Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  When Luke went back to Canada and left Jennet behind she had two things to sustain her: his promise, and her own natural curiosity.

  Every day Hannah must wonder at her cousin, at her enthusiasm and a courage that often bordered on the reckless. At home in Scotland she had roamed far and long, and no threats or punishments had ever been able to curb her curiosity or her determination to see it satisfied. Age had not tamed her, and loss had only taught her to be bold in seeking out what she wanted for herself.

  When Hannah pointed this out to her Jennet had an answer, as she did for most things.

  “Because I have no bairns,” she decided after some thought. “It's the raising of bairns that teaches a woman the meaning of fear.”

  They were sitting on Eagle Rock after an afternoon of helping with the corn, both of them sweaty and in want of a swim but still unwilling to move out of the breeze. Beneath their bare feet the rock was warm and all around the forest was a sea of burning color, almost too bright to look at.

  Jennet said, “You've never asked me why it is I bore Ewan no heir. In Carryck the old women decided long ago that I'm barren.”

  “And do you think you're barren?” Hannah asked.

  Jennet lay back suddenly and put an arm over her face. “I wished them away, the bairns. I told them to stay away, that I couldna be a mother when I didna ken how to be a wife.”

  One part of Hannah, the woman who had trained with Richard Todd and studied O'seronni medicine, that part of herself did not believe that it was possible to wish unwanted children away. In the months she had worked in the poorhouse in the city she had seen too many women hollowed out with children they did not want and could ill afford, women not thirty years who looked fifty or more, who greeted the birth of a fifth or sixth or seventh child with cold indifference or plain fury.

  “You think I'm daft,” Jennet said.

  “No,” said Hannah. “I was thinking about the time I spent working in the sick wards at the poorhouse.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jennet said, settling in for the story.

  So Hannah told her something she had rarely told anyone at all, about the dissections she had watched, what she had learned from those women who had died heavy with child or in childbirth or of fever soon afterward. Women whose bodies were claimed not by families but by doctors ravenous always to know more, men who stood around in bloodied shirtsleeves, their heads bent together over flawed wombs, the smell of pipe smoke intertwined with blood and decay while they pointed and prodded and argued. Misshapen wombs, withered or lopsided or torn, diseased in ways she would not tell Jennet or any woman for the dreams those words would conjure.

  When Hannah had finished talking about what she knew and what she could not know, no one could know, about the bearing of children, Jennet said nothing for a long while. One of her hands lay lightly on her stomach, fingers curled. There was a blister on Jennet's thumb, perfectly round and pulsing with rich blood. Hannah was taken with such deep affection and sorrow that her throat swelled with tears. But instead of weeping she forced herself to go on.

  “But this is only one kind of medicine,” she said. “And it comes from men who only know how to look in one way, with a knife. My Kahnyen'kehàka grandmother and great-grandmother and aunts would laugh at such blindness.

  “They taught me that it is possible to will away a child, to keep it waiting in the shadow lands. They taught me the songs to sing to keep a man's seed from taking root. They showed me how to make the tea that washes the child away before it is a child at all.”

  Jennet was studying her, but Hannah did not let her ask the question. “Yes,” she said. “I have drunk the tea, three times.”

  “But you loved your husband,” Jennet said quietly.

  “Oh yes, I did. I do still.”

  “Then why?”

  Hannah pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her legs.

  “After our son was born, Tecumseh called on Strikes-the-Sky to travel with him,” she said. The familiar names had a strange taste on her tongue, but she went on. “I followed the men as they went from village to village, recruiting warriors from all the tribes to join the battle to hold the land. With my son on my back I followed them. Everywhere people were desperate for food, for clothes, for weapons to defend themselves, for hope. The things I saw—the things my son saw when he was still a baby—they were worse than the poorhouse could ever be.”

  She paused to sort through her thoughts, and in the silence she counted the birds in the sky.

  “Go on,” said Jennet. “Please.”

  “Late one summer the army burned all the crops, and so when the winter came many of them starved, youngest and oldest first, as it always is. Their empty bellies swelled and then they died. All my medicines, the things I had spent so much time learning—none of that meant anything at all.”

  Hannah forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it for three heartbeats.

  “That winter was the first time I drank the tea that sends a child back to the shadow lands.”

  And later, Hannah might have said, later when the fighting started in earnest I wanted no other child. Foolish woman that I was.

  Jennet drew in a shuddering breath. “And is there a tea to do the opposite, when a woman wants a child?”

  Hannah sent her a sidelong glance. “There are medicines to encourage a child, yes, and songs to summon one. You will ask me when you are ready, and together Many-Doves and I and you will prove the old women in Carryck wrong.”

  At that Jennet smiled, and leaned forward, and pressed her forehead to her cousin's cheek, damp with perspiration and tears and hope.

  “I'm ready now,” she said. “If only your stubborn brother would come back for me.”

  Jennet was determined to learn everything she could about living in the wilderness, so that when Luke did come back he would find her a worthy wife. No one was safe from her quest; she sought out strangers to ask questions with such complete sincerity and interest that no one ever thought to deny her. Whatever resentment there may have been in the village—and there were some young women who were not happy to learn that this interloper from Scotland had snatched Luke Bonner for her own—it disappeared in the face of Jennet's resolute goodwill and generosity. Jennet was in love and the world was not strong enough to resist her; it must love her back.

  She had her favorites: Curiosity was one of them, Joshua Hench, Curiosity's son-in-law and a blacksmith, was another. She made fast friends with the children, who competed for the honor of teaching her the things they knew and showing her their secret places.

  In short time she had learned how to make biscuits, how to forge a nail, how to grind corn into the finest meal by hand, how to distinguish between the tracks of raccoons, fox, dog, cats of different kinds; she had thrown herself into the harvest without hesitation and laughed when Hannah insisted on treating the scratches and blisters that resulted. She knew where the children went to search for arrowheads and she took lessons in skinning rabbits, loading a rifle, and walking a trail with the quiet watchfulness that was the true sign of an accomplished woodswoman.

  On a Sunday in the late afternoon Hannah and Jennet set out together for the village, the tarot cards tucked safely into the basket Jennet carried with her everywhere. Almost everyone had asked for a reading, once it was understood that she asked nothing in return except answers to her endless questions. When she came back to Lake in the Clouds it would be full of the things she had gathered, from pinecones to mushrooms to spent bullets, but at the moment it was empty and light enough to swing.

  When they left the glen Jennet raised her head and sniffed the air, her nose wrinkling.

  “A frost tonight,” she said, pulling her shawl around her shoulders. Jennet's eyesight was only average, but her sense of smell surprised and impressed everyone.

  Gabriel had made a game of testing her by covering her eyes and passing ever stranger items under her nose: a rusty nail, an apple stem, corn hus
ks, a piece of cherry wood, a scrap of fur from the old pelt the dogs slept on. Only rarely would she be unable to put the right name to a scent, and thus far Hannah had never known her to mistake a change in the weather.

  For her own part, Jennet seemed to take this talent of hers for granted. She made announcements and then moved on.

  “You did say we could go by way of the marsh?”

  “A half hour more won't make a difference,” Hannah agreed. In truth she was just as happy not to go by the bridge under the millhouse, as Jemima Kuick would no doubt be keeping watch, as she did most evenings. Her biweekly visits to the widow were bad enough as it was. Jemima stayed in the shadows but she hovered like a spider over a web.

  “Good,” said Jennet. “I haven't been to see the beaver today.”

  She had taken a huge interest in the dam that crossed the narrowest point of the marsh on the west end of the lake. It was the biggest beaver dam that Hannah knew of, and more than that, it was a rare collaboration between man and beast. The dam was wide enough for two people to walk abreast without disturbing the animals who lived inside and worked so hard to maintain it. Jennet called it a miracle of natural engineering and one that would have delighted her father.

  She spent many evenings long past dusk sitting near the dam with Gabriel and Annie, who could identify each of the beavers and answered all of Jennet's questions.

  Jennet had early sought out Runs-from-Bears, who told her the story of the Kahnyen'kehàka who lived on the lake before the whites came, and how they had made a pact: Brother Beaver would maintain the bridge across the marsh and his Mohawk brothers would do what they could to protect him from the wolf.

  The men in the village had a different take on things, which they also shared with Jennet. The beaver dam was a bridge that cost them neither time nor money to maintain, and more than that: it gave them some level of protection against spring floods.

  “To make hats out of such wondrous creatures.” Jennet always ended her visits with this muttered condemnation.

  This Sunday evening as they crossed the beaver bridge the dusk was already on them and a light rain had begun to fall. The high keen smells—mud and rot and fish—made Hannah think of Elizabeth, who could not keep her nose from wrinkling even after so many years.

  But Jennet did not mind the stink; she had grown up in circumstances far richer and grander than even Elizabeth's, but she had spent all of her girlhood running wild in the Lowland hills, and she was more likely to investigate the cause of a stink than to turn away from it.

  Underfoot the dam was solid and thick with many new layers of dried mud patted into place. It made crossing the marsh quick and clean and still Hannah was bothered.

  A hard winter was coming by all the signs, and the thought of it made her break out in gooseflesh where the cold rain had not.

  To Jennet she said, “You will need furs to wear too, in the winter. We must talk to Many-Doves about your clothes.”

  “But not beaver.” Jennet cast a last glance at a large form moving placidly through the deeper water on the lake side of the dam. And then, more thoughtfully: “Runs-from-Bears says the winter will be cold, with more snow than usual. As bad as the winter the twins were born. I remember you telling me about that when first you came to Carryck.”

  “It was a very bad winter, yes. The river froze solid, which it seldom does.”

  Jennet said, “I have so little experience of snow, real snow, I am almost looking forward to it.”

  Hannah made a sound she hoped would be sufficient to end the conversation. But Jennet was not so easily discouraged.

  “Gabriel says he'll teach me about snowshoes.”

  In the tall grasses that framed the footpath rabbits were playing in the last of the light, and they scattered as the women passed by.

  “You'll have little choice,” Hannah said. “Unless you spend the entire winter by the hearth.”

  Jennet looked genuinely shocked at the idea. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because it's warm and safe,” Hannah said.

  Her cousin let out a soft laugh. “Aye, and boring, forbye. Do you skate on the lake in winter?”

  The question took Hannah by surprise. She felt herself flushing with it, all the way up her spine to the ends of her fingers.

  “No,” she said, and heard her own voice cracking. “The ice is too rough and uncertain.”

  “But if the winter is as bad as you say,” Jennet insisted. And then, more thoughtfully: “Maybe I could ask Mr. Hench to make me a pair of blades.”

  They were silent for the rest of the walk to the Todds'. Hannah wondered at herself, that she could be wounded so easily and without any warning at all by something so simple as a discussion of the coming winter.

  Tell her, Strikes-the-Sky said behind her. For a single moment Hannah knew with absolute certainty that if she turned around she would find him there, looking down at her, his expression impatient.

  Tell her and free yourself, he said again.

  Jennet was sniffing the air once more as they came closer to the Todds' place. “They've been making soap. Do you remember the Sunday we spent with my granny and old Gelleys the washerwoman?”

  “It's been a long time since I've thought about that,” said Hannah. She cleared her throat and when she spoke her voice had transformed itself, taken on the comfortable creak of breathy old age. “‘Thirty year was I heid washerwoman, wi' three guid maids under me. Six days a week did we wash and press.'”

  “I miss my granny.” Jennet's tone had softened and Hannah knew that she, too, was hearing a voice long gone.

  “I remember many things from that afternoon,” Hannah said. “I remember the vicar coming to call. What ever became of him?”

  Jennet's face lit up. “Och, did I never write to you about Willie Fisher? And such a lovely story it is too. He inherited some money from an uncle and he went to sea and became a pirate.”

  Hannah stopped where she was and sent Jennet her severest expression, to which her cousin held up both hands.

  “I swear on my good name, it's aye true. He bought a ship and named her Salvation and went off to the Spice Islands.”

  “Jennet,” Hannah said with a smile. “How does that add up to piracy? It sounds to me as though he's gone off to be a missionary.”

  The corner of Jennet's mouth twitched. “Aye, and are they not one and the same thing? Stealing souls from someone else's God to give to your own. Sometimes it seems to me that a war must soon break out in heaven itself, with such shameless poaching as goes on among the deities.”

  Without realizing that she had intended to, Hannah hugged her cousin.

  “And what did I do to deserve that?” Jennet asked, pleased.

  “You made me laugh,” Hannah said. “It's a rare talent you've got, cousin.”

  Jennet looked embarrassed, but pleased. “I hope I can be of more help to you than that,” she said. “Let's go see what work the doctor has for us.”

  Richard said, “You'll need an assistant, but Ethan is gone to Johnstown and Curiosity to a birthing.” He sent Jennet a severe look from under a lowered brow, but the Earl of Carryck's youngest daughter had been fed a steady diet of such looks from men even more imposing than Richard Todd. She gave him a grin in return.

  “Are you up to the job, Lady Jennet?”

  Richard was the only person in Paradise who still called Jennet by her rightful title, and not out of respect but only to goad her. He was bedridden with nausea and in a great deal of pain today, but Hannah had the idea that he was enjoying himself.

  Jennet said, “Och aye, dinna worry yer heid.”

  To Richard Todd, Jennet always spoke Scots. The only reason for this, as far as Hannah could see, was to pay him back in aggravation. For his part Richard seemed determined to deny her that pleasure by steadfastly refusing to make any comment, no matter what language she used with him. And if she suddenly addressed him in Greek, Hannah thought, he would not raise a brow.

&
nbsp; Now he just grunted, but his mouth jerked at the corner. Hannah bit back her own smile.

  She said, “I could stop by the trading post and ask Anna to assist. Then Jennet could stay here and keep you company.”

  For her troubles she got sharp looks from both of them: from Jennet because Richard Todd was one of the very few people in the village she would not spend time with unless compelled, and from Richard because he would resent being challenged until he was laid in his grave.

  He grunted. “If I wanted company I would get a dog.”

  “'Gin ye could find one wha'd hae ye,” said Jennet clearly, looking him directly in the eye.

  He pointed with his chin to the door before he lost the battle completely and gave in to smiling. “You're dismissed, the two of you. God protect me from the Bonner women.”

  “What exactly will I have to do?” Jennet asked as they made their way to the Grebers' cabin. She was carrying the lantern in one hand and her basket over the other.

  “Hand me things when I ask for them,” Hannah said. “Stay calm. Distract the patient. Don't faint.”

  At that Jennet looked truly insulted. “I've never fainted in my life, and weel you know it, Hannah Bonner.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Hannah said. “I don't know what I was thinking.”

  But Jennet was not so easily appeased. “What's a bit of blood, after all? Have I not seen many a bloody man dragged into the courtyard at Carryck?”

  “Good,” Hannah said, being careful not to show her concern. “Because it's likely to be unpleasant.”

  For the rest of the walk Hannah explained to Jennet exactly what she would have to do. A horse had stepped on Horace Greber's foot while he was in Johnstown. The infection had spread fast, and the surgeon there—a disreputable sort who barbered and let blood and did the odd surgery that came his way, all with the same scalpel—had taken the leg off above the knee to stop it. Then he had sent Horace home to Paradise in the back of a wagon driven by his frightened nine-year-old son while he raved with fever.

  “His boy, the one with the strange name—”