Fire Along the Sky
Page 18

Hannah was surprised at the satisfaction his approval brought to her, the thrill of the words from a man who had not often thought to praise.
She said, “Shall we talk about treatment? My first advice would be to empty that bottle into the pig trough.”
“Advice he has heard before,” Ethan said dryly. The expression in his eyes, something between resignation and sorrow, told Hannah more than anything that had been said thus far.
“Advice I will continue to ignore.” The doctor's voice lifted and wavered just short of breaking. He fell into a chair so heavily that the glass rattled in the windowpanes.
When he spoke again he had regained control of his voice. “You came just in time. Tomorrow you'll go on rounds with me, and then I wash my hands of this godforsaken place, once and for all.”
“And where will you go?” Hannah asked. “Back to Johnstown? You prefer the medical treatment you get there?”
“The only journey I have left to make is to my grave,” Richard Todd said, taking a last swallow from the glass and wiping his mouth on his cuff. “Hopefully before the last of the laudanum runs out.”
Chapter 3
In the rising heat of a new day, Nathaniel Bonner sat on the edge of his bed and thought of waking his wife. She would come to him happily if he reached for her, but for the rest of the day there would be shadows underneath her eyes and a slowness to her speech.
A curl of hair lifted in the breeze from the open window and swept across the curve of her cheek. There was little gray in her hair, but age had touched her in other ways. The faint lines between her brows had become a crease, and the flesh at her jaw was softer, just as all of her was a little rounder and softer and prettier.
He could wake her just to tell her all this—as he had told her many times before—because it gave him pleasure to see her blush. She would hush him and grumble and point out that it was the height of silliness for a woman of her years to make any claims on beauty. But it would please her nonetheless, and she would come to him flushed with embarrassment.
It was more than twenty years since Elizabeth had left England but many of the ideas she had been raised with still trailed along behind her like ragged tail feathers. That women did not age into beauty was one of her ideas; that children could be kept safe from the world was another. Even the losses they had suffered had not convinced her to let go of that second idea.
This particular day ahead of them would be a hard one. All of the children were home at once, which pleased him more than he knew how to put into words. But each of them carried their own bundle of problems, some he had never imagined.
Luke, for one. Luke and Jennet. Elizabeth had pulled that idea out of thin air and put it down in front of him, trouble wrapped up in a pretty ribbon. Nathaniel had lived too long among sharp-eyed women to discredit out of hand what his wife had to say, especially in matters of the heart. So he watched for himself and saw the truth, like words springing to life on the page when a candle is lit in the dusk.
There was a connection between the two of them, but it had nothing to do with new love. Instead of the shy smiles and questioning glances, Luke and Jennet circled each other warily and sparked like steel on flint. It was an old love, a knotty one with deep roots, one that had survived Jennet's marriage and long years of separation, and it explained why Luke had never brought home a bride. What Nathaniel didn't understand was why his oldest son was holding back from the inevitable. Because he wanted Jennet, of that much Nathaniel was sure.
He would have to raise the subject, and soon. But maybe not today.
The bigger problem, the one that couldn't wait, was Daniel.
Elizabeth was fond of saying that if Nathaniel had his way, he would build a wall around Paradise and burn every newspaper at the gates, and she wasn't far from right. The boys were wild at the idea of a war and they couldn't be held back for much longer.
The old way, the way of all the tribes and the way Nathaniel himself had been brought up, was to send a young man off to his first battle under the wing of a father or uncle or older brother. But Elizabeth would not hear of it, and truth be told Nathaniel had trouble remembering why he had ever been eager to go to war.
It was Luke who had presented them with the first glimmer of a real solution, one they could all live with. Late last night he laid it out to Runs-from-Bears and Nathaniel: Daniel and Blue-Jay would leave here with him and head northwest. Luke knew where to find a man called Jim Booke, a Yorker born and raised, with a small band of militiamen under him, loosely attached to Benjamin Forsyth's company of riflemen. Booke and his men moved back and forth along the river, keeping track of the British on the other side, who liked to send raiding parties into New-York. If the boys were the marksmen that Luke claimed they were, Jim Booke had declared himself willing to take them on for a provisional nine-month commitment.
With any luck the war would be over by then. Luke said this last part without looking the men in the eye.
“They'll be far safer with Jim Booke and his men than they would be in that sorry excuse for a navy,” he added. “There's no man who knows the river better.”
“A smuggler, was he, before the war?” Nathaniel had asked, and Luke grinned at him.
“And will be after, unless they call off the embargo.”
That had satisfied Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears both, and Elizabeth as well.
“Nine months,” she echoed when Nathaniel told her all this. And then: “He'll be home in the spring.”