Fire Along the Sky
Page 9

But Hannah could not stay away from the door. She followed Curiosity out into the sunlight just as a young woman pulled her horse to a quick stop and slid from the saddle to land lightly on her feet.
A woman, yes, but no taller than a boy with a pointed chin and sea-green eyes. Then Hannah saw the blond hair and the smile, and while her rational mind said it could not be so, her heart knew without hesitation or doubt. She felt herself moving forward, her arms open wide.
“Jennet.” The word caught in her throat in a great rush of tears. “Jennet.”
“Aye, it's me.” She pulled the bonnet from her head with an impatient yank to show off a head of short-cropped curls as yellow as tow.
“Hannah Bonner, why do you look so surprised? Have I not written a hundred times at least that I'd come one day?”
Others were running up now, Gabriel and Annie first and foremost with what seemed like half the village streaming behind them.
“And what great adventures we'll have,” Hannah finished for her. “I've been waiting for you, cousin, and I didn't even realize it.”
“I see you brought the doctor with you too,” Curiosity said, coming forward now to catch Annie before she ran into the two women and knocked them over.
“And Luke.” Jennet looked over her shoulder. “Here he comes now, with Simon Ballentyne. Hannah, you'll remember his great-granny, Gelleys the washerwoman.”
“I remember a Thomas Ballentyne too,” Hannah said. “It was on his horse I first came to Carryck.”
“Simon's uncle, aye.” Jennet laughed. “Everywhere I go I drag a wee bit of Scotland along. Like cockleburs.”
“But how are we going to feed them all?” Annie wailed, and they were laughing still when Luke Bonner swung down from his saddle.
After Elizabeth greeted Luke and Jennet and the rest, she stepped back and watched, her hands pressed to her cheeks to keep herself from weeping. In the center of the crowd Hannah stood between Luke and Jennet, laughing and talking, touching one and then the other while Annie and Gabriel capered from person to person like puppies.
“Where are Richard and Ethan?” Elizabeth asked this question out loud and was surprised to get an answer from Lily, who had come up behind her.
“They went straight to the house.”
“It looks like the whole village is on its way,” Elizabeth said.
Lily made a sound in her throat that meant she would not take the trouble to correct her mother's exaggeration. Elizabeth glanced at her younger daughter in surprise and saw many things there: joy and disappointment at odds, and frustration. Like a child left out of a party with no chance of gaining an invitation, Elizabeth thought.
“I'll go fetch Da and the others.” Lily turned away, flinging back the words over her shoulder. A challenge, and one Elizabeth must meet.
She had to run to catch Lily up, and then she walked beside her daughter in silence. Little by little the laughter and voices faded away behind them to be replaced by the sounds of water and wind moving through the corn and all the noise of the woods on a late summer day. Little by little Lily's pace slowed to something close to normal, and Elizabeth was glad of it; she found herself a little short of breath.
When they had got as far as the strawberry fields without talking Lily stopped suddenly, folded her arms across her waist and looked down the mountain toward Paradise.
“Da will be glad to have Luke home.”
“Yes, he will.”
“They'll go off with the men to talk about war and Hannah will go off with Jennet and I'll be left behind with the old women, as I always am.”
Elizabeth bit back a smile. “They have a lot to talk about, it's true.”
“Sister could have talked to me,” Lily said, turning toward Elizabeth. Her face was flushed with color. “Why wouldn't she talk to me? I'm not a little girl anymore. She thinks of me as a child, you and Da think of me as a child. But I'm not. At my age Sally had two children.”
It was a discussion they had had so many times in so many ways. From long experience Elizabeth knew that there was nothing she could say at this moment that would soothe this unhappy daughter, who had longed for one thing alone and now could not have it.
Elizabeth understood too well; she had lived all her own girlhood with a family whose loving concern had tied her down as surely as ropes. She had been the bookish cousin with too many opinions and too little income of her own, sometimes amusing in her own way but more often irritatingly informed and vocal. She had left that world behind and come to this one, as Lily wanted to leave here and find a place of her own and the life she wanted.
It is only a delay, Elizabeth promised her daughter silently. Just until it is safe to let you go. It was a sentence she repeated to herself whenever she looked at Lily, but one she tried not to say out loud, because an argument would follow as surely as thunder followed lightning. So she told herself what she could not say to her daughter: Better unhappy than dead.
After a moment they started walking again.
Lily said, “Did you know about Jennet and Luke?”
“Of course not,” Elizabeth answered shortly. “I would not have kept it to myself if I had known they were coming.”
“No,” Lily said impatiently. “Did you know about them?”
Elizabeth pulled up in surprise. Her first inclination was to ask Lily to explain herself and then she saw the two of them again in her mind's eye: Jennet's eyes flashing down at Luke as he stood next to her horse. Something there beyond friendship, a tension as fine and strong as wire drawn out and out over the hottest of fires.