Lake in the Clouds (57 page)

Lily figured out by the second day that Daniel had made some kind of promise—most probably to their father—to keep an eye on her. It was the only way to explain why he invited her to come along when he and Blue-Jay went off to catch frogs or shoot arrows or make some changes to their fort. Sometimes Lily agreed, mostly out of curiosity, but also out of concern. If it made her brother happy to think he was protecting her, she would let him. Lily thought that he might be lonely, but unable to admit it.

Mostly Lily spent her time in the village. She always stopped by the trading post before going on to the Todds’ house, because it seemed to her that pretty much everybody except the widow Kuick found their way to Anna or Curiosity, every day. They came to buy or sell or trade, tobacco and eggs and linsey-woolsey and seeds and venison, to ask advice or help with sick animals or cheese that wouldn’t set or warping a loom; everybody left some news behind. Mostly it wasn’t very surprising news, but every once in a while there was something that might interest her mother, and Lily kept track of those things in her head.

She could spend a half hour or so in the trading post, listening
to the men who sat at the back playing cards or draughts or skittles. They were so busy talking that they didn’t pay any mind at all to who was nearby, but Lily could only stay so long before somebody would take note and ask her nicely what she needed and was she sorry she hadn’t gone along to the city with her aunt Todd or to Albany with her mother?

It irked her that people really believed her mother would go to Albany and leave her behind, and it irked her even worse that she couldn’t tell them the truth, that she hadn’t. People were supposed to think that her mother and father were in Albany, and to give them any other ideas would be the worst kind of betrayal. Lily thought of Selah’s calm expression and the baby she was carrying and the urge to answer questions and even to be around people who would ask them left her cold. Then she would go off to Curiosity and Galileo.

The kitchen at the Todds’ house was as much home to her as the hearth at Lake in the Clouds. She could stay as long as she wanted and ask questions if the urge came on her, or just listen. If the weather turned bad while she was there, Curiosity fed her and put her to bed, and nobody at Lake in the Clouds would worry about where she had got to. Except that she didn’t like to leave Daniel to sleep alone in the loft, and so she usually did go home.

But of course there was no sitting idle in Curiosity’s kitchen; she would set Lily to carding wool or spinning or stirring the wash or polishing pewter, but she didn’t mind that, because the conversations in Curiosity’s kitchen were well worth it. It amazed her, the things grown-ups would say in front of a child who could keep her tongue and look bored. As if she were deaf, or too little to understand what it meant when a woman missed her monthly, or that Peter Dubonnet had got the sudden urge to go hunting when Baldy O’Brien, the hated tax collector, came in from Johnstown.

So two full weeks after the wedding party Lily didn’t know what to think when Curiosity met her at the kitchen door and wouldn’t let her come in. Lily didn’t get more than a glance of the room, but she saw Dolly Smythe sitting at the table with her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking as if she had a fever.

“There’s work in the garden,” Curiosity had said, in the
voice that meant she wasn’t going to tolerate any discussion. “Make yourself useful, child.” And she closed the door.

Curiosity often sent Lily to help in the garden. Generally it suited her fine, because she liked being outside and Bump was almost always there to talk to. Bump was one of her favorite people; he called her “Miss Lily” and told her stories of his travels during the wars and the western frontier and the Indians he had lived with for a time, of a great warrior called Sky-Panther he had once seen, and of the early days in Paradise, when her grandmother and grandfather Middleton had lived up in the schoolhouse and her Granny Bonner had been alive.

Now Lily hesitated, not exactly trying to hear through the kitchen door but wondering why Dolly Smythe was here. The widow wasn’t the kind of mistress to let her servants wander around the village to visit friends in the middle of a workday. It was possible that the widow had decided she didn’t want Dolly in the house anymore, although that was hard to imagine; Dolly was a hard worker and clever, and her manners never caused anybody to click their tongues, not even the old wives who watched the unmarried girls like cats watched their kittens, ready to use their teeth to make a point if they saw the need. Lily’s mother thought a lot of Dolly Smythe, and that was recommendation enough.

There was no sign of Bump in the garden either, which was another mystery as he had hoed three new rows and left the basket with the twisted seed papers on the step of the shed. Lily stood in the middle of the kitchen garden smelling the good smell of warm sun on fresh-turned earth when she thought of Dr. Todd’s laboratory. Maybe that’s where Bump was, helping the doctor. With a glance over her shoulder at the closed kitchen door, Lily went around the shed to look in that direction.

There was no smoke coming out of the chimneys, but she had just about made up her mind to go have a look anyway when Lucy Hench came up behind her.

“You looking for Bump?”

Lucy was two years younger than Lily, but she was tall for her age. She was what Curiosity called a simple soul, which meant that she wasn’t especially bright but she was kind and well-meaning, and in general Lily liked her a lot, although she
could not play with her for more than an hour without getting bored enough to scream.

“Your granny sent me out here to help him in the garden. Is he in the laboratory?”

“Nope,” said Lucy. “Nobody’s in there right now. The doctor went up to see the window.”

“The widow,” Lily said automatically, but she knew that Lucy would go on calling Mrs. Kuick “the window,” as if she were made of glass.

Lucy said, “Don’t know where Bump has got to. Do you want to play dolls with me?” She held up a rag doll wrapped in a handkerchief.

“I’ve got this planting to do,” said Lily. “What’s wrong with the widow, do you know?”

Lucy shrugged one shoulder. “Don’t know, exactly. When Dolly came down to fetch Dr. Todd, she said the window had taken a fit and was throwing things, and could he come quick before she killed somebody.”

“The widow was throwing things?”

Lucy nodded, rocking her baby against her chest. “Sure you don’t want to play dolls? This one of mine, she’s got the canker throat and she’s about to die. You could doctor her.”

“I can’t,” said Lily, working hard to sound as if she would have really liked to. “Do you want to help me in the garden?”

Lucy made a disappointed face and set off to find her sister Solange, who had a doll with eyes and a mouth.

The widow had taken a fit. This was certainly news worthy of being written down, but Lily wasn’t sure what it meant. Last year old Mr. MacGregor had taken a fit right in the middle of the trading post and died with a purple face, but he hadn’t been throwing things at the time. One of the Camerons had thrown a rock through a window, but he had been drunk. She couldn’t imagine the widow Kuick drinking anything stronger than weak cider.

And there was nobody who could explain it to her. Curiosity was in the kitchen with a weeping Dolly Smythe and there was still no sign of Bump at all. Lily turned around once more to look for him and saw that Gabriel Oak was sitting in the sunshine in front of his cabin. He raised a hand in greeting.

Lily looked around herself at the deserted garden and the
closed kitchen door, and then she set off to pay Gabriel Oak a visit.

Even in the full heat of the sun he was wrapped in a cloak with a shawl around his shoulders. Lily knew from Hannah that he was very sick, but now she saw it for herself in the way his skin was stretched so tight over his bones. She wondered if she should have stayed in the garden and not bothered him, but he gave her a smile that reminded her of Daniel when he wasn’t trying to be fractious, sweet and lonely too, somehow.

“Friend Lily,” he said. “Will you sit with me a little while?”

Gabriel Oak was the only Quaker Lily knew, and she wondered if they were all so polite and quiet and easy to talk to. There were two stools, and she climbed up on one.

“I was looking for Bump,” she said. “I’m supposed to help him in the garden. But everything is confused today.”

He blinked at her slowly. “Cornelius went with Dr. Todd. An emergency, I expect.”

“I thought maybe he had.” Lily looked down toward the village, but there was nothing to see there at all except a few dogs sleeping in the road. Lily squinted a little and saw that two of them had bloody muzzles, and there was a tangled mess of orange fur spread out in front of them.

“Look,” said Lily. “They finally got Missus Gathercole’s cat. They’ve been chasing it just about forever.”

Gabriel Oak looked very hard in that direction. Finally he said, “Thou hast very good eyes, Friend Lily. From thy grandfather, no doubt.”

Lily said, “Daniel does too, he can see even farther than me. He says he’s going to be a sharpshooter in the next war. If he has his own rifle by then.”

“Is there to be another war?” Gabriel Oak looked interested, but not very concerned.

“The newspapers say so,” Lily said, more doubtfully now. “My grandfather says it’s none of our concern.”

“Thy grandfather sees clearly in more ways than just one.”

They were silent for a moment together and then Lily let out a great sigh. “Curiosity won’t let me in the kitchen,” she said. “I wish I knew what was going on. Did you see Dolly Smythe come?”

“I did.”

Gabriel Oak picked up his sketchbook while Lily told him the little that she knew from Lucy and what she suspected. He let her talk without interrupting her, but every once in a while he would look up and nod, and Lily never got the sense that he was pretending to listen, as grown-ups often did. Before she knew it she had told him about the blank pages in the book and her plans for it.

“If I knew what was wrong at the mill I could write that down for my mother.”

“Friend Lily,” he said in his soft, deep voice. “There are things other than words to put on paper, and more than one way to tell a story.” And he held up his sketch.

He had drawn Bump at work in the garden while Lucy watched him from the fence. Bump’s mouth was open and Lily could almost hear him singing and Lucy humming along with him because, as Curiosity liked to say with a smile, her sweetest granddaughter couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Without really knowing why, Lily said, “He likes that song best of all, the one about the soldier coming home.”

Gabriel Oak was smiling at her, as if she hadn’t said anything strange at all.

“How do you do that?” she asked. “How do you make them so alive I can hear him singing?”

“I can’t tell thee the how of it,” he said, taking the sketch back. He touched it gently with his pencil, stroking a curve into the line of Bump’s poor back.

“I don’t understand,” Lily said. “How can you not know how you do what you do?”

His brow pulled itself together. “I’ve wondered that myself for many years,” he said. “The closest I can come to explaining it is that some are given a particular gift. A few can weave words into a story, others can carve wood into shapes that seem more real than real. Some can make music, as do young Reuben and his brother. I can draw pictures.” He looked at her and beneath the fringe of his hair his gray eyes were kind and maybe a little hopeful. “Hast thou done any drawing, Friend Lily?”

Lily thought of her slate at school, its rough surface and the dust of the chalk ground deep into her fingers, as dry and unpleasant as digging for onions. Her copybook was not much better, rough paper that she wrote on with quill and the ink
her mother made, or even worse, a quill filled with bullet lead. Line after line of poetry scratched out stroke by stroke.

“No,” she said. “Do you think I could learn how?”

He said, “Some of it can be learned, if thou art willing to study the science of it. Whether or not the gift is in thee, that will show itself. When I was a younger man I gave drawing lessons to the ladies of Baltimore.”

Lily blinked in surprise. Generally Bump told stories and Gabriel Oak listened, but it seemed that he was in a storytelling mood today. She wondered what he meant by it, if he might be willing to give her lessons. That seemed unlikely, but it was exciting, anyway.

She said, “Did any of your students have a gift?”

He closed his eyes for a minute as if he could look back over time. “Some did, yes. But the gifted ones weren’t always those who were willing to work the hardest.”

“I’m a hard worker,” she said, meeting his eye directly.

Gabriel Oak smiled at her and Lily watched, absorbed, as he took a long wooden box from the folds of his cloak. The top slid back to reveal more black-lead pencils than Lily had ever seen at once, short and long, thick and thin. There was a porte-crayon with a piece of graphite held tight by a small clamp; Lily’s mother had one of those too, but she didn’t have a lead pencil.

Lead pencils were made one at a time and had to be ordered from Boston or Albany or even France, where the best ones were made at high cost. The only people Lily had ever seen using a pencil were the surveyor who came from Johnstown when the widow Kuick got into an argument with Dr. Todd and Lily’s own father about the boundaries of their properties, and Gabriel Oak.

He was examining one of the smaller pencils, turning the square shape in his long fingers. Then he took a file from the box and began to work the end to a point. The wood dust smelled sweet; Lily watched it sift down to his lap.

When he handed it to her she turned it in her own fingers, feeling the smooth wood, so polished by use that she couldn’t make out the seams where the top was joined to the sides. She said, “I’ve never used a pencil before.”

“We’ll start from the beginning, then,” said Gabriel Oak. “That’s generally best.”