Fire Along the Sky
Page 58

“But what does it mean?” Jennet asked, a wild note breaking in her voice.
“Two women missing, two men, one child.” Elizabeth heard Hannah answer from far away.
“The whole family?” asked Jennet, unbelieving. “The whole family is missing, and the servants with them?”
“Possibly,” said Elizabeth. “Or perhaps it is unrelated, other people have got lost in the storm.”
Even as she said the words she knew, somehow, that this was not the case. As they all knew.
“We had best look after her then,” Many-Doves said, drawing the sheet up around Dolly's shoulders. “It sounds as though there won't be anybody else coming to do it.”
Chapter 11
December, Montreal
The courier's knocking woke Lily at first light to a chamber so cold that the wool blanket tented over her face crackled, frozen stiff by her own moist breath.
Even huddled beneath blankets and comforters on a thick feather bed, there was no avoiding the clatter of Lucille's pattens as the old lady grumbled her way along the tiled corridor to answer the knock. She began her scolding litany even before she opened the door. The courier—either a very brave man or a foolish one—barked out a surprised laugh. For this he earned not the bowl of coffee and milk he must have been hoping for, but a curtly closed door.
Post at sunrise. It shouldn't surprise Lily anymore, really. Couriers came to her brother's door with astounding regularity, even with the port closed for the winter. At Lake in the Clouds they might get mail once every fortnight if the roads were good; in a muddy spring it could be much longer between deliveries. Here in Montreal it seemed that letters and packages and whole sledges came for Luke every day.
If Lily waited just a little longer Ghislaine, the youngest and friendliest of the servants, would come to wake her. Ghislaine would bring coffee and gossip and serve them both in generous portions while she opened the shutters and coaxed the embers in the hearth into new life. Ghislaine spoke a rustic English full of odd turns of phrase that she had learned from her American grandfather, a Vermont farmer, and they had come to an agreement: in the mornings they spoke English, in the afternoons, French.
It was a friendship based on mutual admiration but also, they were both very much aware, need. Ghislaine was Lily's only source for certain kinds of information about what was happening in the house and the town; in return Lily knew some old stories, shocking enough not to be told around a crowded hearth, that Ghislaine had never been able to prod out of any of the older servants. Lily knew these stories of the Somerville family and Wee Iona, because her father and grandfather and brother had had a part in them.
This grand house that belonged to Luke had once belonged to George Somerville, Lord Bainbridge, lieutenant governor of Lower Canada, a man no one had liked or mourned, dead of an apoplexy long ago. Lily told Ghislaine about the night that the Bonner men had escaped from the Montreal prison only to be caught up again here, in the secret stairway that, Lily and Ghislaine were both very sad to discover for themselves, Luke had indeed bricked closed when the house came into his possession.
Ghislaine longed to see Giselle Somerville, now more properly called Giselle Lacoeur for she had finally settled on a husband, late in her life. Lily would have liked to meet her half brother's mother as well, but Giselle had found a climate more suited to her temperament in Saint Domingue, and Iona was sure that she would never see her daughter in Montreal again. Not in the winter, at least, Luke had agreed. He knew his mother well.
Why Montreal cold should be so very harsh, that was a question Lily had been considering for some time. Over the weeks she had come to realize that it must have something to do with sleeping alone. In the winter nobody at Lake in the Clouds slept by themselves. Lily shared her bed with Annie and sometimes Gabriel, too, if Daniel happened to be away. They huddled together under the covers like kittens, their smells mingling together: milky sweet breath, sharp soap and wood smoke, pine sap.
She missed them, for all their pinches and giggling and pulling of the blankets and sneaking away of pillows. The truth was, even in the heat of summer Lily did not much like sleeping alone in a bed, and she did not have to: she could go with her blanket to lie under the stars or sleep under the falls, if the notion took her.
Before homesickness could dig in, Lily tried to remember what it was she had to do this morning. Was it Monsieur Picot, who clicked his nails against the easel and clucked his tongue when she displeased him, or Monsieur Duhaut, who was teaching her how to grind and mix her own pigments? Monsieur Duhaut was a strange man, morose one day and more morose the next; when his mood lifted a little he would stand too close while Lily worked and breathe onto her neck. She had spoken to Iona about him, and at their next lesson he had greeted her with such a studiously wounded expression that Lily was reminded of a dog caught stealing eggs; sorry not for the transgression, but for his clumsiness in being found out.
Suddenly Lily realized how quiet the lane outside her window was and she remembered that it was a holiday of some sort. What holiday she couldn't really say—the Catholics seemed to have so many of them—but soon the bells would begin to ring the mass. And, she remembered, more awake now, she had promised to go out with Simon to an all-day sleighing party. That made her heart beat faster, as a lesson with Monsieur Duhaut never could, though she was loath to admit it to herself. She had come to Montreal to study art, after all.
The virtuous thing to do would be to spend the day in front of her easel. But of course, she had promised.