Fire Along the Sky Fire Along the Sky

by Sara Donati

  “I assumed you would know, Mrs.—”

  “Mrs. Bonner,” Elizabeth supplied. “And this is Mrs. McGarrity, and Mr. LeBlanc.”

  For once in her life, Anna was speechless; she made some small sound that was meant to be a greeting.

  The Reverend Stiles nodded solemnly. “I have bought the Wildes' place, and I'm here to take possession. Of the orchards and the meetinghouse as well. I've agreed to take up your empty pulpit. Mrs. Wilde impressed upon me how in need this place is of the Lord's word.”

  “Christ on the bloody Cross,” said Charlie, scratching the crown of his head with the stem of his pipe. “Jemima's gone and sold the place out from under Nicholas. I'll bet he doesn't have a clue.”

  Tuesday morning, Lily woke in her own bed at Lake in the Clouds and listened. The house was empty. Her parents had gone down to the village to give the courier their letters and packages, and left her to sleep, something she might have done for a longer time if not for the noise that she could not identify.

  Then it came again: a crashing like dishes breaking, but from outside. More awake now, Lily recognized it for what it was: the great icicles that hung from the eaves, many as tall as her father, were falling. As children she and Daniel had made it their special chore to help the process, taking up fallen branches and leaning out the windows to swipe at the ice.

  Those days were gone now, and wouldn't come again. Daniel was in Canada, and when he was well enough he would escape and make his way home, but even then things wouldn't ever be the same again.

  She tried to imagine her brother without the use of his arm, but it would have been easier to give him wings and watch him fly away. In her mind she always saw her twin busy with something. That was Daniel, the very essence of him: movement and work and getting things done.

  Lily turned her face into her pillow and willed away the tears that wanted to come. Her mother did not weep when she read the letter aloud, though she had gone very pale. Instead she had set herself to work. They all had. Yesterday Lily had spent the day helping Many-Doves and Curiosity, sorting and washing and grinding the herbs and roots they needed. All day she had worked, and into the night.

  She hadn't seen Simon Ballentyne, though he had never been out of her thoughts.

  When she allowed herself to dwell on Simon, and on herself as she had been with him on the night of the ice storm, she was overwhelmed by so many feelings that she despaired of ever making sense of them. Embarrassment was foremost among them, and not far behind, a kind of stunned astonishment, that her body was capable of feeling such things, and that her heart and mind could survive them.

  As soon as her parents went to bed the night before, Lily had dragged out the washtub and started to heat water. Alone in front of the hearth she had climbed into water as hot as she could stand and scrubbed with the fine soap that her aunt Spencer sent from the city. It came all the way from Bruges, a city that Uncle Spencer spoke of often and visited whenever he was in Europe. It smelled of lavender and roses but it could not scrub Simon's smell away, and nothing could. He was in her pores now, and would not be banished.

  To herself Lily must admit that what she wanted, what she really wanted right now, at this early hour of the morning, was to go find Simon and have it all happen again. There was a new hunger in her, one that grew steadily and fed on the memories that she couldn't—didn't want to—keep at bay.

  She had the idea that if she were free to go seek out Simon she would be able to put Daniel out of her mind, for a short time, at least. He would do that for her, and when they were sated she could talk to him and tell him this latest news, and he would listen.

  But they had made an agreement, in the last hour of that long night of the ice storm: they would stay apart during the week, as Simon had promised Lily's mother. He would go about his work and she would go about hers; they would cross paths, certainly—the schoolhouse he was building was next to the old meetinghouse where she did her work. When that happened they might exchange a few words but then they would part, and on Sunday he would call on her as planned. And they would be together, somehow: neither of them had the heart to pretend otherwise. Worn down by passion, satisfied with this compromise, Lily had agreed that she could be patient until Sunday. Now she wondered if that had been foolish; if she could wait so long, or if she would have to go looking for Simon before too many days had passed. She had no pride left where he was concerned, but neither, she was surprised to realize, did she miss it very much.

  Her brother was lying in a prison camp in mortal pain and here she lay in the full light of day, thinking of the things she might do with Simon Ballentyne before the sun set, if she happened to come across him alone.

  Disgusted with herself, Lily got out of bed and dressed. Gabriel and Annie were playing cards in the workroom, their voices rising and falling as they argued good-naturedly. She slipped out without stopping to eat, and headed for the village.

  She was so lost in her own thoughts that Lily didn't notice anything amiss until she was over the bridge. Then it took the Ratz boys to get her attention.

  “You're late,” Harry shouted as he ran by. “It's already started!”

  “What's started?” Lily called back, picking up her pace.

  But she got no answer. The boys flew up the trading-post steps and disappeared inside, the door open long enough for Lily to see the crowd of people.

  For a moment she paused, and considered. It could be nothing more than Missy Parker and old Mrs. Hindle in the middle of a particularly colorful argument, or Jed McGarrity's latest experiment with distilling schnapps, or one of the trappers who came into Paradise for supplies with a tall tale. She could just go to her work and get it all from Martha and Callie later, but there was something in the way the boys had been running, some energy that filled her with curiosity and dread in equal measures.

  She slipped into the crowd and found herself confronted by nothing more than the backs of her neighbors. The only person who took note of her was Simon Ballentyne, who stood in the corner, arms folded. He smiled, a little shyly, she thought, the way she herself must be smiling, and gestured her closer with a small movement of his head.

  From the front she heard Jed McGarrity say, “It looks to be in order, signed and sealed and all.”

  The crowd shifted and muttered as Lily inched her way toward Simon. Then she was close enough to smell him, and the skin rose all along her back and the nape of her neck, and she cursed herself for a foolish twit and turned her back to him to try to see what was happening.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Simon leaned forward to talk into her ear, raising his voice a little to be heard, as the talk in the room was growing louder.

  “It looks as if Jemima Wilde sold the orchard and farm out from under Nicholas and ran off,” he said.

  Lily was sure, at first, that she had misunderstood—then she turned her head and saw pity in Simon's expression, and knew she had not.

  He told her the rest of it in a few words: Jemima had found a buyer for the orchards through the newspapers, arranged it all by mail, stolen the deed to the land and signed her husband's name. To the buyer—a milk-white man with a great heavy head and a somber expression—Jemima had spun a story that sounded believable: her husband was a sailor who had been called back to his ship, and had signed the papers before he left.

  Jemima was gone and wouldn't be back in Paradise ever again.

  That was the hardest thing to imagine. As long as Lily had been alive, she had known Jemima Wilde; she could imagine her nowhere else in the world but here.

  Those ideas were still ordering themselves in Lily's mind when she heard Nicholas's voice. She went up on tiptoe and still could see nothing, and then Simon simply picked her up and set her on top a pile of crates that gave her better advantage over the room.

  Nicholas stood, head bent over the papers in his hands. His hair fell forward so that she couldn't make out his eyes or his expression, but the set of his shoulders mad
e him look as old as the stranger who stood between him and Jed McGarrity.

  “His name is Stiles,” Simon said, his tone pitched so low that only she could hear him. “From Boston by way of Maine, he says.” Seated as she was, Lily could look directly into Simon's eyes, if she only had the courage.

  She whispered back, “But it can't be lawful, can it?”

  “It's not my signature,” said Nicholas just then, as if he had heard her question.

  “But the money was paid in good faith,” said Stiles in a deep, steady voice. “I'm here with all my worldly possessions, and a nephew to raise. Still, if you could refund the money . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Lily caught sight of her mother and father, standing to one side. She had rarely seen her mother look so somber, though her father's expression was, as ever, impossible to read. Because he wished it so.

  “No,” said Nicholas. “She took the little bit of money I had put by when she went yesterday. To buy linen, she said.” His voice sounded high and soft and far away, like that of a man speaking in his sleep.

  Jed McGarrity looked as uncomfortable as Lily had ever seen him. He said, “This ain't a matter a constable can settle.” He spoke directly to Nicholas, and his tone was full of regret. “But he's got the deed, Nicholas.”

  “And a signed receipt,” said the stranger. “Signed and witnessed.”

  “And a signed receipt,” Jed echoed reluctantly. “It don't look good, but you can go to the courts with it, see what they say.”

  “What nonsense,” said Anna, pushing out of the crowd. “He could go to the courts. And feed himself how in the meantime?” With her fists on her ample hips, she waggled her head at Nicholas. “Wake up, man. You go get back what was took from you. Ride after Jemima—she can't have gone far in her condition.”

  “Do you know where she was going, Mr. Stiles?” Jed asked the question reluctantly, his gaze skittering back and forth between Nicholas and his wife. Anna in a temper was best avoided, and he was looking for a way out of the conversation, anyone could see that.

  “I don't,” said the reverend. “I'm sorry to say.”

  Nicholas said, “It's not my signature.” He said it like a boy who knew he would be beaten for something he had not done, a boy who had been beaten before without cause and had no hope of any other kind of treatment.

  Lily's heart twisted with sorrow and anger and a deep, abiding disgust.

  “I'll ride after her for you, Wilde,” shouted Praise-Be Cunningham. “I'll drag her back here by her hair, by God, and show her what's what.”

  At that Nicholas seemed to wake up, finally, and Lily looked away from the sight of his face. Only twice in her life had she seen a person struck so hard. One was her own mother when she lost a child, and the other was Mr. Hindle's mother, who had lived through a Mohawk raid as a child and had never quite been right afterward.

  He held out the papers to the man beside him without looking. “Take your deed, Mr. Stiles. I'll be cleared out by the end of the day.”

  The older man's jowls worked busily, but then he nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Wilde. May the Almighty bless and keep you in your adversity.”

  There was a moment's stunned silence, and then angry voices rose up again, a wasp's nest poked once too often. Martin Ratz pushed his way to the door but he turned back, his face contorted with outrage.

  “Wilde, you're an idiot and a coward if you let that woman get away with stealing you blind. I'd feel sorry for you if you weren't such a pitiful excuse for a man.”

  Missy Parker was pushing through the crowd too, but in the other direction, toward the front. When she got where she wanted to be she was breathing hard, her ample bosom heaving and flushed. She took a moment to put her cap to rights and pat the kerchief around her neck.

  “Watch out, Reverend,” Charlie LeBlanc said in a low voice that would not be heard beyond the circle of men at the very back of the room. “You're square in her sights, now.”

  Behind Lily, Simon grunted softly. Then his hand was on her shoulder, and his breath stirred the hair at her ear.

  She leaned toward him, just a little, thinking that he had something to say, and then stayed like that, shoulder to shoulder.

  “Reverend Stiles,” Missy Parker was saying. “Maybe it's a little unusual how you've come to us, but I for one am glad to have you. We've been too long without a shepherd.”

  All around the room people began to shift uncomfortably. Lily saw suspicion and disquiet on the faces of most of the women, but the men were amused or annoyed or a little of both. Stiles wasn't the first preacher to think he could bring some order to this particular flock. No doubt the wagering would start as soon as Stiles was out of earshot: how many days it would be before he gave up and sold out. Tonight when the regulars sat down in the tavern they would talk themselves hoarse, cursing Missy Parker and Jemima Wilde both, and the Reverend Mr. Stiles most of all.

  Lily could almost feel sorry for the Yankee preacher who had been enticed into this nest of no-nonsense Yorkers. It was a fine joke Jemima had played on them all, and Lily had the uncomfortable idea that it wouldn't be the last one. But Stiles didn't seem to have any sense of that.

  The severe old man was looking at Missy Parker from under a tangled mass of white eyebrows, his small mouth pursed tight, out of place in the fleshy face. “The good Lord giveth and he taketh away.” His voice boomed out, filling the room. He raised both hands, palm outward, squeezed his eyes shut, and tilted his head back. “Let us pray.”

  “But not here,” Anna McGarrity said, clapping her hands. “And not now. I got a business to run, Reverend Stiles.”

  The heavy head dropped forward. When he opened his eyes Lily saw a burning anger there, the first sign of the real man, she thought: she would draw him this way, when she had the chance.

  “We'll adjourn to the meetinghouse, then,” he announced. And seeing the surprise in the faces around him said, “There is a meetinghouse, Mrs. Wilde assured me.”

  Missy Parker cleared her throat importantly and flashed a triumphant look in Elizabeth's direction. “Well, sure we had a meetinghouse, Mr. Stiles. But it was give over to less godly pursuits.”

  Lily might have spoken up then, but Simon's hand slipped to her waist and tightened. “Wait,” he said. “Let your father handle it. Stiles isn't the kind of man who'll pay attention to anything a woman has to say.”

  It was true and it was infuriating too. Lily caught her father's eye and the shrug that said he was more aggravated than worried and would make short work of the trouble at hand.

  “Let's leave it to him,” Simon said so softly that no one else could hear. “Come, lass, come away.”

  Lily swallowed down all the protests that rose up so readily, and let him help her down from the crate. She was at the door when she realized that Nicholas Wilde was standing there too, his hand on the latch, watching her.

  She wanted to say something to him, something kind and helpful, something that would make the terrible lost look in his eyes go away. But there were no words that could accomplish that, and Lily felt that lack as surely as she felt Simon's hand on her waist.

  Nicholas looked at her for a long moment and then turned his head away. He closed the door behind him.

  When Lily found the nerve to follow him, seconds or minutes or hours later, the only sign that he had ever existed were fresh heel marks in the road, already filling with water.

  “Will you walk with me for a bit?” she asked Simon, and set off, not waiting for his answer. She turned onto a trail that led up through the woods, a trail she could walk in full dark and never take a misstep, and she walked as hard and fast as the mud and the boggy patches would let her.

  Simon stayed close behind. For a white man he walked well, without a lot of extra movement or noise. Her uncle Runs-from-Bears liked Simon, and no doubt this was part of the reason; he had little patience with any man who lumbered through the forests like a cow. Except for Gabriel all her people liked him, though they t
ried to keep it to themselves.

  And I like him too, Lily admitted to herself. She liked his dry humor and calm good sense and the way he talked to his elders, respectful but not fearful; she liked what he had made of himself. She liked the smell of him and the dimples he had hidden for so many years, and the strength in his arms and hands and the way he couldn't hide what he was feeling when he held her. She was aware of him just behind her, down to the shape of the shadow he threw when they passed through a patch of sunlight.

  Her father had asked her, as no one else had dared, if she loved Simon Ballentyne, and she had told him the truth: she didn't know. She still didn't know, not really. For a long time she had believed herself in love with Nicholas Wilde, but now that felt to her like a dream only partly recalled.

  He'll ask now where we're going, Lily told herself, and determined that she would turn around and go home when he did. But Simon kept his questions to himself and followed her, and she pushed on until every breath burned and she cursed the awkwardness of her skirts.

  Birds called in the trees and a squirrel screamed a warning at them; there were tracks in the mud that she might have pointed out: a deer with a fawn, bobcat, quail, bear. Lily took her hairpins down as she walked and put them in the pocket she wore around her waist, shook her head so her hair flew free. Because she felt like it; because she knew that he liked her hair.

  They crossed a corner of the Todd pasture that fell away in a slope from the woods. Off in the distance they could see Black Abe tending his charcoal pits, a small figure moving in and out of the smoke. The path went back into the woods, darker here on the east side of the hill that separated this property from Old Judge Middleton's. Lily admitted to herself that she had a destination: her grandfather's abandoned house and farm, on a low hillside that backed onto the endless forests. Whether or not Simon would realize where they were going, that she didn't know and didn't really care, as long as he kept following her.

  The house and land belonged to Ethan now, part of his inheritance from his stepfather, but no one in Paradise would ever think of this place as anything but Judge Middleton's homestead.