Fire Along the Sky
Page 164

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 made 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.”