Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  There was a moment, while Jennet was out of sight and Daniel lay on the table before her, pale and sweating, that Hannah imagined the worst: Sergeant Jones had taken her surgeon's kit with him. She was wishing that she had thought of this possibility before Jennet went to see Caudebec, when her cousin appeared with the box in her arms and two great guards behind her, their scarlet coats like beacons in the dim barracks.

  And that, of course, was what had taken so long: Jennet had needed the time to convince them that they wanted nothing more in the world than to bring every candle they could find.

  Mr. Whistler said, “She was born with the touch, was our Miz Jennet.”

  From deep inside his laudanum haze, Daniel laughed.

  “A swallow more?” Mr. Whistler asked her, and then lifted up Daniel's head to slip the spoon between slackened lips.

  Hannah, convinced not so long ago that she would never again pick up a probe or scalpel, had found that she hadn't forgotten anything at all. The instruments came to her hand as easily as a quill came to her stepmother's, and obeyed her in the same way. In her first day she amputated four frostbitten fingers and six toes, sutured and cauterized and abraided wounds, moving from one man to the next.

  She was reminded, to her surprise, that there was a pleasure to be had in the work. When things went well she brought relief. Some of the men had lived with severe pain for so long that its sudden absence rendered them as helpless as infants, who must weep themselves to sleep. Even if she had to take a foot or an arm to save a life there was some satisfaction in doing it well and cleanly. A farmer without a leg might still tend his crops and raise his children and give a wife comfort.

  The first thing was to forget who the man tied to the table was. He was not her brother or anyone she had ever met or hoped to know. What she had before her was simply a body, a long plane of abdomen, winter pale. There was so little fat on him that she could see each of the muscle groups clearly defined, and the beat of his pulse, too, between breaths.

  The wound itself, a dark red dimple in the plane of the oblique muscle, had made a bed for itself as angry and threatening as a wasp's nest. One she must disturb.

  In the light of the candles Hannah traced the bed of infection first with her eyes and then, gently probing, with her fingers.

  Sleepily Daniel said, “Don't you be a coward, sister, and neither will I.”

  Across from Hannah Jennet said nothing, but she was pale and sweat had broken out on her forehead.

  With a quick, neat movement, she made a curved incision. A thick river of pus and blood welled up in the track of the scalpel. There was a tensing in the muscles, and Daniel made a small sound: relief more than pain.

  All through the room men had gone very quiet. Cards and dominoes and dice were forgotten, arguments faded away as Hannah worked.

  “Christ, what a stench,” said one of the redcoats. Then he turned away and vomited onto his boots. The smell of porridge and ale joined the miasma that hung around the table: laudanum, sweat, blood, infection.

  “Just a little put-ri-fi-cation,” sang Mr. Whistler, rolling each syllable. “Just a spot of corruption to be washed away.”

  Hannah heard her own voice clear and sharp and far away, asking for the things she needed. When it came time to dig into the muscle, Jennet handed her the probe with a hand that shook only a little.

  “Shall I give him more laudanum?” asked Mr. Whistler, and got a negative grunt from Daniel in reply. In the minute it took Hannah to find the bullet and extract it, that was the only sound he made.

  “Well, look there,” Mr. Whistler said in a conversational tone. “There it is, the devil. I suppose that was a bullet once, but it don't look like much now at all.”

  Hannah was pulling something from the wound: thin and ragged and bloody, it unwound itself endlessly from its cave, and then fell with a wet plop to the table.

  “Christ above,” said Mr. Whistler. “What is that?”

  “A piece of shirting,” said Hannah.

  “Well, no wonder then,” Jennet said, gently scolding. “You're meant to wear clothes on the outside, man.”

  Soft laughter echoed through the room. From Daniel there was nothing at all, for he had finally fainted.

  “It took him long enough,” said Mr. Whistler, and even Hannah must smile at that.

  “Now you've done it,” Jennet said quietly. “Now you've gone and saved your brother's life. You'll never hear the end of it, my dear.”

  Chapter 27

  Dear family,

  Simon Ballentyne has stopped here on his way back to Paradise and must be soon away. I write in my own hand so you will see and understand the full truth of my words. Runs-from-Bears sends his own message to my aunt and cousins with news of Blue-Jay, and so here I will write only of Daniel.

  Just today I removed a bullet from my brother's side. It was bedded deep in the muscle and did not come out willingly, but the wound is clean now and drains as it should.

  The damage to his left arm is more troubling, and about it I can say only that there was some unknown injury to muscles and nerves in the shoulder. He is in some considerable pain, but he bears it without complaint. Please tell my aunt Many-Doves and Curiosity that he drinks the tea they sent every day, as they would approve.

  Jennet and I are very busy caring for the prisoners, but we are well. Outside the garrison my uncle and cousin look after our needs, and inside the garrison we have the colonel's promise of safe-passage. For Simon's good help we are especially thankful.

  In all haste,

  Your loving daughter

  Hannah, also called Walks-Ahead by the Kahnyen'kehàka, her mother's people, and Walking-Woman by her husband's. Written in her own hand the first day of March 1813.

  Chapter 28

  With the news of the misfortune that had befallen Daniel and Blue-Jay, the gossiping quieted for as much as a full day, and then flared back to life with a roar: Lily Bonner had come home, after all, to find her lover married. Whatever disappointment the villagers might have felt about the loss of Jennet and her stories was offset by the idea that sooner or later Lily would have to speak up and put an end to all the rumors.

  Given her choice, Lily would have pretended that she had never been away, had never seen or heard of the city of Montreal, and most certainly had never known anyone who went by the name of Nicholas Wilde or Simon Ballentyne.

  During the day she kept busy enough with the sugaring, which had always been one of her favorite things. She spent her days with Gabriel and Annie, checking the sap buckets and pouring them into the cauldron Many-Doves watched over. It was work Gabriel disliked but he knew better than to complain to his aunt or father, who would have scolded him or, worse, laughed at him. He satisfied himself with saving his complaints for Lily and Annie.

  “I don't hear you complaining in the morning when my mother turns out the cakes,” Annie pointed out to him now and then, and he had the good grace to duck his head and grin. Like the rest of the men at Lake in the Clouds, Gabriel had a weakness for maple sugar in all its forms.

  The nights were harder. Sometimes, alone in the chamber she had last shared with her sister and cousin, Lily lay awake and wondered what was worse about going into the village: the questions about Simon, or the stories about Nicholas and his new wife. Stories so awful that she did not want to believe them, no matter how many times she was told.

  Everyone had their own ideas about Jemima and Nicholas, and everyone was sure that Lily must share their conclusions, if only they could try to explain it one more time.

  Curiosity's report was all that Lily had needed or wanted, and that she had got straightaway, and without embellishment. Jemima had acted as Jemima had always and would always act: with her own interest and survival first and foremost. She had let Dolly Wilde wander off to her death, and then she had taken advantage of a lonely man in mourning. And now she was pregnant by Nicholas, who had become the brunt of the joke.

  “He was ripe for the pick
ing,” Curiosity had told Lily. “All she had to do was shake the tree a little.” And then Curiosity had put her long, cool hands on Lily's face and said the rest of it.

  “He did a foolish thing, child. But he ain't the first good man to be towed down the road to perdition by his privates, and he won't be the last. No call to go red in the face, now. I'm speaking plain, woman to woman. No call to hate the man either. Lord knows he's reaping a fool's bounty.”

  Lily said, “I don't hate him. I couldn't hate him.”

  “Good,” Curiosity said. “Now the next thing is, you got to put him out of your mind.”

  That would be harder, of course. First, because unless she avoided the village completely, she must come across Nicholas or Jemima with some regularity; and second, because everyone in Paradise knew that there had been some connection between them. Some illicit connection, the nature of which required grave and nonstop discussion, if not direct questions.

  In the trading post to buy some salt a few days after she came home, Lily came face to face with Missy Parker, who studied her waistline openly. According to Martha and Callie, who were willing to share all the village gossip that her own mother and Curiosity had held back, Missy Parker was convinced in her soul that Lily had been sent to Montreal to bring Nicholas Wilde's bastard into the world. Now, confronted with the fact of Lily's waist—narrower now than when she left—even Missy Parker must concede that point.

  “You must be very disappointed,” Lily said.

  Missy Parker sniffed, the tic in her right eye fluttering. She had no idea what Lily was talking about, and no time for such nonsense either.

  Lily would have been satisifed to leave it at that, but Anna could not. To the men playing skittles in front of the stove and the girls examining hair ribbons and Nettie Dubonnet who nursed her youngest in the corner, she announced her opinion in a loud and clear voice: Lily Bonner was a fine girl of upstanding moral character and a friend to many folks, young and old, men and women, rich and poor, and if some folks had got the idea that she was anything but Christian and charitable, why then they should bring those claims directly to her, Anna Metzler Hauptmann McGarrity, so that she could set them back on the straight and narrow. And by the way, shouldn't those folks who professed themselves to be scholars of the good book remember that part about motes and beams and minding your own business?

  This story Lily took to her mother, hoping to make her laugh. There was very little laughter at Lake in the Clouds since she had come home, or more upsetting still, very little talk at all. But Elizabeth had only listened in silence and then thought for a while, in her quiet way. Then she said, “In a week or so they will find something else to occupy them. You must be patient.”

  Lily had been expecting something very different from her mother: a long talk about rights and responsibilities and appropriate behaviors. Elizabeth Middleton Bonner would approach the problem of a daughter's compromised reputation from a number of directions at once, and leave books on her bed with passages marked for her to read: Locke on education and potential, Paine on liberty and the rights of man, and most certainly her mother's favorite, the staid old German philosopher Kant, with his eternal chasing after truth on the wings of categorical imperative.

  Lily admitted with some reluctance that she had missed such discussions with her mother, and had been looking forward to them again, even if it were her own behavior and poor choices that were to be taken apart and examined with the help of Mr. Kant. And it would have happened, if not for Daniel. The truth was, they were all too worried about what was happening in the stockade at Nut Island to talk philosophy or to pay any attention to the gossips, even when it came to the mess that Lily had got herself into.

  It wasn't fair, and there was nothing to be done about it. Curiosity seemed to be the only one who took note, but the comfort that she had to offer was laced with bitter truths.

  “One of the worst things about being a woman,” Curiosity had said to her, “is the waiting. Seem like you always waiting for something. Just now your mama plain out of her head with worry about your brother, and you got to wait until she come up for air and see you standing there. It don't seem fair, I know. It ain't fair, I suppose. But she ain't forgot about you.”

  In the evening they sat together and her mother read aloud as she always had, except that now sometimes her voice trailed away to nothing. Then they would all sit in silence looking into the fire and thinking of Daniel and Blue-Jay and Jennet and Hannah, thrown back into the maw of the war she had never even wanted to talk about. Even Gabriel was withdrawn and difficult to reach. In the night sometimes he cried out.

  It was a relief to have him to comfort. Lily sat with him, his head bedded on her lap while she stroked his hair and spoke calm words and watched until he drifted back to a more peaceful sleep.

  Annie followed her around in the day, full of questions that had no answers. It was odd, Lily thought, how for each of them worry took a different face. Many-Doves worked from dawn and well into the night, until she fell into an exhausted sleep. Elizabeth knitted stocking after stocking and wrote letters to every cousin and friend; Nathaniel walked.

  Up before first light, he would take his rifle down from the rack over the door and slip out. Lily imagined him on the mountain, his back to the sunrise as he studied the horizon to the north. In his mind's eye he would travel the great lake, winding through islands to where Champlain narrowed into the Sorel, all the way to Nut Island and the stockade.

  Every morning she lay awake and hoped that her father would come and ask her to walk with him, and every morning he went alone.

  When she had been home a week, Lily began to believe that her father was never going to raise the subject of Simon Ballentyne or Nicholas Wilde with her. At first it was a relief and then, quite quickly, a burden. The surprise was this: his anger would have been easier to bear than the terrible weight of his thoughtful silence.

  Then one day she came home and found her father sitting in front of the hearth across from Nicholas Wilde.

  She stood in the doorway, her heart beating so hard in her throat that she couldn't make a sound. Instead she closed the door and took off her mantle and hung it on its hook, and then she came into the room in her stocking feet and waited.

  “It's time we talked,” said her father. “There's business we need to settle.”

  Lily had seen Nicholas three times since she came home: that night in Curiosity's kitchen, and twice from afar when she was on her way home from the village. She had yet to see Jemima at all. This was the first time she could really look at Nicholas, and what she saw was more painful than any stories told in malice.

  He's reaping a fool's bounty, Curiosity had said. At the time it hadn't meant very much to Lily, but now she saw what the last months had cost this man.

  Nicholas stared at his hands while he spoke. He said, “I just want to say once more in front of Lily what I said to you before, Nathaniel. I'm sorry for the hurt I've caused. I should have known better than to let you get attached to me, no matter how innocent it was. It was wrong, and I apologize.”

  There was a stone in her throat, one that would choke her if she did not spit it out or swallow it. But if she said those things that were in her mind, if she put those words out into the world, then they could never be taken back again: they would live in her father's mind and heart for as long as he drew breath. And she could not bear how he would look at her then, if he understood what kind of person she was, really, down deep.

  Lily closed her eyes. Nicholas took that for agreement, or at least surrender to the inevitable. “You know I'm married again. It don't matter how I came to make such a mess of things, at least it don't matter to you. I take the blame for it.” His voice went hoarse. “I apologize to you. And I wish you well, Lily Bonner. I truly do. Will you shake my hand?”

  His hand, long and fine fingered, an artist's hand, she had once told him, that could coax gold-red fruit from the earth. What a child she had been. Lily took
his hand and felt how cold it was, and limp, and tentative.

  She stood up and left the room, and not until she closed her chamber door behind herself did she realize that she had not spoken a single word to Nicholas Wilde, a man she had loved with all her heart, and now must love and hate in equal measure. For his cowardice, and for his betrayal.

  Her father said, “What would you have had the man say to you?”

  She had been asleep when he came in, her face damp on a pillow slip wet with her weeping. Now Lily righted herself in the dim of the late afternoon and blinked. For a moment she thought it was her twin sitting on the chair beside the bed. She would have given anything just now to have Daniel beside her; she would have gladly taken whatever hard words he had and asked for more, just for the pleasure of sitting with him. But instead here was her father, her beloved father, looking at her with an expression she could hardly stand to see. Not exactly angry, but worried and disappointed and frustrated too, and struggling with all of that.

  She let herself bend over, pressed her forehead to her knees and rocked herself.

  “Come, girl,” he said, low and soft; her father's calm voice in the night. “Breathe deep. You're safe, now. You're home.”

  She stayed like that for a while, weeping without sound, her father's hand light on her back. Then she straightened and wiped her face with her hands. “I don't know. I don't know what I wanted him to say. Something else.”

  Something impossible. Something foolish.

  After a moment he said, “I've got two things I need to make clear. First is, no matter what nonsense you've got in your head, I'm not mad at you. Not over something like this. You'll pick up and move on and make more mistakes, and I won't be mad at you about those either, unless you set out to hurt somebody on purpose. The second thing is, I'm glad you're home, daughter. I missed you, but I'm wondering why you came.”