Fire Along the Sky
Page 22

Hannah glanced up in surprise and caught Nicholas's expression: worry and sorrow, desperation and disgust, all fighting for the upper hand. And he was ashamed and angry, at his wife and at himself. That he could not cure her; that she had retreated away from him and the world to a point out of reach but not quite gone.
There was little to offer him in the way of hope or relief, and so Hannah turned back to the patient. She touched her on the cheek and tipped her head up to look directly in her eyes.
“Dolly,” she said firmly. “You have a beautiful daughter. Can you tell me her name?”
Dolly blinked at her, opened her mouth and closed it again. A flicker of consciousness chased across her face and was extinguished as quickly as it had come.
“Callie,” Hannah said. “Does your mother ever seem to wake up and take note of you when you are sitting with her?”
The girl glanced at Cookie and then at her father, as if there were more than one answer to this question and she was afraid of choosing the wrong one.
“No,” she whispered finally. “Never.”
“She could live to be eighty just as she is,” Hannah said much later, when she and Richard were alone again.
“Or she'll choke to death on a stone tomorrow. And it would be a blessing.”
Richard's complexion was very bad, and in spite of the fact that they were walking slowly and in the cool shade of the forest his face was wet with perspiration. He stopped to pass his handkerchief over his brow, and then he lowered himself to sit on the stump of an old oak that shifted and groaned beneath him. His breathing was labored as he took out a small flask of dark glass from his coat pocket and uncorked it. The smell was unmistakable.
Hannah watched his throat work as he swallowed enough laudanum to kill a smaller man. How long had he been dosing himself like this, to have built up such a need? It was a question she did not bother to ask, because he would take pleasure in refusing to answer. His mind was still with his patient, and he would discuss nothing else.
“I've never heard of this compulsion to eat rocks and dirt before,” he wheezed. “Have you ever seen the like?”
She shook her head and leaned against a tree. “I have seen many things, but nothing like this.”
He squinted up at her, and for the first time since Hannah had come home, she saw the worst of his old self: the acid mockery that he spat up now and then like an excess of bile he must share with whoever stood next to him. “What have you seen, little Hannah Bonner? Men's battle wounds, women's sorrows.”
It had been so long since Hannah let herself feel anger, true anger, that she did not recognize it at first: the rush of blood to her face and hands, the way the nerves in her fingertips tingled. A force like water falling, unstoppable. The words leapt from her just like that.
“You haven't asked me about my uncle,” she said sharply. “Why haven't you?”
Richard's gaze flickered just enough to show his surprise and he shrugged. “I heard through Nathaniel that Otter—”
“Strong-Words,” Hannah corrected him sharply. “Otter was his boy-name.”
He inclined his head. “That Strong-Words fell at the battle at Tippecanoe. If you were expecting my condolences for a man who took every opportunity to shoot at me—”
All the old history between Richard Todd and Hannah's family rose up like a battalion of ghosts as distinct and undeniable as the moving shadows cast by the trees. For a moment there was silence, and then Richard found the good grace to look away and clear his throat.
“Over the years I've come to regret the part I played in what happened at Barktown. I would have told Strong-Words so had I ever had the chance.”
“I'm sure that would have meant a great deal to him,” Hannah said, her tone as bitter as the words themselves.
Richard sighed and ran a hand over the bristle on his chin. “I'm not asking your forgiveness, girl, but I'll give you my condolences. Your uncle was a brave man from what I've heard, and he died honorably.”
“Honorably,” Hannah echoed, the word like gall on her tongue. “He died in a battle that was lost before it even began. They brought me his body in a pile with ten others, two of them his sons. Do not presume to speak to me of women's sorrow, Richard Todd. Do not dare.”
For a long moment there was no sound but the birds: the chittering of the wrens, crows bickering, a solitary blue jay at odds with the world. Hannah's own heartbeat seemed as loud in her ears. Finally Richard got up with a sigh and started off again in the direction of the village.
Over his shoulder he said, “Come along then, woman. I don't have all day to listen to your tales of woe.”
It was then that Hannah saw that he had laid a trap, one that she had walked into without hesitation. No amount of questioning could have made her talk about the last few years, but he had turned her anger into a tool for his own use and got what he wanted anyway. He had opened the door, and now she would find it hard to close.
For a moment Hannah watched Richard Todd walk away and she was filled with reluctant admiration. She took note of his thinning frame, the way he stooped in pain, the set of his shoulders. That his death was not far off Hannah could not deny, but she knew something else just as unsettling: he would try to get her stories to take with him; he would work to dig them out of her one by one, using whatever tools necessary.
From the outside, Jennet could see nothing particularly interesting about the abandoned meetinghouse. A wood-frame building in a village of buildings built of square-hewed logs, all in the middle of a remarkable world crowded with trees. It sagged at the door and windows but the floor was solid underfoot and the door hinges had been recently oiled. When Lily opened the shutters, the emptied room filled with light.