Lake in the Clouds (71 page)

Hannah leaned against the door, crossed her arms across her chest, and dropped her chin to fight tears that threatened to spring up so suddenly and uninvited.

“He’s a stranger. I’ve spent a total of six hours in his company in a crowd of people, and last night my little brother pulled me aside to say that he would give me his permission to go west with Strikes-the-Sky if I promise to come home to visit every year. My little brother has me married off already and I haven’t even spent an hour alone with the man. I don’t understand how something like this can happen from one day to the next.”

“Something like what?” Curiosity asked softly.

Hannah shook her head because she dared not speak, and slipped out the door.

When Jemima Kuick answered the knock at the widow’s parlor door just after dinner to find Hawkeye standing there, she was struck pure dumb. Two ideas came to her, neither of them good. The first was that the twins had finally told their story, and Hawkeye was here for her; the second, far less frightening, was that he had figured out how Reuben had got burned, and he had come to accuse Dye of murder. She wouldn’t mind the idea of Dye hanging, if it weren’t for the fact that when the whole truth came out Isaiah might end up right next to him.

Hawkeye said, “Well, Mima, ain’t you going to invite me in?” He didn’t smile but he didn’t look angry either, which meant he wasn’t here about the twins and what had happened the afternoon at Eagle Rock when Lily fell.

At the sound of his voice the widow’s head snapped up sharply. “Mr. Bonner,” she said in her haughtiest tone. “What do you mean, coming here without invitation or summons?”

Jemima didn’t have much use for any of the Bonners, but she knew better than to talk to Hawkeye like he was a beggar with
an open hand. The widow underestimated him or gave herself too much credit, or both; either way Jemima would stand by and just watch her reap her just reward. If she were to run down to the tavern and take wagers on which one of these two would win in a battle of wills, not even Charlie LeBlanc would be stupid enough to put his money on the widow.

“Mrs. Kuick.” Hawkeye ducked his head to keep from hitting it on the door frame as he came in. He was too big for the room, too big for the house itself.

“What do you want, Mr. Bonner?”

“Well, I didn’t come to drink tea with you, if that’s what you were thinking. We got some business to discuss, you and me.”

And then without asking or waiting or even looking at the widow for permission, he sat down on Mr. Kuick’s chair. A deep armchair upholstered in brown velvet with embroidered linen on the arms and back; the chair that nobody was allowed to sit on or even touch, not even Isaiah. The chair that the widow dusted herself every day. Hawkeye sat down across from the widow just like that and took no note of her thunderous expression.

“Of all the temerity—” she began in a sputter, but he cut her off with a wave of the hand.

“Save your breath,” he said easily. “Don’t like being here any more than you like having me, so I’ll just say what I got to say right out so we can get this settled and I can be on my way.”

The widow let out a strangled sound. “Hurry up about it then, if you must.”

“Oh, I must all right. What I want to know is, are you sending your man Dye to trespass on Hidden Wolf or is he doing that all on his own? The reason I ask is simple. I need to know how many names to put on the warrant. Just his, or yours too. I’ll have Jed McGarrity write it up all proper so it’s ready when the judge comes through on his circuit. Of course if I should catch Dye at it between now and then I’ll just shoot me a trespasser and that’ll leave you to explain to the judge on your own.”

Jemima had never seen the widow blanch, but she did it now. All the color left her face and then rushed back just as suddenly in such a deep flush that she looked as if she had painted herself as gaudy as any stage actress.

“How dare you,” the widow whispered. “How dare you threaten me with the law.”

Other folks might start to shake when the widow got to whispering, but Hawkeye just leaned forward with his hands on his knees, his brow pulled down low. “Oh, I dare all right. You best not underestimate me. A body makes accusations against me and mine and then carries a weapon onto my property, why then the law’s the very least I got in mind.”

“Leave here at once,” the widow said, pointing with a trembling finger at the door. “Before I call my son and have him put you out.”

“I’ll leave here when I’ve had an answer from you,” Hawkeye said, leaning back again. “Then I’m headed down to see McGarrity to sign the warrant. Unless we can get this settled here and now.”

The widow said, “Your accusations are ridiculous. I have never directed Mr. Dye to break the law, nor do I believe that he would do such a thing. I will have you up on charges, sir. For your assault on my character and morals.”

Hawkeye pushed out a deep breath. “Before you go off to complain about my manners, why don’t you make sure you know what you’re talking about. Call the man in here and ask him. If you think you can trust him to tell the truth.”

It was a bold move on Hawkeye’s part, and Jemima had to admire him for it. If the widow refused to call Dye in, it would look as though she didn’t trust him, or worse, that she did have some part in his trespassing and could not risk his testimony. That would put her in Hawkeye’s power in a way that was not to be borne.

But if she did call Dye in, then she had no choice but to support him in whatever lies he told, or look as if she had no control over her employees. If Dye told the truth, that he had been trespassing on the mountain—-Jemima knew for a fact that he had; twice she had seen him coming out of the forests well past the Kuicks’ property line—then he would have to be dismissed immediately.

The problem there was a simple one: the widow liked Dye; she liked the money he made for her and the way he handled the mill and the slaves. He left her alone, which was what she wanted. All was well with her world if she could sit here like a queen and leave the work to men like Dye, bound to her by
what she believed to be loyalty. If only she knew the whole of it. Jemima sucked in her lower lip to keep herself from smiling.

The expression on the widow’s face said she understood the trap that Hawkeye had set and would concede him this first small battle. She yanked the bell pull so hard that Jemima would not have been surprised if it had pulled right out of the wall. Instead she heard the faraway tinkling of the bell in the kitchen.

“I will send down to the mill for my overseer,” she said coolly. “We will finish this conversation as soon as he is here, but we will finish it in the kitchen.” She looked Hawkeye up and down very pointedly, lingering on his moccasins. “This is not a matter for my good parlor.”

Hawkeye had a frightening grin, and he used it now. “I don’t care where we do the talking,” he said, unfolding his long frame from Mr. Kuick’s chair. “But we’ll get to the bottom of this before I leave here today, that much I promise you.”

Jemima fled the widow’s parlor just behind Hawkeye, dodging Georgia, who had come to answer the bell. She had no intention of listening to the widow rant until the overseer could be found.

She had just slipped past Hawkeye when the widow yelled down the hall. “You make sure that man goes straight to the kitchen and nowhere else! Do you hear me, Jemima?”

Hawkeye winked at her. “She thinks I’ll pocket the good silver while she ain’t watching. Maybe you best tie my hands, too, and march me to the kitchen at the end of a musket.”

Jemima didn’t bother to answer him, but neither did she do as she had been told. While he headed for the kitchen she went in the other direction, along the front hall, through Isaiah’s empty study and then the back hall that ended in the door that led down to the root cellar.

At this time of year, before the new crops had started to come in, the cellar was almost empty. Bushels and baskets and folded burlap sacks were her only company when she came to the cellar, which was why Jemima liked it here. She paused to listen for the sound of steps. When she was sure no one had followed her she moved aside the plank that leaned against the wall and ducked into the short passageway that ended in a tangle of bush and blackberry vines.

The widow was afraid of another Indian uprising and she
had wanted a secret escape, a way out of the house should the need ever arise. Except of course it wasn’t secret at all: the house had been built by men who lived in the village, after all, and the passageway saw almost as much traffic as the kitchen door. This was the way that Isaiah slipped out at night to meet Dye, and Jemima had long suspected that the maids used it to sneak out when the urge was on them. For her own purposes she used it only during the daylight hours, simply because she didn’t like having every step she took tracked by Georgia and reported back to the widow.

The passageway took her out into the far end of the kitchen garden, behind a clump of evergreens. From there Jemima could go where she liked: up the mountain where she was not welcome, down to the village where she was not wanted; to the mill, which was forbidden to her. Or she could stay right where she was and contemplate the situation at hand. Georgia had trotted off toward the mill to fetch Dye. Whether or not Isaiah showed himself when she delivered her message, Jemima had no doubt he was somewhere nearby and would hear about Hawkeye’s accusations. The question was, Would he leave Dye to handle this on his own, or would he try to calm the waters with Hawkeye as he had done at the graveside?

Either way Jemima would be in the kitchen to hear what Dye had to say. She hunkered down to wait.

Below her the Sacandaga rushed eastward, separating the mountain from the rest of Paradise. From here she could see most of the village, including the cabin where she had been born and raised up. At that time the land it stood on had belonged to old Judge Middleton; now it belonged to his grandson Ethan and was in Dr. Todd’s control. He had rented it to the blacksmith when he married Daisy Freeman, and since then they had added another room and a porch, and the kitchen garden was twice the size it had been.

Daisy was there now, weeding her butter beans while two of her children played nearby, the sun shining bright on their woolly black hair. But for the rush of the water Jemima thought she could hear the girls laughing.

Her father would have never stood still to see free blacks living in the village at all, much less in a cabin built by a white
man for his family. Back in those days when they were always hungry but knew right from wrong.

Georgia’s voice brought Jemima up out of her daydream, and she curled up tight so that there was no chance of Dye catching sight of her as he strode on past with Georgia running at his heels. Jemima waited for a count of twenty and got up to go back into the house when the clatter of horses’ hooves on the bridge made her turn.

Riders coming down from the mountain, and in a hurry; maybe Nathaniel on his way to lend his father some backup with the widow. Maybe with something else on his mind entirely.

She waited until the horses came into view and then stood, so surprised by the riders that she had to look twice to convince herself that she wasn’t imagining things.

Curiosity and Galileo Freeman were trotting through the village on horseback, both of them dressed for a long trip. Galileo’s rifle was in its sling on his back, for all the good it would do him, half-blind. The saddlebags were filled to bursting, but stranger than that, Curiosity had a bundle tied across her chest with a shawl. A bundle that squirmed and wiggled. A child’s fist rose up from the swaddling. A black child.

Daisy had come up on her feet in the middle of her bean patch. She raised a hand toward her parents and waved; nothing of surprise there at all, neither in her expression nor in the way she watched them with her hand at her brow to shade her eyes.

The children called out after them. “Goodbye! Goodbye!” Daisy hushed them and sent a concerned look up toward the millhouse. Jemima could not be seen where she stood, but she stepped back anyway, feeling the scrape of blackberry vines on her bare arms.

The horses never slowed. The Freemans rode through Paradise in broad daylight and nobody lifted a finger to stop them. They disappeared on the Johnstown trail just like that, without a backward glance.

Jemima stood and watched until the dust settled and the Freemans were gone. Then she listed for herself the things that she knew.

First, the rumors that had been drifting through the village since the spring about the runaway and her child were true.
The Bonner’s were running slaves, and the Freemans with them. That made them thieves, all of them. Thieves and liars and hypocrites.

Hawkeye stood in the kitchen right now with Dye, making threats; calling names, making demands.

Second, they were well organized. Cookie would be part of it; no doubt she stood at the door keeping watch, hiding her satisfaction. Maybe she had given some signal that Dye was out of the way and the Freemans should ride. Jemima had been worried about poison, but Cookie’s revenge was less obvious and most probably more of a satisfaction to her. She helped the Bonner’s steal from the widow and from Dye; stood there smiling while the Freemans took the child away toward safety and Hawkeye tied the widow in knots with the cold, slow flow of his righteous indignation.

Third, they were sure enough of themselves to move by daylight. Most probably they had been doing this so long that they stopped being careful. And now they had given her the last weapon she would need to keep herself safe.

Jemima breathed a deep sigh of relief and thanksgiving. When she could trust her expression, she went into the kitchen to watch Hawkeye deal out what Dye had coming to him.

Hannah kept herself so busy that there should have been no time to think of Strikes-the-Sky and for that very reason, she explained to herself, she could think of little else. While she worked in the laboratory with Richard Todd, talked to Bump, ground willow bark, examined an infected scratch on Dolly’s leg, while she ate or walked or answered questions put to her, another part of her mind was considering Strikes-the-Sky. The way his expression shifted so suddenly from arrogance to curiosity and back again, the sound of his voice and the oddities of his language, the way he held a cup when he drank, the sound of him laughing at one of Lily’s stories, the tone he took with the boys: serious and forthright, interested in their games and opinions. The few words he had said to her:
thank you,
and
please,
and
in the west they talk of your skill as a healer.