by Sara Donati
“By God,” said Moses Southern, pushing suddenly toward the counter. “By God! You dare to lie in our faces and think you can get away with it—”
Nathaniel had begun to move forward as soon as Moses had, but Anna came between the old trapper and Elizabeth first, her solid form acting as both a wall and a battering ram. She put out one muscled arm and gave him a shove.
“Get out of here if you can’t behave no better than that,” she shouted. “If you want to talk civilized, then you step back there and use a suitable tone, or I’ll pick you up and toss you out the door myself, Southern. Do you doubt I can do it?”
Heaving with anger, Moses looked in turn at Nathaniel and Elizabeth, and then his eyes skittered quickly through the room, clearly counting allies: Liam Kirby had slipped out through the back door, but Billy stood watching, his hands on his belt. Archie Cunningham and Claude Dubonnet stood ready to reach for weapons. The others, men not clearly on either side of this battle, but none of them well disposed toward the Mohawk, stood aside waiting to see what would happen. Nathaniel placed himself slightly in front of Elizabeth, and saw Hawkeye coming up on her other side.
“Samuel Todd died fighting for the Mohawk fifteen years ago,” said Moses Southern. “Everybody knows that.”
“Well, then,” said Hawkeye in an easy tone that set Nathaniel’s nerves humming, for he knew well it meant that his father was on the edge of losing his temper. “They forgot to tell Samuel to go bury hisself, because he’s alive as you and me.”
Southern let out a grunt. “Samuel Todd is long dead. And if you’re lying about that, then you’re probably lying about the rest of it. Todd is rotting out there in the bush.”
Kitty made a strangled noise. Furious, Elizabeth turned toward Moses Southern.
“If you insist on calling me a liar again, Mr. Southern, I am afraid you might be in real danger. You see that my husband and my father-in-law do not take well to such insults. Now.” She looked around the room, her eyes pausing briefly on Julian, who was leaning against the counter, clearly enjoying the entire proceeding. Then she found her father near the door, and her eyes narrowed. “I would like to have your attention. Samuel Todd is alive, I saw him myself. As is his brother Richard. Both these facts are verifiable, if you care to make the trip. If you do not, I would ask you to desist in these ridiculous claims. Father?”
The judge stepped forward reluctantly.
“I believe you know something about this advertisement in the newspaper?”
“For Miss Katherine’s sake—”
“How very gallant of you,” Elizabeth said dryly. “To go to such length and expense. Julian, I expect this was your idea?”
“I don’t like to take all the credit,” her brother said, looking uncomfortable for the first time since he had come in. “Kitty was in a bad state of mind,” he added, and then he had the good grace to flush, his neck and the tips of his ears mottling red. “Not that it was our fault, but we thought we might as well be of help.”
Elizabeth turned a glare on Julian; Nathaniel felt her anger rising like the screech of a hawk before it swooped down on its prey. But it was Kitty who spoke up.
Her eyes were fixed on Julian as if she had never seen such a creature before. “Julian Middleton,” she said very softly. “I fear for your immortal soul.”
She held his gaze until he looked away.
Elizabeth turned to the judge. “Father, are you going to charge us with some crime against Richard Todd? Because if you are, do it now, please.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Father?”
“No,” he said then, pursing his lips. “I have nothing to charge you with.”
“Do not sound so very disappointed, Father,” Elizabeth said dryly.
The judge drew himself up to his full height. “Your sarcasm is uncalled for, Elizabeth. It does you no good credit.”
“You see that marriage has done little to improve me, then.”
Nathaniel saw the tension in her face and in the slight tremble of her hands, and he knew even if her father did not that she was upset and hurt. He put a hand on her shoulder.
Kitty Witherspoon suddenly came to life, pulling her cloak around herself in spite of the heat. “I have heard enough. Father, please.” And she pushed her way through the crowd with the Reverend Witherspoon close behind her. Elizabeth was still staring at the judge.
“Elizabeth,” Nathaniel said. “We’re done here.”
“No you ain’t,” said Moses Southern. “I still got a question to ask.”
Hawkeye’s rifle stock hit the floor with a thump, and the group of men around Moses jumped like rabbits. Moses himself stayed steady, his fist curled white around the barrel of his own rifle.
But Hawkeye talked to all of them, drew each man in the room in with his eyes. “You’re wanting to ask about Hidden Wolf, and by God it’s time to get it out in the open. The mountain belongs to my daughter-in-law and my son, by law. They got the paperwork, anybody wants to doubt my word.” He pointed to an old hand-drawn map on the wall. “I can draw the boundaries, if that’s necessary. But I think you all know where they lie.”
“You planning to keep us from hunting on the Wolf?” asked Dubonnet, his thin voice spiraling up in a harsh arc.
“I don’t make the gaming laws,” Hawkeye said coldly. “If you hunt out of season, it’s the judge you’ll answer to—ain’t that so, Alfred?”
The judge nodded, reluctantly. “The gaming laws and restrictions will be enforced on private and public lands.”
Hawkeye grunted. “So this is what we got to say. You can track your game onto the Wolf, same as always. Berrying, that kind of thing, that we’ve got no problem with. But there’ll be no more timber taken from our land—” Billy Kirby made a protesting noise, and Hawkeye nodded at him. “I see you, Billy. Not another tree from our land, do you hear, and we don’t care what terms you got to offer. There’s plenty of timber out there otherwise. No trapping, either.”
“How about looking at the Wolf, Hawkeye, that still allowed?” Moses’ tone was all spit and poison.
“Well, now, I dunno,” Hawkeye said slowly. “I suppose so, long as you don’t get too close, Moses. As for the rest of you, stay off the Wolf past the strawberry fields. Any man found farther up than that, my son here will take you before the judge for trespassing. Now, me personally, maybe I’ll shoot first, depends on what I catch you at.”
Billy Kirby spoke for the first time. “Ain’t like you ever caught anybody up till now.”
There was a new silence in the room as Hawkeye looked at Billy. As he held the gaze past the point of no return, the younger man blanched, but he did not look away.
“You don’t want to be the first, Billy,” Hawkeye said, so softly that the skin rose on Nathaniel’s nape. “Not now that you’ve had fair warning. You all leave us to our own business, keep your hounds and your hands off what don’t belong to you, and there won’t be any trouble.”
“What about them Mohawk? How many more of them you got headed this way?” Archie Cunningham directed this at Hawkeye, but Nathaniel stepped forward.
“My family is my own business,” he said. “Anybody interferes with them, I’ll deal with it myself. And the law will back me up on that, won’t it, Judge?”
Nathaniel had never seen Middleton look so miserable. He cast a glance at his son, whose jaw was strung tight enough to hear his teeth grinding, and then nodded.
“That’s all we wanted to set straight,” Hawkeye said. “You’ll find us good neighbors, if you’ll leave us in peace.”
Elizabeth was silent most of the way up the mountain, busy sorting through the conversations in the trading post. Snatches of sentences came to her, so that her temper flared and flared again. She saw Julian’s pale face, the way he had avoided looking at Kitty at all. He had gambled on the knowledge that Elizabeth could not expose him without exposing Kitty at the same time; he had won. She could not cause more pain where there was al
ready so much.
In front of her Nathaniel walked with his head up, watching the woods. She knew that Hawkeye did the same behind her. The men carried their rifles at the ready, and their tension hummed almost loud enough to be heard. Elizabeth fought with a wave of fear and anger. She would not be forced from her new home; she would not be Miss Middleton again, to please her father and console her brother. But she remembered Robbie’s words, and she knew he was right: this would take no good end. Hawkeye had offered a truce in a conciliatory tone, he had sought out every eye in the room. But few had met him in return; she had watched carefully. It had been a rational offer; the only possible way to live together with these people who had been at war so long that they could not face the idea of its alternative. You’ll find us good neighbors, if you’ll leave us in peace.
Axel, bless him, had stepped forward. “Ja, Dan’l. We’ve never been anything else,” he had said. “Ain’t no need to expect less now. You’re welcome here anytime, and you’ll find most of us will be glad of the company of any of the Hidden Wolf folk.”
It had been a relief, to be reminded of this. That there were other people, reasonable people, in the village. Jed McGarrity, and his family. Curiosity and Galileo and their children. The Gloves, who had greeted her kindly. And other families, enough of them to make Paradise home.
Elizabeth had accepted Nathaniel’s arm to leave the trading post, and then stopped to speak to Anna about the pile of dry goods on the counter. Hurrying to catch up to him at the door, a foot on the tail of her skirt had held her up.
We’ll find that mine, came a soft voice. And then we’ll find you dead in your beds. It might have been Moses, but perhaps not. She had not turned around.
XLVIII
Elizabeth held her breath well into the second week of the school session, and then, cautiously, she allowed herself to exhale. There had been no trouble from the village, no disruptions of any kind to herself or her students. Every morning thus far, she and Hannah had walked down Hidden Wolf with no escort save for the company of Hector and Blue, Hawkeye’s dogs. The hunters were sorely vexed by the unprecedented and apparently endless ban on deer tracking, and were willing to take on escort duties, even if they did not take them very seriously; they were easily seduced away by the promise of a squirrel, and would turn tail and head for home as soon as Elizabeth put the key in the schoolhouse door. Nathaniel was less than enthusiastic about this arrangement, but Elizabeth had argued for it and persuaded him in the end that it would not serve anyone to have her appear frightened to her students.
She had eight of them, each more well behaved, attentive, and hardworking than the last. Each with some talent, small or large, that she could clearly see and lovingly encourage. Each with problems small enough to address carefully after long contemplation. And five of the eight were girls, two of whom—Dolly Smythe with her painfully crossed eyes, and her own Hannah—showed real curiosity and intelligence. This final blessing she kept to herself, for she did not wish to discourage the other children by showing favoritism.
Now they worked with heads bent over precious paper, quills held tightly in curled fingers. Once a day they put aside their hornbooks to practice penmanship, and they copied today’s sentence from the board exactly as she had put it there:
No man is an island, entire of itself
—JOHN DONNE
Elizabeth watched Ruth Glove chewing her lower lip almost ragged in concentration as she carefully dipped the quill in the inkpot she shared with her sister. Behind Ruth and Hepzibah, Ephraim Hauptmann had put down his quill. No doubt he had rushed through the sentence and produced something barely legible.
“If you are satisfied with your work, Ephraim, then sit quietly until we are finished,” Elizabeth said to him. “However, if you think you could do better, you might try again.”
He picked up his quill with a resigned sigh. Ephraim was a good boy, but his mind did tend to wander from the task at hand. Not so Ian McGarrity, who would fill the whole paper if she let him. Elizabeth watched Ian squint at the board even from the spot closest to it, and wondered once again when she should speak to his parents about his eyesight. The McGarritys had no money for spectacles, but Elizabeth could and in fact intended to buy some for the boy when she was next in Johnstown or Albany. First there would need to be some arrangement; she would have to accept half of a pig, or a keg of maple syrup, or something that the McGarritys could spare as payment, to suit their sense of equity.
The only sounds in the room were Henrietta Hauptmann’s labored breathing, the scratching of quills, and the ticking of Elizabeth’s little clock on the desk in front of her. Absentmindedly, she paged through the Bible, searching with only half her concentration for tomorrow’s penmanship verse. This half hour was one of the few times she had for her own thoughts in an otherwise busy school morning, for all the children were needed at home in the afternoons and she was determined to fit not only reading, writing, and arithmetic into each day, but also some rudimentary history and geography. Many-Doves could no longer spare the time to help, and thus Elizabeth could not conduct extra lessons with the older and more advanced students: Dolly, Hannah, and Rudy McGarrity needed more complex arithmetic and they were ready to start French. Perhaps in the fall. Elizabeth closed the Bible and looked out the window.
The haze on the lake had not yet burned off: it would be a hot day. She suppressed the urge to pull at her bodice, which was uncomfortably tight these days, and especially uncomfortable in the heat. As she did many times every day, she wished herself back in Kahnyen’kehàka dress. Her students wore loose-fitting overshirts of airy muslin and light, high-waisted summer frocks. Her own summer clothing was made for the damp, cool mornings of Oakmere. She would have to have some dresses made, and soon.
Elizabeth sighed again, and tried to focus on a suitable verse for the next day’s lesson. For some time she had been considering “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” but each time she came across the sentence Moses Southern’s scowl rose in her mind’s eye and she felt incapable of adequately defending this choice. And when she thought of Moses, she must also think of his daughter. She could not deny it was a relief not to have Jemima in her classroom, but neither could she deny that this was a guilty pleasure. The little girl needed the experience of school, even if Elizabeth did not especially enjoy the challenge she presented. Once again she thanked God for her sweet-natured and biddable students.
“Miss?”
The small voice startled her out of her daydream. Ephraim Hauptmann stood before her desk, his hands folded in front of himself. His usually pale seven-year-old face was flushed the color of ripe strawberries, and under the luxuriant fringe of hay-colored hair his eyes darted this way and that, unwilling to meet hers. The classroom went suddenly even more still than it had been.
“Yes, Ephraim, what is it?”
“Please, miss,” he said in a whisper that was heard in every corner of the room. “My winkle’s got stuck.”
Elizabeth blinked. The little boy blinked back at her, his eyes as round as pennies, his color deepening to plum. She looked more carefully at his grubby hands, crossed so primly in front of himself, and saw the glint of dark glass between his fingers. His inkpot.
Biting her lip, she looked down at her own hands, at a fading scar on her thumb. Elizabeth looked at anything and everything that might keep her from laughing out loud. From the corner of her eye, she stole a look at the class. Each child sat there completely engaged, waiting for her to solve this problem, as if it were an everyday occurrence for little boys to try inkpots on for size. Which, Elizabeth mused to herself, might be the case. She wondered what other mischief she had overlooked.
“I said, I’ve got my—”
“I heard you, Ephraim,” Elizabeth interrupted him. “I’m thinking.”
The first hushed giggles came from Ephraim’s sister Henrietta, with Hannah fast behind. Elizabeth sent them what was meant to be a firm look, but which she thought probably cam
e closer to a grimace.
“Well—” she began slowly.
Thump! Elizabeth sprang up from her chair, nearly overturning it in her alarm. The children were up, too, and looking around. There was an outraged cry from outside, and another thump which set the open window behind her desk to rattling. As she turned in that direction, she had a brief glimpse of Ephraim’s shocked face, his ink-stained fingers pressed to his mouth and the small glass bottle dangling incongruously from his unbuttoned breeches.
“Oooowwww!” came another screech. Elizabeth stuck her head out of the window to see Nathaniel pinning Liam Kirby to the wall.
“Leeeemeegoo!” howled Liam, arms and legs flailing.
The children had raced out of the door as soon as she had turned her back, and they appeared in a crowd at the corner of the building.
“Look here, Boots,” Nathaniel said. “You’ve got a Peeping Tom.”
“His name ain’t Tom,” offered Ruth Glove cheerfully. “That’s Liam Kirby.”
“He knows that,” Dolly hissed. “A Peeping Tom’s somebody who looks in at windows where he don’t belong.”
Liam was squirming but Nathaniel held him fast, leaning with all his weight on the fistful of hair pulled up hard and taut against the wall. Pinned like a bug, Liam sputtered and squeaked and sent Elizabeth pleading glances.
Elizabeth turned her attention to her students. “I don’t recall giving permission for you to leave your seats. Please return to them at once.”
Sheepishly, with lingering last looks toward Liam, they retreated the way they had come. Elizabeth waited until she heard the door close and heard them talking inside the classroom behind her.
“What are you doing here, Liam?”
“Nothing,” he spat, earning a smart cuff above the ear from Nathaniel.
“Oooww! What was that for?”
“For your sweet manners and courteous ways,” Nathaniel said. “Remember it.” Then he looked at Elizabeth. “It ain’t the first time. I was watching today because I saw his tracks here.”
