Fire Along the Sky
Page 193

“What has Daniel told you?”
“That she looks like me,” Liam said. “That she is nothing like her mother. That Jemima has run off and left the girl an orphan.”
“He read you the letters from home,” Hannah said.
Liam closed his eyes. “I can almost hear Elizabeth's voice in the written words. She tries hard not to judge, but she cain't hide it.”
“Where Jemima is concerned, she fails, yes.” Hannah had thought herself to be empty of curiosity after so many years, but a question came to her and in her weariness she put it to words.
“Why Jemima?” she asked. “Why ever did you take up with Jemima that summer?”
He said, “You know the answer to that.”
A flush of anger drove the weariness from Hannah. “Do not lay the blame on me, Liam Kirby.”
His head turned toward her, his face a pale oval in the darkness. “The blame is mine,” he said. “Mine alone. I was lonely and angry and I let myself be brought low. What will you tell her about me?”
For a moment Hannah was confused. She saw herself and Jemima, tried to imagine that conversation.
He touched her hand. “Will you tell my daughter about me?”
“Yes,” Hannah said.
“Tell her all of it,” Liam said. “The bad and the good both. So she doesn't make more of me than she should. Tell her, I'm sorry I never got to see her.”
Hannah nodded in the dark. “Yes. I will do that.”
He cleared his throat, and when he spoke next he brought forth the language they had spoken as children, the language of her mother's people. The words came rough and poorly formed from his mouth, but he was offering her something and Hannah could not refuse it.
He said, “I should have waited that summer, when you were in Scotland. I shouldn't have run off. Things would be different now, if I hadn't been so impatient.”
“Tell me,” Hannah said, though she didn't want to hear any of it. “Tell me how.”
And she sat while he spoke, haltingly, slowly, reaching for words, to draw her the picture of a Paradise that might have been.
When he slept, finally, she leaned over and pressed her mouth to his brow, and then Hannah went to her own cot and waited for sleep.
Rumors were as unavoidable as lice in the crowded, overheated stockade, and sometimes almost as irritating. The soldiers brought all news to Jennet, as they might bring a coin to a banker to find out what it was made of. Jennet was not generally easily persuaded and sometimes laughed out loud at a particularly outrageous claim, though never in such a way as to insult a man's dignity.
Since the sinking of the Ferret, soldiers had been pouring into the garrison by the dozens, militia and regulars both. When the work parties returned in the evenings with details, the debates began.
“They've got the blood lust now,” an old sergeant told Jennet. “They liked the taste of the Ferret just fine and now they'll go hunting.”
Long John took offense at such pessimism. “Let the bloody lobsterbacks show their face on American waters,” he grumbled. “And the Vermont boys will make short work of them.”
The other kind of rumor was even more disturbing. Mr. Whistler brought it to Jennet and presented it like a particularly disgusting piece of offal.
“They say we're to be moved to Halifax, Miss Jennet. To a prison ship.”
Jennet, who liked Mr. Whistler for his careful ways, his odd humor, and his unwavering loyalty to Hannah, paused from her work to smile at him. “Who exactly has been saying such a thing?”
Mr. Whistler pursed his lips and dug into the thicket of beard on his neck. “Word came in with the work party. Sometimes the guards talk free around them.”
The man Jennet was tending let out a long groan that ended in a soft whimper of pain. Some men needed comforting in their extremity and others chafed under it. This one, a sailor with three teeth and a stunning collection of scars on his back, was the latter type.
She said, “Pull yourself together, Mr. Mason. You still have your leg, after all. Is that not worth some pain?”
The muscles in the broad throat flexed as he swallowed, but the sailor managed a nod.
Mr. Whistler handed her a piece of toweling that once she would not have used to wipe down a dog, but now Jennet took it gladly. To him she said, “I doubt it will come to that.”
He had bright brown eyes under a single long, bristling white eyebrow, and now they were fixed on her as if they could dig right into her mind to whatever thoughts she was hiding away. But Jennet had been raised to keep secrets carefully and close, and finally Mr. Whistler heaved a shoulder in grim resignation and went off with the basin of bloody water.
“Heard about them Tory prison ships,” said the sailor. He had a high, broken voice, ruined by shouting or drink or both. “Don't much care for the idea of dying in one of them.”
“Nor shall you,” Jennet said.
She meant to sound sure of herself but in fact it was all a ruse; she was sure of nothing at all. Two days since Runs-from-Bears had left for Montreal, and still there was no word, from him or from Luke. During the day she could keep her worry to herself, but alone with Hannah it spilled out of her.
“Has Luke ever given you cause to doubt him?” was Hannah's only response to Jennet's long recitation of worries.
Which was true, of course, but hard to remember in the heat of the day, when the flies covered the faces of the wounded and the stench of sweat and blood and excrement was thick enough to spoon.