Fire Along the Sky
Page 17

The housekeeper's name was Cookie and her son's, Levi, and they had taken the last name Fiddler upon gaining their manumission papers.
Cookie reminded Jennet of old MacQuiddy, who had run Carryckcastle for fifty years, and thinking of MacQuiddy put Jennet in mind of all the messages she had yet to deliver from Carryck. She went back to find Hannah, only to discover that her cousins were gone.
In their place sat Gabriel, who yawned widely enough to show her his tonsils, and passed on a message: Hannah had been called away to see Uncle Doctor Todd (a strange formulation, Jennet noted, but said nothing), and Lily had disappeared in the direction of home.
“Will you ride home with me and Mama to Lake in the Clouds?” he asked between yawns. “We'll show you the firefly meadow.”
Jennet cast a glance back at the men, and saw that Luke was watching her. She felt his gaze at the base of her spine, as sharp and probing as a knife.
You'll come to me, this time.
It was a sentence she had repeated to herself every day since the Isis weighed anchor in Canada. The moment she saw Luke on the dock two things came to her clearly: she had been right to make the journey, and she must let him find his own way to her. She saw the truth of this every time she laid out the tarot cards, and with it came a calm understanding. He would come, in time. She knew it in her bones.
Elizabeth was walking toward them, an empty basket over her arm. Gabriel hopped down from the table. “Are you coming?”
“Aye,” Jennet said. “I am.”
Hannah knew the Todd house as well as her own, even in the dark. For a moment she stood in the kitchen taking in the familiar smells of tallow and toasting cornmeal, cinnamon and yeast and drying herbs, and when her eyesight had adjusted she made her way into the hall. Richard Todd stood in the open door of his study backlit by candlelight, waiting for her.
For a long moment she could find nothing to say. The doctor had always been a big man, broad and hard muscled, but quick of foot and graceful in his movements. He had lived among her mother's people, who gave him the name Cat-Eater for his ability to strike silently and for the fact that he shied at nothing, would do almost anything to reach a goal he had set for himself.
The man standing in front of her had lost as much as fifty pounds; the whites of his eyes were the color of poorly tanned doeskin.
“Hannah Bonner,” he said, and she was relieved to hear that his voice had not withered away with the rest of him. “I hear that your husband ran off and left you and never came back. You did right to come home.”
Then he turned and went back into the study, moving as if every step rattled the marrow in his bones.
Hannah took a deep breath and followed him.
Ethan was sitting at the desk, with a sheaf of papers before him and a quill in his hand: another boy turned into a man while she was gone, but something was different about Ethan that had nothing to do with the passing years. Another story to hear, more loss or loneliness or frustration.
Suddenly Hannah was overcome with weariness; she would have liked to simply walk away, but she could not, not when she saw the way Richard held himself. Pain had a posture of its own; it sat in the spine and across the slope of the shoulders and bowed bone.
“I wondered if you would come without being summoned,” he said. “But I see the party was too much for you to resist.”
She had not seen him in ten years, but he had lost none of his sharp tongue.
“Ethan.” Hannah nodded in his direction and ignored Richard completely. “It is very good to see you.”
“What, no word of greeting for your old teacher?” Richard had turned his back to her to pour himself a glass of port. “I am cut to the quick.”
Hannah came forward into the light. “Curiosity told me you had not improved in the niceties. She also said that you are ill.”
He glanced at her over his shoulder. “I expect you want to talk about your dead son and missing husband as much as I want to talk about my health.”
“The dead cannot be helped,” Hannah said, hearing the irritation in her own voice but not trying to hide it. “The sick are another matter.”
From the desk Ethan said, “He wants you to diagnose him from twenty paces, cousin. It's a test he puts to every doctor he comes across.”
“And how do his colleagues meet that challenge?”
“Poorly, for the most part,” Richard Todd said, turning to face her. He held up his glass in a toast. “But then they were not trained by me. What do you see, my girl?”
“It is your liver,” Hannah said in as neutral a tone as she could manage. “I expect there's at least one palpable tumor, most probably more, in your abdomen and chest as well. You're taking laudanum for the pain, I can smell it. You need quite a lot of it.”
He grunted in satisfaction. “You see how well I trained her, Ethan? She not only sees in the dark, she sees through skin and bone. Not to say anything of that sense of smell.” He raised a glass in her direction.
From the darkened hallway came the sound of Curiosity's sharp laugh, the one she reserved for people who might deserve some sympathy but who would do best without it. “You didn't train her all by yourself, Richard, and you sure as sugar cain't take any credit for her nose.”
He squinted in Curiosity's direction and waved his free hand dismissively. “After I'm dead you can take all the credit, Curiosity, and there will be nobody left to correct you. Well done, Doctor Bonner. Well done indeed.”