Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  Luke was built like his father, long boned and lean, but muscular in the way of men who must be quick as well as strong. Wicht and braw and bonnie, the Carryck girls had called him. Look at the hands on him, they had said knowingly, when Jennet was too young to really understand. Look at the breadth of his wrist. He had spent time with some of them, but never enough so that any lass could lay claim. How they had all mourned when he went away without a wife.

  Jennet roused herself suddenly.

  “Luke.”

  He collapsed onto his back. “Yes. I wanted to marry you. I still want to marry you, but for the war. Or I'll say it this way: I'll want to marry you the day the war is over.”

  She wanted to ask him about all the lost years, and if he regretted the decision he had made when he left Scotland without her, but now she realized that the question must wait. It would lead to nothing but more arguments, while the issue at hand might go in a very different direction. And there was the matter of his hands and wrists and fingers so strong and clever . . . she swallowed again and turned her hips away.

  “Married men don't go to war?”

  He put back his head and groaned. “I won't marry and go to war.”

  “Because you might die.”

  He nodded. “Among other things.”

  “But tomorrow a tree might fall on your hard head, Luke Bonner, and kill you just as dead as a hangman's noose. I'll admit it would have to be a bloody great tree to do the job, but in theory at least it is possible.” She wound a hand in his hair and tugged until he brought his face to hers, and then she nipped his lower lip. “And still you won't marry and go to war.”

  “Jennet.” His breath on her skin, and suddenly all of him cradled between her legs, but he was talking and she must listen.

  “Think for a minute. Remember that I live in Canada. If a common soldier falls in battle his widow and family get a pension from the king, or they should. If things go badly for me—” He paused, moved his hips experimentally and grinned when she could not hold back a gasp.

  “They'd hang you for a spy and traitor.” She tried to close her knees and he turned expertly to stop her, raised his own knee and lodged it against the heat of her.

  With his mouth touching hers he said, “And all my holdings would be forfeit to the king, and should I have a wife she'd be penniless and—people would not be kind. Now can we finish what we've started, girl?”

  He gave her a hard look and for a moment she was reminded, uncomfortably, of the days long ago when he had tutored her in Latin and French and philosophy. He had been a demanding teacher, uncompromising and infuriating. How often had she wished him and his mulish ways to the devil.

  “But,” Jennet said.

  His knee nudged more insistently; his belly touched hers and she felt herself start to melt away.

  “But what?”

  She forced herself to say it. “I don't understand why you've got to run off and spy, like a boy who can't stand to be left out of a game.”

  At that his face tightened just enough to let her know that she had gone too far.

  “You wouldn't understand.”

  “Of course I wouldna,” she said, twisting away from him suddenly. She pulled the blanket up to cover herself. “I'm naucht but daftie, a jaud, a wee lass wha doesna ken her place.”

  “You wouldn't understand,” he said very deliberately, but he didn't put his hands on her again.

  “Och, I see,” Jennet said bitterly. “Politics. What wad I ken o sic things, coming up as I did a papist in Protestant Scotland.”

  “You're being dense,” he said in his severest schoolmaster voice. “It doesn't suit you.”

  Her temper flared so quickly that she could not stop herself from raising a hand, which he caught neatly.

  He said, “You can slap me a thousand times, Jennet Scott, you can wish me to the devil in a hundred languages. But I will not marry you until this war is over.”

  She forced her breathing to a calmer place, uncomfortably aware of his arousal and her own. “And if I will not lay with you until you do?”

  “Then we'll both suffer for it,” he said with a flash of anger as bright as her own. “For you want me as much as I want you. Or will you deny it?”

  He pulled the blanket down and pressed her against him, his hand spanning the small of her back. And he wanted her, oh yes, and she wanted him so fiercely that for a moment she simply forgot how to draw breath. Then he pulled her beneath him and pinned her hands with his own and kissed her so thoroughly that everything else was driven from her mind but the taste and feel of him.

  “Deny it,” he demanded, and kissed her again before she could say even a single word.

  “Deny it,” he said again, more fiercely. Luke in a temper, and because he wanted her; it was more than she had let herself hope for, so soon.

  “I canna.” She shook her head feebly from side to side. “I cannot deny that I want you, Luke Bonner. Can you deny that you love me?”

  He smiled against her mouth, turned his hip with the grace of a dancing master and then in one strong thrust he locked himself inside her.

  “Finally,” he said hoarsely, spreading one hand beneath her to lift her hips. She opened her mouth to welcome him but he kissed her and closed the circle, belly to belly and mouth to mouth.

  Later, when the fury had passed, Luke picked her up. They were both naked and slick with sweat, speckled with straw.

  “Take the lantern,” he said, crouching down so she could snatch it by the handle, and then he carried her out of the barn toward the rushing of the waterfall.

  “Somebody will see,” she said against his neck. She knew she should be concerned but could not find it in herself. Everything in her throbbed, every nerve, and what else was there to know?

  “We're just soaking your bumps.” He was grinning in the way of a man who has got what he wanted, which both infuriated her and made her want to give him more.

  With the lantern set on a plane of stone they slid into water so blessedly cool in the slick heat of the night air that anything she might have wanted to say was lost in a sigh of contentment.

  For a long while they did nothing but float together in the water, paddling quietly or clinging to the mossy rocks to exchange kisses. Then Jennet remembered the question she had asked, but that he had not bothered to answer.

  “You never did say,” she scolded him. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the waterfall, and he was ever a man to take advantage of such things.

  “What?” He put his head back to wet his hair again and then shook himself like a dog. “What did you want me to say?”

  She began to swim away but he caught her up and then he subdued her while she struggled, and when she was exhausted and could do no more than let him hold her he said it, against her ear. “I love you, Jennet Scott, and well you know it. I've loved you since you were a girl with dirt on your face, I loved you the day I left Scotland and every day since.”

  “And?”

  “And?” he asked in mock outrage. “Is that not enough? Don't be greedy, girl.”

  “And?” she said, pinching him mercilessly until he yelped and snatched at her flying hands.

  “And on the day the war ends I'll marry you. You harpy.”

  “The war could go on for years and years,” she said into his ear, so he would hear her and the rest of the sleeping world would not; what she was about to say was hard, even for the brazen wanton she had just proved herself to be.

  He went very still. “It could.”

  “So I have an idea.”

  He nodded, though Jennet felt the muscles in his arms tense. “Go on.”

  “Handfasting. You know the old custom, for a year and a day.”

  Luke was very quiet. “And? What happens in a year and a day?”

  Jennet heard her voice going very rough. It was irritating to have her own voice betray her, but she pushed on. “In a year and a day we meet, right here.”

  “Just like this?
” His hand slid over her bum and slipped between her thighs.

  She pinched him again and he caught her hand and bit it, lightly. “And then, what happens in a year and a day when we meet here?”

  “If you have changed your mind, or if I have changed my mind, then we part peacefully from one another.”

  “I've waited ten years for you, Jennet. I can wait ten more, if I must.”

  “Then you're far more patient than I,” she said testily. “For I'll not pace away what's left of my youth counting out empty days and wondering. Hear me weel, Luke. I'll not wait more than a year and a day.”

  He frowned at her. “And if neither of us have changed our minds in a year and a day?”

  “We marry.”

  “And if I don't come on that day?”

  “Then the assumption is you've released me from my promise and I'm free to bestow my favors elsewhere.”

  “Ah.” A shadow passed over his face. “And would you?”

  She bit back a smile. “Finally.”

  He frowned at her, inclined his head, and his arms tightened around her. “Finally? Finally what?”

  “I'm thinking of Thunder,” she said, leaning back in his arms to study his expression.

  “My horse.”

  “Aye, your horse. All the care and grooming and worry for a great bloody beast, and when Dugal Montgomerie offered you three times what any animal is worth—”

  The muscles in his cheek jumped. “What's mine is mine.”

  “Aye. And here am I, the happiest of women because you value me as highly as your horse.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “All this by way of promising that you won't go off with Dugal Montgomerie.”

  “Or anyone else,” Jennet said. “Should you keep the terms of the handfasting, of course. Luke Bonner. Or Luke Fraser or Scott or whichever name you've settled on. What is it to be, may I ask? So I can have my initials sewn into my linen.” She tried to look serious, and failed.

  “I'm using Bonner for the time being,” he said, studying her face. “If that suits you.”

  “Very well,” she said. “I'll take it, in a year and a day.”

  He brushed her wet hair back from her face. “This feels like a trap.”

  Jennet studied his expression by the light of the lantern reflected on the water. There was some worry there, but more resignation.

  “Och, nae. It's just the opposite.”

  “It feels like a trap,” he said again. He studied her face as she studied his. “But if you're in need of a promise, Jennet, then fine and good.”

  “You'll marry me in a year and a day whether or not the war is over?”

  He was looking at her intently. “In a year and a day I'll come back here and we'll settle it then. That's as much of a promise as I can give you. Will you be satisfied with that?”

  It was very late and the moon was long gone, but Jennet had never felt more awake in her life. He was leaving tomorrow and she would not see him for a very long time, perhaps all of the winter and spring and through the summer, but he would come back to her. And he would marry her then, she would see to it.

  “Aye,” she said. “I will.”

  Then he was towing her toward the falls and through the rush of water to the cavern behind, cool and dark. The lantern light wavered thinly through the curtain of the falls so that she could make out his face, but she had to shout to be heard.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Sealing the bargain,” he shouted back. There was a little ledge of rock and he pulled himself up on it and held out his hand for her.

  She paddled away and treaded water. She could not deny that she wanted to go to him, but more than that Jennet needed simply to look. With the light flickering on his wet skin he was like an illustration out of the great book of myths in her father's library, a grinning messenger of the gods come to teach her a lesson or play a trick on her.

  She said, “You'll be very tired on the morrow, and you've got a long way to travel.”

  “Come to me now,” he said, curling his fingers at her. “Come, hen.”

  It made her laugh out loud to hear him call her hen, as if they were old dears married thirty years. She came closer and closer still, but not quite close enough.

  She said, “There's only room for one to sit there.”

  Quick as a snake he leaned forward, snatched her wrist and lifted her out of the water as if she weighed no more than any other fish that might swim into his net.

  “What are you doing?” A stupid question if ever there was one, but he grinned at her, this new grin she had already come to recognize and appreciate.

  “Why, Jennet Scott,” he said, pulling her into a straddle over his lap so that they were face to face. “What else would I be doing but once again proving you wrong?”

  Chapter 7

  Late September, Paradise

  In the cool hour before dawn Elizabeth woke with a start and realized two things: her husband was gone, and a white owl was perched in the jack pine outside her chamber window like a lost child huddled into a blanket.

  A bird and nothing more, she told herself. Feathers, beak, eyes that shone like lanterns. She would not entertain dramatic notions or talk of omens; this was her home, not a theater or one of the novels that her cousin sent her from the city.

  Nathaniel was gone to hunt or check his traps or both. She would see him before long, coming into the glen with a brace of grouse or a turkey or with a doe draped around his shoulders and he would smile and hold up a hand in greeting when she came out on the porch.

  Her husband was gone and so were Daniel and Lily, but Nathaniel would be back in a few hours and they would not; not today or tomorrow or even next week. Lily was in Montreal living a life Elizabeth could imagine with little trouble. She led a day-to-day existence something like the one she herself had led at the same age, when she still lived at Oakmere with her aunt and uncle Merriweather. Elizabeth had been an orphaned cousin of little means or beauty but great ambitions and imagination, but Lily was far richer in every way.

  There had been one letter from Lily, if it could be called a letter at all. When the string was cut a whole sheaf of drawings had unfolded in Elizabeth's lap, each with words scribbled along the margins. Houses and shops and lanes, a market square crowded with people, a butcher's errand boy clutching a piglet while he argued with a soldier three times his own size, Wee Iona asleep in front of the hearth with her knitting in her lap, Luke bent over his ledgers. By piecing the drawings together it was just possible to extract the story of Lily's first days in Montreal.

  But there was no word thus far from Daniel and Blue-Jay, who had disappeared into the war, doing things Elizabeth would not, could not, let herself think about.

  She made herself look out the window only to find that the owl was gone. Some of the tension ran away from her like water wrung from a cloth; she was relieved and irritated at herself too. Elizabeth had started to think that perhaps superstition crept into a woman's mind as she got older and could no more be willed away than the lines that dug themselves into the corners of the eyes and mouth.

  She sat up in bed and was thankful for the common things: the crackle of the mattress, the feel of linen against her skin, the smell of wood smoke and pinesap and her own body. The ache in her belly that only food would quiet; the fact that her fingernails needed trimming and her hair washing. Things to anchor her to this world, the one in which she must live and move no matter where her children might be.

  Enough light had seeped into the dark that she could see Nathaniel's imprint in the bed beside her, the long fact of him, his weight and shape. He had left a single hair behind, a long dark hair on his pillow like a line of writing in a strange language.

  Autumn had settled down over the world and the evidence was everywhere to be seen. Every day another wash of color in the forests, each more insistent than the last; the first geese vaulting themselves into the sky in the shape of a giant wing; the first squash a
nd pumpkins ready for harvest. But even without those things Nathaniel's absence said the same thing to her, and said it more loudly.

  Now that the hunting and trapping season had started she would wake every morning alone, because they were no different, really, than the beaver or the squirrels or any of the animals in the forest who must make themselves ready for the snows. Every year it was the same and every year she must struggle anew and struggle harder not to be resentful of the work that took him away from her while she slept.

  Overhead Elizabeth heard stirring followed by a good thump and the sound of Jennet's laughter. She had fallen out of the bed again, as she did most mornings, dreaming herself back to her wide bed at Carryckcastle. While Elizabeth dressed she listened to the sounds of talking, too muted to really make out what Jennet and Hannah were saying, but musical and pleasing as the singing of thrushes.

  They were women well versed in the sorrows of the world, but together they worked some kind of magic on each other. In this house they were become girls again. Jennet and Hannah and Gabriel and Annie; Elizabeth thought of them as four children, brimming with surprises and promise and distraction. When Hannah and Jennet had more serious things to discuss, something that Elizabeth knew must happen, they did that out of her hearing. Whether out of concern for her state of mind or simply for privacy she did not know, but Elizabeth was thankful for the wall they built between herself and melancholy.

  Today when her part of the housework and fieldwork was done she would sit down at her desk. First she would finish the essay she was writing for the editor of the New-York Spectator, which must go with the next post to the city. In six or eight weeks it would come back again in smeared newsprint. When that obligation was met she would write a letter to Lily, and one to Daniel.

  Elizabeth finished with her hair and went out to start breakfast. At the door she paused to look back at the bed, and for a moment she wished she had left it unmade, at least until Nathaniel was home again.