia,” Richard said.
Hannah might have corrected him, but Lily and Jennet were close enough to hear. They came running up, full of laughter and good spirits.
“Sister,” Hannah said. “Maybe you had best take Jennet to see the meetinghouse instead of coming with us.”
Lily's glance darted from Richard to Hannah and back again. “You're going to see Dolly.”
“And the Widow Kuick,” added Richard.
The small mouth twitched. “All right then.” She touched Jennet on the arm. “We'd only be in the way. Come, there are better things to see.”
On the way to the Wildes', walking through the orchards so lovingly tended, Richard told Hannah the little there was to say about Dolly's history and condition. There was nothing surprising in the story: a difficult pregnancy, a hard birth followed by prolonged melancholia and a general decline into senselessness.
“The worst is her tendency to wander away,” Richard finished. “Once it took a day and a night to find her. Since then Nicholas has been locking her in her room at night.”
“Not all the time. I saw her in the village at dusk, not three weeks ago.”
The air was filled with the hum of wasps feasting on fallen fruit, and from somewhere on the far side of the orchard the sound of men singing.
On the day Cookie and her two grown sons had received their manumission papers they had all come to work for Nicholas. In the village folks liked to joke that Nicholas Wilde would pay Levi and Zeke any wage they asked, just as long as the three of them could sing together while they worked. Like a heavenly chorus come down to earth, Anna McGarrity had told her, and now Hannah heard it for herself.
The cabin was visible now, small and well kept, with shutters closed against the sun. Dolly sat in a rocker on the porch, her hands folded in her lap and her daughter at her feet. The girl's eyes, sharp and bright, watched them as they came closer. She took after her mother, dark-haired and round of face, but instead of having her mother's sweet temperament she seemed to bristle.
“There's a child who never learned to smile,” said Richard while they were still out of earshot.
It surprised Hannah to hear him say such a thing. Richard looked at the human body as he would at a mechanical clock that needed repair. In her experience he put little importance in a patient's state of mind.
She said, “Smiles won't get her through the world she was born into.”
Richard grunted his agreement.
The little chamber that was Dolly's alone was crowded with people: Cookie, who stood nearby with her arms crossed at her waist; Callie, who sat next to her mother and held her hand; Nicholas, his hat crumpled in his hands and his work clothes wet with sweat. All of them were watching Hannah as if she had some magic that would fix the woman who sat silently on the bed, staring at a pebble she held in her hand.
Richard stood back and said nothing while Hannah examined Dolly. She seemed content to be touched, smiling vaguely when Hannah said her name or asked her to turn, like a friendly stranger from another land, without the language or any understanding of the customs of the place where she found herself.
Physically Hannah could find nothing seriously wrong with Dolly: she was thin, and her muscle tone was poor, but her heart was strong and steady and her lungs and eyes were clear. While Hannah gently probed her liver and spleen and abdomen Dolly turned her face away.
Cookie was watching closely, and now she spoke up.
“She ain't in any pain, if that's what you looking for.”
Hannah turned to her. “How do you know?”
Callie was stroking her mother's hand. “She cries when something hurts.”
Very evenly Hannah said, “Does she ever try to harm herself?”
Nicholas cleared his throat and studied his shoes before he raised his head to meet her gaze. “I don't think she means to cause herself harm . . .” His voice trailed off.
“She likes to swallow pebbles,” Callie said. “She knows she's not supposed to, but she still does. And sometimes she eats dirt, if we don't watch her.”
Hannah glanced up in surprise and caught Nicholas's expression: worry and sorrow, desperation and disgust, all fighting for the upper hand. And he was ashamed and angry, at his wife and at himself. That he could not cure her; that she had retreated away from him and the world to a point out of reach but not quite gone.
There was little to offer him in the way of hope or relief, and so Hannah turned back to the patient. She touched her on the cheek and tipped her head up to look directly in her eyes.
“Dolly,” she said firmly. “You have a beautiful daughter. Can you tell me her name?”
Dolly blinked at her, opened her mouth and closed it again. A flicker of consciousness chased across her face and was extinguished as quickly as it had come.
“Callie,” Hannah said. “Does your mother ever seem to wake up and take note of you when you are sitting with her?”
The girl glanced at Cookie and then at her father, as if there were more than one answer to this question and she was afraid of choosing the wrong one.
“No,” she whispered finally. “Never.”
“She could live to be eighty just as she is,” Hannah said much later, when she and Richard were alone again.
“Or she'll choke to death on a stone tomorrow. And it would be a blessing.”
Richard's complexion was very bad, and in spite of the fact that they were walking slowly and in the cool shade of the forest his face was wet with perspiration. He stopped to pass his handkerchief over his brow, and then he lowered himself to sit on the stump of an old oak that shifted and groaned beneath him. His breathing was labored as he took out a small flask of dark glass from his coat pocket
and uncorked it. The smell was unmistakable.
Hannah watched his throat work as he swallowed enough laudanum to kill a smaller man. How long had he been dosing himself like this, to have built up such a need? It was a question she did not bother to ask, because he would take pleasure in refusing to answer. His mind was still with his patient, and he would discuss nothing else.
“I've never heard of this compulsion to eat rocks and dirt before,” he wheezed. “Have you ever seen the like?”
She shook her head and leaned against a tree. “I have seen many things, but nothing like this.”
He squinted up at her, and for the first time since Hannah had come home, she saw the worst of his old self: the acid mockery that he spat up now and then like an excess of bile he must share with whoever stood next to him. “What have you seen, little Hannah Bonner? Men's battle wounds, women's sorrows.”
It had been so long since Hannah let herself feel anger, true anger, that she did not recognize it at first: the rush of blood to her face and hands, the way the nerves in her fingertips tingled. A force like water falling, unstoppable. The words leapt from her just like that.
“You haven't asked me about my uncle,” she said sharply. “Why haven't you?”
Richard's gaze flickered just enough to show his surprise and he shrugged. “I heard through Nathaniel that Otter—”
“Strong-Words,” Hannah corrected him sharply. “Otter was his boy-name.”
He inclined his head. “That Strong-Words fell at the battle at Tippecanoe. If you were expecting my condolences for a man who took every opportunity to shoot at me—”
All the old history between Richard Todd and Hannah's family rose up like a battalion of ghosts as distinct and undeniable as the moving shadows cast by the trees. For a moment there was silence, and then Richard found the good grace to look away and clear his throat.